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10843	----	The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes: A Study of Ideational Behavior ROBERT M. YERKES Harvard University BEHAVIOR MONOGRAPHS Volume 3, Number 1, 1916 Serial Number 12 Edited by JOHN B. WATSON The Johns Hopkins University WITH SIX PLATES AND FIVE TEXT FIGURES CONTENTS I. Interests, opportunity and materials II. Observational problems and methods III. Results of multiple-choice experiments: 1. Skirrl, _Pithecus irus_ 2. Sobke, _Pithecus rhesus_ 3. Julius, _Pongo pygmaeus_ IV. Results of supplementary tests of ideational behavior: 1. Julius, _Pongo pygmaeus_: Box stacking experiment Box and pole experiment Draw-in experiment Lock and key test 2. Skirrl, _Pithecus irus_: Box stacking experiment Box and pole experiment Draw-in experiment Hammer and nail test Other activities 3. Sobke, _Pithecus rhesus_: Box stacking experiment Draw-in experiment Box and pole experiment Other activities V. Miscellaneous observations: 1. Right- and left-handedness 2. Instinct and emotion: Maternal instinct Fear Sympathy VI. Historical and critical discussion of ideational behavior in monkeys and apes: 1. Evidences of ideation in monkeys 2. Evidences of ideation in apes VII. Provision for the study of the primates and especially the monkeys and anthropoid apes VIII. Bibliography I INTERESTS, OPPORTUNITY AND MATERIALS Two strong interests come to expression in this report: the one in the study of the adaptive or ideational behavior of the monkeys and the apes; and the other in adequate and permanent provision for the thorough study of all aspects of the lives of these animals. The values of these interests and of the tasks which they have led me to undertake are so widely recognized by biologists that I need not pause to justify or define them. I shall, instead, attempt to make a contribution of fact on the score of each interest. While recognizing that the task of prospecting for an anthropoid or primate station may in its outcome prove incomparably more important for the biological and sociological sciences and for human welfare than my experimental study of ideational behavior, I give the latter first place in this report, reserving for the concluding section an account of the situation regarding our knowledge of the monkeys, apes, and other primates, and a description of a plan and program for the thorough-going and long continued study of these organisms in a permanent station or research institute. In 1915, a long desired opportunity came to me to devote myself undividedly to tasks which I have designated above as "prospecting" for an anthropoid station and experimenting with monkeys and apes. First of all, the interruption of my academic duties by sabbatical leave gave me free time. But in addition to this freedom for research, I needed animals and equipment. These, too, happily, were most satisfactorily provided, as I shall now describe. When in 1913, while already myself engaged in seeking the establishment of an anthropoid station, I heard of the founding of such an institution at Orotava, Tenerife, the Canary Islands, I immediately made inquiries of the founder of the station, Doctor Max Rothmann of Berlin, concerning his plans (Rothmann, 1912).[1] As a result of our correspondence, I was invited to visit and make use of the facilities of the Orotava station and to consider with its founder the possibility of coöperative work instead of the establishing of an American station. This invitation I gratefully accepted with the expectation of spending the greater part of the year 1915 on the island of Tenerife. But the outbreak of the war rendered my plan impracticable, while at the same time destroying all reasonable ground for hope of profitable coöperation with the Germans in the study of the anthropoids. In August, 1915, Doctor Rothmann died. Presumably, the station still exists at Orotava in the interests of certain psychological and physiological research. So far as I know, there are as yet no published reports of studies made at this station. It seems from every point of view desirable that American psychologists should, without regard to this initial attempt of the Germans to provide for anthropoid research, further the establishment of a well equipped American station for the study not only of the anthropoid apes but of all of the lower primates. [Footnote 1: See bibliography at end of report.] In the early months of the war while I was making every effort to obtain reliable information concerning conditions in the Canary Islands, I received an urgent invitation from my friend and former student, Doctor G. V. Hamilton, to make use of his collection of animals and laboratory at Montecito, California, during my leave of absence from Harvard. This invitation I most gladly accepted, and in February, 1915, I established myself in Santa Barbara, in convenient proximity to Doctor Hamilton's private laboratory where for more than six months I was able to work uninterruptedly under nearly ideal conditions. Doctor Hamilton without reserve placed at my disposal his entire collection of animals, laboratory, and equipment, provided innumerable conveniences for my work, and in addition, bore the entire expense of my investigation. I cannot adequately thank him for his kindness nor make satisfactory acknowledgment here of his generous aid. Thanks to his sympathetic interest and to the courtesy of the McCormick family on whose estate the laboratory was located, my work was done under wholly delightful conditions, and with assistance from Ramon Jimenez and Frank Van Den Bergh, Jr., which was invaluable. The former aided me most intelligently in the care of the animals and the construction of apparatus; and the latter, especially, was of very real service in connection with many of my experiments. The collection of animals which Doctor Hamilton placed at my disposal consisted of ten monkeys and one orang utan. The monkeys represented either _Pithecus rhesus_ Audebert (_Macacus rhesus_), _Pithecus irus_ F. Cuvier (_Macacus cynomolgos_), or the hybrid of these two species (Elliot, 1913). There were two eunuchs, five males, and three females. All were thoroughly acclimated, having lived in Montecito either from birth or for several years. The orang utan was a young specimen of _Pongo pygmaeus_ Hoppius obtained from a San Francisco dealer in October, 1914 for my use. His age at that time, as judged by his size and the presence of milk teeth, was not more than five years. So far as I could discover, he was a perfectly normal, healthy, and active individual. On June 10, 1915, his weight was thirty-four pounds, his height thirty-two inches, and his chest girt twenty-three inches. On August 18 of the same year, the three measurements were thirty-six and one-half pounds, thirty-three inches, and twenty-five inches. For the major portion of my experimental work, only three of the eleven animals were used. A growing male, _P. rhesus_ monkey, known as Sobke; a mature male, _P. irus_, called Skirrl; and the young orang utan, which had been named Julius. Plates I and II present these three subjects of my experiments in characteristically interesting attitudes. In plate I, figure 1, Julius appears immediately behind the laboratory seated on a rock, against a background of live oaks. This figure gives one an excellent idea of the immediate environment of the laboratory. Figure 2 of the same plate is a portrait of Julius taken in the latter part of August. By reason of the heavy growth of hair, he appeared considerably older as well as larger at this time than when the photograph for figure 1 was taken. In plate II, figure 3, Julius is shown in the woods in the attitude of reaching for a banana, while in figure 4 of the same plate he is represented as walking upright in one of the cages. Likenesses of Sobke are presented in figures 5 and 6 of plate II. In the latter of these figures he is shown stretching his mouth, apparently yawning but actually preparing for an attack on another monkey behind the wire screen. Figure 7 of this plate indicates Skirrl in an interesting attitude of attention and with an obvious lack of self-consciousness. The same monkey is represented again in figures 8 and 9 of plate II, this time in the act of using hammer and saw. EXPLANATION OF PLATE II FIGURE 3.--Orang utan, Julius, reaching for banana. FIGURE 4.--Julius walking across his cage. FIGURE 5.--_P. rhesus_, Sobke. FIGURE 6.--Sobke stretching his jaws (yawn?) preparatory to a fight. FIGURE 7.--_P. irus_, Skirrl. FIGURE 8.--Skirrl using hammer and nail. FIGURE 9.--Skirrl using a saw. All of the animals except the orang utan had been used more or less for experiments on behavior by Doctor Hamilton, but this prior work in no way interfered with my own investigation. Doctor Hamilton has accumulated a large mass of the most valuable and interesting observations on the behavior of monkeys, and he more thoroughly understands them than any other observer of whom I have knowledge. Much to my regret and embarrassment in connection with the present report, he has thus far published only a small portion of his data (Hamilton, 1911, 1914). In his most recent paper on "A study of sexual tendencies in monkeys and baboons," he has given important information concerning several of the monkeys which I have observed. For the convenience of readers who may make use of both his reports and mine, I am designating the animals by the names previously given them by Hamilton. The available and essential information concerning the individuals is presented below. _List of animals in collection_ Skirrl. _Pithecus irus_. Adult male. Sobke. _P. rhesus_. Young adult male. Gertie. _P. irus-rhesus_. Female. Born November, 1910. Maud. _P. rhesus_. Young adult female. Jimmy II. _P. irus_. Adult male. Scotty. _P. irus_ (?). Adult male. Tiny. _P. irus-rhesus_. Female. Born August, 1913. Chatters. _P. irus_. Adult eunuch. Daddy. _P. irus_. Adult eunuch. Mutt. _P. irus_. Young adult male. Born August, 1911. Julius. _Pongo pygmaeus_. Male. Age, 4 years to 5 years. When I arrived in Santa Barbara, Doctor Hamilton was about to remodel, or rather reconstruct, his animal cages and laboratory. This gave us opportunity to adapt both to the special needs of my experiments. The laboratory was finally located and built in a grove of live oaks. From the front it is well shown by figure 10 of plate III, and from the rear, by figure 11. Its location was in every way satisfactory for my work, and in addition, the spot proved a delightful one in which to spend one's time. [Illustration: FIGURE 12.--Ground plan of Montecito laboratory and cages. Scale 1/120 L, laboratory; C, cages; A, experiment room in which multiple-choice apparatus was installed; B, E, additional rooms for research; D, store room and shop; Z, large central cage communicating with the eight smaller cages 1-8.] Figure 12 is a ground plan, drawn to scale, of the laboratory and the adjoining cages, showing the relations of the several rooms of the laboratory among themselves and to the nine cages. Although the construction was throughout simple, everything was convenient and so planned as to expedite my experimental work. The large room A, adjoining the cages, was used exclusively for an experimental study of ideational behavior by means of my recently devised multiple-choice method. Additional, and supplementary, experiments were conducted in the large cage Z. Room D served as a store-room and work-shop. The laboratory was forty feet long, twenty-two feet wide, and ten feet to the plate. Each small cage was six, by six, by twelve feet deep, while the large compartment into which each of the smaller cages opened was twenty-four feet long, ten feet wide, and twelve feet deep. II OBSERVATIONAL PROBLEMS AND METHODS My chief observational task in Montecito was the study of ideational behavior, or of such adaptive behavior in monkeys and apes as corresponds to the ideational behavior of man. It was my plan to determine, so far as possible in the time at my disposal, the existence or absence of ideas and the rôle which they play in the solution of problems by monkeys and apes. I had in mind the behavioristic form of the perennial questions: Do these animals think, do they reason, and if so, what is the nature of these processes as indicated by the characteristics of their adaptive behavior? My work, although obviously preliminary and incomplete, differs from most of the previous studies of the complex behavior of the infrahuman primates in that I relied chiefly upon a specially devised method and applied it systematically over a period of several months. The work was intensive and quantitative instead of more or less incidental, casual, and qualitative as has usually been the case. Naturally, during the course of my special study of ideational behavior observations were made relative to various other aspects of the life of my subjects. Such, for example, are my notes on the use of the hands, the instincts, the emotions, and the natural aptitudes of individuals. It is, indeed, impossible to observe any of the primates without noting most interesting and illuminating activities. And although the major portion of my time was spent in hard and monotonous work with my experimental apparatus, I found time each day to get into intimate touch with the free activities of my subjects and to observe their social relations and varied expressions of individuality. As a result of my close acquaintance with this band of primates, I feel more keenly than ever before the necessity of taking into account, in connection with all experimental analyses of behavior, the temperamental characteristics, experience, and affective peculiarities of individuals. The light which I have obtained on the general problem of ideation has come, first, through a method which I have rather inaptly named the multiple-choice method, and second, and more incidentally, through a variety of supplementary methods which are described in Section IV of this report. These supplementary methods are simple tests of ideation rather than systematic modes of research. They differ from my chief method, among other respects, in that they have been used by various investigators during the past ten or fifteen years. It was not my aim to repeat precisely the observations made by others, but instead to verify some of them, and more especially, to throw additional light on my main problem and to further the analysis of complex behavior. What has been referred to as the multiple-choice method was devised by me three years ago as a means of obtaining strictly comparable objective data concerning the problem-solving ability of various types and conditions of animals. The method was first tried with human subjects in the Psychopathic Hospital, Boston, with a crude keyboard apparatus which, however, proved wholly satisfactory as a means of demonstrating its value. It has since been applied by means of mechanisms especially adapted to the structure and activities of the organisms, to the study of the behavior of the crow, pig, rat, and ringdove (Yerkes, 1914; Coburn and Yerkes, 1915; Yerkes and Coburn, 1915). The method has also been applied with most gratifying results to the study of the characteristics of ideational behavior in human defectives,--children, and adults,--and in subjects afflicted with various forms of mental disease. It is at present being tried out as a practical test in connection with vocational guidance and various forms of institutional examination, such as psychopathic hospital and court examinations. As no adequate description of the method has yet been published to which I can here refer, it will be necessary to present its salient characteristics along with a description of the special form of apparatus which was found suitable for use with monkeys and apes. The method is so planned as to enable the observer to present to any type or condition of organism which he wishes to study any one or all of a series of problems ranging from the extremely simple to the complex and difficultly soluble. All of the problems, however, are completely soluble by an organism of excellent ideational ability. For the human subject, the solution of the easiest problem of all requires almost no effort, whereas even moderately difficult problems may require many repetitions of effort and hours or days of application to the task. In each case, the solution of the problem depends upon the perception of a certain constant relation among a series of objects to which the subject is required to attend and respond. Such relations are, for example, secondness from one end of the group, middleness, simple alternation of ends, or progressive movement by constant steps from one end of a group to the other. It is possible to present such relational problems by means of relatively simple reaction-mechanisms. In their essential features, all of the several types of multiple-choice apparatus designed by the writer and used either by him or by his students and assistants are the same. They consist of a series of precisely similar reaction-devices, any one or all of which may be used in connection with a given observation. These reaction-mechanisms are so chosen as to be suited to the structure and action-system of the animal to be studied. For the human being the mechanism consists of a simple key and the total apparatus is a bank of keys, with such electrical connections as are necessary to enable the observer to obtain satisfactory records of the subject's behavior. Let us suppose the bank of keys, as was actually the case in my first form of apparatus, to consist of twelve separate reaction-mechanisms; and let us suppose, further, the constant relation (problem) on the basis of which the subject is required to react to be that of middleness. It is evident that in successive trials or experiments the keys must be presented to the subject in odd groups, the possibilities being groups of 3, 5, 7, 9, or 11. If for a particular observation the experimenter wishes to present the first three keys at the left end of the keyboard, he pushes back the remaining nine keys so that they cannot be operated and requires the subject to select from the group of three keys the one which on being pressed causes a signal to appear. It is of course the clearly understood task of the subject to learn to select the correct key in the group on first trial. This becomes possible only as the subject observes the relation of the key which produces the desired effect to the other keys in the group. On the completion of a subject's reaction to the group of three keys, a group of seven keys at the opposite end of the keyboard may, for example, be presented. Similarly, the subject is required to discover with the minimum number of trials the correct reaction-mechanism. Thus, time after time, the experimenter presents a different group of keys so that the subject in no two successive trials is making use of the same portion of the keyboard. It is therefore impossible for him to react to spatial relations in the ordinary sense and manner, and unless he can perceive and appropriately respond to the particular relation which constitutes the only constant characteristic of the correct reaction-mechanism for a particular problem, he cannot solve the problem, or at least cannot solve it ideationally and on the basis of a small number of observations or trials. For the various infrahuman animals whose ideational behavior has been studied by means of this method, it has been found eminently satisfactory to use as reaction-mechanisms a series of similar boxes, each with an entrance and an exit door. An incentive to the selection of the right box in a particular test is supplied by food, a small quantity of which is placed in a covered receptacle beyond the exit door of each of the boxes. Each time an animal enters a wrong box, it is punished for its mistake by being confined in that box for a certain period, ranging from five seconds to as much as two minutes with various individuals or types of organism. This discourages random, hasty, or careless choices. When the right box is selected, the exit door is immediately raised, thus uncovering the food, which serves as a reward. After eating the food thus provided, the animal, according to training, returns to the starting point and eagerly awaits an opportunity to attempt once more to find the reward which it has learned to expect. With this form of the apparatus, the boxes among which choice may be made are indicated by the raising (opening) of the front door. Since with various birds and mammals the box form of apparatus had proved most satisfactory, I planned the primate apparatus along similar lines, aiming simply to adapt it to the somewhat different motor equipment and destructive tendencies of the monkeys. I shall now briefly describe this apparatus as it was constructed and used in the Montecito laboratory. EXPLANATION OF PLATE IV FIGURE 13.--Multiple-choice apparatus, showing observer's bench and writing stand. FIGURE 14.--Apparatus as seen from observer's bench. FIGURE 15.--Entrances to multiple-choice boxes as seen from the response-compartment. FIGURE 16.--Apparatus as seen from the rear, showing exit doors, food receptacles, and covers for same. The apparatus was built in room A (figure 12), this room having been especially planned for it with respect to lighting as well as dimensions and approaches. It was unfortunately impossible to obtain photographs showing the whole of the apparatus, but it is hoped that the four partial views of plate IV may aid the reader who is unfamiliar with previously described similar devices to grasp readily the chief points of construction. In this plate, figure 13 shows the front of the complete apparatus, with the alleyway and door by way of which the experimenter could enter. The investigator's observation-bench and record-table also appear in this figure, together with weighted cords used to operate the various doors and the vertically placed levers by means of which each pair of doors could be locked. Figure 14 is the view presented to the observer as he stood on the bench or observation stand of figure 13 and looked over the entire apparatus. Three of the entrance doors are shown at the right of this figure as raised, whereas the remainder of the nine entrance doors of the apparatus are closed. Figure 15 is a view of the entrance doors from below the wire roof of the apparatus. Again, two of the doors are shown as raised, and three additional ones as closed. The rear of the apparatus appears in figure 16, in which some of the exit doors are closed and others open. In the latter case, the food receptacles appear, and on the lower part of the raised doors of the corresponding boxes may be seen metal covers for the food receptacles projecting at right angles to the doors, while on the lower edge of each door is an iron staple used to receive a sliding bar which could be operated from the observer's bench as a means of locking the doors after they had been closed. The space beyond the exit doors was used as an alleyway for the return of the animals to the starting point. It will be necessary at various points in later descriptions to refer to these several figures. But further description of them will be more readily appreciated after a careful examination of the ground plan of the apparatus presented as figure 17 In accordance with the labelling of this figure, the experimenter enters the apparatus room through doorway 16, passes thence through doorways 17 and 10 to the large cage Z, from which he has direct access to the animals and can bring them into the apparatus. The multiple-choice mechanism proper, consisting of nine similar boxes (nine were used instead of twelve as a matter of convenience of construction, not because this smaller number is otherwise preferable) is labelled F. These boxes are numbered 1 to 9, beginning at the left. This numbering was adhered to in the recording of results throughout the investigation. The other important portions of the apparatus are the runway D, from which the subject at the experimenter's pleasure could be admitted through doorway 12 to the large response-chamber E; the alleyways G, H, and I, by way of which return to the starting point was possible; the observation bench C, with its approach step 13; and the observer's writing table A. In the construction of this large apparatus, it was necessary to make provision for the extremely destructive tendencies of monkeys and anthropoid apes,--hence the apparent cumbersomeness of certain portions. It was equally necessary to provide for the protection of the observer and the prevention of escape of the subjects by completely covering the apparatus and alleyways with a heavy wire netting. Each of the eighteen doors of the multiple-choice boxes, and in addition doors 11, 12, and 15 of the runway D, were operated by the observer from his bench C by means of weighted window cords which were carried by pulleys appropriately placed above the apparatus. Each weight was so chosen as to be just sufficient to hold its door in position after the experimenter had raised it. For the convenience of the experimenter in the rapid operation of the twenty-one doors, the weights for the doors of runway D were painted gray, those for the entrance doors, white, and those for the exit doors, black. In each entrance door, as is shown in figure 15 of plate IV, a window was cut so that the experimenter might watch the animal after it had entered a given box, and especially note when it left the box after having received its reward. This window was covered with wire netting. No such windows were necessary in the exit doors, but to them were attached heavy galvanized iron flanges which served to cover the food receptacles. One of these flanges is labelled o in figure 17. The food receptacles were provided by boring holes in a 2 by 4 inch timber securely nailed to the floor immediately outside of the exit doors. Into these holes aluminum cups fitted snugly, and the iron flanges, when the doors were closed, fitted so closely over the cups that it was impossible for the animals to obtain food from them. [Illustration: FIGURE 17.--Ground plan of multiple-choice apparatus in experiment room A. Scale 1/60 A, record stand; C, bench for observer; B, step as approach to C; D, alleyway leading to E, response-compartment; F, one of the nine (1-9) similar multiple-choice boxes; G, H, alleyways leading from boxes to starting point at D; I, alleyway used by experimenter as approach to rear of apparatus; W, W, windows; P, alleyway; Z, large cage; 16, entrance to room A; 17, entrance to apparatus and thence via 10 to cages; 18, entrance to alleyway 1; 11, 15, entrances to D; 12, entrance to E; 13, entrance door of box 5; 14, exit door of box 5; o, cover for food receptacle.] As originally constructed, no provision was made in the apparatus for locking the entrance and exit doors of the several boxes when they were closed. But as two of the subjects after a time learned to open the doors from either outside or inside the boxes, it became necessary to introduce locking devices which could be operated by the experimenter from the observation bench. This was readily accomplished by cutting holes in the floor, which permitted an iron staple, screwed to the lower edge of each door, to project through the floor. Through these staples by means of a lever for each of the nine boxes, the observer was able to slide a wooden bar, placed beneath the floor of the room, thus locking or unlocking either the entrance door, the exit door, or both, in the case of any one of the nine boxes. Since figure 17 is drawn to scale, it will be needless to give more than a few of the dimensions of the apparatus. Each of the boxes was 42 inches long, 18 inches wide, and 72 inches deep, inside measurements. The alleys D, I, and H were 24 inches, and G 30 inches wide, by 6 feet deep. The doors of the several boxes were 18 inches wide, by 5 feet high, while those in the alleyways were 24 inches wide by 6 feet high. The response-compartment E of figure 17 was 14 feet 4 inches, by 8 feet, by 6 feet in depth. In order that the apparatus might be used with adult human subjects conveniently, if such use should prove desirable, the depth throughout was made 6 feet, and it was therefore possible for the experimenter to walk about erect in it. The experimental procedure was briefly as follows: A small quantity of food having been placed in each of the food cups and covered by the metal flanges on the exit doors, the experimenter raised door 11 of figure 17 and then opened door 10 and the door of the cage in which the desired subject was confined. After the latter, in search of food, had entered the runway D, the experimenter lowered door 11 to keep it in this runway, and immediately proceeded to set the reaction-mechanisms for an experiment (trial). Let us suppose that the first setting to be tried involved all of the nine boxes. Each of the entrance doors would therefore be raised. Let us further suppose that the right door is defined as the middle one of the group. With the apparatus properly set, the experimenter next raises door 12, thus admitting the animal to the response-compartment E. Any one of the nine boxes may now be entered by it. But if any except number 5, the middle member of the group, be entered, the entrance door is immediately lowered and both the exit and entrance doors locked in position so that the animal is forced to remain in the box for a stated period, say thirty seconds. At the expiration of this time the entrance door is raised and the animal allowed to retrace its steps and make another choice. When the middle box is chosen, the entrance door is lowered and the exit door immediately raised, thus uncovering the food, which the animal eats. As a rule, by my monkeys and ape the reward was eaten in the alleyway G instead of in the multiple-choice box. As soon as the food has been eaten, the exit door is lowered by the experimenter, and the animal returns by way of G and H to runway D, where it awaits its next trial. As rewards, bananas and peanuts were found very satisfactory, and although occasionally other foods were supplied in small quantities, they were on the whole less constantly desired than the former. Four problems which had previously been presented to other organisms were in precisely the same form presented to the three primates. These problems may be described, briefly, by definition of the right reaction mechanism, thus: problem 1, the first mechanism at the subject's left; problem 2, the second mechanism at the subject's right (that is, from the end of the series at the subject's right); problem 3, alternately, the first mechanism at the subject's left and the first at its right; problem 4, the middle mechanism of the group. It was my intention to present these four problems, in order, to each of the three animals, proceeding with them as rapidly as they were solved. But as it happened, only one of the three subjects got as far as the fourth problem. When observations had to be discontinued, Sobke was well along with the last, or fourth problem; Skirrl was at work at the third problem; and Julius had failed to solve the second problem. For each of the problems, a series of ten different settings of the doors was determined upon in advance. These settings differ from those employed in a similar investigation with the pig only in that the numbering of the doors is reversed. In the present apparatus, the boxes as viewed from the front (entrance) are numbered from the left to the right end, whereas those of the pig apparatus were numbered from the right end to the left end. Below are presented for each of the several problems (1) the numbers of the settings presented in series; (2) the numbers of the doors open; (3) the number of doors open in each setting and for the series of ten settings; and (4) the number of the right door. PROBLEM 1. First mechanism at left of group Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................1.2.3......................3..................1 2..................8.9........................2..................8 3..................3.4.5.6.7..................5..................3 4..................7.8.9......................3..................7 5..................2.3.4.5.6..................5..................2 6..................6.7.8......................3..................6 7..................5.6.7......................3..................5 8..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................4 9..................7.8.9......................3..................7 10..................1.2.3......................3..................1 -- Total 35 PROBLEM 2. Second mechanism from the right end of group Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................7.8.9......................3..................8 2..................1.2.3.4....................4..................3 3..................2.3.4.5.6.7................6..................6 4..................1.2.3.4.5.6................6..................5 5..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................7 6..................1.2.3......................3..................2 7..................2.3.4.5....................4..................4 8..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9..........9..................8 9..................1.2.3.4....................4..................3 10..................3.4.5.6.7.8................6..................7 -- Total 50 PROBLEM 3. Alternately the first mechanism at the left and the first at the right end of the group Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................5.6.7......................3..................5 2..................5.6.7......................3..................7 3..................1.2.3.4.5.6................6..................1 4..................1.2.3.4.5.6................6..................6 5..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................4 6..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................8 7..................2.3.4.5....................4..................2 8..................2.3.4.5....................4..................5 9..................3.4.5.6.7.8.9..............7..................3 10..................3.4.5.6.7.8.9..............7..................9 -- Total 50 PROBLEM 4. Middle mechanism of the group Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................2.3.4......................3..................3 2..................5.6.7.8.9..................5..................7 3..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7..............7..................4 4..................7.8.9......................3..................8 5..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................6 6..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9..........9..................5 7..................1.2.3......................3..................2 8..................2.3.4.5.6..................5..................4 9..................3.4.5.6.7.8.9..............7..................6 10..................6.7.8......................3..................7 -- Total 50 It was found desirable after a problem had been solved to present a new and radically different series of settings in order to determine to what extent the subject had learned to choose the correct door by memorizing each particular setting. These supplementary observations may be known as control experiments, and the settings as supplementary settings. In case of these, as for the original settings, the essential facts are presented in tabular arrangement. Settings for Control Experiments PROBLEM 1. First at left end Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................2.3.4......................3..................2 2..................6.7.8.9....................4..................6 3..................3.4.5......................3..................3 4..................4.5.6.7.8.9................6..................4 5..................6.7.8.9....................4..................6 6..................1.2.3.4.5..................5..................1 7..................2.3.4.5.6.7.8..............7..................2 8..................3.4.5.6.7.8................6..................3 9..................5.6.7......................3..................5 10..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9..........9..................1 PROBLEM 2. Second from right end Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................5.6.7.8....................4..................7 2..................2.3.4.5.6..................5..................5 3..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9..........9..................8 4..................5.6.7......................3..................6 5..................1.2.3.4....................4..................3 6..................4.5.6......................3..................5 7..................2.3.4.5....................4..................4 8..................1.2.3......................3..................2 9..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7..............7..................6 10..................2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9............8..................8 PROBLEM 3. Alternate left and right ends Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................5.6........................2..................5 2..................5.6........................2..................6 3..................4.5.6.7.8.9................6..................4 4..................4.5.6.7.8.9................6..................9 5..................1.2.3.4.5..................5..................1 6..................1.2.3.4.5..................5..................5 7..................2.3.4.5.6.7................6..................2 8..................2.3.4.5.6.7................6..................7 9..................3.4.5.6.7.8................6..................3 10..................3.4.5.6.7.8................6..................8 PROBLEM 4. Middle Doors No. of No. of Settings open doors open right door 1..................4.5.6.7.8..................5..................6 2..................1.2.3......................3..................2 3..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9..........9..................5 4..................2.3.4.5.6..................5..................4 5..................6.7.8......................3..................7 6..................3.4.5.6.7.8.9..............7..................6 7..................7.8.9......................3..................8 8..................1.2.3.4.5.6.7..............7..................4 9..................2.3.4......................3..................3 10..................3.4.5.6.7..................5..................5 It was my aim so far as possible to present to a given subject each day the ten settings under a given problem in order, without interruption. If for any reason the series of observations had to be interrupted, it was resumed at the same point subsequently. Occasionally it was found desirable or necessary to present only five of the series of ten settings in succession and then to interrupt observations for an interval of a few minutes or even several hours. But as a rule it was possible to present the series of ten settings. All things being considered, it proved more satisfactory to give only ten trials a day to each subject. Frequently twenty and rarely thirty trials were given on the same day. In such cases the series of settings was simply repeated. The only pause between trials was that necessary for resetting the entrance doors and replenishing the food which served as a reward for success. III RESULTS OF MULTIPLE-CHOICE EXPERIMENTS 1. Skirrl, _Pithecus irus_ _Problem 1. First at the Left End_ Systematic work with the multiple-choice apparatus and method described in the previous section was undertaken early in April with Skirrl, Sobke, and Julius. The results for each of them are now to be presented with such measure of detail as their importance seems to justify. Skirrl had previously been used by Doctor Hamilton in an experimental study of reactive tendencies. He proved so remarkably inefficient in the work that Doctor Hamilton was led to characterize him as feeble-minded, and to recommend him to me for further study because of his mental peculiarities. With me he was from the first frank, aggressive, and inclined to be savage. It was soon possible for me to go into the large cage, Z, with him and allow him to take food from my hand. He was without fear of the experimental apparatus and it proved relatively easy to accustom him to the routine of the experiment. Throughout the work he was rather slow, inattentive, and erratic. Beginning on April 7, I sought to acquaint him with the multiple-choice apparatus by allowing him to make trips through the several boxes, with the reward of food each time. Thus, for example, with the entrance and exit doors of box 7 raised, the monkey was allowed to pass into the reaction-compartment E and thence through box 7 to the food cup. As soon as he had finished eating, he was called back to D by the experimenter and, after a few seconds, allowed, similarly, to make a trip by way of one of the other boxes. By reason of this preliminary training he soon came to seek eagerly for the reward of food. On April 10 the apparatus was painted white in order to increase the lightness and thus render it easier for the experimenter to observe the animal's movements, and when on April 12 Skirrl was again introduced to it for further preliminary training, he utterly refused to enter the boxes, giving every indication of extreme fear of the white floors and even of the sides of the boxes. Finally, the attempts to induce him to enter the boxes had to be given up, and he was returned to his cage unfed. The following day I was equally unsuccessful in either driving or tempting him with food into the apparatus. But on April 14 he was so hungry that he was finally lured in by the use of food. He cautiously approached the boxes and attempted to climb through on the sides instead of walking on the floor. It was perfectly evident that he had an instinctive or an acquired fear of the white surfaces. As the matter was of prime importance for the success of my work, I inquired of Doctor Hamilton, and of the men in charge of the cages, for any incident which might account for this peculiar behavior, and I learned that some three months earlier, while the animal cages were being whitewashed, Skirrl had jumped at one of the laborers who was applying a brush to the framework of one of the cages and had shaken some lime into his eyes. He was greatly frightened and enraged. Evidently he experienced extreme discomfort, if not acute pain, and there resulted an association with whiteness which was quite sufficient to cause him to avoid the freshly painted apparatus. Having obtained an adequate explanation of this monkey's peculiar behavior, I proceeded with my efforts to induce him to work smoothly and rapidly, and on April 15, by covering the floor with sawdust, I so diminished the influence of the whiteness as to render the preliminary training fairly satisfactory. At the end of two more days everything was going so well that it seemed desirable to begin the regular experiment. On the morning of April 19, Skirrl was introduced to the apparatus and given his first series of ten trials on problem 1. This problem demanded the selection of the first door at the left in any group of open doors. The procedure was as previously described in that the experimenter raised the entrance doors of a certain group of boxes, admitted the animal to the reaction-chamber, punished incorrect choices by confining the animal for thirty seconds, and rewarded correct choices by raising the exit door and thus permitting escape and the obtaining of food. The trials were given in rapid succession, and the total time required for this first series of ten trials was thirty-five minutes. Skirrl worked faithfully throughout this interval and exhibited no marked discouragement. When confined in a box he showed uneasiness and dissatisfaction by moving about constantly, shaking the doors, and trying to raise them in order to escape. For the series of settings used in connection with problem 1, the reader is referred to page 18. In the first setting, the doors numbered 1, 2, and 3, were opened. As it happened, the animal when admitted to the reaction-chamber immediately chose box l. Having received the reward of food, he was called back to D, and doors 8 and 9 having been raised in preparation for the next trial, he was again admitted to the reaction-chamber. This time he quickly chose box 9 and was confined therein for thirty seconds. On being released, he chose after an interval of four minutes, box 8, thus completing the trial. As it is highly important, not only in connection with the present description of behavior, but also for subsequent comparison of the reactions of different types of organism in this experiment, to present the detailed records for each trial, tables have been constructed which offer in brief space the essential data for every trial in connection with a given problem. Table 1 contains the results for Skirrl in problem 1. It is constructed as follows: the date of a series of trials appears in the first vertical column; the numbers (and number) of the trials for the series or date appear in column 2; the following ten columns present respectively the results of the trials for each of the ten settings. Each number, in these results, designates a box entered. At the extreme right of the table are three columns which indicate, first, the number of trials in which the right box was chosen first, column headed R; and second, the number of trials in which at least one incorrect choice occurred, column headed W. In the last column, the daily ratio of these first choices appears. Taking the first line of table 1 below the explanatory headings, we note on April 19 ten trials, numbered 1 to 10, were given to Skirrl. In trial 1, with setting 1, he chose correctly the first time, and the record is therefore simply 1. In trial 2, setting 2, he incorrectly chose box 9, the first time. At his next opportunity, he chose box 8, which was the right one. The record therefore reads 9.8. In trial 3, setting 3, he chose incorrectly twice before finally selecting the right box. The record reads 6.7.3, and so on throughout the ten trials which constitute a series. The summary for this series indicates three right and seven wrong first choices, that is, three cases in which the right box was entered first. The ratio of right to wrong first choices is therefore 1 to 2.33. Since the total number of doors open in the ten settings is thirty-five, and since in each of the ten settings one door is describable as the right door, the probable ratio, apart from the effects of training, of right to wrong first choices is 1 to 2.50. It is evident, therefore, that Skirrl in his first series of trials closely approximated expectation in the number of mistakes. TABLE 1 Results for Skirrl, _P. irus_, in Problem 1 ========+==========+=========+=========+===========+=============+===========+===========+===========+=============+===========+===========+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | | | | R | W | of | trials | 1.2.3 | 8.9 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | | | R to W --------+----------+---------+---------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+---+---+-------- April | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 19 | 1- 10 | 1 | 9.8 | 6.7.3 | 9.7 | 6.2 | 7.8.6 | {6.7.7.7 | 4 | 7 | 2.3.3.1 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | | | | | {6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 11- 20 | 3.2.1 | 9.8 | 5.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 8.8.6 | 5 | 8.4 | 7 | 3.1 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 21 | 21- 30 | 3.1 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 6.2 | 6 | 5 | 6.4 | 9.7 | 1 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 22 | 31- 40 | 1 | 9.8 | 3 | 7 | 6.2 | 6 | 6.7.5 | 5.8.4 | 9.8.9.8.7 | 2.1 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 23 | 41- 50 | 2.3.1 | 8 | 5.7.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 7.8.4 | 7 | 3.1 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 24 | 51- 60 | 1 | 8 | 4.5.7.3 | 9.7 | 5.6.2 | 6 | 6.7.5 | 6.4 | 8.9.7 | 1 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 26 | 61- 70 | 1 | 8 | 6.7.4.7.3 | 7 | 4.5.6.2 | 6 | 5 | 8.4 | 7 | 3.2.3.1 | 6 | 4 | 1: .67 27 | 71- 80 | 3.1 | 8 | 3 | 9.7 | 4.6.2 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 5.8.4 | 7 | 1 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 28 | 81- 90 | 2.3.1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 4.5.6.2 | 6 | 5 | 5.8.4 | 7 | 1 | 7 | 3 | 1: .43 29 | 91- 100 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 9.7 | 6.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 8 | 2 | 1: .25 30 | 101- 110 | 1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5.6.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 2.3.1 | 7 | 3 | 1: .43 May | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 111- 120 | 2.3.2.1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1: .11 3 | 121- 130 | 1 | 8 | 5.6.3 | 7 | 4.5.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 8 | 2 | 1: .25 4 and 5 | 131- 140 | 3.2.1 | 8[1] | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1: .11 5 | 141- 150 | 1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1: .11 --------+----------+---------+---------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | 2.3.4.5 | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | | | 2.3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 6.7.8 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 6.7.8.9 | | | | +---------+---------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------+-----------+-----------+---+---+-------- 6 | 1- 10 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 3.2.1 | 6.2 | 5.6.7.8.3 | 5 | 6.1 | 6 | 4 | 1: .67 ========+==========+=========+=========+===========+=============+===========+===========+===========+=============+===========+===========+===+===+======== [Footnote 1: End of series on May 4.] By reading downward in any particular column of results, one obtains a description of the changes in the animal's reaction to a particular setting of the doors. Thus, for instance, in the case of setting 1, which was presented to the animal in trials numbered 1, 11, 21, and so on to 141, it is clear from the records that no definite improvement occurred. But oddly enough, in the case of setting 10, which presented the same group of open doors, almost all of the reactions are right in the lower half of the column. For setting 2, it is evident that mistakes soon disappeared. Comparison of the data of table 1 indicates that the number of correct first choices is inversely proportional to the number of doors in use, while the number of choices made in a given trial is directly proportional to the number of doors in use. During the first week of work on this problem, Skirrl improved markedly. His performance was somewhat irregular and unpredictable, but on the whole the experiment seemed fairly satisfactory. Cold, cloudy, or rainy days tended to diminish steadiness and to increase the number of mistakes. Similarly, absence of hunger was unfavorable to continuous effort to find the right box. The period of confinement, as punishment for wrong choices, was increased from thirty seconds to sixty seconds on April 26. But there is no satisfactory evidence that this favored the solution of the problem. Work on May 4 was interrupted by a severe storm, the noise of which so distracted the monkey that he ceased to work. Consequently, observations were interrupted on the completion of trial 132, and on May 5, the series was begun with setting 3. On this date, eighteen trials were given in succession, and in only one of them did a mistake occur. Since the ten trials numbered 133 to 142 were correct, Skirrl was considered to have solved problem 1, and systematic training was discontinued. On the following day, as a measure of the extent to which the animal had learned to select the first door at the left no matter what its position or the number of doors in the group presented, a control series was given in which the settings differed from the regular series of settings. These supplementary settings are presented at the bottom of table 1 together with the records of reaction in ten trials. Since in only six of these ten control settings was the first choice correct, it is scarcely fair to insist that the animal was reacting on the basis of an ideational solution of the problem. Rather, it would seem that he had learned to react to particular settings. A careful study of all of the data of response, together with notes on the varied behavior of the animal during the experiments, justifies the statement that Skirrl's solution of problem 1 was incomplete and unreliable. It was highly dependent upon the particular situation, or even the particular door at the left end of the group, and slightly if at all dependent upon anything comparable to the human idea of first at the left of the group. This particular series of observations has been described and discussed in some detail in order to make the chief points of method clear. It will be needless, hereafter, to refer explicitly to many of the characteristics of reaction or to the important points in the construction of tables which have been mentioned. A graphic representation of Skirrl's learning process in problem 1 is presented in figure 18. The irregularities are most striking, and fairly indicate the erraticness of the animal. The curve is based upon the data in next to the last column of table 1, that is, the column presenting the errors or wrong first choices in each series of trials. Unquestionably, the form of such a curve of learning should be considered in connection with the method or methods of selecting the right box employed by the animal during the course of experimentation. It appears from an analysis of the behavior of Skirrl in problem 1 that there developed a single definite and persistent method, namely, that of going to one box in the group, and in case it happened to be a wrong one, of choosing, on emergence from it, the next toward the right end of the group, and so on down the line. Having reached the extreme right end, the tendency was to follow the side of the reaction-chamber around to the opposite end and to enter the first box at the left end of the group, which was, of course, the right one. This method appears, with certain slight variations, in approximately ninety per cent of the trials which involved incorrect choices. Thus, in the case of trials 121 to 130, of which eight exhibit right first choices, the remaining two exhibit the method described above except that the final member at the right end of the group was in each case omitted. [Illustration: FIGURE 18.--Error curves of learning for the solution of problem 1 (first box at left end).] On the whole, Skirrl's behavior in connection with this problem appears to indicate a low order of intelligence. He persisted in such stupid acts as that of turning, after emergence from the right box, toward the right and passing into the blind alley I, instead of toward the left, through G and H, to D. In contrast with the other animals, he spent much time before the closed doors of the boxes, instead of going directly to the open doors, some one of which marked the box in which the reward of food could be obtained. It is, moreover, obvious that his responses, as they appear in table 1, are extremely different from those of a human being who is capable of bringing the idea of first at the left end to bear upon the problem in question. _Problem 2. Second from the Right End_ Following the series of control trials of problem 1 given to Skirrl on May 6, a period of four days was allowed during which the animal was merely fed in the boxes each day. This was done in order that he should partially lose the effects of his previous training to choose the first box at the left before being presented with the second problem, the second box from the right. On May 11 regular experimentation was begun with problem 2. Naturally the situation presented unusual difficulties to the monkey because of his previously acquired habit, and on the first day it was possible to give only five trials, in all except the first of which Skirrl had to be aided by the experimenter to find the right box. He persistently, as appears in the first line of records of table 2, entered the first box at the left. The series was continued on May 13, but with very unsatisfactory results, since he apparently had been greatly discouraged by the unusual difficulties previously met. Only four trials could be given, and in these the showing made was very poor. It is noteworthy, however, that in trials 6, 7, and 8, May 13, there was no marked tendency to choose the first box at the left. Thus quickly had the force of the previous habit been broken. For problem 2, the total number of open doors in the ten settings is fifty, as appears from the data on page 18, and as ten of these fifty open doors may be defined as right ones, the expected ratio of right to wrong first choices in the absence of previous training is 1 to 4. The actual ratio for the first series given in problem 2 is 1 to 8, while in the second series it is 0 to 10. On the morning of May 13, work was interrupted in the ninth trial by what seemed at the moment a peculiarly unfortunate accident, but in the light of later developments, an incident most fruitful of valuable results. Skirrl, in trial 9, directly entered box 1. Since this was not the right box, he was punished by being confined in it for ten seconds. While in the box he howled and when the entrance door was raised for him to retrace his steps, he came out with a rush, showing extreme excitement and either rage or fear, I could not be sure which. At intervals he uttered loud cries, which I am now able to identify as cries of alarm. Repeatedly he went to the open door of box 1 and peered in, or peered down through the hole in the floor which received the staple on the door. He refused to enter any one of the open boxes and continued, at intervals of every half minute or so, his cries. For thirty minutes I waited, hoping to be able to induce him to complete the series of trials, but in vain. Although it was obvious that he was eager to escape from the apparatus, he would not enter any of the boxes even when the exit doors were raised. Instead, he gnawed at the door (12 in fig. 17) to the alleyway D and attempted to force his way through, instead of taking the easy and clear route to the alleys, through one of the boxes. His behavior was most surprising and puzzling. Finally, I gave up the attempt to complete the series and returned him to his cage by way of the entrance door to the response-compartment E. I then entered the apparatus to seek some explanation of the animal's behavior, and my search was rewarded by the finding of two sharp pointed nails which protruded for an inch or more in the middle of the floor of box 1. My assistant, who had been charged with the task of installing the locks for the several doors, had used nails instead of screws for attaching staples underneath the floor and had neglected to clinch the nails. Skirrl, in the dim light of the box, doubtless stepped upon one of the nails and inflicted a painful, although not serious, injury upon himself. It was impossible for him to see clearly the source of his injury. He was greatly frightened and expressed the emotion most vigorously. His behavior strongly suggested a superstitious dread of some unseen danger. It may be that the instinctive fear of snakes, so strong in monkeys, was partly responsible for his response. The first result of this accident was that more than two weeks were lost, for it was impossible, during the next few days, to induce the animal to enter any of the multiple-choice boxes voluntarily. From May 14 to May 24, I labored daily to overcome his newly acquired fear. The usual procedure was to coax him through one box after another by standing at the exit door with some tempting morsel of food. After several days of this treatment, he again trusted himself to the boxes, although very circumspectly and only when both entrance and exit doors were raised. Not until May 24 was it possible to resume regular experimentation, and on that day it was found necessary to indicate the right box by raising the exit door slightly and then immediately lowering it. Trials in which this form of aid was given are indicated in table 2 by a star following the last choice. Gradually, Skirrl regained his confidence in the apparatus and began to work more naturally. For a long time he would not stand punishment, and it was necessary for the experimenter to be very careful in locking the doors, since the sound of the bar sliding beneath the floor often frightened and caused him to quit work. Day after day the tendency to peer through the holes in the floor at the entrance to the boxes rendered it clear that the animal feared some danger from beneath the floor. This behavior was so persistent that much time was wasted in the experiments. On the last day of May, punishment by confinement for ten seconds in wrong boxes was introduced, but since this tended to discourage the monkey, there was substituted for it on June 1 the punishment of forcing him to work his way out of each wrong box by raising the entrance door which had been closed behind him. This he could fairly readily do, and his stay in a box rarely measured more than ten seconds. As a variation in the mode of procedure, confinement for thirty seconds was tried on June 5, but it worked unsatisfactorily and had to be abandoned. During this series, the animal was startled by the sound from one of the sliding bars under the floor, and in the sixth trial he refused to work. As improvement was very slow, varied modes of rewarding and punishing the animal were tried in the hope of discovering a means of facilitating the work. Among the former are the use of banana, grapes, peanuts, and other eagerly sought foods in varying quantities, and in the latter are included periods of confinement ranging from ten seconds to sixty seconds. In the end, confinement of about thirty seconds, combined with a small quantity of food which was much to the monkey's taste, gave most favorable results. All this time Skirrl's attention to the task in hand was seldom good. He was easily diverted and even when extremely hungry, often stopped work in the middle of an early trial, yawned repeatedly and finally sat down to wait for release from the apparatus. The results obtained during the long continued trials with this animal in problem 2 are presented in table 2, which differs from the previously described table, first, in that several of the trials are followed by an asterisk to indicate that aid was given by the experimenter, and second, in that two additional columns, headed, respectively, R and W, are presented. These give the right and wrong first choices for each day, whereas the two columns preceding them give the same data for each series of ten trials. Similarly, the ratio of right to wrong choices is presented for each day in table 2, instead of for each series of ten trials as in table 1. From the results of table 2, several peculiarly interesting facts appear. In the first place the influence of the habit of choosing the first box at the left disappears with surprising suddenness, and in the second place, there are remarkable contrasts in the results for different settings as they appear in their respective vertical columns. Thus, in the case of setting 1, after the first trial mistakes became relatively infrequent, whereas in setting 6, which involved the same number of doors, mistakes continued to be the rule until nearly a thousand trials had been given. The most likely explanation of this difference is that for some reason the animal avoided box 9. The _reactive tendencies_, or better, the _methods of reaction_ which manifested themselves during this long series of observations may be described as follows: (a) choice of the first box at the left; (b) random choice with tendency to choose first, a box near the middle of the group; (c) choice of first box at the right followed by the one next to it on the left; (d) direct choice of the right box. TABLE 2 Results for Skirrl, _P. irus_, in Problem 2 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 2.3.4.5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- May | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 11&13 | 1- 9 | 7.7.9.7.8 | {1.2.2.1.4.1 | {2.3.2.3.2.5 | {4.6.1.4.1.1 | 4.4.7 | 3.1.2 | 4 | 4.1.8 | 1 | | 1 | 8 | 1 | 8 | 1: 8.00 | | | {2.1.2.1.3 | {2.3.2.5.6 | {2.6.1.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 11- 20 | 8*[1] | 2.4.3* | 4.5.6* | 2.2.5* | 5.6.6.7* | 3.1.2 | {5.2.3.5.3.2 | 4.6.8* | 4.4.3* | 5.5.6.7* | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | | | | | | {3.5.2.4* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 25 | 21- 30 | 8* | 4.4.3* | 5.6 | {6.6.2.3.4 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 5.6.3.8 | 4.4.3 | 6.4.6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | {6.6.5* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 31- 40 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 5.8 | 4.3 | 5.3.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 27 | 41- 50 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.8.6.8.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 5.4 | {6.5.4.3 | 4.3 | 5.4.8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | {2.1.5.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 28 | 51- 60 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 5 | 5.6.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 4 | {5.4.3 | 4.3 | {5.4.3.3.4.5 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | {3.6.8 | | {6.4.3.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 29 | 61- 70 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.6.5 | 7 | 3.3.3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.4.7.6.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 31 | 71- 80 | 8 | 4.4.4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 6.8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {6.7.6.4.3 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 June | | | | | | | | | {2.6.3.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.8.6.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 81- 90 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | {6.5.6.5.8 | 3.1.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | {5.4.6.4.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 91- 100 | 9.7.8 | 4.2.4.3 | 7.5.6 | 5 | 6.8.7 | 3.3.1.2 | 5.3.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 2 | 101- 110 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 6.8.6.5.7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 111- 120 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.3.5.7.6 | {6.2.3.6.4 | 7 | 3.2 | {5.2.3.5.3.2 | 9.6.4.7.8 | {4.1.2 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | {3.6.2.5 | | | {3.5.2.3.4 | | {4.2.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.8.6.3 | | | | | 3 | 121- 130 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | {5.3.2.3 | 8 | 4.2.3 | {5.4.5.8.8 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | {5.2.5.4 | | | {6.3.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 131- 140 | 8 | 4.3 | 5.7.3.2.6 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 1.3.2 | 5.3.4 | 6.7.8 | 4.2.1.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 4 | 141- 150 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 2 | {5.3.2.3 | 6.8 | 4.1.3 | 5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | {5.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 151- 160 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 5.6.7.8 | 4.3 | 5.6.8.7 | 5 | 5 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 5 | 161- 170 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.8.7 | 3.2 | 5.3.2.3.5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 171- 176 | 8 | 2.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5* | 8.7 | 3.2* | | | | | 1 | 5 | 3 |13 | 1: 4.33 7 | 177- 180 | | | | | | | 5.4 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 8.7 | 1 | 3 | | | " | 181- 190 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.3.2.5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 5 | 9 | 1: 1.80 8 | 191- 200 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 201- 210 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.4.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 9 | 211- 220 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 221- 230 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 3 |17 | 1: 5.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 10 | 231- 240 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {3.2.3.2.4.3 | 4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | {2.5.4.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 11 | 241- 250 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 12 | 251- 260 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | {7.6.7.7 | 3 | 3.7* | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | {6.9.8* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 14 | 261- 270 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {5.3.4.3 | 3 | {3.3.3.3.4 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 | | | | | | | | | {9.8* | | {4.6.4.7* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 15 | 271- 280 | 7.9.8 | 4.2.3 | 3.4.3.7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | | | " | 281- 290 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.3.2.3 | | | | | | | 16 | 291- 300 | 7.8 | {4.4.4 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | {6.5.4.3 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | {4.4.3 | | | | | | {5.6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 301- 310 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 5.5.4 | {7.6.5.4.6 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | | | | | | | | {5.7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 17 | 311- 320 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.7.6.7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 321- 330 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 18 | 331- 340 | 7.7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 341- 350 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 19 | 351- 360 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.5.6.5.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 361- 370 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.4.3.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 21 | 371- 380 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 381- 390 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 22 | 391- 400 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.5.4.6.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 5.4 | 6.7.8 | 4.4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 401- 410 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 5.4 | 6.7.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 411- 420 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {7.6.7.6 | 4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | {6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 421- 430 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 431- 440 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 25 | 441- 450 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.5.7 | 3.3.2 | 5.5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 26 | 451- 460 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 461- 470 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 28 | 471- 480 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 29 | 481- 490 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 30 | 491- 500 | 7.9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 501- 510 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 July | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 511- 520 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 521- 530 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {7.6.5.6.5 | 4.4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.6.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 531- 540 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 3 | 541- 550 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 5.5.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 551- 560 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 5 | 561- 570 | 7.7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 571- 580 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.4.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 581- 590 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.6.5 | {5.4.5.4.4 | 2 | 3.4 | 6.5.4.3.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | {6.5.6.5.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7 | 591- 600 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 601- 610 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 8 | 611- 620 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 621- 630 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | | | " | 631- 640 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 6 |24 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 9 | 641- 650 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | {3.2.5.3 | 7.6.5.4.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | {2.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.4.3.7 | | | | | | | 10 | 651- 660 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {6.5.4.7.6 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.4.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 10 | 661- 670 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 6 | 4 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 12 | 671- 680 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.5.4.7.8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 13 | 681- 690 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | {6.5.4 | 3.2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | {6.5.4.5 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | {6.5.7 | | | | | {6.5.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 691- 700 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 |12 | 8 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 14 | 701- 710 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | {6.5.4.5 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | | {4.6.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | " | 711- 720 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 6.5.4.8 | 3 | 6.5.7 | 7 | 3 |13 | 7 | 1: 0.54 15 | 721- 730 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 731- 740 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 16 | 741- 750 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 751- 760 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 |12 | 8 | 1: 0.67 17 | 761- 770 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 771- 780 | 8 | 2.2.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 19 | 781- 790 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.4 | 7.6.5.8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 791- 800 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 6.5.6.7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 801- 810 | 8 | 2.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.7 | 2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |20 |10 | 1: 0.50 20 | 811- 820 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 2.2.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 821- 830 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | 8 | 2.3 | 8.7 | 6 | 4 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 21 | 831- 840 | 8 | 3 | 5.4.5.6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 841- 850 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.2.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |14 | 6 | 1: 0.43 22 | 851- 860 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 861- 870 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 871- 880 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 |11 |19 | 1: 1.73 23 | 881- 890 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 891- 900 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 24 | 901- 910 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 911- 920 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 26 | 921- 930 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 2.2.3 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 931- 940 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 27 | 941- 950 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 28 | 951- 960 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 5.4.7 | 2 | 5.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 29 | 961- 970 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 8.7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 1: 0.25 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 30 | 971- 980 | 8 | 3 | 4.3.2.6 | 5 | {6.5.4.6 | 2 | 5.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 | | | | | | {6.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 31 | 981- 990 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 1: 0.25 August | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 991-1000 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | {2.3.5.3 | 7.6.8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 | | | | | | | | {2.3.3.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 3 | 1001-1010 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.6.5.6.7.8 | 3 | 5.4.3.4.3.7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 1011-1020 | 8 | 2.3 | 5.6 | 3.2.3.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 2.1.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 4 | 1021-1030 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.4.3.7.6 | 6.5 | {6.5.6 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | {2.2.4.2 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | | | {5.6.7 | | | | {4.2.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 1031-1040 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 6.4.3.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 2.3 | 8.7 | 5 | 5 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 | 1041-1050 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 2.3.2.6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 2.2.4.3 | {8.8.6.8.4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 1051-1060 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 4.2.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7 | 1061-1070 | 8 | 3 | 5.4.3.6 | 4.5 | {6.5.6.5 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 | | | | | | {4.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 9 | 1071-1080 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 |10 | 0 |10 | 0 | 1: 0.00 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | | | | 1.2.3.4 | 2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | 5.6.7.8 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8.9 | 5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4 | 4.5.6 | 2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | 5.6.7 | 6.7.8.9 | | | | | --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 10 | 1- 10 | 6.5.7 | 3.2.6.5 | 8 | 6 | 2.4.3 | 5 | 5.4 | 2 | 7.5.2.7.6 | 8 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 11 | 11- 20 | 7 | 3.6.5 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 6.5 | 4 | 3.2 | 7.6 | 8 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {3.2.3.5.3 | | | | | | | | 12 | 21- 30 | 7 | 2.2.6.5 | 7.8 | 6 | 3 | 5 | {2.5.3.2 | 2 | 6 | 8 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 | | | | | | | | {5.3.2.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.5.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote 1: First choices correct by reason of aid from the experimenter are not counted as correct (R) in the summary.] [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] The method of choosing the first box at the right end and then the one next to it developed in the case of all except two of the ten settings. The time of appearance is worth noting. In setting 1, it failed to appear; in setting 2, it developed early,--after about one hundred trials; in setting 3, after about one hundred and fifty trials; in setting 4, after about one hundred and fifty trials; in setting 5, after about one hundred and seventy trials; in setting 6, after about one hundred trials; in setting 7, after about fifty trials; in setting 8, it never developed; in setting 9, after about fifty trials; and in setting 10, it developed very late,--after about four hundred and seventy trials. This method of reaction, although inadequate, proved remarkably persistent, and it is doubtful whether it had been wholly overcome at the conclusion of the experiment. In the case of the series of trials given on June 8, numbered 191 to 200, the method used was either that of the first at the right and then the next, or direct choice of the right box. Throughout the trials with this problem, the end boxes, numbers 1 and 9, were avoided. This is at least partially explained by the fact that they never existed, and obviously never could appear, in problem 2, as right boxes. In trials 601 to 610, given on July 7, there occurred partial return to the formerly established method of choosing the first door at the right. This relapse was characteristic of what happened during the many days which intervened between the definite appearance of this habit and the final solution of the problem. Especially in connection with such relapses, Skirrl showed extreme fatigue or ennui and often would refuse to work and simply sit before the open doors yawning. This happened even when he was extremely hungry and evidently eager enough for food. From July 12 on the hunger motive was increased by feeding the monkey only in the apparatus and by so regulating the amount of food given in each trial that he should obtain barely enough to keep him in good physical condition. An increase in the number of correct choices promptly resulted, and continued until on July 14 the ratio of choices was 1 to .54. It appeared from these data that a relatively small number of choices, say not more than ten a day, the rewards in connection with which supplied the only food received by the animal, yielded most favorable results. On July 16, the period of confinement in wrong boxes was increased to sixty seconds, and it was so continued for a number of days. But in the end, it became clear that the period of thirty seconds, combined with a liberal reward in the shape of desired food and a single series of ten trials per day, was most satisfactory. The detailed data of table 2 indicate that at this time Skirrl was making his choices by memory of the particular setting. Skirrl, on July 17 was evidently hungry and eager to locate food, but seemingly unable to select the right box. In trial 5 (765th) of the series, he was punished by confinement in box 8. When the doors were unlocked in order that the entrance door might be raised to release him, the lock-bar, sliding under the floor, made a slight grating noise, and the instant the entrance door was opened, he jumped out excitedly. _He made no outcry, but as soon as he was out of the box, sat down, and taking up his right hind foot, examined it for a few seconds._ Having apparently assured himself that nothing serious had happened, he went on unconcernedly about his task. The presumption is that the sound of the lock-bar, associated as it was with his painful experience in box 1, revived the strongly affective experience of stepping on the nail. Psychologically described, the sound induced an imaginal complex equivalent to the earlier painful experience. The behavior seems to the writer a most important bit of evidence of imagery in the monkey. Finally, on August 9, after ten hundred and seventy trials, Skirrl succeeded in choosing correctly in the ten trials of a series, and he was therefore considered to have solved the problem of the second door from the right end of the group. On the following day, he was given a control series with the settings which are presented on page 19 and also at the bottom of table 2. In this series he chose correctly five times,--in other words, as often correctly as incorrectly. An analysis of the choices indicates, however, that two of the five correct choices were made in box 8, which, as it happened, had proved a peculiarly easy one for him throughout the training, since from the first he tended to avoid door 9. Consequently, it is only fair to conclude, from the results for this control series and for those given on August 11 and 12, that the animal chose not on the basis of anything remotely resembling a general idea of secondness from the right end, but instead on the basis of gradually acquired modes of reaction to the particular settings. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that he had failed to learn to react appropriately and readily to most of the settings of the regular series. The curve which represents the course of the learning process in this problem is presented in figure 19. For this and all other curves which involve more than a single series of observations a day, the method of construction was as follows: The first series for each day of training is indicated on the curve by a dot, while the second or third series on a given day, although space is allowed for them, are not so indicated. Consequently, the form of the curve is determined chiefly by the first series per day. The extreme irregularities of this curve are most interesting and puzzling, as are also the variations in the daily ratios of right to wrong first choices. Three times in the course of the training, this ratio rose to 1 to 9, or higher. The causes for such extreme variations are not easily enumerated, but a few of the most obvious contributory causes are variations in the weather, especially cloudiness or fogginess, which rendered the apparatus dark; variations in the degree of hunger or eagerness for food; differences in the activities of the animals in the cages outside of the laboratory (sometimes they were noisy and distracted the subject), and finally, differences in the physical fitness and attitude of the animal from day to day. The more or less incidental behavior in connection with this experiment more strongly than the statistical results of the work on problem 2 indicate the existence of imagery. That ideas played a part in the solution of the problem is probable, but at best they functioned very ineffectively. The small number of methods used in the selection of the right box, and the slight variations from the chief method, that of choosing the first box at the right end and then the one next to it, apparently justify Doctor Hamilton's characterization of this monkey as defective. [Illustration: FIGURE 19.--Error curves of learning for the solution of problem 2 (second box from right end).] _Problem 3. Alternately First at Left and First at Right_ Following the control series given in connection with problem 1, an interval of rest lasting from August 12 to August 19 was allowed in order that Skirrl might in part at least lose the effects of his training and regain his customary interest in the apparatus by being allowed to obtain food easily instead of by dint of hard labor,--labor which was harder by far, apparently, than physical activity because it demanded of the animal certain mental processes which were either lacking or but imperfectly functional. The difficultness of the daily tasks appears to be reliably indicated by the tendency to yawn. Systematic work on problem 3, which has been defined as alternately the first door at the left and the first door at the right of the group, was begun August 19, and for nine days a single series of ten trials per day was given. Work then had to cease because of the experimenter's return to Cambridge. The results of the work on this problem demand but brief analysis and comment. The expected ratio of one right to four wrong choices per series appears (see table 3) for the first series of trials, and _this in spite of the fact that Skirrl had been trained for several weeks to choose the second door from the right end_. One would ordinarily have predicted a much larger number of incorrect choices. The right choices were due to the monkey's strong tendency to go first to the first door at the right and thence to the one next to it. Indeed in the series given on August 24; this method was followed without variation. In other words, in every one of the ten trials Skirrl entered first the box at the extreme right end of the group. This necessarily resulted in as many right as wrong first choices. Consequently, the ratio reads 1 to 1. But the method was not adhered to, and at no time either before or after that date did he succeed in equalling this achievement. There was, as a matter of fact, no steady improvement, and so far as one may judge from the records which were obtained, the course of events in the solution of this problem would have been similar to those in problem 2. TABLE 3 Results for Skirrl, _P. irus_, in Problem 3 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== Date | No. of | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | R | W | R | W |Ratio of | trials | 5.6.7 | 5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 2.3.4.5 | 2.3.4.5 | 3.4.5.6.7.8.9| 3.4.5.6.7.8.9| | | | |R to W ________|___________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|______________|___|___|___|___|________ August | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.4.6 | | | | | | | {8.7.6.5 | | | | | 19 | 1- 10 | 7.5 | 6.7 | {3.2.6.4 | 5.3.6 | {7.8.7.6 | 8 | 4.3.5.4.5.2 | 5 | 9.8.7.6.4.3 | {4.5.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 | | | | {3.6.1* | | {8.6.4 | | | | | {6.5.9* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.4.6.5 | | {8.7.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 11- 20 | 7.6.5 | {6.5.6.5 | {4.6.5.3 | 5.3.2.4.6 | {7.5.8.8 | 8 | 5.4.3.2 | 4.5 | 8.7.6.5.4.3 | {8.7.6.8.3 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1:9.00 | | | {7 | {2.5.1* | | {7.6.4* | | | | | {7.6.4.3.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.2.5.6 | | | | {5.3.5.4 | | | | | | | | 21 | 21- 30 | 7.6.7.6.5 | 7 | {5.3.6.5 | 2.5.5.6 | 8.6.5.4 | 8 | {3.5.3.5 | 5 | {9.8.7.6 | 8.9 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | {4.3.1* | | | | {4.3.2* | | {5.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 31- 40 | 7.6.5 | 6.5.7 | {6.4.3.2 | 3.2.6 | 8.7.6.4 | 8 | 5.4.5.3.2 | 5.2 | 8.7.3 | 9 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 | | | | {5.6.2.1 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 41- 50 | 7.6.5 | 7 | {6.2.5 | 6 | {8.7.8.7 | 8 | 5.3.2 | 5 | {9.8.7.6 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 | | | | {4.3.1 | | {5.7.5.4 | | | | {5.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {8.7.3.6 | | | | | 25 | 51- 60 | 7.6.5 | 6.5.7 | 5.2.1 | 6 | 8.5.4 | 8 | 2 | 2.5 | 9.8.7.4.3 | {8.7.5.3 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | {8.7.9* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 61- 70 | 7.6.5 | 6.5.7 | 1 | 2.1.6 | 8.7.6.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.5 | 9.8.7.5.3 | {3.6.8.3 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | {4.7.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {8.6.3.3 | | | | | 27 | 71- 80 | 7.6.5 | 7 | 2.1 | 1.5.6 | 8.7.6.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.8.7.6.3 | {7.5.3.8 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | {3.6.9* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 28 | 81- 90 | 7.6.7.5 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 8.6.4 | 4.8 | 2 | 2.4.5 | 8.7.4.3 | 3.8.9 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] 2. Sobke, _Pithecus rhesus_ _Problem 1. First at the Left End_ Sobke was somewhat afraid of the experimenter when the investigation was undertaken, and instead of willingly coming out of his cage when the door was raised, he often had to be coaxed out and lured into the apparatus with food. Whereas Skirrl was frank and rather aggressive, Sobke was stealthy in his movements, furtive, and evidently suspicious of the experimenter as well as of the apparatus. He was perfectly safe to approach, but would not permit anyone to touch him. After a few days, he began to take food from the hands of the experimenter. Preliminary work to acquaint this monkey with the routine of the experiment was begun on April 13. As in the case of Skirrl, he was lured into the apparatus and was taught the route through the boxes to the starting point by being allowed to obtain food once each day in each of the nine boxes. The procedure was simple. The entrance door and the exit door of a particular box were raised and the animal admitted to the reaction-compartment and permitted to pass through the box whose doors stood open, take its food, and return to the starting point. Sobke very quickly learned the route perfectly and came to work steadily and rapidly. After five days of preliminary work of this sort, he was so thoroughly accustomed to the apparatus that it was evidently desirable to begin with regular training experiments. The first series of trials was given on April 19. Both punishment and reward were employed from the first. The punishment consisted of confinement for thirty seconds in each wrong box, and the reward of a small piece of banana, usually not more than a tenth of a medium sized banana for each correct choice. The total time for the first series of trials was fourteen minutes. This indicates that Sobke worked rapidly. My notes record that he worked quickly though shyly, wasted almost no time, made few errors of choice, and waited quietly during confinement in the boxes. In this, also, he differed radically from Skirrl who was restless and always tried to escape from confinement. Throughout the work on problem 1, punishment and reward were kept constant. Everything progressed smoothly; there were no such irregularities of behavior as appeared in the case of Skirrl, and consequently the description of results is a relatively simple matter. Sobke invariably chose the end boxes. His performance was in every way superior to that of Skirrl. As previously, the detailed results are presented in tabular form (table 4). From this table it appears that, whereas the expected ratio of right to wrong first choices for this problem is 1 to 2.5, the actual ratio for Sobke's first series was 1 to .67. This surprisingly good showing is unquestionably due to his marked tendency to choose the end box of a group; and this tendency, in turn, may in part be the result of the preliminary training, for during that only one box was open each time. But, if the preliminary training were responsible for Sobke's tendency, it should be noted that it had very different effect upon Skirrl, and, as will be seen later, upon Julius. The results for the ten different settings of the doors for problem 1 as they appear in table 4 are of interest for a number of reasons. In the first place, the setting 1. 2. 3 appearing twice,--at the beginning of the series and again at the end--yielded markedly different results in the two positions. For whereas no mistakes were made in the case of setting 1, there were fifty per cent of incorrect first choices for setting 10. Again, satisfactory explanation is impossible. It is conceivable that fatigue or approaching satiety may have had something to do with the failures at the end of the series, but as a rule, as is indicated by settings 1, 2, and 6, if correct choices were made at the beginning, they continued throughout the day's work. In this problem, Sobke's improvement was steady and fairly rapid, and in the eighth series, trials 71 to 80, only correct first choices appear. Consequently, seventy trials were required for the solution of the problem. This number is in marked contrast with Skirrl's one hundred and thirty-two trials. Immediately following the first perfect series, Sobke was given two series of control tests on April 28. Conditions were unfavorable, since the day was stormy and the rain pattering on the sheet-iron roof made a great din. Nevertheless, he worked steadily and well up to the sixth trial, which was preceded by a slight delay because of the necessity of refilling some of the food boxes. After this interruption, wrong choices occurred in trial 6. And again after trial 9, there was brief interruption, followed by wrong choices in trial 10. The ratio of right to wrong choices for this first control series was therefore 1 to .25. TABLE 4 Results for Sobke, _P. rhesus_, in Problem 1 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | | | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 1.2.3 | 8.9 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- April | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 19 | 1-10 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 9.7 | 6.2 | 6 | 7.5 | 4 | 9.7 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 20 | 11-20 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 7.5 | 8.4 | 9.9.7 | 1 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1:0.43 21 | 21-30 | 1 | 8 | 4.3 | 9.7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 8.4 | 7 | 1 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1:0.43 22 | 31-40 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6.2 | 6 | 6.5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1:0.43 23 | 41-50 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 9.7 | 3.1 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 1:0.25 24 | 51-60 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 9.7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 2.1 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 1:0.25 26 | 61-70 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1:0.11 27 | 71-80 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 |10 | 0 |10 | 0 | 1:0.00 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | 2.3.4 | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | 2.3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 5.6.7.8 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 6.7.8.9 | | | | | | +--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+ | | | | 28 | 1-10 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 5.4.1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 5.4.2.1 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 11-20 | 2 | 6 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 2.1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 9 | 1 |17 | 3 | 1:0.18 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== Six minutes after completion of the first control series, a second was given under slightly more favorable conditions, and in this only a single wrong choice occurred, in that box 2 was first chosen in trial 6 instead of box 1. From the results of these two control series, it is evident that Sobke's solution of problem 1 is reasonably adequate. He is easily diverted or disturbed in his work by any unusual circumstances, but so long as everything goes smoothly, he chooses with ease and certainty. Whether it is fair to describe the behavior as involving an idea of the relation of the right box to the other members of the group would be difficult to decide. I hesitate to infer definite ideation from the available evidence, but I strongly suspect the presence of images and relatively ineffective or inadequate ideation. It is perfectly evident that Sobke is much more intelligent than Skirrl. In practically every respect, he adapted himself more quickly to the experimental procedure and progressed more steadily toward the solution of the problem than did Skirrl. The contrast in the learning processes of the two monkeys could scarcely be better exhibited than by the curves of learning which are presented in figure 18. The first, that for Sobke, is surprisingly regular; the second, that for Skirrl, is quite as surprisingly irregular. These results correlate perfectly with the steadiness and predictability of the former's responses and the irregularity and erraticness of the latter's. _Problem 2. Second from the Right End_ On the completion of problem 1 Sobke was in perfect condition, as to health and training, for experimental work. He had come to work quietly, fairly deliberately, and very steadily. His timidity had diminished and he would readily come to the experimenter for food, although still he was somewhat distrustful at times and became timid when anything unusual occurred in the apparatus. As preparation for problem 2, a break in regular experimentation covering four days followed the control series of problem 1. On each of these four days the monkey was allowed to get food once from each of the nine boxes, both doors of a given box being open for the trial and all other doors closed. For this feeding experiment, the doors were opened in irregular order, and this order was changed from day to day. Systematic work with problem 2 began on May 3, with punishment of thirty seconds for mistakes and a liberal reward of food for each success. Early in the series of trials it was discovered that Sobke was likely to become discouraged and waste a great deal of time unless certain aid were given by the experimenter. On this account, after the first two trials, the method was adopted of punishing the animal by confinement for the first ten mistakes in a trial, and of then, if need be, indicating the right box by slightly and momentarily raising the exit door. Every trial in which aid was thus given by the experimenter is indicated in table 5 by an asterisk following the last choice. In the first series of trials for this problem, aid had to be given in seven of the ten trials, and even so the series occupied seventy-one minutes. It is possible that had no aid been given, the work might have been continued successfully with a smaller number of trials than ten per day. But under the circumstances it seemed wiser to avoid the risk of discouraging and thus spoiling the animal for use in the experiment. It should be stated, also, that it proved impossible to adhere to the period of thirty seconds as punishment in this series. For the majority of the wrong choices confinement of not more than ten seconds was used. For the second series, given on May 4, the conditions were unfavorable in that it was dark and rainy, and the noise of the rain on the roof frightened Sobke. He refused to work after the fourth trial, and the series had to be completed on the following day. The total time required for this series was seventy-eight minutes. The work on May 6 was distinctly better, and the animal's behavior indicated, in a number of trials, definite recognition of the right door. He might, for example, make a number of incorrect choices, then pause for a few seconds to look steadily at the doors, and having apparently found some cue, run directly to the right box. No aid from the experimenter was needed in this series. On the following day improvement continued and the animal's method of choosing became definite and fairly precise. He was deliberate, quiet, and extremely business-like. The time for the series was thirty-one minutes. The period of punishment was increased on May 12 to thirty seconds. Previously, for the greater number of the trials, it had been ten to fifteen seconds. This increase apparently did not disturb the monkey, for he continued to work perfectly throughout the series, although making many mistakes in spite of deliberate choices and the refusal of certain boxes in each trial. An interesting and significant incident occurred on May 13 when at the conclusion of trial 5, Doctor Hamilton came into the experiment room for a few minutes. Sobke immediately stopped working, and he could not be induced to make any choices until Doctor Hamilton had left the room. This well indicates his sensitiveness to his surroundings, and his inclination to timidity or nervousness even in the presence of conditions not in themselves startling. Work was continued thus steadily until May 28 when, because of the failure of the animal to improve, it seemed wise to increase the period of confinement as punishment to sixty seconds. In the meantime, it had sometimes been evident that Sobke was near to the solution of his problem. He would often make correct choices in three or four trials in succession and then apparently lose his cue and fail utterly for a number of trials. After June 1, in order to hasten the solution of the problem, two series per day were given. In some instances the second series was given almost immediately after the first, while in others an interval of an hour or more intervened. It was further found desirable to give Sobke all of his food in the apparatus. When the rewards obtained in the several trials did not satisfy his hunger, additional food was presented, on the completion of the series of experiments, in one or more of the food cups. On days marked by unwillingness or refusal to work, very little food was given. Thus, the eagerness of the monkey to locate the right box was increased and, as a matter of observation, his deliberateness and care in choice increased correspondingly. Sixty seconds punishment was found satisfactory, and it was therefore continued throughout the work on this problem. It was evident, on June 9, from the behavior of the monkey as well as from the score, that the perfect solution of the problem was near at hand. This fact the experimenter recorded in his daily notes, and sure enough, on the following day Sobke chose correctly throughout the series of ten trials. The time for this series was only ten minutes. The choices were made deliberately and readily. An analysis of the data of table 5 reveals five methods or reactive tendencies which appeared more or less definitely in the following order: (a) Choice of first box at the left, because of experience in problem 1. This tendency was very quickly suppressed by the requirements in connection with problem 2. Indeed one of the most significant differences which I have discovered between the behavior of the primates and that of other mammals is the time required for the suppression of such an acquired tendency. The monkey seems to learn almost immediately that it is not worth while to persist in a tendency which although previously profitable no longer yields satisfaction, whereas in the crow, pig, rat, and ring dove, the unprofitable mode of response tends to persist during a relatively large number of trials. (b) The tendency to choose, first, a box near the left end of the group, to go from that to the box at the extreme right end of the group, thence to the one next in order, which was, of course, the right box. This tendency appears fairly clearly from May 7th on. (c) The box at the extreme right was first chosen and then the one next to it. For example, in setting 2, box 4 would be chosen first, then box 3. Or, if this did not occur, the method previously described under (b) was likely to be employed, as for example, in setting 8, where such choices as 7.6.5.1.8 appear. (d) In certain series there appeared a marked preference for a particular box, usually box 3 (see results for May 24). This was doubtless due in a measure, if not wholly, to the fact that box 3 was the right box twice in each series of ten settings. But it should be added that the same is true of box 7, for which no preference was manifested at any time. (e) Direct choice of the right box. The five reactive methods or tendencies enumerated above roughly appeared in the order named, but there were certain irregularities and the order as well as the time of appearance varied somewhat from setting to setting. In general, method c was the most frequently used prior to the development of method e, the direct choice of the right box. TABLE 5 Results for Sobke, _P. rhesus_, in Problem 2 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 2.3.4.5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | May | | {7.7.9.7.7 | {1.2.4.1 | {3.2.7.2 | {4.6.1.6 | | {3.1.3.3 | | | {4.1.4.1 | {3.8.3.3 | | | | | 3 | 1-10 | {9.7.9.7.9 | {1.4.1.1 | {7.7.7.5 | {1.6.1.1 | 5.8.6.7 | {3.3.1.1 | 3.5.4 | 9.1.8 | {4.1.4.2 | {3.8.6.3 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | {7.9.9.7.8* | {4.3* | {2.7.6* | {1.3.5* | | {1.1.2* | | | {1.4.3* | {8.3.7* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.7.2.7 | | (8.8.4.8 | | {5.5.5.5 | {9.5.5.9 | | | | | | | 4 and 5 | 11-20 | (7.9.7.9.9 | 1.4.1.3 | {2.7.3.2 | 1.6.5 | {8.8.4.8 | {3.3.1.1.3 | {5.5.5.3 | {7.1.6.6 | {4.4.4.4 | {8.8.6.8 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | {9.7.7.9.8 | | {7.2.6* | | {4.8.7* | {3.3.1.2 | {5.5.4* | {6.5.8* | {4.4.4.3 | {8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 21-30 | 9.7.9.7.8 | 4.3 | 7.2.3.7.6 | {6.3.1.6 | 6.8.7 | 3.1.2 | {5.3.5.3 | {6.9.4.6.1 | {4.1.2.4 | {3.4.5.3 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | | | {6.2.6.5 | | | {2.4 | {7.9.7.8 | {4.2.3 | {8.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7 | 31-40 | 7.9.7.8 | 1.4.3 | 2.7.6 | 3.5 | 4.8.7 | 3.1.2 | 3.2.3.5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 5.8.3.4.8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 8 | 41-50 | 7.9.7.8 | (4.2.4.1.4 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.4.8.7 | {3.1.3.1 | 5.3.5.4 | {7.4.2.1 | {4.2.4.1 | 5.3.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | {4.2.2.4.3 | | | | {3.1.3.2 | | {9.8 | {4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.3.5.3 | | | | | | | | 10 | 51-60 | 7.7.8 | 3 | 7.3.2.7.6 | 6.4.6.5 | (6.4.8.5 | 3.1.3.2 | {2.5.3.5 | 5.9.8 | 4.2.4.3 | {6.5.4 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | {4.8.7 | | {2.5.4 | | | {3.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 11 | 61-70 | 7.9.7.8 | 1.4.3 | 4.3.2.7.6 | 6.5 | {5.4.8.6 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.5.2.3.1.8 | 3 | 6.5.3.8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | {5.4.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 12 | 71-80 | 7.9.8 | 3 | 7.3.2.7.6 | 6.5 | 5.4.8.7 | 1.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 5.4.3.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 13 | 81-90 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 3.7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 1.3.2 | 2.5.2.5.4 | 7.6.5.9.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {1.2.1.2.2 | | | | | | 14 | 91-100 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.4.7 | 1.3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | {1.4.2.2.1 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | {4.1.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 15 | 101-110 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 5.4.5.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 2.1.3 | 8.8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 17 | 111-120 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | {2.1.2.1.2 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.5.1.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | {1.3.2.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 18 | 121-130 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.5.2.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.3.2.5.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.5.2.5.3 | | | | | | | | 19 | 131-140 | 8 | 3 | 3.2.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | {5.5.2.5.5 | 7.6.9.8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | {3.2.5.5.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.5.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 141-150 | 7.8 | 3 | 3.2.7.6 | 6.5 | 5.4.7 | 3.2 | 3.2.5.4 | 6.5.4.3.8 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 21 | 151-160 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.7.5.3.7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.3.5.2.5.4 | 7.6.5.9.8 | 3 | 6.4.3.8.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 22 | 161-170 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 3.2.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | {5.2.5.3 | 7.6.5.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | {2.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {3.1.3 | | | | | | | | | 24 | 171-180 | 8 | 3 | {3.2.7.5 | {3.6.4 | 8.7 | {1.3.3 | {3.5.4 | 8 | {4.4.2.1 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | {7.3.6 | {3.6.5 | | {3.2 | | | {4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 25 | 181-190 | 7.9.7.9.8 | 3 | 3.7.6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 4.3.8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 26 | 191-200 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 27 | 201-210 | 7.9.8 | 3 | 3.2.7.6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 28 | 211-220 | 8 | 3 | 3.7.6 | 4.3.2.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.5.9.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 29 | 221-230 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.4.3.7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.2.5.4 | 7.6.5.8 | 3 | 3.8.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 31 | 231-240 | 7.7.8 | 3 | 3.7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 3 | 3.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 June | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 241-250 | 8 | 3 | 5.4.7.6 | 3.2.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 251-260 | 7.9.8 | 3 | 3.7.6 | 5 | 6.5.4.8.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 5.4.3.8 | {4.2.1.4 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | {2.4.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 261-270 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 3.2.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.4 | 8 | 3 | 6.5.3.8.7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 271-280 | 7.8 | 3 | 3.7.6 | 3.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.5.4.3.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 3 | 281-290 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 3.6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 291-300 | 9.8 | 3 | 3.6 | 4.3.6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 7.6.5.9.8 | 3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 4 | 301-310 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 3.4.3.6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 3.2.5.4 | 7.6.5.8 | 3 | 3.8.7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 311-320 | 8 | 3 | 5.4.7.6 | 3.2.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.2.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 5 | 321-330 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 4.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 331-340 | 8 | 3 | 7.4.7.6 | 3.2.4.6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 |13 | 7 | 1: 0.54 7 | 341-350 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 8.7 | 1.3.1.2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 351-360 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 8.7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |13 | 7 | 1: 0.54 8 | 361-370 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.7.6 | 3.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 9.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | | 371-380 | 8 | 3 | 7.6 | 3.4.4.3.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 3.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 9 | 381-390 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 4.2.1.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 391-400 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 3.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 9 | 1 |16 | 4 | 1: 0.25 10 | 401-410 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 |10 | 0 |10 | 0 | 1: 0.00 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | | | | 1.2.3.4 | 2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | 5.6.7.8 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8.9 | 5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4 | 4.5.6 | 2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | 5.6.7 | 6.7.8.9 | | | | | | +--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 11 | 1-10 | 6.7 | 3.5 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 3.4 | 3.2 | 7.7.2.6 | 8 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 12 | 11-20 | 7 | 3.6.6.2.5 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 4.5 | 4 | 2 | 7.6 | 8 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] Examination of table 5 indicates that some of the settings proved very easy for Sobke; others, extremely difficult. Consequently, the number of methods which were tried and rejected for a given setting varies from two to five. Setting 2 proved a fairly simple one, and after the inhibition of the tendency to choose the first box at the left, the only definite tendency to appear was that of choosing the first box at the right, and then the one next to it. After one hundred and thirty trials, this method suddenly gave place to direct choice of the right box, and during the following twenty-eight series, no error occurred for this setting. Setting 4, on the contrary, proved extremely difficult, and a variety of methods is more or less definitely indicated by the records. It is needless to lengthen the description by analyzing the data for each setting, since the reader by carefully scanning the columns of data in table 5 may observe for himself the various tendencies and their mutual relations. Sobke's curve of learning (figure 19) in problem 2, is extremely irregular, as was that of Skirrl. Similar irregularities appear in the daily ratios of right to wrong first choices presented in the last column of table 5. Most of these irregularities were due, I have discovered, to unfavorable external conditions. Thus, dark rainy days and disturbing noises outside the laboratory were obviously conditions of poor work. On the day following the final and correct series for problem 2, a control series was given. In this Sobke seemed greatly surprised by the new situations which presented themselves. Repeatedly he exhibited impulses to enter the box which would have been the correct one in the regular series of settings. He frequently inhibited such impulses and chose correctly, but at other times he reacted quickly and made mistakes. It was evident from his behavior that he was not guided by anything like a definite idea of the relation of the right box to the other members of the group. In a second control series given on the following day, June 12, confusion appeared, but less markedly. For the first setting, a correct choice was made with deliberation. For the second setting, box 3 was immediately chosen, as should have been the case in the regular series of settings. Sobke seemed confused when he emerged from this box and had difficulty in locating the right one. Then followed direct correct choices for settings 3, 4, and 5. For setting 6, there is recorded a deliberately made wrong choice, and so on throughout the series, the choices being characterized by deliberateness and definite search for the right box. Uncertainty was plainly indicated, and in this the behavior of the animal differed markedly from that in the concluding series of the regular experiment. It seems safe to conclude from the results of these control series that Sobke has no free idea of the relation of secondness from the right and is chiefly dependent upon memory of the particular settings for cues which lead to correct choice. _Problem 3. Alternately First at Left and First at Right_ For four successive days after the last control series in connection with problem 2, Sobke was merely fed in the apparatus according to previous description (p. 43). He exhibited a wonderfully keen appetite and was well fed during this interval between problems. The method of experimentation chosen for problem 3 in the light of previous experience was that of confining the monkey for a short time, ten to fifteen seconds, in the wrong box, in each of the first ten mistakes for a given trial, and of then aiding him to find the right box by the slight and momentary raising of the exit door. Aid proved necessary in a few of the trials during the first four days. Then he worked independently. As work progressed it was found possible and also desirable to increase the period of confinement, and in the end, sixty seconds proved satisfactory. It was also thought desirable to increase the number of trials per day from a single series during the early days to two or even three series from June 29 on. Often three series could be given in succession without difficulty. During the early trials on this problem Sobke worked remarkably well, but later his willingness diminished, evidently because of his failure readily to solve the problem, and it became extremely difficult to coax him into the apparatus. On days when he entered only reluctantly and as it seemed against his will, he was likely to be nervous, erratic, and often slow in making his choices, but above all he tended to waste time by not returning to the starting point, preferring rather to loiter in the alleyways or run back and forth. TABLE 6 Results for Sobke, _P. rhesus_, in Problem 3 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | | 3.4.5.6 | 3.4.5.6 | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 5.6.7 | 5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 2.3.4.5 | 2.3.4.5 | 7.8.9 | 7.8.9 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | June | | | | | {3.1.2.1 | {7.8.7.8 | | | | {9.8.7.9 | | | | | | 17 | 1--10 | {6.6.7.6 | 5.7 | {4.4.3.5.4 | {4.4.2.1 | {8.8.7.8 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.5 | {8.7.6.9 | 3.8.9 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 | | {6.5 | | {5.4.2.1 | {5.4.6* | {7.7.4* | | | | {8.7.3* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {3.4.2.5 | | {8.7.7.5 | | | | | | | | | | 18 | 11--20 | 6.6.6.5 | 5.7 | {4.5.6.4 | 3.1.4.3.6 | {8.8.7.8 | 8 | 3.2 | (3.4.2.4 | 9.8.8.7.3 | 8.6.9 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1:9.00 | | | | {2.3.1* | | {7.8.4* | | | {4.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {3.6.5.4 | | {8.8.7.7 | | | | | | | | | | 19 | 21--30 | 6.5 | 7 | {2.5.2.6 | 3.6 | {7.8.8.8 | 8 | 4.3.2 | {3.2.4.2 | {9.8.7.9.7 | 9 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | {3.5.1* | | {8.4 | | | {2.5 | {6.5.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (8.8.8.8 | | | | {9.9.8.9 | | | | | | 21 | 31--40 | 6.5 | 5.6.5.7 | {3.5.4.6 | 2.5.3.6 | {7.8.3.8 | 8 | 4.2 | 2.5 | {9.5.9.9 | 9 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 | | | | {4.3.5.1 | | {8.7.4* | | | | {9.9.3* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 22 | 41--50 | 7.6.5 | 6.5.5.7 | 1 | 2.1.3.6 | {8.8.8.8 | 8 | 2 | 2.3.2.2.5 | {9.8.9.8.7 | 9 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 | | | | | | {7.8.4 | | | | {6.5.9.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 51--60 | 5 | 6.5.7 | 1 | {1.2.1.1 | 8.5.4 | 8 | 5.4.2 | 2.4.2.5 | {9.8.4.9 | 9 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 | | | | | {3.2.6 | | | | | {7.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 61--70 | 7.6.5 | 7 | 2.3.1 | 2.1.5.4.2.6 | 8.7.8.4 | 8 | 4.5.4.3.2 | 2.2.4.5 | 9.7.6.8.3 | 9 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 25 | 71--80 | 6.5 | 5.7 | 3.1 | 6 | 8.5.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.5 | 9.8.7.3 | 3.9 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 81--90 | 7.7.6.5 | 6.5.7 | 3.1 | {1.4.1.1 | 8.4 | 8 | 5.4.2 | 2.5 | 9.8.9.6.3 | 9 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 | | | | | {5.1.6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 28 | 91--100 | 7.6.5 | 7 | 1 | 1.2.4.6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.2.2.5 | 9.8.8.7.9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 29 | 101--110 | 7.6.5 | 5.7 | 1 | {1.1.5.3 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 4.2.5 | {9.9.8.9.4 | 9 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | {2.1.6 | | | | | {9.7.6.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 111--120 | 6.5 | 6.5.7 | 1 | 2.1.1.3.6 | 8.5.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.5 | 9.8.7.6.4.3 | 9 | 4 | 6 | 8 |12 | 1:1.50 30 | 121--130 | 5 | 6.5.6.5.5.7 | 1 | 3.1.6 | 8.7.6.8.5.4 | 8 | 2 | 4.2.4.2.5 | 9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 131--140 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2.3.6 | 8.5.6.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.8.3 | 3.9 | 6 | 4 |11 | 9 | 1:0.82 July | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 141--150 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1.6 | 8.7.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.2.5 | 9.8.6.9.3 | 9 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 151--160 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2.5.3.6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 2.5 | 9.3 | 8.8.7.5.4.9 | 5 | 5 |11 | 9 | 1:0.82 2 | 161--170 | 6.5 | 7 | 1 | 2.6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.5 | 9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 3 | 171--180 | 6.5 | 7 | 1 | 1.5.6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 3.5 | 9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 181--190 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 4.6 | 8.6.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.8.4.8.5.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 |12 | 8 | 1:0.67 5 | 191--200 | 6.5 | 5.7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.5.3 | 9 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 201--210 | 5 | 7 | 6.1 | 2.6 | 8.6.4 | 8 | 5.3.5.4.3.2 | 4.3.5 | 9.7.3 | 9 | 4 | 6 |10 |10 | 1:1.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 211--220 | 5 | 5.7 | 1 | 2.6 | 8.6.4 | 8 | 2 | 4.3.5 | 9.3 | {5.4.8.3 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {8.5.4.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 221--230 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 5.3.6 | 8.6.8.4 | 8 | 4.2 | 3.2.5 | 9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 9 |11 | 1:1.22 7 | 231--240 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2.6 | 8.4 | 7.4.8 | 2 | 4.3.5 | 8.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 241--250 | 5 | 7 | 2.6.3.5.1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.6.2.6.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 251--260 | 5 | 7 | {6.3.2.6 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.5.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 |19 |11 | 1:0.58 | | | | {5.4.3.1 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 8 | 261--270 | 7.5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 5.2 | 5 | 8.3 | 8.5.4.9 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 271--280 | 5 | 7 | 2.6.4.6.1 | 6 | 8.5.8.4 | 7.4.8 | 5.5.3.5.2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 |10 |10 | 1:1.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 9 | 281--290 | 5 | 5.7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 2.5 | 8.3 | {7.3.8.6.8 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.7.3.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 291--300 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 301--310 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 5.2 | 5 | 9.5.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 |20 |10 | 1:0.50 10 | 311--320 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 7.4.8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 321--330 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 5.2.6 | 8.7.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 |14 | 6 | 1:0.43 12 | 331--340 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 8.3 | 9 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 341--350 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 5.2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 |15 | 5 | 1:0.33 13 | 351--360 | 5 | 5.7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 5.2 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 361--370 | 5 | 7 | 6.1 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 5.2 | 3.2.5 | 9.3 | 9 | 6 | 4 |13 | 7 | 1:0.54 14 | 371--380 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 7.4.3.9 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 381--390 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 4.7.3.9 | 7 | 3 |15 | 5 | 1:0.33 15 | 391--400 | 5 | 5.5.7 | 1 | 3.6 | 8.4 | 8 | 3.2 | 5 | 8.3 | 9 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 401--410 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 7.3 | 6.5.3.9 | 7 | 3 |12 | 8 | 1:0.67 16 | 411--420 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 9 | 1 | | | " | 421--430 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 4.7.4.9 | 9 | 1 | | | " | 431--440 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 5.7.3.9 | 8 | 2 |26 | 4 | 1:0.15 17 | 441--450 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 4.8 | 2 | 5 | 4.3 | 3.5.9 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 451--460 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 3.6 | 4 | 5.4.8 | 2 | 5 | 9.3 | 9 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 461--470 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 9 |10 | 0 |24 | 6 | 1:0.25 19 | 471--480 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 6 | 8.4 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 9 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1:0.11 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5.6 | 5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 2.3.4.5.6.7 | 2.3.4.5.6.7 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | | | | | | +--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 19 | 1--10 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 9 | 1 | 5 | 3.7.2 | 7 | 3 | 8 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 1:0.11 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] The data of table 6 indicate for this problem only three pronounced reactive tendencies: (a) As the initial tendency, the choice of the second box from the right end. This proved surprisingly weak, in view of the animal's long training on problem 2, and it disappeared quickly. (b) Choice of the end boxes, and (c) direct choice of the right box. For this, as for the other problems, extreme differences in method and in time and degree of success appear for the different settings. Thus, while settings 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 10 proved to be easy, settings 4, 5, 8, and 9 were evidently more difficult. [Illustration: FIGURE 20.--Error curve of learning for the solution of problem 3 (alternately the first box at the left end and the first at the right end) by Sobke.] From the first this problem promised to be much easier for Sobke than problem 2, and although the actual number of trials necessary for the solution is greater by sixty for problem 3 than for problem 2, comparison of the data of the tables justifies the statement that the third problem was both easier and more nearly adequately solved than the second. This is not surprising when the nature of the two problems is considered, for whereas problem 2 requires choice by perception of the relationship of secondness from the right end of the group, problem 3 requires, instead, the choice of the end member of the group each time, with the additional variation of alternation of ends. Now as it happens, the end member is easily selected by the monkey, and it appears further that alternation was relatively easy for Sobke to acquire. Consequently, the combination of end and alternation proved easier than the choice of the second from the right end of the group. The above statements are supported by comparison of the curves of learning. The curve for problem 2, figure 19, is extremely irregular; that for problem 3, figure 20, much more regular. Similarly, the daily ratios of right to wrong choices as exhibited in tables 5 and 6 indicate smaller variations for the third problem than for the second. Sobke made ten correct first choices in the third series for July 17, but he was working very uncertainly and it seemed rather a matter of good luck than good management that he succeeded in presenting this perfect series: For this reason and also because it did not seem feasible to have Sunday intervene between the final and perfect regular series and the control series, an additional regular series was given on July 19, in which, as the table indicates, a single mistake occurred, in trial 5. The monkey was working perfectly. The series of trials required only ten minutes, and it was evident that carelessness and eagerness to obtain food were chiefly responsible for the mistake. The control series given on July 19 immediately after the series just described resulted similarly in one failure and nine successes. The choices were made easily and with certainty, and the only mistake, that of setting 7, was apparently due to carelessness. This excellent showing for the control series wholly justifies the comparison of problems 2 and 3 as to difficultness, made above. Whereas in both problems 1 and 2 the control trials caused confusion, in the case of problem 3, they did not essentially alter the behavior of the animal. The fact seems to be that for this problem the particular setting is of relatively little importance; while turning alternately to the extreme left and the extreme right is of prime importance. That Sobke had the idea of alternation or of the end box, there seems no more reason for insisting than that he had the idea of secondness from the right end in problem 2. It is possible, even probable, that these ideas existed rather vaguely in his consciousness, but there is obviously no necessity for insisting that the solution of the problems depended upon them. _Problem 4. Middle_ As the available time for the continuation of the experiment was limited, it was decided to proceed with work on problem 4 immediately upon the completion of problem 3, and on July 20, the problem of the middle door was presented to Sobke. Since it was anticipated that this sudden change would confuse and discourage him greatly, the only form of punishment administered was the momentary lowering of the entrance door of the wrong box. As in the previous problem, he was aided after ten successive wrong choices. As might have been anticipated, he persistently entered the end boxes of the groups, and this in some instances probably would have been kept up for many minutes had not the experimenter lured him into the right box by slightly raising the exit door. In the first series, he had to be aided in five of the ten trials. The total time for the series was forty-five minutes, the total number of choices, eighty-eight. In the second series, he was aided in four of the trials. The total time required was seventy-two minutes, and the total number of choices was seventy-six. Throughout the first series, Sobke worked hard, but with evidently increasing dissatisfaction. He clung persistently to his acquired tendency to choose the end boxes, and after each trial he returned less willingly to the starting point. Up to this time his attitude toward the experimenter had been perfectly friendly, if not wholly trustful. But when on July 21 he was brought into the apparatus for the second series, he exhibited a wholly new form of behavior, for instead of attending diligently to the open doors and devoting his energies to trying to find the right box, he instead, after gazing at them for a few seconds, turned toward the experimenter and jumped for him savagely, throwing himself against the wire netting with great force. This was repeated a number of times during the first two or three trials, and it occurred less frequently later in the series. Since nothing unusual had happened outside of the experiment room, the suggested explanation of this sudden change in attitude and behavior is that the monkey resented and blamed on the experimenter the difficulty which he was having in obtaining food. From this time on until the end of my work, Sobke was always savage and both in and out of the apparatus he was constantly on the watch for an opportunity to spring upon me. Previously, it had been possible for me to coax him into the apparatus by offering him food and to return him to his cage by walking after him. But on and after the twenty-first of July, it was impossible for me to approach him without extreme risk of being bitten. Doctor Hamilton when told of this behavior, reported that several times monkeys have shown resentment toward him when they were having trouble in the experiment. I therefore feel fairly confident that I have not misinterpreted Sobke's behavior. When on July 22 I gave Sobke an opportunity to enter the apparatus, he refused, and it was impossible to lure him in with food. Two hours later, having waited meantime for his breakfast, he entered readily and worked steadily and persistently through his third series of trials, but in no one of these trials did he choose correctly. Neither on this day nor the following did he exhibit resentment while at work. He apparently had regained his affective poise and was able to attend as formerly to the task of locating his rewards. During these first three series, although the ratio of right to wrong choices stood 0 to 10, there occurred a marked reduction in the number of trials in which aid was necessary as well as in the total number of choices, and on July 23 correct reactions began to appear. Improvement during the next hundred trials was steady and fairly rapid, and on July 31, a record of seven right to three wrong trials was obtained. This was surprising to the experimenter, as well as gratifying, since he was eager to have the animal complete this problem before work should have to be discontinued. Everything went smoothly until August 2, when my assistant, who had been left in charge of the experimental work for a week, attempted to increase the number of trials per day to two series. Sobke apparently was not quite ready for this increase in the amount of his day's labor and refused to work at the end of the first series. In this series he did less well than on the previous day. The following day, August 3, unfortunately and contrary to the wishes of the experimenter, the laboratory was painted and there was necessarily considerable disturbance because of the presence of the workmen, and in addition, the pervasive odor of fresh paint. Sobke chose still less successfully on this date, and on August 4, he refused to work after the eighth trial. It is true that during these bad days the total number of choices steadily diminished while the successes, also, diminished, or at best, failed to increase. When on August 9, I returned to the laboratory to take charge, I found that Sobke was no longer trying to solve the problem as when I had gone away. His attitude had changed in that he had become indifferent, careless, and obviously discouraged with his task. TABLE 7 Results for Sobke, _P. rhesus_, in Problem 4 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | 1.2.3.4 | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | 3.4.5.6 | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 2.3.4 | 5.6.7.8.9 | 5.6.7 | 7.8.9 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 7.8.9 | 6.7.8 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | July | | | {5.9.5.5 | {1.7.1.3 | {9.7.9.7 | | {1.9.3.1 | | {6.3.2.6 | | | | | | | 20 | 1- 10 | 2.4.2.4.3 | {5.9.5.6 | {1.7.1.7 | {7.9.7.9 | {8.4.8.4 | {9.2.9.3 | 3.1.3.2 | {3.6.3.2 | {9.3.4.3 | {8.6.6.8.6 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | {5.8.7* | {1.7.4* | {7.7.8 | {4.6 | {9.1.5* | | {6.3.4* | {3.9.3.6 | {8.6.8.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {7.9.7.7 | {4.8.5.5 | {1.4.3.2 | | | {3.9.3.8 | | | | | | 21 | 11- 20 | 2.3 | {5.6.5.5 | {1.2.7.1 | {7.9.7.7 | {8.4.8.4 | {8.9.1.9 | 3.1.2 | {6.2.3.2.6 | {4.3.3.5 | 6.7 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | {9.5.5.7 | {7.3.7.4 | {9.7.8* | {5.4.6* | {1.9.5* | | {3.5.2.4 | {3.4.6* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {3.7.4.8 | | | | | | 22 | 21- 30 | 2.3 | 5.6.5.6.7 | 1.7.4 | {7.9.7 | 4.7.4.6 | {1.4.6.3 | 3.1.2 | 5.2.6.4 | {4.3.5.8 | 6.6.7 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | | | {7.7.8 | | {2.7.5 | | | {3.7.6* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.4.7.4 | | | | | | 23 | 31- 40 | 2.4.3 | 5.6.8.7 | 1.7.4 | {7.7.7.7 | 4.7.6 | 2.7.5 | 3.1.2 | 6.4 | {7.5.4.3 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | {7.7.8 | | | | | {7.3.6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 41- 50 | 3 | 5.6.7 | 1.6.4 | 7.7.7.8 | 4.7.6 | {2.7.6.4 | 3.2 | 6.5.4 | 5.3.8.6.6 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | {2.7.3.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {9.6.5* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 51- 60 | 4.3 | 6.5.7 | 2.7.4 | 7.8 | 6 | {6.4.2.7 | 3.2 | {6.5.3.5.2 | 7.6 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | {4.8.6.5 | | {6.5.6.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.7.3.7 | | | | | | | | | 27 | 61- 70 | 3 | 6.5.7 | 2.5.4 | 7.7.8 | 5.7.6 | {4.6.1.4 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 5.7.6 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | {7.3.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 28 | 71- 80 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 7.8 | 5.4.7.6 | 2.7.6.5 | 2 | 5.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 29 | 81- 90 | 3 | 6.5.7 | 2.4 | 7.7.8 | 5.4.6 | {2.7.7.6 | 2 | 4 | 5.4.7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | {2.7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 30 | 91-100 | 3 | 7 | 2.6.5.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 5.4 | 5.4.6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 31 | 101-110 | 3 | 7 | 2.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 7.6 | 7 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 1: 0.43 August | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 111-120 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.7.6.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 4.2.7.6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 3 | 121-130 | 3 | 6.5.7 | 7.6.5.4 | 7.8 | 7.6 | 5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 4 | 131-140 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.7.6.4 | 7.8 | 6 | {2.7.6.4 | 2 | 6.4 | 3.5.4.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 | | | | | | | {8.7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | {2.4.4.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 | 141-150 | {2.4.4.2 | 6.5.7 | {2.7.6.7 | 8 | 7.6 | {2.8.7.6 | 3.2 | 6.4 | 7.6 | 8.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | {4.3* | | {5.4 | | | {8.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 151-160 | 2.4.4.3 | 7 | 2.6.5.4 | 7.8 | 7.6 | 7.6.5 | 2 | 6.4 | 6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.4.2.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 161-170 | {4.2.4.2 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 7.8 | 7.6 | 7.6.5 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | {4.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7 | 171-180 | 4.3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 8 | 7.6 | 5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 181-190 | {4.2.4.4 | 7 | 7.6.5.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 | | {2.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 9 | 191-200 | 3 | 7 | 5.4 | 8 | 8.7.6 | 6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 8.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 10 | 201-210 | 3 | 7 | 2.5.4 | 7.8 | 7.6 | {2.8.7.6 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | {8.7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 11 | 211-220 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 7.8 | 6 | {7.6.4.3 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 | | | | | | | {2.7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 12 | 221-230 | 3 | 7 | 2.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 7.6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 8.7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 19 | 231-240 | 3 | 7 | 2.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 6.4 | 8.7.6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 241-250 | 3 | 7 | 5.4 | 8 | 7.6 | {2.4.1.2.7 | 3.2 | 6.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | {8.7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 21 | 251-260 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 7.8 | {7.4.5.4 | {6.4.3.2 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 8.7.6 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | {8.7.6 | {7.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 261-270 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 7.8 | 6 | 6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 24 | 271-280 | 3 | 7 | 6.4 | 7.8 | 7.6 | 2.5 | 2 | 4 | 7.4.3.8.7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 25 | 281-290 | 3 | 7 | 2.5.4 | 8 | 7.6 | 5 | 2 | 6.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 26 | 291-300 | 3 | 7 | 6.5.4 | 8 | 7.6 | 7.6.5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.6 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1: 1.00 27 | 301-310 | 3 | 7 | 2.6.5.4 | 8 | 7.6 | 5 | 2 | 6.5.4 | 7.5.4.9.8.6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 28 | 311-320 | 3 | 7 | 2.5.4 | 8 | 6 | 9.8.7.5 | 2 | 3.4 | 8.6 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1: 0.67 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] I immediately set about reinstating the former attitude by lessening the number of trials and the punishment, and by increasing the value of the reward, but my best efforts, continuing up to August 28, failed markedly to improve the condition. The number of correct choices did somewhat increase, but at no time did the animal attain the degree of success which he had achieved as early as July 31 in the eleventh series of trials. During the last two weeks of experimentation, all possible efforts were put forth to discover the best combination of rewards and punishments. Punishment was varied from 0 to confinement of sixty seconds, and many kinds of food in different amounts were tried as rewards, but in spite of everything Sobke failed to improve markedly. From time to time, notably on August 12 and 21, he exhibited peculiarly strong resentment toward me and repeatedly attempted to attack me. The outcome of my experiments with problem 4 is peculiarly interesting in that it indicates the importance of a favorable attitude toward the work and the extreme risk from disturbing or discouraging conditions. It seems not improbable that had the work progressed without change in experimenter, or method of procedure, and above all without the disturbance of the painting, Sobke might have solved problem 4 within a few days. This is by no means certain, however, for in problems 2 and 3 the ratio of right to wrong choices instead of increasing steadily increased very irregularly. The detailed results for this problem are given in table 7. Reactive tendencies which appear are: (a) persistent choice of the end boxes followed, subsequently, by (b) the tendency to locate the middle box directly. This proved fairly easy when the number of boxes involved was only three as in settings 1, 4, 7, and 10. Setting 4 was most difficult of all, because box 9 was avoided or ignored. When the number of open boxes was as great as five, as in settings 2 and 8, the task was obviously more difficult, but whereas success in setting 2 appeared early, in setting 8 it failed to appear during the course of experimentation. For the settings 3, 6, and 9, involving either seven or nine open boxes, the direct choice of the middle box was next to impossible, and Sobke tended to choose, first of all, a particular box toward one end of the series, for example, box 2, in setting 3, and box 7 in setting 9. To the experimenter, as he watched the animal's behavior, it looked as though effort each time were being made to locate the middle member of the group. This appeared relatively easy for groups of three boxes, extremely difficult for as many as five boxes, and almost impossible for seven or nine. 3. Julius, _Pongo pygmaeus_ _Problem 1. First at the Left End_ The orang utan, Julius, was gentle, docile, and friendly with the experimenter throughout the period of investigation. He at no time showed inclination to bite and could be handled safely. As contrasted with Skirrl and even with Sobke, he adapted himself to the multiple-choice apparatus very promptly, and only slight effort on the part of the observer was necessary to prepare him, by preliminary trials, for the regular experiments. But in order to facilitate work, he was familiarized with the apparatus by means of regular route training and feeding in the several boxes from April 5 to April 9. On April 10 the apparatus was painted white as has been stated previously, and on the following Monday, April 12, Julius when again introduced to it gave no indications of fear, uneasiness, or dislike, but worked as formerly, making his round trips quickly and eagerly entering any box which happened to be open, in order to obtain the reward of food. The regular experimentation was undertaken on April 13, and the results of the first series of trials with Julius are sharply contrasted with those obtained with the monkeys in that fewer choices were necessary. Instead of the expected ratio of right to wrong first choices, 1 to 2.5, the orang utan gave a ratio of 1 to 1. An additional markedly different result from that obtained with the monkeys is indicated below in the total time required for a series of trials. As examples, the data for the first, second, fifth, and tenth series are presented. TIME FOR SERIES OF TRIALS 1st series 2nd series 5th series 10th series Skirrl 35 min. 20 min. 14 min. 10 min. Sobke 14 " 17 " 10 " 9 " (8th series) Julius 12 " 11 " 14 " 9 " It is also noteworthy that Julius in the presence of visitors or under other unusual conditions worked steadily and well, whereas the monkeys, and especially Sobke, tended to be distracted and often refused to work at all. Almost from the beginning of his work on problem l, Julius began to develop the tendency to enter immediately the open door nearest the starting point. In case the group of open doors lay to the right of the middle of the apparatus, this method naturally yielded success; whereas if the group included doors to the left of the middle, it resulted in failure. Obviously it was a most unsatisfactory method, and although it enabled him to make more right than wrong first choices, it prevented him from increasing the number of right choices, and as table 1 indicates, it maintained the ratio of 1 right to .67 wrong first choices for eight successive days. On April 23 a break occurred in which the number of correct choices was reduced from six to five. Julius worked very rapidly and with almost no hesitation in choosing. My notes record "he seems to miss the point wholly. It is doubtful whether the punishment is sufficiently severe." At this time he was being punished by thirty seconds confinement in each wrong box, the interval having been held fairly steadily from the first series of experiments. On April 26 it was increased to sixty seconds, in an effort to break him of the habit of choosing the "nearest" door. But he became extremely restless under the longer confinement and tried his best to raise the entrance and exit doors. Since there was at this time no mechanism for locking them when closed, it was difficult for the experimenter to prevent him from escaping by way of the entrance door or from raising the exit door sufficiently to obtain the food. Indeed, the longer confinement worked so unsatisfactorily that on the following day I substituted for it the punishment of forcing him to raise the entrance door of the wrong box in order to escape for a new choice. He was rewarded with food in the alleyway H, beside door 15 (figure 17), only when he chose correctly on first attempt. This method discouraged him extremely and proved wasteful of time. Consequently, in a second series on the same date return was made to the former method, and he was rewarded with food whenever he found the right box. But on April 28, the two methods were again employed, the first in the initial series and the second in a final series of trials. The animal's persistent attempts to raise the doors gave the experimenter so much trouble that on April 29 barbed wire was nailed over the windows of the entrance doors with the hope that it might prevent him from working at them. But he quickly learned to place his fingers between the barbs and raise the doors as effectively as ever. On April 30 the reward of food was given only when the first choice was that of the right box and in that event it was placed in the alleyway H as stated above. As it seemed absolutely essential to break the unprofitable habit of choosing the nearest door, on May 3 a new series of settings was presented, in which only the doors to the left of the middle of the row of nine boxes were used as right doors. That is, in this new series, doors 1 to 4 occur as right doors; 5 to 9 do not. As punishment for wrong choices on this date, Julius was confined in the wrong box from one to five minutes. It was difficult to keep him in, but by means of cords which had been attached to the doors, this was successfully accomplished. Yet another and slightly different series of settings was employed on May 4, and this, proving satisfactory, was continued in use until the end of the experiment, with punishment ranging from sixty to one hundred and twenty seconds for each mistake. Naturally the modification of settings introduced May 3 greatly increased the proportion of wrong first choices. Indeed, as appears in table 8, the ratio of right to wrong immediately changed from 1:0.67 to 1:4.00. Between May 3 and May 10, no steady and consistent improvement in method or in the number of correct first choices occurred, and on the last named date, Julius chose correctly only three times in his ten trials. At this time there was, as my notes record, no satisfactory indication of progress, and the status of the experiment seemed extremely unsatisfactory in as much as in spite of the experimenter's best efforts to break up the habit of choosing the nearest door, the orang utan still persisted, to a considerable extent, in the use of this method. The only encouraging feature of the results was an evident tendency to choose somewhat nearer the left end of a group than previously. TABLE 8 Results for Orang utan in Problem 1 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | | | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 1.2.3 | 8.9 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | April | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 13 | 1- 10 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 7.6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 14 | 11- 20 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 15 | 21- 30 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.5.5.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 16 | 31- 40 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 17 | 41- 50 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 19 | 51- 60 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 20 | 61- 70 | 2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 21 | 71- 80 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5.4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 22 | 81- 90 | 3.1 | 8 | 5.3 | 7 | 6.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 23 | 91-100 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 5.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 5.4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 24 | 101-110 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 1:0.67 26 | 111-120 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 5.4 | 7 | 3.1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 27 | 121-130 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 6.5 | 5.8.6.4 | 7 | 3.3.3.1 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 131-140 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 |10 |10 | 1:1.00 28 | 141-150 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 5.4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 151-160 | 3.1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 7 | 3 |14 | 6 | 1:0.43 29 | 161-170 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 171-180 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 |12 | 8 | 1:0.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 30 | 181-190 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | {4.5.6.4 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | | {5.6.4.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 191-200 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.5.6.7.3 | 7 | 4.5.3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.2.1 | 6 | 4 |12 | 8 | 1:0.67 May | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 201-210 | 3.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 211-220 | 3.2.1 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4.2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 3.1 | 6 | 4 |12 | 8 | 1:0.67 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | 2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | 2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 6.7.8 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | 4.5.6.7.8.9 | 6.7.8.9 | | | | | --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 3 | 221-230 | 3.1 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 3.1 | 4.3 | 4 | 4.3.2 | 3.1 | 4 | 4.3.2 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | 2.3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | | | | | 2.3.4.5 | | | | | | | | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 6.7.8 | 8.9 | 2.3.4.5 | 3.4.5.6 | 1.2.3 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | | | | | --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 4 | 231-240 | 3.2.1 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 4 | 4.3.2 | 4.3 | 3.2.1 | 4 | 3.2 | 3.2.1 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 5 | 241-250 | 2.1 | 3 | 3.2 | 4 | 3.2 | 4.3 | 3.2.1 | 4 | 3.2 | 3.2.1 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 6 | 251-260 | 2.1 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 3.2 | 3 | 2.1 | 4 | 3.2 | 2.1 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 1:1.00 7 | 261-270 | 2.1 | 3 | 3.2 | 4 | 3.2 | 3 | 2.1 | 4 | 4.2 | 2.1 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1:1.50 8 | 271-280 | 2.1 | 4.3 | 4.3.2 | 4 | 3.2 | 4.3 | 3.1 | 4 | 3.2 | 2.1 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1:4.00 10 | 281-290 | 1 | 4.3 | 4.2 | 4 | 3.2 | 4.3 | 2.1 | 4 | 3.2 | 2.1 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1:2.33 11 | 291-300 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 |10 | 0 |10 | 0 | 1:0.00 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1.2.3 | 8.9 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 6.7.8 | 5.6.7 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3 | | | | | --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 12 | 301-310 | 1 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 7 | 1 |10 | 0 |10 | 0 | 1:0.00 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== A series of correct first choices was obtained on May 11, greatly to the surprise of the experimenter, for no indication had previously appeared of this approaching solution of the problem. It seemed possible, however, that the successes were accidental, and it was anticipated that in a control series Julius would again make mistakes. But on the following day, May 12, the presentation of the original series of ten settings, which, of course, differed radically from the settings used from May 4 to May 11 was responded to promptly, readily, and without a single mistake. Julius had solved his problem suddenly and, in all probability, ideationally. Only three reactive tendencies or methods appeared during Julius's work on this problem: (a) choice of the open door nearest to the starting point (sometimes the adjacent boxes were entered); (b) a tendency to avoid the "nearest" door and select instead one further toward the left end of the group; (c) direct choice of the first door on the left. The curve of learning plotted from the daily wrong choices and presented in figure 18, had it been obtained with a human subject, would undoubtedly be described as an ideational, and possibly even as a rational curve; for its sudden drop from near the maximum to the base line strongly suggests, if it does not actually prove, insight. Never before has a curve of learning like this been obtained from an infrahuman animal. I feel wholly justified in concluding from the evidences at hand, which have been presented as adequately as is possible without going into minutely detailed description, that the orang utan solved this simple problem ideationally. As a matter of fact, for the solution he required about four times the number of trials which Sobke required and twice as many as were necessary for Skirrl. Were we to measure the intelligence of these three animals by the number of trials needed in problem 1, Sobke clearly would rank first, Skirrl second, and Julius last of all. But other facts clearly indicate that Julius is far superior to the monkeys in intelligence. We therefore must conclude that _where very different methods of learning appear, the number of trials is not a safe criterion of intelligence._ The importance of this conclusion for comparative and genetic psychology needs no emphasis. _Problem 2. Second from the Right End_ Julius was given four days' rest before being presented with problem 2. He was occasionally fed in the apparatus, but regular continuation of training was not necessary to keep him in good form. During this rest interval, locks were attached to the doors of the apparatus so that the experimenter by moving a lever directly in front of him could fasten either one or both of the doors of a given box by a single movement. On May 13 Julius was given opportunity to obtain food from each of the boxes in turn, and trial of the locks was made in order to familiarize him with the new situation. He very quickly discovered that the doors could not be raised when closed, and after two days of preliminary work, he practically abandoned his formerly persistent efforts to open them. The locks worked satisfactorily from a mechanical point of view as well as from that of the adaptation of the animal to the modified situation. Problem 2 was regularly presented for the first time on May 17, on which day a single series was given. The period of punishment adopted was twenty seconds, and for each successful choice a small piece of banana was given as a reward. After the first trial in this series, in which Julius repeatedly entered the first box at the left, that is box 7, there was but slight tendency to reënter the first box at the left of the group. Instead, Julius developed the method of moving box by box toward the right end of the group. The choices were made promptly, and their systematic character enabled the animal to obtain his reward fairly quickly, in spite of the large number of mistakes. In the second series, the orang utan developed the interesting trick of quickly dodging out of the wrong box before the experimenter could lower the door behind him. This he did only after having been punished for many wrong choices to the point of discouragement. The trick was easily broken up by the sudden lowering of the entrance door as soon as he had passed under it. There appeared on May 21 an unfavorable physical condition which manifested itself, first of all through the eyes which appeared dull and bloodshot. On the following day they were inflamed and the lids nearly closed. Julius refused to eat, and experimentation was impossible. Until June 2 careful treatment and regulation of diet was necessary. He passed through what at the time seemed a rather startling condition, but rapidly regained his usual good health, and on June 3, although somewhat weak and listless, he again worked fairly steadily. Since it was now possible to lock the doors and confine the animal for any desired period, on June 5 the interval of punishment was made sixty seconds, and a liberal quantity of banana, beet, or carrot was offered as reward. No increase in the number of successful choices appeared, and Julius showed discouragement. Sawdust had been strewn on the floor, and in the intervals between trials as well as during confinement in wrong boxes, he took to playing with the sawdust. He would take it up in one hand and pour it from hand to hand until all had slipped through his fingers, then he would scrape together another handful and go through the same process. Often he became so intent on this form of amusement that even when the exit door was raised, he would not immediately go to get the food. The reactive tendencies which appeared in the work on problem 2 will now be presented in order, since I shall have to refer to them repeatedly, and the list will be more useful to the reader at this point than at the conclusion of the presentation of daily results. The following is not an exhaustive list but includes only the most important and conspicuous tendencies or methods together with the dates on which they were most apparent. (a) May 17, choice of first box at left of group or near it, then the next in order, and so on, until the second from the right was reached. This method with irregularities and certain definite skipping was used at various times, sometimes over periods of several days, during the course of the work. (b) June 3, preference for number 3 and number 4 developed immediately after the orang utan's illness and when he was working rather listlessly. On June 9 and 10, the original tendency (a) reappeared and persisted for a number of series. (c) June 14, a tendency to choose the box at or near the right end of a group, and then the one next to it. In connection with this tendency, which of course required only two choices in any given trial, interest in playing with the sawdust on the floor developed. Again on June 21, the animal returned to the use of tendency (a). (d) June 29, movement to box at right end of group, hesitation before it, and turning through a complete circle so that the second box from the right was faced. This, the correct box, was often promptly entered. This method, if persisted in, would obviously have yielded solution of the problem. (e) July 5, approach to and pretense to enter the box next to the right end (right one), and then choice of some other box. This _feint_ is peculiarly interesting, and its origin and persistence are difficult to account for. (f) In connection with the tendency to pretend that he was going to enter the second box from the right end, Julius developed also the tendency to turn around in front of the box at the right end, starting sometimes to back into it, and then to enter, instead, the box second from the end. (g) July, 6 and 7, a fairly definite tendency to take the one next in order or, instead, to go directly to the right box. (h) July 10, direct first choices without approach to other boxes appeared for the first time on this date. For this problem, it proved impossible to establish and maintain uniform conditions of experimentation. Instead, because of the failure of the animal to improve and the tendency to discouragement, both punishment and reward had to be altered from time to time, and other and more radical changes were occasionally made in the experimental procedure. Below for the sake of condensed and consecutive presentation, the most important conditions from day to day are arranged in tabular form: CONDITIONS OF EXPERIMENT FROM DAY To DAY FOR PROBLEM 2 Date Punishment Reward May 17 ............. 20 sec. confinement ........ Food in right box for each (Aid after 10 trials) trial " 18 to 21 ........ 30 sec. confinement ........ Food (banana) in right box for each trial " 22 to June 2 .... Illness, no experiments June 3 ............... 15 sec. confinement ........ Food (banana) in right box for each trial " 4 ............... 30 " " ............. Food (banana) in right box for each trial " 5-10 ............ 60 " " ............. Beet, carrot and loquat, in addition to banana " 11 .............. 10 to 30 sec. confinement .. Beet, carrot and loquat, in addition to banana " 12 to 15 ........ 60 sec. confinement ........ Beet, carrot and loquat, in addition to banana " 16 .............. 60 " " ............. Banana and sweet corn--former preferred " 17 (1st series). 60 sec. confinement ........ Food (banana, as in early series) " 17 (2nd series). No confinement in wrong box; Food only for correct first but instead, return to choices starting point by way of alleys " 18 to 22 ........ No confinement in wrong box; Food only for correct first but instead, return to choices starting point by way of alleys " 22 (2nd series). No punishment; allowed to Food for each trial enter boxes until right one was found " 23 .............. Return to starting point. After five wrong choices of a given box the animal was held for 60 secs. in one of the boxes and was then released by way of the exit door and rewarded when the right one was chosen " 23 (2nd series). No punishment .............. Reward for each trial " 24 (1st series). Return to starting point. .. Food only for correct first choices " 24 (2nd series). No punishment .............. Reward for each trial " 25-30 ........... Same as on 24th ............ July 1 (1st series). No punishment .............. " " " " " 1 (2nd series). Return to starting point ... Reward only for correct first choices " 2-8 ............. Same as on July 1 .......... " 8 (2nd series). No punishment .............. Reward for each trial " 8 (3rd series). Return to starting point ... Reward only for correct first choices " 9-10 ............ Same as for July 8 (3rd series) " 10 (2nd series). Momentary confinement in ..... Reward for each correct choice wrong boxes " 12 .............. Return to starting point ..... Reward for correct first choice " 12 (2nd series). 30 sec. confinement .......... Reward for each correct choice " 12 (3rd series). 5 " " ............... " " " " " " 13 .............. 30 " " ............... " " " " " " 14-17 ........... Return to starting point ..... Reward for correct first choices " 17 (2nd series). 60 sec. confinement .......... Reward for each correct choice " 19 .............. 30 " " ............... " " " " " " 20-26 ........... 10 " " ............... " " " " " " 27-30 ........... Right box indicated by slight Reward in each right box raising of exit door momentarily. No punishment " 30 (2nd series). Return to starting point ..... Reward for correct first choices " 31 .............. " " " " ..... " " " " " " 31 (2nd series) to Aug. 10 .... 10 to 60 sec. confinement .... Reward for each correct choice Aug. 10 (2nd series). Threatened with whip ......... " " " " " " 11 (1st series). " " " ........... " " " " " " 11 (2nd series). 10 sec. confinement .......... " " " " " " 12 .............. Threatened with whip ......... " " " " " " 12 (2nd series). 10 sec. confinement .......... " " " " " " 19 .............. 10 " " ............... " " " " " " 19 (2nd series). Threatened with whip ......... " " " " " With the above reactive tendencies and modifications of method in mind we may continue our description of results. On June 9 there developed a tendency to increase the magnitude of the original error by choosing nearer the left end of the groups. This is odd, since one would naturally suppose that an animal as intelligent as the orang utan would tend to avoid the general region in which success was never obtained and to focus attention on the right, as contrasted with the wrong end of each group. _It obviously contradicts the law of the gradual elimination of use less activities._ In other words, it is wholly at variance with the principle of trial and error exhibited by many infrahuman organisms. Julius, although making many mistakes, worked diligently and, for the most part, fairly rapidly. The day's work proved most important because of the change in method and also because of the appearance of hesitation, the rejection of certain boxes, and the definite choice of others. My notes record "this is a most important day for Julius in problem 2;" but subsequent results do not clearly justify this prophecy. The method of choosing the first box at the left and then of moving down the line until the right one was reached was so consistently followed that during a number of days it was possible for me to predict almost every choice. Indeed, to satisfy my curiosity in this matter during a number of series I guessed in advance the box which would be chosen. The percentages of correct guesses ranged from ninety to one hundred. June 10, for example, yielded two series for which the ratio of right to wrong first choices was 0 to 10, and in which the method described above was used consistently throughout. It was inevitable that punishment by confinement and the discouragement resulting therefrom should interfere with the regularity of work and make it extremely difficult to obtain strictly comparable results from series to series and from day to day. The data for this problem, as presented in table 9, have values quite different from those for the monkeys, chiefly because of the more variable conditions of observation. It was occasionally noted that the disintegration of a definite method and the disappearance of the tendency on which it depended occurred rather suddenly. Frequently it happened that having used an inadequate method fairly persistently on a given day, the animal would on the following day exhibit a wholly different method. Even over night a new method might develop. In the monkeys, although there was occasionally something comparable with this, it was by no means so evident. TABLE 9 Results for Orang utan in Problem 2 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | 1.2.3.4.5 | | | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 2.3.4.5.6.7 | 1.2.3.4.5.6 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5 | 6.7.8.9 | 1.2.3.4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | May | | {7.7.7.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 17 | 1- 10 | {7.7.7.7 | 1.1.3 | 2.4.6 | 2.3.4.5 | 4.5.7 | 3.2 | 2.3.4 | {2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | {7.7.8 | | | | | | | {6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.5.6.8 | | | | | 18 | 11- 20 | 7.8 | 1.3 | 3.4.5.6 | 2.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 2.3.4 | {2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | {8.8.8.3 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | | {6.7.8 | | {4.5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.4.7.7.2 | | | | | | | {5.3.4.5 | | | | | 19 | 21- 30 | 7.8 | 1.3 | {5.7.7.2 | 5 | 4.6.8.4.7 | 1.2 | 2.3.4 | 5.8 | 3 | {6.8.4.5 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | {3.2.4.6 | | | | | | | {3.5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 31- 40 | {7.9.7.7 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 4.5 | 5.6.7 | 2 | 4 | 5.6.7.8 | 3 | 5.6.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | {9.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 21 | 41- 50 | 7.8 | 3 | 3.4.5.6 | 4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 4.5.6.8 | 3 | 4.5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 June | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 3 | 51- 60 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 3.1.2 | 3.4 | {3.7.9.7 | 3 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | {9.7.6.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 4 | 61- 70 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 3.3.1.2 | 4 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 1: 2.33 5 | 71- 80 | 7.9.7.8 | 3 | 3.4.5.6 | 3.6.3.4.5 | 4.7 | 3.1.2 | 4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 81- 90 | 7.8 | 3 | 3.4.5.6 | 3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 2.3 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 7 | 91- 100 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 1.2 | 3.4 | {3.4.5.6 | 2.3 | {3.4.5.6 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | | {7.8 | | {8.5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 8 | 101- 110 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 111- 120 | 7.8 | 3 | 4.5.6 | 3.4.5 | 5.6.7 | 2 | 5.5.2.3.4 | 4.5.6.7.8 | 4.4.1.2.3 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 9 | 121- 130 | 7.8 | 2.3 | 4.5.6 | 4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 2 | 3.4 | {2.3.4.5 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 131- 140 | 7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 5 | 4.5.6.7 | 1.2 | 2.3.4 | 6.7.8 | 2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | 2 |18 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 10 | 141- 150 | 7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 1.2 | 2.3.4 | {1.2.3.4 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 0 |10 | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 151- 160 | 7.8 | 1.2.3 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 1.2.3.4.5 | 4.5.6.7 | 1.2 | 2.3.4 | {1.2.3.4 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 0 |10 | 0 |10 | 0:10.00 | | | | | | | | | {5.6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 11 | 161- 170 | 8 | {4.1.2.4.1 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 5 | 6.7 | {3.1.3.1 | 5.2.3.4 | 2.6.7.8 | 4.1.2.3 | 8.5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | {4.1.4.1.3 | | | | {3.1.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 171- 180 | 9.7.8 | 4.3 | 5.6 | 4.5 | 7 | 3.1.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.2.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 12 | 181- 190 | 7.9.7.9.8 | 1.2.3 | 3.4.5.6 | 6.4.5 | 5.6.7 | 2 | 5.3.4 | 7.8 | 4.1.2.3 | 4.5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 9 | 1: 9.00 14 | 191- 200 | 9.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.7.8 | 4.2.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 201- 210 | 8 | 2.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.1.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 15 | 211- 220 | {7.9.7.9 | 4.2.3 | 6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | {7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 221- 230 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 5.6.7 | 1.2 | 2.3.4 | 3.4.5.6.7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 1 | 9 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 16 | 231- 240 | 7.9.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 5.4 | 5.6.7.8 | 4.1.4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 241- 250 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.7.8 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 1 | 9 | 3 |17 | 1: 5.67 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 17 | 251- 260 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | {6.5.4.6 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.5.6.7.8 | 3 | 5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | | | {5.4.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.6.6.5.6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.5.5.6.6 | | | | | | | | | | " | 261- 270 | {9.7.7.7 | 4.4.4.4.3 | 6 | 5 | {6.6.6.6.6 | {3.3.3.3 | 4 | {4.5.4.5.4 | 3 | {5.5.5.5 | 4 | 6 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | {7.7.7.8 | | | | {6.5.4.5 | {3.3.2 | | {5.6.7.8 | | {5.5.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | {6.5.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 18 | 271- 280 | {7.7.7.7 | 4.4.4.4.3 | 5.5.5.5.6 | 5 | {5.5.5.6 | {3.3.3. | 4 | {4.6.5.6 | 4.4.3 | 5.6.4.7 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 1: 4.00 | | {7.7.8 | | | | {5.5.6 | {3.3.2 | | {6.7.4.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {7.7.7.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 19 | 281- 290 | {9.9.9.7 | {4.4.4 | {5.7.7 | 5 | 5.7 | {3.3.3.3 | 4 | 5.8 | {4.4.4.4 | {6.5.6.5 | 2 | 8 | | | | | {7.7.8 | {4.4.3 | {7.4.6 | | | {3.3.2 | | | {4.4.3 | {5.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 291- 300 | 7.7.7.7.8 | 4.4.4.4.3 | 5.5.6 | 5 | {5.6.6.5.6 | 3.3.2 | {5.5.5.5 | 5.6.8 | 4.4.3 | 6.6.6.7 | 1 | 9 | 3 |17 | 1: 5.67 | | | | | | {6.6.6.7 | | {3.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.6.6.6.7 | | | | | | | 21 | 301- 310 | 7.7.8 | 4.4.3 | 5.6 | 5 | {6.6.6.5 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.5.5.2.4 | {3.4.3.5.5 | {4.2.2.4 | 5.3.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | | | {5.6.5.7 | {3.2 | | {1.1.2.4.7 | {4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.3.2.2.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 311- 320 | {7.7.7.7 | 1.1.1.2.3 | {5.5.4.2 | 1.1.6.5 | 4.6.7 | 1.3.2 | {2.2.2.2 | {1.1.2.3 | {2.2.2.4 | {6.3.3.8 | 0 |10 | 1 |19 | 1:19.00 | | {7.7.8 | | {2.5.6 | | | | {2.2.3.4 | {6.6.6.8 | {2.3 | {4.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 22 | 321- 330 | 7.8 | {2.4.2.1.4 | 6 | 5 | 6.6.8.7 | 3.2 | 5.5.3.3.4 | 3.3.7.7.8 | 4.4.4.2.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | {4.4.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 331- 340 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 5.6.7 | 4 | 6 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 341- 350 | 7.8 | 4.2.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | {3.3.3.1 | 5.5.4 | {7.5.4.3 | 4.4.4.3 | {6.6.3.6 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | | | | {3.3.3.2 | | {6.7.7.8 | | {8.6.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 351- 360 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | {6.7.6.5 | 4.3 | 5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | 3 |17 | 1: 5.67 | | | | | | | | | {7.6.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 361- 370 | 7.8 | 4.4.2.3 | 7.7.6 | 6.6.4.5 | 7 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | | | | {3.3.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 371- 380 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 25 | 381- 390 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.7.7.6 | {6.6.6.6 | 8.6.7 | 3.1.2 | 5.3.5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | {6.4.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 391- 400 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 5 | 5 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 401- 410 | 9.9.9.8 | 3 | {7.7.7.7.3 | {6.6.6.6 | 8.8.8.7 | 3.2 | {5.5.5.5 | 7.8 | {4.4.4.4 | 6.6.8.8.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | {3.7.7.6 | {6.6.5 | | | {5.5.4 | | {4.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 411- 420 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 28 | 421- 430 | 8 | {4.4.4.4 | 7.6 | {6.6.3.6 | 7 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.5.5.4 | 9.7.7.5.8 | 4.4.4.3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | {4.4.3 | | {6.6.6.5 | | {3.3.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 431- 440 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {7.6.5.4 | | | | | | | " | 441- 450 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {3.2.1.5 | 4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 8 |22 | 1: 2.75 | | | | | | | | | {7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 29 | 451- 460 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.6.6.5 | 8.6.7 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | | {3.3.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 461- 470 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 3.2.3.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 471- 480 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 7.7.6 | 6.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 5.5.5.5.5.4 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 |13 |17 | 1: 1.31 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 30 | 481- 490 | 8 | {4.4.4.4 | 7.7.6 | 6.6.6.5 | 8.6.6.5.7 | {3.1.3.3 | 5.5.5.4 | 8 | 4.4.4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | {4.4.3 | | | | {3.3.3.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 491- 500 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.7.7.6 | 6.6.5 | 8.8.7 | 3.3.3.3.2 | 5.4 | {9.9.7.4 | 3 | 8.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 5 |15 | 1: 3.00 | | | | | | | | | {9.6.8 | | | | | | | July | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1 | 501- 510 | 9.7.9.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 8.6.7 | 3.3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 511- 520 | {9.7.7.7 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.4.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | 8 | 4.4.4.3 | 8.6.5.6.7 | 3 | 7 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | {7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 521- 530 | 9.8 | 3 | 7.5.7.6 | 6.4.5 | 8.7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 531- 540 | 9.9.7.8 | 3 | 7.4.6 | 5 | 6.6.7 | 3.3.2 | 3.4 | 7.3.5.4.8 | 4.3 | {8.8.6.5 | 2 | 8 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | | | {4.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 3 | 541- 550 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | {6.6.6.6 | 6.8.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 5.5.4 | 9.6.9.6.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | {6.6.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 551- 560 | 9.9.7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 8.6.5.7 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.4 | {7.6.5.7 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 | | | | | | | {3.2 | | {9.7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 5 | 561- 570 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | {8.8.8.8 | {3.3.3.3 | 5.5.5.5.4 | 8 | 4.4.4.3 | 8.8.8.8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | | | {8.8.7 | {3.3.3.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 571- 580 | 9.8 | 4.4.4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 8.8.7 | {3.3.3.3.3 | {5.5.5.5.5 | 7.6.8 | 4.4.3 | 7 | 2 | 8 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 | | | | | | | {3.3.3.2 | {5.5.5.4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 581- 590 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.7.6 | 6.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 591- 600 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 4.5 | 6.6.6.7 | 2 | 5.3.5.4 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 8.8.8.7 | 5 | 5 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 7 | 601- 610 | 8 | 1.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.7 | 2 | 5.4 | 5.6.6.6.7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 611- 620 | {9.7.7.7.9 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.5.6.5.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.9.7.9.8 | {4.4.4.4 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 | | {7.7.7.8 | | | | | | | | {4.4.4.3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 8 | 621- 630 | {9.9.9.7.9 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.6.6.5 | {8.8.8.8 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.8 | 3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | {9.9.8 | | | | {5.6.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {7.6.5.7 | | | | | | | " | 631- 640 | 9.8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | {6.5.4.6 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | | | | | {9.7.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 641- 650 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.9.6.7.9.8 | 3 | 8.6.8.7 | 8 | 2 |17 |13 | 1: 0.76 9 | 651- 660 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.6.7.6.8 | 3 | 8.6.8.8.4.7 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 661- 670 | 9.9.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.6.7.6.8 | 4.3 | 5.6.8 | 3 | 7 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 10 | 671- 680 | 9.8 | 3 | 5.4.5.6 | 5 | 6.4.8.6.7 | 3.2 | {3.5.3.2.3 | {7.6.5.6 | 3 | 5.4.3.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | {5.3.5.2.4 | {5.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 681- 690 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 7 | 3 |10 |10 | 1: 1.00 12 | 691- 700 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 3.4 | 7.7.7.7.8 | 4.2.2.3 | 8.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 701- 710 | 9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {7.6.5.4.3 | 3 | 8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | | | | | | {2.1.4.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 711- 720 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | {7.6.5.4.3 | 3 | {6.5.4.3.6 | 4 | 6 | 9 |21 | 1: 2.33 | | | | | | | | | {2.5.9.8 | | {5.4.3.8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 13 | 721- 730 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 6 | 4.3.6.5 | 4.6.5.4.7 | 2 | 4 | {6.5.4.3 | 3 | {5.4.3.6 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | {2.1.8 | | {8.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.7.5.4 | | | | | | | 14 | 731- 740 | 8 | 3 | 5.5.6 | 5 | {5.6.5.5 | 3.2 | 4 | {7.7.4.6 | 3 | 4.6.7 | 5 | 5 | | | | | | | | | {8.8.7 | | | {5.6.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.4.5.5.4 | | {4.4.4.5.5 | | | | | " | 741- 750 | 8 | 3 | 5.6 | 5 | {6.5.6.6 | 2 | 4 | {5.6.4.4.4 | 3 | {5.4.8.8.4 | 6 | 4 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 | | | | | | {6.8.4.7 | | | {7.6.8 | | {5.5.6.4.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 15 | 751- 760 | 7.7.9.7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.6.8 | 3 | {6.6.6.8 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {5.4.6.6.5 | | | | | " | 761- 770 | 8 | 3 | 5.6 | 5 | 6.6.6.6.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 5.4.7.8 | 3 | {5.3.5.8.5 | 5 | 5 |11 | 9 | 1: 0.82 | | | | | | | | | | | {5.5.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.6.7.6.9 | | | | | | | 16 | 771- 780 | 7.7.7.8 | 3 | 6 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 2 | 3.4 | {7.7.5.5 | 3 | (5.6.8.5 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.6.6.8 | | {3.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.6.7.2 | | | | | | | " | 781- 790 | 7.8 | 3 | {4.5.4.3 | {4.6.4.4 | {4.4.6.8 | 2 | 3.4 | {3.4.4.4 | 3 | 6.7 | 3 | 7 | 7 |13 | 1: 1.86 | | | | {2.6 | {1.4.3.5 | {5.7 | | | {9.9.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 17 | 791- 800 | 7.8 | 2.3 | 6 | {4.4.4.3.6 | 4.8.4.6.7 | 2 | 4 | {5.7.6.6.1 | 3 | 5.7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | {2.4.2.5 | | | | {7.4.4.8 | | | | | | | | | | {2.4.4.4.2 | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 801- 810 | 7.8 | {4.2.4.1.4 | 5.7.6 | 5 | 5.7 | 2 | 3.5.5.4 | 6.8 | {2.4.4.2 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | 6 |14 | 1: 2.33 | | | {2.4.3 | | | | | | | {4.2.4 3 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 19 | 811- 820 | 7.9.7.8 | 2.4.2.4.3 | 5.7.6 | 3.6.4.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 6.8 | 4.4.3 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 821- 830 | 7.8 | 2.4.4.3 | 6 | 4.6.6.6.5 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 3.5.5.5.4 | 6.8 | 2.4.3 | 6.5.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 831- 840 | 7.9.8 | 2.4.4.2.4.3 | 7.6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.6.4.6.8 | 2.4.3 | 6.8.7 | 4 | 6 | 8 |22 | 1: 2.75 20 | 841- 850 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.7.6 | 4.6.5 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 3.5.8 | 2.4.3 | 6.8.6.8.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 851- 860 | 8 | 2.4.3 | 6 | 3.6.5 | 5.7 | 2 | 2.5.4 | 4.7.8 | 2.4.3 | 4.4.6.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 861- 870 | 7.8 | 2.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 2.4 | 6.8 | 2.4.3 | 4.7 | 4 | 6 | 9 |21 | 1: 2.33 21 | 871- 880 | 7.9.8 | 2.4.3 | 5.7.6 | {4.6.4.6 | 4.6.7 | 2 | 3.5.3.5.4 | 5.7.8 | 2.4.3 | 5.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | | {3.2.4.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 881- 890 | 7.8 | 2.4.2.3 | 3.5.7.6 | 3.4.6.4.6.5 | 4.6.5.6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.8 | 3 | 4.6.5.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 891- 900 | 7.8 | 2.4.3 | 5.7.6 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 4 | {4.6.5.7.6 | 2.4.3 | 5.7 | 1 | 9 | 5 |25 | 1: 5.00 | | | | | | | | | {4.2.4.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 22 | 901- 910 | 7.8 | 2.4.3 | 5.7.6 | 4.6.5 | 6.8.7 | 2 | 2.5.4 | 5.6.8 | 2.3 | 6.7 | 1 | 9 | | | " | 911- 920 | 7.8 | 2.3 | 5.6 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 2 | 3.4 | 4.6.8 | 2.3 | 5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | 2 |18 | 1: 9.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 921- 930 | 7.8 | 2.3 | {3.2.4.4 | 5 | 4.6.5.6.7 | 2 | 3.2.4 | 5.4.6.8 | 2.3 | {4.5.4.3.5 | 2 | 8 | | | | | | | {5.6 | | | | | | | {6.5.6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 23 | 931- 940 | 7.9.7.8 | 3 | 5.4.6 | 5 | 5.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 941- 950 | 7.8 | 3 | 5.6 | 4.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 3.5.4 | 5.6.8 | 2.3 | 6.7 | 3 | 7 |10 |20 | 1: 2.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 24 | 951- 960 | 7.8 | 2.3 | {2.7.7.4 | 4.6.5 | 5.7 | 2 | 4 | 4.6.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | {5.7.4.6 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 961- 970 | 7.9.7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | (6.8.6.8 | 2 | 5.5.3.4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 | | | | | | {6.7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {4.2.6.4 | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 971- 980 | 7.9.7.8 | 3 | 6 | {6.4.6.4 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 6.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 6 | 4 | | | | | | | | {6.1.5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 981- 990 | 7.9.7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.6.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 7 | 3 | | | | 991-1000 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.8.5.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.8 | 4.2.3 | 6.5.7 | 5 | 5 |18 |12 | 1: 0.67 --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- In |trials 1001| to 1100 the | right door |was indicated | by being |raised before | the choice | was made. | | | | | | | | --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- 30 | 1101-1110 | 8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 6.6.5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | {7.7.7.7.7 | 3 | 6.6.7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 6 | 1: 1.50 | | | | | | | | | {7.6.6.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {7.7.6.7 | | | | | | | 31 | 1111-1120 | 7.7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.3.2 | 4 | {7.6.6.7 | 4.4.4.3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.6.8* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 1121-1130 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 8.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 August | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2 | 1131-1140 | 8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.3.3.2 | 4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 1141-1150 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 7.6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 4.3 | 7 | 3 | 7 | 9 |11 | 1: 1.22 3 | 1151-1160 | 7.9.8 | 4.3 | 7.6 | 5 | 6.7 | 2 | 5.4 | 7.6.7.8 | 4.3 | 6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 1161-1170 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 7 | 6 | 4 | 8 |12 | 1: 1.50 4 | 1171-1180 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 6.5.6.7 | 2 | 8 | | | " | 1181-1190 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.3.2 | 4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 |10 |10 | 1: 1.00 5 | 1191-1200 | 7.8 | 4.4.3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.3.3.2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | | 1201-1210 | 8 | 4.3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 1211-1220 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6.5 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 7.7.6.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 |17 |13 | 1: 0.76 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 6 | 1221-1230 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | {6.5.6.6 | 2 | 4 | {5.6.5.7 | 3 | 6.8.6.7 | 7 | 3 | | | | | | | | | {5.6.5.7 | | | {9.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 1231-1240 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 4.5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 6.7 | 6 | 4 |13 | 7 | 1: 0.54 7 | 1241-1250 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 | 8.7 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 1251-1260 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 3 | | | " | 1261-1270 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 5.3.4 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 |23 | 7 | 1: 0.30 9 | 1271-1280 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 2 | 5.4 | 9.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 | | | " | 1281-1290 | 8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | 7.8 | 3 | 7 | 8 | 2 |16 | 4 | 1: 0.25 10 | 1291-1300 | 7.8 | 3 | 7.6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 5 | | | " | 1301-1310 | 7.8 | 4.3 | 5.6 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 3 | 7 | | | " | 1311-1320 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 5.7 | 2 | 4 | 5.7.8 | 3 | 4.6.8.7 | 6 | 4 |14 |16 | 1: 1.14 11 | 1321-1330 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 3.2 | 4 | 4.6.7.8 | 2.3 | 5.7 | 4 | 6 | | | " | 1331-1340 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 4 |10 |10 | 1: 1.00 12 | 1341-1350 | 9.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 6.7 | 6 | 4 | | | " | 1351-1360 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 7.8 | 3 | 6.7 | 6 | 4 |12 | 8 | 1: 0.67 19 | 1361-1370 | 7.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 6.7 | 2 | 4 | 6.7.8 | 3 | 6.7 | 6 | 4 | | | | 1371-1380 | 9.8 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 3.2 | 4 | 7.9.8 | 3 | 6.8.7 | 6 | 4 |12 | 8 | 1: 0.67 ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] After two hundred and fifty trials on problem 2 had been given Julius, it seemed desirable to introduce a radical change in method in order to stimulate him to maximal effort. It was therefore decided to force him to make a round trip through the apparatus in connection with each choice, and to let this forced labor serve, in the place of confinement, as punishment for mistakes. This new method yielded peculiar and characteristic results. They differ from those previously obtained largely because of the orang utan's remarkably strong tendency to reenter the box through which he had just passed. This occurred so persistently, as may be seen in table 9 (June 17, second series, June 18, etc.), that a further modification of method was introduced in that after the same wrong box had been entered five times in succession, the experimenter on the next choice of the box confined the animal for a stated interval, say sixty seconds, in it, and then allowed it to escape by way of the exit door and choose repeatedly until it finally located the right box. Were it not for this particular feature of the method, the number of choices recorded after June 17 would unquestionably be very much greater than the table indicates. The new method proved a severe test of the orang utan's patience and perseverance, for he had to work much harder than formerly for his reward, and often became much fatigued before completing the regular series of ten trials. Early in the use of this method, he developed the habit of rolling around from exit door to starting point by a series of somersaults. When especially discouraged he would often bump his head against the floor so hard that I could hear the dull thud. As has been noted, I found it desirable to vary the procedure repeatedly. It proved especially interesting to give one series per day with the round trip as punishment and another series with confinement as punishment. Day after day, as the experiment progressed, slight or great fluctuations of the ratios of right to wrong choices appeared, but without consistent improvement. There was, to be sure, as the last column of table 9 shows, a radical improvement during the first six hundred and fifty trials, for the number of right choices per series increased from 0 to 8. But, as the observations were continued from day to day, it became more and more evident that the animal was merely passing from tendency to tendency--method to method--mixing tendencies, and occasionally developing new ones, without approach to the solution of the problem. This fact would have led me to discontinue the work much earlier than I actually did had it not been for the peculiarity of the results obtained with problem 1. It seemed not improbable that at any time Julius might succeed in perfectly solving this problem over night precisely as he had solved the first problem. A curiously interesting bit of behavior appeared for the first time on June 29. Julius had gone to the first box at the right end of the group, and instead of entering, he had wheeled around toward his right, and turning a complete circle, faced the right box, which he promptly entered. Subsequently, the tendency developed and the method was used with increasing frequency. On June 30, it appeared in the first series, four times, in the second series, six times; on July 1, in the first series, three times, and in the second series, four times; on July 2, in the first series, five times, and in the second series, nine times. It was indeed only by accident that the animal failed to fulfill the technical requirement for perfect solution of the problem in this series. Yet, had he done so, his subsequent trials would doubtless have revealed the lack of any other idea than that of turning completely around before entering a box. This odd bit of behavior proved peculiarly interesting and significant in that the tendency to turn became dissociated from the position (in front of the first box at the right end of the group) in connection with which it originally developed. After a few days, Julius would enter the reaction-chamber and instead of proceeding directly to the right end of the group, would stop suddenly wherever he happened to be, turn toward his right in a complete circle, and hasten into the box nearest to him which, as often as not, proved to be the wrong one. Thus the idea of turning completely about, which had it continued its association with the idea of facing the first box at the right, would have yielded success, instead became useless because of its dissociation. That the orang utan is capable of using free ideas seems clear enough in the light of this behavior. That he proved incapable of getting the idea of second from the right end is as clearly shown by the detailed results of table 9,--the fruits of weeks of experimenting. Certain other interesting tricks developed in Julius's behavior. Thus, on July 5, there appeared the tendency to move as though about to enter the right box (feint), then to stop suddenly and promptly enter another box, which was, of course, a wrong one. The reason for the development of this tendency could not be discovered, but in connection with it, there appeared another tendency which possibly can be explained. Julius took to backing into the chosen box so that he could face the experimenter. He would then, after a period of hesitation, come out and promptly enter one of the other boxes. This tendency was apparently due to the fact that during one or two series the experimenter growled at the orang utan every time he made a mistake. The growl startled him and caused him to look around. He evidently felt the need of keeping his eyes on the experimenter,--Hence the backing into the open box. The tendency disappeared shortly after the experimenter gave up the use of the growl as a method of punishing the animal for what were suspected to be careless choices. Curiously enough, it was not until July 10 that direct choice of the right box was made at all frequently. Previously, selection of it had been made almost invariably after approach to other boxes. But in the second series for July 10 there was an extraordinary improvement in method. This developed in the presence of two visitors, and it is therefore all the more surprising. The choices were made not only directly, but with decision and evident certainty that was quite at variance with the previous behavior of the animal. All the while through variation of methods, I was seeking to discover the best means of holding the orang utan to his maximum effort and care in attempting to select the right box. One day it would seem as though forcing him to make round trips with rewards only for correct first choices proved most satisfactory, and the next it might seem equally clear that punishment by confinement for thirty seconds or sixty seconds, with reward for correct choice in every trial, yielded better results. In the end I had to admit that no best method had been demonstrated and that I had failed to develop conditions which served to compel the animal's attention to the problem and to lead him to work without discouragement. There were, it is true, days on which it seemed practically certain that the problem would be solved, but as it turned out, Julius never succeeded in choosing correctly--throughout a series of ten trials. As a last resort, in order to make perfectly sure that the orang utan was doing his best, I decided to introduce corporal punishment in a mild form. For this purpose, I placed my assistant in charge of the apparatus and the series of trials, and stationed myself in one corner of the reaction-chamber with a whip in my hand. Whenever Julius entered a wrong box, I approached him with the whip and struck at him, being careful not to injure him and rarely striking him at all, for the threat was more effective than a blow. He was extremely afraid of the whip and would begin to whine and attempt to get out of the way as soon as he saw it. This method was introduced on August 10, but no improvement resulted, and in the end there was no reason to consider it more satisfactory than the other procedures. I am now wholly convinced that Julius did his best to choose correctly in the majority of the numerous series which were given him in connection with problem 2. From trials 1001 to 1100, a radical departure from the previous methods was introduced in that the right box was indicated to the animal by the slight and momentary raising of its exit door. Of course no records of the choices for this group of one hundred trials appear in table 9, for the simple reason that the animal inevitably and immediately entered the right box. It was thought that this method might serve to break up the previously developed tendencies toward inadequate forms of response and so encourage the animal that he would later solve the problem when given opportunity to select the right box without aid from the experimenter. But as a matter of fact, while the ratio of right to wrong first choices was 1 to .67 in the series preceding this change of method, it was 1 to 1.50 in the first series following its use. There is no satisfactory evidence that Julius profited by this experience, though as a matter of fact he did succeed in making his best daily record, eight right to two wrong choices, on August 4, after 1190 trials. The curve of learning for this problem has been plotted and is presented in figure 19. It is of course incomplete and it is offered only to indicate the extreme irregularity in performance. _Problem 1a. First at the Right End_ It was decided on August 19 that the further continuation of the work of Julius on problem 2 was not worth while. He had become much discouraged, and although willing to work for food, gave no indications whatever of improvement and seemed to have exhausted his methods. It seemed wise instead of giving up work with him in the multiple-choice method to return to a form of problem 1. We may designate it as problem 1a. The right box is definable as the first at the right end of the series instead of the first at the left end as in the original problem 1. It was thought possible that Julius might quickly solve this problem by a process similar to that used for problem 1. Work was begun on problem 1a, August 20, and for six successive days two series of trials per day were given, the settings for which as well as the resulting choices are given in table 10. Most notable in these results is the large number of cases in which Julius chose first the second box from the right end of the series, or in other words that box which had been the right one in problem 2. Contrary to expectation, he showed no inclination to abandon this tendency to choose the second from the right end, and the ratio of right to wrong choices changed in the direction opposite from expectation, beginning with 1 to 4 and ending on the sixth day with 0 to 20. It was obviously useless to continue the experiment further since Julius had given up his attempts to locate the right box in the first choice and was apparently satisfied to discover it by a process of trial and error. He had, it would seem, satisfied himself that the problem was insoluble. These results obtained in problem 1a constitute a most interesting comment on the effects of problem 2 on the orang utan. Behavior similar to that which he developed well might have been obtained from a child of three to four years placed in a like situation and forced to strive, day after day, to solve a problem beyond its ideational capacity. In many respects the most interesting and to the experimenter the most surprising result of this long series of observations with Julius was the lack of consistent improvement. It seemed almost incredible that he should continue, day after day, to make incorrect choices in a particular setting while choosing correctly in some other setting which from the standpoint of the experimenter was not more difficult. TABLE 10 Results for Orang utan in problem 1a ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== | No. | S.1 | S.2 | S.3 | S.4 | S.5 | S.6 | S.7 | S.8 | S.9 | S.10 | | | | | Ratio Date | of | | | | | | | | | | 1.2.3.4 | R | W | R | W | of | trials | 5.63 | 1.2.3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 2.3.4.5 | 3.4.5.6.7 | 1.2.3 | 5.6.7.8 | 1.2 | 2.3.4.5.6 | 5.6.7 | | | | | R to W --------+-----------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+--------------+---+---+---+---+-------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | August | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 20 | 1- 10 | 6 | 3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 3 | 7.8 | 2 | 5.5.6 | 6.7 | 3 | 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 11- 20 | 5.6 | 3.4 | {7.8.7.8 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2.3 | {7.6.7.7 | 2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 1 | 9 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 | | | | {8.7.8.9 | | | | {6.7.7.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 21 | 21- 30 | 5.6 | 3.4 | {7.8.7.6 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2.3 | 7.8 | 2 | 5.6 | 5.7 | 1 | 9 | | | | | | | {8.7.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 31- 40 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 7.7.6.8.9 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 3 | 6.7.8 | 2 | 6 | 6.7 | 3 | 7 | 4 |16 | 1: 4.00 23 | 41- 50 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 7.8.9 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2.3 | 6.7.8 | 2 | 5.6 | 5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | | | " | 51- 60 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 7.8.9 | 4.5 | 6.7 | 2.3 | 6.8 | 2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 1 | 9 | 2 |18 | 1: 9.00 24 | 61- 70 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 6.8.9 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 2.3 | 6.7.8 | 1.2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 0 |10 | | | " | 71- 80 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 4.5 | 5.7 | 2.3 | 5.7.8 | 2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 1 | 9 | 1 |19 | 1:19.00 25 | 81- 90 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 5 | 5.6.7 | 2.3 | 7.8 | 1.2 | 5.6 | 4.5.6.7 | 1 | 9 | | | " | 91-100 | 5.6 | 3.4 | 6.7.8.9 | 3.4.5 | 6.6.7 | 2.3 | 6.7.8 | 1.2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 0 |10 | 1 |19 | 1:19.00 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 26 | 101-110 | 5.6 | 3.4 | {6.7.8.8 | 3.5 | 5.6.7 | 2.3 | 5.6.7.6.7.8 | 1.2 | 5.6 | 6.7 | 0 |10 | | | | | | | {6.7.6.9 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | {6.7.8.8 | | | | | | | | | | | | " | 111-120 | 5.6 | 2.3.4 | {6.7.8.7 | 3.4.5 | 5.6.7 | 2.3 | 7.8 | 1.2 | 5.6 | 4.5.6.7 | 0 |10 | 0 |20 | 0:20.00 | | | | {6.7.9* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ========+===========+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+==============+===+===+===+===+======== [Footnote *: Aided by experimenter.] The evidence suggests that in this young orang utan ideational learning tended to replace the simpler mode of problem solution by trial and error. Seemingly incapable of solving his problems by the lower grade process, he strove persistently, and often vainly, to gain insight. He used ideas ineffectively. Animals far lower in intelligence (e.g., the pig), surpass him in ability to solve these relational problems because they use the method of elimination by trial consistently and effectively. Julius, in these experiments, made a poor showing because his substitute for trial and error is only slightly developed. Would he have succeeded better with the same problems if mentally mature? There are many important features of the results which, for lack of space, have not been indicated or discussed. They can be developed from later comparative studies of the data, for in the tables appear all of the essential facts of response apart from those mentioned in the text. IV RESULTS OF SUPPLEMENTARY TESTS OF IDEATIONAL BEHAVIOR 1. Julius, _Pongo pygmaeus_ _Box Stacking Experiment_ In addition to the multiple-choice experiments which have been described in detail in the previous section, it was possible to conduct certain less systematic tests of ideational behavior in the monkeys and the orang utan. From the technical standpoint these tests were relatively unsatisfactory because only inexactly describable. But their results are in many respects more interesting, if not also more important, in the light which they throw on ideation than are those previously presented. First, in order of time, comes a test which may be designated as the box stacking experiment. The method will now be described in connection with an account of the behavior of Julius as contrasted with that of a child of three years and four months of age. In the large central cage labelled Z, figure 12, which was twenty-four feet long, ten feet wide, and ten to twelve feet deep, the following situation was arranged. From the center of the wire covering of the cage, a banana was suspended on a string so that it was approximately six feet from the floor, five feet from either side of the cage, and twelve feet from either end. From all approaches it was far beyond the reach of Julius, since it was impossible for him to climb along the wire roof and thus reach the string. Two boxes were placed on the floor of the cage several feet from the point directly under the banana. The one of these boxes was heavy and irregular in shape, as is shown in figures 21, 23 and 24 of plate V. Its greatest height was twenty-one inches; its least height, eighteen inches; its other dimensions, twelve and sixteen inches respectively. The smaller and lighter box measured twenty-two by twelve by ten inches. According to the experimenter's calculations, the only way in which Julius could obtain the banana was by placing the smaller box upon the larger and then climbing upon them. At 10 a.m. on March 5, Julius was admitted to the large cage, and the banana was pointed out to him by the experimenter. He immediately set about trying to get it, and worked diligently during the whole of the period of observation, which, because of the unfinished condition of some of the cages, was limited to slightly over ten minutes. Within this period he made upward of a dozen fairly well directed attempts to obtain the food. Chief among them were three attempts to reach the banana from different positions on the left wall of the cage (as the experimenter faced the laboratory); two attempts to reach it from different positions on the right wall; two from the large box in positions nearly under the banana; two from the large box with the aid of the experimenter's hand; and one from the distant end of the cage(?). There occurred, also, less definite and easily describable efforts to get at the reward. On account of the unfinished condition of the cages, the experimenter had to remain in the large cage with Julius during the test. This interfered with the experiment because the animal tended both to try to escape and to get the experimenter to help him with his task. Particularly interesting is the latter sort of behavior. After the orang utan had made two or three futile attempts to obtain the food he came to the experimenter, who was standing in one corner of the cage, took him by the hand, and led him to a point directly under the banana. He then looked up toward the banana, grasped the experimenter's arm, raised it, and then tried to pull himself up. He was not allowed to get the food by climbing up on the experimenter. A few minutes later, he again led the experimenter toward the banana, but receiving discouragement in this activity, he proceeded to devote himself to other methods. Apart from the distractions which have been mentioned above, Julius's attention to the food was surprisingly constant. Whatever his position with respect to it, he seemed not for an instant to lose his motive, and to whatever part of the cage he went and whatever he did during the interval of observation was evidently guided by the strong desire to obtain the banana. Frequently he would look directly at it for a few seconds and then try some new method of reaching it. His gaze was deliberate and in the handling of the boxes he accurately gauged distances. Several times he succeeded in placing the larger box almost directly under the banana, and repeatedly he located that portion of the side wall from which he could most nearly reach the coveted prize. EXPLANATION OF PLATE V Orang utan, Julius, obtaining banana by piling boxes or by using pole FIGURE 21.--Julius in act of setting larger box on end. FIGURE 22.--Placing smaller box on larger. FIGURE 23.--Balancing on larger box preparatory to reaching for banana. FIGURE 24.--Balancing and reaching to the utmost. FIGURE 25.--Standing on three boxes (after stacking them) and reaching for reward. FIGURE 26.--Lifting smaller box up toward banana. FIGURE 27.--The act of stacking the boxes. FIGURE 28.--Sequel to figure 27. FIGURE 29.--Box and pole experiment. Pushing the second pole into the box. FIGURE 30.--Pushing pole into box. FIGURE 31.--Enjoying the reward of success. From my notes I quote the following comment on the results of the initial experiment: "Despite all that has been written concerning the intelligent behavior of the orang utan, I was amazed by Julius's behavior this morning, for it was far more deliberate and apparently reflective as well as more persistently directed toward the goal than I had anticipated. I had looked for sporadic attempts to obtain the banana, with speedy discouragement and such fluctuations of attention as would be exhibited by a child of two to four years. But in less than ten minutes Julius made at least ten obvious and well directed attempts to reach the food. There were also wanderings, efforts to obtain aid from the experimenter, and varied attempts to escape from the cage." Before proceeding further with the description of the behavior of Julius in the box stacking test, I shall describe for contrast the behavior of a boy three years four months of age when confronted with a situation practically identical with that which the ape was given an opportunity to meet. For the child, the banana was suspended, as previously described, from the roof of the cage. The same two boxes were placed on the floor at considerable distances from the banana, and in addition, a light stick, about six feet long, and a piece of board, the latter by accident, were on the floor. The child was asked to get the banana for Julius, and he eagerly and confidently volunteered to do so. His behavior may best be described by enumeration of the several attempts made. They include (1) placing the larger box nearly under the banana and reaching from it. (2) Standing of the larger box on end with resulting failure because the child could not stand on the sloping edges of the top of the box. (3) The larger box was turned on its side and the lighter box drawn up opposite it and stood on end. The child then mounted the larger box and from it stepped to the top of the smaller. But the boxes had not been placed beneath the banana, and when the child reached for it, he found himself several feet away from his prize. (4) The boxes were moved to a position nearly under the banana and another futile attempt was made to reach it without placing the smaller box on top of the larger one, the only position from which the child could readily obtain it. (5) The piece of board was placed on top of the larger box and from this height the child again reached upward. (6) The six-foot stick was taken up and an attempt was made to strike the banana and thus dislodge it, but it was too securely fastened to be obtained thus. (7) Attention shifted to other things, and the child played for a time with the board. Reminded of the banana by the experimenter, he again tried method (3). (8) He again used the stick on the banana. (9) The effort to knock the prize to the floor having failed, he became discouraged and said that he must go home. (10) When told that Julius was very hungry and wanted the banana, he repeated efforts similar to those described in (3) and (6). Up to this time the observations had covered a period of twenty minutes. The child was now taken from the cage and allowed to play about for fifteen minutes. Asked then whether he would go back and try to get the banana, he replied, "No, 'cause I don't want to get it," thus indicating his discouragement with the situation. When taken into the cage, he, nevertheless, made the additional attempts indicated below: (11) Use of one of the boxes. (12) He remarked, "Now I know, I'll get it," and after so saying, repeated (3). (13) Failing, he turned to me and said, "I could get it if I was on your head," but he did not, as Julius had done, lead me to the proper place and try to reach the banana by climbing up or by urging me to lift him. (14) Later, he played in the boxes, apparently forgetful of his task. Finally he remarked: "I'll get the banana," but he made no attempt to do so, and instead, watched the monkeys intently. Thereafter, he showed no further interest in the solution of the problem, and the experiment, after a total period of fifty-five minutes, was discontinued. Comparison of the behavior of the ape with that of the child indicates a greater variety of ideas for the latter. Julius gauged his distances much more accurately than the child, attended more steadily, and worked more persistently to obtain the reward, but he did not so nearly approach the idea of stacking the boxes as did the child, for the latter, in placing the board on one of the boxes, exhibited in ineffective form the idea which should have yielded the solution of the problem. The child was given no further opportunity to work at the problem, whereas Julius, as I shall now describe, continued his efforts on subsequent days under somewhat different conditions. On Wednesday, March 10, the banana was suspended as formerly, and three boxes, all of them small and light enough to be readily handled by the ape, were placed in distant parts of the cage. The six-foot stick which had been present in the test with the child, but not in the first test with Julius, was also placed in the cage. Julius was allowed to work for about an hour. As formerly, he was sufficiently hungry to be eager to get the food and evidently tried all of the possible ways which occurred to him. Chief among these were (1) the use of the various boxes separately or in pairs in very varied positions but never with one upon another,--the only way in which the banana could be reached; (2) climbing to various points on the sides of the cage, with infrequent attempts to reach the banana. Usually his eyes saved him the vain effort. Unlike the child, Julius paid little attention to the six-foot stick. Two or three times he took it up and seemingly reached for the banana, but in no case did he try persistently to strike it and knock it from the string. It is but fair, however, to remark that such an act is very difficult for the young orang utan, as compared with the child, because of the weakness of the legs and the awkwardness of striking from a sitting posture. As previously, the steadiness of attention and the persistence of effort toward the end in view were most surprising. At one time Julius walked to the end of the cage and there happened to see one of the monkeys eating. He watched intently a few seconds and then hastened back to the banana as if his task had been suggested to him by the sight of the feeding animal. Most interesting and significant in this behavior was the suddenness with which he would turn to a new method. It often looked precisely as though a new idea had come to him, and he was all eagerness to try it out. On March 11, Julius was given another opportunity to obtain the banana by the use of the three boxes. Although he used them together he made no effort to place one upon another. Certain of his methods are shown in plate V, especially by figures 21, 23 and 24. This experiment was continued on April 2 under yet different conditions, for this time only two boxes were placed in the cage, the one of them the heavy, irregularly-shaped box and the other the smaller, lighter one originally used. On the end of the heavier box had been nailed a two by two inch wooden block in order to increase the difficulty in using this box alone. As previously, Julius made varied attempts to obtain the banana, but on the whole his interest and attention seemed somewhat weaker than previously and there were indications of discouragement because of repeated failures. He handled the boxes conspicuously well, and it seemed at times that he would certainly succeed in placing the one upon the other and in reaching the food. After one series of attempts from the sides of the cage and from the large box, he deliberately turned away from the box and neatly executed a somersault on the floor of the cage, as much as to say, "I am disgusted with the whole situation." Again, later on the same day, after falling from the top of the larger box, which tilted over very easily, he rolled himself into a ball, and childlike, played with his feet. An additional evidence of his changed affective attitude toward his task, especially in connection with definite failures, appeared in his rough handling and biting of the boxes. When most impatient, he worked very roughly. Julius was allowed to work for the reward from thirty to ninety minutes, or, as a rule, until he had become completely discouraged on April 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 13. His behavior was interesting and significant, but nothing new appeared except that his willingness to work gradually disappeared, and on April 13, although previously hungry, he made only a single attempt to obtain the banana and then paid no further attention to it. The prolonged and varied efforts to obtain the banana were due in a measure at least to three accidental successes. Thus on April 2, 3 and again on the 5th, by fortunate combinations of circumstances, he succeeded in getting the banana, contrary to the intention of the experimenter. Although active at first on April 6, he soon wearied of his task and quit work. The same was true on April 7, and again on the 8th and 9th. On these days, although hungry, he did not care to enter the large cage and worked only a few minutes each day, seldom making more than two or three half-hearted attempts to obtain the banana. His attitude toward the task had changed completely, in that hopelessness had taken the place of eager expectancy. By the 13th of April he had so nearly given up voluntary efforts to solve the problem that it seemed worth while to test his ability to get the idea by watching the experimenter. For this purpose the following test of imitation was made. On the morning of April 14, having placed a banana in the usual position, I took Julius into the large cage, dragged the two boxes to the proper position beneath the banana, placed the smaller one upon the larger one and then climbed up on them to show the ape that I could reach the banana. I then stepped down and gave him a chance to climb on the boxes. He did so immediately and obtained the food. Another piece of banana was supplied, the boxes were placed in distant corners of the cage, and fifteen minutes were allowed Julius so to place them that he could obtain his reward. He gave no indications of having profited by my demonstration, but worked with the boxes singly, usually with the larger one. On April 16, with the banana in position and the two boxes also in the cage, Julius was admitted and allowed to work for five minutes, but again without success. I then placed the boxes properly for him and he immediately climbed up and got the banana. While he was eating, the boxes were carried to distant corners of the cage and another banana placed in position. Now thirty minutes were allowed him for unaided work on the problem. As formerly, the larger box was used repeatedly and attempts to reach from the side of the cage appeared, but there was no tendency to try to use the two boxes together. He worked fairly persistently, however, and showed clearly the stimulating and encouraging effect of aid from the experimenter. Once more, on April 17, Julius was taken into the cage and allowed to watch me place the boxes in proper position. He then climbed up and obtained the desired food. After the bait had been renewed and the boxes displaced, he immediately tried to use the larger one, then he reached for the small one as though to use both together. But the impulse died out and he turned again to the larger box as usual, standing it on end, and persistently trying to balance himself on it. Nothing else of special interest happened during the interval of unaided effort. Similarly, I placed the boxes for the ape on April 19, allowed him to get the banana and then gave him opportunity to try for himself after the boxes had been displaced. This time he immediately reached for the smaller box and moved it about a little, thus indicating a new association. He next turned to the larger box and worked with it persistently. Later, he once more worked with the smaller box in an unusual manner. He repeatedly stood on it, but made no attempt to lift it or to place it on the larger box. Clearly the usually neglected smaller box had become associated with the satisfaction of obtaining the banana. The same method was carried out on April 20. As I placed the boxes in position beneath the banana, Julius watched with unusual intentness, and when it came his turn to try to obtain the food by the use of the boxes, he began at once to work with the smaller box, but as on April 19, he soon abandoned it and turned to the other. While I was making note of this particular feature of his behavior, he suddenly seized the smaller box by two corners with his hands and by one edge with his teeth, and after a few attempts placed it on top of the larger box, climbed up, and obtained the banana. Because of bad weather on April 21, the next test was made on April 22, with everything as usual. Unaided, the ape was given an opportunity to obtain the coveted reward, while I stood ready to obtain records of his behavior with my camera. He wasted no time, but piled the smaller box on top of the larger one immediately, and obtained his reward. As soon as opportunity was offered, he repeated the performance. The same thing happened on April 23 and several succeeding dates. Julius had got the idea, and the only further improvement possible was in skill in manipulating the boxes. One of the curious performances which appeared during the imitative period is pictured in figure 26, plate V, where the ape is seen lifting the smaller box into the air. This he did three or four times one day, raising it toward the banana each time as though he expected thus to obtain the reward. As he did not go up with the box (according to his expectation?), he abandoned this method, and looking about, discovered the larger box in a distant corner. Thereupon, he promptly pulled the boxes to their proper position beneath the banana, stacked them, and obtained his food. After considerable skill had been acquired in the placing of the boxes, the one upon the other, the height of the banana above the floor was increased so that three boxes were necessary. Figure 25 of plate V shows him standing on three boxes and reaching upward, and figures 22, 27 and 28 show various modes of handling the boxes and of reaching from them. He was not at all particular as to the stability of his perch, and often mounted the boxes when it seemed to the experimenter inevitable that they should topple over and precipitate him to the floor. Only once, however, during the several days of experimentation did he thus fall. Obviously important is the evident change in the animal's attention on April 20. He watched with a keenness of interest which betokened a dawning idea. Before he had succeeded in stacking the boxes, I had written in my note-book, "He seemed much interested today, in my placing of the boxes." Interesting, and important also, is the ease and efficiency with which he met the situation time after time, after this first success. "Trial and error" had no obvious part in the development of the really essential features of the behavior. The ape had the idea and upon it depended for guidance. Except for the fact that Julius was immature, probably under five years of age, it is likely that he would have stacked the boxes spontaneously instead of by suggestion from the experimenter or imitatively. No unprejudiced psychologist would be likely to interpret the activities of the orang utan in the box-stacking experiment as other than imaginal or ideational. He went directly, and in the most business-like way from point to point, from method to method, trying in turn and more or less persistently or repeatedly, almost all of the possible ways of obtaining the coveted food. The fact that he did not happen upon the only certain road to success is surprising indeed in view of the many ineffective methods which he used. It seemed almost as though he avoided the easy method. It is especially important, in connection with these results, to point out the risk of misinterpretation of observations on the anthropoid apes. If they can imitate human activities as readily and effectively as Julius did in this particular experiment, we can never be sure of the spontaneity of their ideational behavior unless we definitely know that they have had no opportunity to see human beings perform similar acts. Of all the methods of eliciting ideational or allied forms of behavior used in my study of the monkeys and ape, none yielded such illuminating results as the box stacking test, and although from the technical standpoint, it has many shortcomings, as a means to qualitative results it has proved invaluable. _Other Methods of Obtaining the Reward_ Some weeks later, I tried to discover how Julius would obtain the much desired banana when the boxes were absent. I placed in the large cage a stick about six feet long and an old broom. When admitted, he looked about for the boxes, but not seeing them, picked up the broom and placing it with the splints down, beneath the banana, he tried to climb it, but as it fell over with him, he abandoned this after a few trials, went to his cage, and picking up some old bags which he used at night as covers, he dragged them out and placed them on the floor beneath the banana. He next put the broom upon them and tried to climb up. This general type of behavior persisted for several minutes, everything within reach being used as were the bags, as a means of raising him in the desired direction. Finally, he placed his feet on the broom where the handle joins the splints, seized the handle near the top with his hands, drew himself up as far as possible, and then launched himself in the air and tried to seize the banana. On the third attempt he succeeded. Later, he was given a plain stick about five feet long. Figure 32 of plate VI shows him using this to obtain the banana in the manner described above. He would grasp it with one or both feet, usually one, ten to fifteen inches from the floor of the cage, meanwhile holding with his hands near the top of the stick. He would then, with all his strength, draw himself up suddenly and jump toward the banana. Often he came down rather hard on the cement floor, much to his disgust. Yet another method of obtaining the reward developed a day or two later. A light red-wood stick about five feet long and an inch in its other dimensions was the only object in the cage which could possibly be of use in obtaining the banana. The aim of the experimenter was to discover whether Julius would use this as a club. Previously, in connection with the use of the boxes, he had taken up the same stick two or three times and reached for the banana with it, but in no case had he struck at it or clearly tried to knock it from the string, as did the child most readily and naturally. When provided with this same stick, and it alone, as a means of obtaining the food, he hit upon the following interesting method. Placing one end of the stick between a wooden brace and the wire side of the cage, he climbed up to a level with the banana as is shown in figure 33 of plate VI. Then holding with one hand and one foot to a timber of the cage and to the stick with his other foot, he swung outward as far as possible and reached the banana with his free hand. Having once succeeded by the method, he used it whenever given an opportunity. It was impossible for him to make the reach without the use of the small stick, while with it he succeeded fairly easily and regularly. _Box and Pole Experiment_ Following the box stacking test, Julius was given an opportunity to exhibit ideation in another type of experiment. This may be designated the box and pole test. The conditions are describable thus. A strong wooden box eighty-four inches long, by four inches wide, by four inches deep, with open ends, was built with one side hinged. Hasps and padlocks enabled the experimenter to lock this "lid" after food had been placed in the center of the box. This box could be placed in the center of the large cage and there fastened by means of cross bars. It is well shown in position in figure 29, plate V. Two poles each eight feet long and approximately one and a half inches in their other dimensions were the only additional materials in the experiment. On May 1, Julius was allowed to see the experimenter place a half banana in this box, close the lid, lock it in position, and securely fasten the box by means of the cross bars. He was then given opportunity to try to get the banana. The two poles lay on opposite sides of the box and near the edges of the cage. Doctor Hamilton and the writer were in the cage watching. Julius looked into the box through one end, and seeing the banana, reached for it. He could not obtain it in this way, so he began to bite at the box and to pull at it with all his strength. During the fifteen minutes allowed him, he worked at the box in a great variety of ways, fooling with the locks which had been attached to the hasps as well as with the cross bars and continually reaching in at the one or the other end. He was somewhat distracted by the presence of the two observers and attended rather unsatisfactorily to the task in hand. Not once did he touch the poles, and it is doubtful whether he even noticed them. He was not very hungry at this time, and after a few minutes active work he virtually gave up trying to get the food. Two days later, on May 3, the box was once more placed in position, this time with a half banana in the middle and a small piece of banana near each open end. The two poles lay on the floor of the cage, each several feet distant from the box. Julius was eager for food. When released he went immediately to the box, reached in and obtained a piece of banana from the end nearer the laboratory. He then looked in and saw the piece near the middle of the box. His next move was to pick up the eight foot pole and push it into the box, but before pushing it all the way through, he stopped and began to pull at the box in various ways. Shortly he returned to the pole and twice thrust it in as far as he could reach. The first time, after thrusting it all the way through, he pulled it out and examined the end as though expecting the banana to come out with it. After a third attempt he looked into the box, presumably seeing the banana, then turned a backward somersault, came to the end of the cage, and looked at me. Had it been at all possible, he would have taken me by the hand and led me to the box as a helper. After a few seconds, he returned to the pole, pried the lid of the box with it, then gnawed at the pole. For about five minutes he worked fairly rapidly and steadily, using the poles, pulling, gnawing, and walking about. His next move was to go to the opposite end of the box, look in, take the piece of banana which was near the opening, then pick up the second pole, which had not previously been noticed, and after a number of attempts, push it into and through the box, looking after it and then pulling it out and looking into the box. Having done this he again came to my end of the cage, and from there returned to try once more with the pole which he had first used. He pushed this pole all the way through, then walked to the other end of the box, looked in and reaching in, obtained the banana which had been pushed far enough along to be within his grasp. Figures 29, 30 and 31 of plate V show stages of this process. Julius had worked twenty-four minutes with relatively little lost time before succeeding. He had shown almost from the start the idea of using the pole as an instrument, and his sole difficulty was in making the pole serve the desired purpose. The experiment was rendered still more crucial on May 5 by the placing of the two poles upright in opposite corners of the large cage. For a few minutes after he entered the cage, Julius did not see them, and his time was spent pulling and gnawing at the box. Then he discovered one of the poles, seized it, and pushed it into the box. He tried four times, then went and got the other pole and pushed it into the opposite end of the box. Twice he did this, then he returned to the original pole, bringing the second one with him. He pushed it in beside the first, and as it happened, shoved the banana out of the opposite end of the box. But he did not see this, and only after several seconds when he happened to walk to that end of the box did he discover the banana. The total time until success was fifteen minutes. Subsequently the ape became very expert in using the pole to obtain the banana, and often only a minute or two sufficed for success. It was not possible for him to direct the stick very accurately, for when he was in such a position that he could look through the box, he could not work the stick itself. It was, therefore, always a matter of chance whether he obtained the banana immediately or only after a number of trials. Although it is possible that the use of the poles in this experiment was due to observation of human activities, it seems probable in the light of what we know of the natural behavior of the anthropoid apes that Julius would have solved this problem independently of human influence. It was the expectation of the experimenter that the pole would be used to push the banana through the box, but as a matter of fact the ape used it, first of all, to pull the food toward him, thus indicating a natural tendency which is important in connection with the statements just made. Subsequently he learned that the banana must be pushed through and obtained at the farther end of the box. I am not prepared to accept the solution of this problem as satisfactory evidence of ideation, but I do know that few observers could have watched the behavior of the orang utan without being convinced that he was acting ideationally. _Draw-in Experiment_ An interesting contrast with the box and pole test is furnished by what may be called the draw-in experiment. This was planned as a simple test of Julius's ability to use a stick to draw things into his cage from beyond the wire side. A board was placed, as is shown in figure 34 of plate VI, with sides to hold a banana, carrot, or some other bit of food, in position. In the actual test either a carrot or a banana was placed about two feet from the wire netting and a stick two feet long was then put into the cage with the ape. When this situation was first presented to Julius, he looked at the banana, reached for it, and failing, picked up a bag from the floor of the cage and tried to push it through the wire mesh toward the banana. He also used a bit of wire in the same way, but was unable thus to get the food. As soon as a stick was placed in his cage, he grasped it and used it in a very definite, although unskillful, way to pull the banana toward him. He was extremely eager and impatient, but nevertheless persistent in his efforts, and within five minutes from the beginning of the first trial, he had succeeded in getting two pieces of banana, using always his left hand to manipulate the stick. This test was repeated a number of times with similar results. He had from the first the ability to use a stick in this way, and the only difficulty with the test as a means of obtaining evidence of ideational behavior is that the possibility of imitation of man cannot be certainly excluded. _Lock and Key Test_ By my assistant it was reported on May 5 that the orang utan had been seen to place a splinter of wood in a padlock which was used on the cages and to work with it persistently. It looked very much like imitation of the human act of using the key, and I therefore planned a test to ascertain whether Julius could readily and skillfully use a key or could learn quickly to do so by watching me. The first test was made on May 15 with a heavy box whose hinged lid was held securely in position by means of a hasp and a padlock. The key, which was not more than an inch in length, was fastened to a six inch piece of wire so that Julius could not readily lose it. With the animal opposite me, I placed a piece of banana in the box, then closed the lid and snapped the padlock. I next handed Julius the key. He immediately laid it on the floor opposite him and began biting the box, rolling it around, and occasionally biting also at the lock and pulling at it. During these activities he had pulled the box toward his cage. Now he suddenly looked up to the position where the banana had been suspended in the box experiment. Evidently the box had suggested to him the banana. For thirty minutes he struggled with the box almost continuously, chewing persistently at the hinges, the hasp, or the lock. Then he took the key in his teeth and tried to push it into one of the hinges, then into the crack beneath the lid of the box. Subsequently I allowed him to see me use the key repeatedly, and as a result, he came to use it himself now and then on the edge of the box, but he never succeeded in placing it in the lock, and the outcome of the experiment was total failure on the part of the animal to unfasten the lock of his own initiative or to learn to use the key by watching me do so. I did not make any special attempt to teach him to use the key, but merely gave him opportunity to imitate, and it is by no means impossible that he would have succeeded had the key been larger and had the situation required less accurately coordinated movements. However, it is fair to say that the evidence of the idea of using the key in the lock was unconvincing. My assistant's observation was, perhaps, misleading in so far as it suggested that idea. It may and probably was purely by accident that the animal used the splinter on the padlock. 2. Skirrl, _Pithecus irus_ _Box Stacking Experiment_ The monkey Skirrl was tested by means of the box stacking experiment much as Julius had been. On August 23, with a carrot suspended six feet from the floor of the large cage and three boxes in distant corners, the animal was admitted and his behavior noted. The boxes, which were made of light, thin material, ranged in size from one six inches in its several dimensions to one twenty inches long, thirteen inches wide, and eleven inches deep. Only by using at least two of these boxes was it possible for the animal to reach the carrot. Immediately on admission to the cage, Skirrl began to gnaw at the boxes, trying with all his might to tear them to pieces. After some thirty minutes of such effort, interrupted by wanderings about the cage and attempts to get at the other monkeys, he suddenly went to the largest box of all, set it up on end almost directly under the carrot, mounted it, and looked up at the food. It was still beyond his reach and he made no effort to get it, but instead, he reached from his perch on the big box for the next smaller box, which was approximately sixteen inches, by fourteen, by twelve. This he succeeded in pulling toward him, at the same time raising it slightly from the floor, but his efforts caused the large box to topple over and he quit work. The experiment was discontinued after a few minutes, the total period of observation having been thirty-five minutes. Skirrl handled the boxes with ease and with evident pleasure and interest. He also noticed the carrot at various times during the interval, but his attention was fixed on it only for short periods. The test was continued on August 24 when, instead of a carrot, a half banana was used as bait. It was placed only five feet from the floor, and three boxes were as formerly placed in distant corners of the cage. When admitted, Skirrl looked at the banana, then pulled one of the boxes toward it, but instead of mounting, he went to the smallest box and began to gnaw it. Shortly, he mounted the middle sized box and looked up toward the banana, but the box was not directly under the bait, and in any event, it would have been impossible for him to reach it. He next went to the largest box, gnawed it vigorously, turned it over several times, and then abandoned it for the middle sized box, from which by skillful use of his teeth and hands, he quickly tore off one side. By this time, apparently without very definitely directed effort on the part of the monkey, all three of the boxes were in the center of the cage and almost directly beneath the banana. Skirrl climbed up on the largest box and made efforts to pull the middle sized one up on to it, the while looking at the banana every few seconds. He did not succeed in getting the boxes properly placed, and after a time began moving them about restlessly. His behavior plainly indicated that hunger was not his chief motive. He was more interested in playing with things or in working with them than in eating, and the satisfaction of tearing a box to pieces seemed even greater than that of food. It is especially noteworthy that when Skirrl attempts to dismember a box, instead of starting at random, he searches carefully for a favorable starting point, a place where a board is slightly loosened or where a slight crack or hole enables him to insert his hand or use his teeth effectively. Many times during this experiment he was observed to examine the boxes on all sides in search of some weak point. If no such weak point were found, he shortly left the box; but if he did find a favorable spot, he usually succeeded, before he gave up the attempt, in doing considerable damage to the box. Following the behavior described above, Skirrl returned to the middle sized box, placed it on end under the banana, mounted, and looked upward at the bait, but as it was a few inches beyond his reach, he made no attempt to get it, but instead, after a few seconds, went to the smallest box, and finding a weak point, began to tear it to pieces. Later he rolled what was left of the smallest box close to the other two boxes, nearly under the banana, and the remainder of his time was spent gnawing at the boxes and playing with pieces which he had succeeded in tearing from them. During the remainder of the thirty minute interval of observation, no further attention was given the bait. Again, on August 25, the test was tried, but this time with boxes whose edges had been bound with tin so that it was impossible for the monkey to destroy them. He spent several minutes searching for a starting point on the middle sized box, but finding none, he dragged it under the banana, looked up, mounted the box, but, as previously, did not reach for the bait because it was beyond his reach. He then played with the boxes for several minutes. Finally he worked the two smaller boxes to a position directly under the banana, put the middle sized one on end, mounted it, and looked at the bait, but again abandoned the attempt without reaching. During the thirty minutes of observation he made no definite effort to place one box upon another. Three times he mounted one or another of the boxes when it was under the banana or nearly so, but in no case was it possible for him to reach the bait. From the above description of this monkey's behavior, it seems fairly certain that with sufficient opportunity, under strong hunger, he would ultimately succeed in obtaining the bait by the use of two or more boxes. For his somewhat abortive and never long continued efforts to drag two boxes together or to place the one upon the other clearly enough indicate a tendency which would ultimately yield success. The possibility of imitation is not excluded, for Skirrl had opportunities to see Julius and the experimenter handle the boxes. Because of the other work which seemed more important at the time, this experiment was not continued further. The results obtained suggest the desirability of testing thoroughly the ability of monkeys to use objects as only the anthropoid apes and man have heretofore been thought capable of using them. _Box and Pole Experiment_ Skirrl was first tested with the box and pole experiment on August 12. As in the case of Julius, a half banana was placed in the middle of the long box and the attention of the monkey was attracted to the bait by small pieces of carrot placed near each open end. Two poles were placed near the box on the floor of the cage. When admitted to the cage Skirrl went almost directly to the ends of the box, took the pieces of carrot which were in sight, but apparently failed to perceive the bait in the middle of the box. For a while he played with the locks on the box, shoved it about, and amused himself with it, showing no interest in obtaining the food. Later he looked through the box and saw the banana. He then dragged the box about, apparently trying to get it into his cage, but he gave no attention to the poles nor did he make any evident effort to obtain the banana which was easily visible in the center of the box. The period of observation was only twelve minutes. On August 24 this experiment was repeated with an important modification of the apparatus in that the wooden lid of the long box had been replaced by a wire cover through which the animal could see the bait. Two poles were as formerly on the floor of the cage, not far from the box. Skirrl almost immediately noticed the banana and tried to get it by gnawing at the box. He did not once reach in at the ends of the box, but he did handle the poles, throwing them about and pounding with them. There was not the slightest attempt to use them in obtaining the bait. This experiment was later repeated three times at intervals of a number of days, but in no case did Skirrl show any tendency to use the poles as means of obtaining the food. _Draw-in Experiment_ This also was arranged in the same manner as for Julius, and on each of five days Skirrl was allowed at least thirty minutes to work for the bait. Either a banana or a carrot was each day placed on the board well beyond his reach, and one or two, usually two, small sticks were put into his cage. Not once during the several periods of observation did Skirrl make any attempt to use a stick or any other object as a means of drawing the food to him. Instead, he reached persistently with his arm, pulled and gnawed at the wires which were in his way, and occasionally picked up and gnawed or pounded with the sticks in the cage. His attention every now and then would come back to the food, but it tended to fluctuate rather rapidly, and in the regular period of observation, thirty minutes, it is unlikely that he attended to the bait itself for as much as five minutes. In this respect as well as many others, Skirrl's behavior contrasts sharply with that of the orang utan. The results of this experiment indicate the lack in the monkey of any tendency or ability, apart from training, to use objects as means of obtaining food. Ways of using objects as tools which apparently are perfectly natural to the anthropoid apes and to man are rarely employed by the lower primates. _Hammer and Nail Test_ One day I happened to observe Skirrl playing with a staple in his cage. He had found it on the floor where it had fallen and was intently prodding himself with the sharp points, apparently enjoying the unusual sensations which he got from sticking the staple into the skin in various portions of his body, and especially into the prepuce. A few days later I saw him playing in similar fashion with a nail which he had found, and still later he was seen to be using a stick to pound the nail with. This suggested to me the hammer and nail test. A heavy spike was driven into an old hammer to serve as an indestructible handle. This hammer, along with a number of large wire nails and a piece of redwood board, was then placed in the monkey's cage. Skirrl immediately took up the hammer, grasping the middle of the handle with his left hand, and with his right hand taking up a nail. He then sat down on the board, examined the nail, placed the pointed end on the board, and with well directed strokes by the use of the head of the hammer drove the nail into the board for the distance of at least an inch. He then tried to pull it out, but was forced to knock it several times with the hammer before he could do so. This performance, during the next few minutes, was repeated several times with variations. Often the side of the hammer was used instead of the head, and occasionally, as is shown in figure 8 of plate II, he seized the hammer well up toward the juncture of the same with the spike. This figure does justice to the performance. At the moment the picture was taken, Skirrl's attention had been attracted by a monkey in an adjoining cage, and he had momentarily looked up from his task, the while holding nail and hammer perfectly still. This test was repeated on various days, and almost uniformly Skirrl showed intense interest in hammer and nails and used them more or less persistently in the manner described. Occasionally, apparently for the sake of variety, he would put the blunt end of the nail on the board and hammer on the point. Again, he would try persistently to drive the nail into the cement floor, and once by accident, when hammer and nails were left in his cage over night, he succeeded in making several holes in the bottom of his sheet iron water pan. There was no doubting the keen satisfaction which the animal took in this form of activity. It is impossible to say that the behavior was not imitative of man, for Skirrl, along with all of the other monkeys, had had abundant opportunity to see carpenters working. But this much can be said against the idea of imitation,--no one of the other animals, not excepting the orang utan, showed any interest whatever in hammer and nails. Occasionally they would be played with momentarily or pushed about, but Sobke, Jimmie, Gertie, Julius, although given several opportunities to exhibit any ability which they might have to drive nails, made not the least attempt to do so. Evidently we must either conclude that Skirrl had a peculiarly strong imitative tendency in this direction, or instead, a pronounced disposition or instinct for the use of objects as tools. It would seem fair to speak of it as an instinct for mechanical activity. Under this same heading may be described Skirrl's reactions to such objects as a handsaw, a padlock, and a water faucet. The saw was given to him in order to test his ability to use it in human fashion, for if he could so expertly imitate the carpenter driving nails, it seems likely that he might also imitate the use of the saw. As a matter of fact, he showed no tendency to use the saw as we do. Instead, he persistently played with it in various ways, at first using it as a sort of plane to scrape with, later often rubbing the teeth over a board so that they cut fairly well, but never as effectively as in the hands of a man. After two or three days' practice with the saw, Skirrl hit upon a method which is, as I understand, used by man in certain countries, namely, that of placing the saw with the teeth up, holding it rigid, and then rubbing the object which is to be sawed over it. This Skirrl succeeded in doing very skillfully, for he would sit down on the floor of the cage, grip with both feet the handle of the saw, with the teeth directed upward, then holding either end in his hands, he would repeatedly rub a stick over the teeth. In this way, of course, he could make the saw cut fairly well. But still more to his liking was the use of a spike instead of a stick as an object to rub over the teeth, for with this he was able to make a noise that would have satisfied even a small boy. Further light is shed on the force of the tendency to imitate man by the saw test. After Skirrl had been given an opportunity to show what he could do with the tool spontaneously, I demonstrated to him the approved human way of sawing. Often he would watch my performance intently as though fascinated by the sound and motion, but when given the tool he invariably followed his own methods. Although I repeated this test of imitation several times on three different days, the results were wholly negative. _Other Activities_ One day as Skirrl was being returned to his own cage by way of the larger cage, he picked up an unfastened padlock and carried it into the cage with him. For more than an hour he amused himself almost without interruption by playing with this lock. The things which he did with it during that time would require pages to describe. His interest in it was very similar to that which he had exhibited in hammer and nails, saw, and indeed any objects which he could play with. The lock was pounded in various ways, bitten, poked with nails, hooked into the wires of the cage, used to pull on, pounded with a stick, used to hammer on the floor of the cage with, and in fine, manipulated in quite as great a variety of ways as a human being could have discovered. Finally it was hooked to the side of the cage and snapped shut, and as Skirrl was unable to dislodge it from this position, he shortly gave up playing with it. At the end of the large cage and just outside the wire netting was a faucet to which a hose was usually attached. The valve could be opened by turning a wheel-shaped hand piece. Both Skirrl and Julius learned to turn this wheel in order to get water to play with, but usually the former's strength was not sufficient to turn on the water. The latter could do it readily. The indications are that both animals profited by seeing human beings turn on the water. This unquestionably attracted their attention to the faucet, and probably by playing with it they accidentally happened upon the proper movement. At any rate, Skirrl's behavior was significant in this connection, for he would pick up the hose to see if water were flowing, and if it were not, he would throw it down, go directly to the faucet, and try to turn the wheel. The association of the wheel with the desired flow of water was therefore definitely established. Shall we describe the act as ideational? It seems the natural thing to do. 3. Sobke, _Pithecus rhesus_ _Box Stacking Experiment_ For this test, in the case of Sobke, three light boxes made of redwood about one-third of an inch thick were used. The smallest, box 1, was six inches in each direction, the next larger, box 2, was twelve inches, and the third, box 3, eighteen inches. As in the case of the other animals, bait, either banana or carrot, was suspended from the middle of the roof of the large cage at such distance from the floor as to be reached by the animal only by the use of the boxes. The first observations on Sobke were made on June 14. The three boxes had been placed in the form of a pyramid directly under the banana, which hung about eighteen inches above the uppermost box. Sobke's attention while in his cage had been attracted to the bait by seeing me fastening it in position, but when admitted to the large cage, he simply glanced at it and then wandered about the cage, picking up bits of food and struggling to get at the other monkeys. This he did for about five minutes. He then went to the boxes, placed his hands on top of the bottom one, but did not climb up on it. A few minutes later he returned to the box again, climbed up, and readily reached the food, which he ate while resting on boxes 1 and 2. I now replaced the bait and gave the monkey a second chance to obtain it. Almost immediately he climbed up as far as the second box, but although he could reach the banana only from the uppermost box, he deliberately shoved it off to the ground and sat down upon box 2. As he was unable to obtain the banana from this, he soon began to gnaw and pull at it, and as he was succeeding all too well in his efforts to tear the box to pieces, he had to be returned to his cage. The most important features of his behavior were, first, his stealthy and indirect manner, and second, his failure to use other means of obtaining the bait than that supplied by the observer. Instead of looking straight at the experimenter, or at the object which he wished to obtain, he apparently looked and attended elsewhere. For this reason it was often difficult to decide whether or not he had noticed the bait or the boxes. Finally I was led to conclude that he usually knew exactly what was going on and had in his furtive way noted all of the essential features of the situation, and that his manner was extremely indicative of his mental attitude of limited trust. Both Julius and Skirrl went to the opposite extreme in the matter of directness, or as we should say in human relations, frankness. They would look the experimenter directly in the eye, and they usually gazed intently at anything, such for example as the bait, that interested them. Sobke, even when very hungry, instead of going directly toward the bait, and trying to obtain it, usually did various other things as though pretending that he had no interest in food. On the following day, June 15, the three boxes were again placed nearly under the banana, but this time the two smaller boxes, numbers 1 and 2, were pushed to the extreme end of the lower box and so far from the bait that it could not be reached from box 1. It was necessary then for the animal to push boxes 1 and 2 along on box 3 until they were nearer the bait. Sobke, when admitted to the cage, evidently noticed the banana, but as formerly, he made no immediate effort to obtain it. After wandering in search of food and quarreling with the other monkeys for several minutes, he went to the boxes, pushed the topmost one, number 1, off on to the floor, and then carried it into his cage where he quickly tore one side off. He next returned to the large cage, climbed up on box 2, and he was able, by jumping, to reach and obtain the banana. As Sobke was very good at jumping, his new method rendered the box stacking experiment of uncertain value, since it was next to impossible so to arrange the spatial relations of bait and boxes that he should be neither discouraged by too great a distance nor encouraged to jump by too small a distance. Evidently it would be more satisfactory to simplify the conditions by trying to discover, first of all, whether he would use a single box as a means of reaching the reward. In pursuance of this idea, I suspended a piece of bread five feet from the floor of the cage, and a few feet to one side of it, I placed a box from which it could be reached, or at least easily seized by jumping. Sobke shortly walked to a point beneath the bait and leaping into the air, seized it. I then replaced the bait, raising it to a height of five feet ten inches from the floor of the cage. When I had retired, Sobke placed himself in the proper position beneath, looked up at it, but went away without jumping for it. During the remaining ten minutes of observation, he paid no further attention to the bait, having satisfied himself evidently that it was beyond his reach. My use of this test was concluded on June 16 when once more I suspended a piece of bread six feet from the floor and placed a few feet to one side the eighteen inch box, number 3, from which had the monkey pushed it to a point directly under the bread, he could have obtained the food easily. Sobke noticed the food promptly, and from time to time as he wandered about, he glanced at it out of the corner of his eye, but not once did he sit down and look at it steadily and directly as Julius and Skirrl might have done. In the first twenty minutes of observation the monkey made no attempt either to use the box or to reach the food by jumping. I then placed the box directly under the bait, and scarcely had I withdrawn from the cage before Sobke climbed up on it and looked toward the food. He could not reach it without jumping, and he made no effort to get it. I had left a second box in the cage,--one which I had been using as a seat. Sobke now went to this box, placed his hands on it, looked toward the bait, and then went to a distant part of the cage. No further indications were obtained during the remainder of the period of observation of interest in the boxes as possible means of obtaining the desired food. It is of course obvious that this experiment was not long enough continued to justify the conclusion that either Sobke or Skirrl could not use the boxes or even learn to place one box upon another in order to obtain the bait. The experiment, like several others which are being described briefly, was used to supplement the multiple-choice experiment, and the experimenter's chief interest was to discover the number and variety of methods which would be used by the animal in the first few presentations of a situation. It is practically certain that both of these monkeys would have succeeded ultimately in solving the problem of obtaining the food had they been left in the cage with a number of boxes, for Skirrl very early indicated interest in moving the boxes about, and Sobke showed a tendency in that direction which perhaps was inhibited partially by his distrust of the experimenter. _Draw-in Experiment_ For Sobke, as for Julius and Skirrl, the draw-in test was made by putting food on a shelf outside the cage, beyond the reach of the animal, and placing in the cage with the animal one or two sticks long enough to be used for drawing in the bait. Sobke was first given this test on July 24. He tried persistently to reach the banana with his hand, seized the box which supported the bait, shook it, picked up one or other of the sticks, and chewed at it repeatedly, but not once did he make any move to use a stick to draw the food toward him. This experiment was repeated on July 27, 29, 30 and 31, a period of thirty minutes being allowed on each day for observation. At no time did Sobke show any inclination to use either a stick or any other object as a means of reaching the bait. Instead, he confined himself strictly to the use of hands and teeth. This test makes it fairly certain that Sobke had no natural tendency to use objects as tools. In so far as he attended to things about the cage or laboratory, it seemed to be rather to play with them in a general way than to use them ideationally or otherwise for definite purposes. The definitely negative result of the draw-in experiment rendered needless prolonged observation with the box and pole test, whose results are now to be presented. _Box and Pole Experiment_ The eighty-four inch box, previously used for a similar test with Julius, was presented to Sobke on August 24, the wooden cover having been replaced by a wire one so that the monkey could readily see the bait in the middle of the box. Sobke, when admitted to the large cage, went directly to the box and at once discovered the banana which was midway between the ends. He evidently desired it. Shortly, he went to one end of the box and looked in. This he repeated later. He also shook the box and tried to pull it about and tear it with his teeth, but to the two poles lying nearby on the floor of the cage he gave not the slightest attention during a thirty minute period of observation. The experiment was not repeated because of more important work. _Other Activities_ In more respects than I have taken time to enumerate in the above descriptions of behavior, the relations of Sobke to objects differed from those of Skirrl, and still more from those of Julius. Hammer, nails, saw, stones, sticks, locks, and various other objects received relatively little attention from Sobke unless they happened to come in his way; then they were usually pushed aside with but scant notice. Rarely he would carry something to the shelf of his cage with him, but as a rule only to lay it down and attend to something else. Skirrl, on the contrary, attended persistently to anything new in the shape of a movable object. He was extremely partial to objects which could be manipulated by him in various ways, and especially to any thing with which he could make a noise. His interest in hammer and nails, saw, locks, etc., seemed never to wane. I have seen him play for an hour almost uninterruptedly with a hammer and a nail, or even with a big spike which he could use to pry about his cage. In the absence of anything more interesting, even a staple or a small nail might receive his undivided attention for minutes at a time. How important is the species difference in this connection, I have no means to judge, but if we may not consider these different modes of behavior characteristic of _P. rhesus_ as contrasted with _P. irus_, we must conclude that remarkable individual differences exist among monkeys, for whereas Skirrl is by nature a mechanical genius, Sobke has apparently no such disposition. I can imagine no more fascinating task than the careful analytical study of the temperaments of these two animals. Skirrl's behavior has importantly modified my conception of genius. V MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS 1. _Right- and left-handedness_ Several years ago Doctor Hamilton reported to me observations which he had made on preference for the right or left paw in dogs. He has not, I believe, published an account of his work. Subsequently, Franz observed a similar preference in monkeys which, according to his report, exhibit marked tendency to be right-handed, left-handed, or ambidextrous. My own observations, although they are wholly incidental to my other work, seem worthy of description at this point. I noted, first of all, that the orang utan Julius tended to use his left hand. He by no means limited himself to this, but in difficult situations he almost invariably reached for food or manipulated objects in connection with food getting with the left hand. Figures 23 and 24 of plate V, show him reaching for a banana with the left hand. Likewise, figure 34 exhibits the use of the left hand in the draw-in experiment. So marked was Julius's preference for his left hand that I became interested in observing similar phenomena in the monkeys. Skirrl, when driving nails, held the hammer with his left hand and the nail with his right hand. The fact that he never was observed to reverse the use of the hands is surprising, for other observations indicate that he preferred the right hand for certain acts. Stimulated by the obvious left-handedness, in certain connections, of Julius and Skirrl, I tested the preference of several of the monkeys in the following simple way. Standing outside the cage I would hold out a peanut to a hungry animal, keeping it so far from the cage that the monkey could barely reach it with its fingers. I noted the hand which was used to grasp the food. Next I varied the procedure by placing the peanut on a board in order to make sure that I was not definitely directing the animal's attention. With Sobke the following results were obtained. In forty trials given on two different days, he reached for and obtained the food each time with his left hand. Only by holding the bait well toward the right side of his body was it possible to induce him to use the right hand. So far as may be judged from these observations and from others in connection with the experiments, this animal is definitely left-handed. With Skirrl the results are strikingly different. As stated above, he used the hammer consistently with his left hand, but in twenty attempts to obtain food by reaching, he used his right hand seventeen times and his left only three times. It was quite as difficult to induce him to use his left hand for this purpose as it was to induce Sobke to use his right. We must therefore conclude that Skirrl is right-handed in connection with certain movements and left-handed in others. The monkey named Gertie in the reaching experiment consistently used her left hand, never once using the right. Jimmie, so far as it was possible to make tests with him, also used his left hand, but it should be said that the results are unsatisfactory because he was at the time extremely pugnacious and paid attention to the experimenter rather than to the food. Scotty, in the first series of ten trials, used his right hand eight times, his left twice. In the second series, given the following day, he used the right hand three times and the left seven times. From this we should have to infer that he is ambidextrous. A female _rhesus_ monkey which had been brought to the laboratory only a few days previously showed a preference for the right hand by the use of it fourteen times to six. In connection with these data which are, I should repeat, too scanty to be of any considerable value, I wish to describe my own experience. Although naturally left-handed, I am by training right-handed to the extent of having been able to use my hands in writing and in various other activities equally well at the age of twelve. I am at present ambidextrous in that there are many things which I do with equal readiness and skill with either hand. Delicate, exact, and finely coordinated movements, such as those of writing and using surgical instruments, I perform always with my left hand while grosser movements involving the whole hand or arm, I am rather likely to perform with my right hand. It seems not improbable in the light of my own experience that we shall find some specialization among the lower animals with respect to preference for right and left hand or arm. I should not be at all surprised to discover that it is the rule for animals to possess or to develop readily definite preference for one hand in connection with a given act of skill and to have quite as definite a preference for the other hand in connection with a radically different kind of act. 2. _Instinct and emotion_ Of the many presumably instinctive modes of behavior which were observed, only those which have to do with social relations seem especially worth reporting. From among them I shall select for description a few which have already been referred to in connection with the experimental observations. _Maternal Instinct_ Aspects of the maternal instinct I had opportunity to observe in Gertie, who on February 27 gave birth to a male infant, I present below the substance of a previously published note on her behavior (Yerkes, 1915). "On February 27 one of the monkeys of our collection gave birth, in the cages at Montecito, to a male infant. The mother is a _Macacus cynomolgus rhesus_ (_P. irus rhesus_) who has been described by Hamilton (1914, p. 298) as 'Monkey 9, Gertie, _M. cynomolgus rhesus_ (_P. irus rhesus_). Age, 3 years 2 months. (She is now, May 1, 1915, 4 years and 6 months.) Daughter of monkeys 3 and 10. First pregnancy began September, 1913.' The result of this pregnancy was, I am informed, a still-birth. "The second pregnancy, which shall now especially concern us, resulted likewise in a still-birth. Parturition occurred Saturday night, and the writer first observed the behavior of the mother the following Monday morning. In the meantime the laboratory attendant had obtained the data upon which I base the above statements. "At the time of parturition Gertie was in a 6 by 6 by 12 foot out-door cage containing a small shelter box, with an exceptionally quiet and gentle male (not the father of the infant) who is designated in Hamilton's paper as Monkey 28, Scotty. "My notes record the following exceptionally interesting and genetically important behavior. On March 1, when I approached her cage, Gertie was sitting on the floor with the infant held in one hand while she fingered its eyelids and eyes with the other. Scotty sat close beside her watching intently. When disturbed by me the mother carried her infant to a shelf at the top of the cage. Repeatedly attempts were made to remove the dead baby, but they were futile because Gertie either held it in her hands or sat close beside it ready to seize it at the slightest disturbance. "Especially noteworthy on this, the second day after the birth of the infant, are the male's, as well as the female's, keen interest in the body and their frequent examinations of the eyes, as if in attempts to open them. Often, also, the mother searched the body for fleas. "Observations were made from day to day, and each day opportunity was sought to remove the body without seriously frightening or exciting the female. No such opportunity came, and during the second week the corpse so far decomposed that, with constant handling and licking by the adults, it rapidly wore away. By the third week there remained only the shriveled skin covering a few fragments of bone, and the open skull from the cavity of which the brain had been removed. This the mother never lost sight of: even when eating she either held it in one hand or foot, or laid it beside her within easy reach. "Gradually this remnant became still further reduced until on March 31 there existed only a strip of dry skin about four inches long with a tail-like appendage of nearly the same length. "The male, Scotty, on this date was removed to another cage. Gertie made a great fuss, jumping about excitedly and uttering plaintive cries when she discovered that her mate was gone. Whenever I approached her cage she scurried into the shelter box and stayed there while I was near. This behavior I never before had observed. It continued for two days. On April 2, it was noted that she had lost her recently acquired shyness and she no longer made any attempts to avoid me. As usual, on this date, she was carrying the remnant about with her. "The following day, April 3, Gertie was lured from her cage to a large adjoining compartment for certain experimental observations. After she had been returned to her own cage the remnant was noticed on the floor of the large cage. I picked it up. Gertie evidently noticed my act; for although at a distance of at least ten feet from me, she made a sharp outcry and sprang to the side of the cage nearest me. I held the piece of skin (it looked more like a bit of rat skin than the remains of a monkey) out to her and she immediately seized it and rushed with it to the shelf at the top of the cage. "Two days later the remnant was missing, and careful search failed to discover it in the cage. It is probable that Gertie had carelessly left it lying on the floor whence it was washed out when the cages were cleaned. On this date Gertie seemed quieter than for weeks previously. "Thus it appears that during a period of five weeks the instinct to protect her offspring impelled this monkey to carry its gradually vanishing remains about with her and to watch over them so assiduously that it was utterly impossible to take them from her except by force. "After reading this note in manuscript, Doctor Hamilton informed me that Gertie had behaved toward her first still-birth as toward her second. And, further, that Grace, a baboon, also carried a still-birth about for weeks. "I am now heartily glad that my early efforts to remove the corpse were futile, for this record of the persistence of maternal behavior seems to me of very unusual interest to the genetic psychologist." _Fear_ In connection with the multiple-choice experiments Skirrl exhibited what seemed to be instinctive fear as a result of his unfortunate experience with nails in the floor of box 1. He seemingly referred his misadventure to some unseen enemy under the floor, and this in spite of the fact that he was given abundant opportunity to examine the floor of the box, but not until after the dangerous nails had been clinched. His long continued avoidance of the experiment boxes and his still more persistent hesitancy in entering them, coupled with his almost ludicrous efforts to see beneath the floor through the holes cut for the staples on the doors, gave me the impression of superstitious fear of the unseen. As I watched and recorded his behavior day after day during the period of most pronounced fear, I could not avoid the thought that the instinctive fear of snakes had something to do with his peculiar actions, and although I have never studied either the natural or the acquired responses of monkeys to snakes, I suspect that lacking such instinctive equipment, Skirrl would have behaved differently as a result of the pricks which he received from the nails. It is needless to redescribe his acquired fear of whiteness as it manifested itself in the freshly painted apparatus. Accompanying these instructive modes of response and their emotions are suggestions of peculiarly interesting problems as well as of modes of attacking them. As a matter of fact, Skirrl's fear-reactions did much to alter my conception of the constitution of his mind. I should not have been surprised by the features of behavior exhibited, but I was by no means prepared for their persistence, and for the highly emotional attitude toward the particular situation. Only an organism of complexly constituted nervous system and fairly highly developed affective life could be expected to respond as did this monkey. As has been suggested above, I find the appeal to instinct, modified by experience, a natural mode of accounting for the unexpected features of Skirrl's behavior. _Sympathy_ The instinctive playfulness of the young monkey Tiny contrasted most strikingly with the more serious, if not more sedate, modes of behavior of the older individuals. During the greater part of my period of observation Tiny was cage-mate of Scotty, the most calm and apparently lazy of all the monkeys. Tiny delighted in teasing Scotty, and her varied modes of mildly tormenting him and of stirring him to pursuit or to retaliation were as interesting as they were amusing. Her most common trick was to steal up behind him and pull the hair of his back, or seize his tail with her hands or teeth. Often when he was asleep she would suddenly run to him, give a sudden jerk at a handful of hairs, and leap away. He was surprisingly patient, and I never saw him treat her roughly in retaliation. Another of Tiny's favorite forms of amusement was that of trying to stir up the other monkeys to attacks on one another. She very cleverly did this by pretending that she herself was being attacked. The instant the older animals began to show hostility toward one another she would leap out of the way and watch the disturbance with evident satisfaction. It was this mode of behavior in the little animal which ultimately provided opportunity for the observations which I wish now to report as indicative of sympathetic, possibly I may say altruistic, emotions. Tiny was confined with Scotty in a cage adjoining the one in which Jimmie and Gertie were being kept. The cages were separated by wire netting of half-inch mesh. One morning as I was watching the behavior of the animals in the several cages, I noticed Tiny dressing with her teeth a wounded finger. It had evidently been bitten by one of the other animals, in all probability either by Jimmie or Gertie. Tiny was trimming away the loose bits of skin very neatly and cleansing the wound. After working at this task for a few minutes, she quickly climbed up to the shelf near the top of her cage, and by rushing to the partition wire between the two cages, she lured Gertie to an attempted attack on her. Gertie sprang up to the partition, placed her hands on it, with the fingers projecting through the meshes, and attempted to seize Tiny's fingers with her teeth. But the latter was too quick for her, and withdrawing her hands, like a flash seized in her teeth the middle finger of Gertie's left hand. She then bit it severely and with all her might, at the same time pulling and twisting violently, often placing the entire weight of her body on the finger. Her sharp teeth cut to the bone, and it was impossible for the larger and stronger monkey to tear away. For several seconds this continued, then Gertie succeeded in escaping, whereupon she at once retreated to the opposite end of her shelf and proceeded to attend to her injured finger. She cried, wrung her hands, and from time to time placed the finger in her mouth as though in an effort to relieve the pain. By this time Jimmie's attention had been attracted by the disturbance and he rushed up to the shelf, and facing Gertie, watched her intently for a few seconds. The look of puzzled concern on his face was most amusing. Apparently he felt dimly that something in which he should have intelligent interest was going on, but was unable wholly to understand the situation. After watching Gertie for a time and trying to discover what she was doing, which was rendered difficult by her tendency to turn away from him, in order to shield her injured finger, he rushed over to the wire partition and made strenuous efforts to seize Tiny with his hands and teeth. But although she continued close to the partition and often crowded against it with face and hands flattened on the wires, he was not able to get hold of her, and after a few vain attempts he returned to his mate, and again with evident solicitousness and the most troubled expression, watched her wringing her hands and chewing or sucking at her injured finger. Shortly he again returned to the partition and renewed his attempts to seize the young monkey. Thus he went back and forth from one place of interest to the other several times, but being unable to achieve anything at either point, he finally gave up and returned to his breakfast on the floor of the cage. I report this incident fully because the behavior of Jimmie was in marked contrast with the usual behavior of the monkeys. Selfishness seemed everywhere dominant, while clear indications of sympathetic emotions were rare indeed. The above is undoubtedly the best evidence of anything altruistic that I obtained. It is possible that Tiny's action was retaliatory, but although it is practically certain that either Gertie or Jimmie inflicted the wound on her finger, I of course cannot be sure that the spirit of revenge stirred her to punish Gertie so severely. Jimmie's part in the whole affair is, however, perfectly intelligible from our human point of view, and there seems no reason to doubt that he did experience something like a feeling of sympathy with his mate, coupled with a feeling of resentment or anger against Tiny. VI HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF IDEATIONAL BEHAVIOR IN MONKEYS AND APES It is my purpose in this section to indicate the relations of my work on monkeys and apes to that of other investigators. Although throughout the report I have used freely the psychological terms idea and ideation, it has been my aim to describe the behavior of my animals rather than to interpret it or speculate concerning its accompaniments. Certain acts I have designated as ideational simply because they seemed to exhibit the essential features of what we call ideational behavior in man. Further study may, and probably will, modify my opinion concerning this matter. It is of prime importance to analyze ideational behavior so that it may be accurately described and satisfactorily defined in terms of its distinguishing characteristics. I had hoped to be able to present a tentative analysis in this report, but the results of my efforts are so unsatisfactory that I do not feel justified in publishing them. The terms idea and ideation have been used to designate contents of consciousness which are primarily representative. Nowhere have I attempted to indicate different types or grades of ideational behavior and nowhere have I found it necessary to emphasize differences between image and idea. In general, the acts which I have called ideational have been highly adaptive, and the learning processes in connection with which they have appeared have differed strikingly from those of the selective sort in their abruptness of appearance. Extremely interesting and valuable definitions of ideation and discussions of the characteristics of different sorts of ideas in the light of original observations on monkeys have been presented by Thorndike (1901, pp. 1, 2; 1911, p. 174); Kinnaman (1902, p. 200); and Hobhouse (1915, p. 270). As these authors have contributed importantly to our knowledge of the behavior of monkeys, their discussions of the meaning of terms are especially valuable. Serviceable definitions are to be found, also, in Romanes (1900), Morgan (1906), Washburn (1908), and Holmes (1911). _Evidences of Ideation in Monkeys_ Aside from anecdotal and traveller's notes on the behavior of monkeys and apes we have only a scanty literature. In fact, the really excellent articles on the behavior and mental life of these animals may be counted on one's fingers; and not more than half of these are experimental studies. I shall, in this brief historical sketch, neglect entirely the anecdotal literature, since my own work is primarily experimental, and since its results should naturally be compared with those of other experimenters. Thorndike (1901), the American pioneer in the application of the experimental method to the study of mind in animals, published the first notable paper on the psychology of monkeys. His results force the conclusion that "free ideas" seldom appear in the monkey mind and have a relatively small part in behavior. That the species of Cebus which he observed exhibits various forms of ideation he is willing to admit. But he insists that it is of surprisingly little importance in comparison with what the general behavior of monkeys as known in captivity and as described by the anecdotal writers have led us to expect. It is important to note, however, that Thorndike's observations were limited to Cebus monkeys which, as contrasted with various old world types, are now considered of relatively low intelligence. In many respects the most thoroughgoing and workmanlike experimental study of monkeys is that of Kinnaman (1902), who has reported on the study of various forms of response in _P. rhesus_. He presents valuable data concerning the learning processes, sensory discrimination, reaction to number, and to tests of imitation. His results indicate a higher level of intelligence than that discovered by Thorndike, but this is almost certainly due to difference in the species observed. Kinnaman goes so far as to say "We have found evidence, also, of general notions and reasoning, both of low order" (p. 211). The contribution of Hobhouse (1915) to our knowledge of the mental life of monkeys, although in a measure experimental, is based upon relatively few and unsystematic observations as contrasted with those of Thorndike and Kinnaman. It appears, however, that Hobhouse's experiments were admirably planned to test the ideational capacity of his subjects, and one can not find a more stimulating discussion of ideation than that contained in his "Mind in Evolution." The results of his tests made with a _P. rhesus_ monkey are similar to those of Kinnaman, for almost all of them indicate the presence and importance of ideas. Watson (1908) in tests of the imitative ability of _P. rhesus_ saw relatively little evidence of other than extremely simple forms of ideation. But in contrast with his results, those obtained by Haggerty (1909), in a much more extended investigation in which several species of monkey were used, obtained more numerous and convincing evidences of ideation in imitative behavior. Although this author wholly avoids the use of psychological terms, seeking to limit himself to a strictly objective presentation of results, it is clear from an unpublished manuscript (thesis for the Doctorate of Philosophy, deposited in the Library of Harvard University) that he would attribute to monkeys simple forms of ideational experience. Witmer (1910) reports, in confirmation of Haggerty's results, intelligently imitative behavior in _P. irus_. The work of Shepherd (1910) agrees closely, so far as evidences of ideation are concerned, with that of Thorndike. He obviously strives for conservatism in his statements concerning the adaptive intelligence of his monkeys, all of which belonged to the species _P. rhesus_. At one point he definitely states that they exhibit ideas of a low order, or something which corresponds to them. Satisfactory evidences of reasoning he failed to obtain. Franz's (1907, 1911) studies of monkeys, unlike those mentioned above, have for their chief motive not the accurate description of various features of behavior but instead knowledge of the functions of various portions of the brain. His results, therefore, although extremely interesting and of obvious value to the comparative psychologist, throw no special light upon the problem of ideation. The investigation by Hamilton (1911) of reactive tendencies in _P. rhesus_ and _irus_ yielded preeminently important data concerning complex behavior. For the ingenious quadruple-choice method devised by this observer showed that mature monkeys exhibit fairly adequate types of response. As Hamilton's interest centered in behavior, he did not discuss ideation, but this does not prevent the comparison of his data with those of the present report, and the agreement of his findings with my own is obvious. My work contrasts sharply with that briefly mentioned above in that I applied systematically and over a period of several months an experimental method suited to reveal problem solving ability. Previously, the so-called problem or puzzle-box method had been used as a means of testing for the presence of ideas. For this I substituted the multiple-choice method. One of the chief advantages of this new method is the possibility of obtaining curves of learning for the solution or attempted solution of relational problems of varying difficultness. I am confident that these curves of learning will prove far more valuable than such data as are yielded by the puzzle-box method. The Pithecus monkeys, which I studied intensively, yielded relatively abundant evidences of ideation, but with Thorndike I must agree that of "free ideas" there is scanty evidence; or rather, I should prefer to say, that although ideas seem to be in play frequently, they are rather concrete and definitely attached than "free." Neither in my sustained multiple-choice experiments nor from my supplementary tests did I obtain convincing indications of reasoning. What Hobhouse has called articulate ideas, I believe to appear infrequently in these animals. But on the whole, I believe that the general conclusions of previous experimental observers have done no injustice to the ideational ability of monkeys. It is clearly important, however, that we always should take into account the species of animal observed, for unquestionably there are extreme differences in mental development among the monkeys. As I view my results in the light of their relations to earlier work, I am strongly impressed with the importance of the use of improved methods for the study of complex behavior. The delayed reaction method of Hunter, the quadruple-choice method of Hamilton, and my multiple-choice method offer new and promising approaches to forms of activity which thus far have been only superficially observed. The ability exhibited by Skirrl to try a method out and then to abandon it suddenly is characteristic of animals high in intelligence. Most of the problems which I presented to my animals would be rated as difficult by psychologists, for as a rule they involved definite relations and demanded on the part of the subject both perception of a particular relation and the ability to remember or re-present it on occasion. I was greatly surprised by the slow progress of the monkeys toward the solution of these problems. It had been my supposition that they would solve them more quickly than any lower type of mammal, but as a matter of fact they succeeded less well than did pigs. Their behavior throughout the work proved that of far greater significance for the experimenter than the solution of a problem is definite knowledge of the modes of behavior exhibited from moment to moment, or day to day. This is true especially of those incidental or accidental modes of response which so frequently appeared in connection with my work that I came to look upon them, the surprises of each day, as my chief means of insight. _Evidences of Ideation in Apes_ Reliable literature of any sort concerning the behavior and mental life of the anthropoid apes is difficult to find, and still more rare are reports concerning experimental studies of these animals. There are, it is true, a few articles descriptive of tests of mental ability, but even these are scarcely deserving of being classed as satisfactory experimental studies of the psychology of the ape. I have the satisfaction of being able to present in the present report the first systematic experimental study of any feature of the behavior of an anthropoid ape. Among the most interesting and valuable of the descriptions which may be classed among accounts of tests of mental ability is Hobhouse's (1915) study of the chimpanzee. The subject was an untrained animal, so far as stated, of somewhat unsatisfactory condition because of timidity. Nevertheless, Hobhouse was able to obtain from him numerous and interesting responses to novel situations, some of which may be safely accepted as evidences of ideation of a fairly high order. Similar in method and result to the work of Hobhouse is that of Haggerty (unpublished thesis for the Doctorate of Philosophy, deposited in the Library of Harvard University). Haggerty's tests of the ability of young orang utans and chimpanzees to solve simple problems and to use tools in various ways yielded results which contrast most strikingly with those obtained in his experimental study of the imitative tendency in monkeys. His observations, had he committed himself to anything approaching interpretation, doubtless would have led him to conclusions concerning the ideational life of these animals very similar to those of Hobhouse. Koehler, working in the Canary Islands, has, according to information which I have received from him by letter, made certain experiments with orang utans and chimpanzees similar to those of Hobhouse and Haggerty. His results I am unable to report as I have scanty information concerning them. They are, presumably, as yet unpublished. In his laboratory at Montecito, California, Hamilton has from time to time kept anthropoid apes, but without special effort to investigate their ideational behavior. He has most interesting and valuable data concerning certain habits and instincts, all as yet unpublished. To a congress of psychologists Pfungst (1912) briefly reported on work with anthropoid apes in certain of the German zoölogical gardens. His preliminary paper does not enable one to make definite statements concerning either his methods or such results as he may have obtained concerning ideational behavior. So far as I know, he has not as yet published further concerning his investigation. Möbius (1867) has described interesting observations concerning the mental life of the chimpanzee. But this, like all of the work previously mentioned, is rather in the nature of casual testing than thoroughgoing, systematic, and analytic study. In addition to the above reports, there are a few concerning the behavior of apes which have been especially trained for purposes of exhibition. Most interesting of these is that of Witmer (1909), who studied in exhibitions and in his own laboratory the behavior of the chimpanzee Peter. The varied forms of intelligently adaptive behavior exhibited by this ape convinced Witmer of ideational experience and even of an approach to reasoning. In his brief report he expresses especial interest in the possibility of educating this "genius among apes" to the use of language. A chimpanzee named Consul was observed several years ago by Hirschlaff (1905), and his tricks were interestingly described from the pedagogical standpoint. Similar in character is Shepherd's (1915) brief description of the stage behavior of Peter and Consul, both chimpanzees. It is impossible to determine from the account whether these animals are the same as were observed by both Witmer and Hirschlaff. As no reference is made in Shepherd's paper to other descriptions of the behavior of these animals and as he adds nothing to what had already been presented, the reader obtains no additional light on ideation. I have mentioned only samples of the articles on trained anthropoids. All are necessarily descriptions of the behavior of individuals who had been trained not for psychological purposes but for the vaudeville stage, and although such observations unquestionably have certain value for comparative psychology, it is well known that unless an observer knows the history of an act, he is not able to evaluate it in terms of intelligence and is especially prone to overestimate its value as evidence of ideation. There remain studies of the apes, dealing primarily with behavior and mental characteristics, which are slightly if at all experimental and deserve to be ranked as naturalistic accounts. Such is, for example, the book of Sokolowski (1908), in which attention is given to the characteristics of young as well as fairly mature specimens of the gorilla, chimpanzee and orang utan. The various publications of Garner (1892, 1896, 1900) deal especially with the language habits of monkeys and apes, but observations bearing on ideation are reported. Wallace (1869) describes certain features of the behavior of an infant orang utan whose mother he shot in Borneo. He also reports observations concerning the behavior of adult orang utans, many specimens of which were shot by him during his travels. Early in the last century, Cuvier (1810) interested himself in studies of the intellectual characteristics of the orang utan, and his data, taken with those of Wallace, Sokolowski, and others similarly interested in the natural history of mind, give one a valuable glimpse of the life of the anthropoid ape. Finally, the data brought together by Brehm (1864, 1875, 1888) in his famous Tierleben; by Darwin (1859, 1871) in "The Origin of Species," and other works, by Romanes (1900), especially in his books on mental evolution, by C. Lloyd Morgan (1906) in his several works on comparative psychology, and by Holmes (1911) in his discussion of the evolution of intelligence, contribute not unimportantly to our all too meagre knowledge of the mental life of the anthropoid apes. My own results, viewed in the light of what one may learn from the literature, stand out as unique because of the method of research. Never before, so far as I have been able to learn, has any ape been subjected to observation under systematically controlled conditions for so long a period as six months. Moreover, my multiple-choice method has the merit of having yielded the first curve of learning for an anthropoid ape. This fact is especially interesting when one considers the nature of the particular curve. For so far as one may say by comparing it with the curves for various learning processes exhibited by other mammals, it is indicative of ideation of a high order, and possibly of reasoning. I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of my results, for as contrasted with what might be obtained by further study, and with what must be obtained if we are adequately to describe the mind of the orang utan, they are meager indeed. Especially noteworthy, as evidences of ideation, in the results yielded by the multiple-choice method are (1) the use by the orang utan of several different methods in connection with each problem; (2) the suddenness of transition from method to method; (3) the final and perfect solution of problem I without diminution of the initial errors; (4) the dissociation of the act of turning in a circle from that of standing in front of a particular box. To these features of behavior others of minor importance might be added. But as they have been sufficiently emphasized in the foregoing detailed descriptions, I need only repeat my conclusion, from the summation of evidence, that this young orang utan exhibited numerous free ideas and simple thought processes in connection with the multiple-choice experiment. His ultimate failure to solve the second problem is peculiarly interesting, although in the light of other features of his behavior by no means indicative of inferior intelligence. The various supplementary experimental tests which I employed are in no wise importantly distinguished from those used by other observers. The box stacking experiment has, according to my private information, been used by Koehler. It is obviously important that such tests be applied in the same manner to individuals not only of the different genera of anthropoid apes, but of different ages, sex, and condition of training. The box stacking experiment, although it yielded complete success only as a result of suggestion on my part, proved far more interesting during its progress than any other portion of my work. In connection with it, the orang utan exhibited surprisingly diverse and numerous efforts to meet the demands of the situation. It is fair to characterize him as inventive, for of the several possible ways of obtaining the banana which were evident to the experimenter, the ape voluntarily used all but two or three, and one of these he subsequently used on the basis of imitation. Had Julius been physically and mentally mature, my results would undoubtedly have been much more impressively indicative of ideas, but even as matters stand, the survey of my experimental records and supplementary notes force me to conclude that as contrasted with the monkeys and other mammals, the orang utan is capable of expressing free ideas in considerable number and of using them in ways highly indicative of thought processes, possibly even of the rational order. But contrasted with that of man the ideational life of the orang utan seems poverty stricken. Certainly in this respect Julius was not above the level of the normal three-year-old child. In common with other observers, I have had the experience of being profoundly impressed by the versatility of the ape, and however much I might desire to disprove the presence of free ideas and simple reasoning processes in the orang utan, I should feel bound to accept many of the results of my tests as evidences of such experience. I have attempted to indicate briefly the historical setting of my investigation. I propose, now, in the concluding section, to look forward from this initial research and to indicate as well as I may in a few words the possibilities of results important for mankind from the thorough study of the monkeys and anthropoid apes. VII PROVISION FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRIMATES, AND ESPECIALLY THE MONKEYS AND ANTHROPOID APES[1] [Footnote 1: Much of the material of this section was published originally in _Science_ (Yerkes, 1916).] I should neglect an important duty as well as waste an opportunity if in this report I did not call attention to the status of our knowledge concerning the monkeys and apes and present the urgent need of adequate provision for the comparative study of all of the primates. Although for centuries students of nature have been keenly interested in the various primates, the information which has been accumulated is fragmentary and wholly inadequate for generally recognized scientific and practical needs. There is a voluminous literature on many aspects of the organization and lives of the monkeys and apes, but when one searches in it for reasonably connected and complete descriptions of the organisms from any biological angle, one, is certain to meet disappointment. Concerning their external characteristics we know much; and our classifications, if not satisfactory to all, are at least eminently useful. But when one turns to the morphological sciences of anatomy, histology, embryology, and pathology, one discovers great gaps, where knowledge might reasonably be expected. Even gross anatomy has much to gain from the careful, systematic examination of these organisms. With still greater force this statement applies to the studies of finer structural relations. Little is known concerning the embryological development and life history of certain of the primates, and almost nothing concerning their pathological anatomy. Clearly less satisfactory than our knowledge of structure is the status of information concerning those functional processes which are the special concern of physiology and pathology. Certain important experimental studies have been made on the nervous system, but rarely indeed have physiologists dealt systematically with the functions of other systems of organs. There are almost no satisfactory physiological descriptions of the monkeys, anthropoid apes, or lower primates. SUB-DIVISIONS OF THE ORDER PRIMATES _Order_ _Sub-orders_ _Families_ ,- a. PROSIMII (Lemurs and Aye-Ayes) | | ,- i. Hapalidae (Marmosets) | | ii. Cebidae (Howling Monkeys, PRIMATES -+ | Tee Tees, Squirrel Monkeys, | | Spider Monkeys, and Capuchin | | Monkeys) `- b. ANTHROPOIDEA ... -+ iii. Cercopithecidae (Baboons | and Macaques) | iv. Simiidae (Gibbons, Orangs, | Chimpanzees, and Gorillas) `- v. Hominidae (Man) When we turn to the science of genetics we meet a similar condition, for the literature reveals only scattered bits of information concerning heredity in the primates. No important experimental studies along genetic lines have been made with them, and such general observations from nature as are on record are of extremely uncertain value. Were one to insist that we know nothing certainly concerning the relation of heredity in other primates than man, the statement could not well be disputed. Occasionally in recent years students of human diseases have employed monkeys or apes for experimental tests, but aside from the isolated results thus obtained, extremely little is known concerning the diseases peculiar to the various types of infra-human primates or the significant relations of their diseases to those of man. Next in order of extent to our morphological knowledge of these organisms is that of their behavior, mental life, and social relations. But certainly no one who is conversant with the behavioristic, psychological and sociological literature could do otherwise than emphasize its incompleteness and inadequacy. For our knowledge of behavior has come mostly from naturalistic observation, scarcely at all from experimentation; our knowledge of social relations is obviously meager and of uncertain value; and finally, our knowledge of mind is barely more than a collection of carelessly drawn inferences. This picture of the status of scientific work on the primates, although not overdrawn, will doubtless surprise many readers, and even the biologist may find himself wondering why we are so ignorant concerning the lives of the organisms most nearly akin to us, and naturally of deepest interest to us. The reasons are not far to seek. Most scientific investigators are forced by circumstances to work with organisms which are readily obtained and easily kept. The primates have neither of these advantages, for many, if not most of them, are expensive to get and either difficult or expensive to keep in good condition. Clearly, then, our ignorance is due not to lack of appreciation of the scientific value of primate research but instead to its difficultness and costliness. Strangely enough, the practical importance of knowledge of the primates has seldom been dwelt upon even by those biologists who are especially interested in it. It is, therefore, appropriate to emphasize the strictly human value of the work for which I am seeking provision. During the past few years it has been abundantly and convincingly demonstrated that knowledge of other organisms may aid directly in the solution of many of the problems of experimental medicine, of physiology, genetics, psychology, sociology, and economics. In the light of these results, it is obviously desirable that all studies of infrahuman organisms, but especially those of the various primates, should be made to contribute to the solution of our human problems. To me it seems that thoroughgoing knowledge of the lives of the infrahuman primates would inevitably make for human betterment. Through the science of genetics, as advanced by experimental studies of the monkeys and anthropoid apes, practical eugenic procedures should be more safely based and our ability to predict organic phenomena greatly increased. Similarly, intensive knowledge of the diseases of the other primates in their relations to human diseases should contribute importantly to human welfare. And finally, our careful studies of the fundamental instincts, forms of habit formation, and social relations in the monkeys and apes should lead to radical improvements in our educational methods as well as in other forms of social service. Along theoretical lines, no less than practical, systematic research with the primates should rapidly justify itself, for upon its results must rest the most significant historical or genetic biological descriptions. It is beyond doubt that genetic psychology can best be advanced to-day by such work, and what is obviously true of this science is not less true of all the biological sciences which take account of the developmental or genetic relations of their events. In view of the probable values of increasingly complete accounts of primate life, it seems far from extravagant to insist that the securing of adequate provision for systematic and long continued research is the most important task for our generation of biologists and the one which we shall be least excusable for neglecting. Indeed, when one stops to reflect concerning the situation, it seems almost incredible that the task has not been accomplished. Some ten years ago Professor John B. Watson (1906) entered a plea for the founding of a station for the experimental study of behavior. He made no special mention of work with the monkeys and apes, but it is clear from the problems which he enumerates that he would consider them most important subjects for observation. Professor Watson's plea has apparently been forgotten by American biologists, and it seems not inappropriate to revive it at this time. For surely we have advanced sufficiently along material and scientific lines during the last ten years to render possible the realization of his hope. To my knowledge, only one definite attempt has thus far been made to gain special provision for the study of the primates. Somewhere about the year 1912 there was established on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, a modest station for the study of the anthropoid apes. I have already referred to it briefly on page 1. The plan and purpose of this station, which is of German origin, have been presented briefly by Rothmann (1912). From personal communications I know that a single investigator has been in residence at the station since its founding and that psychological and physiological results of value have been obtained, but no published reports have come to my attention. When I first heard of the existence of the German anthropoid station I naturally thought of the possibility of coöperative work, but the events of the past two years have rendered the chances of cooperation so remote that it now seems wholly desirable and indeed imperative to seek the establishment of an American station, which, unlike the German station, shall provide adequately not only for the study of the anthropoid apes but for that of all of the lower primates. It should be the function of such a station or research institute (1) to bring together and correlate all the information at present available; (2) to fill in existing gaps observationally and thus complete and perfect our knowledge of these organisms; (3) to seek to bring all available information to bear upon the problems of human life. Hitherto the unsatisfactoriness of progress has been due to the lack of a definite plan and program. Every investigator has gone his own way, doing what little his personal means and opportunity rendered possible. The time has at last come when concerted action seems feasible as well as eminently desirable. I am therefore offering a plan and program which, if wisely developed, should lead ultimately to fairly complete and practically invaluable knowledge of the lives of all of the primates. There should be provided in a suitable locality a station or research institute which should offer adequate facilities (1) for the maintenance of various types of primate in normal, healthy condition; (2) for the successful breeding and rearing of the animals, generation after generation; (3) for systematic and continuous observation under reasonably natural conditions; (4) for experimental investigations from every significant biological point of view; (5) for profitable cooperation with existing biological institutes or departments of research throughout the world. The station should be located in a region whose climate is highly favorable to the life of many of the lower primates as well as to that of man. Such a location is by no means easy to find. Because of my intense interest in the subject, I have, during the past five years, prospected in various parts of the world for a satisfactory site. I shall now attempt to indicate the chief requirements and also the foremost advantages and disadvantages of several regions which have been considered. It is first of all requisite that the climate be such as to agree with the organisms to be studied and such, also, as to render their breeding normal and dependable. Second in importance is its satisfactoriness for the life and scientific productiveness of the observer. While certain tropical localities would meet the first requirement perfectly, they would prove extremely unsatisfactory for research activity. It therefore seems essential to find a region whose climate shall reasonably meet the needs of the experimenter while adequately meeting those of the animals to be studied. A further factor which has important bearing upon the productiveness of the observer is the degree of isolation from civilization and from other scientific work. No scientist can long work effectively, even in a reasonably healthy and stimulating climate, if entirely cut off from similar interests and activities. It is therefore desirable, if at all possible, to discover a location in the midst of civilization and with reasonably good opportunities for scientific associations. With these several desiderata before us, I shall call attention to a number of possible sites for a station, several of which I have visited. Southern California, and especially the portion of the State between Santa Barbara and San Diego, promises fairly well. It is definitely known that certain, if not all, species of monkey will breed there fairly satisfactorily, and although it has not yet been demonstrated, there is no reason to suppose that in certain regions the anthropoid apes might not also be kept in perfect health and successfully bred. The main advantages of this general region are (a) a climate which promises to be reasonably satisfactory for many if not all of the primates; (b) admirable climatic conditions for investigators; (c) wholly satisfactory scientific and cultural environment for the staff of a station. The most significant disadvantages are (a) a temperature, which is at times a trifle too low for the comfort of certain of the monkeys and apes. It is by no means certain, however, that they would not usually adapt themselves to it. (b) The necessity of importing all of the animals and of having to rely upon successful acclimatization. Of course it is to be assumed that importation would be necessary only at the outset of such work, since the animals later should replenish themselves within the confines of the station. Florida offers possibilities somewhat similar to those of southern California, but as I have not had opportunity to examine the conditions myself, I can say only that in view of such information as is available the advantage seems to be greatly in favor of the latter. Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico, and for that matter, several of the West Indies, offer possible sites for a successful station. I have reasonably intimate personal knowledge only of the conditions in Jamaica. The major advantages in the West Indies are (a) suitable climatic conditions and food supply for the animals; and (b) reasonably satisfactory climatic conditions for the staff. These are, however, more than counterbalanced in my opinion by the following serious disadvantages: (a) the relative isolation of the investigators from their fellow scientists; (b) the necessity of importing all of the animals originally used; (c) the risk of destruction of the station by storms. It is definitely known that anthropoid apes as well as monkeys can be successfully kept, bred, and reared in the West Indies. During the past year, on the estate of Doha Rosalia Abreu, near Havana, Cuba, a chimpanzee was born in captivity. A valuable account of this important event and of the young ape has been published by Doctor Louis Montané (1915). It therefore seems practically certain that regions could be found readily on Jamaica, Porto Rico, or smaller islands, which would be eminently satisfactory for the breeding of apes. There are obvious reasons why an American station for the study of the primates should be located on territory controlled by the United States Government, and if a tropical location proves necessary, it would probably be difficult to find more satisfactory regions, aside from the inconveniences and risk of importation and the relative isolation of the investigators, than are available on Porto Rico. I have not seriously considered the possibility of locating an American station on the continent of Africa, for although two of the most interesting and important of the anthropoid apes, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, are African forms, while many species of monkey are either found there or could readily be imported, it has seemed to me that the islands of the West and East Indies and the portions of the United States referred to above are much to be preferred over anything available in Africa. In the East, Borneo, the Philippine Islands, and Hawaii are well worth considering. Borneo is the home of the gibbon and of at least one species of orang utan, and in addition to these important assets, it presents the advantages of (a) a wholly suitable climate and food supply for monkeys and apes; and (b) climatic conditions for investigators which, I am informed by scientific friends, are nearly ideal. For investigators the most serious disadvantage here, as in all other parts of the East, would be the isolation from other scientific work and workers. The possibilities of Central America I considered several years ago when it seemed to me possible that work might profitably be done with monkeys and apes on the Canal Zone. The advantages are (a) a climate which promises fairly well for the animals; and (b) reasonable accessibility from the United States. The disadvantages are (a) a far from ideal climate for long continued scientific work; and (b) an environment which from the cultural and scientific point of view leaves much to be desired. Were a permanent psycho-biological station for the study of the primates to be established in southern California, it would, even though wholly satisfactory conditions for the breeding, rearing, and studying of the animals were maintained, furnish more or less inadequate opportunity for the observation of the animals under free, natural conditions. It would therefore be necessary, to supplement the work of such a station by field work in Borneo, Sumatra, Africa, India, South America, and such other regions as the species of organism under consideration happen to inhabit. Considering equally the needs of the experimenter and the demands of the animals, it seems to me reasonable to conclude that southern California should be definitely proved unsuitable before a more distant site were selected. For the information which I have been able to accumulate convinces me that it would in all probability be possible successfully to breed and keep the primates there, and it is perfectly clear that in such event the output of a station would be enormously greater because of the more favorable conditions for research than in any tropical region or in a more isolated location. Assuming that satisfactory provision in the shape of a scientific establishment for the study of the primates in their relations to man were available, the following program might be followed: (1) Systematic and continuous studies of important forms of individual behavior, of social relations, and of mind; (2) experimental studies of physiological processes, normal and pathological, and especially of the diseases of the lower primates, in their relations to those of man; (3) studies of heredity, embryology, and life history; (4) research in comparative anatomy, including gross anatomy, histology, neurology, and pathological anatomy. Each of these several kinds of research should be in progress almost continuously in order that no materials or opportunities for observation be needlessly wasted. Because of the nature of the work, it would be necessary to provide, first of all, for those functional studies which demand healthy and normally active organisms, whose life history is intimately and completely known. This is true of all studies in behavior, whether physiological, psychological, or sociological. Simultaneously with behavioristic observations and often upon the same individuals, genetic experiments might be conducted. This would be extremely desirable because of the relatively long periods between generations. After the usefulness of an animal in behavioristic or genetic inquiries had been exhausted, it might be made to render still further service to science in various experimental physiological, or medical inquiries. And finally, the same individual might ultimately be used for various forms of anatomical research. Thus, it is clear that the scientific usefulness of a lemur, a monkey, or an ape might be maintained at a high level throughout and even beyond the period of its life history. The program thus briefly sketched would provide either directly or indirectly for work on every aspect of primate life. Especially important would be the intimacy of interest and cooperation among investigators, for the comparative method should be applied consistently and to the limit of its value. The results of various kinds of observation should be correlated so that there should ultimately emerge a unitary and practically valuable account of primate life, to replace the patchwork of information which we now possess. Because of the costliness of maintaining and breeding the monkeys and apes, it is especially desirable that the several kinds of research mentioned above should be conducted. Indeed, it would seem inexcusably wasteful to attempt to maintain a primate or anthropoid station for psychological observations alone, or for any other narrowly limited biological inquiry. Furthermore, the station should be permanent, since for many kinds of work it would be essential to have intimate knowledge of the life history and descent of an individual. With the lower primates, a generation might be obtained in from two to five years; with the higher, not more frequently, probably, than from ten to fifteen years. It therefore seems not improbable that the value of the work done in such a station would continue to increase for many years and would not reach its maximum short of fifty or even one hundred years. A staff of several highly trained and experienced biologists would be needed. The following organization is suggested as desirable, although, as indicated below, not necessarily essential in the beginning: (1) An expert especially interested in the problems of behavior, psychology, and sociology, with keen appreciation of practical as well as of theoretical problems; (2) an assistant trained especially in comparative physiology; (3) an expert in genetics and experimental zoology; (4) an assistant with training and interests in comparative anatomy, histology, and embryology; (5) an expert in experimental medicine, who could conduct and direct studies of the diseases of man as well as of the lower primates and of measures for their control; (6) an assistant trained especially in pathology and neurology. To this scientific staff of six highly trained individuals there should be added a business manager, a clerical force of three individuals, a skilled mechanician, a carpenter, and at least four laborers. The annual expenditures of an institute with such a working staff, would in southern California, approximate fifty thousand dollars. It would therefore be necessary that it have an endowment of approximately one million dollars. In the absence of this foundation it would, of course, be possible to make a reasonably satisfactory beginning on the work which has been outlined in the following less expensive manner. A working plant might be established, on ground rented or purchased at a low figure, for about ten thousand dollars; the salary of a director, assistants, a clerical helper, and combined mechanic and laborer might be estimated at the same figure; the cost of animals and of maintenance of the plant would approximate five thousand dollars. Thus, we should obtain as an estimate of the expenditures for the first year twenty-five thousand dollars. Without expansion, the work might be conducted during the second year for fifteen thousand dollars, and subsequently it might be curtailed or expanded, resources permitting, according as results achieved and in prospect justified. An institute established on such a modest basis as this still might render largely important scientific service through its own research and through organized cooperation with other existing research establishments. Thus, for example, supposing that behavioristic, psychological, sociological, and genetic inquiries were conducted in the institute itself, animals might be supplied on a mutually satisfactory basis to institutes for experimental medicine, for physiological research, and for anatomical studies. Under such conditions, it is conceivable that extremely economical and good use might be made of all the available primate materials. But it is not improbable that even coöperative research would prove on the whole more profitable, except possibly in the case of morphological work, if investigators could conduct their studies in the institute itself rather than in distant laboratories. In any event, the idea of coöperation should be prominent in connection with the organization of a research station for the study of the primates. For thus, evidently, scientific achievement in connection with these important types of animal might be vastly increased over what would be possible in a single relatively small institution with a limited and necessarily specialized staff of workers. Despite the fact that biologists generally recognize the importance of the work under consideration and are eager to have it done, it is perfectly certain that we shall accomplish nothing unless we devote ourselves confidently, determinedly and unitedly, with faith, vision, and enthusiasm, to the realization of a definite plan. Our vision is clear,--if we are to gather and place at the service of mankind adequate comparative knowledge of the life of the primates and if we are to make this possible harvest of scientific results count for human betterment, we must bend all our efforts to the establishment of a station or institute for research. VIII BIBLIOGRAPHY BREHM, A. Tierleben. 1888. COBURN, C.A. and YERKES, R.M. A study of the behavior of the crow, 1915. _Corvus Americanus_ Aud. by the multiple-choice method. _Journal of Animal Behavior_, vol. 5, 75-114. CUVIER, FREDERIC. Description d'un orang-outang, et observations sur 1810. ses facultées intellectuelles. _Annales du Museum d'Histoire naturelle_, vol. 16, 46-65. DARWIN, C. Origin of species. 1859. 1871. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. ELLIOT, D.G. A review of the primates. New York. 1913. FRANZ, S.I. On the functions of the cerebrum: the frontal lobes. 1907. _Archives of Psychology_, no. 2, 1-64. 1911. 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Intelligent imitation and curiosity in a monkey. _Psychological_ _Clinic_, vol. 3, 225-227. YERKES, R.M. The study of human behavior. _Science_, vol. 39, 625-633. 1914. 1910. Maternal instinct in a monkey. _Journal of Animal Behavior_, vol. 5, 403-405. 1916. Provision for the study of the monkeys and apes. _Science_, vol. 43, 231-234. YERKES, R.M. and COBURN, C.A. A study of the behavior of the pig 1915. _Sus scrofa_ by the multiple-choice method. _Journal of_ _Animal Behavior_, vol. 5, 185-225. 
14557	----	Copyright (C) 2007 by Lidija Rangelovska. Please see the corresponding RTF file for this eBook. RTF is Rich Text Format, and is readable in nearly any modern word processing program. 
18477	----	+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's Note | | | | Eight printer errors have been corrected, all of them wrong or | | missing full-stops or commas. Also, in the completion tests which | | start at line 5972, the words to be omitted, which were italicised | | in the original, have instead been surrounded by curly brackets | | to aid readability. In all other cases, italics are denoted by | | underscores and bold by equals signs. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ Teacher Training Series EDITED BY W. W. CHARTERS _Professor of Education, Carnegie Institute of Technology_ THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE _A PSYCHOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS_ BY WILLIAM HENRY PYLE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY. AUTHOR'S PREFACE This book is written for young students in high schools and normal schools. No knowledge can be of more use to a young person than a knowledge of himself; no study can be more valuable to him than a study of himself. A study of the laws of human behavior,--that is the purpose of this book. What is human nature like? Why do we act as we do? How can we make ourselves different? How can we make others different? How can we make ourselves more efficient? How can we make our lives more worth while? This book is a manual intended to help young people to obtain such knowledge of human nature as will enable them to answer these questions. I have not attempted to write a complete text on psychology. There are already many such books, and good ones too. I have selected for treatment only such topics as young students can study with interest and profit. I have tried to keep in mind all the time the practical worth of the matters discussed, and the ability and experience of the intended readers. TO THE TEACHER This book can be only a guide to you. You are to help your students study human nature. You must, to some extent, be a psychologist yourself before you can teach psychology. You must yourself be a close and scientific student of human nature. Develop in the students the spirit of inquiry and investigation. Teach them to look to their own minds and their neighbor's actions for verification of the statements of the text. Let the students solve by observation and experiment the questions and problems raised in the text and the exercises. The exercises should prove to be the most valuable part of the book. The first two chapters are the most difficult but ought to be read before the rest of the book is studied. If you think best, merely read these two chapters with the pupils, and after the book is finished come back to them for careful study. In the references, I have given parallel readings, for the most part to Titchener, Pillsbury, and Münsterberg. I have purposely limited the references, partly because a library will not be available to many who may use the book, and partly because the young student is likely to be confused by much reading from different sources before he has worked out some sort of system and a point of view of his own. Only the most capable members of a high school class will be able to profit much from the references given. TO THE STUDENT You are beginning the study of human nature. You can not study human nature from a book, you must study yourself and your neighbors. This book may help you to know what to look for and to understand what you find, but it can do little more than this. It is true, this text gives you many facts learned by psychologists, but you must verify the statements, or at least see their significance to _you_, or they will be of no worth to you. However, the facts considered here, properly understood and assimilated, ought to prove of great value to you. But perhaps of greater value will be the psychological frame of mind or attitude which you should acquire. The psychological attitude is that of seeking to find and understand the _causes of human action, and the causes, consequences, and significance of the processes of the human mind_. If your first course in psychology teaches you to look for these things, gives you some skill in finding them and in using the knowledge after you have it, your study should be quite worth while. W. H. PYLE. EDITOR'S PREFACE There are at least two possible approaches to the study of psychology by teacher-training students in high schools and by beginning students in normal schools. One of these is through methods of teaching and subject matter. The other aims to give the simple, concrete facts of psychology as the science of the mind. The former presupposes a close relationship between psychology and methods of teaching and assumes that psychology is studied chiefly as an aid to teaching. The latter is less complicated. The plan contemplates the teaching of the simple fundamentals at first and applying them incidentally as the occasion demands. This latter point of view is in the main the point of view taken in the text. The author has taught the material of the text to high school students to the end that he might present the fundamental facts of psychology in simple form. W. W. C. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER II. DEVELOPMENT OF THE RACE AND OF THE INDIVIDUAL 18 CHAPTER III. MIND AND BODY 34 CHAPTER IV. INHERITED TENDENCIES 50 CHAPTER V. FEELING AND ATTENTION 73 CHAPTER VI. HABIT 87 CHAPTER VII. MEMORY 124 CHAPTER VIII. THINKING 152 CHAPTER IX. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES 176 CHAPTER X. APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY 210 GLOSSARY 223 INDEX 227 THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION =Science.= Before attempting to define psychology, it will be helpful to make some inquiry into the nature of science in general. Science is knowledge; it is what we know. But mere knowledge is not science. For a bit of knowledge to become a part of science, its relation to other bits of knowledge must be found. In botany, for example, bits of knowledge about plants do not make a science of botany. To have a science of botany, we must not only know about leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, etc., but we must know the relations of these parts and of all the parts of a plant to one another. In other words, in science, we must not only _know_, we must not only have _knowledge_, but we must know the significance of the knowledge, must know its _meaning_. This is only another way of saying that we must have knowledge and know its relation to other knowledge. A scientist is one who has learned to organize his knowledge. The main difference between a scientist and one who is not a scientist is that the scientist sees the significance of facts, while the non-scientific man sees facts as more or less unrelated things. As one comes to hunt for causes and inquire into the significance of things, one becomes a scientist. A thing or an event always points beyond itself to something else. This something else is what goes before it or comes after it,--is its cause or its effect. This causal relationship that exists between events enables a scientist to prophesy. By carefully determining what always precedes a certain event, a certain type of happening, a scientist is able to predict the event. All that is necessary to be able to predict an event is to have a clear knowledge of its true causes. Whenever, beyond any doubt, these causes are found to be present, the scientist knows the event will follow. Of course, all that he really _knows_ is that such results have always followed similar causes in the past. But he has come to have faith in the uniformity and regularity of nature. The chemist does not find sulphur, or oxygen, or any other element acting one way one day under a certain set of conditions, and acting another way the next day under exactly the same conditions. Nor does the physicist find the laws of mechanics holding good one day and not the next. The scientist, therefore, in his thinking brings order out of chaos in the world. If we do not know the causes and relations of things and events, the world seems a very mixed-up, chaotic place, where anything and everything is happening. But as we come to know causes and relations, the world turns out to be a very orderly and systematic place. It is a lawful world; it is not a world of chance. Everything is related to everything else. Now, the non-scientific mind sees things as more or less unrelated. The far-reaching causal relations are only imperfectly seen by it, while the scientific mind not only sees things, but inquires into their causes and effects or consequences. The non-scientific man, walking over the top of a mountain and noticing a stone there, is likely to see in it only a stone and think nothing of how it came to be there; but the scientific man sees quite an interesting bit of history in the stone. He reads in the stone that millions of years ago the place where the rock now lies was under the sea. Many marine animals left their remains in the mud underneath the sea. The mud was afterward converted into rock. Later, the shrinking and warping earth-crust lifted the rock far above the level of the sea, and it may now be found at the top of the mountain. The one bit of rock tells its story to one who inquires into its causes. The scientific man, then, sees more significance, more meaning, in things and events than does the non-scientific man. Each science has its own particular field. Zoölogy undertakes to answer every reasonable question about animals; botany, about plants; physics, about motion and forces; chemistry, about the composition of matter; astronomy, about the heavenly bodies, etc. The world has many aspects. Each science undertakes to describe and explain some particular aspect. To understand all the aspects of the world, we must study all the sciences. =A Scientific Law.= By _law_ a scientist has reference to uniformities which he notices in things and events. He does not mean that necessities are imposed upon things as civil law is imposed upon man. He means only that in certain well-defined situations certain events always take place, according to all previous observations. The Law of Falling Bodies may be cited as an example. By this law, the physicist means that in observing falling bodies in the past, he has noticed that they fall about sixteen feet in the first second and acquire in this time a velocity of thirty-two feet. He has noted that, taking into account the specific gravity of the object and the resistance of the air, this way of falling holds true of all objects at about the level of the sea. The more we carefully study the events of the world, the more strongly we come to feel that definite causes, under the same circumstances, always produce precisely the same result. The scientist has faith that events will continue to happen during all the future in the same order of cause and effect in which they have been happening during all the past. The astronomer, knowing the relations of the members of the solar system--the sun and planets--can successfully predict the occurrence of lunar and solar eclipses. In other fields, too, the scientist can predict with as much certainty as does the astronomer, provided his knowledge of the factors concerned is as complete as is the knowledge which the astronomer has of the solar system. Even in the case of human beings, uncertain as their actions seem to be, we can predict their actions when our knowledge of the factors is sufficiently complete. In a great many instances we do make such predictions. For example, if we call a person by name, we expect him to turn, or make some other movement in response. Our usual inability to make such predictions in the case of human beings is not because human beings are not subject to the law of cause and effect, it is not that their acts are due to chance, but that the factors involved are usually many, and it is difficult for us to find out all of them. =The Science of Psychology.= Now, let us ask, what is the science of psychology? What kind of problems does it try to solve? What aspect of the world has it taken for its field of investigation? We have said that each science undertakes to describe some particular aspect of the world. Human psychology is the science of human nature. But human nature has many aspects. To some extent, our bodies are the subject matter for physiology, anatomy, zoölogy, physics, and chemistry. Our bodies may be studied in the same way that a rock or a table might be studied. But a human being presents certain problems that a rock or table does not present. If we consider the differences between a human being and a table, we shall see at once the special field of psychology. If we stick a pin into a leg of the table, we get no response. If we stick a pin into a leg of a man, we get a characteristic response. The man moves, he cries out. This shows two very great differences between a man and a table. The man is _sensitive_ and has the power of action, the power of _moving himself_. The table is not sensitive, nor can it move itself. If the pin is thrust into one's own leg, one has _pain_. Human beings, then, are sensitive, conscious, acting beings. And the study of sensitivity, action, and consciousness is the field of psychology. These three characteristics are not peculiar to man. Many, perhaps all, animals possess them. There is, therefore, an animal psychology as well as human psychology. A study of the human body shows us that the body-surface and many parts within the body are filled with sensitive nerve-ends. These sensitive nerve-ends are the sense organs, and on them the substances and forces of the world are constantly acting. In the sense organs, the nerve-ends are so modified or changed as to be affected by some particular kind of force or substance. Vibrations of ether affect the eye. Vibrations of air affect the ear. Liquids and solutions affect the sense of taste. Certain substances affect the sense of smell. Certain organs in the skin are affected by low temperatures; others, by high temperatures; others, by mechanical pressure. Similarly, each sense organ in the body is affected by a definite kind of force or substance. This affecting of a sense organ is known technically as _stimulation_, and that which affects the organ is known as the _stimulus_. Two important consequences ordinarily follow the stimulation of a sense organ. One of these is movement. The purpose of stimulation is to bring about movement. To be alive is to respond to stimulation. When one ceases to respond to stimulation, he is dead. If we are to continue alive, we must constantly adjust ourselves to the forces of the world in which we live. Generally speaking, we may say that every nerve has one end in a sense organ and the other in a muscle. This arrangement of the nerves and muscles shows that man is essentially a sensitive-action machine. The problems connected with sensitivity and action and the relation of each to the other constitute a large part of the field of psychology. We said just now, that a nerve begins in a sense organ and ends in a muscle. This statement represents the general scheme well enough, but leaves out an important detail. The nerve does not extend directly to a muscle, but ordinarily goes by way of the brain. The brain is merely a great group of nerve cells and fibers which have developed as a central organ where a stimulation may pass from almost any sense organ to almost any muscle. But another importance attaches to the brain. When a sense organ is stimulated and this stimulation passes on to the brain and agitates a cell or group of cells there, _we are conscious_. Consciousness shifts and changes with every shift and change of the stimulation. The brain has still another important characteristic. After it has been stimulated through sense organ and nerve, a similar brain activity can be revived later, and this revival is the basis of _memory_. When the brain is agitated through the medium of a sense organ, we have _sensation_; when this agitation is revived later, we have a _memory idea_. A study of consciousness, or mind, the conditions under which it arises, and all the other problems involved, give us the other part of the field of psychology. We are not merely acting beings; we are _conscious_ acting beings. Psychology must study human nature from both points of view. We must study man not only from the outside; that is, objectively, in the same way that we study a stone or a tree or a frog, but we must study him from the inside or subjectively. It is of importance to know not only how a man _acts_, but also how he _thinks and feels_. It must be clear now, that human action, human behavior, is the main field of psychology. For, even though our main interests in people were in their minds, we could learn of the minds only through the actions. But our interests in other human beings are not in their minds but in _what they do_. It is true that our interest in ourselves is in our minds, and we can know these minds directly; but we cannot know directly the mind of another person, we can only guess what it is from the person's actions. =The Problems of Psychology.= Let us now see, in some detail, what the various problems of psychology are. If we are to understand human nature, we must know something of man's past; we must therefore treat of the origin and development of the human race. The relation of one generation to that preceding and to the one following makes necessary a study of heredity. We must find out how our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas are dependent upon a physical body and its organs. A study of human actions shows that some actions are unlearned while others are learned or acquired. The unlearned acts are known as _instincts_ and the acquired acts are known as _habits_. Our psychology must, therefore, treat of instincts and habits. How man gets experience, and retains and organizes this experience must be our problem in the chapters on sensations, ideas, memory, and thinking. Individual differences in human capacity make necessary a treatment of the different types and grades of intelligence, and the compilation of tests for determining these differences. We must also treat of the application of psychology to those fields where a knowledge of human nature is necessary. =Applied Psychology.= At the beginning of a subject it is legitimate to inquire concerning the possibility of applying the principles studied to practical uses, and it is very proper to make this inquiry concerning psychology. Psychology, being the science of human nature, ought to be of use in all fields where one needs to know the causes of human action. And psychology is applicable in these fields to the extent that the psychologist is able to work out the laws and principles of human action. In education, for example, we wish to influence children, and we must go to psychology to learn about the nature of children and to find out how we can influence them. Psychology is therefore the basis of the science of education. Since different kinds of work demand, in some cases, different kinds of ability, the psychology of individual differences can be of service in selecting people for special kinds of work. That is to say, we must have sometime, if we do not now, a psychology of professions and vocations. Psychological investigations of the reliability of human evidence make the science of service in the court room. The study of the laws of attention and interest give us the psychology of advertising. The study of suggestion and abnormal states make psychology of use in medicine. It may be said, therefore, that psychology, once abstract and unrelated to any practical interests, will become the most useful of all sciences, as it works out its problems and finds the laws of human behavior. At present, the greatest service of psychology is to education. So true is this that a department has grown up called "educational psychology," which constitutes at the present time the most important subdivision of psychology. While in this book we treat briefly of the various applications of psychology, we shall have in mind chiefly its application to education. =The Science of Education.= Owing to the importance which psychology has in the science of education, it will be well for us to make some inquiry into the nature of education. If the growth, development, and learning of children are all controlled and determined by definite causal factors, then a systematic statement of all these factors would constitute the science of education. In order to see clearly whether there is such a science, or whether there can be, let us inquire more definitely as to the kind of problems a science of education would be expected to solve. There are four main questions which the science of education must solve: (1) What is the aim of education? (2) What is the nature of education? (3) What is the nature of the child? (4) What are the most economical methods of changing the child from what it is into what it ought to be? The first question is a sociological question, and it is not difficult to find the answer. We have but to inquire what the people wish their children to become. There is a pretty general agreement, at least in the same community, that children should be trained in a way that will make them socially efficient. Parents generally wish their children to become honest, truthful, sympathetic, and industrious. It should be the aim of education to accomplish this social ideal. It should be the aim of the home and the school to subject children to such influences as will enable them to make a living when grown and to do their proper share of work for the community and state, working always for better things, and having a sympathetic attitude toward neighbors. Education should also do what it can to make people able to enjoy the world and life to the fullest and highest extent. Some such aim of education as this is held by all our people. The second question is also answered. Psychological analysis reveals the fact that education is a process of becoming adjusted to the world. It is the process of acquiring the habits, knowledge, and ideals suited to the life we are to live. The child in being educated learns what the world is and how to act in it--how to act in all the various situations of life. The third question--concerning the nature of the child--cannot be so briefly answered. In fact, it cannot be fully answered at the present time. We must know what the child's original nature is. This means that we must know the instincts and all the other inherited capacities and tendencies. We must know the laws of building up habits and of acquiring knowledge, the laws of retention and the laws of attention. These problems constitute the subject matter of educational psychology, and at present can be only partially solved. We have, however, a very respectable body of knowledge in this field, though it is by no means complete. The answer to the fourth question is in part dependent upon the progress in answering the third. Economical methods of training children must be dependent upon the nature of children. But in actual practice, we are trying to find out the best procedure of doing each single thing in school work; we are trying to find out by experimentation. The proper way to teach children to read, to spell, to write, etc., must be determined in each case by independent investigation, until our knowledge of the child becomes sufficient for us to infer from general laws of procedure what the procedure in a particular case should be. We venture to infer what ought to be done in some cases, but generally we feel insecure till we have proved our inference correct by trying out different methods and measuring the results. Education will not be fully scientific till we have definite knowledge to guide us at every step. What should we teach? When should we teach it? How should we teach it? How poorly we answer these questions at the present time! How inefficient and uneconomical our schools, because we cannot fully answer them! But they are answerable. We can answer them in part now, and we know how to find out the answer in full. It is just a matter of patient and extensive investigation. We must say, then, that we have only the beginnings of a science of education. The problems which a science of education must solve are almost wholly psychological problems. They could not be solved till we had a science of psychology. Experimental psychology is but a half-century old; educational psychology, less than a quarter-century old. In the field of education, the science of psychology may expect to make its most important practical contribution. Let us, then, consider very briefly the problems of educational psychology. =Educational Psychology.= Educational psychology is that division of psychology which undertakes to discover those aspects of human nature most closely related to education. These are (1) the original nature of the child--what it is and how it can be modified; (2) the problem of acquiring and organizing experience--habit-formation, memory, thinking, and the various factors related to these processes. There are many subordinate problems, such as the problem of individual differences and their bearing on the education of subnormal and supernormal children. Educational psychology is not, then, merely the application of psychology to education. It is a distinct science in itself, and its aim is the solving of those educational problems which for their solution depend upon a knowledge of the nature of the child. =The Method of Psychology.= We have enumerated the various problems of psychology, now how are they solved? The method of psychology is the same as that of all other sciences; namely, the method of observation and experiment. We learn human nature by observing how human beings act in all the various circumstances of life. We learn about the human mind by observing our own mind. We learn that we _see_ under certain objective conditions, _hear_ under certain objective conditions, _taste_, _smell_, _feel cold_ and _warm_ under certain objective conditions. In the case of ourselves, we can know both our _actions_ and our _mind_. In the case of others, we can know only their _actions_, and must infer their mental states from our own in similar circumstances. With certain restrictions and precautions this inference is legitimate. We said the method of psychology is that of observation and experiment. The experiment is observation still, but observation subjected to exact methodical procedure. In a psychological experiment we set out to provide the necessary conditions, eliminating some and supplying others according to our object. The experiment has certain advantages. It enables us to isolate the phenomena to be studied, it enables us to vary the circumstances and conditions to suit our purposes, it enables us to repeat the observation as often as we like, and it enables us to measure exactly the factors of the phenomena studied. =A Psychological Experiment.= Let us illustrate psychological method by a typical experiment. Suppose we wish to measure the individual differences among the members of a class with respect to a certain ability; namely, the muscular speed of the right hand. Psychological laboratories have delicate apparatus for making such a study. But let us see how we can do it, roughly at least, without any apparatus. Let each member of the class take a sheet of paper and a pencil, and make as many strokes as possible in a half-minute, as shown in Figure I. The instructor can keep the time with a stop watch, or less accurately with the second hand of an ordinary watch. Before beginning the experiment, the instructor should have each student taking the test try it for a second or two. This is to make sure that all understand what they are to do. When the instructor is sure that all understand, he should have the students hold their pencils in readiness above the paper, and at the signal, "Begin," all should start at the same time and make as many marks as possible in the half-minute. The strokes can then be counted and the individual scores recorded. The experiment should be repeated several times, say six or eight, and the average score for each individual recorded. [Illustration: FIGURE I.--STROKES MADE IN THIRTY SECONDS A test of muscular speed] Whether the result in such a performance as this varies from day to day, and is accidental, or whether it is constant and fundamental, can be determined by repeating the experiment from day to day. This repetition will also show whether improvement comes from practice. If it is decided to repeat the experiment in order to study these factors, constancy and the effects of practice, some method of studying and interpreting the results must be found. Elaborate methods of doing this are known to psychologists, but the beginner must use a simpler method. When the experiment is performed for the first time, the students can be ranked with reference to their abilities, the fastest one being called "first," the second highest, "second," and so on down to the slowest performer. Then after the experiment has been performed the second time, the students can be again ranked. A rough comparison can then be made as follows: Determine how many who were in the best half in the first experiment are among the best half in the second experiment. If most who were among the best half the first time are among the best half in the second experiment, constancy in this performance is indicated. Or we might determine how many change their ranks and how much they change. Suppose there are thirty in the class and only four improve their ranks and these to the extent of only two places each. This would indicate a high degree of constancy. Two different performances can be compared as above described. The abilities on successive days can be determined by taking the average rank of the first day and comparing it with the average rank of the second day. If the effects of practice are to be studied, the experiments must be kept up for many days, and each student's work on the first day compared with his work on succeeding days. Then a graph can be plotted to show the improvement from day to day. The average daily speed of the class can be taken and a graph made to show the improvement of the class as a whole. This might be plotted in black ink, then each individual student could put on his improvement in red ink, for comparison. A group of thirty may be considered as furnishing a fair average or norm in this kind of performance. In connection with this simple performance, making marks as fast as possible, it is evident that many problems arise. It would take several months to solve anything like all of them. It might be interesting, for example, to determine whether one's speed in writing is related to this simple speed in marking. Each member of the class might submit a plan for making such a study. The foregoing simple study illustrates the procedure of psychology in all experimentation. A psychological experiment is an attempt to find out the truth in regard to some aspect of human nature. In finding out this truth, we must throw about the experiment all possible safeguards. Every source of error must be discovered and eliminated. In the above experiment, for example, the work must be done at the same time of day, or else we must prove that doing it at different times of day makes no difference. Nothing must be taken for granted, and nothing must be assumed. Psychology, then, is like all the other sciences, in that its method of getting its facts is by observation and experiment. SUMMARY. Science is systematic, related knowledge. Each science has a particular field which it attempts to explore and describe. The field of psychology is the study of sensitivity, action, and consciousness, or briefly, human behavior. Its main problems are development, heredity, instincts, habits, sensation, memory, thinking, and individual differences. Its method is observation and experiment, the same as in all other sciences. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Make out a list of things about human nature which you would like to know. Paste your list in the front of this book, and as you find your questions answered in this book, or in other books which you may read, check them off. At the end of the course, note how many remain unanswered. Find out whether those not answered can be answered at the present time. 2. Does everything you do have a cause? What kind of cause? 3. Human nature is shown in human action. Human action consists in muscular contraction. What makes a muscle contract? 4. Plan an experiment the object of which shall be to learn something about yourself. 5. Enumerate the professions and occupations in which a knowledge of some aspect of human nature would be valuable. State in what way it would be valuable. 6. Make a list of facts concerning a child, which a teacher ought to know. 7. Make a complete outline of Chapter I. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, Chapters I, II, and V. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapter I. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapter I. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapter I. CHAPTER II DEVELOPMENT OF THE RACE AND OF THE INDIVIDUAL =Racial Development.= The purpose of this chapter is to make some inquiry concerning the origin of the race and of the individual. In doing this, it is necessary for us first of all to fix in our minds the idea of causality. According to the view of all modern science, everything has a cause. Nothing is uncaused. One event is the result of other previous events, and is in turn the cause of other events that follow. Yesterday flowed into to-day, and to-day flows into to-morrow. The world as it exists to-day is the result of the world as it existed yesterday. This is true not only of the inorganic world--the world of physics and chemistry--but it is true of living things as well. The animals and plants that exist to-day are the descendants of others that lived before. There is probably an unbroken line of descent from the first life that existed on the earth to the living forms of to-day. Not only does the law of causality hold true in the case of our bodies, but of our minds as well. Our minds have doubtless developed from simpler minds just as our bodies have developed from simpler bodies. That different grades and types of minds are to be found among the various classes of animals now upon the earth, no one can doubt, for the different forms certainly show different degrees of mentality. According to the evidence of those scientists who have studied the remains of animals found in the earth's crust, there is a gradual development of animal forms shown in successive epochs. In the very oldest parts of the earth's crust, the remains of animal life found are very simple. In later formations, the remains show an animal life more complex. The highest forms of animals, the mammals, are found only in the more recent formations. The remains of man are found only in the latest formations. Putting these two facts together--(1) that the higher types of mind are found to-day only in the higher types of animals, and (2) that a gradual development of animal forms is shown by the remains in the earth's crust--the conclusion is forced upon us that mind has passed through many stages of development from the appearance of life upon the earth to the present time. Among the lower forms of animals to-day one sees evidence of very simple minds. In amoebas, worms, insects, and fishes, mind is very simple. In birds, it is higher. In mammals, it is higher still. Among the highest mammals below man, we see manifestations of mind somewhat like our own. These grades of mentality shown in the animals of to-day represent the steps in the development of mind in the animals of the past. We cannot here go into the proof of the doctrine of development. For this proof, the reader must be referred to zoölogy. One further point, however, may be noted. If it is difficult for the reader to conceive of the development of mind on the earth similar to the development of animals in the past, let him think of the development of mind in the individual. There can certainly be no doubt of the development of mind in an individual human being. The infant, when born, shows little manifestation of mentality; but as its body grows, its mind develops, becoming more and more complex as the individual grows to maturity. =The World as Dynamic.= The view of the world outlined above, and held by all scientific men of the present time, may be termed the _dynamic_ view. Man formerly looked upon the world as static, a world where everything was fixed and final. Each thing existed in itself and for itself, and in large measure independent of all other things. We now look upon things and events as related and dependent. Each thing is dependent upon others, related to others. Man not only _lives in_ such a world, but is _part of_ such a world. In this world of constant and ceaseless change, man is most sensitive and responsive. Everything may affect him. To all of the constant changes about him he must adjust himself. He has been produced by this world, and to live in it he must meet its every condition and change. We must, then, look upon human nature as something coming out of the past and as being influenced every moment by the things and forces of the present. Man is not an independent being, unaffected by everything that happens; on the contrary, he is affected by all influences that act upon him. Among these influences may be mentioned weather, climate, food, and social forces. The condition of the various organs of a child's body determine, to some extent, the effect which these various forces have upon it. If a child's eyes are in any way defective, making vision poor, this tremendously influences his life. Not only is such a child unable to see the world as it really is, but the eyestrain resulting from poor vision has serious effects on the child, producing all sorts of disorders. If a child cannot hear well or is entirely deaf, many serious consequences follow. In fact, every condition or characteristic of a child that is in any way abnormal may lead on to other conditions and characteristics, often of a serious nature. The growth of adenoids, for example, may lead to a serious impairment of the mind. Poor vision may affect the whole life and character of the individual. The influence of a parent, teacher, or friend may determine the interest of a child and affect his whole life. The correct view of child life is that the child is affected, in greater or less degree, by every influence which acts upon him. =Significance of Development and Causality.= What are the consequences of the view just set forth? What is the significance of the facts that have been enumerated? It is of great consequence to our thinking when we come to recognize fully the idea of causality. We then fully accept the fact that man's body and mind are part of a causal and orderly world. Let us consider, for example, the movement of a muscle. Every such movement must be caused. The physiologist has discovered what this cause is. Ordinarily and normally, a muscle contracts only when stimulated by a nerve current. Tiny nerve fibrils penetrate every muscle, ending in the muscle fibers. The nerve-impulse passing into the fibers of the muscles causes them to contract. The nerve stimulus itself has a cause; it ordinarily arises directly or indirectly from the stimulation of a sense organ. And the sense organs are stimulated by outside influences, as was explained previously. Not only are our movements caused, but our sensations, our ideas, and our feelings follow upon or are dependent upon some definite bodily state or condition. The moment that we recognize this we see that our sensations, ideas, and feelings are subject to control. It is only because our minds are in a world of causality, and subject to its laws, that education is possible. We can bring causes to bear upon a child and change the child. It is possible to build up ideas, ideals, and habits. And ideas, ideals, and habits constitute the man. Training is possible only because a child is a being that can be influenced. What any child will be when grown depends upon what kind of child it was at the beginning and upon the influences that affect it during its early life while it is growing into maturity. We need have no doubt about the outcome of any particular child if we know, with some degree of completeness, the two sets of factors that determine his life--his inheritance and the forces that affect this inheritance. We can predict the future of a child to the extent that we know and understand the forces that will be effective in his life. The notion of causality puts new meaning into our view of the _training_ of a child. The doctrine of development puts new meaning into our notion of the _nature_ of a child. We can understand man only when we view him genetically, that is, in the light of his origin. We can understand a child only in the light of what his ancestors have been. As these lines are being written, the greatest, the bloodiest war of history is in progress. Men are killing men by thousands and hundreds of thousands. How can we explain such actions? Observation of children shows that they are selfish, envious, and quarrelsome. They will fight and steal until they are taught not to do such things. How can we understand this? There is no way of understanding such actions until we come to see that the children and men of to-day are such as they are because of their ancestors. It has been only a few generations, relatively speaking, since our ancestors were naked savages, killing their enemies and eating their enemies' bodies. The civilized life of our ancestors covers a period of only a few hundred years. The pre-civilized life of our ancestors goes back probably thousands and thousands of years. In the relatively short period of civilization, our real, original nature has been little changed, perhaps none at all. The modern man is, at heart, the same old man of the woods. The improvements of civilization form what is called a social heritage, which must be impressed upon the original nature of each individual in order to have any effect. Every child has to learn to speak, to write, to dress, to eat with knife and fork; he must learn the various social customs, and to act morally as older people dictate. The child is by nature bad, in the sense that the nature which he inherits from the past fits him better for the original kind of life which man used to live than it does for the kind of life which we are trying to live now. This view makes us see that training a child is, in a very true sense, _making him over again_. The child must be trained to subdue and control his original impulses. Habits and ideals that will be suitable for life in civilized society _must be built up_. The doctrine of the Bible in regard to the original nature of man being sinful, and the necessity of regeneration, is fundamentally correct. But this regeneration is not so much a sudden process as it is the result of long and patient building-up of habits and ideals. One should not despair of this view of child-life. Neither should one use it as an excuse for being bad, or for neglecting the training of children. On the contrary, taking the genetic view of childhood should give us certain advantages. It makes us see more clearly the _necessity_ of training. Every child must be trained, or he will remain very much a savage. In the absence of training, all children are much alike, and all alike bad from our present point of view. The chief differences in children in politeness and manners generally, in morals, in industry, etc., are due, in the main, to differences in training. It is a great help merely to know how difficult the task of training is, and that training there must be if we are to have a civilized child. We must take thought and plan for the education and training of our children. The task of education is in part one of changing human nature. This is no light task. It is one that requires, in the case of each child, some twenty years of hard, patient, persistent work. =Individual Development.= Heredity is a corollary of evolution. Individual development is intimately related to racial development. Indeed, racial development would be impossible without heredity in the individual. The individual must carry on and transmit what the race hands down to him. This will be evident when we explain what heredity means. By heredity we mean the likeness between parent and offspring. This likeness is a matter of form and structure as well as likeness of action or response. Animals and plants are like the parents in form and structure, and to a certain extent their responses are alike when the individuals are placed in the same situation. A robin is like the parent robins in size, shape, and color. It also hops like the parent birds, sings as they do, feeds as they do, builds a similar nest, etc. But the likeness in action is dependent upon likeness in structure. The young robin acts as does the old robin, because the nervous mechanism is the same, and therefore a similar stimulus brings about a similar response. Most of the scientific work in heredity has been done in the study of the transmission of physical characteristics. The main facts of heredity are evident to everybody, but not many people realize how far-reaching is the principle of resemblance between parent and offspring. From horses we raise horses. From cows we raise cows. The children of human beings are human. Not only is this true, but the offspring of horses are of the same stock as the parents. Not only are the colts of the same stock as the parents, but they resemble the parents in small details. This is also true of human beings. We expect a child to be not only of the same race as the parents, but to have family resemblances to the parents--the same color of hair, the same shape of head, the same kind of nose, the same color of eyes, and to have such resemblances as moles in the same places on the skin, etc. A very little investigation reveals likenesses between parent and offspring which we may not have expected before. However, if we start out to hunt for facts of heredity, we shall perhaps be as much impressed by differences between parent and child as we shall by the resemblances. In the first place, every child has two parents, and it is often impossible to resemble both. One cannot, for example, be both short and tall; one cannot be both fair and dark; one cannot be both slender and heavy; one cannot have both brown eyes and blue. In some cases, the child resembles one parent and not the other. In other cases, the child looks somewhat like both parents but not exactly like either. If one parent is white and the other black, the child is neither as white as the one parent nor as black as the other. The parents of a child are themselves different, but there are four grandparents, and each of them different from the others. There are eight great grandparents, and all of them different. If we go back only seven generations, covering a period of perhaps only a hundred and fifty years, we have one hundred and twenty-eight ancestors. If we go back ten generations, we have over a thousand ancestors in our line of descent. Each of these people was, in some measure, different from the others. Our inheritance comes from all of them and from each of them. How do all of these diverse characteristics work out in the child? In the first place, it seems evident that we do not inherit our bodies as wholes, but in parts or units. We may think of the human race as a whole being made up of a great number of unit characters. No one person possesses all of them. Every person is lacking in some of them. His neighbor may be lacking in quite different ones. Now one parent transmits to the child a certain combination of unit characters; the other parent, a different combination. These characteristics may not all appear in the child, but all are transmitted through it to the next generation, and they are transmitted purely. By being transmitted purely, we mean that the characteristic does not seem to lose its identity and disappear in fusions or mixtures. The essential point in this doctrine of heredity is known as Mendelism; it is the principle of inheritance through the pure transmission of unit characters. An illustration will probably make the Mendelian principle clear. Let us select our illustration from the plant world. It is found that if white and yellow corn are crossed, all the corn the first year, resulting from this crossing, will be yellow. Now, if this hybrid yellow corn is planted the second year, and freely cross-fertilized, it turns out that one fourth of it will be white and three fourths yellow. But this yellow consists of three parts: one part being pure yellow which will breed true, producing nothing but yellow; the other two parts transmit white and yellow in equal ratio. That is to say, these two parts are hybrids, the result of crossing white with yellow. It is not meant that one can actually distinguish these two kinds of yellow, the pure yellow and the hybrid yellow, but the results from planting it show that one third of the yellow is pure and that the other two thirds transmit white and yellow in equal ratio. The main point to notice in all this is that when two individuals having diverse characteristics are crossed, the characteristics do not fuse and disappear ultimately, but that the two characteristics are transmitted in equal ratio, and each will appear in succeeding generations, and will appear pure, just as if it had not been crossed with something different. The first offspring resulting from the cross--known as hybrids--may show either one or the other of the diverse characteristics, or, when such a thing is possible, even a blending of the two characteristics. But whatever the actual appearance of the first generation of offspring resulting from crossing parents having diverse characteristics, their germ-cells transmit the diverse characteristics in equal proportion, as explained above. When one of the diverse characteristics appears in the first generation of offspring and the other does not appear, or is not apparent, the one that appears is said to be _dominant_, while the one not appearing is said to be _recessive_. In our example of the yellow and white corn, yellow is dominant and white recessive. And it must be remembered that the white corn that appears in the second generation will breed true just as if it had never been crossed with the yellow corn. One third of the yellow of the second generation would also breed true if it could be separated from the other two thirds. It is not here claimed that Mendelism is a universal principle, that all characteristics are transmitted in this way. However, the results of the numerous experiments in heredity lead one to expect this to be the case. Most of the experiments have been with lower animals and with plants, but recent experiments and statistical studies show that Mendelism is an important factor in human heredity, in such characteristics as color of hair and eyes and skin, partial color blindness, defects of eye, ear, and other important organs. The studies that have been made of human heredity have been, for the most part, studies of the transmission of physical characteristics. Very little has been done that bears directly upon the transmission of mental characteristics. But our knowledge of the dependence of mind upon body should prepare us to infer mental heredity from physical heredity. Such studies as throw light on the question bear us out in making such an inference. The studies that have been more directly concerned with mental heredity are those dealing with the resemblances of twins, studies of heredity in royalty, studies of the inheritance of genius, and studies of the transmission of mental defects and defects of sense organs. The results of all these studies indicate the inheritance of mental characteristics in the same way that physical characteristics are transmitted. Not only are human mental characteristics transmitted from parent to offspring, but they seem to be transmitted in Mendelian fashion. Feeble-mindedness, for example, seems to be a Mendelian character and recessive. From the studies that have been made, it seems that two congenitally feeble-minded parents will have only feeble-minded children. Feeble-mindedness acts in heredity as does the white corn in the example given above. If one parent only is feeble-minded, the other being normal, all of the children will be normal, just as all of the corn, in the first generation after the crossing, was yellow. But these children whose parents are the one normal and the other feeble-minded, while themselves normal, transmit feeble-mindedness in equal ratio with normality. It works out as follows: If a feeble-minded person marry a person of sound mind and sound stock, the children will all be of sound, normal mind. If these children take as husbands and wives men and women who had for parents one normal and one feeble-minded person, their children will be one fourth feeble-minded and three fourths of them normal. To summarize the various conditions: If a feeble-minded person marry a feeble-minded person, all the children will be feeble-minded. If a feeble-minded person marry a sound, normal person (pure stock), all the children will be normal. If the children, in the last case, marry others like themselves as to origin, one fourth of their offspring will be feeble-minded. If such hybrid children marry feeble-minded persons, one half of the offspring will be feeble-minded. It is rash to prophesy, but future studies of heredity may show that Mendelism, or some modification of the principle, always holds true of mind as well as of body. Little can be said about the transmission of particular definite mental traits, such as the various aspects of memory, association, attention, temperament, etc. Before we can speak with any certainty here, we must make very careful experimental studies of these mental traits in parents and offspring. No such work has been done. All we have at the present time is the result of general observation. =Improvement of the Race.= Eugenics is the science of improvement of the human race by breeding. While we can train children and thereby make them much better than they would be without such training, this training does not improve the stock. The improvement of the stock can be accomplished only through breeding from the best and preventing the poor stock from leaving offspring. This is a well-known principle in the breeding of domestic animals. It is doubtless just as true in the case of human beings. The hygienic and scientific rearing of children is good for the children and makes their lives better, but probably does not affect their offspring. We should not forget that all the social and educational influences die with the generation that receives them. They must be impressed by training on the next generation or that generation will receive no influence from them. The characters which we acquire in our lifetime seem not to be transmitted to our children, except through what is known as social heredity, which is merely the taking on of characteristics through imitation. Our children must go through all the labor of learning to read, write, spell, add, multiply, subtract, and divide, which we went through. Moral traits, manners and customs, and other habits and ideals of social importance must be acquired by each successive generation. =Heredity _versus_ Environment.= The question is often asked whether heredity or the influence of environment has the most to do with the final outcome of one's life. It is a rather useless question to ask, for what a human being or anything else in the world does depends upon what it is itself and what the things and forces are that act upon it. Heredity sets a limitation for us, fixes the possibilities. The circumstances of life determine what we will do with our inherited abilities and characteristics. Hereditary influences incline us to be tall or short, fat or lean, light or dark. The characteristics of our memory, association, imagination, our learning capacity, etc., are determined by heredity. Of course, how far these various aspects develop is to some extent dependent upon the favorable or unfavorable influences of the environment. What is possible for us to do is settled by heredity; what we may actually do, what we may have the opportunity to do, is largely a matter of the circumstances of life. In certain parts of New England, the number of men who become famous in art, science, or literature is very great compared to the number in some other parts of our country. As far as we have any evidence, the native stocks are the same in the two cases, but in New England the influences turn men into the direction of science, art, and literature. Everything there is favorable. In other parts of the country, the influences turn men into other spheres of activity. They become large landowners, men of business and affairs. The question may be asked whether genius makes its way to the front in spite of unfavorable circumstances. Sometimes it doubtless does. But pugnacity and perseverance are not necessarily connected with intellectual genius. Genius may be as likely to be timid as belligerent. Therefore unfavorable circumstances may crush many a genius. The public schools ought to be on the watch for genius in any and all kinds of work. When a genius is found, proper training ought to be provided to develop this genius for the good of society as well as for the good of the individual himself. A few children show ability in drawing and painting, others in music, others in mechanical invention, some in literary construction. When it is found that this ability is undoubtedly a native gift and not a passing whim, special opportunity should be provided for its development and training. It will be better for the general welfare, as well as for individual happiness, if each does in life that for which he is by nature best fitted. For most of us, however, there is not much difference in our abilities. We can do one thing as well as we can many other things. But in a few there are undoubted special native gifts. SUMMARY. This is an orderly world, in which everything has a cause. All events are connected in a chain of causes and effects. Human beings live in this world of natural law and are subject to it. Human life is completely within this world of law and order and is a part of it. Education is possible only because we can change human beings by having influences act upon them. Individuals receive their original traits from their ancestors, probably as parts or units. Mendelism is the doctrine of the pure transmission of unit characters. Eugenics is the science of improving the human race by selective breeding. An individual's life is the result of the interaction of his hereditary characteristics and his environment. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Try to find rock containing the remains of animals. You can get information on such matters from a textbook on geology. 2. Read in a geology about the different geological epochs in the history of the earth. 3. Make a comparison of the length of infancy in the lower animals and in man. What is the significance of what you find? What advantage does it give man? 4. What is natural selection? How does it lead to change in animals? Does natural selection still operate among human beings? (See a modern textbook on zoölogy.) 5. By observation and from consulting a zoölogy, learn about the different classes of animal forms, from low forms to high forms. 6. By studying domestic animals, see what you can learn about heredity. Enumerate all the points that you find bearing upon heredity. 7. In a similar way, make a study of heredity in your family. Consider such characteristics as height, weight, shape of head, shape of nose, hair and eye color. Can you find any evidence of the inheritance of mental traits? 8. Make a complete outline of Chapter II. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING DAVENPORT: _Heredity in Relation to Eugenics_. KELLICOTT: _The Social Direction of Human Evolution_. CHAPTER III MIND AND BODY =Gross Dependence.= The relation of mind to body has always been an interesting one to man. This is partly because of the connection of the question with that of life after death. An old idea of this relation, almost universally held till recently, was that the mind or spirit lived in the body but was more or less independent of the body. The body has been looked upon as a hindrance to the mind or spirit. Science knows nothing about the existence of spirits apart from bodies. The belief that after death the mind lives on is a matter of faith and not of science. Whether one believes in an existence of the mind after death of the body, depends on one's religious faith. There is no scientific evidence one way or the other. The only mind that science knows anything about is bound up very closely with body. This is not saying that there is no existence of spirit apart from body, but that at present such existence is beyond the realm of science. The dependence of mind upon body in a general way is evident to every one, upon the most general observation and thought. We know the effect on the mind of disease, of good health, of hunger, of fatigue, of overwork, of severe bodily injury, of blindness or deafness. We have, perhaps, seen some one struck upon the head by a club, or run over by an automobile, and have noted the tremendous consequences to the person's mind. In such cases it sometimes happens that, as far as we can see, there is no longer any mind in connection with that body. The most casual observation, then, shows that mind and body are in some way most intimately related. =Finer Dependence.= Let us note this relation more in detail, and, in particular, see just which part of the body it is that is connected with the mind. First of all, we note the dependence of mind upon sense organs. We see only with our eyes. If we close the eyelids, we cannot see. If we are born blind, or if injury or disease destroys the retinas of the eyes or makes the eyes opaque so that light cannot pass through to the retinas, then we cannot see. Similarly, we hear only by means of the ears. If we are born deaf, or if injury destroys some important part of the hearing mechanism, then we cannot hear. In like manner, we taste only by means of the taste organs in the mouth, and smell only with the organs of smell in the nose. In a word, our primary knowledge of the world comes only through the sense organs. We shall see presently just how this sensing or perceiving is accomplished. =Dependence of Mind on Nerves and Brain.= We have seen how in a general way the mind is dependent on the body. We have seen how in a more intimate way it is dependent on the special sense organs. But the part of the body to which the mind is most directly and intimately related is the nervous system. The sense organs themselves are merely modifications of the nerve ends together with certain mechanisms for enabling stimuli to act on the nerve ends. The eye is merely the optic nerve spread out to form the retina and modified in certain ways to make it sensitive to ether vibrations. In addition to this, there is, of course, the focusing mechanism of the eye. So for all the sense organs; they are, each of them, some sort of modification of nerve-endings which makes them sensitive to some particular force or substance. Let us make the matter clear by an illustration. Suppose I see a picture on the wall. My eyes are directed toward the picture. Light from the picture is refracted within the eyes, forming an image on each retina. The retina is sensitive to the light. The light produces chemical changes on the retina. These changes set up an excitation in the optic nerves, which is conducted to a certain place in the brain, causing an excitation in the brain. Now the important point is that when this excitation is going on in the brain, _we are conscious, we see the picture_. As far as science can determine, we do not see, nor hear, nor taste, nor smell, nor have any other sensation unless a sense organ is excited and produces the excitation in the brain. There can be no doubt about our primary, sensory experience. By primary, sensory experience is meant our immediate, direct knowledge of any aspect of the world. In this field of our conscious life, we are entirely dependent upon sense organs and nerves and brain. Injuries to the eyes destroying their power to perform their ordinary work, or injuries to the optic nerve or to the visual center in the brain, make it impossible for us to see. These facts are so self-evident that it seems useless to state them. One has but to hold his hands before his eyes to convince himself that the mind sees by means of eyes, which are physical sense organs. One has but to hold his hands tight over his ears to find out that he hears by means of ears--again, physical sense organs. But simple and self-evident as the facts are, their acceptance must have tremendous consequences to our thinking, and to our view of human nature. If the mind is dependent in every feature on the body with its sense organs, this must give to this body and its sense organs an importance in our thought and scheme of things that they did not have before. This close dependence of mind upon body must give to the body a place in our scheme of education that it would not have under any other view of the mind. We wish to emphasize here that this statement of the close relation of the mind and body is not a theory which one may accept or not. It is a simple statement of fact. It is a presupposition of psychology. By "presupposition" is meant a fundamental principle which the psychologist always has in mind. It is axiomatic, and has the same place in psychology that axioms have in mathematics. All explanations of the working of the mind must be stated in terms of nerve and brain action, and stimulation of sense organs. Since the sense organs are the primary and fundamental organs through which we get experience, and since the sensations are the elementary experiences out of which all mental life is built, it is necessary for us to have a clear idea of the sense organs, their structure and functions, and of the nature of sensations. =Vision.= _The Visual Sense Organs._ The details of the anatomy of the eye can be looked up in a physiological textbook. The essential principles are very simple. The eye is made on the principle of a photographer's camera. The retina corresponds to the sensitive plate of the camera. The light coming from objects toward which the eyes are directed is focused on the retina, forming there an image of the object. The light thus focused on the retina sets up a chemical change in the delicate nerve tissue; this excitation is transmitted through the optic nerve to the occipital (back) part of the brain, and sets up brain action there. Then we have visual sensation; we see the object. The different colors that we see are dependent upon the vibration frequency of the ether. The higher frequencies give us the colors blue and green, and the lower frequencies give us the colors yellow and red. The intermediate frequencies give us the intermediate colors blue-green and orange. By vibration frequencies is meant the rate at which the ether vibrates, the number of vibrations a second. If the reader wishes to know something about these frequencies, such information can be found in a textbook on physics. It will be found that the vibration rates of the ether are very great. It is only within a certain range of vibration frequency that sunlight affects the retina. Slower rates of vibration than that producing red do not affect the eye, and faster than that producing violet do not affect the eye. The lightness and darkness of a color are dependent upon the intensity of the vibration. Red, for example, is produced by a certain vibration frequency. The more intense the vibration, the brighter the red; the less intense, the darker the red. When all the vibration frequencies affect the eyes at the same time, we see no color at all but only brightness. This is due to the fact that certain vibration frequencies neutralize each other in their effect on the retina, so far as producing color is concerned. Red neutralizes green, blue neutralizes yellow, violet neutralizes yellowish green, orange neutralizes bluish green. All variations in vision as far as color and brightness are concerned are due to variations in the stimulus. Changes in vibration frequency give the different colors. Changes in intensity give the different brightnesses: black, gray, and white. All explanations of the many interesting phenomena of vision are to be sought in the physiological action of the eye. Besides the facts of color and light and shade, already mentioned, some further interesting visual phenomena may be mentioned here. _Visual Contrast._ Every color makes objects near it take on the antagonistic or complementary color. Red makes objects near appear green, green makes them appear red. Blue makes near objects appear yellow, while yellow makes them appear blue. Orange induces greenish blue, and greenish blue induces orange. Violet induces yellowish green, and yellowish green induces violet. These color-pairs are known as antagonistic or complementary colors. Each one of a pair enhances the effect of its complementary when the two colors are brought close together. In a similar way, light and dark tints act as complementaries. Light objects make dark objects near appear darker, and dark objects make light objects near seem lighter. These universal principles of contrast are of much practical significance. They must be taken account of in all arrangements of colors and tints, for example, in dress, in the arrangement of flowers and shrubs, in painting. _Color-Mixture._ If, on a rotating motor, disks of different colors--say red and yellow--are placed and rotated, one sees on looking at them not red or yellow but orange. This phenomenon is known as _color-mixture_. The result is due to the simultaneous stimulation of the retina by two kinds of ether vibration. If the colors used are a certain red and a certain green, they neutralize each other and produce only gray. All the pairs of complementary colors mentioned above act in the same way, producing, if mixed in the right proportion, no color, but gray. If colored disks not complementary are mixed by rotation on a motor, they produce an intermediate color. Red and yellow give orange. Blue and green give bluish green. Yellow and green give yellowish green. Red and blue give violet or purple, depending on the proportion. Mixing pigments gives, in general, the same results as mixing by means of rotating the disks. The ordinary blue and yellow pigments give green when mixed, because each of the two pigments contains green. The blue and yellow neutralize each other, leaving green. _Visual After-Images._ The stimulation of the retina has interesting after effects. We shall mention here only the one known as _negative after-images_. If one will place on the table a sheet of white paper, and on this white paper lay a small piece of colored paper, and if he will then gaze steadily at the colored paper for a half-minute, it will be found that if the colored paper is removed one sees its complementary color. If the head is not moved, this complementary color has the same size and shape as the original colored piece of paper. The negative after-image can be projected on a background at different distances, its size depending on the distance of the background. The after-image will be found to mix with an objective color in accordance with the principles of color-mixture mentioned above. After-image phenomena have some practical consequences. If one has been looking at a certain color for some time, a half-minute or more, then looks at some other color, the after-image of the first color mixes with the second color. _Adaptation._ The fact last mentioned leads us to the subject of adaptation. If the eyes are stimulated by the same kind of light for some time, the eyes become adapted to that light. If the light is yellow, at first objects seem yellow, but after a time they look as if they were illuminated with white light, losing the yellow aspect. But if one then goes out into white light, everything looks bluish. The negative after-image of the yellow being cast upon everything makes the surroundings look blue, for the after-image of yellow is blue. All the other colors act in a similar way, as do also black and white. If one has been for some time in a dark room and then goes out to a lighter place, it seems unusually light. And if one goes from the light to a dark room, it seems unusually dark. =Hearing or Audition.= Just as the eye is an organ sensitive to certain frequencies of ether vibration, so the ear is an organ sensitive to certain air vibrations. The reader should familiarize himself with the physiology of the ear by reference to physiologies. The drum-skin, the three little bones of the middle ear, and the cochlea of the inner ear are all merely mechanical means of making possible the stimulation of the specialized endings of the auditory nerve by vibrations of air. As the different colors are due to different vibration frequencies of the ether, so different pitches of sound are due to differences in the rates of the air vibrations. The low bass notes are produced by the low vibration frequencies. The high notes are produced by the high vibration frequencies. The lowest notes that we can hear are produced by about twenty vibrations a second, and the highest by about forty thousand vibrations a second. =Other Sense Organs.= We need not give a detailed statement of the facts concerning the other senses. In each case the sense organ is some special adaptation of the nerve-endings with appropriate apparatus in connection to enable it to be affected by some special thing or force in the environment. In the case of taste, we find in the mouth, chiefly on the back and edges of the tongue, organs sensitive to sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. In the nose we have an organ that is sensitive to the tiny particles of substances that float in the air which we breathe in through the nose. In the skin we find several kinds of sense organs that give us the sensations of cold and warmth, of pressure and pain. These are all special and definite sensations produced by different kinds of organs. The sense of warmth is produced by different organs from those which produce the sense of cold. These organs can be detected and localized on the skin. So, also, pain and touch or pressure have each its particular organ. Within the body itself we have sense organs also, particularly in the joints and tendons and in the muscles. These give us the sensations which are the basis of our perception of motion, and of the position of the body and its members. In the semicircular canals of the inner ear are organs that give us the sense of dizziness, and enable us to maintain our equilibrium and to know up from down. The general nature of the sense organs and of sensation should now be apparent. The nervous system reaches out its myriad fingers to every portion of the surface of the body, and within the body as well. These nerve-endings are specially adapted to receive each its particular form of stimulation. This stimulation of our sense organs is the basis or cause of our sensations. And our sensations are the elementary stuff of all our experience. Whatever thoughts we have, whatever ideas or images we have, they come originally from our sensations. They are built up out of our sensations or from these sensations as they exist in memory. =Defects of Sense Organs.= The organs of sight and hearing are now by far the most important of our sense organs. They enable us to sense things that are at a distance. We shall therefore discuss defects of these two organs only. Since sensations are the primary stuff out of which mind is made, and since sight and hearing are the most important sense organs, it is evident that our lives are very much dependent on these organs. If they cannot do their work well, then we are handicapped. And this is often the case. The making of the human eye is one of the most remarkable achievements of nature. But the making of a perfect eye is too big a task for nature. She never makes a perfect eye. There is always some defect, large or small. To take plastic material and make lenses and shutters and curtains is a great task. The curvature of the front of the eye and of the front and back of the crystalline lens is never quite perfect, but in the majority of cases it is nearly enough perfect to give us good vision. However, in about one third of school children the defect is great enough to need to be corrected by glasses. The principle of the correction of sight by means of glasses is merely this:[1] When the focusing apparatus of the eye is not perfect, it can be made so by putting in front of the eye the proper kind of lens. There is nothing strange or mysterious about it. In some cases, the eye focuses the light before it reaches the retina. Such cases are known as nearsightedness and are corrected by having placed in front of the eyes concave lenses of the proper strength. These lenses diverge the rays and make them focus on the retina. In other cases, the eye is not able to focus the rays by the time they reach the retina. In these cases, the eyes need the help of convex lenses of the proper strength to make the focus fall exactly on the retina. [1] The teacher should explain these principles and illustrate by drawings. Consult a good text in physiology. Noyes' University of Missouri Extension Bulletin on eye and ear defects will be found most useful. Another defect of the eye, known as astigmatism, is due to the fact that the eye does not always have a perfectly spherical front (cornea). The curvature in one direction is different from that in others. For example, the vertical curvature may be more convex than the horizontal. Such a condition produces a serious defect of vision. It can be corrected by means of cylindrical lenses of the proper strength so placed before the eye as to correct the defect in curvature. Still another defect of vision is known as presbyopia or farsightedness due to old age. It has the following explanation: In early life, when we look at near objects, the crystalline lens automatically becomes thicker, more convex. This adjustment brings the rays to a focus on the retina, which is required for good vision. As we get old, the crystalline lens loses its power to change its adjustment for near objects, although the eye may see at a distance as well as ever. The old person, therefore, must wear convex glasses when looking at near objects, as in reading and sewing. Another visual defect of a different nature is known as partial color blindness. The defects described above are due to misshapen eyes. Partial color blindness is due to a defect of the retina which makes it unable to be affected by light waves producing red and green. A person with this defect confuses red and green. While only a small percentage of the population has this defect, it is nevertheless very important that those having it be detected. People having the defect should not be allowed to enter occupations in which the seeing of red and green is important. It was recently brought to the author's attention that a partially color-blind man was selling stamps in a post office. Since two denominations of stamps are distinguished by red and green colors, this man made frequent mistakes. He was doing one of the things for which he was specially unfitted. It is easy to detect color blindness by simple tests. So great is the importance of good vision in school work and the later work of life, that every teacher should know how to make simple tests to determine visual defects. Children showing any symptoms of eyestrain should be required to have their visual defects corrected by a competent oculist, and should be warned not to have the correction made by a quack. There is great popular ignorance and even prejudice concerning visual defects, and it is very important that teachers have a clear understanding of the facts. =Defects of Hearing.= Hearing defects are only about half as frequent as those of sight. They are nearly all due to catarrhal infection of the middle ear through the Eustachian tube. The careful and frequent medical examination of school children cannot, therefore, be too strongly emphasized. The deafness or partial deafness that comes from this catarrhal infection can seldom be cured; it must be prevented by the early treatment of the troubles which cause it. SUMMARY. The mind is closely related to the body. Especially is it dependent upon the brain, nerves, and sense organs. The sense organs are special adaptations of the nerve-ends for receiving impressions. Each sense organ receives only its particular type of impression. The main visual phenomena are those of color-mixture, after-images, adaptation, and contrast. Since sensation is the basis of mental life, defects of the sense organs are serious handicaps and should be corrected if possible. Visual defects are usually due to a misshapen eyeball and can be corrected by proper glasses, which should be fitted by an oculist. Hearing defects usually arise from catarrhal trouble in the middle ear. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Make a study of the relation of the mind to the body. Enumerate the different lines of evidence which you may find indicating their close relationship. 2. Can you find any evidence tending to show that the mind is independent of the body? 3. _Color-Mixture._ Colored disks can be procured from C. H. Stoelting Company, Chicago. If a small motor is available, the disks can be rotated on the motor and the colors mixed. Mix pairs of complementary colors, also pairs of non-complementary colors, and note the result. A simple device can be made for mixing colors, as follows: On a board stand a pane of glass. On one side of the glass put a colored paper and on the other side of the glass put a different color. By looking through the glass you can see one color through transmitted light and the other color through reflected light. By inclining the glass at different angles you can get different proportions of the mixture, now more of one color, now more of the other. 4. _Negative After-Images._ Cut out pieces of colored paper a half inch square. Put one of these on a white background on the table. With elbows on the table, hold the head in the hands and gaze at the colored paper for about a half-minute, then blow the paper away and continue to gaze at the white background. Note the color that appears. Use different colors and tabulate the results. Try projecting the after-images at different distances. Project the after-images on different colored papers. Do the after-images mix with the colors of the papers? 5. An interesting experiment with positive after-images can be performed as follows: Shut yourself in a dark closet for fifteen or twenty minutes to remove all trace of stimulation of the retina. With the eyes covered with several folds of thick black cloth go to a window, uncover the eyes and take a momentary look at the landscape, immediately covering the eyes again. The landscape will appear as a positive after-image, with the positive colors and lights and shades. The experiment is best performed on a bright day. 6. _Adaptation._ Put on colored glasses or hold before the eyes a large piece of colored glass. Note that at first everything takes on the color of the glass. What change comes over objects after the glasses have been worn for fifteen or twenty minutes? Describe your experience after removing the glasses. Plan and perform other experiments showing adaptation. For illustration, go from a very bright room into a dark room. Go from a very dark room to a light one. Describe your experience. 7. _Contrast._ Take a medium gray paper and lay it on white and various shades of gray and black paper. Describe and explain what you find. 8. _Color Contrast._ Darken a room by covering all the windows except one window pane. Cover it with cardboard. In the cardboard cut two windows six inches long and one inch wide. Over one window put colored glass or any other colored material through which some light will pass. By holding up a pencil you can cast two shadows on a piece of paper. What color are the shadows? One is a contrast color induced by the other; which one? Explain the results. 9. Make a study of the way in which women dress. What do you learn about color effects? 10. From the Stoelting Company you can obtain the Holmgren worsteds for studying color blindness. 11. _Defective Vision._ Procure a Snellen's test chart and determine the visual acuity of the members of the class. Seat the subject twenty feet from the chart, which should be placed in a good light. While testing one eye, cover the other with a piece of cardboard. Above each row of letters on the chart is a number which indicates the distance at which it can be read by a normal eye. If the subject can read only the thirty-foot line, his vision is said to be 20/30; if only the forty-foot line, the vision is 20/40. If the subject can read above the twenty-foot line and complains of headache from reading, farsightedness is indicated. If the subject cannot read up to the twenty-foot line, nearsightedness or astigmatism is indicated. 12. _Hearing._ By consultation with the teacher of physics, plan an experiment to show that the pitch of tones depends on vibration frequency. Such an experiment can be very simply performed by rotating a wheel having spokes. Hold a light stick against the spokes so that it strikes each spoke. If the wheel is rotated so as to give twenty or thirty strokes a second, a very low tone will be heard. By rotating the wheel faster you get a higher tone. Other similar experiments can be performed. 13. Acuity of hearing can be tested by finding the distance at which the various members of the class can hear a watch-tick. The teacher can plan an experiment using whispering instead of the watch-tick. (See the author's _Examination of School Children_.) 14. By using the point of a nail, one can find the "cold spots" on the skin. Warm the nail to about 40 degrees Centigrade and you can find the "warm spots." 15. By touching the hairs on the back of the hand, you can stimulate the "pressure spots." 16. By pricking the skin with the point of a needle, you can stimulate the "pain spots." 17. The sense of taste is sensitive only to solutions that are sweet, sour, salt, or bitter. Plan experiments to verify this point. What we call the "taste" of many things is due chiefly to odor. Therefore in experiments with taste, the nostrils should be stopped up with cotton. It will be found, for example, that quinine and coffee are indistinguishable if their odors be eliminated by stopping the nose. The student should compare the taste of many substances put into the mouth with the nostrils open with the taste of the same substances with the nostrils closed. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN AND BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapters VII and XII. MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, Chapters III, IV, VI, and VII. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapters II, III, and IV. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapter II. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapter I, par. 3; also Chapter II. CHAPTER IV INHERITED TENDENCIES =Stimulus and Response.= We have learned something about the sense organs and their functions. We have seen that it is through the sense organs that the world affects us, stimulates us. And we have said that we are stimulated in order that we may respond. We must now inquire into the nature of our responses. We are moving, active beings. But how do we move, how do we act when stimulated? Why do we do one thing rather than another? Why do we do one thing at one time and a different thing at another time? Before we answer these questions it will be necessary for us to get a more definite and complete idea of the nature of stimulus and response. We have already used these terms, but we must now give a more definite account of them. It was said in the preceding chapter that when a muscle contracts, it must first receive a nerve-impulse. Now, anything which starts this nerve-impulse is called the stimulus. The muscular movement which follows is, of course, the response. The nervous system forms the connection between the stimulus and response. The stimulus which brings about a response may be very simple. Or, on the other hand, it may be very complex. If one blows upon the eyelids of a baby, the lids automatically close. The blowing is the stimulus and the closing of the lids is the response. Both stimulus and response are here very simple. But sometimes the stimulus is more complex, not merely the simple excitation of one sense organ, but a complicated stimulation of an organ, or the simultaneous stimulation of several organs. In playing ball, the stimulus for the batter is the on-coming ball. The response is the stroke. This case is much more complex than the reflex closing of the eyelids. The ball may be pitched in many different ways and the response changes with these variations. In piano playing, the stimulus is the notes written in their particular places on the staff. Not only must the position of the notes on the staff be taken into account, but also many other things, such as sharps and flats, and various characters which give directions as to the manner in which the music is to be played. The striking of the notes in the proper order, in the proper time, and with the proper force, is the response. In typewriting, the stimulus is the copy, or the idea of what is to be written, and the response is the striking of the keys in the proper order. Speaking generally, we may say that the stimulus is the force or forces which excite the sense organs, and thereby, through the nervous system, bring about a muscular response. This is the ordinary type of action, but we have already indicated a different type. In speaking of typewriting we said the stimulus might be either the copy or ideas. One can write from copy or dictation, in which the stimulus is the written or spoken word, but one can also write as one thinks of what one wishes to write. The latter is known as _centrally initiated action_. That is to say, the stimulus comes from within, in the brain, rather than from without. Let us explain this kind of stimulation a little further. Suppose I am sitting in my chair reading. I finish a chapter and look at my watch. I notice that it is three o'clock, and recall that I was to meet a friend at that time. The stimulus in this case is in the brain itself; it is the nervous activity which corresponds to the idea of meeting my friend. If we disregard the distinction between mind and body, we may say that the stimulus for a response may be an idea as well as a perception, the perception arising from the immediate stimulation of a sense organ, and the idea arising from an excitation of the brain not caused by an immediate stimulation of a sense organ. =Instincts and Habits.= In human action it is evident that there is always a stimulus to start the nerve-impulse which causes the action. If we make inquiry concerning the connection between the stimulus and response; if we ask how it has come about that a particular stimulus causes a particular response rather than some other possible response, we find two kinds of causes. In one case the causal connection is established through heredity; in the other, the causal connection is established during a person's lifetime through training. A chicken, for example, hides under some cover the first time it hears the cry of a hawk; it scratches the first time its feet touch sand or gravel; it pecks the first time it sees an insect near by. An infant closes its eyes the first time it feels cold wind blow upon them; it cries the first time it feels pain; it clasps its fingers together the first time a touch is felt inside them. The child's nervous system is so organized that, in each of the cases named, the stimulus brings forth the particular, definite response. These acts do not have to be learned. But it is quite different in typewriting and piano playing. One _must learn_ what keys on the piano to strike in response to the various situations of the notes as written in the music. One must also learn the keys on the typewriter before he can operate a typewriter. And in the case of other habits, we find, for example, that one does not respond by saying "81" for 9 times 9; nor "13" for 6 plus 7; nor "8" for 15 minus 7; nor "8" for the square root of 64; nor "144" for the square of 12, etc., until one has learned in each case. Some connections between stimulus and response we have through inheritance; all others are built up and established in one's lifetime, particularly in the first thirty years of one's life. We have spoken of bonds between stimulus and response, but have not explained just what can be meant by a _bond_. In what sense are stimulus and response bound together? A bond is a matter of greater permeability, of less resistance in one direction through the nervous system than in other directions. Nerves are conductors for nerve-currents. When a nerve-current is started in a sense organ, it passes on through the path of least resistance. Now, some nerves are so organized and connected through inheritance as to offer small resistance. This forms a ready-made connection between stimulus and response. Muscular responses that are connected with their stimuli through inherited bonds, by inherited nerve structure, are called instincts. Those that are connected by acquired bonds are called habits. Sucking, crying, laughing, are instinctive acts. Adding, typewriting, piano playing, are habits. The term _instinct_ may be given to the act depending upon inherited structure, an inherited bond, or it may be given to the inherited bond itself. Similarly, the term _habit_ may be given to an act that we have had to learn or to the bond which we ourselves establish between response and stimulus. In this book we shall usually mean by instinct an action depending upon inherited structure and by habit an act depending upon a bond established during lifetime. A good part of our early lives is spent in building up bonds between stimuli and responses. This establishing of bonds or connections is called _learning_. =Appearance of Inherited Tendencies.= Not all of our inherited tendencies are manifested immediately after birth, nor indeed in the earliest years of childhood, but appear at different stages of the child's growth. It has already been said that a child, soon after birth, will close its eyelids when they are blown upon. The lids do not close at this time if one strikes at them, but they will do this later. The proper working of an instinct or an inherited tendency, then, depends upon the child's having reached a certain state of development. The maturing of an instinct depends upon both age and use, that is to say, upon the age of the animal and the amount of use or exercise that the instinctive activity has had. The most important factor, however, seems to be age. While our knowledge of the dependence of an instinct upon the age of the animal is not quite so definite in the case of human instincts, the matter has been worked out in the case of chickens. The experiment was as follows: Chickens were taken at the time of hatching, and some allowed to peck from the first, while others were kept in a dark room and not allowed to peck. When the chickens were taken out of the dark room at the end of one, two, three, and four days, it was found that in a few hours they were pecking as well as those that had been pecking from birth. It seems probable, if we may judge from our limited knowledge, that in the human child, activities are for the most part dependent upon the age of the child, and upon the state of development of the nervous system and of the organs of the body. =Significance of Inherited Tendencies.= Although human nature is very complex, although human action nearly always has some element of habit in it, nevertheless, inborn tendencies are throughout life powerful factors in determining action. This will at once be apparent if we consider how greatly we are influenced by anger, jealousy, love, fear, and competition. Now we do not have to learn to be jealous, to hate, to love, to be envious, to fight, or to fear. These are emotions common to all members of the human race, and their expression is an inborn tendency. Throughout life no other influences are so powerful in determining our action as are these. So, although most of our detailed actions in life are habits which we learn or acquire, the fundamental influences which decide the course of our action are inherited tendencies. =Classification of Instincts.= For convenience in treatment the instincts are grouped in classes. Those instincts most closely related to individual survival are called _individualistic_ instincts. Those more closely related to the survival of the group are called _socialistic_. Those individualistic tendencies growing out of periodic changes of the environment may be called _environmental_ instincts. Those closely related to human infancy, adapting and adjusting the child to the world in which he lives, may be called _adaptive_. There is still another group of inherited tendencies connected with sex and reproduction, which are not discussed in this book. We shall give a brief discussion of the instincts falling under these various classes. It must be remembered, however, that the psychology of the instincts is indefinite and obscure. It is difficult to bring the instincts into the laboratory for accurate study. For our knowledge of the instincts we are dependent, for the most part, on general observation. We have had a few careful studies of the very earliest years of childhood. However, although from the theoretical point of view our knowledge of the instincts is incomplete, it is sufficient to be of considerable practical value. =The Individualistic Instincts.= Man's civilized life has covered but a short period of time, only a few hundred or a few thousand years. His pre-civilized life doubtless covered a period of millions of years. The inborn tendencies in us are such as were developed in the long period of savage life. During all of man's life in the time before civilization, he was always in danger. He had many enemies, and most of these enemies had the advantage of him in strength and natural means of defense. Unaided by weapons, he could hardly hold his own against any of the beasts of prey. So there were developed in man by the process of natural selection many inherited responses which we group under the head of _fear_ responses. Just what the various situations are that bring forth these responses has never been carefully worked out. But any situation that suddenly puts an individual in danger of losing his life brings about characteristic reactions. The most characteristic of the responses are shown in connection with circulation and respiration. Both of these processes are much interfered with. Sometimes the action is accelerated, at other times it is retarded, and in some cases the respiratory and circulatory organs are almost paralyzed. Also the small muscles of the skin are made to contract, producing the sensation of the hair standing on end. Just what the original use of all these responses was it is difficult now to work out, but doubtless each served some useful purpose. Whether any particular situations now call forth inherited fear responses in us is not definitely established. But among lower animals there are certain definite and particular situations which do call forth fear responses. On the whole, the evidence rather favors the idea of definite fear situations among children. It seems that certain situations do invariably arouse fear responses. To be alone in the dark, to be in a strange place, to hear loud and sudden noises, to see large, strange animals coming in threatening manner, seem universally to call forth fear responses in children. However, the whole situation must always be considered. A situation in which the father or mother is present is quite different from one in which they are both absent. But it is certain that these and other fears are closely related to the age and development of the child. In the earlier years of infancy, certain fears are not present that are present later. And it can be demonstrated that the fears that do arise as infancy passes on are natural and inherited and not the result of experience. Few of the original causes of fear now exist. The original danger was from wild animals chiefly. Seldom are we now in such danger. But of course this has been the case for only a short time. Our bodies are the same sort of bodies that our ancestors had, therefore we are full of needless fears. During the early years of a child's life, wise treatment causes most of the fear tendencies to disappear because of disuse. On the other hand, unwise treatment may accentuate and perpetuate them, causing much misery and unhappiness. Neither the home nor the school should play upon these ancestral fears. We should not try to get a child to be good by frightening him; nor should we often use fear of pain as an incentive to get a child to do his work. Man has always been afraid, but he has also always been a fighter. He has always had to fight for his life against the lower animals, and he has also fought his fellow man. The fighting response is connected with the emotions of anger, envy, and jealousy. A man is angered by anything that interferes with his life, with his purposes, with whatever he calls his own. We become angry if some one strikes our bodies, or attacks our beliefs, or the beliefs of our dear friends, particularly of our families. The typical responses connected with anger are such as faster heart-beat, irregular breathing, congestion of the blood in the face and head, tightening of the voluntary muscles, particularly a setting of the teeth and a clinching of the fists. These responses are preparatory to actual combat. Anger, envy, and jealousy, and the responses growing out of them, have always played a large part in the life of man. A great part of history is a record of the fights of nations, tribes, and individuals. If the records of wars and strifes, and the acts growing out of envy and jealousy and other similar emotions should be taken out of history, there would not be much left. Much of literature and art depict those actions of man which grew out of these individualistic aspects of his nature. Competition, which is an aspect of fighting, even to the present day, continues to be one of the main factors in business and in life generally. Briefly, fighting responses growing out of man's selfishness are as old as man himself, and the inherited tendencies connected with them are among the strongest of our natures. In the training of children, one of the most difficult tasks is to help them to get control over the fighting instinct and other selfish tendencies. These tendencies are so deeply rooted in our natures that it is hard to get control of them. In fact, the control which we do get over them is always relative. The best we can hope to do is to get control over our fighting tendencies in ordinary circumstances. It is doubtful whether it would be good for us if the fighting spirit should disappear from the race. It puts vim and determination into the life of man. But our fighting should not be directed against our fellow man. The fighting spirit can be retained and directed against evil and other obstacles. We can learn to attack our tasks in a fighting spirit. But surely the time has come when we should cease fighting against our neighbors. =Social Tendencies.= Over against our fighting tendencies we may set the socialistic tendencies. Coöperative and sympathetic actions grow out of original nature, just as truly as do the selfish acts. But the socialistic tendencies are not, in general, as strong as are the individualistic ones. What society needs is the strengthening of the socialistic tendencies by use, and a weakening of at least some of the individualistic tendencies, by control and disuse. Socialistic tendencies show themselves in gangs and clubs formed by children and adults. It is, therefore, a common practice now to speak of the "gang" instinct. Human beings are pleased and content when with other human beings and not content, not satisfied, when alone. Of course circumstances make a difference in the desires of men, but the general original tendency is as stated. The gang of the modern city has the following explanation: Boys like to be with other boys. Moreover, they like to be active; they want to be doing something. The city does not provide proper means for the desired activities, such as hunting, fishing, tramping, and boating. It does not provide experiences with animals, such as boys have on the farm. Much of the boy's day is spent in school in a kind of work not at all like what he would do by choice. There is not much home life. Usually there is not the proper parental control. Seldom do the parents interest themselves in planning for the activities of their children. The result is that the boys come together on the streets and form a club or gang. Through this organization the boy's nature expresses itself. Without proper guidance from older people, this expression takes a direction not good for the future character and usefulness of the boy. The social life of children should be provided for by the school in coöperation with the home. The school or the schoolroom should constitute a social unit. The teacher with the parents should plan the social life of the children. The actual work of the school can be very much socialized. There can be much more coöperation and much more group work can be done in the school than is the case at present. And many other social activities can be organized in connection with the school and its work. Excursions, pageants, shows, picnics, and all sorts of activities should be undertaken. The schoolhouse should be used by the community as the place for many of its social acts and performances. Almost every night, and throughout the summer as well as in the winter, the people, young and old, should meet at the school for some sort of social work or play. The Boy Scouts should be brought under the control of the school to help fulfill some of its main purposes. =Environmental Instincts.= In this class there are at least two tendencies which seem to be part of the original nature of man; namely, the _wandering_ and the _collecting_ tendencies. _Wandering._ The long life that our ancestors lived free and unrestrained in the woods has left its effect within us. One of the greatest achievements of civilization has been to overcome the inherited tendencies to roam and wander, to the extent that for the most part we live out our lives in one home, in one family, doing often but one kind of work all our lives. Originally, man had much more freedom to come and go and do whatever he wished. Truancies and runaways are the result of original tendencies and desires expressing themselves in spite of training, perhaps sometimes because of the lack of training. In childhood and youth these original tendencies should, to some extent, be satisfied in legitimate ways. Excursions and picnics can be planned both for work and for play. If the child's desires and needs can be satisfied in legitimate ways, then he will not have to satisfy them illegitimately. The teaching itself can be done better by following, to some extent, the lead of the child's nature. Much early education consists in learning the world. Now, most of the world is out of doors and the child must go out to find it. The teacher should make use of the natural desires of the children to wander and explore, as a means of educating them. The school work should be of such a nature that much outdoor work will need to be done. _Collecting._ It is in the nature of children to seize and, if possible, carry away whatever attracts attention. This tendency is the basis of what is called the collecting instinct. If one will take a walk with a child, one can observe the operation of the collecting tendency, particularly if the walk is in the fields and woods. The child will be observed to take leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, nuts, pebbles, and in fact everything that is loose or can be gotten loose. They are taken at first aimlessly, merely because they attract attention. The original, natural response of the child toward that which attracts attention is usually to get it, get possession of it and take it along. It is easy to see why such tendencies were developed in man. In his savage state it was highly useful for him to do this. He must always have been on the lookout for things which could be used as food or as weapons. He had to do this to live. But one need not take a child to the woods to observe this tendency. One can go to the stores. Till a child is trained not to do it, he seizes and takes whatever attracts attention. Just as the wandering tendencies can be used for the benefit of the child, so can the collecting tendencies. Not only should the children make expeditions to learn of the world, but specimens should be collected so that they can be used to form a museum at the school which will represent the surrounding locality. Geological, geographical, botanical, and zoölogical specimens should be collected. The children will learn much while making the collections, and much from the collections after they are made. "Education could profit greatly by making large demands upon the collecting instinct. It seems clear that in their childhood is the time when children should be sent forth to the fields and woods, to study what they find there and to gather specimens. The children can form naturalists' clubs for the purpose of studying the natural environment. Such study should embrace rocks, soils, plants, leaves, flowers, fruits, and specimens of the wood of the various trees. Birds and insects can be studied and collected. The work of such a club would have a twofold value. (1) The study and collecting acquaint the child with his natural environment, and in doing it, afford a sphere for the activity of many aspects of his nature. They take him out of doors and give an opportunity for exploring every nook and corner of the natural environment. The collecting can often be done in such a way as to appeal to the group instincts. For example, the club could hold meetings for exhibiting and studying the specimens, and sometimes the actual collecting could be done in groups. (2) The specimens collected should be put into the school museum, and the aim of this museum should be to represent completely the local environment, the natural and physical environment, and also the industrial, civil, and social environment. The museum should be completely illustrative of the child's natural, physical, and social surroundings. The museum would therefore be educative in its making, and when it is made, it would have immense value to the community, not only to the children but to all the people. In this museum, of course, should be found the minerals, rocks, soils, insects,--particularly those of economic importance,--birds, and also specimens of the wild animals of the locality. If proper appeal is made to the natural desire of the children, this instinct would soon be made of service in producing a very valuable collection. The school museum in which these specimens are placed should also include other classes of specimens. There should be specimens showing industrial evolution, the stages of manufacture of raw material, specimens of local historical interest, pictures, documents, books. The museum should be made of such a nature that parents would go there nearly as often as the children. The school should be for the instruction of all the people of the community. It should be the experiment station, the library, the debating club, the art gallery for the whole community."[2] [2] Pyle's _Outlines of Educational Psychology_, pp. 84-86. =Imitation.= One of the fundamental original traits of human nature is the tendency to imitate. Imitation is not instinctive in the strict meaning of the word. Seeing a certain act performed does not, apart from training and experience, serve as a stimulus to make a child perform a similar act. Hearing a certain sound does not serve as a stimulus for the production of the same sound. Nevertheless, there is in the human child a tendency or desire to do what it sees others doing. A few hours spent in observing children ought to convince any one of the universality and of the strength of this tendency. As our experience becomes organized, the idea of an act usually serves as the stimulus to call it forth. However, this is not because the idea of an act, of necessity, always produces the act. It is merely a matter of the stimulus and the response _becoming connected in that way_ as the result of experience. Our meaning is that an act can be touched off or prompted by any stimulus. Our nervous organization makes this possible. The particular stimulus that calls forth a particular response depends upon how we have been trained, how we have learned. In most cases our acts are coupled up with the ideas of the acts. We learn them that way. In early life particularly, the connection between stimulus and response is very close. When a child gets the idea of an act, he immediately performs the act, if he knows how. Now, seeing another perform an act brings the act clearly into the child's consciousness, and he proceeds to perform it. But the act must be one which the child already knows how to perform, otherwise his performance of it will be faulty and incomplete. If he has never performed the particular act, seeing another perform the act sets him to trying to do it and he may soon learn it. If he successfully performs an act when he sees it done by another, the act must be one which he already knows how to perform, and for whose performance the idea has already served as a stimulus. Now if imitation were instinctive in the strict sense, one could perform the act for the first time merely from seeing another do it, without any previous experience or learning. It is doubtful whether there are any such inherited connections. It is, however, true that human beings are of such a nature that, particularly in early life, they _like_ to do and _want_ to do what they see others doing. This is one of the most important aspects of human nature, as we shall see. =Function and Importance of Imitation in Life.= Natural selection has developed few aspects of human nature so important for survival as the tendency to imitate, for this tendency quickly leads to a successful adjustment of the child to the world in which he lives. Adult men and women are successfully adjusted to their environment. Their adjustment might be better, but it is good enough to keep them alive for a time. Now, if children do as they see their parents doing, they will reach a satisfactory adjustment. We may, therefore, say that the tendency to imitate serves to adjust the child to his environment. It is for this reason that imitation has been called an _adaptive instinct_. It would perhaps be better to say merely that the _tendency_ to imitate is part of the _original equipment of man_. Imitation is distinctively a human trait. While it occurs in lower animals it is probably not an important factor in adjusting them to their environment. But in the human race it is one of the chief factors in adjustment to environment. Imitation is one of the main factors in education. Usually the quickest way to teach a child to do a thing is to show him how. Through imitation we acquire our language, manners, and customs. Ideals, beliefs, prejudices, attitudes, we take on through imitation. The tendency to imitate others coupled with the desire to be thought well of by others is one of the most powerful factors in producing conformity. They are the whips which keep us within the bounds of custom and conventionality. The tendency to imitate is so strong that its results are almost as certain as are those of inherited tendencies. It is almost as certain that a child will be like his parents in speech, manners, customs, superstitions, etc., as it is that he will be like them in form of body. He not only walks and talks and acts like his parents, but he thinks as they do. We, therefore, have the term _social heredity_, meaning the taking on of all sorts of social habits and ideals through imitation. The part that imitation plays in the education of a child may be learned by going to a country home and noting how the boy learns to do all the many things about the farm by imitating his father, and how the girl learns to do all the housework by imitating her mother. Imitation is the basis of much of the play of children, in that their play consists in large part of doing what they see older people doing. This imitative play gives them skill and is a large factor in preparing for the work of life. =Dramatization.= Dramatization is an aspect of imitation, and is a means of making ideas more real than they would otherwise be. There is nothing that leads us so close to reality as action. We never completely know an act till we have done it. Dramatization is a matter of carrying an idea out into action. Ideas give to action its greatest fullness of meaning. Dramatic representation should, therefore, have a prominent place in the schools, particularly in the lower grades. If the child is allowed to mimic the characters in the reading lesson, the meaning of the lesson becomes fuller. Later on in the school course, dramatic representation of the characters in literature and history is a means of getting a better conception of these characters. In geography, the study of the manners and customs and occupations of foreign peoples can be much facilitated through dramatic representation. Children naturally have the dramatic tendency; it is one aspect of the tendency to imitate. We have only to encourage it and make use of it throughout the school course. =Imitation in Ideals.= Imitation is of importance not only in acquiring the actions of life but also in getting our ideals. Habits of thinking are no less an aspect of our lives than are habits of acting. Our attitudes, our prejudices, our beliefs, our moral, religious, and political ideals are in large measure copied from people about us. The family and social atmosphere in which one lives is a mold in which one's mind is formed and shaped. We cannot escape the influence of this atmosphere if we would. One takes on a belief that his father has, one clings to this belief and interprets the world in the light of it. This belief becomes a part of one's nature. It is a mental habit, a way of looking at the world. It is as much a part of one as red hair or big feet or a crooked nose. Probably no other influence has so much to do with making us what we are as social beings as the influence of imitation. =Play.= Play is usually considered to be a part of the original equipment of man. It is essentially an expression of the ripening instincts of children, and not a specific instinct itself. It is rather a sort of make-believe activity of all the instincts. Kittens and dogs may be seen in play to mimic fighting. They bite and chew each other as in real fighting, but still they are not fighting. As the structures and organs of children mature, they demand activity. This early activity is called play. It has several characteristics. The main one is that it is pleasurable. Play activity is pleasurable in itself. We do not play that we may get something else which we like, as is the case with the activity which we call work. Play is an end in itself. It is not a means to get something else which is intrinsically valuable. One of the chief values of play comes from its activity aspect. We are essentially motor beings. We grow and develop only through exercise. In early life we do not have to exert ourselves to get a living. Play is nature's means of giving our organs the exercise which they must have to bring them to maturity. Play is an expression of the universal tendency to action in early life. Without play, the child would not develop, would not become a normal human being. All day long the child is ceaselessly active. The value of this activity can hardly be overestimated. It not only leads to healthy growth, but is a means through which the child learns himself and the world. Everything that the child sees excites him to react to it or upon it. He gets possession of it. He bites it. He pounds it. He throws it. In this way he learns the properties of things and the characteristics of forces. Through play and imitation, in a very few years the child comes to a successful adjustment in his world. Play and imitation are the great avenues of activity in early life. Even in later life, we seldom accomplish anything great or worth while until the thing becomes play to us, until we throw our whole being into it as we do in play, until it is an expression of ourselves as play is in our childhood. The proper use of play gives us the solution of many of the problems of early education. Play has two functions in the school: (1) Motor play is necessary to growth, development, and health. The constant activity of the child is what brings about healthy growth. In the country it is not difficult for children to get plenty of the proper kind of exercise, but in the larger cities it is difficult. Nevertheless, opportunity for play should be provided for every child, no matter what the trouble or expense, for without play children cannot become normal human beings. Everywhere parents and teachers should plan for the play life of the children. (2) In the primary grades play can have a large place in the actual work of the school. The early work of education is to a large extent getting the tools of knowledge and thought and work--reading, spelling, writing, correct speech, correct writing, the elementary processes of arithmetic, etc. In many ways play can be used in acquiring these tools. One aspect of play particularly should have a large place in education; namely, the manipulative tendencies of children. This is essentially play. Children wish to handle and manipulate everything that attracts their attention. They wish to tear it to pieces and to put it together. This is nature's way of teaching, and by it children learn the properties and structures of things. They thereby learn what things do and what can be done with them. Teachers and parents should foster these manipulative tendencies and use them for the child's good. These tendencies are an aspect of curiosity. We want to know. We are unhappy as long as a thing is before us which we do not understand, which has some mystery about it. Nature has developed these tendencies in us, for without a knowledge of our surroundings we could not live. The child therefore has in his nature the basis of his education. We have but to know this nature and wisely use and manipulate it to achieve the child's education. SUMMARY. Instincts are inherited tendencies to specific actions. They fall under the heads: individualistic, socialistic, environmental, adaptive, sexual or mating instincts. These inherited tendencies are to a large extent the foundation on which we build education. The educational problem is to control and guide them, suppressing some, fostering others. In everything we undertake for a child we must take into account these instincts. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Make a study of the instincts of several animals, such as dogs, cats, chickens. Make a list showing the stimuli and the inherited responses. 2. Make a study of the instincts of a baby. See how many inherited responses you can observe. The simpler inherited responses are known as _reflexes_. The closing of the eyelids mentioned in the text is an example. How many such reflexes can you find in a child? 3. Make a special study of the fears of very young children. How many definite situations can you find which excite fear responses in all children? Each member of the class can make a list of his own fears. It may then be seen whether any fears are common to all members of the class and whether there are any sex differences. 4. Similarly, make a study of anger and fighting. What situations invariably arouse the fighting response? In what definite, inherited ways is anger shown? Do your studies and observations convince you that the fighting instinct and other inherited responses concerned with individual survival are among the strongest of inherited tendencies? Can the fighting instinct be eliminated from the human race? Is it desirable to eliminate it? 5. Make a study of children's collections. Take one of the grades and find what collections the children have made. What different objects are collected? 6. Outline a plan for using the collecting instinct in various school studies. 7. With the help of the principal of the school make a study of some specific cases of truancy. What does your finding show? 8. Make a study of play by watching children of various ages play. Make a list of the games that are universal for infancy, those for childhood, and those for youth. (Consult Johnson's _Plays and Games_.) 9. What are the two main functions of play in education? Why should we play after we are mature? 10. Study imitation in very young children. Do this by watching the spontaneous play of children under six. What evidences of imitation do you find? 11. Outline the things we learn by imitation. What is your opinion of the place which imitation has in our education? 12. Make a study of imitation as a factor in the lives of grown people. Consider styles, fashions, manners, customs, beliefs, prejudices, religious ideas, etc. 13. On the whole, is imitation a good thing or a bad thing? 14. Make a plan of the various ways in which dramatization can be profitably used in the schools. 15. Make a study of your own ideals. What ideals do you have? Where did you get them? What ideals did you get from your parents? What from books? What from teachers? What from friends? 16. Show that throughout life inherited tendencies are the fundamental bases from which our actions proceed, on which our lives are erected. 17. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN and BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapters III, VIII, IX, and X. KIRKPATRICK: _Fundamentals of Child Study_, Chapters IV-XIII. MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, pp. 184-187. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapter X. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapters IV-IX. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapter VIII. CHAPTER V FEELING AND ATTENTION =The Feelings.= Related to the instincts on one side and to habits on the other are the feelings. In Chapter III we discussed sensation, and in the preceding chapter, the instincts, but when we have described an act in terms of instinct and sensation, we have not told all the facts. For example, when a child sees a pretty red ball of yarn, he reaches out to get it, then puts it into his mouth, or unwinds it, and plays with it in various ways. It is all a matter of sensation and instinctive responses. The perception of the ball--seeing the ball--brings about the instinctive reaching out, grasping the ball, and bringing it to the mouth. But to complete our account, we must say that the child is _pleased_. We note a change in his facial expression. His eyes gleam with pleasure. His face is all smiles, showing pleasant contentment. Therefore we must say that the child not only sees, not only acts, but the seeing and acting are _pleasant_. The child continues to look, he continues to act, because the looking and acting bring joy. This is typical of situations that bring pleasure. We want them continued; we act in a way to make them continue. _We go out after the pleasure-giving thing._ But let us consider a different kind of situation. A child sees on the hearth a glowing coal. It instinctively reaches out and grasps it, starts to draw the coal toward it, but instinctively drops it. This is not, however, the whole story. Instead of the situation being pleasant, it is decidedly unpleasant. The child fairly howls with pain. His face, instead of being wreathed in smiles, is covered with tears. He did not hold on to the coal. He did not try to continue the situation. On the contrary, he dropped the coal, and withdrew the hand. The body contracted and shrank away from the situation. These two cases illustrate the two simple feelings, pleasantness and unpleasantness. Most situations in life are either pleasant or unpleasant. Situations may sometimes be neutral; that is, may arouse neither the feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness. But usually a conscious state is either pleasant or unpleasant. A situation brings us life, joy, happiness. We want it continued and act in a way to bring about its continuance. Or the situation tends to take away our life, brings pain, sorrow, grief, and we want it discontinued, and act in a way to discontinue it. These two simple forms of feeling perhaps arose in the beginning in connection with the act of taking food. It is known that if a drop of acid touches an amoeba, the animal shrinks, contracts, and tries to withdraw from the death-bringing acid. On the other hand, if a particle of a substance that is suitable for food touches the animal, it takes the particle within itself. The particle is life-giving and brings pleasure. =The Emotions.= Pleasure and displeasure are the simple feelings. Most situations in life bring about very complex feeling states known as _emotions_. The emotions are made up of pleasure or displeasure mixed or compounded with the sensations from the bodily reactions. The circulatory system, the respiratory system, and nearly all the involuntary organs of the body form a great sounding board which instantly responds in various ways to the situations of life. When the youth sees the pretty maiden and when he touches her hand, his heart pumps away at a great rate, his cheeks become flushed, his breathing is paralyzed, his voice trembles. He experiences the emotion of love. The state is complex indeed. There is pleasantness, of course, but there is in addition the feeling of all the bodily reactions. When the mother sees her dead child lying in its casket, her head falls over on her breast, her eyes fill with tears, her shoulders droop, her chest contracts, she sobs, her breathing is spasmodic. Nearly every organ of the body is affected in one way or another. The state is _unpleasant_, but there is also the feeling of the manifold bodily reactions. So it is always. The biologically important situations in life bring about, through hereditary connections in the nervous system, certain typical reactions. These reactions are largely the same for the same type of situation, and they give the particular coloring to each emotion. It is evident that the emotions are closely related to the instincts. The reflexes that take place in emotions are of the same nature as the instincts. Each instinctive act has its characteristic emotion. There are fear instincts and fear emotions. Fear is unpleasant. In addition to its unpleasantness there is a multitude of sensations that come from the body. The hair stands on end, the heart throbs, the circulation is hastened, breathing is interrupted, the muscles are tense. This peculiar mass of sensations, blended with the unpleasantness, gives the characteristic emotion of fear. But we need not go into an analysis of the various emotions of love, hate, envy, grief, jealousy, etc. The reader can do this for himself.[3] [3] See James' _Psychology, Briefer Course_, Chapter XXIV. Nearly every organ of the body plays its part in the emotions: the digestive organs, the liver, the kidneys, the throat and mouth, the salivary glands, the eyes and tear glands, the skin muscles, the facial muscles, etc. And every emotion is made up of pleasantness or unpleasantness and the sensations produced by some combination of bodily reactions. It is well for us to remember the part that bodily conditions and states play in the emotional life. The emotional state of a man depends upon whether he has had his dinner or is hungry, whether the liver is working normally, and upon the condition of the various secreting and excreting organs and glands. In a word, it is evident that our emotions fall within a world of cause and effect. _Our feeling states are caused._ =Importance in Life.= Our feelings and emotions are the fountains from which nearly all our volitional actions flow. Feeling is the _mainspring_ of life. Nearly everything we do is prompted by love, or hate, or fear, or jealousy, or rivalry, or anger, or grief. If the feelings have such close relation to action, then the schools must take them into account, for by education we seek to control action. If the feelings control action, then we must try to control the feelings. We must get the child into a right state of mind toward the school, toward his teacher, and toward his work. The child must like the school, like the teacher, and _want_ to learn. Moreover, we must create the right state of mind in connection with each study, each task. The child must come to feel the need and importance of each individual task as well as of each subject. The task is then desirable, it is to be sought for and worked at, it is important for life. This is merely enlisting the child's nature in the interest of his education. For motive, we must always look to the child's nature. The two great forces which pull and drive are _pleasure_ and _pain_. Nature has no other methods. Formerly the school used pain as its motive almost exclusively. The child did his tasks to escape pain. For motive we now use more often the positive influences which give pleasure, which pull instead of drive. What will one not do _for_ the _loved_ one? What will one not do _to_ the _hated_ one? The child who does not love his teacher gets little good from school while under that teacher. Moreover, school work is often a failure because it is so unreal, has so little relation to an actual world, and seems foreign to any real needs of the child. No one is going to work very hard unless the work is prompted by desire. Our desires come from our needs. Therefore, if we are to enlist the child's feelings in the service of his education, we must make the school work vital and relate it, if possible, to the actual needs of the child. It must not be forgotten, however, that we must build up permanent attitudes of respect for authority, obedience, and reverence for the important things of life. Neither must it be forgotten that we can create needs in the child. If in the education of the child we follow only such needs as he has, we will make a fine savage of him but nothing else. It is the business of the school to create in the child the right kind of needs. As was pointed out in our study of the instincts, we must make the child over again into what he ought to be. But this cannot be a sudden process. One cannot arouse enthusiasm in a six-year-old child over the beauties of higher mathematics. It takes ten or fifteen years to do that, and it must be done little by little. =Control of the Emotions.= Without training, we remain at the mercy of our baser emotions. The child must be trained to control himself. Here is where habit comes in to modify primitive action. The child can be trained to inhibit or prevent the reactions that arise in hatred, envy, jealousy, anger, etc. For a fuller discussion of this point we must wait till we come to the discussion of habit and moral training. =Mood and Temperament.= A mood is a somewhat extended emotional state continuing for hours or days. It is due to a continuance of the factors which cause it. The state of the liver and digestive organs may throw one for days into a cross and ugly mood. When the body becomes normal, the mood changes or disappears. Similarly, one may for hours or days be overjoyed, or depressed, or morose, or melancholy. Parents and teachers should look well to the matter of creating and establishing continuous and permanent states of feeling that are favorable to work and development. Some people are permanently optimistic, others pessimistic. Some are always joyful, others as constantly see only the dark side of life. Some are always serious and solemn, others always gay, even giddy. These permanent emotional attitudes constitute temperament, and are due to fundamental differences within the body that are in some cases hereditary. Crossness and moroseness, for example, may be due to a dyspeptic condition and a chronically bad liver. The happy dispositions belong to bodies whose organs are functioning properly, in which assimilation is good--all the parts of the body doing their proper work. Poor eyes which are under a constant strain, through the reflex effects upon various organs of the body, are likely to develop a permanently cross and irritable disposition. Through the close sympathetic relation of the various organs, anything affecting one organ and interfering with its proper action is likely to affect many other organs and profoundly influence the emotional states of the body. In growing children particularly, there are many influences which affect their emotions, things of which we seldom think, such as the condition of vision and hearing, the condition of the teeth, nose, and throat, and the condition of all the important vital organs of the body. When a child's disposition is not what we think it ought to be, we should try to find out the causes. =Training the Emotions.= The emotions are subject to training. The child can be taught control. Moreover, he can be taught to appreciate and enjoy higher things than mere animal pleasure; namely, art, literature, nature, truth. The child thereby becomes a spiritual being instead of a mere pig. The ideal of the school should be to develop men and women whose baser passions are under control, who are calm, self-controlled, and self-directed, and who get their greatest pleasure from the finer and higher things of life, such as the various forms of music, the songs of birds, the beauties and intricate workings of nature. This is a wonderful world and a wonderful life, but the child may go through the world without seeing it, and live his life without knowing what it is to live. His eyes must be opened, he must be trained to see and to feel. It is not the place here to tell how this is to be done. This is not a book on methods of teaching. We can only indicate here that the business of the school is not merely to teach people how to make a living, but to teach them how to enjoy the living. There are many avenues from which we get the higher forms of pleasure. There are really many different worlds which we may experience: the world of animals, the world of plants, the mechanical world, the chemical world, the world of literature and of art, the world of music. It is the duty of the schools to open up these worlds to the children, and make them so many possibilities of joy and happiness. The emotions and feelings, then, are not lawless and causeless, but are a part of a world of law and order. They are themselves caused and therefore subject to control and modification. =Attention.= Attention, too, is related to inherited tendencies on the one side and to habits on the other. If one is walking in the woods and catches a glimpse of something moving in the trees, the eyes _instinctively_ turn so that the person can get a better view of the object. If one hears a sudden sound, the head is instinctively turned so that the person can hear better. One stops, the body is held still and rigid, breathing is slow and controlled--all to favor better hearing. The various acts of attention are reflex and instinctive. But what is attention? By attention we mean _sensory clearness_. When we say we are attentive to a thing or subject, we mean that perceptions or ideas of that thing or subject are _clear_ as compared to other perceptions and ideas that are in consciousness at the same time. The contents of one's consciousness, the perceptions and ideas that constitute one's mind at any one moment are always arranged in an _attentive_ pattern, some being clear, others unclear. The pattern constantly changes and shifts. What is now clear and in the focus of consciousness, presently is unclear and may in a moment disappear from consciousness altogether, while other perceptions or ideas take its place. The first question that arises in connection with attention is, What are the causes of attention? The first group of causes are hereditary and instinctive. The child attends to loud things, bright things, moving things, etc. But as we grow older, the basis of attention becomes more and more _habit_. An illustration will make this clear. I once spent a day at a great exposition with a machinist. He was constantly attending to things mechanical, when I would not even see them. He had spent many years working with machinery, and as a result, things mechanical at once attracted him. Similarly, if a man and a woman walk along a street together and look in at the shop windows, the woman sees only hats, dresses, ribbons, and other finery, while the man sees only cigars, pipes, and automobile supplies. Every day we live, we are building up habits of attending to certain types of things. What repeatedly comes into our experience, easily attracts our attention to the exclusion of other things. =The Function of Attention.= Attention is the unifying aspect of consciousness. There are always many things in consciousness, and we cannot respond to all at once. The part of consciousness that is clear and focal brings about action. The things to which we attend are the things that count. In later chapters we shall learn that in habit-formation, attention is an important factor. We must attend to the acts we are trying to make habitual. In getting knowledge, we must attend to what we are trying to learn. In committing to memory, we must attend to the ideas that we are trying to fix and make permanent. In thinking and reasoning, those ideas become associated together that are together in attention. Attention is therefore the controlling aspect of consciousness. It is the basis of what we call _will_. The ideas that are clear and focal and that persist in consciousness are the ideas that control our action. When one says he has made up his mind, he has made a choice; that merely means that a certain group of ideas persist in consciousness to the exclusion of others. These are the ideas which ultimately produce action. And it is our past experience that determines what ideas will become focal and persist. =Training the Attention.= There are two aspects of the training of attention. (1) We can learn to hold ourselves to a task. When we sit down to a table to study, there may be many things that tend to call us away. There lies a magazine which we might read, there is a play at the theater, there are noises outside, there is a friend calling across the street. But we must study. We have set ourselves to a task and we must hold fast to our purpose. The young child cannot do this. He must be trained to do it. The instruments used to train him are pleasure and pain, rewards and punishments that come from parents. Gradually, slowly, the child gains control over himself. No one ever amounts to anything till he can hold himself to a task, to a fixed purpose. One must learn to form plans extending over weeks, months, and years, and to hold unflinchingly to them, just as one must hold himself to his study table and allow nothing to distract or to interfere. No training a child can receive is more important than this, for it gives him control over his life, it gives him control over the ideas that are to become focal and determine action. It is for this reason that we call such training a training of attention. It might perhaps better be called a training of the will. But the will is only the attentive consciousness. The idea that is clear, that holds its own in consciousness, is the idea that produces action. When we say that we _will_ to do a certain thing, all we can mean is that the _idea of this act_ is clearest and holds its focal place in consciousness to the exclusion of other ideas. It therefore goes over into action. (2) The training just discussed may be called a general training of attention giving us a general power and control over our lives, but there is another type of training which is specific. As with the machinist mentioned above, so with all of us; we attend to the type of thing that we have formed a habit of attending to. Continued experience in a certain field makes it more and more easy to attend to things in that field. One can take a certain subject and work at it day after day, year after year. By and by, the whole world takes on the aspect of this chosen subject. The entomologist sees bugs everywhere, the botanist sees only plants, the mechanic sees only machines, the preacher sees only the moral and religious aspects of action, the doctor sees only disease, the mathematician sees always the quantitative aspect of things. Ideas and perceptions related to one's chosen work go at once and readily to the focus of consciousness; other things escape notice. It is for this reason that we become "crankier" every year that we live. We are attending to only one aspect of the world. While this blinds us to other aspects of the world, it brings mastery in our individual fields. We can, then, by training and practice, get a general control over attention, and by working in a certain field or kind of work, we make it easy to attend to things in that field or work. This to an extent gives us control of our lives, of our destiny. =Interest.= The essential elements of interest are attention and feeling. When a person is very attentive to a subject and gets pleasure from experience in that subject, we commonly say that he is _interested_ in that subject. Since the importance of attention and feeling in learning has already been shown and will be further developed in the chapters which follow in connection with the subjects of habit, memory, and thinking, little more need be said here. The key to all forms of learning is _attention_. The key to attention is _feeling_. Feeling depends upon the nature of the child, inherited and acquired. In our search for the means of arousing interest, we look first to the original nature of the child, to the instincts and the emotions. We look next to the acquired nature, the habits, the ideals, the various needs that have grown up in the individual's life. Educational writers have overemphasized the original nature of the child as a basis of interest and have not paid enough attention to acquired nature. We should not ask so much what a child's needs are, but what they _ought_ to be. Needs can be created. The child's nature to some extent can be changed. The problem of arousing interest is therefore one of finding in the child's nature a basis for attention and pleasure. If the basis is not to be found there, then it must be built up. How this can be done, how human nature can be changed, is to some extent the main problem of psychology. Every chapter in this book, it is hoped, will be found to throw some light on the problem. SUMMARY. The two elementary feeling states are pleasantness and unpleasantness. The emotions are complex mental states composed of feeling and the sensations from bodily reactions to the situations. Feeling and emotion are the motive forces of life, at the bottom of all important actions. The bodily reactions of emotions are reflex and instinctive. Attention is a matter of the relative clearness of the contents of consciousness. The function of attention is to unify thought and action. It is the important factor in all learning and thinking, for it is only the attentive part of consciousness that is effective. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Make out a complete list of the more important emotions. 2. Indicate the characteristic expression of each emotion in your list. 3. Can you have an emotion without its characteristic expression? If, for example, when a situation arises which ordinarily arouses anger in you, you inhibit all the usual motor accompaniments of anger, are you really angry? 4. Are the expressions of the same emotion the same for all people? 5. Try to analyze some of your emotional states: anger, or fear, or grief. Can you detect the sensations that come from the bodily reactions? 6. Try to induce an emotional state by producing its characteristic reactions. 7. Try to change an emotional state to an opposite emotion; for example, grief to joy. 8. Try to control and change emotional states in children. 9. Name some sensations that for you are always pleasant, others that are always unpleasant--colors, sounds, tastes, odors, temperatures. 10. Confirm by observation the statement of the text as to the importance of emotions in all the important actions of life. 11. To what extent do you have control of your emotional states? What have you observed about differences in expression of deep emotions by different people? In case of death in the family, some people wail and moan and express their grief in the most extreme manner, while others do not utter a sound and show great control. Why the difference? 12. Make an introspective study of your conscious states to note the difference in clearness of the different processes that are going on in consciousness. Do you find a constant shifting? 13. Perform experiments to show the effects of attention in forming habits and acquiring knowledge. (1) Perform tests in learning, using substitution tests as described in Chapter X. Use several different keys. In some experiments have no distractions, in others, have various distracting noises. What differences do you find in the results? (2) Try learning nonsense syllables, some lists with distractions, others without distractions. (3) Try getting the ideas from stories read to you, as in the logical memory experiment described in Chapter X. Some stories should be read without distractions, others with distractions. 14. Why are you unable to study well when under the influence of some strong emotion? 15. Are you trained to the extent that you can concentrate on a task and hold yourself to it for a long time? 16. Do you see that as far as will and attention and the emotions are concerned, your life and character are in large measure in your own hands? 17. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN and BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapters IV, V, and VI. MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, Chapter XIV, also pp. 187-192 and pp. 370-371. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapters V and XI. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapter XIV. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapters IV, VIII, and XI. CHAPTER VI HABIT =The Nature of Habit.= We now turn from man's inherited nature to his acquired nature. Inherited tendencies to action we have called instincts; acquired tendencies to action we shall call habits. We can best form an idea of the nature of habit by considering some concrete cases. Let us take first the case of a man forming the habit of turning out the basement light. It usually happens that when a man has an electric light in the basement of his house, it is hard for him at first to think to turn out the light at night when he retires, and as a consequence the light often burns all night. This is expensive and unnecessary, so there is a strong incentive for the man to find a plan which will insure the regular turning-off of the light at bedtime. The plan usually hit upon is the following: The electric switch that controls the basement light is beside the basement stairway. The man learns to look at the switch as he comes up the stairs, after preparing the furnace fire for the night, and learns to take hold of the switch when he sees it and turn off the light. Coming up the stairs means to look at the switch. Seeing the switch means to turn it. Each step of the performance touches off the next. The man sees that in order to make sure that the light will always be turned off, the acts must all be made automatic, and each step must touch off the next in the series. At first, the man leaves the light burning about as often as he turns it off. After practicing for a time on the scheme, the different acts become so well connected that he seldom leaves the light burning. We say that he has formed the _habit_ of turning off the light. For a second illustration, let us take the process of learning that nine times nine equals eighty-one. At first, one does not say or write "eighty-one" when one sees "nine times nine," but one can acquire the habit of doing so. It does not here concern us how the child learns what the product of nine times nine is. He may learn it by counting, by being told, or by reading it in a book. But however he first learns it, he fixes it and makes it automatic and habitual by _continuing_ to say or to write, "nine times nine equals eighty-one." The essential point is that at first the child does not know what to say when he hears or sees the expression "nine times nine," but after long practice he comes to give automatically and promptly the correct answer. For the definite problem "nine times nine" there comes the definite response "eighty-one." For a third illustration, let us take the case of a man tipping his hat when he meets a lady. A young boy does not tip his hat when he meets a lady until he has been taught to do so. After he learns this act of courtesy he does it quite automatically without thinking of it. For the definite situation, meeting a lady of his acquaintance, there comes to be established the definite response, tipping the hat. A similar habit is that of turning to the right when we meet a person. For the definite situation, meeting a person on the road or street or sidewalk, there is established the definite response, turning to the right. The response becomes automatic, immediate, certain. There is another type of habit that may properly be called an intellectual habit, such as voting a certain party ticket, say the Democratic. When one is a boy, one hears his father speak favorably of the Democratic party. His father says, "Hurrah for Bryan," so he comes to say, "Hurrah for Bryan." His father says, "I am a Democrat," so he says he is a Democrat. He takes the side that his father takes. In a similar way we take on the same religious notions that our parents have. It does not always happen this way, but this is the rule. But no matter how we come to do it, we do adopt the creed of some party or some church. We adopt a certain way of looking at public questions, and a certain way of looking at religious questions. For certain rather definite situations, we come to take definite stands. When we go to the booth to vote, we look at the top of the ballot to find the column marked "Democratic," and the definite response is to check the "Democrat" column. Of course, some of us form a different habit and check the "Republican" column, but the psychology of the act is the same. The point is that we form the Democratic habit or we form the Republican habit; and the longer we practice the habit, the harder it is to change it. In the presidential campaign of 1912, Roosevelt "bolted" from the Republican party. It was hard for the older Republicans to follow him. While one occasionally found a follower of Roosevelt who was gray, one usually found the old Republicans standing by the old party, the younger ones joining the Progressive party. It is said that when Darwin published "The Origin of Species," very few old men accepted the doctrine of evolution. The adherents of the new doctrine were nearly all young men. So there is such a thing as an intellectual habit. One comes to take a definite stand when facing certain definite intellectual situations. Similar to the type of habits which we have called intellectual is another type which may be called "moral." When we face the situation of reporting an occurrence, we can tell the truth or we can lie. We can build up the habit of meeting such situations by telling the truth on all occasions. We can learn to follow the maxim "Tell the truth at all times, at all hazards." We can come to do this automatically, certainly, and without thought of doing anything else. Most moral situations are fairly definite and clear-cut, and for them we can establish definite forms of response. We can form the habit of helping a person in distress, of helping a sick neighbor, of speaking well of a neighbor; we can form habits of industry, habits of perseverance. These and other similar habits are the basis of morality. The various kinds of habits which we have enumerated are alike in certain fundamental particulars. In all of them there is a definite situation followed by a definite response. One sees the switch and turns off the light; he sees the expression "nine times nine" and says "eighty-one"; he sees a lady he knows and tips his hat; in meeting a carriage on the road, he turns to the right; when he has to vote, he votes a certain ticket; when he has to report an occurrence, he tells it as it happened. There is, in every case, a definite situation followed by a definite response. Another characteristic is common to all the cases mentioned above, _i.e._ the response is acquired, it does not come at first. In every instance we might have learned to act differently. We could form the habit of always leaving the light burning; could just as easily say "nine times nine equals forty"; we could turn to the left; we could vote the Republican ticket. We can form bad moral habits as well as good ones, perhaps more easily. The point is, however, that we acquire definite ways of acting for the same situations, and these definite ways of acting are called habits. =Habit and Nerve-Path.= It has already been stated that a habit is a tendency toward a certain type of action in a certain situation. The basis of this tendency is in the nervous system. In order to understand it we must consider what the nervous system is like. Nerves terminate at one end in a sense organ and at the other end ultimately in a muscle. In Figure II, A is a sense organ, B a nerve going from the sense organ to the brain C. D, E, F, G, and H are motor nerves going from the brain to the muscles. Now, let us show from the diagram what organization means and what tendency means. At first when the child sees the expression "nine times nine," he does not say "eighty-one." The stimulus brings about no definite action. It is as likely to go out through E or F as through D. But suppose we can get the child to say "nine times nine equals eighty-one." We can write the expression on the blackboard and have the child look at it and say "nine times nine equals eighty-one." Suppose the act of saying "eighty-one" is brought about by the nerve-current going out through nerve-chain D. By repetition, we establish a bond. A stimulus of a particular kind comes through A, goes over B to C, and out over D, making muscles at M bring about a very definite action in saying "eighty-one." [Illustration: FIGURE II.--THE ORGANIZATION OF TENDENCIES] From the point of view of physiology, the process of habit-formation consists in securing a particular nerve coupling, establishing a particular nerve path, so that a definite form of stimulation will bring about a definite form of response. A nerve tendency is simply the likelihood that a stimulus will take a certain course rather than any other. This likelihood is brought about by getting the stimulus to take the desired route through the nervous system to a group of muscles and to continue following this route. The more times it passes the same way, the greater is the probability that at any given time the stimulus will take the accustomed route and bring about the usual response. At first any sort of action is possible. A nerve stimulus can take any one of the many routes to the different muscles. By chance or by conscious direction, the stimulus takes a certain path, and by repetition we fix and make permanent this particular route. This constitutes a nerve tendency or habit. =Plasticity.= Our discussion should have made it clear that habit is acquired nature, while instinct is inherited nature. Habit is acquired tendency while instinct is inherited tendency. The possibility of acquiring habits is peculiarly a human characteristic. While inanimate things have a definite nature, a definite way of reacting to forces which act upon them, they have little, if any, possibility of varying their way of acting. Water might be said to have habits. If one cools water, it turns to ice. If we heat it, it turns to steam. But it _invariably_ does this. We cannot teach it any different way of acting. Under the same conditions it always does the same thing. Plants are very much like inanimate things. Plants have definite ways of acting. A vine turns around a support. A leaf turns its upper surface to the light. But one cannot teach plants different ways of acting. The lower forms of animals are somewhat like plants and inanimate objects. But to a very slight extent they are variable and can form habits. Among the higher animals, such as dogs and other domestic animals, there is a greater possibility of forming habits. In man there are the greatest possibilities of habit-formation. In man the learned acts or habits are many as compared to the unlearned acts or instincts; while among the lower animals the opposite is the case--their instincts are many as compared to their habits. We may call this possibility of forming habits _plasticity_. Inanimate objects such as iron, rocks, sulphur, oxygen, etc., have no plasticity. Plants have very little possibility of forming habits. Lower animals have somewhat more, and higher animals still more, while man has the greatest possibility of forming habits. This great possibility of forming habits is one of the main characteristics of man. Let us illustrate the contrast between man and inanimate objects by an example. If sulphur is put into a test tube and heated, it at first melts and becomes quite thin like water. If it is heated still more, it becomes thick and will not run out of the tube. It also becomes dark. Sulphur _always_ does this when so treated. It cannot be taught to act differently. Now the action of sulphur when heated is like the action of a man when he turns to the right upon meeting a person in the street. But the man has to acquire this habit, while the sulphur does not have to learn its way of acting. Sulphur always acted in this way, while man did not perform his act at first, but had to learn it by slow repetition. Everything in the world has its own peculiar nature, but man is unique in that his nature can be very much changed. To a large extent, a man is _made_, his nature is _acquired_. After we become men and women, we have hundreds and thousands of tendencies to action, definite forms of action, that we did not have when young. Man's nature might be said to consist in his tendencies to action. Some of these tendencies he inherits; these are his instincts. Some of these he acquires; these are his habits. =What Habits Do for Us.= We have found out what habits are like; let us now see what they do for us. What good do they accomplish for us? How are we different after forming a habit from what we were before? We can best answer these questions by a consideration of concrete cases. Typewriting will serve very well the purpose of illustration. We shall give the result of an actual experiment in which ten university students took part. During their first half hour of practice, they wrote an average of 120 words. At the end of forty-five hours of practice, they were writing an average of 680 words in a half hour. This was an increase of speed of 560 per cent. An expert typist can write about 3000 words in a half hour. Such a speed requires much more than forty-five hours practice, and is attained by the best operators only. [Illustration: FIGURE III.--LEARNING CURVES The upper graph shows the improvement in speed of a group of students working two half hours a day. The lower curve shows the improvement of a group working ten half-hours a day.] In the foregoing experiment, the students improved in accuracy also. At the beginning of the work, they made 115 errors in the half hour. At the end of the practice, with much faster speed, they were making only 327 errors in a half hour. The actual number of errors had increased 280 per cent. The increase in errors was therefore exactly half as much as the increase in speed. This, of course, was a considerable increase in accuracy, for while the speed had increased to 5.6 times what it had been at the beginning, the errors had increased only 2.8 times. The subjects in this experiment paid much more attention to speed than they did to accuracy. If they had emphasized accuracy, they would have been doing almost perfect work at the end of the practice, and their speed would have been somewhat less. Practice, then, not only develops speed but also develops accuracy. There are also other results. At the beginning of work with the typewriter, there is much waste of energy and much fatigue. The waste of energy comes from using unnecessary muscles, and the fatigue is partly due to this waste of energy. But even apart from this waste of energy, an habituated act is performed with less fatigue. The various muscles concerned become better able to do their work. As a result of habituation there is, then, greater speed, greater accuracy, less waste of energy, and less fatigue. If we look not at the changes in our work but at the changes in ourselves, the changes in our minds due to the formation of habits, we find still other results. At the beginning of practice with the typewriter, the learner's whole attention is occupied with the work. When one is learning to do a new trick, the attention cannot be divided. The whole mind must be devoted to the work. But after one has practiced for several weeks, one can operate the typewriter while thinking about something else. We say that the habituated act sinks to a lower level of consciousness, meaning that as a habit becomes more and more fixed, less and less attention is devoted to the acts concerned. Increased skill gives us pleasure and also gives us confidence in our ability to do the thing. Corresponding to this inner confidence is outer certainty. There is greater objective certainty in our performance and a corresponding inner confidence. By objective certainty, we mean that a person watching our performance, becomes more and more sure of our ability to perform, and we ourselves feel confidence in our power of achievement. Now that we have shown the results of habituation let us consider additional illustrations. In piano playing, the stimuli are the notes as written in the music. We see the notes occupying certain places on the scale of the music. A note in a certain place means that we must strike a certain key. At first the response is slow, we have to hunt out each note on the keyboard. Moreover, we make many mistakes; we strike the wrong keys just as we do in typewriting. We are awkward, making many unnecessary movements, and the work is tiresome and fatiguing. After long practice, the speed with which we can manipulate the keys in playing the piano is wonderful. Our playing becomes accurate, perfect. We do it with ease, with no unnecessary movements. We can play the piano, after we become skilled, without paying attention to the actual movements of our hands. We can play the piano while concentrating upon the meaning of the music, or while carrying on a conversation, or while thinking about something else. As a rule, pleasure and confidence come with skill. Playing a difficult piece on the piano involves a skill which is one of the most complicated that man achieves. It is possible only through habituation of the piano-playing movements. Nailing shingles on a roof illustrates well the various aspects of habituation. The expert carpenter not only nails on many more shingles in a day than does the amateur, but he does it better and with more ease, and with much less fatigue. The carpenter knows exactly how much he can do in a day, and each particular movement is certain and sure. The carpenter has confidence in, and usually prides himself on, this ability, thus getting pleasure out of his work. The operations in arithmetic illustrate most of the results of habituation. Practice in addition makes for speed and accuracy. In a few weeks' time we can very much increase our speed and accuracy in adding, or in the other arithmetical operations. The foregoing examples are sufficient, although they could be multiplied indefinitely. Almost any habit one might name would show clearly most of the results enumerated. The most important aspects of habituation may be summed up in the one word _efficiency_. Habituation gives us speed and accuracy. Speed and accuracy mean skill. Skill means efficiency. =How Habits Are Formed.= It is clear from the foregoing discussion that the essential thing in a habit is the definiteness of the connection between the stimulus and the response, between the situation and the reaction to the situation. Our question now is, how is this definiteness of connection established? The answer is, _through repetition_. Let us work the matter out from a concrete case, such as learning to play the piano. In piano playing the stimulus comes from the music as printed on the staff. A note having a certain position on the staff indicates that a certain key is to be struck. We are told by our music teacher what keys on the piano correspond to the various notes on the staff, or we may learn these facts from the instruction book. It makes no difference how we learn them; but after we know these facts, we must have practice to give us skill. The mere knowledge will not make us piano players. In order to be skillful, we must have much practice not only in striking the keys indicated by the various note positions, but with the various combinations of notes. For example, a note on the second space indicates that the player must strike the key known as "A." But "A" may occur with any of the other notes, it may precede them or it may follow them. We must therefore have practice in striking "A" in all these situations. To have skill at the piano, we must mechanize many performances. We must be able to read the notes with accuracy and ease. We must practice so much that the instant we see a certain combination of notes on the staff, our hands immediately execute the proper strokes. Not only must we learn what keys on the piano correspond to the various notes of the music, but the notes have a temporal value which we must learn. Some are to be sounded for a short time, others for a longer time. We have eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, etc. Moreover, the signature of the music as indicated by the sharps or flats changes the whole situation. If the music is written in "A sharp" then when "A" is indicated on the staff, we must not strike the white key known as "A," but the black key just above, known as "A sharp." Briefly, in piano playing, the stimulus comes from the characters printed on the staff. The movements which these characters direct are very complicated and require months and years of practice. We must emphasize the fact that practice alone gives facility, years of practice. But after these years of practice, one can play a piece of music at sight; that is, the first stimulus sets off perfectly a very complicated response. This sort of performance is one of the highest feats of skill that man accomplishes. To get skill, then, one must practice. But mere repetition is not sufficient. For practice to be most effective, one must put his whole mind on what he is doing. If he divides his attention between the acts which he is practicing and something else, the effect of the practice in fixing and perfecting the habit is slight. It seems that when we are building up a new nerve-path which is to be the basis of a new habit, the nervous energies should not be divided; that the whole available nervous energy should be devoted to the acts which we are repeating. This is only another way of saying that when we are practicing to establish a habit, we should attend to what we are doing and to nothing else. But after the habit-connection is once firmly established, we can attend to other things while performing the habitual act. The habitual action will go on of itself. We may say, then, that in order to be able to do a thing with little or no attention, we must give much attention to it at first. Another important factor in habit-formation is pleasure. The act which we are practicing must give us pleasure, either while we are doing it or as a result. Pleasurable results hasten habit-formation. When we practice an act in which we have no interest, we make slow progress or none at all. Now the elements of interest are attention and pleasure. If we voluntarily attend to a thing and its performance gives us pleasure, or pleasure results from it, we say we are interested in it. The secret of successful practice is interest. Repeatedly in laboratory experiments it happens that a student loses interest in the performance and subsequently makes little, if any, progress. One of the biggest problems connected with habit-formation is that of maintaining interest. A factor which prevents the formation of habits is that of exceptions. If a stimulus, instead of going over to the appropriate response, produces some other action, there is an interference in the formation of the desired habit. The effect of an exception is greater than the mere neglect of practice. The _exception opens up another path_ and tends to make future action uncertain. Particularly is this true in the case of moral habits. Forming moral habits is usually uphill work anyway, in that we have instincts to overcome. Allowing exceptions to enter, in the moral sphere, usually means a slipping back into an old way of acting, thereby weakening much the newly-made connection. In any kind of practice, when we become fatigued we make errors. If we continue to practice when fatigued, we form connections which we do not wish to make and which interfere with the desired habits. =Economy of Practice.= The principles which we have enumerated and illustrated are fairly general and of universal validity. There are certain other factors which we may discuss here under the head of economical procedure. To form a habit, we must practice. But how long should we practice at one time? This is an experimental problem and has been definitely solved. It has been proved by experiment that we can practice profitably for as long a time as we can maintain a high degree of attention, which is usually till we become fatigued. This time is not the same for all people. It varies with age, and in the case of the same person it varies at different times. If ordinary college students work at habit-formation at the highest point of concentration, they get the best return for a period of about a half hour. It depends somewhat on the amount of concentration required for the work and the stage of fixation of the habit, _i.e._ whether one has just begun to form the habit or whether it is pretty well fixed. For children, the period of successful practice is usually much less than a half hour--five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, depending upon the age of the child and the kind of work. The best interval between periods of practice is the day, twenty-four hours. If one practices in the morning for a half hour, one can practice again in the afternoon with nearly as much return as he would secure the next day, but not quite. In general, practice is better, gives more return, if spread out. To practice one day as long as one can work at a high point of efficiency, and then to postpone further practice till the next day, gives one the most return for the time put in. But if one is in a hurry to form a habit, one can afford to practice more each day even if the returns from the practice do diminish proportionately. This matter has been tried out on the typewriter. If one practices for ten half hours a day with half-hour rests between, one does not get so much return for his time as he would if he should spread it out at the rate of one or two half-hour practices a day. But by working ten half hours a day, one gets much more efficiency in the same number of days than if he should practice only one or two half hours a day. This point must not be misunderstood. We do not mean that one must not work at anything longer than a half hour a day. We mean that if one is forming a habit, his time counts for more in forming the habit if spread out at the rate of a half hour or an hour a day, than it does if put in at a faster rate. Therefore if one is in no hurry and can afford to spread out his time, he gets the best return by so doing, and the habit is more firmly fixed than if formed hurriedly. But if one is in a hurry, and has the time to devote to it, he can afford to concentrate his practice up to five hours or possibly more in a day, provided that rest intervals are interspersed between periods of practice. There is one time in habit-formation when concentrated practice is most efficient. That is at the beginning. In a process as complicated as typewriting, so little impression is made at the beginning by a short period of practice that progress is but slight. On the first day, one should practice about four or five times to secure the best returns, a half hour each time. =What the Teacher Can Do.= Now, let us see how the teacher can be of assistance to the pupil in habit-formation. The teacher should have a clear idea of the nature of the habit to be formed and should demonstrate the habit to the pupil. Suppose the habit is so simple a thing as long division. The teacher should explain each step in the process. She should go to the blackboard and actually solve a number of problems in long division, so that the pupils can see just how to do it. After this the pupils should go to the board and solve a problem themselves. The reason for this procedure is that it is most economical. If the children are left to get the method of doing long division from a book, they will not be able to do it readily and will make mistakes. A teacher can explain a process better than it can be explained in a book. By giving a full explanation and demonstration and then by requiring the children to work a few problems while she watches for mistakes, correcting them at once, the teacher secures economy of effort and time. The first step is to demonstrate the habit to the pupils; the second, to have them do the act, whatever it is, correcting their mistakes; the third, to require the pupils to practice till they have acquired skill. The teacher must make provision for practice. =What Parents Can Do.= Parents can be of very great assistance to children who are forming habits. (1) They can coöperate with the school, which is directing the child in the systematic formation of a great system of habits. The teacher should explain these habits to the parents so that they may know what the teacher is trying to do. Quite often the home and the school are working at cross purposes. The only way to prevent this is for them to work in the closest coöperation, with the fullest understanding of what is being undertaken for the child. Parents and teachers should often meet together and talk over the work of training the children of the community. Parents should have not merely a general understanding of the work of the school, but they should know the details undertaken. The school often assigns practice work to be done at home in reading, writing, arithmetic. Parents should always know of these assignments and should help the children get the necessary practice. They can do this by reminding the child of the work, by preparing a suitable place where the work may be done, and by securing quiet for the practice. Children like play and it is easy for them to forget their necessary work. Parents can be of the greatest service to childhood and youth by holding the children to their responsibilities and duties. Few parents take any thought of whether their children are doing all possible for their school progress. Few of those who do, make definite plans and arrangements for the children to accomplish the necessary practice and study. This is the parent's duty and responsibility. Moreover, parents are likely to feel that children have no rights, and think nothing of calling on them in the midst of their work to do some errand. Now, children should work about the house and help their parents, but there should be a time for this and a separate time for study and practice on school work. When a child sits down for serious practice on some work, his time should be sacred and inviolable. Instead of interfering with the child, the parents should do everything in their power to make this practice possible and efficient. In their relations with their children perhaps parents sin more in the matter of neglecting to plan for them than in any other way. They plan for everything else, but they let their children grow up, having taken no definite thought about helping them to form their life habits and to establish these habits by practice. When a child comes home from school, the mother should find out just what work is to be done before the next day and should plan the child's play and work in such a way as to include all necessary practice. If all parents would do this, the value to the work of the school and to the life of the child would be incalculable. (2) Just as one of the main purposes of the teacher is to help the child gain initiative, so it is one of the greatest of the parents' duties. Parents must help the children to keep their purposes before them. Children forget, even when they wish to remember. Often, they do not want to remember. The parents' duty is to get the child to _want_ to remember, and to help him to remember, whether he wants to or not. One of the main differences between childhood and maturity is that the child lives in the present, his purposes are all immediate ones. Habits always look forward, they are for future good and use. Mature people have learned to look forward and to plan for the future. They must, therefore, perform this function for the children. They must look forward and see what the child should learn to do, and then see that he learns to do it. (3) Parents must help children to plan their lives in general and in detail; _i.e._ in the sense of determining the ideals and habits that will be necessary for those lives. The parents must do this with the help of the child. The child must not be a blind follower, but as the child's mind becomes mature enough, the parent must explain the matter of forming life habits, and must show the child that life is a structure that he himself is to build. Life will be what he makes it, and the time for forming character is during early years. The parent must not only tell the child this but must help him to realize the truth of it, must help him continually, consistently. (4) Of course it is hardly necessary to say that the parent can help much, perhaps most, by example. The parent must not only tell the child what to do but must _show_ him how it should be done. (5) Parents can help in the ways mentioned above, but they can also help by coöperating among themselves in planning for the training of the children of the community. One parent cannot train his children independently of all the other people in the community. There must be a certain unity of ideals and aims. Therefore, not only is there need for coöperation between parents and teachers but among parents themselves. Although they coöperate in everything else, they seldom do in the training of their children. The people of a community should meet together occasionally to plan for this common work. =Importance of Habit in Education and Life.= A man is the sum of his habits and ideals. He has language habits; he speaks German, or French, or English. He has writing habits, spelling habits, reading habits, arithmetic habits. He has political habits, religious habits. He has various social habits, habitual attitudes which he takes toward his fellows. He has moral habits--he is honest and truthful, or he is dishonest and untruthful. He always looks on the bright side, or else on the dark side of events. All these habits and many more, he has. They are structures which he has built. One's life, then, is the sum of his tendencies, and these tendencies one establishes in early life. This view gives an importance to the work of the school which is derived from no other view. The school is not a place where we get this little bit of information, or the other. It is the place where we are molded, formed, and shaped into the beings we are to be. The school has not risen to see the real importance of its work. Its aims have been low and its achievements much lower than its aims. Teachers should rise to the importance of their calling. Their work is that of gods. They are creators. They do not make the child. They do not give it memory or attention or imagination. But they are creators of tendencies, prejudices, religions, politics, and other habits unnumbered. So that in a very real sense, the school, with all the other educational influences, makes the man. We do not give a child the capacity to learn, but we can determine what he shall learn. We do not give him memory, but we can select what he shall remember. We do not make the child as he is at the beginning, but we can, in large measure, determine the world of influences which complete the task of _making_. In the early part of life every day and every hour of the day establishes and strengthens tendencies. Every year these tendencies become stronger. Every year after maturity, we resist change. By twenty-five or thirty, "character has set like plaster." The general attitude and view of the world which we have at maturity, we are to hold throughout life. Very few men fundamentally change after this. It takes a tremendous influence and an unusual situation to break one up and make him an essentially different man after maturity. Every year a "crank" becomes "crankier." It is well that this is so. Everything in the world costs its price. Rigidity is the price we pay for efficiency. In order to be efficient, we must make habitual the necessary movements. After they are habituated, they resist change. But habit makes for regularity and order. We could not live in society unless there were regularity, order, fixity. Habit makes for conservatism. But conservatism is necessary for order. In a sense, habit works against progress. But permanent improvement without habit would be impossible, for permanent progress depends upon holding what we gain. It is well for society that we are conservative. We could not live in the chaos that would exist without habit. Public opinion resists change. People refuse to accept a view that is different from the one they have held. We could get nowhere if we continually changed, and it is well for us that we continue to do the old way to which we have become accustomed, till a new and better one is shown beyond doubt. Even then, it is probably better for an old person to continue to use the accustomed methods of a lifetime. Although better methods are developed, they will not be so good for the old person as those modes of action that he is used to. The possibility of progress is through new methods which come in with each succeeding generation. When we become old we are not willing to change, but the more reasonable of us are willing that our children should be taught a better way. Sometimes, of course, we find people who say that what was good enough for them is good enough for their children. Most of us think better, and wish to give our children a "better bringing up than ours has been." These considerations make clear the importance of habit in life. They should also make clear a very important corollary. If habits are important in life, then it is the duty of parents and teachers to make a careful selection of the habits that are to be formed by the children. The habits that will be necessary for the child to form in order to meet the various situations of his future life, should be determined. There should be no vagueness about it. Definite habits, social, moral, religious, intellectual, professional, etc., will be necessary for efficiency. We should know what these various habits are, and should then set about the work of establishing them with system and determination, just as we would the building of a house. Much school work and much home training is vague, indefinite, uncertain, done without a clear understanding of the needs or of the results. We therefore waste time, years of the child's life, and the results are unsatisfactory. =Drill in School Subjects.= In many school subjects, the main object is to acquire skill in certain processes. As previously explained, we can become skillful in an act only by repetition of the act. Therefore, in those subjects in which the main object is the acquiring of skill, there must be much repetition. This repetition is called drill. The matter of economical procedure in drill has already been considered, but there are certain problems connected with drill that must be further discussed. Drill is usually the hardest part of school work. It becomes monotonous and tiresome. Moreover, drill is always a means. It is the means by which we become efficient. Take writing, for example. It is not an end in itself; it is the means by which we convey thoughts. Reading is a means by which we are able to get the thought of another. In acquiring a foreign language, we have first to master the elementary tools that will enable us to make the thought of the foreign language our own. It seems that the hardest part of education always comes first, when we are least able to do it. It used to be that nearly all the work of the school was drill. There was little school work that was interesting in itself. In revolt against this kind of school, many modern educators have tried to plan a curriculum that would be interesting to the child. In schools that follow this idea, there is little or no drill, pure and simple. There is no work that is done for the sole purpose of acquiring skill. The work is so planned that, in pursuing it, the child will of necessity have to perform the necessary acts and will thereby gain efficiency. In arithmetic, there is no adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, only as such things must be done in the performance of something else that is interesting in itself. For example, the child plays store and must add up the sales. The child plays bean bag and must add up the score. Practice gained in this indirect way is known as incidental drill. Direct drill consists in making a direct approach; we wish to be efficient at adding, so we practice adding as such and not merely as incidental to something else. This plan of incidental drill is in harmony with the principle of interest previously explained. There are several things, however, that must be considered. The proper procedure would seem to be to look forward and find out in what directions the child will need to acquire skill and then to help him acquire it in the most economical way and at the proper time. Nature has so made us that we like to do a new trick. When we have taught a child how to add and subtract, he likes to perform these operations because the operations themselves give pleasure. Therefore much repetition can be allowed and much skill acquired by a direct approach to the practice. When interest drags, incidental drill can be fallen back upon to help out the interest. Children should be taught that certain things must be done, certain skill must be acquired. They should accept some things on the authority of elders. They should be taught to apply themselves and to give their whole attention to a thing that must be done. A desire for efficiency can be developed in them. The spirit of competition can sometimes be effectively used to add interest to drill. Of course, interest and attention there must be, and if it cannot be secured in one way, it must be in another. Experiments have abundantly shown the value of formal drill, that is to say, drill for drill's sake. If an arithmetic class is divided, one half being given a few minutes' drill on the fundamental operations each day but otherwise doing exactly the same work as the other half of the class, the half receiving the drill acquires much more skill in the fundamental operations and, besides, is better at reasoning out problems than the half that had no drill. The explanation of the latter fact is doubtless that the pupils receiving the drill acquire such efficiency in the fundamental operations that these cause no trouble, leaving all the energies of the pupils for reasoning out the problems. It has been shown experimentally that a direct method of teaching spelling is more efficient than an indirect method. It is not to be wondered at that such turns out to be the case. For in a direct approach, the act that we are trying to habituate is brought more directly before consciousness, receiving that focal attention which is necessary for the most efficient practice in habit-formation. If one wishes to be a good ball pitcher, one begins to pitch balls, and continues pitching balls day after day, morning, noon, and night. One does not go about it indirectly. If one wishes to be a good shot with a rifle, one gets a rifle and goes to shooting. Similarly, if one wishes to be a good adder, the way to do is to begin adding, not to begin doing something else. Of course any method that will induce a child to realize that he ought to acquire a certain habit, is right and proper. We must do all we can to give a child a desire, an interest in the thing that he is trying to do. But there is no reason why the thing should not be faced directly. =Rules for Habit Formation.= In the light of the various principles which we have discussed, what rules can be given to one forming habits? The evident answer is, to proceed in accordance with established principles. We may, however, bring the most important of these principles together in the form of rules which can serve as a guide and help to one forming habits. (1) _Get initiative._ By this is meant that a person forming a habit should have some sustaining reason for doing it, some end that is being sought. This principle will be of very little use to young children, only to those old enough to appreciate reasons and ends. In arithmetic, for example, a child should be shown what can be accomplished if he possesses certain skill in addition, subtraction, and multiplication. It is not always possible for a young person to see why a certain habit should be formed. For the youngest children, the practice must be in the form of play. But when a child is old enough to think, to have ideals and purposes, reasons and explanations should be worked out. (2) _Get practice._ If you are to have skill, you must practice. Practice regularly, practice hard while you are doing it. Throw your whole life into it, as if what you are doing is the most important thing in the world. Practice under good conditions. Do not think that just any kind of practice will do. Try to make conditions such that they will enable you to do your best work. Such conditions will not happen by chance. You must make them happen. You must make conditions favorable. You must seek opportunities to practice. You must realize that your life is in the making, that _you_ are making it, that it is to a large extent composed of habits. These habits you are building. They are built only by practice. Get practice. When practicing, fulfill the psychological conditions. Work under the most favorable circumstances as to length of periods, intervals, etc. (3) _Allow no exceptions._ You should fully realize the great influence of exceptions. When you start in to form a habit, allow nothing to turn you from your course. Whether the habit is some fundamental moral habit or the multiplication table, be consistent, do not vacillate. Nothing is so strong as consistent action, nothing so weak as doubtful, wavering, uncertain action. Have the persistence of a bull dog and the regularity of planetary motion. =Transfer of Training.= Our problem now is to find out whether forming one habit helps one to form another. In some cases it does. The results of a recent experiment performed in the laboratory of educational psychology in the University of Missouri, will show what is meant. It was found that if a person practiced distributing cards into pigeon holes till great proficiency was attained, and then the numbering of the boxes or pigeon holes was changed, the person could learn the new numbering and gain proficiency in distributing the cards in the new way more quickly than was the case at first. Similarly, if one learns to run a typewriter with a certain form of keyboard, one can learn to operate a different keyboard much more quickly than was the case in learning the first keyboard. It is probable that the explanation of this apparent transfer is that there are common elements in the two cases. Certain bonds established in the first habit are available in the second. In the case of distributing the cards, many such common elements can be made out. One gains facility in reading the numbering of the cards. The actual movement of the hand in getting to a particular box is the same whatever the number of the box. One acquires schemes of associating and locating the boxes, schemes that will work in both cases. But suppose that one spends fifteen days in distributing cards according to one scheme of numbering, and then changes the numbering and practices for fifteen days with the new numbering, at the end of the second fifteen days one has more skill than at the close of the first fifteen days. In fact, in five days one has as much skill in the new method as was acquired in fifteen days in the first method. However, and this is an important point, the speed in the new way is not so great as the speed acquired in thirty days using one method or one scheme all the time. Direct practice on the specific habit involved is always most efficient. One should probably never learn one thing _just because_ it will help him in learning something else, for that something else could be more economically learned by direct practice. Learning one language probably helps in learning another. A year spent in learning German will probably help in learning French. But two years spent in learning French will give more efficiency in French than will be acquired by spending one year on German and then one year on French. If the only reason for a study is that it helps in learning something else, then this study should be left out of the curriculum. If the only reason for studying Latin, for example, is that it helps in studying English, or French, or helps in grammar, or gives one a larger vocabulary in English on account of a knowledge of the Latin roots, then the study of the language cannot be justified; for all of these results could be much more economically and better attained by a direct approach. Of course, if Latin has a justification in itself, then these by-products are not to be despised. The truth seems to be that habits are very specific things. A definite stimulus goes over to a definite response. We must decide what habits we need to have established, and then by direct and economical practice establish these habits. It is true that in pursuing some studies, we acquire habits that are of much greater applicability in the affairs of life than can be obtained from other studies. When one has acquired the various adding habits, he has kinds of skill that will be of use in almost everything that is undertaken later. So also speaking habits, writing habits, spelling habits, moral habits, etc., are of universal applicability. Whenever one undertakes to do a thing that involves some habit already formed, that thing is more easily done by virtue of that habit. One could not very well learn to multiply one number by another, such as 8,675,489 by 439,857, without first learning to add. This seems to be all there is to the idea of the transfer of training. One gets an act, or an idea, or an attitude, or a point of view that is available in a new thing, thereby making the new thing easier. The methods one would acquire in the study of zoölogy would be, many of them, directly applicable in the study of botany. But, just as truly, one can acquire habits in doing one thing that will be a direct hindrance in learning another thing. Knocking a baseball unfits one for knocking a tennis ball. The study of literature and philosophy probably unfits one for the study of an experimental science because the methods are so dissimilar, in some measure antagonistic. =Habit and Moral Training.= By moral training, we mean that training which prepares one to live among his fellows. It is a training that prepares us to act in our relations with our fellow men in such a way as to bring happiness to our neighbors as well as to ourselves. Specifically, it is a training in honesty, truthfulness, sympathy, and industry. There are other factors of morality but these are the most important. It is evident at once that moral training is the most important of all training. This is, at any rate, the view taken by society; for if a man falls short in his relations with his fellows, he is punished. If the extent of his falling is very great, his liberty is entirely taken away from him. In some cases, he is put to death. Moral training, in addition to being the most important, is also the most difficult. What the public schools can do in this field is quite limited. The training which the child gets on the streets and at home almost overshadows it. =Nature of Moral Training.= A good person is one who does the right social thing at the right time. The more completely and consistently one does this, the better one is. What kind of training can one receive that will give assurance of appropriate moral action? Two things can be done to give a child this assurance. The child can be led to form proper ideals of action and proper habits of action. By ideal of action, we mean that the child should know what the right action is, and have a desire to do it. Habits of action are acquired only through action. As has been pointed out in the preceding pages, continued action of a definite kind develops a tendency to this particular action. One's character is the sum of his tendencies to action. These tendencies can be developed only through practice, through repetition. Moral training, therefore, has the same basis as all other training, that is, in habits. The same procedure that we use in teaching the child the multiplication table is the one to use in developing honesty. In the case of the tables, we have the child say "fifty-six" for "eight times seven." We have him do this till he does it instantly, automatically. Honesty and truthfulness and the other moral virtues can be fixed in the same way. =Home and Moral Training.= The home is the most important factor in moral training. This is largely because of the importance of early habits and attitudes. Obedience to parents and respect for authority, which in a large measure underlie all other moral training, must be secured and developed in the early years of childhood. The child does not start to school till about six years old. At this age much of the foundation of morality is laid. Unless the child learns strict obedience in the first two or three years of life, it is doubtful whether he will ever learn it aright. Without the habit of implicit obedience, it is difficult to establish any other good habit. Parents should understand that training in morality consists, in large measure, in building up habits, and should go about it in a systematic way. As various situations arise in the early life of a child, the parents should obtain from him the appropriate responses. When the situations recur, the right responses should be again secured. Parents should continue to insist upon these responses till tendencies are formed for the right response to follow when the situation arises. After continued repetition, the response comes automatically. The good man or woman is the one who does the right thing as the situation presents itself, does it as a matter of course because it is his nature. He does not even think of doing the wrong thing. One of the main factors in child training is consistency. The parent must inflexibly require the right action in the appropriate situation. Good habits will not be formed if parents insist on proper action one day but on the next day allow the child to do differently. Parents must plan the habits which they wish their children to form and execute these plans systematically, exercising constant care. Parents, and children as well, would profit from reading the plan used by Franklin. Farseeing and clear-headed, Franklin saw that character is a structure which one builds, so he set about this building in a systematic way. For a certain length of time he practiced on one virtue, allowing no exceptions in this one virtue. When this aspect of his character had acquired strength, he added another virtue and then tried to keep perfect as to both.[4] [4] See _Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_. =The School and Moral Training.= In this, as in all other forms of training, the school is supplementary to the home. The teacher should have well in mind the habits and ideals that the home has been trying to develop and should assist in strengthening the bonds. The school can do much in developing habits of kindness and sympathy among the children. It can develop civic and social ideals and habits. Just how it can best do this is a question. Should moral ideals be impressed systematically and should habits be formed at the time these ideals are impressed, or should the different ideals be instilled and developed as occasion demands? This is an experimental problem, and that method should be followed which produces the best results. It is possible that one teacher may use one method best while a different teacher will have better success with another method. More important than the question of a systematic or an incidental method is the question of making the matter vital when it is taken up. Nothing is more certain than that mere knowledge of right action will not insure right action. In a few hours one can teach a child, as matters of mere knowledge, what he should do in all the important situations of life; but this will not insure that he will henceforth do the right things. There are only two ways by which we can obtain any assurance that right action will come. The first way is to secure right habits of response. We must build up tendencies to action. Tendencies depend upon previous action. The second way is to help the child to analyze moral situations and see what results will follow upon the different kinds of action. There can be developed in a child a desire to do that which will bring joy and happiness to others, rather than pain and sorrow. But this analysis of moral situations is not enough to insure right moral action; there must be practice in doing the right thing. The situation must go over to the right response to insure its going there the next time. The first thing in moral training is to develop habits. Then, as soon as the child is old enough he can strengthen his habits by a careful analysis of the problem why one should act one way rather than another. This adds motive; and motive gives strength and assurance. SUMMARY. Habits are acquired tendencies to specific actions in definite situations. They are fixed through repetition. They give us speed, accuracy, and certainty, they save energy and prevent fatigue. They are performed with less attention and become pleasurable. The main purpose of education is to form the habits--moral, intellectual, vocational, cultural--necessary for life. Habits and ideals are the basis of our mature life and character. Moral training is essentially like other forms of training, habit being the basis. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Practice on the formation of some habit until considerable skill is acquired. Draw a learning curve similar to the one on page 95, showing the increase in skill. A class experiment can be performed by the use of a substitution test. Take letters to represent the nine digits, then transcribe numbers into the letters as described on page 192. Keep a record of successive five-minute periods of practice till all have practiced an hour. This gives twelve practice periods for the construction of a learning curve. The individual experiments should be more difficult and cover a longer period. Suitable experiments for individual practice are: learning to operate a typewriter, pitching marbles into a hole, writing with the left hand, and mirror writing. The latter is performed by standing a mirror vertically on the table, placing the paper in front and writing in such a way that the letters have the proper form and appearance when seen in the mirror. The subject should not look at his hand but at its reflection in the mirror. A piece of cardboard can be supported just over the hand so that only the image of the hand in the mirror can be seen. 2. A study of the interference of habit can be made as follows: Take eight small boxes and arrange them in a row. Number each box plainly. Do not number them consecutively, but as follows, 5, 7, 1, 8, 2, 3, 6, 4. Make eighty cards, ten of each number, and number them plainly. Practice distributing the cards into the boxes. Note the time required for each distribution. Continue to distribute them till considerable skill is acquired. Then rearrange the order of the boxes and repeat the experiment. What do the results show? 3. Does the above experiment show any transfer of training? Compare the time for each distribution in the second part of the experiment, _i.e._ after the rearrangement of the boxes, with the time for the corresponding distribution in the first part of the experiment. The question to be answered is: Are the results of the second part of the experiment better than they would have been if the first part had not been performed? State your results and conclusions and compare with the statements in the text. 4. A study of the effects of spreading out learning periods can be made as follows: Divide the class into two equal divisions. Let one division practice on a substitution experiment as explained in Exercise 1, for five ten-minute periods of practice in immediate succession. Let the other division practice for five days, ten minutes a day. What do the results indicate? The divisions should be of equal ability. If the first ten-minute practice period shows the sections to be of unequal ability, this fact should be taken into account in making the comparisons. Test sheets can be prepared by the teacher, or they can be obtained from the Extension Division of the University of Missouri. 5. An experiment similar to No. 4 can be performed by practicing adding or any other school exercise. Care must be taken to control the experiment and to eliminate disturbing factors. 6. Try the card-distributing experiment with people of different ages, young children, old people, and various ages in between. What do you learn? Is it as easy for an old person to form a habit as it is for a young person? Why? 7. If an old person has no old habits to interfere, can he form a new habit as readily as can a young person? 8. Cite evidence from your own experience to prove that it is hard for an old person to break up old habits and form new ones which interfere with the old ones. 9. Do you find that you are becoming "set in your ways?" 10. What do we mean by saying that we are "plastic in early years"? 11. Have you planned your life work? Are you establishing the habits that will be necessary in it? 12. Is it an advantage or a disadvantage to choose one's profession or occupation early? 13. Attention often interferes with the performance of a habitual act. Why is this? 14. If a man removes his vest in the daytime, he is almost sure to wind his watch. On the other hand if he is up all night, he lets his watch run down. Why? 15. Do you know of people who have radically changed their views late in life? 16. Try to teach a dog or a cat a trick. What do you learn of importance about habit-formation? 17. What branches taught in school involve the formation of habits that are useful throughout life? 18. Make a list of the moral habits that should be formed in early years. 19. Write an essay on _Habit and Life_. 20. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN AND BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapters XI and XVII. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, pp. 48-59; also Chapter XV. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapters X, XI, and XII. ROWE: _Habit Formation_, Chapters V-XIII. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, p. 169, par. 37. CHAPTER VII MEMORY =Perceptions and Ideas.= In a previous chapter, brief mention was made of the difference between perceptions and ideas. This distinction must now be enlarged upon and made clearer. Perceptions arise out of our sensory life. We see things when these things are before our eyes. We hear things when these things produce air vibrations which affect our ears. We smell things when tiny particles from them come into contact with a small patch of sensitive membrane in our noses. We taste substances when these substances are in our mouths. Now, this seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, etc., is _perceiving_. We perceive a thing when the thing is actually at the time affecting some one or more of our sense organs. A perception, then, results from the stimulation of a sense organ. Perception is the process of perceiving, sensing, objects in the external world. Ideas are our _seeming_ to see, hear, smell, taste things when these things are not present to the senses. This morning I saw, had a _perception_ of, a robin. To-night in my study, I have an _idea_ of a robin. This morning the robin was present. Light reflected from it stimulated my eye. To-night, as I have an idea of the robin, it is not here; I only seem to see it. The scene which was mine this morning is now revived, reproduced. We may say, therefore, that ideas are the conscious representatives of objects which are not present to the senses. Ideas are revived experiences. Revived experience is memory. Since it is memory that enables us to live our lives over again, brings the past up to the present, it is one of the most wonderful aspects of our natures. The importance of memory is at once apparent if we try to imagine what life would be without it. If our life were only perceptual, if it were only the sights and sounds and smells and tastes of the passing moment, it would have little meaning, it would be bare and empty. But instead of our perceptions being our whole life, they are only the starting points of life. Perceptions serve to arouse groups of memory images or ideas, and the groups of ideas enrich the passing moment and give meaning to the passing perceptions, which otherwise would have no meaning. Suppose I am walking along the street and meet a friend. I see him, speak to him, and pass on. But after I have passed on, I have ideas. I think of seeing my friend the day before. I think of what he said and of what he was doing, of what I said and of what I was doing. Perhaps for many minutes there come ideas from my past experience. These ideas were aroused by the perception of my friend. The perception was momentary, but it started a long train of memory ideas. I pass on down the street and go by a music store. Within the store, a victrola is playing _Jesus, Lover of My Soul_. The song starts another train of memory ideas. I think of the past, of my boyhood days and Sunday school, my early home and many scenes of my childhood. For several minutes I am so engrossed with the memory images that I scarcely notice anything along the street. Again, the momentary perception, this time of sounds, served to revive a great number of ideas, or memories, of the past. These illustrations are typical of our life. Every moment we have perceptions. These perceptions arouse ideas of our past life and experience. One of these ideas evokes another, and so an endless chain of images passes along. The older we become, the richer is our ideational life. While we are children, the perceptions constitute the larger part of our mental life, but as we become older, larger and larger becomes the part played by our memory images or ideas. A child is not content to sit down and reflect, giving himself up to the flow of ideas that come up from his past experience, but a mature person can spend hours in recalling past experience. This means that the older we grow, the more we live in the past, the less we are bound down by the present, and when we are old, instead of perceptions being the main part of mental life, they but give the initial push to our thoughts which go on in an endless chain as long as we live. =The Physiological Basis of Memory.= It will be remembered that the basis of perception is the agitation of the brain caused by the stimulation of a sense organ by an external thing or force. If there is no stimulation of a sense organ, there is no sensation, no perception. Now, just as the basis of sensation and perception is brain activity, so it is also the basis of ideas. In sensation, the brain activity is set up from without. In memory, when we have ideas, the brain activity is set up from within and is a fainter revival of the activity originally caused by the stimulation of the sense organ. Our ideas are just as truly conditioned or caused by brain activity as are our sensations. Memory presents many problems, and psychologists have been trying for many years to solve them. We shall now see what they have discovered and what is the practical significance of the facts. =Relation of Memory to Age and Sex.= It is a common notion that memory is best when we are young, but such is not the case. Numerous experiments have shown that all aspects of memory improve with age. Some aspects of memory improve more than others, and they improve at different times and rates; but all aspects do improve. From the beginning of school age to about fourteen years of age the improvement of most aspects of memory is rapid. If we pronounce a number of digits to a child of six, it can reproduce but few of them, a child of eight or ten can reproduce more, a child of twelve can reproduce still more, and an adult still more. If we read a sentence to children of different ages, we find that the older children can reproduce a longer sentence. If we read a short story to children of different ages, and then require them to reproduce the story in their own words, the older children reproduce more of the story than do the young children.[5] [5] See age and sex graphs, pp. 184, 188, 189. Girls excel boys in practically all the aspects of memory. In rote memory, that is, memory for lists of unrelated words, there is not much difference; but the girls are somewhat better. However, in the ability to remember the ideas of a story, girls excel boys at every age. This superiority of girls over boys is not merely a matter of memory. A girl is superior to a boy of the same age in nearly every way. This is merely a fact of development. A girl develops faster than a boy, she reaches maturity more quickly, in mind as well as in body. Although a girl is lighter than a boy at birth, on the average she gains in weight faster and is heavier at twelve than a boy of the same age. She also gains faster in height, and for a few years in early adolescence is taller than a boy of the same age. Of course, boys catch up and finally become much taller and heavier than girls. Similarly, a girl's mind develops faster than the mind of a boy, as shown in memory and other mental functions. =The Improvement of Memory by Practice.= All aspects of memory can be improved by practice, some aspects much, other aspects little. The memory span for digits, or letters, or words, or for objects cannot be much improved, but memory for ideas that are related, as the ideas of a story, can be considerably improved. In extensive experiments conducted in the author's laboratory, it was found that a person who at first required an hour to memorize the ideas in a certain amount of material, could, after a few months' practice, memorize the same amount in fifteen minutes. And in the latter case the ideas would be better remembered than they were at the beginning of the experiment. Not only could a given number of ideas be learned in less time, but they would be better retained when learned in the shorter time. If a person comes to us for advice as to how to improve his memory, what should we tell him? In order to answer the question, we must consider the factors of a good memory. =Factors of a Good Memory.= (1) The first requirement is to get a good impression in the beginning. Memory is revived experience. The more vivid and intense the first experience, the more sure will be the later recall. So if we wish to remember an experience, we must experience it in the first place under the most favorable conditions. The thing must be seen clearly, it must be understood, it must be in the focus of consciousness. The best teaching is that which leads the child to get the clearest apprehension of what is taught. If we are teaching about some concrete thing, a plant, a machine, we should be sure that the child sees the essential points, should be sure that the main principles enter his consciousness. We should find out by questioning whether he really does clearly understand what we are trying to get him to understand. Often we think a pupil or student has forgotten, when the fact is that he never really knew the thing which we wished to have him remember. The first requisite to memory, then, is to _know in the first place_. If we wish to remember knowledge, the knowledge must be seen in the clearest light, really _be_ knowledge, at the outset. Few people ever really learn how to learn. They never see anything clearly, they never stick to a point till it is apprehended in all its relations and bearings; consequently they forget, largely because they never really knew in the fullest sense. Most teaching is too abstract. The teacher uses words that have no meaning to the pupil. Too much teaching deals with things indirectly. We study _about_ things instead of studying things. In geography, for example, we study about the earth, getting our information from a book. We read about land formations, river courses, erosion, etc., when instead we should study these objects and processes themselves. The first thing in memory, then, is clear apprehension, clear understanding, vivid and intense impression. (2) The second thing necessary to memory is to repeat the experience. First we must get a clear impression, then we must repeat the experience if we would retain it. It is a mistake to believe that if we have once understood a thing, we will always thereafter remember it. We must think our experiences over again if we wish to fix them for permanent retention. We must organize our experience. To organize experience means to think it over in its helpful relations. In memory, one idea arouses another. When we have one idea, what other idea will this arouse? It depends on what connections this idea has had in our minds in the past. It depends on the associations that it has, and associations depend on our thinking the ideas over together. Teachers and parents should help children to think over their experiences in helpful, practical relations. Then in the future, when an idea comes to mind, it brings along with it other ideas that have these helpful, practical relations. We must not, then, merely repeat our experiences, but must repeat them in helpful connections or associations. In organizing our experience, we must systematize and classify our knowledge. One of the chief differences in men is in the way they organize their knowledge. Most of us have experiences abundant enough, but we differ in the way we work over and organize these experiences. Organization not only enables us to remember our experience, but brings our experience back in the right connections. The advice that should be given to a student is the following: Make sure that you understand. If the matter is a lesson in a book, go through it trying to get the main facts; then go through it again, trying to see the relation of all the facts. Then try to see the facts in relation to your wider experience. If it is a history lesson, think of the facts of the lesson in their relation to previous chapters. Think of the details in their bearing on wider and larger movements. A teacher should always hold in mind the facts in regard to memory, and should make her teaching conform to them. She should carefully plan the presentation of a new topic so as to insure a clear initial impression. A new topic should be presented orally by the teacher, with abundant illustration and explanation. It cannot be made too concrete, it cannot be made too plain and simple. Then after the teacher has introduced and made plain the new topic, the pupil reads and studies further. At the next recitation of the class, the first thing in order should be a discussion, on the part of the pupils. This will help the pupils to get the facts cleared up and will help the teacher to find out whether the pupils have the facts right. The first part of the recitation should also be a time for questions. Everything should now be made clear, if there are any errors or misunderstandings on the pupil's part. Of course any procedure in a recitation should depend upon the nature of the material and to some extent on the stage of advancement of the pupil; but in general such a procedure as that just outlined will be most satisfactory and economical: first clear initial presentation by the teacher; then reading and study on the part of the pupil, and third, discussions on the following day. Teachers should also endeavor to show students how to study to the best advantage. Pupils do not know how to study. They do not know what to look for, and do not know how to find it after they know what they are looking for. They should be shown. Of course, some of them learn without help how to study. But some never learn, and it would be a great saving of time to help all of them master the arts of study and memorizing. A very important factor in connection with memory is the matter of meaning. If a person will try to memorize a list of nonsense words, he will find that it is much more difficult than to memorize words that have meaning. This is a significant fact. It means that as material approaches nonsense, it is difficult to memorize. Therefore we should always try to grasp the meaning of a thing, its significance. In science, let us always ask, what is the meaning of this fact? What bearing does it have on other facts? How does it affect the meaning of other facts? =Kinds of Memories.= We should not speak of memory as if it were some sort of power like muscular strength. We should always speak of _memories_. Memories may be classified from several different points of view: A classification may be based on the kind of material, as memory for concrete things, the actual objects of experience, on the one hand, and memory for abstract material, such as names of things, their attributes and relations, on the other. Again, we can base a classification on the type of ideation to which the material appeals, as auditory memory, visual memory, motor memory. We can also base a classification on the principle of _meaning_. This principle of classification would give us at least three classes: memory for ideas as expressed in sentences, logical memory; memory for series of meaningful words not logically related in sentences, rote memory; memory for series of meaningless words, a form of rote memory. This classification is not meant to be complete, but only suggestive. With every change in the kind of material, the method of presenting the material to the subject, or the manner in which the subject deals with the material, there may be a change in the effectiveness of memory. While these different kinds or aspects of memory may have some relation to one another, they are to some extent independent. One may have a good rote memory and a poor logical memory, or a poor rote memory and a good logical memory. That is to say, one may be very poor at remembering the exact words of a book, but be good at remembering the meaning, the ideas, of the book. One may be good at organizing meaningful material but poor at remembering mere words. On the other hand, these conditions may be reversed; one may remember the words but never get the meaning. It is of course possible that much of this difference is due to habit and experience, but some of the difference is beyond doubt due to original differences in the nervous system and brain. These differences should be determined in the case of all children. It is quite a common thing to find a feeble-minded person with a good rote memory, but such a person never has a good logical memory. One can have a good rote memory without understanding, one cannot have a good logical memory without understanding. Let us now ask the question, why can one remember better words that are connected by logical relations than words that have no such connection? If we read to a person a list of twenty nonsense words, the person can remember only two or three; but if a list of twenty words connected in a sentence were read to a person, in most cases, all of them would be reproduced. The reason is that the words in the latter case are not new. We already know the words. They are already a part of our experience. We have had days, perhaps years, of experience with them. All that is now new about them is perhaps a slightly new relation. Moreover, the twenty words may contain but one, or at most only a few, ideas, and in this case it is the ideas that we remember. The ideas hold the words together. If the twenty words contain a great number of ideas, then we cannot remember all of them from one reading. If I say, "I have a little boy who loves his father and mother very much, and this boy wishes to go to the river to catch some fish," one can easily remember all these words after one reading. But if I say, "The stomach in all the Salmonidæ is syphonal and at the pylorus are fifteen to two hundred comparatively large pyloric coeca"; although this sentence is shorter, one finds it more difficult to remember, and the main reason is that the words are not so familiar. =Memory and Thinking.= What is the relation of memory to thinking and the other mental functions? One often hears a teacher say that she does not wish her pupils to depend on memory, but wishes them to reason things out. Such a statement shows a misunderstanding of the facts; for reasoning itself is only the recall of ideas in accordance with the laws of association. Without memory, there would be no reasoning, for the very material of thought is found to be the revived experiences which we call ideas, memories. One of the first requisites of good thinking is a reliable memory. One must have facts to reason, and these facts must come to one in memory to be available for thought. If one wishes to become a great thinker in a certain field, he must gain experience in that field and organize that experience in such a way as to remember it and to recall it when it is wanted. What one does deplore is memory for the mere words with no understanding of the meaning. In geometry, for example, a student sometimes commits to memory the words of a demonstration, with no understanding of the meaning. Of course, that is worse than useless. One should remember the meaning of the demonstration. If one has memorized the words only, he cannot solve an original problem in geometry. But if he has understood the meaning of the demonstration, then he recalls it, and is enabled to solve the problem. If one does not remember the various facts about the relationships in a triangle, he cannot solve a problem of the triangle until he has worked out and discovered the necessary facts. Then memory would make them available for the solution of the problem. =Memory and School Standing.= That memory plays a large part in our life is evident; and, of course, it is an important factor in all school work. It matters not what we learn, if we do not remember it. The author has made extensive experiments to determine the relation that memory has to a child's progress in school. The method used was to give logical memory tests to all the children in a school and then rank the children in accordance with their abilities to reproduce the story used in the test. Then they were ranked according to their standing in their studies. A very high correlation was found. On the whole, the pupils standing highest in the memory tests were found to stand highest in their studies. It is true, of course, that they did not stand highest merely because they had good memories, but because they were not only better in memory, but were better in most other respects too. Pupils that are good in logical memory are usually good in other mental functions. A test of logical memory is one of the best to give us an idea of the school standing of pupils. Not only is the retention of ideas of very great importance itself, but the acquiring of ideas, and the organizing of them in such a way as to remember them involves nearly all the mental functions. The one who remembers well ideas logically related, is the one who pays the closest attention, the one who sees the significance, the one who organizes, the one who repeats, the one who turns things over in his mind. A logical memory test is therefore, to some extent, a test of attention, association, power of organization as well as of memory; in a word, it is a test of mental power. Other things being equal, a person whose power of retention is good has a great advantage over his fellows who have poor ability to remember. Suppose we consider the learning of language. The pupil who can look up the meaning of a word just once and remember it has an advantage over the person who has to look up the meaning of the word several times before it is retained. So in any branch of study, the person who can acquire the facts in less time than another person, has the extra time for learning something else or for going over the same material and organizing it better. The scientist who remembers all the significant facts that he reads, and sees their bearing on his problems, has a great advantage over the person who does not remember so well. Of course, there are certain dangers in having a good memory, just as there is danger in being brilliant generally. The quick learner is in danger of forming slovenly habits. A person who learns quickly is likely to form the habit of waiting till the last minute to study his lesson and then getting a superficial idea of it. The slow learner must form good habits of study to get on at all. Teachers and parents should prevent the bright children from forming bad habits of study. The person who learns quickly and retains well should be taught to be thorough and to use the advantage that comes from repetition. The quick learner should not be satisfied with one attack on his lesson, but should study the lesson more than once, for even the brilliant learner cannot afford to neglect the advantages that come from repetition. A person with poor memory and only mediocre ability generally can make up very much by hard work and by work that takes advantage of all the laws of economical learning. But he can never compete successfully with the person who works as hard as he does and who has good powers of learning and retention. The author has found that in a large class of a hundred or more, there is usually a person who has good memory along with good mental ability generally, and is also a hard worker. Such a person always does the best work in the class. A person with poor memory and poor mental powers generally cannot hope to compete with a person of good memory, good mental powers generally, if that person is also a good worker. =Learning and Remembering.= A popular fallacy is expressed in the saying "Easy come, easy go." The person who is the best learner is also the best in retaining what is learned, provided all other conditions are the same. This matter was determined in the following way: A logical memory test was given to all the children in a city school system. A story was read to the pupils and then reproduced by them in writing. The papers were corrected and graded and nothing more was said about the test for one month. Then at the same time in every room, the teachers said, "You remember the story I read to you some time ago and which I asked you to reproduce. Well, I wish to see how much of the story you still remember." The pupils were then required to write down all the story that they could recall. It was found that, in general, the children who write the most when the story is first read to them, write the most after the lapse of a month, and the poorest ones at first are the poorest ones at the end of the month. Of course, the correspondence is not perfect, but in some cases, in some grades, it is almost so. The significance of this experiment is very great. It means that the pupil who gets the most facts from a lesson will have the most facts at any later time. This is true, of course, only if other things are equal. If one pupil studies about the matter more, reflects upon it, repeats it in his mind, of course this person will remember more, other things being equal. But if neither reviews the matter, or if both do it to an equal extent, then the one who learns the most in the first place, remembers the most at a later time. I have also tested the matter out in other ways. I have experimented with a group of men and women, by reading a passage of about a page in length, repeating the reading till the subject could reproduce all the facts. It was found that the person who acquired all the facts from the fewest readings remembered more of the facts later. It must be said that there is less difference between the subjects later than at first. In the laboratory of Columbia University a similar experiment was performed, but in a somewhat different way. Students were required to commit to memory German vocabularies and were later tested for their retention of the words learned. It was found that those who learned the most words in a given time, also retained the largest percentage of what had been learned. It should not be surprising that this is the case. The quick learner is the one who makes the best use of all the factors of retention, the factors mentioned in the preceding paragraph--good attention, association, organization, etc. Another experiment performed in the author's laboratory bears out the above conclusions. A group of students were required to commit to memory at one sitting a long list of nonsense syllables. The number of repetitions necessary to enable each student to reproduce them was noted. One day later, the students attempted to reproduce the syllables. Of course they could not, and they were then required to say them over again till they could just repeat them from memory. The number of repetitions was noted. The number of repetitions was much less than on the first day. On the third day, the process was repeated. The number of repetitions was fewer still. This relearning was kept up each day till each person could repeat the syllables from memory without any study. It was found that the person who learned the syllables in the fewest repetitions the first time, relearned them in the fewest repetitions on succeeding days. All the experiments bearing on the subject point to the same conclusion; namely, that the quick learner, if other things are equal, retains at least as well as the slow learner, and usually retains better. =Transfer of Memory Training.= We have said above that there are many kinds or aspects of memory. It has also been said that we can improve memory by practice. Now, the question arises, if we improve one aspect of memory, does this improve all aspects? This is an important question; moreover, it is one to be settled by experiment and not by argument. The most extensive and thorough experiment was performed by an English psychologist, Sleight. The experiment was essentially as follows: He took a large number of pupils and tested the efficiency of the various aspects of their memory. He then took half of them and trained one aspect of their memory until there was considerable improvement. The other section had no memory training meanwhile. After the training, both groups again had all aspects of their memory tested. Both groups showed improvement in all aspects because the first tests gave them some practice, but the group that had been receiving the training was no better in those aspects not trained than was the group receiving no training at all. Aspects of memory much like the one trained showed some improvement, but other aspects did not. The conclusion is that memory training is specific, that it affects only the kind of memory trained, and related memories. This is in harmony with what we learned about habit. When we receive training, it affects only the parts of us trained and other closely related parts. =Learning by Wholes.= We do not often have to commit to memory verbatim, but when we do, it is important that we should know the most economical way. Experiments have clearly demonstrated that the most economical way is to read the entire selection through from beginning to end and continue to read it through in this way till the matter is learned by heart. In long selections, the saving by this method is considerable. A pupil is not likely to believe this because if he spends a few minutes learning in this manner, he finds that he cannot repeat a single line, while if he had concentrated on one line, he could have repeated at least that much. This is true; but although he cannot repeat a single line by the whole procedure, he has learned nevertheless. It would be a good thing to demonstrate this fact to a class; then the pupils would be satisfied to use the most economical procedure. The plan holds good whether the matter be prose or poetry. But experiments have been carried on only with verbatim learning. The best procedure for learning the facts so that one can give them in one's own words has not yet been experimentally determined. =Cramming.= An important practical question is whether it pays to go over a great amount of material in a very short time, as students often do before examinations. From all that has been said above, one could infer the solution to this problem. Learning and memorizing are to some extent a growth, and consequently involve time. There is an important law of learning and memory known as Jost's law, which may be stated as follows: If we repeat or renew associations, the repetitions have most value for the old associations. Therefore when we learn, we should learn and then later relearn. This will make for permanent retention. Of course, if we wish to get together a great mass of facts for a temporary purpose and do not care to retain them permanently, cramming is the proper method. If we are required to pass an examination in which a knowledge of many details is expected and these details have no important permanent value, cramming is justified. When a lawyer is preparing a case to present to a court, the actual, detail evidence is of no permanent value, and cramming is justified. But if we wish to acquire and organize facts for their permanent value, cramming is not the proper procedure. The proper procedure is for a student to go over his work faithfully as the term of school proceeds, then occasionally review. At the end of the term, a rapid review of the whole term's work is valuable. After one has studied over matter and once carefully worked it out, a quick view again of the whole subject is most valuable, and assists greatly in making the acquisition permanent. But if the matter has not been worked out before, the hasty view of the material of the course, while it may enable one to pass the examination, has no permanent value. =Function of the Teacher in Memory Work.= The function of a teacher is plainly to get the pupils to learn in accordance with the laws of memory above set forth; but there are certain things that a teacher can do that may not have become evident to the reader. It has been learned in experiments in logical memory that when a story is read to a subject and the subject attempts to reproduce it, certain mistakes are made. When the story is read again, it is common for the same mistakes to be made in the recall. Certain ideas were apprehended in a certain way; and, when the piece is read again, the subject pays no more attention to the ideas already acquired and reported, and they are therefore reported wrongly as they were in the first place. Often the subject does not notice the errors till his attention is called to them. This suggests an important function of the teacher in connection with the memory work of the pupils. This function is to correct mistakes in the early stages of learning. A teacher should always be on the watch to find the errors of the pupils and to correct them before they are fixed by repetition. A teacher should, also, consider it her duty to test the memory capacities of the pupils and to give each the advice that the case demands. =Some Educational Inferences.=--There are certain consequences to education that follow from the facts of memory above set forth that are of considerable significance. Many things have been taught to children on the assumption that they could learn them better in childhood than later, because it was thought that memory and the learning capacity were better in childhood. But both of these assumptions are false. As children grow older their learning capacity increases and their memories become better. It has particularly been held that rote memory is better in childhood and that therefore children should begin their foreign language study early. It is true that as far as _speaking_ a foreign language is concerned, the earlier a child begins it the better. But this is not true of learning to read the language. The sounds of the foreign language that we have not learned in childhood in speaking the mother tongue are usually difficult for us to make. The organs of speech become set in the way of their early exercise. In reading the foreign language, correct pronunciation is not important. We are concerned with _getting_ the thought, and this is possible without pronouncing at all. Reference to graphs on pages 190 and 191 will show that rote memory steadily improves throughout childhood and youth. The author has performed numerous experiments to test this very point. He has had adults work side by side with children at building up new associations of the rote memory type and found that always the adult could learn faster than the child and retain better what was learned. The experience of language teachers in college and university does not give much comfort to those who claim that language study should be begun early. These teachers claim that the students who have had previous language study do no better than those who have had none. It seems, however, that there certainly ought to be _some_ advantage in beginning language study early and spreading the study out over the high school period. But what is gained does not offset the tremendous loss that follows from requiring _all_ high school students to study a foreign language merely to give an opportunity for early study to those who are to go on in the university with language courses. A mature university student that has a real interest in language and literature can begin his language study in the university and make rapid progress. Some of the best classical scholars whom the author knows began their language study in the university. While it would have been of some advantage to them to have begun their language study earlier, there are so few who should go into this kind of work that society cannot afford to make provision for their beginning the study in the high school. The selection and arrangement of the studies in the curriculum must be based on other grounds than the laws of memory. What children make most progress in and need most to know are the concrete things of their physical and social environment. Children must first learn the world--the woods and streams and birds and flowers and plants and animals, the earth, its rocks and soils and the wonderful forces at work in it. They must learn man,--what he is and what he does and how he does it; how he lives and does his work and how he governs himself. They should also learn to read and to write their mother tongue, and should learn something of that great store of literature written in the mother tongue. The few that are to be scholars in language and literature must wait till beginning professional study before taking up their foreign language; just as a person who is to be a lawyer or physician must also wait till time to enter a university before beginning special professional preparation. The child's memory for abstract conceptions is particularly weak in early years; hence studies should be so arranged as to acquaint the child with the concrete aspects of the world first, and later to acquaint him with the abstract relations of things. Mathematics should come late in the child's life, for the same reason. Mathematics deals with quantitative relations which the child can neither learn nor remember profitably and economically till he is more mature. The child should first learn the world in its descriptive aspects. =Memory and Habit.= The discussion up to this point should have made it clear to the reader that memory is much the same thing as habit. Memory considered as retention depends upon the permanence of the impression on the brain; but in its associative aspects depends on connections between brain centers, as is the case with habit. The association of ideas, which is the basis of their recall, is purely a matter of habit formation. When I think of George Washington, I also think of the Revolution, of the government, of the presidency, of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, etc., because of the connections which these ideas have had in my mind many times before. There is a basis in the brain structure for these connections. There is nothing in any _idea_ that connects it with another idea. Ideas become connected because of the _way in which we experience them_, and the reason one idea calls up another idea is because the brain process that is the cause of one idea brings about another brain process that is the cause of a second idea. The whole thing is merely a matter of the way the brain activities become organized. Therefore the various laws of habit-formation have application to memory in so far as memory is a matter of the association of ideas, based on brain processes. One often has the experience of trying to recall a name or a fact and finds that he cannot. Presently the name or fact may come, or it may not come till the next day or the next week. What is the cause of this peculiar phenomenon? The explanation is to be found in the nervous system. When one tries to recall the name and it will not come to mind, there is some temporary block or hindrance in the nerve-path that leads from one center to the other and one cannot think of the name till the obstruction is removed. We go on thinking about other things, and in the meantime the activities going on in the brain remove the obstruction; so when the matter comes up again, the nerve current shoots through, and behold, the name comes to mind. [Illustration: FIGURE IV--ASSOCIATIVE CONNECTIONS The diagram represents schematically the neural basis of the association of ideas.] Now the only preventive of such an occurrence is to be found in the law of habit, for the block ordinarily occurs in case of paths or bonds not well established. We must _think together_ the things we wish to have associated. Repetition is the key to the situation, repetition which is the significant thing in habit-formation, repetition which is the only way of coupling two things which we wish to have associated together. Of course, there is no absolute coupling of two ideas. One sometimes forgets his own name. When we are tired or ill, things which were the most closely associated may not hang together. But those ideas hold together in the firmest way that have been experienced together most often in a state of attention. The diagram on page 147 illustrates schematically the neural connections and cross-connections which are the bases of the association of ideas, the circles _A_, _B_, _C_, _D_, _E_, and _F_ represent brain processes which give rise to ideas, and the lines represent connecting paths. Note that there are both direct and indirect connections. SUMMARY. Sensation and perception give us our first experience with things; memory is revived experience. It enables us to live our experience over again and is therefore one of the most important human traits. The physiological basis of memory is in the brain and nervous system. Memory improves with practice and up to a certain point with the age of the person. It is better in girls than in boys. Good memory depends on vivid experience in the first place and on organization and repetition afterward. The person who learns quickly usually retains well also. Memory training is specific. The extension of the learning process over a long time is favorable to memory. Memory ideas are the basis of thinking and reasoning. CLASS EXERCISES 1. The teacher can test the auditory memory of the members of the class for rote material by using letters. It is better to omit the vowels, using only the consonants. Prepare five groups of letters with eight letters in a group. Read each group of letters to the class, slowly and distinctly. After reading a group, allow time for the students to write down what they recall, then read the next group and so proceed till the five groups have been read. Grade the work by finding the number of letters reproduced, taking no account of the position of the letters. 2. In a similar way, test visual memory, using different combinations of letters. Write the letters plainly on five large squares of cardboard. Hold each list before the class for as long a time as it took to read a group in experiment No. 1. 3. Test memory for words in a similar way. Use simple words of one syllable, making five lists with eight words in a list. 4. Test memory for objects by fastening common objects on a large cardboard and holding the card before the class. Put eight objects on each card and prepare five cards. Expose them for the same length of time as in experiment No. 2. 5. Test memory for _names_ of objects by preparing five lists of names, eight names in a list, and reading the names as in experiment No. 1. 6. You now have data for the following study: Find the average grade of each student in the different experiments. Find the combined grade of each student in all the above experiments. Do the members of the class hold the same rank in all the tests? How do the boys compare with the girls? How does memory for objects compare with memory for names of objects? How does auditory memory compare with visual? What other points do you learn from the experiments? 7. The teacher can make a study of the logical memory of the members of the class by using material as described on page 184. Make five separate tests, using stories that are well within the comprehension of the class and that will arouse their interest. Sufficient material will be found in the author's _Examination of School Children_ and Whipple's _Manual_. However, the teacher can prepare similar material. 8. Do the students maintain the same rank in the separate tests of experiment No. 7? Rank all the students for their combined standing in all the first five tests. Rank them for their combined standing in the logical memory tests. Compare the two rankings. What conclusions are warranted? 9. You have tested, in experiment No. 7, logical memory when the material was read to the students. It will now be interesting to compare the results of No. 7 with the results obtained by allowing the students to read the material of the test. For this purpose, select portions from the later chapters of this book. Allow just time enough for the selection to be read once slowly by the students, then have it reproduced as in the other logical memory experiment. Give several tests, if there is sufficient time. Find the average grade of each student, and compare the results with those obtained in No. 7. This will enable you to compare the relative standing of the members of the class, but will not enable you to compare the two ways of acquiring facts. For this purpose, the stories would have to be of equal difficulty. Let the members of the class plan an experiment that would be adequate for this purpose. 10. A brief study of the improvement of memory can be made by practicing a few minutes each day for a week or two, as time permits, using material that can be easily prepared, such as lists of common words. Let the members of the class plan the experiment. Use the best plan. 11. The class can make a study of the relation of memory to school standing in one of the grades below the high school. Give at least two tests for logical memory. Give also the rote memory tests described on page 189. Get the class standing of the pupils from the teacher. Make the comparison as suggested in Chapter I, page 15. Or, the correlation can be worked out accurately by following the directions given in the _Examination of School Children_, page 58, or in Whipple's _Manual_, page 38. 12. Let the members of the class make a plan for the improvement of their memory for the material studied in school. Plan devices for learning the material better and for fixing it in memory. At the end of the course in psychology, have an _experience_ meeting and study the results reported. 13. Prepare five lists of nonsense syllables, with eight in a list. Give them as in experiment No. 3, and compare the results with those of that experiment. What do the results indicate as to the value to memory of _meaningful_ material? What educational inferences can you make? In preparing the syllables, put a vowel between two consonants, and use no syllable that is a real word. 14. A study of the effects of distractions on learning and memory can be made as follows: Let the teacher select two paragraphs in later chapters of this book, of equal length and difficulty. Let the students read one under quiet conditions and the other while an electric bell is ringing in the room. Compare the reproductions in the two cases. 15. From the chapter and from the results of all the memory tests, let the students enumerate the facts that have educational significance. 16. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN and BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapter XV. MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, pp. 165-170. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapters VI and VIII. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapter XIII. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapter VII. CHAPTER VIII THINKING In Chapter III we learned about sensation. We found that when a sense organ is stimulated by its appropriate type of stimulus, this stimulation travels through the sensory nerves and sets up an excitation in the brain. This excitation in the brain gives us sensation. We see if the eye is stimulated. We hear if the ear is stimulated, etc. In Chapter VII we learned that after the brain has had an excitation giving rise to sensation, it is capable of reviving this excitation later. This renewal or revival of a brain excitation gives us an experience resembling the original sensation, only usually fainter and less stable. This revived experience is called _image_ or _idea_. The general process of retention and revival of experience is, as we have seen, known as memory. An idea, then, is a bit of revived experience. A perception is a bit of immediate or primary experience. I am said to perceive a chair if the chair is present before me, if the light reflected from the chair is actually exciting my retinas. I have an _idea_ of the chair when I _seem_ to see it, when the chair is not before me or when my eyes are shut. These distinctions were pointed out in the preceding chapter. Let us now proceed to carry our study of ideas further. =Association of Ideas.= The subject of the association of ideas can best be introduced by an experiment. Take a paper and pencil, and think of the word "horse." Write this word down, and then write down other words that come to mind. Write them in the order in which they come to mind. Do this for three or four minutes, and try the experiment several times, beginning with a different word each time. Make a study of the lists of words. Compare the different lists and the lists written by different students. In the case of the writer, the following words came to mind in the first few seconds: horse, bridle, saddle, tail, harness, buggy, whip, man, sky, stars, sun, ocean. Why did these words come, and why did they come in that order? Why did the idea "horse" suggest the idea "bridle"? And why did "bridle" suggest "saddle"? Is there something in the nature of ideas that couples them with certain other ideas and makes them _always_ suggest the other ideas? No, there is not. Ideas become coupled together in our experience, and the coupling is in accordance with our experience. Things that are together in our experience become coupled together as ideas. The idea "horse" may become coupled with any other idea. The general law of the association of ideas is this: Ideas are joined together in memory or revived experience as they were joined in the original or perceptive experience. But the matter is complicated by the fact that things are experienced in different connections in perceptive experience. I do not always experience "horse" together with "bridle." I sometimes see horses in a pasture eating clover. So, as far as this last experience is concerned, when I think "horse" I should also think "clover." I sometimes see a horse running when a train whistles, so "whistle" and "horse" should be coupled in my mind. A horse once kicked me on the shoulder, so "horse" and "shoulder" should be connected in my mind. And so they are. The very fact that these various experiences come back to me proves that they are connected in my mind in accordance with the original experiences. The revival of various horse experiences has come to me faster than I could write them down, and they are all bound together in my memory. If I should write them all out, it would take many hours, perhaps days. Not only are these "horse ideas" bound together with one another, but they are bound more or less directly, more or less closely, to everything else in my life. I can, therefore, pass in thought from the idea "horse" to any other idea, directly or indirectly. Now, in any given case, what idea will actually come first after I have the idea "horse"? This depends upon the tendencies established in the nervous system. The brain process underlying the idea "horse" has connections with many other processes and tends to excite these processes. The factors that strengthen these tendencies or connections are the frequency, recency, primacy, and vividness of experience. Let us consider, in some detail, each of these factors. =Primacy of Experience.= A strong factor in determining association is the _first experience_. The first, the original, coupling of ideas tends to persist. The first connection is nearly always a strong one, and is also strengthened by frequent repetition in memory. Our first experience with people and things persists with great strength, across the years, in spite of other associations and connections established later. Just now there comes to mind my first experience with a certain famous scientist. It was many years ago. I was a student in an eastern university. This man gave a public lecture at the opening of the session. I remember many details of the occurrence with great vividness. Although I studied under this man for three years, no other experience with him is more prominent than the first. First experiences give rise to such strong connections between ideas that these connections often persist and hold their own as against other connections depending upon other factors. The practical consequences of this factor in teaching are, of course, evident. Both teachers and parents should take great care in the matter of the first experiences of children. If the idea-connections of first experiences are likely to persist, then these connections should be desirable ones. They should not be useless connections, nor should they, ordinarily, be connections that will have to be radically undone later. Usually it is not economical to build up connections between ideas that will not serve permanently, except in cases in which the immaturity of the mind makes such a procedure necessary. =Recency of Experience.= The most recent connection of ideas is relatively strong, and is often the determining one. But the most recent connection must be very recent or it has no especial value. If I have seen a certain friend to-day, and his name is brought to mind now, to-day's experience with him will likely be brought to mind _first_. But if my last seeing him was some days or months ago, the idea-connection of the last meeting has no great value. Of course, circumstances always alter the matter. Perhaps we should say in the last instance that, other things being equal, the last experience has no special value. If the last experience was an unusual one, such as a death or a marriage, then it has a value due to its vividness and intensity and its emotional aspects. These factors not only add strength to the connections made at the time but are the cause of frequent revivals of this last experience in memory in the succeeding days. All these factors taken together often give a last experience great associative strength, even though the last experience is not recent. =Frequency of Experience.= The most frequent connection of ideas is probably the most important factor of all in determining future associations. The first connection is but one, and the last connection is but one, while repeated connections may be many in number. Connections which recur frequently usually overcome all other connections. Hence frequency is the dominant factor in association. Most of the strength of first connections is due to repetitions in memory later. The first experience passes through the mind again and again as memory, and thereby becomes strengthened. The fact that repetition of connections establishes these connections is, of course, the justification of drill and review in school studies. The practical needs of life demand that certain ideas be associated so that one calls up the other. Teachers and parents, knowing these desirable connections, endeavor to fix them in the minds of children by repetition. The important facts of history, literature, civics, and science we endeavor, by means of repetition, to fasten in the child's mind. =Vividness and Intensity of Experience.= A vivid experience is one that excites and arouses us, strongly stimulating our feelings. Such experiences establish strong bonds of connection. When I think of a railroad wreck, I think of one in which I participated. The experience was vivid, intense, and aroused my emotions. I hardly knew whether I was dead or alive. Then, secondly, I usually think of a wreck which I witnessed in childhood. A train plunged through a bridge and eighteen cars were piled up in the ravine. The experience was vivid and produced a deep and lasting impression on me. The practical significance of this factor is, of course, great. When ideas are presented to pupils these ideas should be made clear. Every conceivable device should be used to clarify and explain,--concrete demonstration, the use of objects and diagrams, pictures and drawings, and abundant oral illustration. We must be sure that the one taught understands, that the ideas become focal in consciousness and take hold of the individual. This is the main factor in what is known as "interest." An interesting thing is one that takes hold of us and possesses us so that we cannot get away from it. Such experiences are vivid and have rich emotional connections or accompaniments. Ideas that are experienced together at such times are strongly connected. =Mental Set or Attitude.= Another influence always operative in determining the association of ideas is mental set. By mental set we mean the mood or attitude one is in,--whether one is sad or glad, well or ill, fresh or fatigued, etc. What one has just been thinking about, what one has just been doing, are always factors that determine the direction of association. One often notices the effects of mental set in reading newspapers. If one's mind has been deeply occupied with some subject and one then starts to read a newspaper, one may actually miscall many of the words in the article he is reading; the words are made to fit in with what is in his mind. For example, if one is all wrought up over a wedding, many words beginning with "w" and having about the same length as the word "wedding," will be read as "wedding." Mental set may be permanent or temporary. By permanent we mean the strong tendencies that are built up by continued thought in a certain direction. One becomes a Methodist, a Democrat, a conservative, a radical, a pessimist, an optimist, etc., by continuity of similar experiences and similar reactions to these experiences. Germans, French, Irish, Italians, Chinese, have characteristic sets or ways of reacting to typical situations that may be called racial. These prejudicial ways of reacting may be called racial sets or attitudes. Religious, political, and social prejudices may all be called sets or attitudes. Temporary sets or attitudes are leanings and prejudices that are due to temporary states of mind. The fact that one has headache, or indigestion, or is in a hurry, or is angry, or is hungry, or is emotionally excited over something will, for the time, be a factor in determining the direction of association. One of the tasks of education is to build up sets or attitudes, permanent prejudices, to be constant factors in guiding association and, consequently, action. We wish to build up permanent attitudes toward truth, honesty, industry, sympathy, zeal, persistence, etc. It is evident that attitude is merely an aspect of habit. It is an habitual way of reacting to a definite and typical situation. This habitual way is strengthened by repetition, so that set or attitude finally, after years of repetition, becomes a part of our nature. Our prejudices become as strong, seemingly, as our instinctive tendencies. After a man has thought in a particular groove for years, it is about as sure that he will come to certain definite conclusions on matters in the line of his thought as that he would give typical instinctive or even reflex reactions. We know the direction association will take for a Presbyterian in religious matters, for a Democrat in political matters, with about as much certainty as we know what their actions will be in situations that evoke instinctive reactions. =Thinking and Reasoning.= Thinking is the passing of ideas in the mind. This flow of ideas is in accordance with the laws of association above discussed. The order in which the ideas come is the order fixed by experience, the order as determined by the various factors above enumerated. In early life, one's mind is chiefly perceptual, it is what we see and hear and taste and smell. As one grows older his mind grows more and more ideational. With increasing age, a larger and larger percentage of our mental life is made up of ideas, of memories. The child lives in the present, in a world of perceptions. A man is not so much tied down to the present; he lives in memory and anticipation. He thinks more than does the child. A man is content to sit down in his chair and think for hours at a time, a child is not. This thinking is the passing of ideas, now one, then another and another. These ideas are the survivals or revivals of our past experience. The order of their coming depends on our past experience. As I sit here and write, there surge up out of my past, ideas of creeks and rivers and hills, horses and cows and dogs, boys and girls, men and women, work and play, school days, friends,--an endless chain of ideas. This "flow" of ideas is often started by a perception. For illustration, I see a letter on the table, a letter from my brother. I then have a visual image of my brother. I think of him as I saw him last. I think of what he said. I think of his children, of his home, of his boyhood, and our early life together. Then I think of our mother and the old home, and so on and on. Presently I glance at a history among my books, and immediately think of Greece and Athens and the Acropolis, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates, schoolmates and teachers, and friends connected in one way or another with my college study of Greek. In this description of the process of thinking, I have repeatedly used the words "think of." I might have said instead, "there came to mind ideas of Athens, ideas of friends," etc. Thinking, then, is a general term for our idea-life. Reasoning is a form of thinking. Reasoning, too, is a flow of ideas. But while reasoning is thinking, it is a special form of thinking; it is thinking to a purpose. In thinking as above described and illustrated, no immediate ends of the person are served; while in reasoning some end is always sought. In reasoning, the flow of ideas must reach some particular idea that will serve the need of the moment, the need of the problem at hand. Reasoning, then, is controlled thinking, thinking centering about a problem, about a situation that one must meet. The statement that reasoning is _controlled_ thinking needs some explanation, for the reader at once is likely to want to know what does the controlling. There is not some special faculty or power that does the controlling. The control is exercised by the set into which one is thrown by the situation which confronts one. The set puts certain nerve-tracts into readiness to conduct, or in other words, makes certain groups of ideas come into mind, and makes one satisfied only if the right ideas come. As long as ideas come that do not satisfy, the flow keeps on, taking one direction and then another, in accordance with the way our ideas have become organized. An idea finally comes that satisfies. We are then said to have reached a conclusion, to have made up our mind, to have solved our problem. But the fact that we are satisfied is no sure sign that the problem is correctly solved. It means only that our past experiences, available at the time through association, say that the conclusion is right. Or, in more scientific terms, that the conclusion is in harmony with our past experience, as it has been organized and made available through association. There is not within us a little being, a reasoner, that sits and watches ideas file by and passes judgment upon them. The real judge is our nervous system with its organized bonds or connections. An illustration may make the matter clearer: A boy walking along in the woods comes to a stream too wide for him to jump across. He wishes to be on the other side, so here is a situation that must be met, a problem that must be solved. A flow of ideas is started centering about the problem. The flow is entirely determined and directed by past experience and the present situation. The boy pauses, looks about, and sees on the bank a pole and several large stones. He has walked on poles and on fences, he therefore sees himself putting the pole across the stream and walking on it. This may be in actual visual imagery, or it may be in words. He may merely say, "I will put the pole across and walk on it." But, before having time to do it, he may recall walking on poles that turned. He is not then satisfied with the pole idea. The perception of stones may next become clear in his mind, and if no inhibiting or hindering idea comes up, the stone idea carries him into action. He piles the stones into the stream and walks across. As was mentioned above, the flow of ideas may take different forms. The imagery may take any form but is usually visual, auditory, motor, or verbal. Further discussion of the point that reasoning is determined by past experience may be necessary. Suppose the teacher ask the class a number of different questions, moral, religious, political. Many different answers to the questions will be received, in some cases as many answers to the questions as there are pupils. Ask whether it is ever right to steal, whether it is ever right to lie, whether it is ever right to fight, whether it is ever right to disobey a parent or teacher, whether oak is stronger than maple, whether iron expands more when heated than does copper, whether one should always feed beggars, etc. The answers received, in each case, depend on the previous experience of the pupils. The more nearly alike the experiences of the pupils, the more nearly alike will be the answers. The more divergent the experiences, the more different will be the answers. The basis of reasoning is ultimately the same sort of thing as the basis of habit. We have repeated experiences of the same kind. The ideas of these experiences become welded together in a definite way. Association between certain groups of ideas becomes well fixed. Later situations involving these groups of ideas set up definite trains of association. We come always to definite conclusions from the same situations provided that we are in the same mental set and the factors involved are the same. Throughout early life we have definite moral and religious ideas presented to us. We come to think in definite ways about them or with them. It therefore comes about that every day we live, we are determining the way we shall in the future reason about things. We are each day getting the material for the solution of the problems that will be presented to us by future situations. And the reason that one of us will solve those problems in a different way from another is because of having somewhat different experiences, and of organizing them in a different way. =Meaning and the Organization of Ideas.= In the preceding paragraphs we have several times spoken of the organization of ideas. Let us now see just what is meant by this expression. Intimately connected with the organization of ideas is _meaning_. What is the meaning of an idea? The meaning of an idea is another idea or group of ideas that are very closely associated with it. When there comes to mind an idea that has arisen out of repeated experience, there come almost immediately with it other ideas, perhaps vivid images which have been connected with the same experience. Suppose the idea is of a horse. If one were asked, "What is a horse?" ideas of a horse in familiar situations would present themselves. One may see in imagination a horse being driven, ridden, etc., and he would then answer, "Why, a horse is to ride," or "A horse is to drive," or "A horse is a domestic animal," etc. Again, "What is a cloud? What is the sun? What is a river? What is justice? What is love?" One says, "A cloud is that from which rain falls," or "A cloud is partially condensed vapor. The sun is a round thing in the sky that shines by day. A river is water flowing along in a low place through the land. Justice is giving to people what they deserve. Love is that feeling one has for a person which makes him be kind to that person." The answer that one gives depends on age and experience. But it is evident that when a person is asked what a thing is or what is the meaning of a thing, he has at once ideas that have been most closely associated with the idea in question. Now, since the most important aspect of a thing is what we can do with it, what use it can be to us, usually meaning centers about _use_. A chair is to sit in, bread is to eat, water is to drink, clothes are to wear, a hat is a thing to be worn on one's head, a shovel is to dig with, a car is to ride in, etc. Use is not quite so evident in such cases as the following: "Who was Cæsar? Who was Homer? Who is Edison? What was the Inquisition? What were the Crusades?" However, one has, in these cases, very closely associated ideas, and these ideas do center about what we have done with these men and events in our thinking. "Cæsar was a warrior. Homer was a writer of epics. Edison is an inventor," etc. These men and events have been presented to us in various situations as standing for various things in the history of the world. And when we think of them, we at once think of what they did, the place they fill in the world. This constitutes their meaning. It is evident that an idea may have many meanings. And the meaning that may come to us at any particular moment depends upon the situation. A chair, for example, in one situation, may come to mind as a thing to sit in; in another situation, as a thing to stand in the corner and look pretty; in another, a thing to stand on so that one may reach the top shelf in the pantry; in another, a thing to strike a burglar with; in another, a thing to knock to pieces to be used to make a fire. The meaning of a thing comes from our experience with it, and the thing usually comes to have more and more meanings as our experience with it increases. When we meet something new, it may have practically no meaning. Suppose we find a new plant in the woods. It has little meaning. We may be able to say only that it is a plant, or it is a small plant. We touch it and it pricks us, and it at once has more meaning. It is a plant that pricks. We bite into it and find it bitter. It is then a plant that is bitter, etc. In such a way, objects come to have meaning. They acquire meaning according to the connections in which we experience them and they may take on different meanings for different persons because of the different experiences of these persons. The chief interest we have in objects is in what use we can make of them, how we can make them serve our purposes, how we can make them contribute to our pleasure. The organization of experience is the connecting, through the process of association, of the ideas that arise out of our experience. Our ideas are organized not only in accordance with the way we experience them in the first place, but in accordance with the way we think them later in memory. Of course, ideas are recalled in accordance with the way we experience them, but since they are experienced in such a multitude of connections, they are recalled later in these various connections and it is possible in recall to repeat one connection to the exclusion of others. Organization can therefore be a selective process. Although "horse" is experienced in a great variety of situations or connections, for our purposes we can select some one or more of these connections and by repetition in recalling it, strengthen these connections to the exclusion of others. Herein lies one of the greatest possibilities in thinking and reasoning, which enables us, to an extent, to be independent of original experience. We must have had experience, of course, but the strength of bonds between ideas need not depend upon original experience, but rather upon the way in which these ideas are recalled later, and especially upon the number of times they are recalled. It is in the matter of the organization of experience that teachers and parents can be of great help to young people. Children do not know what connections of ideas will be most useful in the future. People who have had more experience know better and can, by direction and suggestion, lead the young to form, and strengthen by repetition, those connections of ideas that will be most useful later. In the various school studies, a mass of ideas is presented. These ideas, isolated or with random connections, will be of little service to the pupils. They must be organized with reference to future use. This organization must come about through thinking over these ideas in helpful connections. The teacher knows best what these helpful connections are and must help the pupil to make them. Suppose the topic studied in history is the Battle of Bunker Hill. The teacher should assist the child to think the battle over in many different connections. There are various geographical, historical, and literary aspects of the battle that are of importance. These aspects should be brought to mind and related by being thought of together. Thinking things together binds them together as ideas; and later when one idea comes, the others that have been joined with it in the past in thought, come also. Therefore, in studying the Battle of Bunker Hill, the pupil not only reads about it, but gets a map and studies the geography of it, works out the causes that led up to the battle, studies the consequences that followed, reads speeches and poems that have been made and written since concerning the battle, the monument, etc. Similarly, all the topics studied in school should be thought over and organized with reference to meaning and with reference to future use. As a result of such procedure, all the topics become organized and crystallized, with all related ideas closely bound together in association. One of the greatest differences in people is in the organization of their ideas. Of course, people differ in original experience, but they differ more in the way they organize this experience and prepare it for future needs. Just as in habit-formation we should by exercise and practice acquire those kinds of skill that will serve us best in the future, so in getting knowledge we should by repetition strengthen the connections between those ideas that we shall need to have connected in the future. All education looks forward and is preparatory. As a result of training in the organization of ideas, a pupil can learn how to organize his experience, in a measure, independent of the teacher. He learns to know, himself, what ideas are significant, and what connections of ideas will be most helpful. Such an outcome should be one of the ends of school training. =Training in Reasoning.= We have already mentioned ways in which a child can be helped in gaining power and facility in reasoning. In this paragraph we shall discuss the matter more fully. There are three aspects of training in reasoning, one with reference to original experience, one with reference to the organization of this experience as just discussed, and one with reference to certain habits of procedure in the recall and use of experience. (1) _Original experience._ Before reasoning in any field, one must have experience in that field. There is no substitute for experience. After having the experience, it can be organized in various ways, but experience there must be. Experience may be primary, with things themselves, or it may be secondary, received second hand through books or through spoken language. We cannot think without ideas, and ideas come only through perceptions of one kind or another. Originally, all experience arises out of sensations. Language makes it possible for us to profit through the perceptual experience of others. But even when we receive our experience second hand, our own primary experience must enable us to understand the meaning of what we read and hear about, else it is valueless to us. Therefore, if we wish to be able to reason in the field of physics, of botany, of chemistry, of medicine, of law, or of agriculture, we must get experience in those fields. The raw material of thought comes only through experience. In such a subject as physical geography, for example, the words of the book have little meaning unless the child has had original experience in the matter discussed. He must have seen hills and valleys and rivers and lakes and rocks and weathering, and all the various processes discussed in physical geography; otherwise, the reading of the text is almost valueless. The same thing is true of all subjects. To reason in any subject we must have had original experience in it. (2) _The organization of experience._ After experience comes its organization. This point has already been fully explained. It was pointed out that organization consists in thinking our experience over again in helpful relations. Here parents and teachers can be of very great service to children. (3) _Habits of thought._ There are certain habits of procedure in reasoning, apart from the association of the ideas. One can form the habit of putting certain questions to oneself when a problem is presented, so that certain types of relations are called up. If one is a scientist, one looks for causes. If one is a lawyer, one looks up the court decisions. If one is a physician, one looks for symptoms, etc. One of the most important habits in connection with reasoning is the habit of caution. Reasoning is waiting, waiting for ideas to come that will be adequate for the situation. One must form the habit of waiting a reasonable length of time for associations to run their course. If one act too soon, before his organized experience has had time to pass in review, he may act improperly. Therefore one must be trained to a proper degree of caution. Of course, caution may be overdone. One must act sometime, one cannot wait always. Another habit is that of testing out a conclusion before it is finally put into practice. It is often possible to put a conclusion to some sort of test before it is put to the real test, just as one makes a model and tries out an invention on a small scale. One should not have full confidence in a conclusion that is the result of reasoning, till the conclusion has been put to the final test of experiment, of trial. This last statement leads us to the real function of reasoning. Reason points the way to action in a new situation. After the situation is repeated for a sufficient number of times, action passes into the realm of habit. =Language and Thinking.= The fact that man has spoken and written language is of the greatest significance. It has already been pointed out that language is a means through which we can get experience secondhand. This proves to be a great advantage to man. But language gives us still another advantage. Without language, thinking is limited to the passing of sensory images that arise in accordance with the laws of association. But man can name things and the attributes of things, and these names become associated, so that thinking comes to be, in part at least, a matter of words. Thinking is talking to oneself. One cannot talk without language. The importance that attaches to language can hardly be overestimated. When the child acquires the use of language, he has acquired the use of a tool, the importance of which to thinking is greater than that of any other tool. Now, one can think without language, in the sense that memory images come and go,--we have defined thinking as the flow of imagery, the passing or succession of ideas. But after we have named things, thinking, particularly reasoning, becomes largely verbal, or as we said above, _talking to oneself_. Not only do we give names to concrete things but we give names to specific attributes and to relations. As we organize and analyze our experiences, there appear uniformities, principles, laws. To these we give names, such as white, black, red, weight, length, thickness, justice, truth, sin, crime, heat, cold, mortal, immortal, evolution, disintegration, love, hate, envy, jealousy, possible, impossible, probable, etc. We spoke above of meanings. To meanings we give names, so that a single word comes to stand for meanings broad and significant, the result of much experience. Such words as "evolution" and "gravitation," single words though they are, represent a wide range of experiences and bring these experiences together and crystallize them into a single expression, which we use as a unit in our thought. Language, therefore, makes thought easier and its accomplishment greater. After we have studied Cæsar for some years, the name comes to represent the epitome, the bird's-eye view of a great man. A similar thing is true of our study of other men and movements and things. Single words come to represent a multitude of experiences. Then these words become associated and organized in accordance with the principles of association discussed above, so that it comes about that the older we are, the more we come to think in words, and the more these words represent. The older we are, the more abstract our thinking becomes, the more do our words come to stand for meanings and attributes and laws that have come out of the organization of our experience. It is evident that the accuracy of our thinking depends upon these words standing for the _truth_, depends upon whether we have organized our experience in accordance with facts. If our word "Cæsar" does not stand for the real Cæsar, then all our thinking in which Cæsar enters will be incorrect. If our word "justice" does not stand for the real justice, then all our thinking in which justice enters will be incorrect. This discussion points to the tremendous importance of the organization of experience. Truth is the agreement of our thought with the thing, with reality. We must therefore help the young to see the world clearly and to organize what they see in accordance with the facts and with a view to future use. Then the units of this organized experience are to be tagged, labeled, by means of words, and these words or labels become the vehicles of thought, and the outcome of the thinking depends on the validity of the organization of our experience. SUMMARY. Thinking is the passing of ideas in the mind; its basis is in the association of memory ideas. The basis of association is in original experience, ideas becoming bound together in memory as originally experienced. The factors of association are primacy, recency, frequency, intensity, and mental set or attitude. Reasoning is thinking to a purpose. We can be trained in reasoning by being taught to get vivid experience in the first place and in organizing this experience in helpful ways, having in mind future use. CLASS EXERCISES 1. A series of experiments should be performed to make clear to the students that the basis of the association of ideas is in _experience_ and not in the nature of the ideas themselves. (a) Let the students, starting with the same word, write down all the ideas that come to mind in one minute. The teacher should give the initial idea, as sky, hate, music, clock, table, or wind. The first ten ideas coming to each student might be written on the blackboard for study and comparison. Are any series alike? Is the tenth idea in one series the same as that in any other? (b) For a study of the various factors of association, perform the following experiment: Let the teacher prepare a list of fifty words--nouns and adjectives, such as wood, murder, goodness, bad, death, water, love, angel. Read the words to the class and let each student write down the first idea that comes to mind in each case. After the list is finished, let each student try to find out what the determining factor was in each case, whether primacy, frequency, recency, vividness, or mental set. When the study is completed, the student's paper should contain three columns, the first column showing the stimulus words, the second showing the response words, the third showing the determining factors. The first column should be dictated and copied after the response words have been written. (c) Study the data in (a) and (b), noting the variety of ideas that come to different students for the same stimulus word. It will be seen that they come from a great variety of experiences and from all parts of one's life from childhood to the present, showing that all our experiences are bound together and that we can go from one point to any other, directly or indirectly. 2. Perform an experiment to determine how each member of the class thinks, _i.e._ in what kind of imagery. Let each plan a picnic in detail. How do they do it? Do they see it or hear it or seem to act it? Or does it happen in words merely? 3. Think of the events of yesterday. How do they come to you? Do your images seem to be visual, auditory, motor, or verbal? Do you seem to have all kinds of imagery? Is one kind predominant? 4. Test the class for speed of free association as described on page 193. Repeat the experiment at least five times and rank the members of the class from the results. 5. Similarly, test speed for controlled association as described on page 195 and rank the members of the class. 6. Compare the rankings in Nos. 4 and 5. 7. The teacher can extend the controlled association tests by preparing lists that show different kinds of logical relations with one another, from genus to species, from species to genus, from verb to object, from subject to verb, etc. Do the students maintain the same rank in the various types of experiments? Do the ranks in these tests correspond to the students' ranks in thinking in the school subjects? 8. At least two series of experiments in reasoning should be performed, one to show the nature of reasoning and the other to show the ability of the members of the class. (a) Put several problems to the class, similar to the following: What happens to a wet board laid out in the sunshine? Explain. Suppose corn is placed in three vessels, 1, 2, and 3. Number 1 is sealed up air tight and kept warm? Number 2 is kept open and warm? Number 3 is kept open and warm and moist. What happens in each case? Explain. Condensed milk does not sour as long as the can remains unopened. After the can is opened, the milk sours if allowed to become warm; it does not sour if kept frozen. Why? Two bars of metal are riveted together. One bar is lead, the other iron. What happens when the bars are heated to 150 C? 500 C? 1000 C? 2000 C? Answer the following questions: Is it ever right to steal? To kill a person? To lie? Which are unwise and mistaken, Republicans or Democrats? In the above, do all come to the same conclusion? Why? Were any unable to come to a conclusion at all on some questions? Why? Do the experiments make it clear that reasoning is dependent upon experience? (b) Let the teacher prepare five problems in reasoning well within the experience of the class, and find the speed and accuracy of the students in solving them. Compare the results with those in the controlled association tests. Test the class with various kinds of mechanical puzzles. 9. The students should study several people to ascertain how well those people have their experience organized. Is their experience available? Can they come to the point immediately, or, are they hazy, uncertain, and impractical? 10. It is claimed that we have two types of people, theoretical and practical. This is to some extent true. What is the explanation? 11. From the point of view of No. 10, compare teachers and engineers. 12. If anything will work in theory, will it work in practice? 13. From what you have learned in the chapter and from the experiments, write a paper on training in reasoning. 14. What are the main defects of the schools with reference to training children to think? 15. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN and BAGLEY: _Human Behavior_, Chapters XVI and XVIII. DEWEY: _How We Think_, Parts I and III. MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, Chapters VIII and XII; also pp. 192-195. PILLSBURY: _Essentials of Psychology_, Chapters VI and IX. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_, Chapter XV. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, Chapters V, VI, and X. CHAPTER IX INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES =Physical Differences.= One never sees two people whose bodies are exactly alike. They differ in height or weight or color of the skin. They differ in the color of the hair or eyes, in the shape of the head, or in such details as size and shape of the ear, size and shape of the nose, chin, mouth, teeth, feet, hands, fingers, toes, nails, etc. The anatomist tells us that we differ internally just as we do externally. While the internal structure of one person has the same general plan as that of another, there being the same number of bones, muscles, organs, etc., there are always differences in detail. We are built on the same plan, _i.e._ we are made after a common type. We vary, above and below this type or central tendency. Weight may be taken for illustration. If we should weigh the first thousand men we meet, we should find light men, heavy men, and men of medium weight. There would be few light men, few heavy men, but many men of medium weight. This fact is well shown in diagram by what is known as a curve of distribution or frequency surface, which is constructed as follows: Draw a base line A B, and on this line mark off equal distances to represent the various weights. At the left end put the number representing the lightest men and at the right the number representing the heaviest men; the other weights come in between in order. Then select a scale; we will say a millimeter in height above the base line represents one person of the weight represented on the base, and in drawing the upper part of the figure, A C B, we have but to measure up one millimeter for each person weighed, of the weight indicated below on the base. [Illustration: FIGURE V--FREQUENCY SURFACE--WEIGHT The solid line represents men, the broken line, women.] A study of this frequency surface shows a tendency for people to be grouped about the central tendency or average. There are many people of average weight or nearly so, but few people who deviate widely from the average weight. If we measure people with reference to any other physical characteristic, or any mental characteristic, we get a similar result, we find them grouped about an average or central tendency. =Mental Differences.= Just as we differ physically, so also we differ mentally, and in the various aspects of our behavior. The accompanying diagram (Free Association) shows the distribution of a large number of men and women with respect to the speed of their flow of ideas. When men and women are measured with respect to any mental function, a similar distribution is found. [Illustration: FIGURE VI--FREQUENCY SURFACE--FREE ASSOCIATION Solid line, men; broken line, women. The numbers below the base represent the number of words written in the Free Association test, and the numbers at the left represent the number of people making the respective scores.] An interesting question is whether our mental differences have any relation or connection with one another. If one mental characteristic is of high order, are all the others of high order also? Does a good memory indicate a high order of attention, of association, of imagination, of learning capacity? Experiments show that mental characteristics have at least some degree of independence. But the rule is that they generally go together, a high order of ability in one mental function indicating a high order of ability in at least some others, and a low order of ability in one function indicating a low order in other functions. However, it seems that abilities that are very much specialized, such as musical ability, artistic ability, etc., may exist in high order while other mental functions may be only mediocre. It is a common thing for a musical person to be of rather poor ability otherwise. To the extent that special abilities require specialized differences in the structure of brain, nervous system, or sense organ, they can exist in some degree of independence of other functions. Musical ability to some extent does require some such differences and may therefore be found either with a high or a low degree of ability in other characteristics. It is doubtless true that at maturity the unequal power of mental functions in the same person may be partly due to the fact that one function has been exercised and others neglected. A person having very strong musical tendencies is likely to have such a great interest in music that he will think other activities are not worth while, and will consequently neglect these other activities. It will therefore turn out that at maturity the great differences in mental functions in such a person are in part due to exercise of one function and neglect of others. But there can be no doubt that in many cases there are large original, inherited differences, the individual being poor in one aspect of mind and good in others. Feeble-minded people are usually poor in all important aspects of mind. However, one sometimes finds a feeble-minded person having musical or artistic ability, and often such a person has a good rote memory, sometimes a good verbal memory. However, the so-called higher mental functions--logical memory, controlled association, and constructive imagination--are all poor in a feeble-minded person. Each mental function may be looked upon as in some measure independent; each is found existing in people in varying degrees from zero ability up to what might be called genius ability. The frequency curves in Fig. VI show this. Take rote memory for example. Idiots are found with practically zero ability in rote memory. At the other extreme, we find mathematical prodigies who, after watching a long freight train pass and noting the numbers of the cars, can repeat correctly the number of each car. Rote memory abilities can be found representing every step between these two extremes. This principle of distribution holds true in the case of all mental functions. We find persons practically without them, and others possessing them in the highest order, but most people are grouped about the average ability. =Detecting Mental Differences.= It has already been said that mind has many different aspects and that people differ with respect to these aspects. Now let us ask how we can measure the degree of development of these aspects or functions of mind. We measure them just as we measured muscular speed as described in the first chapter. Each mental function means ability to do something--to learn, to remember, to form images, to reason, etc. To measure these different capacities or functions we have but to require that the person under consideration _do_ something, as learn, remember, etc., and measure how well and how fast he does it, just as we would measure how far he can jump, how fast he can run, etc. In such measurements, the question of practice is always involved. If we measure running ability, we find that some are in practice while others are not. Those in practice can run at very nearly their ultimate capacity. Those who are not in practice can be trained to run much faster than they do. To get a true measure of running capacity, we should practice the persons to be measured till each runs up to the limit of his capacity, and then measure each one's speed. The same thing is true, to some extent, when we come to measure mental functions proper. However, the life that children live gives exercise to all fundamental functions of the mind, and unless some of the children tested have had experience which would tend to develop some mental functions in a special way, tests of the various aspects of learning capacity, memory, association, imagination, etc., are a fairly good measure of original, inherited tendencies. Of course, it must be admitted that there are measurable differences in the influence of environment on children, and when these differences are extreme, no doubt the influence is shown in the development of the child's mind. A child reared in a home where all the influences favor its mental development, ought to show a measurable difference in such development when compared with a child reared in a home where all the influences are unfavorable. It is difficult to know to what extent this is true, for the hereditary and environmental influences are usually in harmony, the child of good hereditary stock having good environmental influences, and vice versa. When this is not the case, _i.e._ when a child of good stock is reared under poor environmental influences, or when a child of poor stock is reared under good influences, the results seem to show that the differences in environment have little effect on mental development, as far as the fundamental functions are concerned, except in the most extreme cases. Each mental function is capable of some development. It can be brought up to the limit of its possibilities. But recent experiments indicate that such development is not very great in the case of the elementary, fundamental functions. Training, however, has a much greater effect on complex mental activities that involve several functions. Rote memory is rather simple; it cannot be much affected by training. The memory for ideas is more complex; it can be considerably affected by training. The original and fundamental functions of the mind depend upon the nature of the nervous system which is bequeathed to us by heredity. This cannot be much changed. However, training has considerable effect on the coördinations and combinations of mental functions. Therefore, the more complex the mental activities which we are testing, the more likely they are to have been affected by differences in experience and training. If we should designate the logical memory capacity of one person by 10, and that of another by 15, by practice we might bring the first up to 15 and the second to 22½, but we could not equalize them. We could never make the memory of the one equal to that of the other. In an extreme case, we might find one child whose experience had been such that his logical memory was working up to the limit of its capacity, while the other had had little practice in logical memory and was therefore far below his real capacity. In such a case, a test would not show the native difference, it would show only the present difference in functioning capacity. Fairly adequate tests for the most important mental functions have been worked out. A series of group tests with directions and norms follow. The members of the class can use these tests in studying the individual differences in other people. The teacher will find other tests in the author's _Examination of School Children_, and in Whipple's _Manual of Mental and Physical Tests_. =MENTAL TESTS= GENERAL DIRECTIONS The results of the mental tests in the school will be worse than useless unless the tests are given with the greatest care and scientific precision. Every test should be most carefully explained to the children so that they will know _exactly_ what they are to do. The matter must be so presented to them that they will put forth _all possible_ effort. They must take the tests seriously. Great care must be taken to see that there is no cheating. The work of each child should be his own work. In those tests in which time is an important element, the time must be _carefully kept_, with a stop watch if one is available. The papers should be distributed for the tests and turned face downward on the pupil's desk. The pupil, when all are ready to begin, should take the paper in his hand and at the signal "begin" turn it over and begin work, and when the signal "stop" is given, should quit work instantly and turn the paper over. Before the work begins, the necessary information should be placed on each paper. This information should be the pupil's name, age, grade, sex, and school. This should be on every paper. When the test is over the papers should be immediately collected. LOGICAL MEMORY =Object.= The purpose of this test is to determine the pupil's facility in remembering and reproducing ideas. A pupil's standing in the test may serve as an indication of his ability to remember the subject matter of the school studies. [Illustration: FIGURE VII--LOGICAL MEMORY "WILLIE JONES"] =Method.= The procedure in this test is for the teacher to read slowly and distinctly the story to be reproduced. Immediately after the reading the pupils are to write down all of the story that they can recall. They must not begin to write till _after_ the reading. Ten minutes should be allowed for the reproduction. This is ample time, and each pupil should be told to use the whole time in working on his reproduction. At the end of ten minutes, collect the papers. Care should be taken to see that each pupil does his own work, that there is no copying. Before reading the story, the teacher should give the following instructions: I shall read to you a story entitled "Willie Jones and His Dog" (or "A Farmer's Son," or "A Costly Temper," as the case may be). After I have read the story you are to write down all you can remember of it. You are not to use the exact words that I read unless you wish. You are to use your own words. Try to recall as much as possible and write all you recall. Try to get all the details, not merely the main facts. =Material.= For grades three, four, and five, use "Willie Jones and His Dog"; for grades six, seven, and eight, use "A Farmer's Son"; for the high school, use "A Costly Temper." The norms for the latter are based on eighth grade and high school pupils. * * * * * WILLIE JONES AND HIS DOG Willie | Jones | was a little | boy | only | five years old. | He had a dog | whose name was Buster. | Buster was a large | dog | with long, | black, | curly | hair. | His fore | feet | and the tip | of his tail | were white. | One day | Willie's mother | sent him | to the store | which was only | a short | distance away. | Buster went with him, | following behind. | As Buster was turning | at the corner, | a car | struck him | and broke | one | hind | leg | and hurt | one | eye. | Willie was | very | sorry | and cried | a long | time. | Willie's father | came | and carried | the poor | dog | home. | The broken leg | got well | in five | weeks | but the eye | that was hurt | became blind.| A FARMER'S SON Will | was a farmer's | son | who attended school | in town. | His clothes | were poor and his boots | often smelled | of the farmyard | although he took great | care of them. | Since Will had not gone to school | as much | as his classmates, | he was often | at a disadvantage, | although his mind | was as good | as theirs,--| in fact, he was brighter | than most | of them. | James, | the wit | of the class, | never lost an opportunity | to ridicule | Will's mistakes, | his bright | red | hair, | and his patched | clothes. | Will | took the ridicule | in good part | and never | lost his temper. | One Saturday | as Will | was driving | his cows | to pasture, | he met James | teasing | a young | child, | a cripple. | Will's | indignation | was aroused | by the sight. | He asked | the bully | to stop, | but when he would not, | Will pounced | upon him | and gave him | a good | beating, | and he would not | let James go | until he promised | not to tease | the crippled | child | again. | A COSTLY TEMPER A man | named John | Murdock | had a servant | who worried him | much by his stupidity. | One day | when this servant was more | stupid | than usual, | the angry | master | of the house | threw a book | at his head. | The servant | ducked | and the book flew | out of the window. | "Now go | and pick that book up!" | ordered the master. | The servant | started | to obey, | but a passerby | had saved him | the trouble, | and had walked off | with the book. | The scientist | thereupon | began to wonder | what book | he had thrown away, | and to his horror, | discovered | that it was a quaint | and rare | little | volume | of poems, | which he had purchased | in London | for fifty | dollars. | But his troubles | were not over. | The weeks went by | and the man had almost | forgotten his loss, | when, strolling | into a secondhand | bookshop, | he saw, | to his great delight, | a copy of the book | he had lost. | He asked the price. | "Well," | said the dealer, | reflectively, | "I guess we can let you have it | for forty | dollars. | It is a very | rare book, | and I am sure | that I could get seventy-five | dollars for it | by holding on a while." | The man of science | pulled out his purse | and produced the money, | delighted at the opportunity of replacing | his lost | treasure. | When he reached home, | a card | dropped out | of the leaves. | The card was his own, | and further | examination | showed that he had bought back | his own property. | "Forty dollars' | worth of temper," | exclaimed the man. | "I think I shall mend my ways." | His disposition | afterward | became so | good | that | the servant became worried, | thinking the man | must be ill. | * * * * * [Illustration: FIGURE VIII--LOGICAL MEMORY--"A FARMER'S SON"] =The Results.= The material for the test is divided into units as indicated by the vertical lines. The pupil's written reproduction should be compared unit by unit with the story as printed, and given one credit for each unit adequately reproduced. The norms for the three tests are shown in the accompanying Figures VII, VIII, and IX. In these and all the graphs which follow, the actual ages are shown in the first horizontal column. The norms for girls appear in the second horizontal column, the norms for boys in the column at the bottom. By the _norm_ for an age is meant the average performance of all the pupils of that age examined. Age ten applies to those pupils who have passed their tenth birthday and have not reached their eleventh birthday, and the other ages are to be similarly interpreted. The vertical lines in the graphs indicate birthdays and the scores written on these lines indicate ability at these exact ages. The column marked ten, for example, includes all the children that are over ten and not yet eleven. The graphs show the development from age to age. In general, it will be noticed, there is an improvement of memory with age, but in the high school, in the "Costly Temper" test, there is a decline. This may not indicate a real decline in ability to remember ideas, but a change in attitude. The high school pupil probably acquires a habit of remembering only significant facts. His memory is selective, while in the earlier ages, the memory may be more parrot-like, one idea being reproduced with about as much fidelity as another. This statement is made not as a _fact_, but as a _probable_ explanation. ROTE MEMORY [Illustration: FIGURE IX--LOGICAL MEMORY--"A COSTLY TEMPER"] =Object.= The object of the rote memory tests is to determine the pupil's memory span for unrelated impressions--words that have no logical relations with one another. Much school work makes demands upon this ability. Therefore, the tests are of importance. =Method.= There are two lists of words, _concrete_ and _abstract_, with six groups in each list. The list of concrete words should be given first, then the abstract. The procedure is to pronounce the first group, _cat_, _tree_, _coat_, and then pause for the pupils to write these three words. Then pronounce the next group, _mule_, _bird_, _cart_, _glass_, and pause for the reproduction, and so on through the list. [Illustration: FIGURE X--CONCRETE ROTE MEMORY] Give the following instructions: We wish to see how well you can remember words. I shall pronounce first a group of three words. _After_ I have pronounced them, you are to write them down. I shall then pronounce a group of four words, then one of five words, and so continue with a longer group each time. You must pay very close attention for I shall pronounce a group but once. You are not required to write the words in their order, but just as you recall them. =Material.= The words for the test are given in the following lists: _Concrete_ _Abstract_ 1. cat, tree, coat 1. good, black, fast 2. mule, bird, cart, glass 2. clean, tall, round, hot 3. star, horse, dress, fence, man 3. long, wet, fierce, white, cold 4. fish, sun, head, door, shoe, 4. deep, soft, quick, dark, great, block dead 5. train, mill, box, desk, oil, 5. sad, strong, hard, bright, pup, bill fine, glad, plain 6. floor, car, pipe, bridge, hand, 6. sharp, late, sour, wide, rough, dirt, cow, crank thick, red, tight [Illustration: FIGURE XI--ABSTRACT ROTE MEMORY] =Results.= The papers are graded by determining the number of concrete words and the number of abstract words that are reproduced. No account is taken of whether the words are in the right position or not. A perfect score in each test would therefore be thirty-three. The norms are shown in Figures X and XI. THE SUBSTITUTION TEST =Object.= This test determines one's ability to build up new associations. It is a test of quickness of learning. =Method.= The substitution test-sheets are distributed to the pupils and turned face down on the desks. The teacher gives the following instructions: We wish to see how fast you can learn. At the top of the sheet which has been distributed to you there is a key. In nine circles are written the nine digits and for each digit there is written a letter which is to be used instead of the digit. Below the key are two columns of numbers; each number contains five digits. In the five squares which follow the number you are to write the letters which correspond to the digits. Work as fast as you can and fill as many of the squares as you can without making mistakes. When I say "stop," quit work instantly and turn the paper over. Before beginning the test the teacher should explain on the blackboard the exact nature of the test. This can be done by using other letters instead of those used in the key. Make sure that the pupils understand what they are to do. Allow _eight_ minutes in grades three, four, and five, and _five_ minutes above the fifth grade. =Material.= For material, use the substitution test-sheets. This and the other test material can be obtained from the University of Missouri, Extension Division. =Results.= In grading the work, count each square correctly filled in as one point, and reduce the score to speed per minute by dividing by eight in grades three, four, and five, and by five in the grades above. The norms are shown in Figure XII. [Illustration: FIGURE XII--SUBSTITUTION TEST] FREE ASSOCIATION =Object.= This test determines the speed of the free flow of ideas. The result of the test is a criterion of the quickness of the flow of ideas when no restriction or limitation is put on this flow. =Method.= The procedure in this test is to give the pupils a word, and tell them to write this word down and all the other words that come into their minds. Make it clear to them that they are to write whatever word comes to mind, whether it has any relation to the word that is given them or not. Start them with the word "cloud." Give the following instructions: I wish to see how many words you can think of and write down in three minutes. I shall name a word, you may write it down and then all the other words that come into your minds. Do not write sentences, merely the words that come into your minds. Work as fast as you can. [Illustration: FIGURE XIII--FREE ASSOCIATION TEST] =Results.= Score the work by counting the number of words that have been written. The norms are shown in Figure XIII. OPPOSITES =Object.= This is a test of controlled association. It tests one aspect of the association of ideas. All thinking is a matter of association of ideas. Reasoning is controlled association. The test may therefore be taken as a measure of speed in reasoning. [Illustration: FIGURE XIV--OPPOSITES TEST--LISTS I AND II] =Method.= Distribute the lists of opposites to the pupils and turn them face down on the desks. Use List One in grades three, four, and five, and List Two in grades above. Allow two minutes in grades three, four, and five and one minute in grades above. Give the following instructions: On the sheets that have been distributed to you are fifty words. After each word you are to write a word that has the opposite meaning. For example, if one word were "far," you could write "near." Work as fast as you can, and when I say "stop" quit work instantly and turn your paper over. =Results.= The score is the number of opposites correctly written. The norms are shown in Figure XIV. OPPOSITES--LIST NO. 1 1. good 18. up 35. before 2. big 19. thick 36. winter 3. rich 20. quick 37. ripe 4. out 21. pretty 38. night 5. sick 22. heavy 39. open 6. hot 23. late 40. first 7. long 24. wrong 41. over 8. wet 25. smooth 42. love 9. yes 26. strong 43. come 10. high 27. dark 44. east 11. hard 28. dead 45. top 12. sweet 29. wide 46. wise 13. clean 30. empty 47. front 14. sharp 31. above 48. girl 15. fast 32. north 49. sad 16. black 33. laugh 50. fat 17. old 34. man OPPOSITES--LIST NO. 2 1. strong 18. strange 35. fine 2. deep 19. wrong 36. plain 3. lazy 20. quickly 37. sharp 4. seldom 21. black 38. late 5. thin 22. good 39. sour 6. soft 23. fast 40. wide 7. many 24. clean 41. drunk 8. valuable 25. tall 42. tight 9. gloomy 26. hot 43. empty 10. rude 27. long 44. sick 11. dark 28. wet 45. friend 12. rough 29. fierce 46. above 13. pretty 30. great 47. loud 14. high 31. dead 48. war 15. foolish 32. cloudy 49. in 16. present 33. hard 50. yes 17. glad 34. bright THE WORD-BUILDING TEST =Object.= This is a test of a certain type of inventiveness, namely linguistic invention. Specifically, it tests the pupil's ability to construct words using certain prescribed letters. [Illustration: FIGURE XV--WORD-BUILDING TEST] =Method.= The pupils are given the letters, _a_, _e_, _o_, _m_, _n_, _r_, and told to make as many words as possible using only these letters. Give the following instructions: I wish to see how many words you can make in five minutes, using only the letters which I give you. The words must be real English words. You must use only the letters which I give you and must not use the same letter more than once in the same word. You do not, of course, have to use all the letters in the same word. A word may contain one or more letters up to six. =Material.= The pupils need only sheets of blank paper. =Results.= The score is the number of words that do not violate the rules of the test as given in the instructions. The norms are shown in Figure XV. THE COMPLETION TEST =Object.= This is, to some extent, a test of reasoning capacity. Of course, it is only one particular aspect of reasoning. The pupil is given a story that has certain words omitted. He must read the story, see what it is trying to say, and determine what words, put into the blanks, will make the correct sense. The meaning of the word written in a particular blank must not only make the sentence read sensibly but must fit into the story _as a whole_. Filling in the blanks in this way demands considerable thought. =Method.= Distribute the test-sheets and turn them face down on the desks. Allow ten minutes in all the tests. Give the following instructions: On the sheets which have been distributed is printed a story which has certain words omitted. You are to put in the blanks the words that are omitted. The words which you write in must give the proper meaning so that the story reads correctly. Each word filled in must not only give the proper meaning to the sentence but to the story as a whole. =Material.= Use the completion test-sheets, "Joe and the Fourth of July," for grades three, four, and five; "The Trout" for grades, six, seven, and eight; and "Dr. Goldsmith's Medicine" for the high school. =Results.= In scoring the papers, allow one credit for each blank correctly filled. The norms are shown in Figures XVI, XVII, and XVIII. It will be noticed that the boys excel in the "Trout" story. This is doubtless because the story is better suited to them on the ground of their experience and interest. [Illustration: FIGURE XVI--COMPLETION TEST--"JOE AND THE FOURTH OF JULY"] * * * * * JOE AND THE FOURTH OF JULY Joe {ran}[6] errands for {his} mother and {took} care of the {baby} until by the Fourth of July his penny {grew} to be a dime. The day before the Fourth, he {went} down town all by {himself} to get his fire {works}. There were so {many} kinds he hardly knew which to {buy}. The clerk knew that it takes a {long} time to decide, for he had been a {boy} himself not very {long} ago. So he helped Joe to {select} the very best kinds. "When are you going to {fire} them off?" asked the clerk. "I will fire {them} very {early} to-morrow," said the boy. So that night Joe set the {alarm} clock, and the next {morning} got up {early} to fire his firecrackers. [6] The italicized words and letters are left blank in the test sheets. THE TROUT The trout is a fine fish. Once a big trout {lived} in a pool {close} by a spring. He used to {stay} under the bank with {only} his head showing. His wide-open {eyes} shone like jewels. I tried to {catch} him. I would {creep} up to the {edge} of the pool {where} I could see his {bright} eyes looking up. I {caught} a grasshopper and {threw} it over {to} him. Then there was a {splash} in the water and the grasshopper {was gone}. I {did} this {two} or three times. Each time I {saw} the rush and splash and saw the bait had been {taken}. So I put the sa{me} bait on my {hook} and {threw} it over into the {water}. But {all} was silent. The fish was an {old} one and had {grown} very wise. I did this {day} after day with the same luck. The trout {knew} there was a {hook} hidden in the bait. [Illustration: FIGURE XVII--COMPLETION TEST--"THE TROUT"] DOCTOR GOLDSMITH'S MEDICINE This {is} a story of good medicine. Most medicine is {bad} to {take}, but this was so good {that} the sick man {wished} for more. {One} day a poor woman {went} to Doctor Goldsmith and {asked} him to {go} to see her {sick} husband. "He {is} very sick," she said, "and I {can} not {get} him to eat anything." {So} Doctor Goldsmith {went} to {see} him. The doctor {saw} at once that the {reason} why the man {could} not eat was {because} he was {so} poor that he had {not} been {able} to buy good food. Then he {said} to the woman, "{Come} to my house this evening and I will {give you} some {medicine} for your {husband}." The woman {went} in the evening and the {doctor} gave {her} a small paper box tied {up} tight. "{It} is very heavy," {she} said. "May I {see} what it looks {like}?" "{No}," said the doctor, "{wait} until you get {home}." When she {got} home, and she and {her} husband {opened} the box so that he {could} take the first {dose} of medicine,--what do you think they {saw}? The box was {filled} with silver {money}. {This} was the {good} doctor's medicine. * * * * * =Importance of Mental Differences.= (1) _In school work._ One of the important results that come from a knowledge of the mental differences in children is that we are able to classify them better. When a child enters school he should be allowed to proceed through the course as fast as his development warrants. Some children can do an eight-year course in six years; others require ten years; still others can never do it. The great majority, of course, can do it in eight years. [Illustration: FIGURE XVIII--COMPLETION TEST--"DR. GOLDSMITH'S MEDICINE"] Norms for adults, as obtained from university students, are: TEST MEN WOMEN Substitution Test 29.1 32.2 Rote Memory, Concrete 28.5 28.6 Rote Memory, Abstract 28.4 27.9 Free Association 51.5 49.3 Completion, _Dr. Goldsmith's Medicine_ 48.1 49.0 Word Building 20.5 20.1 Logical Memory, _Costly Temper_ 64.0 69.6 [Illustration: FIGURE XIX--FREQUENCY SURFACES--COMPARING FOURTH GRADE WITH HIGH SCHOOL The numbers along the base represent mental age; those at the left, the number of pupils of the respective ages.] It may be thought that a child's success in school branches is a sufficient measure of his ability and that no special mental measurements are needed. This is a mistake. Many factors contribute to success in school work. Ability is only one of these factors, and should be specially and independently determined by suitable tests. Children may fail in school branches because of being poorly started or started at the wrong time, because of poor teaching, sickness, moving from one school to another, etc. On the other hand, children of poor ability may succeed at school because of much help at home. Therefore special mental tests will help in determining to what extent original mental ability is a factor in the success or failure of the different pupils. As far as possible, the children of the same grade should have about the same ability; but such is seldom the case. In a recent psychological study of a school system, the author found wide differences in ability in the same grade. The distribution of abilities found in the fourth grade and in the high school are shown in Figure XIX. It will be seen that in the fourth grade pupils are found with ability equal to that of some in the high school. Of course to some extent such a condition is unavoidable, for a pupil must establish certain habits and acquire certain knowledge before passing from one grade to another. However, much of the wide variation in ability now found in the same grade of a school could be avoided if the teacher had accurate knowledge of the pupils' abilities. When a teacher learns that a child who is doing poorly in school really has ability, she is often able to get from that pupil the work of which he is capable. It has been demonstrated by experience that accurate measures of children's abilities are a great help in gradation and classification. A knowledge of mental differences is also an aid in the actual teaching of the children. The instance mentioned at the close of the last paragraph is an example. A knowledge of the differences among the mental functions of the same pupil is especially helpful. It has been pointed out that the different mental functions in the same pupil are sometimes unequally developed. Sometimes considerable differences exist in the same pupil with respect to learning capacity, the different aspects of memory, association, imagination, and attention. When a teacher knows of these differences, she can better direct the work of the pupils. For example, if a pupil have a very poor memory, the teacher can help him by aiding him to secure the advantage that comes from close and concentrated attention, frequent repetitions, logical organization, etc. On the other hand, she can help the brilliant student by preventing him from being satisfied with hastily secured, superficial knowledge, and by encouraging him to make proper use of his unusual powers in going deeper and more extensively into the school subjects than is possible for the ordinary student. In many ways a teacher can be helpful to her pupils if she has an accurate knowledge of their mental abilities. (2) _In life occupations._ Extreme variations in ability should certainly be considered in choosing one's life work. Only persons of the highest ability should go into science, law, medicine, or teaching. Many occupations demand special kinds of ability, special types of reaction, of attention, imagination, etc. For example, the operation of a telephone exchange demands a person of quick and steady reaction. The work of a motorman on a street car demands a person having the broad type of attention, the type of attention that enables one to keep in mind many details at the same time. Scientific work demands the type of concentrated attention. As far as it is possible, occupations demanding special types of ability should be filled by people possessing these abilities. It is best for all concerned if each person is doing what he can do best. It is true that many occupations do not call for special types of ability. And therefore, as far as ability is concerned, a person could do as well in one of these occupations as in another. The time will sometime come when we shall know the special abilities demanded by the different occupations and professions, and by suitable tests shall be able to determine what people possess the required qualifications. The schools should always be on the lookout for unusual ability. Children that are far superior to others of the same age should be allowed to advance as fast as their superior ability makes possible, and should be held up to a high order of work. Such superior people should be, as far as possible, in the same classes, so that they can the more easily be given the kind and amount of work that they need. The schools should find the children of unusual special ability, such as ability in drawing, painting, singing, playing musical instruments, mechanical invention, etc. Some provision should be made for the proper development and training of these unusual abilities. Society cannot afford to lose any spark of genius wherever found. Moreover, the individual will be happier if developed and trained along the line of his special ability. =Subnormal Children.= A small percentage of children are of such low mentality that they cannot do the ordinary school work. As soon as such children can be picked out with certainty, they should be taken out of the regular classes and put into special classes. It is a mistake to try to get them to do the regular school work. They cannot do it, and they only waste the teacher's time and usually give her much trouble. Besides, they waste their own time; for while they cannot do the ordinary school work, they can do other things, perhaps work of a manual nature. The education of such people should, therefore, be in the direction of simple manual occupations. For detecting such children, in addition to the tests given above, elaborate tests for individual examination have been devised. The most widely used is a series known as the Binet-Simon tests. A special group of tests is provided for the children of each age. If a child can pass the tests for his age, he is considered normal. If he can pass only the tests three years or more below his age, he is usually considered subnormal. But a child's fate should not depend solely upon any number or any kind of tests. We should always give the child a trial and see what he is able to achieve. This trial should cover as many months or years as are necessary to determine beyond doubt the child's mental status. SUMMARY. Just as we differ in the various aspects of body, so also we differ in the various aspects of mind. These differences can be measured by tests. A knowledge of these differences should aid us in grading, classifying, and teaching children, as well as in the selection of occupation and professions for them. Mental traits have some degree of independence; as a result a high degree of one trait may be found with low degree of some others. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Many of the tests and experiments already described should have shown many of the individual differences of the members of the class. The teacher will find in the author's _Examination of School Children_ a series of group tests with norms which can be used for a further study of individual differences. 2. The tapping experiment described in the first chapter can now be repeated and the results taken as a measure of reaction time. 3. You should now have available the records of all the tests and experiments so far given that show individual differences. Make out a table showing the rank of each student in the various tests. Compute the average rank of each student for all the tests. This average rank may be taken as a measure of the intelligence of the students, as far as such can be determined by the tests used. Correlate this ranking with standing in the high school classes. It will give a positive correlation, not perfect, however. Why not? If your measures of intelligence were absolutely correct, you still would not get a perfect correlation with high school standing. Why not? 4. If you had a correct measure of intelligence of 100 mature people in your city, selected at random, would this measure give you an exact measure of their success in life? Give the reason for your answer. 5. Of all the tests and experiments previously described in this book, which gives the best indication of success in high school? 6. If the class in psychology is a large one, a graph should be prepared showing the distribution of abilities in the class. For this purpose, you will have to use the absolute measures instead of ranks. Find the average for each test used. Make these averages all the same by multiplying the low ones and dividing the high ones. Then all the grades of each student can be added. This will give each test the same weight in the average. The use of a slide rule will make this transference to a new average very easy. A more accurate method for this computation is described in the author's _Examination of School Children_, p. 65. The students should make a study of individual differences and the distribution of ability in some grade below the high school. The tests described in this chapter can be used for that purpose. 7. Is it a good thing for high school students to find out how they compare with others in their various mental functions? If you have poor ability, is it a good thing for you to find it out? If the teacher and students think best, the results of all the various tests need not be made known except to the persons concerned. The data can be used in the various computations without the students' knowing whose measures they are. 8. To what extent is ability a factor in life? You find people of only ordinary ability succeeding and brilliant people failing. Why is this? 9. None of the tests so far used measures ideals or perseverance and persistence. These are important factors in life, and there is no very adequate measure for any of them. The students might plan some experiments to test physical and mental persistence and endurance. The tapping experiment, for example, might be continued for an hour and the records kept for each minute. Then from these records a graph could be plotted showing the course of efficiency for the hour. Mental adding or multiplying might be kept up continuously for several hours and the results studied as above. 10. We have said that ideals and persistence are important factors in life. Are they inherited or acquired? 11. Do you find it to be the rule or the exception for a person standing high in one mental function to stand high in the others also? 12. Make a complete outline of the chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_. Chapter XVI. PYLE: _The Examination of School Children_. PYLE: _The Outlines of Educational Psychology_. Chapter XVII. TITCHENER: _A Beginner's Psychology_, pp. 309-311. CHAPTER X APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY =The General Field.= Psychology has now reached that stage in its development where it can be of use to humanity. It can be of use in those fields which demand a knowledge of human nature. As indicated in the first chapter, these fields are education, medicine, law, business, and industry. We may add another which has been called "culture." We cannot say that psychology is able yet to be of very great service except to education, law, and medicine. It has been of less service to the field of business and industry, but in the future, its contribution here will be as great as in the other fields. While the service of psychology in the various fields is not yet great, what it will eventually be able to do is very clear. It is the purpose of this chapter to indicate briefly, the nature and possibilities of this psychological service. =Education.= Throughout the preceding chapters, we have emphasized the educational importance of the facts discussed. There is little left to say here except to summarize the main facts. Since education is a matter of making a child over into what he ought to be, the science of education demands a knowledge of the original nature of children. This means that one must know the nature of instincts, their relations to one another, their order of development, and the possibilities of their being changed, modified, developed, suppressed. It means that one must know the nature of the child's mind in all its various functions, the development and significance of these functions,--memory, association, imagination, and attention. The science especially demands that we understand the principles of habit-formation, the laws of economical learning, and the laws of memory. This psychological knowledge must form the ground-work in the education of teachers for their profession. In addition to this general preparation of the teacher, psychology will render the schools a great service through the psycho-clinicist, who will be a psychological expert working under the superintendents of our school systems. His duty will be to supervise the work of mental testing, the work of diagnosis for feeble-mindedness and selection of the subnormal children, the teaching of such children. He will give advice in all cases which demand expert psychological knowledge. =Medicine.= In the first place, there is a department of medicine which deals with nervous diseases, such as insanity, double personality, severe nervous shock, hallucination, etc. This entire aspect of medicine is wholly psychological. But psychology can be of service to the general practitioner both in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. A thorough psychological knowledge of human nature will assist a physician in diagnosis. Often the best way to find out what ails a patient's body is through the patient's mind, and the doctor must know how to get the truth from the patient's mind even in those cases in which the patient is actually trying to conceal the truth. A profound practical knowledge of human nature is necessary,--a knowledge which can be obtained only by long and careful technical study as well as practice and experience. Psychology can be of service in the treatment of disease. The physician must understand the peculiar mental characteristics of his patient in order to know how to deal with him. In some cases, hypnotism is a valuable aid in treatment, and in many cases, ordinary normal suggestion can be of considerable service. The state of mind of a sick person has much to do with his recovery. The physician must know this and must know how to induce the desired state of mind. Indeed, a patient's trouble is often imaginary, exists in the mind only; in such cases, the treatment should be wholly mental, _i.e._ through suggestion. Of course, the best physicians know these facts and make use of them in their practice, but preparation for this aspect of their work should be a regular part of their medical education. They should not be left to learn these facts from their practice as best they may, any more than they should be expected to learn their physiology and anatomy in this way. =Law.= The service of psychology to law can be very great, but owing to the necessary conservatism of the courts, it will be a long time before they will make much use of psychological knowledge. Perhaps the greatest service will be in determining the credibility of evidence. Psychology can now give the general principles in this matter. Witnesses go on the stand and swear to all sorts of things as to what they heard and saw and did, often months and even years previously. The expert clinical psychologist can tell the court the probability of such evidence being true. Experiments have shown that there is a large percentage of error in such evidence. The additional value that comes from the oath has been measured. The oath increases the liability of truth only a small percentage. Experiments have also shown that one's feeling of certainty is no guarantee of truth. Sometimes the point we feel surest about is the one farthest from the truth. In fact, feeling sure of a thing is no guarantee of truth. In a particular case in court, the psychologist can determine the reliability of the evidence of a particular witness and enable the judge and the jury to put the proper value on such witness's testimony. For example, a witness may swear to a certain point involving the estimation of time and distance. The psychologist can measure the witness's accuracy in such estimates, often showing that what the witness claims to be able to do is an impossibility. A case may hinge on whether an interval of time was ten minutes or twelve minutes, or whether a distance was three hundred or four hundred feet. A witness may swear positively to one or both of these points. The psychologist can show the court the limitations of the witness in making such estimates. Psychology can be of service in the examination of the criminal himself. Through association tests and in other ways, the guilt or innocence of the prisoner can often be determined, and his intellectual status can also be determined. The prisoner may be insane, or feeble-minded, or have some other peculiar mental disorder. Such matters fall within the realm of psychology. After a prisoner has been found guilty, the court should have the advice of the clinical psychologist in deciding what should be done with him. It should be added that the court and not the attorneys should make use of the psychologist. Whenever a psychologist can be of service in a case in court, the judge should summon such assistance, just as he should if expert chemical, physical, physiological, or anatomical knowledge should be desired. A knowledge of human nature can be of much service to society in the prevention of crime. This will come about from a better knowledge of the psychological principles of habit-formation and moral training, through a better knowledge of how to control human nature. A large percentage of all crime, perhaps as much as forty per cent, is committed by feeble-minded people. Now, if we can detect these people early, and give them the simple manual education which they are capable of receiving, we can keep them out of a life of crime. Studies of criminals in reform schools show that the history of many cases is as follows: The person, being of low mentality, could not get on well at school and therefore came to dislike school, and consequently became a truant. Truancy led to crime. Crime sent the person to the court, and the court sent the person to the state reformatory. The great duty of the state is the prevention of crime. Usually little can be done in the way of saving a mature criminal. We must save the children before they become criminals, save them by proper treatment. Society owes it to every child to do the right thing for him, the right thing, whether the child is an idiot or a genius. Merely from the standpoint of economy, it would be an immense saving to the state if it would prevent crime by the proper treatment of every child. =Business.= The contribution of psychology in this field, so far, is in the psychology of advertising and salesmanship, both having to do chiefly with the selling of goods. Students of the psychology of advertising have, by experiment, determined many principles that govern people when reading newspapers and magazines, principles having to do with size and kind of type, arrangement and form, the wording of an advertisement, etc. The object of an advertisement is to get the reader interested in the article advertised. The first thing is to get him to _read_ the advertisement. Here, various principles of attention are involved. The next thing is to have the _matter_ of the advertisement of such a nature that it creates interest and remains in memory, so that when the reader buys an article of that type he buys the particular kind mentioned in the advertisement. In salesmanship, many subtle psychological principles are involved. The problem of the salesman is to get the attention of the customer, and then to make him _want_ to buy his goods. To do this with the greatest success demands a profound knowledge of human nature. Other things being equal, that man can most influence people who has the widest knowledge of the nature of people, and of the factors that affect this nature. The successful salesman must understand human feelings and emotions, especially sympathy; also the laws of attention and memory, and the power of suggestion. A mastery of the important principles requires years of study, and a successful application of them requires just as many years of practice. The last paragraph leads us to a consideration of the general problem of influencing men. In all occupations and professions, one needs to know how to influence other men. We have already discussed the matter of influencing people to buy goods. People who employ labor need to know how to get laborers to do more and better work, how to make them loyal and happy. The minister needs to know how to induce the members of his congregation to do right. The statesman needs to know how to win his hearers and convince them of the justice and wisdom of his cause. Whatever our calling, there is scarcely a day when we could not do better if we knew more fully how to influence people. =Industry.= The service of psychology here is four-fold: (1) Finding what men are fitted for. (2) Finding what kinds of abilities are demanded by the various trades and occupations. (3) Helping the worker to understand the psychological aspects of his work. (4) Getting the best work out of the laborer. _Finding what men are fitted for._ In the preceding chapter, we discussed the individual variations of men. Some people are better fitted physically and mentally for certain types of work than they are for other types of work. The determination of what an individual is fitted for and what he is not fitted for is the business of psychology. In some cases, the verdict of psychology can be very specific; in others, it can be only general. Much misery and unhappiness come to people from trying to do what they are not fitted by nature to do. There are many professions and occupations which people should not enter unless they possess high general ability. Now, psychology is able to measure general ability. There are many other occupations and professions which people should not enter unless they possess some special ability. Music, art, and mechanics may be mentioned as examples of occupations and professions demanding specific kinds of ability. In industrial work, many aspects demand very special abilities, as quick reaction, quick perception, fine discrimination, calmness and self-control, ingenuity, quick adaptation to new situations. Psychology can aid in picking out the people who possess the required abilities. _The different abilities demanded._ It is the business of psychology to make a careful analysis of the specific abilities required in all the various works of life. There are hundreds of occupations and often much differentiation of work within an occupation. It is for the psychologist of the future to make this analysis and to classify the occupations with reference to the kinds of abilities demanded. Of course, many of them will be found to require the same kind of ability, but just as surely, many will be found to require very special abilities. It is a great social waste to have people trying to fill such positions unless they possess the specific abilities required. It should be the work of the high school and college to explain the possibilities, and the demands in the way of ability, of the various occupations of the locality. By possibilities and demands are meant the kinds of abilities required and the rewards that can be expected, the kind of life which the different fields offer. It is the further duty of the high school and college to find out, as far as possible, the specific abilities of the students. With this knowledge before them, the students should choose their careers, and then make specific preparation for them. The schools ought to work in close coöperation with the industries, the student working for a part of the day in school and a part in the industries. This would help much in leading the student to understand the industries and in ascertaining his own abilities and interests. _The psychological aspects of one's work._ All occupations have a psychological aspect. They involve some trick of attention, of association, of memory. Certain things must be looked for, certain habits must be formed, certain movements must be automatized. Workmen should be helped to master these psychological problems, to find the most convenient ways of doing their work. Workmen often do their work in the most uneconomical ways, having learned their methods through imitation, and never inquiring whether there is a more economical way. _Securing efficiency._ Securing efficiency is a matter of influencing men, a matter which we have already discussed. Securing efficiency is quite a different matter from that treated in the preceding paragraph. A workman may have a complete knowledge of his work and be skilled in its performance, and still be a poor workman, because he does not have the right attitude toward his employer or toward his work. The employer must therefore meet the problem of making his men like their work and be loyal to their employer. The laborer must be happy and contented if he is to do good work. Moreover, there is _no use in working_, or in living either, if one cannot be happy and contented. We have briefly indicated the possibilities of psychology in the various occupations and professions. There is a further application that has no reference to the practical needs of life, but to enjoyment. A psychological knowledge of human nature adds a new interest to all our social experience. The ability to understand the actions and feelings of men puts new meaning into the world. The ability to understand oneself, to analyze one's actions, motives, feelings, and thoughts, makes life more worth living. A knowledge of the sensations and sense organs adds much pleasure to life in addition to its having great practical value. Briefly, a psychological knowledge of human nature adds much to the richness of life. It gives one the analytical attitude. Experiences that to others are wholes, to the psychologist fall apart into their elements. Such knowledge leads us to analyze and see clearly what otherwise we do not understand and see only darkly or not at all. Literature and art, and all other creations and products of man take on a wholly new interest to the psychologist. SUMMARY. Psychology is of service to education in ascertaining the nature of the child and the laws of learning; to law, in determining the reliability of evidence and in the prevention of crime; to medicine, in the work of diagnosis and treatment; to business, in advertising and salesmanship; to the industries, in finding the man for the place and the place for the man; to everybody, in giving a keener insight into, and understanding of, human nature. CLASS EXERCISES 1. Visit a court room when a trial is in progress. Note wherein psychology could be of service to the jury, to the judge, and to the attorneys. 2. To test the reliability of evidence, proceed as follows: Take a large picture, preferably one in color and having many details; hold it before the class in a good light where all can see it. Let them look at it for ten or fifteen seconds, the time depending on the complexity of the picture. The students should then write down what they saw in the picture, underscoring all the points to which they would be willing to make oath. Then the students should answer a list of questions prepared by the teacher, on various points in the picture. Some of these questions should be suggestive, such as, "What color is the dog?" supposing no dog to be in the picture. The papers giving the first written description should be graded on the number of items reported and on their accuracy. The answers to the questions should be graded on their accuracy. How do girls compare with boys in the various aspects of the report? What is the accuracy of the underlined points? 3. Let the teacher, with the help of two or three students, perform before the class some act or series of acts, with some conversation, and then have the students who have witnessed the performance write an account of it, as in No. 2. 4. Divide the class into two groups. Select one person from each to look at a picture as in No. 1. These two people are then to write a complete account of the picture. This account is then read to another person in the same group, who then writes from memory his account and reads to another. This is to be continued till all have heard an account and written their own. You will then have two series of accounts of the same picture proceeding from two sources. It will be well for the two who look at the picture to be of very different types, let us say, one imaginative, the other matter-of-fact. Do all the papers of one series have some characteristics that enable you to determine from which group they come? What conclusions and inferences do you draw from the experiment? 5. Does the feeling of certainty make a thing true? See how many cases you can find in a week, of persons feeling sure a statement is true, when it is really false. 6. In the following way, try to find out something which a person is trying to conceal. Prepare a list of words, inserting now and then words which have some reference to the vital point. Read the words one by one to the person and have him speak the first word suggested by those read. Note the time taken for the responses. A longer reaction time usually follows the incriminating words, and the subject is thrown into a visible confusion. 7. Talk to successful physicians and find out what use they make of suggestion and other psychological principles. 8. Spend several hours visiting different grades below the high school. In how many ways could the teachers improve their work by following psychological principles? 9. Could the qualities of a good teacher--native and acquired--be measured by tests and experiments? 10. Visit factories where men do skillful work and try to learn by observation what types of mind and body are required by the different kinds of work. 11. Does the occupation which you have chosen for life demand any specific abilities? If so, do you possess them in a high degree? 12. Could parents better train their children if they made use of psychological principles? 13. In how many ways will the facts learned in this course be of economic use to you in your life? In what ways will they make life more pleasurable? 14. Make a complete outline of this chapter. REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING MÜNSTERBERG: _Psychology, General and Applied_, Chapter XXVII-XXXIII. MÜNSTERBERG: _The Psychology of Industrial Efficiency_. ALPHABETICAL LIST OF REFERENCES FOR CLASS READING COLVIN, S. S., and BAGLEY, W. C.: _Human Behavior_. The Macmillan Company, 1913. DAVENPORT, C. B.: _Heredity in Relation to Eugenics_. Henry Holt & Company, 1911. DEWEY, J.: _How We Think_. D. C. Heath & Company, 1910. KELLICOTT, W. E.: _The Social Direction of Human Evolution_. D. Appleton & Company, 1911. KIRKPATRICK, E. A.: _The Fundamentals of Child Study_. The Macmillan Company, 1912. MÜNSTERBERG, H.: _Psychology, General and Applied_. D. Appleton & Company, 1914. MÜNSTERBERG, H.: _The Psychology of Industrial Efficiency_. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913. PILLSBURY, W. B.: _Essentials of Psychology_. The Macmillan Company, 1916. PYLE, W. H.: _Outlines of Educational Psychology_. Warwick and York, 1912. PYLE, W. H.: _The Examination of School Children_. The Macmillan Company, 1913. ROWE, S. H.: _Habit-Formation and the Science of Teaching_. Longmans, Green, & Company, 1911. TITCHENER, E. B.: _A Beginner's Psychology_. The Macmillan Company, 1916. GLOSSARY Most of the terms given below are explained in the text, but it is hoped that this alphabetical list with brief definitions will prove helpful. It is a difficult task to make the definitions scientific and at the same time brief, simple, and clear. _Abnormal._ Having mental or physical characteristics widely different from those commonly found in ordinary people. _Acquired nature._ Those aspects of habit, skill, knowledge, ideas, and ideals that come from experience and are due to experience. _Action._ Muscular contractions usually producing motion of the body or of some part of the body. _Adaptation._ Adjustment to one's surroundings. _Adaptive._ Readily changing one's responses and acquiring such new responses as enable one to meet successfully new situations; also having tendencies or characteristics which enable one to be readily adjustable. _After-images._ Images that follow immediately after stimulation of a sense organ, and resulting from this stimulation. _Association._ Binding together ideas through experiencing them together. _Attention._ Relative clearness of perceptions and ideas. _Attitude._ The tendency toward a particular type of response in action or a particular idea or association in thought. _Bond._ The connection established in the nervous system which makes a certain response follow a certain stimulus or a certain idea follow another idea or perception. _Capacity._ The possibility of learning, achieving, etc. _Color blindness._ Inability to experience certain colors, usually red and green. _Complementary color._ Complementary colors are those which, mixed in the right proportion, produce gray. _Congenital._ Inborn. _Connection._ The nerve-path through which a stimulus produces a response or through which one idea produces or evokes another. _Conscious._ Having consciousness, or accompanying consciousness or producing consciousness. _Consciousness._ The mental states--perceptions, ideas, feelings--which one has at any moment. _Low level of consciousness._ Conscious processes not so clear as others existing at the same time. _High level of consciousness._ Conscious processes that are clear as compared to others existing at the same time. _Contrast._ The enhancing or strengthening of a sensation by another of opposite quality. _Correlation._ The relation that exists between two functions, characteristics, or attributes that enables us, finding one, to predict the presence of the other. _Development._ The appearance, or growth, or strengthening of a characteristic. _Emotion._ The pleasure-pain aspect of experience plus sensations from characteristic bodily reactions. _Environment._ The objects and forces about us which affect us through our senses. _Environmental instincts._ Instincts which have originated, at least in part, from the periodic changes in man's environment. _Eugenics._ The science of race improvement through selective breeding or proper marriages or in some cases through the prevention of marriage. _Experience._ What we learn of the world through sensation and perception. _Fatigue._ Inability to work produced by work and which only rest will cure. _Feeble-minded._ Having important mental traits only poorly developed or not at all. _Feeling._ The pleasure-pain aspect of experience or of ideational states. _Function._ The use of a thing or process, also any mental process or combination of processes considered as a unit. _Genetic._ Having reference to origin and development. _Habits._ Definite responses to definite stimuli depending upon bonds established by use after birth. _Heredity._ Transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring. _Human nature._ The characteristics and tendencies which we have as human beings, with particular reference to mind and action. _Ideals._ Definite tendencies to act in definite ways. Ideas of definite types of action with tendency toward the actions; ideas of definite conditions, forms, and states together with a desire to experience or possess them. _Ideas._ Revived perceptions. _Images._ Revived sensations, simpler than ideas. _Imitation._ Acting as we see others act. _Impulse._ Tendency to action. _Individualistic instincts._ Those instincts which more immediately serve individual survival. _Individual differences._ The mental and physical differences between people. _Inherited nature._ Those aspects of one's nature due directly to heredity. _Instincts._ Definite responses produced by definite stimuli through hereditary connections in the nervous system. _Intellectual habits._ Definite fixed connections between ideas; definite ways of meeting typical thought situations. _Intensity._ The amount or strength of a sensation or image, how far it is from nothing. _Interest._ The aspect given to experience or thinking by attention and pleasure. _Learning._ Establishing new bonds or connections in the nervous system; acquiring habits; gaining knowledge. _Memory._ The retention of experience; retained and reproduced experience. _Mental set._ Mental attitude or disposition. _Mind._ The sum total of one's conscious states from birth to death. _Nerve-path._ The route traversed by a nerve-stimulus or excitation. _Original nature._ All those aspects of mind and body directly inherited. _Perceive._ To be aware of a thing through sensation. _Perception._ Awareness of a thing through sensation or a fusion of sensations. _Plasticity._ Modifiability, making easy the formation of new bonds or nerve-connections. _Presupposition._ A theory or hypothesis on which an argument or a system of arguments or principles is based. _Primary._ First, original, elementary, perceptive experience as distinguished from ideational experience. _Reaction._ The action immediately following a stimulus and produced by it. _Reasoning._ Thinking to a purpose; trying to meet a new situation. _Reflex._ A very simple act brought about by a stimulus through an hereditary nerve-path. _Response._ The act following a stimulus and produced by it. _Retention._ Memory; modification of the nervous system making possible the revival of experience. _Science._ Knowledge classified and systematized. _Sensation._ Primary experience; consciousness directly due to the stimulation of a sense organ. _Sense._ To sense is to have sensation, to perceive. A sense is a sense organ or the ability to have sensation through a sense organ. _Sense organ._ A modified nerve-end with accompanying apparatus or mechanism making possible a certain form of stimulation. _Sensitive._ Capable of giving rise to sensation, or transmitting a nerve-current. _Sensitivity._ Property of, or capacity for being sensitive. _Sensory._ Relating to a sense organ or to sensation. _Situation._ The total environmental influences of any one moment. _Socialistic instincts._ The instincts related more directly to the survival of a social group. _Stimulation._ The setting up of a nerve process in a sense organ or in a nerve tract. _Stimulus._ That which produces stimulation. _Subnormal._ Having characteristics considerably below the normal. _Tendency._ Probability of a nerve-current taking a certain direction due to nerve-organization. _Thinking._ The passing of images and ideas. _Thought._ Thinking; an idea or group of ideas. _Training._ Establishing nerve connection or bonds. _Vividness._ Clearness of sensations, perceptions, images, and ideas. INDEX Abilities, specialized, 179 Ability, unusual, 206 Adaptation of vision, 41 After-images, visual, 40 Ancestors, 22 f. Anger, 58 Appearance of instincts, 54 Applied psychology, 8-9, 210 ff. Association of ideas, 152 Astigmatism, 44 Attention, 80 ff.; and will, 82. Attitude, 157 Behavior, 7 Bodily conditions, 76 Brain, 7 Brightness, sensation of, 38 Business, 215 Causality, 18, 21 Centrally initiated action, 51 Child, nature of, 11 Cold, sense of, 42 Collecting instinct, 62 College, function of, 217 Color blindness, 45 Color mixture, 39 Color, sensation of, 38 Completion test, 198 Concentrated practice, 102 Consciousness, 7 Conservatism, 109 Costly Temper test, 186 Cramming, 141 Criminal, the, 213 f. Curriculum, 145 Darwin, 89 Defects of sense organs, 43 Development, individual, 24 ff.; racial, 18-21; significance of and causality, 21-24 Direct method, 112 Dizziness, organs that give us sense of, 42 Dramatization, 67 Drill in school subjects, 110-112 Dynamic, world as, 20 Economical practice, 101 ff. Education, 210; aim of, 10; preparatory, 167; science of, 9 ff. Educational inferences, 143 Educational psychology, 9 ff. Efficiency, 98, 108 Emotions, 74 ff. Environment, 31 Environmental instincts, 61 Envy, 58 Evolution, 19 ff. Exceptions, 101, 114 Excursions, 61 Experience, 8; organization of, 169 Experiment, 13 ff. Eye, the, 37 Eye defects, 43 ff. Eyestrain, 20 Farsightedness, 44 Fatigue, 101 Fear, 56 Feeble-mindedness, 29 Feeling, 73 ff. Fighting instincts, 58 Formal drill, III, 112 Free association frequency surface, 178 Free association test, 193 Frequency of experience, 156 Gang instinct, 60 Genetic view of childhood, 24 Genius, 31 Habit, 87 ff.; and nerve path, 91; how formed, 98 ff.; importance in life, 107; intellectual, 89; moral, 90; of thought, 169; results of, 94; specific, 116 Hearing, 41; defects of, 45 Heredity, 24 ff. Heredity _vs._ Environment, 31 Heritage, social, 23 High school and fourth grade abilities compared, 203 High school, function of, 217 Home and moral training, 118 Idea, 52 Ideas, 124 Imitation, 64 ff. Imitation in ideals, 67 Incidental drill, 111 Individual development, 24 ff. Individual differences, 176 ff. Individualistic instincts, 56 Industry, 216 Influencing men, 215 Inheritance, 22 Inherited tendencies, 50 ff. Initiative, 113 Instincts, 52 ff.; classification of, 55; significance of, 55 Interest, 84 Intervals between practice, 102 Jealousy, 58 Joints, sense organs in, 42 Jost's law, 142 Language and thinking, 170 ff. Language study, 144 Latin, 116 Law, service of psychology to, 212 Learning and remembering, 138 Learning by wholes, 141 Life occupations, 205 Logical memory, 184 ff. Meaning, 163 ff. Medicine, 211 Memories, kinds of, 132 Memory, 124 ff.; and age and sex, 127; and habit, 146; and school standing, 135; and thinking, 134; factors of, 128 ff.; good, dangers resulting from, 137; kinds of, 132 Mendelian principle, 26 Mental development, 19 Mental differences, 178; detection of, 180; importance of, 201 ff. Mental functions developed, 182 Mental set, 157 Mental tests, 183 ff. Mind and body, 34 ff. Mood, 78 Moral training, 117 ff. Motive, 77 Muscular speed, 14 Museum, school, 62 ff. Musical ability, 179 Nearsightedness, 44 Needs of child, 77 Nerve tendency, 92 Norms in mental tests, 184 ff. Occupations, 205 Opposites test, 195 ff. Organization of experience, 163 ff. Pain sense, 42 Parents, and habit-formation of children, 104 ff., 119 Perception, 124 Physiological basis of memory, 126 Piano playing, 51, 97 Pitch, 41 Plasticity, 93 Play, 68 Pleasure and habit, 101 Pleasure, higher forms of, 80 Practice, 99, 113 Primary experience, 154 Psychology and culture, 218 Psychology defined, 5; method of, 13; problems of, 8 Race, development of, 18 ff.; improvement of, 30 Ranking students, 15 Reasoning, 159; training in, 168 Recalling forgotten names, 146 Recency of experience, 155 Regeneration, 23 Repetition, 99 Respect for authority, 77 Resemblance, 25 Retina, the, 37 f. Revived experience, 125 Rigidity, 108 Rote memory, 189 Rules for habit-formation, 113 Salesmanship, 215 School, and habit, 108; and moral training, 119 f. Schoolhouse, community center, 60 f. Science, 1 Scientific law, 3 Scientist, 1 ff. Securing efficiency, 218 Selecting habits, 109 Sense organs, affects of stimulating, 6, 7; knowledge through, 35 Sleight's experiment, 140 Smell, 42 Social life of children, 60 Social tendencies, 59 Stimulation, 6 Stimulus and response, 50 Study, learning how to, 132 Subnormal children, 206 Substitution test, 192 Taste, 42 Teacher, function of in memory work, 142; function of in habit-formation, 103 Teaching too abstract, 129 Temperament, 78 Tendons, sense organs in, 42 Thinking, 152 ff., 159 Touch, 42 Transfer of training, 114 ff., 140 Truancies, 61 Typewriting, 51, 94 ff. Vision, 37; importance of, 45 Visual contrast, 39 Vividness and intensity of experience, 156 Wandering, 61 Warmth, sense of, 42 Weight, diagram showing frequency surface of, 177 Word-building test, 197 Work and psychology, 218 
18843	----	Transcriber's Note: Italics have been rendered using _underscores_ and bold using =equals signs=. A number of printer's errors have been corrected, and are listed at the end. * * * * * +----------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Applied Psychology | | | | for Nurses | | | | | | By | | | | Mary F. Porter, A. B. | | | | _Graduate Nurse; Teacher of Applied Psychology, | | Highland Hospital, Asheville, N. C._ | | | | | | | | | | | | Philadelphia and London | | W. B. Saunders Company | | 1921 | | | | | +----------------------------------------------------------+ Copyright, 1921, by W. B. Saunders Company PRINTED IN AMERICA PRESS OF W. B. SAUNDERS COMPANY PHILADELPHIA TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER FOREWORD This little book is the outgrowth of a conviction, strengthened by some years of experience with hundreds of supposedly normal young people in schools and colleges, confirmed by my years of training in a neurological hospital and months of work in a big city general hospital, that it is of little value to help some people back to physical health if they are to carry with them through a prolonged life the miseries of a sick attitude. As nurses I believe it is our privilege and our duty to work for health of body and health of mind as inseparable. Experience has proved that too often the physically ill patient (hitherto nervously well) returns from hospital care addicted to the illness-accepting attitude for which the nurse must be held responsible. I conceive of it as possible that every well trained nurse in our country shall consider it an essential to her professional success to leave her patient imbued with the will to health and better equipped to attain it because the sick attitude has been averted, or if already present, has been treated as really and intelligently as the sick body. To this end I have dealt with the simple principles of psychology only as the nurse can immediately apply them. The writer wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness for criticism of this work and for several definitions better than her own, in the chapters _The Normal Mind_ and _Variations From Normal Mental Processes_, to Dr. Robert S. Carroll, who through the years of hospital training helped her to translate her collegiate psychology from fascinating abstract principles into the sustaining bread of daily life. MARY F. PORTER. ASHEVILLE, N. C., _August, 1921_. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY? 11 CHAPTER II CONSCIOUSNESS 20 The Unconscious 23 Consciousness is Complex 29 Consciousness in Sleep 31 Consciousness in Delirium 32 CHAPTER III ORGANS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 34 The Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems in Action 35 The Sympathetic Nervous System 37 CHAPTER IV RELATION OF MIND AND BODY 40 The Cerebrum or Forebrain 43 CHAPTER V THE NORMAL MIND 47 CHAPTER VI THE NORMAL MIND (Continued) 59 Instinct 59 Memory 62 The Place of Emotion 67 The Beginning of Reason 69 Development of Reason and Will 71 Judgment 72 Reaction Proportioned to Stimuli 75 Normal Emotional Reactions 77 The Normal Mind 77 CHAPTER VII PSYCHOLOGY AND HEALTH 79 Necessity of Adaptability 80 The Power of Suggestion 84 One Thought Can Be Replaced by Another 89 Habit is a Conserver of Effort 90 The Saving Power of Will 93 CHAPTER VIII VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES 95 Disorders and Perversions 95 CHAPTER IX VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES (Continued) 101 Factors Causing Variations from Normal Mental Processes 108 Heredity 108 Environment 109 Personal Reactions 110 CHAPTER X ATTENTION THE ROOT OF DISEASE OR HEALTH ATTITUDE 112 The Attention of Interest 112 The Attention of Reason and Will 118 CHAPTER XI GETTING THE PATIENT'S POINT OF VIEW 124 What Determines the Point of View 124 Getting the Other Man's Point of View 126 The Deluded Patient 133 Nursing the Deluded Patient 135 The Obsessed Patient 136 The Mind a Prey to False Associations 137 CHAPTER XII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NURSE 139 Accuracy of Perception 141 Training Perception 142 Association of Ideas 143 Concentration 146 Self-training in Memory 150 CHAPTER XIII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NURSE (Continued) 152 Emotional Equilibrium 152 Self-correction 160 Training the Will 161 CHAPTER XIV THE NURSE OF THE FUTURE 164 * * * * * INDEX 169 Applied Psychology for Nurses CHAPTER I WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY? Wise men study the sciences which deal with the origins and development of animal life, with the structure of the cells, with the effect of various diseases upon the tissues and fluids of the body; they study the causes of the reactions of the body cells to disease germs, and search for the origin and means of extermination of these enemies to health. They study the laws of physical well-being. They seek for the chemical principles governing the reactions of digestive fluids to the foods they must transform into heat and energy. So the doctor learns to combat disease with science, and at the same time to apply scientific laws of health that he may fortify the human body against the invasion of harmful germs. Thus, eventually, he makes medicine itself less necessary. But another science must walk hand in hand today with that of medicine; for doctors and nurses are realizing as never before the power of mind over body, and the hopelessness of trying to cure the one without considering the other. Hence psychology has come into her own as a recognized science of the mind, just as biology, histology, chemistry, pathology, and medicine are recognized sciences governing the body. As these are concerned with the "how" and "why" of life, and of the body reactions, so psychology is concerned with the "how" and "why" of conduct and of thinking. For as truly as every infectious disease is caused by a definite germ, just as truly has every action of man its adequate explanation, and every thought its definite origin. As we would know the laws of the sciences governing man's physical well-being that we might have body health, so we would know the laws of the mind and of its response to its world in order to attain and hold fast to mind health. Experience with patients soon proves to us nurses that the weal and woe of the one vitally affects the other. "Psychology is the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions." So William James took up the burden of proof some thirty years ago, and assured a doubting world of men and women that there were laws in the realm of mind as certain and dependable as those applying to the world of matter--men and women who were not at all sure they had any right to get near enough the center of things to see the wheels go round. But today thousands of people are trying to find out something of the way the mind is conceived, and to understand its workings. And many of us have in our impatient, hasty investigation, self-analytically taken our mental machines all to pieces and are trying effortfully to put them together again. Some of us have made a pretty bad mess of it, for we tore out the screws and pulled apart the adjustments so hastily and carelessly that we cannot now find how they fit. And millions of other machines are working wrong because the engineers do not know how to keep them in order, put them in repair, or even what levers operate them. So books must be written--books of directions. If you can glibly recite the definition above, know and explain the meaning of "mental life," describe "its phenomena and their conditions," illustrating from real life; if you can do this, and prove that psychology is a science, _i. e._, an organized system of knowledge on the workings of the mind--not mere speculation or plausible theory--then you are a psychologist, and can make your own definitions. Indeed, the test of the value of a course such as this should be your ability, at its end, to tell clearly, in a few words of your own, what psychology is. The word _science_ comes from a Latin root, _scir_, the infinitive form, _scire_, meaning to know. So a science is simply the accumulated, tested knowledge, the proved group of facts about a subject, all that is known of that subject to date. Hence, if psychology is a _science_, it is no longer a thing of guesses or theories, but is a grouping of confirmed facts about the mind, facts proved in the psychology laboratory even as chemical facts are demonstrated in the chemical laboratory. Wherein psychology departs from facts which can be proved by actual experience or by accurate tests, it becomes metaphysics, and is beyond the realm of science; for metaphysics deals with the realities of the supermind, or the soul, and its relations to life, and death, and God. Physics, chemistry, biology have all in their day been merely speculative. They were bodies of theory which might prove true or might not. When they _worked_, by actually being tried out, they became bodies of accepted facts, and are today called sciences. In the same way the laws of the working of the mind have been tested, and a body of assured facts about it has taken its place with other sciences. It must be admitted that no psychologist is willing to stop with the _known_ and _proved_, but, when he has presented that, dips into the fascinations of the yet unknown, and works with promising theory, which tomorrow may prove to be science also. But we will first find what they have verified, and make that the safe foundation for our own understanding of ourselves and others. What do we mean by "mental life"?--or, we might say, the science of the life of the mind. And what is _mind_? But let us start our quest by asking first what reasons we have for being sure mind exists. We find the proof of it in consciousness, although we shall learn later that the activities of the mind may at times be unconscious. So where consciousness is, we know there is mind; but where consciousness is not, we must find whether it has been, and is only temporarily withdrawn, before we say "Mind is not here." And _consciousness_ we might call _awareness_, or our personal recognition of being--awareness of me, and thee, and it. So we recognize _mind_ by its evidences of awareness, _i. e._, by the body's reaction to stimuli; and we find mind at the very dawn of animal life. Consciousness is evidenced in the protozoön, the simplest form in which animal life is known to exist, by what we call its response to stimuli. The protozoön has a limited power of self-movement, and will accept or reject certain environments. But while we see that mind expresses itself in consciousness as vague, as dubious as that of the protozoön, we find it also as clear, as definite, as far reaching as that of the statesman, the chemist, the philosopher. Hence, the "phenomena of mental life" embrace the entire realms of feeling, knowing, willing--not of man alone, but of all creatures. In our study, however, we shall limit ourselves to the psychology of the human mind, since that concerns us vitally as nurses. Animal psychology, race psychology, comparative psychology are not within the realm of our practical needs in hospital life. We would know the workings of man's mind in disease and health. What are the instinctive responses to fear, as shown by babies and children and primitive races? What are the normal expressions of joy, of anger, or desire? What external conditions call forth these evidences? What are the acquired responses to the things which originally caused fear, or joy, or anger? How do grown-ups differ in their reactions to the same stimuli? Why do they differ? Why does one man walk firmly, with stern, set face, to meet danger? Why does another quake and run? Why does a third man approach it with a swagger, face it with a confident, reckless smile of defiance? All these are legitimate questions for the psychologist. He will approach the study of man's mind by finding how his body acts--that is, by watching the phenomena of mental life--under various conditions; then he will seek for the "why" of the action. For we can only conclude what is in the mind of another by interpreting his expression of his thinking and feeling. We cannot see within his mind. But experience with ourselves and others has taught us that certain attitudes of body, certain shades of countenance, certain gestures, tones of voice, spontaneous or willed actions, represent anger or joy, impatience or irritability, stern control or poise of mind. We realize that the average man has learned to conceal his mental reactions from the casual observer at will. But if we see him at an unguarded moment, we can very often get a fair idea of his mental attitude. Through these outward expressions we are able to judge to some extent of the phenomena of his mental life. But let us list them from our own minds as they occur to us this work-a-day moment, then, later on, find what elements go to make up the present consciousness. As I turn my thoughts inward at this instant I am aware of these mental impressions passing in review: You nurses for whom I am writing. The hospitals you represent. What you already know or do not know along these lines. A child calling on the street some distance away. A brilliant sunshine bringing out the sheen of the green grass. The unmelodious call of a flicker in the pine-tree, and a towhee singing in the distance. A whistling wind bending the pines. A desire to throw work aside and go for a long tramp. A patient moving about overhead (she is supposed to be out for her walk, and I'm wondering why she is not). The face and voice of an old friend whom I was just now called from my work to see. The plan and details of my writing. The face and gestures of my old psychology professor and the assembled class engaged in a tangling metaphysic discussion. A cramped position. Some loose hair about my face distracting me. An engagement at 7.30. A sharp resolve to stop wool-gathering and finish this chapter. And yet, until I stopped to examine my consciousness, I was keenly aware _only_ of the thoughts on psychology I was trying to put on paper. But how shall we classify these various contents? Some are _emotion_, _i. e._, feelings; others are _intellect_, _i. e._, thoughts; still others represent _determination_, _i. e._, volition or will. There is nothing in this varied consciousness that will not be included in one or another of these headings. Let us group the contents for ourselves. The nurses for whom I am writing: A result of memory and of imagination (both intellect). A sense of kinship and interest in them (emotion). A determination that they must have my best (will, volition). And so of the hospitals: My memory of hospitals I have known, and my mental picture of yours made up from piecing together the memories of various ones, the recollection of the feelings I had in them, etc. (intellect). What you already know. Speculation (intellect), the speculation based on my knowledge of other schools (memory which is intellect). A desire (emotion) that all nurses should know psychology. Child calling on street. Recognition of sound (intellect) and pleasant perception of his voice (emotion). Desire to throw work aside and go for a tramp on this gorgeous day. Emotion, restrained by stronger emotion of interest in work at hand, and _intellect_, which tells me that this is a work hour--and _will_, which orders me to pay attention to duties at hand. So all the phenomena of mental life are included in feelings, thoughts, and volitions which accompany every minute of my waking life, and probably invade secretly every second of my sleeping life. The conditions of mental life--what are they? 1. In man and the higher animals the central nervous system, which, anatomy teaches us, consists of the brain and spinal cord. (In the lowest forms of animal life, a diffused nervous system located throughout the protoplasm.) 2. An external world. 3. A peripheral nervous system connecting the central nervous system with the outside world. 4. The sympathetic nervous system, provided to assure automatic workings of the vital functions of the body. These organs of the mind will be discussed in a later chapter. CHAPTER II CONSCIOUSNESS We took a glimpse at random into the mental life of an adult consciousness, and found it very complicated, constantly changing. We found it packed with shifting material, which, on the surface, seemed to bear very little relation. We found reason, feeling, and will all interacting. We found nothing to indicate that a consciousness as simple as mere _awareness_ might exist. We believe there might be such in the newborn babe, perhaps even in the baby a month old; but can we prove it? Let us look within again and see if there are not times of mere, bare consciousness in our own experience that give us the proof we need. I have slept deeply all night. It is my usual waking time. Something from within or from without forces an impression upon my mind, and I stir, and slowly open my eyes. As yet I have really not seen anything. With my eyes open my mind still sleeps--but in a few seconds comes a possessing sense of well-being. Obeying some stimulus, not recognized by the senses as yet, I begin to stretch and yawn, then close my eyes and settle down into my pillows as for another nap. I am not aware that I am I, that I am awake, that I have yawned and stretched. I have a pleasant, half-dreamy feeling, but could not give it a name. For those few seconds this is all my world--a pleasant drowsiness, a being possessed by comfort. My consciousness is mere awareness--a pleasant awareness of uncomplicated existence. In another moment or two it is a consciousness of a day's work or pleasure ahead, the necessity of rising, dressing, planning the day, the alert reaction of pleasure or displeasure to what it is to bring, the effort to recall the dreams of sleep--the complicated consciousness of the mature man or woman. But I started the day with a mental condition close to pure sensation, a vague feeling of something different than what was just before. Or this bare consciousness may come in the moment of acute shock, when the sense of suffering, quite disconnected from its cause, pervades my entire being; or at the second when I am first "coming back" after a faint, or at the first stepping out from an anesthetic. In these experiences most of us can recall a very simple mental content, and can prove to our own satisfaction that there is such a thing as mere awareness, a consciousness probably close akin to that of the lower levels of animal life, or to that of the newborn babe when he first opens his eyes to life. _Consciousness_, then, in its elements, is the simplest mental reaction to what the senses bring. How shall we determine when consciousness exists? What are its tests? The response of the mind to stimuli, made evident by the body's reaction, gives the proof of consciousness in man or lower animal. But what do we mean by a stimulus? Light stimulates me to close my eyes when first entering its glare from a dark room, or to open them when it plays upon my eyelids as I sleep and the morning sun reaches me. It is a stimulus from without. The fear-thought, which makes my body tremble, my pupils grow wide, and whitens my cheeks, is a stimulus from within. An unexpected shot in the woods near-by, which changes the whole trend of my thinking and startles me into investigating its cause, is a stimulus from without causing a change within. A _stimulus_, then, is anything within or without the body that arouses awareness; and this is usually evidenced by some physical change, however slight--perhaps only by dilated pupils or an expression of relief. When we see the reaction of the body to the stimulus we know there is consciousness. On the other hand, we cannot say that consciousness is always absent when the usual response does not occur; for there may be injury to organs accounting for the lack of visible reaction, while the mind itself may respond. But with due care, in even such cases, some external symptoms of response can usually be found if consciousness exists. We have already realized how complex, intricate, and changing is fully developed consciousness. THE UNCONSCIOUS But the mind of man knows two distinct conditions of activity--the conscious and the unconscious. Mind is not always wide awake. We recognize what we call the _conscious_ mind as the ruling force in our lives. But how many things I do without conscious attention; how often I find myself deep in an unexplainable mood; how the fragrance of a flower will sometimes turn the tide of a day for me and make me square my shoulders and go at my task with renewed vigor; or a casual glimpse of a face in the street turn my attention away from my errand and settle my mind into a brown study. Usually I am alert enough to control these errant reactions, but I am keenly aware of their demands upon my mind, and frequently it is only with conscious effort that I am kept upon my way unswerved by them, though not unmoved. When we realize that nothing that has ever happened in our experience is forgotten; that nothing once in consciousness altogether drops out, but is stored away waiting to be used some day--waiting for a voice from the conscious world to recall it from oblivion--then we grasp the fact that the quality of present thought or reaction is largely determined by the sum of all past thinking and acting. Just as my body is the result of the heritage of many ancestors plus the food I give it and the use to which I subject it, so my mind's capacity is determined by my inheritance plus the mental food I give it, plus everything to which I have subjected it since the day I was born. For it forgets absolutely nothing. "That is not true," you say, "for I have tried desperately to remember certain incidents, certain lessons learned--and they are _gone_. Moreover, I cannot remember what happened back there in my babyhood." Ah, but you are mistaken, my friend. For you react to your task today differently because of the thing which you learned and have "forgotten." Your mind works differently because of what you disregarded then. "You" have forgotten it, but your brain-cells, your nerve-cells have not; and you are not quite the same person you would be without that forgotten experience, or that pressing stimulus, which you never consciously recognized, but allowed your subconsciousness to accept. Some night you have a strange, incomprehensible dream. You cannot find its source, but it is merely the re-enacting of some past sensation or experience of your own, fantastically arrayed. Some day you stop short in your hurried walk with a feeling of compulsion which you cannot resist. You know no reason for it, but some association with this particular spot, or some vague resemblance, haunts you. You cannot "place" it. One day you hit the tennis-ball at a little different angle than you planned because a queer thought came unbidden and directed your attention aside. Again, under terrific stress, with sick body and aching nerves, you go on and do your stint almost mechanically. You do not know where the strength or the skill is derived. But your unconscious or subconscious--as you will--has asserted itself, has usurped the place of the sick conscious, and enabled you automatically to go on. For we react to the storehouse of the unconscious even as we do to the conscious. Remember that the unconscious is simply the latent conscious--what once was conscious and may be again, but is now buried out of sight. The mind may be likened to a great sea upon which there are visible a few islands. The islands represent the conscious thoughts--that consciousness we use to calculate, to map out our plans, to form our judgments. This is the mind that for centuries was accepted as all the mind. But we know that the islands are merely the tops of huge mountain-ranges formed by the floor of the sea in mighty, permanent upheaval; that as this sea-floor rises high above its customary level and thrusts its bulk above the waters into the atmosphere, is the island possible. Just so there can be no consciousness except as that which is already in the mind--the vast subconscious material of all experience--rises into view and relates itself through the senses to an outside world. We speak very glibly of motion, of force, of power. We say "The car is moving now." But how do we know? Away back there in our babyhood there were some things that always remained in the same place, while others changed position. The _changing_ gave our baby minds a queer sensation; it made a definite impression; and sometimes we heard people say "move," when that impression came. Finally, we call the feeling of that change "move," or "movement," or "motion." The word thereafter always brings to our minds a picture of a change from one place to another. The process--the slow comprehending of the baby mind--was buried in forgetfulness even at the time. But had not the subconscious been imprinted with the incident and all its succeeding associations, that particular phenomenon we could not name today. It would be an entirely unique experience. So our recognition of the impression is merely the rising into consciousness of the subconscious material in response to a stimulus from the outside world which appeals through the sense of sight. We can get no response whatever except as the stimulus asking our attention is related by "like" or "not like" something already experienced; that is, it must bear some relation to the known--and perhaps forgotten--just as the island cannot be, except as, from far down below, the sea-floor leaves its bed and raises itself through the deeps. The visible island is but a symbol of the submarine mountain. The present mental impression is but proof of a great bulk of past experiences. And so we might carry on the figure and compare the birth of consciousness to the instant of appearance of the mountain top above the water's surface. It is not a new bit of land. It is only emerging into a new world. "But," you ask, "do you mean to assert that the baby's mind is a finished product at birth; that coming into life is simply the last stage of its growth? How unconvincing your theory is." No, we only now have the soil for consciousness. The island and the submarine mountain are different things. The sea-floor is transformed when it enters into the new element. An entirely different vegetation takes place on this visible island than took place on the floor of the sea before it emerged. But the only new elements added to the hitherto submerged land come from the new atmosphere, and the sea-floor immediately begins to become a very different thing. Nevertheless, what it is as an island is now, and forever will be due, primarily, to its structure as a submarine mountain. In the new atmosphere the soil is changed, new chemical elements enter in, seeds are brought to it by the four winds--and it is changed. But it is still the sea-floor transformed. Just so the baby brain, complete in parts and mechanism at birth, is a different brain with every day of growth in its new environment, with every contact with the external world. But it is, primarily and in its elements, the brain evolved through thousands of centuries of pushing up to man's level through the sea of animal life, and hundreds of centuries more of the development of man's brain to its present complete mechanism through experience with constantly changing environment. Hence, when the baby sees light and responds by tightly shutting his eyes, then later by opening them to investigate, his sensation is what it is because through the aëons of the past man has established a certain relation to light through experiencing it. To go further than this, and to find the very beginning, how the first created life came to respond to environment at all, is to go beyond the realm of the actually known. But that he did once _first_ experience his environment, and establish a reaction that is now racial, we know. So our baby soon shows certain "instinctive" reactions. He reaches out to grasp. He sucks, he cries, he looks at light and bright objects in preference to dark, he is carrying out the history of his race, but is making it personal. He has evolved a new life, but all his ancestors make its foundation. The personal element, added to his heritage, has made him different from any and all of his forebears. But he can have no consciousness except as a bit from the vast inherited accumulation of the past of his ancestors, of all the race, steps forth to meet a new environment. And again you ask, "How came the first consciousness?" And again I answer, "It is as far back as the first created or evolved organism which could respond in any way to a material world; and only metaphysics and the God behind metaphysics can say." We only know that careful laboratory work in psychology--experiments on the unconscious--today prove that our conscious life is what it is, because of: _first_, what is stored away in the unconscious (_i. e._, what all our past life and the past life of the race has put there); _second_, because of what we have accepted from our environment; and this comprises our material, intellectual, social, and spiritual environment. CONSCIOUSNESS IS COMPLEX The one fact we want at this stage of our inquiry is simply this: that consciousness, awaking at birth, very soon becomes complex. However single and simple in content immediate consciousness may be, it is so intimately linked with all preceding experience that a pure sensation is probably never known after the first second of life. As the sensation is registered it becomes a basis for comparison. That first sensation, perhaps, was just a feeling of _something_. The next is a feeling of something that is the same, or is not the same, as the first. So immediately perception is established. The baby consciousness recognizes that the vague feeling is, or is not, _that same thing_. And from perception to a complex consciousness of perceptions, of ideas, of memories and relations, and judgments, is so short a step that we cannot use our measuring rods to span it. Thus through the various stages of life, from infancy to maturity, the conscious is passing into the unconscious, only to help form later a new conscious thought. Hence the conscious thought is determined by the great mass of the unconscious, plus the external world. But every thought, relegated to the unconscious, through its association there--for it is plastic by nature--comes back to consciousness never quite the same, and meets never quite the same stimulus. And as a result a repeated mental experience is never twice exactly the same. So the conscious becomes the unconscious and the unconscious the conscious, and neither can be without the other. Our problem is to understand the workings of the mind as it exists today, and to try to find some of its most constructive uses; and on that we shall focus attention. To that end we must first examine the various ways in which consciousness expresses itself. We have recognized two distinct mental states--the conscious and the unconscious--and have found them constantly pressing each on the other's domain. Our study of consciousness reveals the normal in the aspects of sleeping and waking, also various abnormal states. Consciousness may become excited, depressed, confused, delirious, or insane. We shall consider later some of the mental workings that account for these abnormal expressions. At present let us examine the mind's activities in sleep and in delirium. CONSCIOUSNESS IN SLEEP Sleep seldom, if ever, is a condition of utter unconsciousness. We so frequently have at least a vague recollection, when we wake, of dreaming--whether or not we remember the dream material--that we are inclined to accept sleep as always a state of some kind of mental activity, though waking so often wipes the slate clean. A new word which serves our purpose well has come into common use these last years, and we describe sleep as a state of rest of the conscious mind made possible as weariness overpowers the _censor_, and this guard at the gate naps. The censor is merely that mental activity which forces the mind to keen, alert, constructive attention during our waking hours, a guard who _censors_ whatever enters the conscious mind and compares it with reality, forcing back all that is not of immediate use, or that is undesirable, or that contradicts established modes of life or thought. In sleep we might say that the censor, wearied by long vigilance, presses all the material--constantly surging from the unconscious into consciousness, there to meet and establish relations with matter--back into the unconscious realms, and locks the door, and lies and slumbers. Then the half-thoughts, the disregarded material, the unfit, the unexpressed longings or fears, the forbidden thoughts; in fact, the whole accumulation of the disregarded or forgotten, good, bad, and indifferent--for the unconscious has no moral sense--seize their opportunity. The guard has refused to let them pass. He is now asleep. And the more insistent of them pick the lock and slip by, masquerading in false characters, and flit about the realms of the sleeping consciousness as ghosts in the shelter of darkness. If the guard half-wakes he sleepily sees only legitimate forms; for the dreams are well disguised. His waking makes them scurry back, sometimes leaving no trace of their lawless wanderings. So the unconscious thoughts of the day have become sleep-consciousness by play acting. CONSCIOUSNESS IN DELIRIUM At this time of our study it will suffice to say that in delirium and in insanity, which we might very broadly call a prolonged delirium, the toxic brain becomes a house in disorder. The censor is sick, and sequence and coherence are lost as the thronging thoughts of the unconscious mind press beyond the portals into consciousness, disordered and confused. We shall later find, however, that this very disorder falls into a sort of order of its own, and a dominant emotion of pain or ecstasy, of depression or fear, of exaltation or depreciation calls steadily upon the stored away incidents and remembered, related feelings of the past and interprets them as present reality. The censor of the sick brain is stupefied by toxins, shock, or exhaustion, and the citadel he is supposed to guard is thronged with besiegers from every side. The strongest--_i. e._, those equipped with most associations pertinent to the emotional status at the time--win out, occupy the brain by force, and demand recognition and expression from all the senses, deluding them by their guise of the reality of external matter. We find consciousness, then, determined by all past experience, by an external world, and by its organ of expression--the _brain_. Consequently, our psychology leads us into anatomy and physiology, which, probably, we have already fairly mastered. In rapid review, only, in the following chapter we shall consider the organs of man's consciousness, the brain, spinal cord, and the senses, and try to establish some relation between the material body and its mighty propelling force--the _mind_. CHAPTER III ORGANS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Nothing is known to us until it has been transmitted to the mind by the senses. The nerves of special sense, of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, the temperature sense ("hot or cold" sense), the muscular sense (sense of weight and position), these, and the nerves controlling voluntary motion, form the peripheral, or surface, nervous system. This acts as a connecting medium between the outside world and the central nervous system, which is composed of the brain and spinal cord. We might liken the nerves, singly, to wires, and all of them together to a system of wires. The things of the external world tap at the switchboard by using the organs of special sense; the nerves, acting as wires, transmit their messages; at the switchboard is the operator--consciousness--accepting and interpreting the jangle of calls. The recognition by the brain of the appeals coming by way of the transmitting sense, and its interpretation of these appeals, is the mind's function of consciousness, whether expressed by thinking, feeling, or willing. THE CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL NERVOUS SYSTEMS IN ACTION I am passing the open door of a bake-shop, and a pervading odor fills the air. I think "hot rolls," because my organ of smell--the nose--has received a stimulus which it transmits along my olfactory nerves to the brain; and there the odor is given a name--"hot rolls." The recognition of the stimulus as an odor and of that odor as "hot rolls" is consciousness in the form of thinking. But the odor arouses desire to eat--hunger; and this is consciousness in the form of feeling. The something which makes me walk into the shop and buy the rolls is consciousness in the form of willing. The sensory appeal from the outside world gained admission through the sense of smell; this transmitted the message, and consciousness recognized the stimulus, which immediately appealed to my hunger and incited action to satisfy that hunger. The ear of the operator in the telegraph office, again, might illustrate consciousness. It must be able to interpret mere clickings into terms of sense. To the operator the sounds say words, and the words are the expression of the object at the other end of the wire. The brain is the receiving operator for all the senses, which bring their messages in code, and which it interprets first as sound, vision, taste, touch, feel, smell, temperature; then more accurately as words, trees, sweet, soft, round, acrid, hot. The mind can know nothing except as the stimulus is transmitted by sense-channels over the nerves of sense, and received by a conscious brain. A baby born without sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch would remain a mere bit of clay. He could have no awareness. But so long as any one sense channel remains open the mind may acquire some knowledge. Suppose I am paralyzed, blind, and deaf, and you put a tennis-ball into my hand. I cannot tell you what it is, not even what it is like. It means nothing whatever to me, for the sense channels of touch, sight, and hearing, through which alone it could be impressed upon my brain, are gone. Suppose I am blind and deaf, but have my sense of touch intact; that I never saw or touched or heard of a tennis-ball before, but I know "apple" and "orange." I can judge that the object is round, that it is about the size of a small orange or apple. It is very light, and has a feel of cloth. I know it to be something new in my experience. You tell me in the language of touch that it is "tennis-ball"; and thereafter I recognize it by its combination of size, feel, and weight, and can soon name it as quickly as you, who see it. Suppose I am blind and my hands are paralyzed, but I have my hearing. You tell me this is a tennis-ball, and if I have known "tennis-ball" in the past, I can describe it to you. It has been impressed upon my brain through my sense of hearing; and memory immediately supplies the qualities that go with "tennis-ball." But if none of the senses has ever developed, my brain can receive no impression whatever; it cannot have even the stimulus of memory. Hence conscious mind cannot be, except as some sense-channel or channels have been opened to carry thought material to the brain. So far as we know today, in this world, mind is absolutely dependent upon the sense organs and the brain--upon matter--for existence. THE SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM Associated with the central nervous system by connecting nerves--but located outside of it in various parts of the body--are groups of nerve-cells (gray matter) and their fibers, forming what we call the _sympathetic nervous system_--the direct connecting link between mind and body. The _central nervous system_ is the director of all conscious action of the body; the _sympathetic_ orders all unconscious action. The beating of the heart, the contraction of the blood-vessels, hence the flowing of the blood, the processes of digestion, the functioning of the glands, are all directed by the sympathetic. In other words, the _central nervous system_ normally controls the movements of the voluntary muscles; the _sympathetic_ controls those of the involuntary muscles. The quick blush, the sudden paling of the cheeks, the start of fear, the dilated pupils of fright are the direct result of the action of involuntary muscles under control of the sympathetic system. The stimulus is received by the central nervous system; the fibers connecting the central and the sympathetic systems carry the message quickly to the latter, which immediately respond by ordering contraction or expansion of involuntary muscles. So tears flow, we breathe freely again or we quake and tremble, our pupils widen or contract, the heart beats suffocatingly, or seems almost to stop. The _sympathetic system_, as the name implies, is influenced by suggestions from the emotions rather than from the intellect. We might say that it is controlled by the "feeling mind" rather than the thinking mind, for intellect cannot influence it in the least. The wise nurse, who knows something of the laws of the mind, soon realizes that the _sympathetic nervous system_, rather than physical disability, causes many indigestions, headaches, diarrheas, dry mouths, chills; is responsible for much nausea, much "exhaustion," etc. When she has had wider experience she finds that almost any known physical disorder can be unconsciously imitated by the suggestible patient, whose sympathetic nervous system causes physical reactions to respond to the feelings of a sick mind. Let the nurse remember, however, that is it not for her to decide whether the disorders from which her patient suffers are of physical or nervous origin. It is for her, on the other hand, to study her patient's mentality and reactions, and to become expert in reporting symptoms of nervous as well as of physical significance. CHAPTER IV RELATION OF MIND AND BODY We have found that mind is entirely dependent upon the bodily organs for its existence. Is the body in the same way dependent upon the mind? Can the mind die and the body go on? Given a perfect body with unblocked sense channels, and put the mind to sleep, paralyze the _central nervous system_ with alcohol in sufficient quantity so that the undamaged _peripheral nervous system_--the senses--can obtain no response or recognition from it, and that perfect body is as useless for the time as if dead. But here comes proof of the remarkable hold of the body on life. The unconscious mind takes up the burden of directing the sympathetic nerves to stimulate the muscles of breathing. The unconscious sees to the beating of the heart. It directs the contraction of the blood-carrying vessels. It maintains certain vital processes of secretion. Thus automatically life goes on; the body still reacts to a limited field of stimuli, and consciousness recognizes it not. But when the unconscious mind ceases to function, then, indeed, does the body die. Yet the conscious mind may "die" and the body live on, so long as the unconscious continues its activity. It is possible for the human body to live for years, utterly paralyzed, with many of the senses gone, with no consciousness of being--if cared for by other persons--a merely vegetable existence. The current of power is broken; but the spark is still glowing, though utterly useless because connected with nothing. And it may continue to glow for some time while properly stimulated from outside sources. We might liken the mind to the boiler in which steam is generated, and the body to the engine which the steam runs. If the boiler bursts, the engine stops; but it may not be otherwise damaged. It simply cannot carry out its main function of motion any longer. The fires under the boiler are still burning and can be kept burning so long as fuel is provided, but the connection is broken and the great bulk of iron is a useless thing in that it can no longer fulfil its purpose. In just such a way may the mind be paralyzed; but the spark of life, which has through all the years kindled the now lost mind to action, may still remain--a useless thing, which would die away if not tended from without by other bodies whose minds are still intact. But in the demented mind consciousness still remains, the awareness of the young child or baby stage of life. The connection between the upper or conscious brain centers and the body has been tampered with; it no longer is direct, but breaks off into switch-lines. But the contact still holds between the lower or unconscious mind and the body; so the automatic body functions go on, directed as they were in babyhood before the independent mind assumed control. Hence, when all acute consciousness is finally gone, the unconscious mind, a perfect automaton, may still carry out the simplest vegetative activities of existence. When body is dead, mind, so far as its reactions to the world we know are concerned, ceases to act. But when the conscious mind is "dead" the body may yet live as a vegetable lives, with all its distinctively human functions lost. Motionless, save for the beating of the heart and the reaction of the lungs to air, the body may still be alive, though the mind long since has ceased all earthly activity. So we discover that an organ of mind is an essential, here, to life of mind, and that mind only can induce this organ to any action above the vegetative stage. But, on the other hand, we find that life can exist without conscious mind, even if untended by others, for a limited time. If the direct nerve connections between the brain and the hand, the brain and the foot, or the brain and the trunk are cut off, the mind henceforth realizes nothing of that part except as the sense of sight reports upon it; for the optic nerves relate the hand and mind, through this sense, as truly as the motor nerves which carry the mind's message for motion to the hand, and the sensory nerves which carry back to the mind the hand's pain. But let the optic nerve be inert, the sensory and motor connections broken between brain and hand, or foot and trunk, or brain and trunk, and the hand or foot may be amputated and the mind never sense the fact; the trunk may be severely injured and the mind be serenely unconscious. So the brain in man is "the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations." Take away all the brain and man's body is a useless mass of protoplasm. The brain's varied and intricate nerve connections with all parts of the body, through nerves branching from the main trunks in the spinal cord, we shall not discuss, for you know them through your study of anatomy. For the purpose of our psychology we need consider only two of the main divisions of the brain--the _cerebrum_, which includes what we call the right and left hemispheres, and the _cerebellum_. THE CEREBRUM OR FOREBRAIN For convenience the various lobes of the cerebrum are known as frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital, according to the parts of the brain referred to: as forehead, temples, crown, or occiput. The cerebellum, or hind brain, is also divided into two hemispheres, and is situated behind and below the hemispheres of the cerebrum. A system of localization has been roughly mapped out, the result of careful laboratory work on animals and of studying the loss of various functions in human beings as related to the location of brain injuries. From these experiments it seems proved that consciousness belongs only to the cortex or surface of the upper brain, and that the vast realm of the unconscious belongs to the lower brain centers. Hence the cortex is the organ of consciousness, and the lower centers are the repository of the unconscious until it again becomes conscious. The motor zone of the cortex we now know to be situated in the convolutions bordering the fissure of Rolando. Vision is evidently excited from the occipital lobes, though not yet conclusively proved. Smell, presumably, is located in the temporal lobes. Considered action is directed from the upper hemispheres only. It is significant that the hemispheres of the cerebrum are also accepted as the seat of memory for man--that intellectual quality which makes him capable of acting from absent stimuli, stimuli only present to memory; which makes it possible for him to reason the present from the experiences of the past. But in all animal life, except the higher forms, the control of action is from the lower brain centers, centers which respond only to present objects. With them memory, as man knows it, is lacking; but the reactions of the past are indelibly imprinted upon motor nerves and muscles, so that when the present object presses the button, as it were, calling forth the experience of the race, the animal instinctively reacts. But of what use to man, then, are the lower brain centers? In man, as in lower animals, they care for the vegetative functions of life, so that our blood continues to circulate, the air enters and leaves our lungs, digestion is carried on, with no assistance from the upper centers, the hemispheres of the cerebrum being thus left free for concentration on the external world of matter, which it can transform into a world of thought. It is the lower or vegetative brain that may still exist and keep life intact when the functions of the cerebrum are destroyed. We can say, then, of the brain as a whole that it is the organ of the mind, the _sine qua non_ of the mind, the apparatus for the registration of sense impressions. The senses themselves are the rudiments of mind, are the means by which stimuli alighting on sense organs enter consciousness; for the nerves of special sense immediately carry the impetus to the brain, where it is recognized as the "not me," the _something_ definitely affecting the _me_, and demanding reaction from the _me_. The functions of the cerebrum we find grouping themselves in three classes: _intellect_, _emotion_, and _volition_, more simply, thinking, feeling, and willing; and we find no mental activity of the normal or abnormal mind which will not fall into one of these groupings. This does not mean that one part of the brain thinks, another part wills, another part feels; for in the performance of any one of these functions the mind acts as a whole. Our thinking or our willing may be permeated with feeling, but the entire mind is simply reacting simultaneously upon various stimuli. CHAPTER V THE NORMAL MIND Mind, we found, is born in the form of consciousness when the outside world impresses itself upon the brain-cells by way of the senses. This consciousness, observation and experiment prove, is first a feeling one, later a feeling-thinking-willing one. The mind, then, is really the activity of the brain as it feels, as it thinks, as it wills. We express this in descriptive terms when we speak of mind as the _flow of consciousness_, the sum of all mental associations, conscious and unconscious. For mind is never a final thing. Looking within at our own mental processes we find that always our thought is just becoming something else. We reach a conclusion, but it is not a resting place, only a starting place for another. My thought was _that_ a moment ago, but while it was _that_ it was becoming _this_, and even now it is becoming something else. Thinking is mind. Feeling is mind. Willing is mind. But for the sake of clearness we speak of feeling, thinking, and willing as being functions of mind. Mind acts by using these powers. But to what end does it act? What purpose does it serve? For these functions are not the reasons of being for the mind, even as motion--while the immediate purpose of the locomotive--is not its chief end. The steam engine may stand in the same spot while its wheels revolve madly; it may move along the tracks alone, and accomplish nothing; or it may transport a great train of loaded cars. Unless it moves to some definite point and carries merchandise or people there, it is a useless, indeed, a dangerous invention. We find, in fact, that it functions to the very definite end of taking man and his chattels to specified places. And so it is with the mind. If it is thinking and feeling and willing only for the sake of exercising these mental powers, it might better not be. But what end do we actually find these functions serving? Mind, with its powers of thinking, feeling, and willing, gives an external world of matter; an internal world of thought, and so relates them to each other as to make them serve man's purposes. Thus these functions exist for accomplishment. In the solving of a problem, for instance, the mind thinks, primarily; in the enjoyment of music it feels, primarily, though its feeling may be determined by the intellectual verdict on the music; in forcing its owner to sit at the piano and practice in the face of strong desire to attend the theater, it wills, primarily. Now one of its functions predominates; now another. But the whole mind, not a feeling section, or a thinking section, or a willing section, operates together to produce action. When I play the piano it calls on all my mind. I think the music. I feel it. I make my fingers play it. But the thinking, the feeling, and the willing act together to result in the fingers playing. The mind, then, is an instrument of achievement. It fulfils its purpose when it makes matter serve useful ends. _Emotion_ or _feeling_ is the function of the mind which associates a sense of pleasure or pain with every thought or act. Feeling is the affective state of mind. By this we mean that it has the power to move us. And this emotion primarily does; for our feeling of pleasure or pain moves us to action, as well as precedes and accompanies and follows action. The word _emotion_ is usually employed to denote an acute feeling state, while the word _mood_ denotes a prolonged feeling condition, _i. e._, a less acute emotional state. The word _feeling_, however, is used to cover both; for in each case the sensational element manifests itself in a definite physical affect, pleasurable or painful in some degree. _Thinking_ is a conscious mental activity exercised to evolve ideas from perceptions, and to combine and compare these ideas to form judgments. Intellection, or thinking, might be explained as the mental process which converts sensation into percepts, groups percepts to form concepts or ideas, stores away ideas and sensations for future use, and recalls them when needed--the recalling being memory--and by reason combines, compares, and associates ideas to form judgments, then compares judgments to form new judgments. The process of intellect we name by terms denoting activity, such as intellection, thinking, the _stream of thought_, and the latter describes it most truly. _Volition_ or _will_ is the function of the mind which compels the expression of thought or feeling in action. For clarity we might indicate the mind and its functions in the following diagram: / Emotion { Pleasure \ { { Pain } { / Eye } { { Ear } { / Sensation / Nose } { { (impression < Mouth } { { on mind from \ Skin } { { some organs) { Muscles } { { { Viscera } { { \ General sensation } { { } { { Perception } } { { (recognition of > of object } / { cause of sensation) } of quality \ Mind < Intellect, or / > Mind \ the Stream < { Self / { of Thought \ { Organic } { { Memory < Inorganic } { { { Percept } { { { Concept } { { } { { { Abstract } { { Ideation < Concrete } { { { Imaginative { Fanciful } { { { Constructive } { { Reason } { \ Judgment } \ Will / The following terms are ones constantly used in psychology, and are briefly defined that there may be no haziness in their application. _Sensation_ is the uninterpreted response of the mind to stimuli brought by sense organs. { hot. Examples: Feeling of { cold. { pain. Sensation may arouse instinct and cause reflex action, or start a feeling state, or a train of thought. _Perception_ is the conscious recognition of the cause of a given sensation. { fluid--water. Example: { cold--snow. { pain--cut. _Percept_ is a word often used to denote the mind's immediate image of the thing perceived. Percepts are of two kinds: object and quality. Example: { object, as water. { quality, as fluid. _Memory_ is the mind's faculty of retaining, recognizing, and reproducing sensations, percepts, and concepts. _Organic memory_ is the mind's reproduction of past bodily sensations. Example: I recall the physical sensations of a chill, and live it over in my mind, so that I can accurately describe how a chill feels to me, though I can but surmise how one feels to you. _Inorganic memory_ is the mind's reproduction of its own reactions in the past. Example: Myself having a chill, how I acted; what I thought and my emotions during that chill. _Ideation_ is the mind's grouping of percepts by the aid of memory, to form concepts. Example: I perceive color, form, mouth, eyes, nose, chin, etc. These percepts I combine as a result of past experience (memory) to form my concept, _face_; and the process of combining is ideation. _Concepts_ are mental representations of things or qualities, _i. e._, of object or quality percepts. We might say that the percept is the mind's immediate image of a thing or quality, and the concept is the result of the storing up and grouping and recombining of percepts. Thus a lasting mental picture is secured; and my idea of horse, for instance, is so clear and definite a thing in my mind that if I should never again see a particular horse, I should yet always be able to think accurately of a horse. Concepts are of two kinds--concrete and abstract. A _concrete concept_, or concrete idea (for concept and idea are interchangeably used), is an idea of a particular object or quality. Examples: This wine-sap apple (object concept). This sweet orange (quality concept). An _abstract concept_, or abstract idea, is a mental reproduction of a quality or an object dissociated from any particular setting or particular experience. Abstract ideas are of two kinds. We speak of them as _abstract object concepts_ and as _abstract quality concepts_. An _abstract object concept_ we might call a generalized idea, an idea comprehending all objects having certain things in common. Example: My idea of animal includes many scores of very different individual animals, but they all have bodies and heads and extremities. They all have some kind of digestive apparatus; they breathe, and can move. An _abstract quality concept_ is easier to think than to explain. It is as though the mind in considering a multitude of different objects found a certain quality common to many of them, and it "abstracted," _i. e._, drew this particular quality, and only this, from them all, and then imagined it as a something in itself which it calls _redness_, or _whiteness_, or _goodness_. Thereafter, whenever it finds something like it anywhere else again it says, "That is like my redness." So I call it "red." In other words, consciousness thereafter can determine in a newly discovered object something it knows well merely because that something corresponds to a representation which experience and memory have already formed. These comprehensive concepts, or _universals_, as some psychologists term them, the mind, having pieced together from experience and memory, holds as independent realities, not primarily belonging to _this_ or _that_, but lending themselves to this or that. For example: My mind says "white," and sees white in some object. But I see the white only because my mind has a quality concept, _whiteness_. This outside object corresponds to my concept. I recognize the likeness and call it "white." I speak of goodness, or purity, of benevolence; or of fulness, emptiness, scantiness. There is no object or quality in the outside world I can say is goodness, or fulness. But I do see things in the external world through my ideas of goodness or fulness that correspond to these ideas. They have some of the qualities the ideas embrace; and so I point them out and say, "This represents purity; that, impurity"; or, "This is full, that is empty." One satisfies my concept of purity, while the other does not. One fulfils my concept of fulness; the other does not. And because we can never point out any one quality in the outside world and say "This is purity, and all of purity; this is goodness; or this good plus this good plus this makes all of goodness"; because of this impossibility we speak of these concepts as having reality somewhere. They are _absolutes_, _universals_, _abstract quality concepts_--the unfound all of which the things we call pure and good are but the part. _Apperception_ is the process of comparing the new with all that is in the mind, and of classifying it by its likeness to something already there. With an abstract idea of an object in mind we very deftly, through the use of memory and constructive imagination, deduce the whole from the part recognized as familiar. Example: In walking through the field, along the bank of the brook, I glimpse under the low-hanging branches of the weeping willow a restlessly moving hoof. I see a certain kind of hoof and only that. Or I hear a lowing sound. And I say "cow." I have not seen a cow, but only a part which tells me a cow is there; for all the cows I ever saw had hoofs of that general description, and so it fits into my concept _cow_, and into no others. Or I have heard cows, only, give that lowing sound before. From my perception, then, of hoof or sound I apperceive _cow_. Memory relates that hoof or that lowing sound to a certain kind of animal known in the past; and constructive imagination draws in all the rest of the picture that belongs with it. Again, we may apperceive an object or quality from our recognition of something which in our experience has been associated, under those particular circumstances, with only that object or quality. I see smoke on the ocean's far horizon, and I decide instantly, "a steamer." I have not perceived any steamer, but only something that "goes with it," as it were. I see the ship with my mind, not with my eyes; for I know that a cloud of smoke out there always has, in my past experience, represented just that. I compare the newly appearing stimulus--smoke in that particular location--with all that is associated with it in my mind, and classify it with the known. I apperceive "steamer." In apperception, then, we construct from the known actually perceived by the senses, the unknown. How does the child realize that the moving speck on the distant hillside is his father? There is nothing to indicate it except that it is black and moves in this direction. But experience tells Johnny that father comes home that way just about this time. Moreover, it says that father looks so when at that distance. When Johnny is as sure it is his father as if he could see his face close beside him he has apperceived him. The speck on the hill is the newly arriving stimulus. Johnny compares it with what corresponds to it in his mind's experience and proclaims, as a fact, that he sees his father. _Reason_ is the mind's comparison and grouping of concepts to form judgments, and its association of judgments to form new judgments. Example: My concept _man_ includes the eventual certainty of his death. My concept mortal means "subject to death." Therefore my judgment is, "Man is mortal." Reason has compared the concepts and found that the second includes the first. _Judgment_ is the mind's decision arrived at through comparing concepts or other judgments. Example: _Man is mortal_ is my decision after comparing the concepts _man_ and _mortal_ and finding that the latter really includes the former. Judgment at the same time says that "Mortals are men," is not a true conclusion. For in this case the first concept is not all included in the second. Mortals are all life that is subject to death. We may assume personal consciousness even as we recognize an individual body. Psychology does not deal with any awareness separated from a person. It knows no central mind of which you partake or I partake, and which is the same for us both. A universal consciousness would simply mean one which is the sum of yours and mine and everybody's who lives today, or who has ever lived. So by _personal consciousness_ the psychologist means his consciousness, or yours, or mine. But they can never be the same; for mine is determined by my entire past and by how things and facts and qualities affect me; and yours, by your past, and by things and facts and qualities, and by how they affect you. _Personal consciousness_ is the mind's recognition of self; and as the self changes with every added experience, so personal consciousness is modified. _Stream of thought_ is a term _James_ has brought into common usage to illustrate the fact, already stressed, that thinking, as we know it, is never static, is never one thing, one percept, one concept, one judgment; but is a lot of these all together, just beginning to be or just beginning to change into something else. We never know a concept, for instance, except as it is a part of our entire consciousness, related to all the rest; just as we do not know the drop of water in the brook as it flows with the stream. We can take up one on our finger-tips, however, and separate it from all the rest. But analyzed in the laboratory, this drop will contain all the elements that a pint or gallon or a barrel of the same water contains. The drop is what it is because the stream has a certain composition. We only have a brook as drops of rain combine to make it, but we also have only the drops as we separate them from the steam. _Imagination_ is the combining by the mind, in a new way, things already known. This may be either into fantastic groupings divorced from reality, or into new, possible, rational groupings not yet experienced. So imagination is of two kinds, the fantastic and the constructive. Fantastic imagination, or fantasy, gives us gnomes, fairies, giants, and flying horses, and all the delights of fairy tales. Constructive imagination is the basis for invention, for literature, and the arts and sciences. The word _thinking_, defined early in this chapter, is broadly used to denote the sum of all the intellectual faculties. Thinking is really the stream of thought. CHAPTER VI THE NORMAL MIND (Continued) INSTINCT We have found that the mind's chief end is action, of itself, or of its body. But what are its incentives to action? We see the very young baby giving evidences of an emotional life, living in an affective, or feeling environment, leading a pleasure-pain existence, from the first. He acts as desire indicates. But from the very moment of his birth he performs actions with which he cannot as yet have a sense-memory connection, because he is doing them for the first time. How can he know how to respond to stimuli from the very beginning? No other possible explanation offers itself than that he is born with certain tendencies to definite action. These we call instincts--man's provision to keep him going, as it were, till reason develops. Instincts are handed down from all the past. Definite tendencies, they are, to certain specific reflex actions in response to certain sensations. These responses, from the very beginning of animal life, have been toward avoiding pain, and toward receiving pleasure. It is as though the stimulus presses the trigger--instinct--and the muscle responds instantly with reflex action. This mechanism is the means of protection and advancement, and takes largely the place of intelligence in all animal life. It is what makes the baby suck and cry, clutch and pull, until a sense memory is established. So instinct is really race memory. We call instinctive those immediate, unthought reactions which are the same with all mankind. The pugnacious instinct--the desire to fight--is the natural reaction of every human being of sane mind to attack. The inner necessity of avenging is so strong in the child or man of untrained mind or soul that he acts before he thinks. He strikes back, or shoots, or plots against his enemies. Only rare development of spirit or the cautious warning of reason which foresees ill consequences, or a will trained to force control, can later make the instinct inactive. Where instinct ends and sense memory, imitation, and desire step in is difficult to determine. Later in life probably most of what we consider instinctive action is simply so-called reflex action, depending on sense memory, action learned so young that it is difficult to distinguish it from the true reflex action, which is due only to race memory. James, in his _Talk to Teachers_, gives us a partial list of the instincts. Thus: Fear Ownership Shyness Love Constructiveness Secretiveness Curiosity Love of approbation The ambitious impulses: Imitation, Emulation, Pride, Ambition, Pugnacity To this partial list we would add self-preservation, reproduction, etc. But instincts conflict with each other, and man carries about with him in babyhood many of them which may have been very useful to his prehistoric ancestors, but which only complicate things for him. Fear and curiosity urge opposite lines of conduct. Love of approbation and shyness are opposed. Love and pugnacity are apt to be at odds. So, gradually, as intelligence increases, the child refuses to allow such impulses to lead him to action. When fear-instinct and love-instinct are at war, reason is provided to come to the rescue. _Instincts_ are racial tendencies of sensational or emotional states to determine action. Instincts are the germs of habit, and when instinct would give rise to a reaction no longer useful, reason, abetted by new habit formation, in the normal mind, weakens instinct's force; and the habit is discarded and the instinct gradually declines. In prehistoric times when food was scarce, and man had not learned the art of tilling the soil, hunger forced him to fight for what he got to eat. As there was often not enough to go around, he maimed or killed his fellow-man that he might have all he wanted, obeying the instinct to survive. So, now, the baby instinctively clutches for all that appeals to him. But an abundance of food for all, or the intelligent realization that co-operation brings more to the individual than does fighting, and a developed sense of responsibility toward others; or merely the fear of the scorn of fellow beings, or the desire to be protected by the love of his kind; perhaps a genuine love of people, acquired by spiritual development, puts the primitive habit of food-grabbing into the discard. Finally, the very instinct of self-preservation may be transformed into desire to serve others. No better illustration of this can ever be offered than the sacrifices of the World War. MEMORY No mind retains consciously everything that has ever impressed it. It is necessary that it put aside what ceases to be of importance or value and make way for new impressions. We found early in our study that the subconscious never forgets, but harbors the apparently forgotten throughout the years, allowing it to modify our thinking, our reactions. But the conscious mind cannot be cluttered with the things of little importance when the more essential is clamoring. So there is a forgetting that is very normal. We forget numberless incidents of our childhood and youth; we may forget the details of much that we have learned to do automatically; but the subconscious mind is attending to them for us. Do you know how to skate? and if so, do you remember just how you did it the first time? Probably all you recall is that you fell again and again because your feet would slip away from where you meant them to be. When you glide over the ice now it is as natural as walking, and as easy. You cannot remember in detail at all how you first "struck out," nor the position of your feet and arms and legs, which you felt forced to assume. At the time there was very real difficulty with every stroke--each one was an accomplishment to be attempted circumspectly, in a certain definite way. All you remember now is, vaguely, a tumble or two, soreness, and lots of fun. We forget details we have intrusted to others as not a part of our responsibility. We forget the things which in no way concern us, in which we have no interest and about which we have no curiosity. And it is well that we do so. If it were not for the ability to forget, our minds would be like a room in which we have lived a lifetime, where we have left everything that has been brought into it since our birth. It would be piled ceiling high, with no room for us, and with difficulty only could we find what we want. As we grow from babyhood to childhood, from childhood to youth, from youth to maturity the room changes with us. We put off childish things. They are stored away somewhere, in an attic or basement, or destroyed. And day after day something new is added, displacing something else. In the case of the mind all these things are stored and cataloged in the subconscious, and forgotten, until some need causes us to look into our catalog-index and see the experience again, or some association calls it back, relating it to something new. So our discussion of the subconscious involved also a discussion of memory. But what of the things we must use frequently and cannot find in our minds? What of absent-mindedness and faulty memory? In such cases our minds might be compared to a cluttered room full of things we need and want to use every day, but in confusion. We know where many of them are, the ones we care most about; but we have to rummage wildly to find the rest. We have no proper system of arrangement of our belongings. You laid down that book somewhere, absent-mindedly, and now you cannot tell where. You were thinking of something else at the time, and inattention proves a most common cause of poor memory. Perhaps you simply have more books than the room can hold in an orderly way, and so you crowded that one in some corner, and now have no recollection of where you put it. Poor memory is the result of lack of attention, or divided attention at the time the particular attention-stimulus knocked. You asked me to buy a ribbon of a certain shade and a certain width when I went to town. I was thinking of my dentist appointment. However, I heard your request, answered it graciously, took the money you offered, still wondering if the dentist would have to draw that tooth. And the chances are that I forgot your ribbon. I was giving you only a passive and divided attention. Or I have more to do than I can possibly accomplish in the next six hours. You ask me to buy the ribbon. I attend accurately for the moment, think distractedly, "How can I do it all?--but I will"--and crowd the intention into an already overburdened corner of my mind, fail to associate it with the other thoughts already there, and return six hours later without the ribbon. My sense of hurry, of stress, of the more important thing to be done, or a reaction of impatience at the request, forced back the ribbon thought and allowed it to be hidden by others. I was really giving you only partial attention, or an emotion interfered with attention; and I forgot. Hence we find that a faulty memory may exist in an otherwise normal mind when poor attention, or divided attention due to emotional stress or to an overcrowded mind, which makes it impossible to properly assort its material, interferes. Again, we forget many things because they are unpleasant to remember. We have no desire, no emotional stimulus to make us remember; or because some of the associations with the forgotten incident are undesirable. We forget many things because if we remembered them we would feel called upon to do some unpleasant duty. You forgot your tennis engagement with B, perhaps, because you were so engrossed in a pleasure at hand, or in your work, that anything which interrupted was, under the circumstances, undesirable. You may have wanted very much to play with him, but some more pressing desire--to care well for your patient, or to continue the present amusement--was stronger. Or you forgot because you did not want to play with him and had no excuse to offer at the time. You wished to forget. Perhaps he does not play a good game, or you do not like him, or at least you like some one else much more, and he happened along; so you forgot B. The unconscious mind saw to it that something else was kept so prominently before your attention that it could not return to the less desired. Thus a forgetting may be purely the result of an emotional interference which makes it, all in all, more pleasant to forget than to remember. If we would help ourselves or our patients whose memories are faulty, and who make them worse by their continual fretting over their disability, we must train ourselves to be willing to forget all that does not in the least concern our interests or those of the people about us, and does not add anything desirable to our knowledge. Thus we may avoid overcrowding the mind. But when we would remember let us give our whole active attention at the moment of presentation of the new stimulus, and immediately tie it up with something in past experience; let us recognize what it is that we should remember, and call the reinforcement of will, which demands that we remember whether we want to or not. Sincere desire to remember will inspire early and frequent recalling, with various associations, or hooks, until the impression becomes permanent. The average patient's poor memory is made worse by his agitation and attention to it, and his conviction that he cannot remember. The fear of forgetting often wastes mental energy which might otherwise provide keenness of memory. If the nurse ties up some pleasant association with the things she wants the sick man to remember, and disregards his painful effort to recall other things, then--unless the mind is disordered--he will often find normal memory reasserting itself. We shall consider this question of memory in more detail in a later chapter of practical suggestions for the nurse. THE PLACE OF EMOTION _Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Thinking._--Emotion we found the constant accompaniment of every other mental activity. It is first on the stage of consciousness and, in the normal mind, last to withdraw. When I am working at a problem in doses or solutions, trying to learn my _materia medica_, or wrestling with the causes of disease in my _medical nursing_, or thinking how I can eke out my last ten dollars till I get some more, I am pursued with some vague or well-defined feeling of annoyance or satisfaction, of displeasure or pleasure. If all goes well, the latter; if not, the former. _Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Will._--I cannot _will_ without a feeling accompaniment, pleasant or unpleasant. I may be using my will only in carrying out what intellect advises. But we found that intellect's operations are always affective, _i. e._, have some feeling of pleasure or pain. And the very act of will itself is a pleasant one and much easier if it is making me do what I want to do; it is a vaguely or actively unpleasant one if it is making me act against desire. In the end, however, if I act against desire in pursuance of reason or a sense of duty, the feeling of pleasure in the victory of my better self is asserted. And feeling cannot be separated from will. _Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Action._--I cannot do anything without a feeling of comfort or discomfort, happiness or unhappiness. Try it for yourself when you are feeding a patient, making a bed, giving a bath or massage, preparing a hypodermic. Other things being normal, if you are performing the task perfectly, the feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, of the very ability to work effectively, with speed and accuracy and nicety, comes with the doing. If you are bungling, there is a pervading sense of dissatisfaction, of unpleasantness. In the automatic or semi-automatic action a great economy of nature has conservatively put feeling at the absolute minimum; but it has not eradicated it. As you walk across the ward, though your predominating thought and feeling may be elsewhere, there is a sense of pleasure or displeasure in the very movement. If your body is fresh and you are of an energetic type and in happy frame of mind, a pervasive feeling of satisfaction is experienced. If tired or discouraged or sore from unaccustomed exercise, every step registers protest. Thus we find by experiment that there is no thought we have, no single conscious movement or action, nor any expression of the will, but is accompanied with what the psychologist broadly terms _pleasure_ or _pain_. So _emotion_, the first expression of mentality, is never absent from any mental or physical act. It permeates all we do, as well as all we think and will, with the partial exception of automatic action, above indicated. THE BEGINNING OF REASON We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion's bidding. But very early the baby's experience operates as a partial check to feeling's exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of _hurt_ when fingers and that bright thing came together; and one such impression will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the brain-cell's retention of the painful feeling of slapped hands when the fingers reaching out to the flame had not yet quite touched. These punishment experiences are only effective in many children after more or less repetition has set up an automatic prohibition from brain to motor nerves; but right here intellect begins to assert itself in the form of sense memory. The baby does not reason about the matter. His nerve-cells simply remember pain, and that particular brightness and glow, and finger touch--or that reaching out to the glow--and slapped hands, as occurring together. In the same way he early connects pleasure with the taste of certain forbidden things. He does not know they are sweet. He only knows "I want." Even here his desire to taste may be checked in action by a vivid memory of what happened when he tasted that other time, and was spanked or put in his little room all alone with only milk and bread to eat for a long time. Later on the child may think, from cause to effect, thus: "Sweet, good, want, taste, spank, hurt (or no dinner, all by self, lonely), spank hurt more than sweets good. Not taste." But long before he can work this out, consciously, two distinct memories, one of pleasure and one of pain, are aroused by the sight of the sweet. And what he will do with it depends upon which memory is stronger. In other words, his action is governed altogether by his feeling, though memory, which is an intellectual factor, supplies the material for feeling. DEVELOPMENT OF REASON AND WILL Later still, when the child is older, we may have somewhat the following mechanism: "Sweets, good, want, taste; spank, hurt; don't care, spank not hurt much, maybe never found put, sweets very good." Now the child is reasoning and choosing between two courses of action, _don't_ and _do_. His decision will depend upon whether immediate satisfaction of desire is stronger than the deferred satisfaction of being good, and the fear of punishment. He probably prefers to take a chance, and even if the worst comes, weighs it with the other worst, not having the sweet--and takes the "bird in the hand." He has reasoned, and has chosen between two emotions the one which his judgment says is the more desirable; and his will carries out the decision of his reasoning. His chief end in life is still to get the most immediate pleasure. Still later in child-life, much later, perhaps, his decision about the jam is based on neither love of it nor fear of punishment, but--despite his still sweet tooth--on a reasoned conclusion that if he eats jam now he may be sick, or he may spoil his appetite for dinner; or on a consideration that sweets between meals are not best on dietetic principles; and _will_ very readily backs up the result of his reasoning. Though his determination is largely based upon feeling, reason has chosen between feelings, between immediate desire to have, and desire to avoid future discomfort. Reason is triumphant over present desire. JUDGMENT The conclusion or decision that reason has reached we call a judgment. The youth who decides against the sweet between meals, we say, has good judgment. And we base our commendation on the proved fact that sweets are real fuel, giving abundantly of heat and energy, and are not to be eaten as mere pastime when the body is already fully supplied with high calorie food not yet burned up; that if sweets are eaten at irregular intervals and at the call of appetite, and not earned by an adequate output of physical work, the digestive apparatus may become clogged, and an overacid condition of the entire intestinal tract threaten. We call judgment good, then, when it is the result of reasoning with correct or logical premises which correspond with the facts of life. We call it bad when it is the conclusion of incorrect or partial or illogic premises. A _premise_ "is a proposition laid down, proved, supposed, or assumed, that serves as a ground for argument or for a conclusion; a judgment leading to another judgment as a conclusion" (Standard Dictionary). Let us illustrate good and bad judgment by following out two lines of reasoning, each quite accurate as such. I want sweets. Sweets are good for people. They give heat and energy, and I need that, for I am chilly and tired. People say "Don't eat sweets between meals." But why? They contain just what I need and the sooner I get them the better. So I have sweets when I want them. The judgment to take the sweets as desire indicates is entirely logical if we accept all the premises as correct. And they are, so far as they go; but they are partial; and so cannot altogether correspond with the facts of life. Sweets are good for people who expend much physical energy. They prove injurious in more than limited amounts to the bed-ridden, the inactive, or the sluggish. Hence this premise is partial and so far incorrect. Sweets do give heat and energy, true. I am chilly and tired, also true. But why? Because I am already toxic from the sweets and meats I have had throughout my sedentary years. The question is, Do I need any more energy-producing food when I am not burning up what I have? So again the premise is partial. I do need heat and energy, but I already have the material for it, and my mode of life has disorganized my system's capacity to utilize these foods normally. So now sweets have become a detriment to my well-being. The judgment which determines me to the habit of eating sweets between meals is the result of logic, but of logic spent on tying up premises which do not fit the facts of the case. One of the most prevalent defects of judgment is illustrated in this common disability to select premises which fit the facts. Ignorance, emotional reasoning, and a defective critical sense probably explain most poor judgments. The other judgment illustrates the logic of correct, provable premises. "No, I shall wait until dinner-time. I have no need of so rich a food, for I had an adequate meal at the usual time and have not worked hard enough to justify adding this burden to my digestive apparatus; besides only hard workers with their muscles can afford to eat many sweets. They cause an overacid condition when taken in excess; and any except at mealtimes would be excess for me, with my moderate physical exercise." This judgment we call good. Its premises correspond to scientific facts. But much reasoning must always be done with probable premises, ones which seem to correspond to the facts, but which have yet to be proved. And our judgment from such suppositions cannot be final until we see if it works. Some few centuries ago supposedly wise men called Christopher Columbus a fool. Of course the world was flat. If it were round man would fall off. It was all spread out and the oceans were its limits. If it should be round, like a ball, as that mad man claimed, then the waters must reach from Europe 'round the sphere and touch Asia; or there might be land out there beyond the ocean's curve. But it wasn't round, and the idea of finding a new way to Asia by sailing in the opposite direction was a fool's delusion. Their logic was perfect. If the earth was flat, and Asia lay east of Europe, it was madness to sail west to reach it. But they argued from a wrong premise, so their judgment was imperfect--for they did not yet know the facts. The result of all reasoning is judgment. And judgment is good as the materials of the reasoning process correspond to facts, or are in line with the most probable of the yet unknown. It is poor as the reasoning material fails to meet the facts, or is out of harmony with the most probable of the yet unproved. It is of no avail, then, to attempt to improve our final judgments as such. We must examine the materials we reason with, then learn to group and compare them logically. And in the very separating of true premises from false, we use and train the judgment we would improve. And this the normal mind can do. REACTION PROPORTIONED TO STIMULI In the normal mind the emotional or feeling accompaniment of thought and action is proportionate and adequate to the circumstances, _i. e._, there is a certain feeling, of a certain strength, natural to every thought and act; and when only that strength, not more or less, accompanies the thought or the act, we say, "That man is emotionally stable. His mind is normally balanced." Joy naturally follows some stimuli; sorrow others. Disappointment or loss, shock, failure, death of loved ones, illness in ourselves or others, do not normally bring joy. A keen sense of suffering, temporarily, perhaps, of numbness; the inability to grasp the calamity; or flowing tears, an aching heart, or the stress of willed endurance, are natural, and normal reactions to such stimuli. A developed will may refuse indulgence in the outward expression of the normal feeling of shock, grief, and loss; and this may be normal. But normal volition does not force us to laugh and dance and be wildly merry in the face of grief and loss and pain. It only suggests the adequate, reasonable acceptance of the facts that cannot be changed--the acceptance of love, faith, and hope that sees in present suffering a means of consecration to service; it does not convert the emotion of sorrow and loss into a pleasurable one. Normal reason does not suggest that _will_ force the reactions to loss and suffering that belong by nature to attainment and success. Nor does reason suggest the long face, the bitter tears, a storm of anger, in response to comedy and farce, in the face of a good joke, or to meet success; and normal will puts reason's counsel into effect. NORMAL EMOTIONAL REACTIONS Some emotions, that seem exaggerated at first thought, may be normal under the circumstances. For no one can know the whole background for emotional response in the life of another. After being long shut up in a darkened room, with bandaged eyes and aching head and sick body, the first visit to the bit of woods back of the house--when all the pains have gone--may bring almost delirious joy. The green of the foliage, the blue of the sky, the arousing tang of the air, the birds, the sense of freedom--all go to the head like new wine. The abandon of joy is a normal response under the circumstances, now. It would hardly be normal to one whose habit it is to visit this same bit of woods every day, to one who loved it, but for whom it had lost the force of newness. To the child, who has never in all his little life had a wish not gratified, the denial of a desired stick of candy is as great a calamity as is the loss of a fortune to the grown man. And the child reacts to feeling equally intense. These are normal reactions to stimuli--normal, under the circumstances. THE NORMAL MIND The normal mind reasons clearly with the best data at hand to results that will stand the test of conformity to reality; the normal mind uses reason and feeling, guided by reasonable attitude; in the normal mind _reason_ advises action and _will_ brings it about; in the normal mind _feeling_ proportionate to the circumstances accompanies every thought and every action. And in the well-balanced man or woman every function of the mind leads to action as its final end. But man only approximates the normal. The perfectly balanced man or woman is so rare as to be a marked person. The average intelligent individual only in general approximates this standard. He goes beyond it in spurts of untrammeled genius, to wrench lightning from the heavens, and to send his trains through the air; or he allows his feelings to dictate to his reason, and much of the time so exaggerates or depreciates the simple facts of life that the results of his reasoning no longer conform sufficiently to reality as to be thoroughly dependable. CHAPTER VII PSYCHOLOGY AND HEALTH In the use of its functions the mind manifests certain powers and certain modes of expression which can act as powerful allies or as damaging enemies of health. We speak of man as adaptable, but also as a being of habits. We speak of him as "feeling" when we wish to express the fact that his emotions influence his body. We expect of the average man a certain amount of suggestibility. We say that he is tremendously affected by his environment, which simply means that his attention, naturally centered chiefly on the things at hand, largely determines what he is. But we recognize that a man of trained mind can choose and will to substitute for his present surroundings thoughts upon more constructive things from past experience, or from future possibilities, or from within the mind's own storehouse. His ability to largely modify his life by his will, we recognize as man's greatest power. _Adaptability_, emotional response, _suggestibility_, _attention_, _thought-substitution_, _habit-formation_, and _will_ can minister vitally to health, or can prove damaging avenues of disease. NECESSITY OF ADAPTABILITY Adaptability is as essential to life of mind as to life of body; and health of mind as well as health of body is determined by the individual ability to adjust himself to environment. There are dreamers who have lived in their ideal world so long that they cannot meet the stern realities of life when they come. The shock is too great for the mind that has accepted only the fantastic, the real as the dreamer would have it; and he lets go altogether his hold on the actual, accepting the would-be world as present fact. And we call him insane. Other visionaries wakened rudely to life as it is, accept it as unchangeable fate, lose all their true ideals and become cynical, or victims of utter depression for whom life holds nothing that matters. Still others go on through the years self-satisfied and serene because they simply refuse to believe unpleasant truths; they "pretend" that their wishes are realities, and acknowledge as facts only the pleasant things of existence. The first two groups have failed to adapt self to life as it is, and the mind is lost or so damaged as to no longer serve its body properly. The "pretenders" have adjusted themselves, and so long as they can remain happily self-deceived all goes well for them, though they complicate living for others. However, they have made an adaptation, a defective one, it is true, but one through which the mind may survive. Some of this class, however, finally build up a more and more elaborate system of self-deception until they, too, are insane. The practically adaptable man can dream dreams, but always recognizes them as dreams, and can stop at will; can vision a beautiful ideal, but comprehends that it is not yet reality, though it may some time become so if he learns and fulfils the laws leading to its realization. The adaptable man or woman recognizes the real as fact, desirable or otherwise, the fantastic as unreal and only to be indulged in as a pastime, and the ideal as the possible, a thing for which to work and sacrifice. So perfect adaptability would mean perfect mental poise. It is for the nurse to realize that the greater number of her patients do not belong to any of these classes absolutely, but that some of them have tendencies leading in these various directions. And it is her privilege to recognize the trend of her sick patient's mental workings, and to so deftly and unobtrusively encourage the recognition of facts as things which are to be used--not as stumbling-blocks--that her mental nursing, as her physical, shall be directed toward health. She can help her patient to accept illness and suffering as realities to be faced, and treatment as a means, whether pleasant or not, of making it possible for health to replace them. The understanding nurse can actively help her charge one step at a time toward adaptation to the new environment, remembering that many of the sick, particularly the depressed, cannot be encouraged or incited to effort by having future health held out to them. They are capable only of living in the present and doubting all the future. _There Can Be No Neurosis Without a Psychosis._--If the brain is the organ of the mind, then what affects the brain must perforce be at least registered by mind. So every physical shock, accident, toxic condition, infection--even the ordinary cold--rouses the mind at least to awareness, usually to discomfort. For the nerve-cells and fibers--those inseparable parts of the body mechanism--speedily report the fact that they are being tampered with. In the toxicity of the infections these very delicate tissues are nourished by toxic fluids; in accidents they carry all the messages from the injured part. Then the brain--that center of all man's reactions and the organ of all his consciousness--receives the report of the disturbance and translates it into terms of more or less disability. The neurosis has become a psychosis. The physical condition has become a mental discomfort. Normally this ensuing mind state should be in accordance with the extent of the injury to the nerve-cells and fibers. But under long-continued discipline, or influenced by emotion, the conscious mind may not recognize the neurosis; whereas, in the hypersuggestible, consciousness will translate it into entirely disproportionate suffering. A great problem of nervous education is what the mind will do with discomfort or pain. Will it put all its attention there and respond with nervousness, irritability, demand for sympathy; or will it relegate all the minor pains to their own little places, accepted as facts but to be disregarded except in so far as actual treatment is needed? Will it turn to attend to the host of other more desirable objects? Or in case of acute suffering, will it take it as a challenge to endurance? Will it use it as a means to strengthen volition, as a stepping-stone to self-mastery? Realizing the force of the law--no neurosis without a psychosis--the nurse will try to eliminate unnecessary irritations to physical comfort, while she helps the patient to adjust himself to the ones which are inevitable. It is the doctor's problem rather than hers, except as she carefully fulfils orders, to eliminate the toxic causes of psychosis. It is hers to help the patient to meet adequately the effects of the infections or toxins, and to prevent as far as possible the surrender to uncontrolled nervousness. Her object is to have him face the psychosis as one of the simple facts of science, then turn the sick mind's attention to more important things; she would encourage _will_ to force endurance; she would stimulate the feeling life to the forward look of confidence and faith, or to acceptance of life's suffering as a challenge. The nurse knows that pains beyond the power of endurance the doctor will lighten. And the patient's reaction to discomfort and suffering, the understanding nurse, without any preaching, can very largely influence. THE POWER OF SUGGESTION One almost universal condition found in illness is _hypersuggestability_. Here is the nurse's despair and her hope. Suggestion may come from without or from within. When from within, we call it autosuggestion. Many of the sick are temporarily resting their reasoning faculties and their judgment. The sick body is causing a feeling of "jangling nerves," and the mind, too, is strongly tempted to be sick. So every harsh sound, every jolt, almost every sentence spoken in their hearing suggests immediate nervous reactions. The mind does not wait to weigh them. The nervous system reacts to them the second the impression is registered. The whole self is oversensitive, and the very inflection of a voice has enormous significance. Let the nurse remember that her way of giving a treatment, her expression, or her very presence becomes a potent stimulus on the second, one to which the patient's mind responds like a flash-light when the button is pressed. The nurse must comprehend the principle of the nervous effect on the patient of all that is done and said, and realize her tremendous privilege in making those stimuli wholesome. The nurse who has a sympathetic insight, with unswerving loyalty to orders, can carry them out with the average patient, unpleasant though they may be to him, in such a way that his wholesome emotional response will be called forth, a response of co-operation, or of faith or of good breeding, or of "downing" the impulse to indulgence; or a response directed toward holding the nurse's interest and attention, and so keeping her in the room; such a response as will gain some privilege, etc. But there are some patients in whose cases ordinary persuasion, suggestion or requests fail. They are too nervously or mentally sick to be moved by logic, or to respond with customary grace to a request which their reason is not awake to answer. All usual suggestions may fail of effect. And for these few, in order that health may be at all assured, even the discipline of force may be necessary. But the nurse must use this only as a last resort, of course, and in accordance with the doctor's orders, and then solely as treatment leading toward the ways of health. Before turning to this final method she should clearly, firmly, and kindly explain the principle of the discipline if the patient's mind is at all capable of grasping it. In any case, force should be used only as the surgeon uses his knife. It hurts, but only to help and to save; and it is not called upon when other methods can secure the needed results. But force, thus limited in its application, may prove the only suggestion which will bring about the action necessary to health on the part of the patient. Force unwisely and unkindly used proves a damaging suggestion, causing reactions of fear or anger; or it may lead to delusions of persecution and to strengthened resistance. Many suggestions come to the patient from within. Discomfort in the right side may suggest appendicitis. A slight indigestion, often purely nervous, may be interpreted as inability to care for certain diet, etc. The wise nurse will displace as many of these as she can by casual suggestions on her own part. She will demand of herself that her very presence be quieting, calming, happy; that her conversation with her patient shall vibrate with a certain something that gives him courage and strengthens the desire and the will to health; that her care of him shall prove confidence-breeding. The patient's attitude, when he is at all suggestible, is largely in the nurse's hands, and she can make his illness a calamity by dishonest, fear-breeding, or suspicion-forming suggestion. After all, the whole question here is one of the normality of the nurse's own outlook on life and people. The happier, truer, and more wholesome it is, the more really can she help her patient to both bodily and mental health. Of one thing let the overzealous nurse beware. Do not irritate your patient by a patent, blatant, hollow cheerfulness that any one of any sense knows is assumed for his benefit. Personally I know of no more aggravating stimulus. _What We Attend To Determines What We Are._--This is one of the first laws of education. If the child's attention from birth could be controlled, his future would be absolutely assured. But attention is a thing of free will and cannot be forced by others. It can be won through interest or self-directed by will. The child's attention is entirely determined by interest, interest in the morbid and painful as truly as in the bright and happy. Punishment interests him tremendously because it affects him, it interferes with his plan of life, it holds his entire immediate attention to his injured self. But something more impelling quickly makes him forget his hurt feelings and he is happy again. The average sick person is emotionally very much like the child. His will at the time, as we noted before, is tempted to take a rest, and his interest is ready to follow bodily feeling unless something more impelling is offered. The nurse who can direct attention to other people, to analyzing the sounds of the street, to understanding something of the new life of a hospital or sick room, to planning a house, or choosing its furniture or equipping a library, or supplying a store; to intelligent references to books or current events; or to redecorating the room--all in his mind; to an appetizing tray, a dainty flower, a bit of sunshine, a picture, etc., is fixing the patient's attention on something constructive, helping him to get well by forgetting to think of himself. Thus the nurse, knowing the laws of attention, can keep herself alert to divert and direct her patient's thought to wholesome interests. Knowing the possibility of thought substitution, she can open up new channels of thinking. Knowing the power of the will to assist in health bringing and health keeping, she can sometimes stimulate long-dormant determination. Let her beware, however, of making the convalescent too dependent upon help from without, but prick his pride to gradually increasing doing for himself. Arouse his reasonable ambition, but let him realize that life must be taken up again a step at a time; and that he _can_ do it. If limitations must be accepted, try to inspire the feeling of pride in accomplishing the utmost possible within a limitation, and an acceptance of the inevitable without bitterness. Attending to the unhappy, the painful, the boring without looking beyond makes life unhappy, painful, and a bore. Not that the nurse should ignore these realities, but she can accept them whole-souledly herself as not the final things, as merely the rocks that can be used to stand upon and get a view of the something better for everybody. When they are thus used by the wholesome mind, facts, the very barest and meanest of them, can be made useful as stepping-stones to the happier facts beyond them. If the nurse can direct or tactfully lead the patient's attention away from himself and his illness, she has found a big reinforcement to his treatment. This question is so vital in the care of patients that it will be discussed at greater length later on. ONE THOUGHT CAN BE REPLACED BY ANOTHER If we control attention we control thought, and with the suggestible patient this principle depends upon the one just now considered. Hope and courage-breeding thoughts can replace despairing and fearful ones, but it will be only when attention is directed through interest or by will to new material. There is no blank in waking consciousness. The last thought or feeling or perception, through association of ideas, brings up a related one, and so on indefinitely. We may start with a pebble on the road and go on logically, smoothly, until in five minutes we are thinking of the coronation of King George, with no sense of anything at all unusual in the succession. It may be a very roundabout process, from "pebble" through "rough way," "ways that hurt," "dangerous ways," "brigands," "uncertainties of life." "Uncertain lies the head that wears a crown," "King George and his crown," "coronation." But this constant stream of thought can be broken into at any point by a spoken word, a passing vehicle, which diverts the mind's trend. So the nurse can take advantage of the mind's very suggestibility, and substitute for the unhappy and sickness breeding by turning attention to anything else of a happier color, and may divert the entire stream of thought in that direction. She who knows these simple laws of the mind, and who at all knows people, is a therapeutic agent of unlimited value. HABIT IS A CONSERVER OF EFFORT It is always easier to follow a beaten path than to break one's way through untrodden forests. It is easier to walk after we "learn how," and learning how is simply doing it over and over until the legs and feet have acquired habits of motion and accommodation to distances and to what is underfoot. It is easy to do anything after we have done it again and again, so that it has become second-nature, and "second-nature" is habit. The wise man early forms certain habits of personal care, of eating, sleeping, exercising; of study, of meeting the usual occurrences of life. The first day he spent at anything new was a hard one. Nothing was done naturally. Active attention had to be keenly held to each detail. He had to learn where things belonged, how to do this and that for the first time, how to work with his associates. Do you remember the first hospital bed you ever made, the first bed-bath you gave, the first massage? You had to be taught bit by bit, detail by detail. You did not look upon the finished whole, but gave almost painful attention to each step that led to the made bed, the completed bath, or the given massage. Your fingers were probably all thumbs unless you had experience in such things before you came to the hospital. Your mind was tired from the strain of trying to remember each suggestion of your instructor. The second time, or certainly the third or fourth time, it went better. After a week of daily experience you gave the bath or massage or made the bed with much less effort. A month later the work was practically automatic and accomplished in a fraction of the time you spent on it that first day. Now you can do it quickly and well with little conscious thought; and at the same time carry on a brisk conversation with your patient or think out your work for the day. Your mind is free for other thoughts while you perform the task easily and perfectly. Your method of doing the work has finally become a habit which saves the effort of conscious attention. The details of your routine work are directed by the subconscious. The habit will be energy and time saving in proportion to the accuracy of your first conscious efforts spent on the new undertaking. Thus, useful habit is the result of active effort. We can acquire habits of thinking and habits of feeling as well as habits of doing. But the other habits, the bad ones, are not acquired with effort. We fall into them. Hazy thinking is easier than clear thinking. Suppose you are by nature rather oversanguine or overdespondent, and you make no genuine attempt to evolve that nature into poise. Directing _will_ to do what _desire_ opposes is too difficult, and you go the way of least resistance. So easily are the bad habits formed; but only with tremendous effort of will and persistence in refusing their insistent demands can they be broken or replaced by helpful ones. But habits can be learned; and bad habits can be broken when an overpowering emotion is aroused against them, possesses the mind, and controls the will; or when reason weighs them in the balance and judgment finds them wanting, and volition directs the mind to displace them by others. The nurse meets in her patients numberless habits which retard recovery of body and make for an unwholesome mental attitude. Some patients have the complaint habit, some the irritation habit, some the self-protection habit, some the habit of impatience, some of reckless expression of despair, some of loss of control, some of incessant self-attention. The nurse who can arouse an incentive to habits of cheer expression when the least cause of cheer appears, who can by reason, or if that is not possible, by suggestion; by holding out incentives, or by making some privilege depend upon control--this nurse can help her patient to displace habits of an illness-accepting mind by habits of a health-accepting one. Above all, let her beware of opening the way to habits of invalidism. Some people acquire the "hospital habit" because it is easier to give way to ill-feeling, however slight, and to be cared for with comfort, than to encourage themselves to build up endurance by giving little attention to minor ailments. THE SAVING POWER OF WILL It is not uncommon to hear a doctor say, "Nothing but his will pulled him through that time." It does not mean quite what it says, for the patient's will would have been helpless to cure him without the medicine and the treatment. But it does mean that in some cases when life is hovering on the brink, even the most skilful treatment cannot hold it back if the _will to live_ is gone. The chances may be half and half. Lack of desire to live may drop the balance on the death side. Determination and hope and confidence may overweigh the life side. For the influence of will in refusing to surrender to depression may throw the needed hair's weight in favor of more normal circulation. Depression and emotion may so effect the sympathetic nervous system as to cause a lowered circulatory activity. Determination, based on volition, may stimulate a response from the sympathetic system which will increase heart activity. And certainly, when it is not a matter of life and death, but a prolonged recovery, will is a saving grace. The patient who sets all his sick energies to the task of winning health reaches his goal quicker than the hopeless and depressed. Perhaps his will merely brings utter relaxation for the time, forces acceptance of present helplessness only for the sake of giving the body a better chance to recuperate; but the very fact that it is acting to hopefully carry out orders lightens by half the nurse's task of getting him well; and she can encourage this will to co-operate with the doctor's efforts by suggestion, by her directness and honesty, by the quiet assurance that at least a reasonable degree of health is won by effort. We have touched upon only a few of the laws of the mind. The nurse can help develop saving mental habits and wholesome attitudes while she helps to strengthen sick bodies; she can make a cure a little more certainly lasting who will remember that: 1. Adaptability is essential to life and health. 2. There is no neurosis without a psychosis. 3. Suggestion may be a powerful factor for health. 4. What we attend to determines what we are. 5. Thought substitution is possible. 6. Habit is a conserver of effort. 7. Will is a saving power. CHAPTER VIII VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES DISORDERS AND PERVERSIONS Life would be a very simple proposition if the mental machinery always worked right. But this is peculiarly subject to damage both from without and from within. From without it may be damaged by the toxins of food, as in the acute toxic psychoses; by the poison of drink, as in the alcohol-produced psychoses, such as acute alcoholic hallucinosis; by lack of muscular exercise, resulting in a deficient supply of oxygen to burn up the accumulated toxins from energy-producing foods; by the infections, which may result in the infection-exhaustion psychoses; by wrong methods of education, and by surroundings which demand too severe a mental strain in the struggle toward adjustment. These damages from without we class roughly as environmental. From within the mental workings may be injured by emotional dominance; by bad habits of thinking and feeling and doing--often the result of wrong methods of education; by defective heredity; by undeveloped will; by the insanities. These danger sources from within we might classify as self-produced and hereditary. There may be disorders of any or every function of the intellect, disorders of feeling, and perversions of will. Some of the most commonly met we list below. Disorders of the _Functions_ of _Intellect_. / Hyperesthesia (exaggeration of sensation) { as found in neurasthenia, or in mania. { Anesthesia (absence of sensation) { as in the numbness of hysteria; in sensory { paralysis. Disorders / Retardation of < as in dementia and melancholia. Sensation \ "Clouding" or dulness { as in simple depression. { Perversion { as in dementia and melancholia. Sweet may taste \ sour; fresh food may smell decayed. / Hyperesthesia (exaggeration) { as in neurasthenia or mania. { Anesthesia Disorders { as in hysteria or paralysis. of { Retardation Perception { as in dementia and melancholia. / "Clouding" or dulness (being < as in simple depression. dependent \ Illusion on sensation { found in normal mind--easily corrected; is always { found in many insanities. disturbed { Hallucinations with it). { frequently met in the infection-exhaustion psychoses, { in dementia, in paranoia, in acute \ hallucinosis of alcoholism. / Hypochondriasis { found in many of the hypersuggestible, frequent { in the mild depressions and in all victims of { self-attention. { Retardation { found in most depressions. { Deficiency { as in idiocy--the inability to form new concepts. { Acceleration { as in hypo-mania. { Poverty { as in the abnormally self-centered; { as in melancholia. { Rambling ideas { as in chronic insanity. { Flight of ideas { as in manias, hysterias, and acute deliriums. Disorders / Fixed ideas of < as in paranoia. Ideation \ Perversions (concepts change their meaning altogether) { as in dementia. { Ideogenous pains { as in hysteria. { Compulsive ideas { common in borderland states; { in psychasthenia, or hysteria. { Disorientation { { thing, { (wrong idea of { place, or { { person); { found in confused conditions; { in delirium from infections; { in insanities. { Confusion { as in the infection-exhaustion psychoses; \ in insanities. / Absent-mindedness. { Amnesia (morbid forgetfulness). { { temporary, Disorders / Aphasia { prolonged, of < {permanent (see later explanation). Memory \ Perversion { as fabrications, due to memory-confusion or { inaccuracy; also due to excessive ideation and \ defective judgment. / / Somatic { { as in hypochondriasis. { { Persecutory { { as in paranoia. { { Unworthiness { { as in simple depression or { { melancholia. { Delusions { Grandeur { Systematized / as in mania or paranoia. Disorders / Transient < Nihilistic of < Fixed \ often found in melancholia. Reason \ { Reference { { as in paranoia. { { Altered personality { { as in hysteria. { { Perverted personality { { (patient may believe he is a dog); { \ as in dementia. { Emotional thinking. { Shut-in personality { as seen in the deficient social capacity of potential \ dementia præcox. / Defective judgment { in all insanities; { in hysteria. { _Ex._: Patient who accepts mental suggestion { of disability as reality. { Perverted judgment Disorders / in severe dementias--as influenced by unreasonable of < fear, hatred, etc.; Judgment \ in all acute insanities--as manifested in inability { of patient to rid himself of his delusions. { Absence of judgment { in all acute insanities; { in later dementias. { Limitations \ in many so-called normal and in all the abnormal. / Suggestibility { in hysteria. { Excitement { in mania. { Depression { in melancholia. Disorders / Phobias of < as found in psychasthenia. Emotion \ Deficiency { as in the apathy of depression. { Perversion { in mania, in depression, in catatonia. { Deterioration { in dementia. { Sense of unreality \ found in all borderland cases. / Wilfulness { in many "normal." Very common in hypomania. { Willessness (aboulia or paralysis of will) { often found in psychasthenia; and in depressive { states. { Morbid inhibition { as in depressive states. { Indecision { as in psychasthenia; { as in simple depression. { Obsessions { found pre-eminently in psychasthenia. { Tics Disorders / in many borderland cases; of < in the hypersensitive as often the only expression Will \ of any neuropathic tendency. { Distractibility { as in hypomania and frequently in hysteria. { Negativism { as in catatonia. { Mutism { as in catatonia. { Compulsive acts { as in psychasthenia, hysteria, etc. { Psychomotor overactivity (volition unable to check) { as in mania. { Psychomotor retardation (volition unable to energize) \ as in depression. From this limited survey of the mind's disorders we realize that every departure from the normal mental attitude tends to associate itself with one of the following five _states of mental disability_. Depression, Exaltation, Perversion, Enfeeblement, Deficiency. CHAPTER IX VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES (Continued) _Hyperesthesia_ is abnormal sensitiveness to stimulation. _Anesthesia_ is loss, either temporary or permanent, of any of the senses. _Perversion_ is morbid alteration of function which may occur in emotional, intellectual, or volitional fields. Example: The odor of a rose causing an acute sense of physical pain. An _illusion_ is a false interpretation of a perception. The normal mind is quite subject to illusions, either due to a faulty sense organ, or to a preconceived state of mind which so strongly expects or presages something else than reality as to misinterpret what the senses bring. Examples: The crooked stick as a snake. A ghost created from shadow. An ordinary ringing in the ears as sleigh-bells. Milk tasting like blood. An _hallucination_ is a perception without an object. The hallucinated individual projects, as it were, the things of his mind's creation into the outer world, and accepts them as reality. He sees snakes where there is nothing to suggest them; sees a ghost where there is no shadow; believes that the taste of blood is constantly in his mouth. There are possible hallucinations of every sense. Nonexistent objects are seen, touched, tasted, heard, or smelled. _Hypochondriasis_ is a state characterized by persistent ideas of non-existent physical disabilities. The hypochondriac has every known symptom of indigestion, or of heart disease, or is threatened with tuberculosis--all in his mind; and whatever the disorder he seizes upon, his attention hovers there, while the ideas of that particular disability persist and strengthen. A _flight of ideas_ is an abnormal rapidity of the _stream of thought_. Every perception so immediately is linked with some association of experience that expression is swift and often incoherent. One word will follow another with amazing rapidity, words suggested by sound association, usually, rather than by that of meaning. Example: "Made a rhyme, had a dime, did a crime, got the time, bring some lime." This association by rhyme is quite common. But the associations of meaning are not uncommon. Example: "Made a rhyme. Mary was a poet. Mary had a little lamb. Where's Mary?--Mary!--No Jim--Jim, all my children--calling, calling, calling," etc. A _fixed idea_ is one which morbidly stays in the mind and cannot be changed by reason. Example: In hypochondriasis, as given above. _Ideogenous pains_ are either pains born of an erroneous idea, or mental reproductions of pains now having no physical cause. A suggestible person, learning that his grandfather died of an organic heart, conceives the idea that he has inherited the trouble, and begins to suffer cardiac pains; and as long as the idea persists the pain is felt. _Compulsive ideas_ are ideas which intrude, recur, and persist despite reason and will. Example: The compulsive idea of contamination may lead its victim to wash and rewash his hands at every contact with matter, until finally, though they are raw and sore, he is incapable of resisting the act. _Disorientation_ is a state of mental confusion as to time, place, or identity. _Amnesia_ is pathologic forgetfulness. Example: As sometimes found in the infection-exhaustion psychoses, when the entire past of the patient may be wiped out for the time. Cases of permanent amnesia are known. _Aphasia_ is a defect in the interpretation or production of language. There may be motor aphasia, auditory aphasia, vocal aphasia, sight aphasia; and with disability to produce words, they may yet be recognized when seen; or when they can be spoken they may not be recognized when heard; or with inability to speak them, they are accurately sensed by hearing; or though understood when heard, they are incomprehensible when read. A _delusion_ is a false belief which cannot be corrected by reason. A _somatic delusion_ is one centering upon alterations in the organs or their functions. Example: Absence of a stomach, inability to swallow. A _nihilistic delusion_ is one which denies existence in whole or part. Example: Mother denies the existence of her child. A _delusion of reference_ is one in which the deluded individual believes himself an object of written, spoken, or implied comment. Example: The actors on the stage are directing their remarks directly against the victim in the box. A _shut-in personality_ is one that habitually responds inadequately to normal social appeal. _Sense of unreality_ is one of the commonest psychic alterations through which customary sensation states are displaced by unnatural and usually distressing ones. Examples: The breakfast table appears undefinably altered. Laughter is accompanied by strange, rather than by normal, sensations. _Morbid inhibition_ is an abnormal, negative activity of the will. Sometimes a patient will try pitifully to express some thought or feeling; the desire to explain is there, but will is blocked in action. Or the patient attempts to dress, makes repeated new beginnings, but cannot succeed. We say, "He is inhibited." An _obsession_ is an idea which morbidly dominates the mind, constantly suggesting irrational action. Obsessed patients may consistently step in such a way as to avoid the juncture of the flagstones on the pavement; may insist on removing their shoes in church; may hail each person met on the street and tap him on the arm; may refuse to ever leave the house without an open umbrella; or may try to attack every man they see, not because they want to hurt or kill, but because they are obsessed to the performance of the action. A _tic_ is a useless, habitual spasm of a muscle imitating a once purposeful action. Motor tics, such as habitual jerking of the arms, shrugging the shoulder, contorting the face, shaking or nodding the head, snapping the fingers, etc., are very common among nervous children, and even in many otherwise normal grown-ups. _Distractibility_ is an abnormal variation of attention. The common inability of the hypomanic patient to hold his attention to any subject when another is open, is very like the distractibility of the child who turns to every new interest as it is presented. _Negativism_ is a state of persistent compulsion to contrary response to suggestion. It is with these patients as though not only initiative were lost but also the power to follow another's lead. But their independence asserts itself in opposing every suggestion and in acting so far as possible contrary to it. _Mutism_, as used in psychiatry, is an abnormal inhibition to speech. Patients sometimes speak no word in many months. To all appearance they are true mutes. Then suddenly something may remove the mental blockade and they talk. _Compulsive acts_ are acts contrary to reason, which the will cannot prevent. A seemingly quite normal patient will sometimes grab a vase from a stand in passing, and dash it to the floor. Something "urged" him to do it, and he could not resist. Others will tear their clothes to shreds, not in anger, but because they "could not help it." _Psychomotor overactivity_ is abnormal activity of both mind and body, contrary to reason and uncontrolled by will. _Psychomotor retardation_ is an underactivity of both mind and body in which consciousness is dulled and the body sluggish. A _neurosis_ is a disorder of the nerves, which may be functional or organic. _Nervousness_ is properly termed a _psychoneurosis_--for we have learned that there can be no neurosis without an accompanying psychosis. _Psychosis_ is the technical synonym for insanity. _Borderland_ disorders constitute a group in which mental perversions do not yet so dominate reactions as to make them irrational. Twilight is neither night nor day; the feelings of the hysteric are not insane, but the actions may be. _Insanity_ is a prolonged departure from the individual's normal standard of thinking, feeling, and acting. _Mania_ is insane excitement. _Melancholia_ is the inability of the mind to react to any stimulus with other than gloom and depression. Melancholia may be of the intellectual type or of the emotional type. The patient who tells you constantly that he has murdered all his children, that he is a criminal beyond the power of God to redeem, who seems chained to his delusions, yet shows no adequate feeling reaction, no genuine sorrow, we call a case of the intellectual type of melancholia. Another patient misinterprets every normal reason for happiness until it becomes a cause of settled foreboding. The mother, whose son fought safely through the war and is now returning to her, feels that his coming forecasts calamity for him. He had better have died in France. She is of the emotional type of melancholia. _Hysteria_ is a nervous disorder based upon suggestibility, and capable of imitating most known diseases. _Insane impulses_ are morbid demands for reckless action beyond the control of the will. Example: The impulse to kill, quite regardless of who may be the victim. _Psychopathic personality_ is a term much used today to designate an hereditary tendency on the part of the individual to mental disorder. The _neuropath_ is the individual with an inborn tendency to the neurosis. _Neurotic_ is a term broadly employed for the nervous in whom emotions predominate over reason. _Neurasthenia_ is a nervous disorder characterized by undue fatiguability. _Psychasthenia_ is a nervous disorder characterized by a sense of unreality, weakness of will, self-accusation, and usually by phobias and obsessions, all subject to temporary correction by reason or influence from without. _Hypochondriasis_ is a disorder characterized by morbid attention to bodily sensations, and insistent ideas of bodily disorder. _Phobia_ is a morbid fear or dread. FACTORS CAUSING VARIATIONS FROM NORMAL MENTAL PROCESSES HEREDITY When we consider the accumulated possibilities for disorder which the family tree of almost any one of us can show, the wonder is not that there are so many nervous or insane, but rather that any come within hailing distance of the normal. For multitudes are born of parents whose bodies were food poisoned or alcohol or drug poisoned, and whose nervous systems were tense and irritable, oversensitive, and suffering from the effect of these same toxins on the brain. Others are of manic-depressive parentage; some are possibly even of paranoic or dementia præcox lineage; while many of our finest and best had psychopathic or neuropathic heredity. Syphilis, itself, and the underpower bodies of tuberculosis are heritages of many. When we realize, too, that we are born with certain inherent tendencies of temperament, which are too often of the melancholic or overcholeric type, our wonder grows that we are not doomed to defeat at birth. Were it not for the possibilities in the germ-plasm of choosing the much of good also in our heredity, often enough to overbalance the bad, and for the proved power of environment and training to modify or even altogether overcome the harmful parts of our birthright, there would be little hope for many. ENVIRONMENT While environment may prove the saving grace from poor heredity, it may itself add heavily to the debit side. With the very best of health backgrounds, environment may damage body and mind beyond repair. Under environment we include everything that touches life from without--people, things, work, play, home, school, social life, business life, college-life, etc. Among factors of environment damaging to mental health are overemotional family life, overstrict home discipline or the lack of needed discipline; overfeeding, underfeeding, wrong diet, lack of proper exercise, stimulants, drugs, overstimulation, overprotection, too much hardship and privation, loneliness, poor educational methods, immorality, etc. PERSONAL REACTIONS What will decide whether a human being can resist, successfully, bad tendencies in heredity, or in environment, or in both, and keep a reasonably balanced mind? It demands insight, ambition, will; and if these remain the body can be forced to saving ways of health, and body and mind can largely make their own environment. But with heavy handicaps of heredity or environment, or both, and poor insight, or lack of desire, or weak will, nothing can save the mind from neurotic taint or worse--nothing but obedience to some one strong enough to control the habits of that life, until self-control is born. And there is a hope that it _can_ be born in the most neurotic or neurasthenic, so long as the mind is sane. But after all, a large number of people whose mental processes are not normal, have only themselves, their poor emotions, their lazy wills, their hazy thinking to blame. We except what are called the heredity insanities--_dementia præcox_ and the other dementias and the _manic-depressive_ groups and _paranoia_ and _psychasthenia_--for in these cases, possibly with the exception of the _manic depressives_, even the most perfect environment could probably not prevent the disorder from asserting itself. Many neurotics, neurasthenics, and hysterics are curable if they will seriously undertake to fulfil the laws of physical and mental health--simple laws, but ones which demand a strengthened will to carry out. CHAPTER X ATTENTION THE ROOT OF DISEASE OR HEALTH ATTITUDE THE ATTENTION OF INTEREST Attention naturally follows interest. It can, however, be held by will to the unappealing, with the usual result of transforming it into a thing of interest. One of the laws of the mind we have already stressed is that what we attend to largely determines what we are, or shall be. The interests which secure our consideration may be the passive result of emotional life, the things which naturally appeal, which give us sensations that the mind normally heeds; or they may be the active result of our will which has forced application upon the things which reason advised as worth acquiring. We found that the beginning of health of mind consists in the directing of thought toward the health-bringing attitude. We have seen how quickly the normal mind can be diverted from the undesirable by a new or stronger emotional stimulus. We found that the sole appeal to attention in the baby-life is through the emotions, and that it is natural throughout life for the mind to heed and follow the interesting; which is only another way of saying that thinking follows where emotion leads, unless volition steps in to prevent. The supreme test of the will's power is its ability to hold the train of thought in the line that reason directs, when feeling would draw it elsewhere. This ability marks the man who does big things; while the inability to ever turn attention away from the interests proposed by feeling assures weakness. Some of the most charming people we shall ever know are those temperamental children of happiness whose interests are naturally wholesome and externalized, whose natures are spontaneous and joyous, and who live as they feel, seemingly never knowing the stress of forced concentration. With them attention follows feeling, feeling is sweet and true, and volition simply carries out what feeling dictates. And life may not be complicated. But there is another class whose attention also follows in the ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses of it. We say that each type has projected himself, that is, has thrust himself out into the external world, and is standing back, looking at his own nature and calling that the universe. But neither of these two groups can long withstand the stress of a world they only feel and have never attempted to comprehend. The irresponsibly happy ones are too often crushed and broken when life proves to bring loss and failure and disappointment; the morbid probably will cease some day to enjoy their melancholic moods, and be unable to find their way out of them. If both had learned to control attention, they might have been saved. The happy, care-free child of the light is at desperate loss when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to him he never attended to them--and now he cannot. If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than spineless feeling distractibility, might have saved him. When thinking can be forced to follow where trained reason directs, and can be kept in that direction, the greatest problem of physical and nervous well being is solved. To the nurse there is no other principle of psychology so important. But no child ever had his attention diverted by reasoning alone. The object at which you wish him to look must be made more impelling than the one he already sees, or he must want much to please you, else he only with his eyes will follow your command while his mind returns to his real interest; and the second you cease to command that eye service, he looks back to the thing that was holding him before. The beginning of all education is in arousing a _want to know_; in turning desire in the direction of knowledge. I am an undisciplined child and I want only candy for my lunch. It is not good for me. Milk is what I should have. I don't want it. You may deprive me of the candy and force me to drink the milk, and I can do nothing but submit. But I rebel within, and I am only more convinced that I "hate" it and want candy, and that you are my natural enemy because you force the one upon me and deprive me of the other. If I were insane and so, of course, could not be reasoned with, this might be inevitable. But it would be unfortunate. In that case, if possible, do not let me see the candy; let only the food it is best for me to have be put before me, and perhaps eventually I shall come to want the more wholesome thing--for it is better than the hunger. But as it happens I am a perfectly normal person, only I am sick. I am tired of bed, and want to sit up--and it does seem that I should have my desire. The nurse, wise in her knowledge of sick "grown-ups," who are, after all, very like children, will find a way to divert my mind from the immediate "I want" to something which I also can be led to want. I may agree that I want more the better feeling an hour from now. Perhaps her humorous picture of the effects of too early freedom on my condition, or of my body's urgent demand for rest, regardless of my mind's wish; perhaps only a joke which diverts me; perchance the "take-for-granted you want to help us out" air; mayhap the story to be read or told; or simply the poise and quiet assurance of the nurse who never questions my reasonableness and acquiescence; perhaps her confidence that this will serve as a means to the end I covet--will result in my gladly taking her advice, and my perfect willingness to wait for new orders, while I indulge in beautiful plans I shall carry out when they finally arrive. In other words, with the sick as with children, attention naturally follows interest. And the good nurse realizes that it is not wise to force co-operation when she can secure it by diverting her patient's thoughts to another interest than the one now holding him. Very often, merely by chatting quietly about something she has learned has an appeal, she can make the patient forget his weariness and boredom, or his resistance to details of treatment. The very milk he is refusing to drink may be down before he realizes it. But right here lies a hidden reef which may cause wreckage in the future. It is good therapy to divert attention by appealing to another interest when the patient is too sick or too stubborn or not clear enough mentally to be reasoned with. But if this becomes a principle, and his reason and active co-operation are never secured to make him choose the way of health for himself, the hour he is out of the nurse's hands he reverts to the things that now happen to appeal to him. Then unless some wise friend is near to continue her method of making the reasonable interesting, the advice of reason can "go to smash." There has been a very constant illustration throughout the past of the unwisdom of relying upon diverted attention alone as an effective therapeutic agent. We hope this will not illustrate our point so clearly in the future. The drunkard, who is just recovering from a big spree, and feels sick and disgusted with himself, and sore and ashamed, is appealed to in glowing terms of the wellness and strength and buoyancy of the man who never drinks. He has no "mornings after." The Lord is just waiting to save this dejected victim of alcohol from his hateful enemy who has made him what he is at this hour, and will forgive all his sottishness, his sins. He will be respected; he can command the love of his family again. He will no longer be a slave, but a free man. Right now, respect of the world and love of family and friends, and cleanness, and the forgiveness of a good God are infinitely more interesting than this splitting headache, this horrible sick feeling. And attention may be very readily diverted. This promised new life is more attractive than the present. It is easy to keep attention there. And he reforms. He swears off "for keeps." He is a happy man, a free man. For a few days or weeks, perhaps even longer, he glories in his new self-respect. It is a strange and enticing sensation. Then one day something goes wrong. He loses some money, or he is awfully tired, or the wife and children bore him, and all of a sudden the one greatest interest in the world is a drink. And because his thinking can always be led by his feeling; because he has never learned to force it to go elsewhere, he has his drink. Appealing to his emotions did not and cannot save him unless that appeal is followed at the right moment by awakened reason, which will look at the whole proposition when the mind is at its normal best, and choose to follow where rational feeling directs. Nor will reason save unless volition comes to its support and strongly backs it up and enforces what it advises. THE ATTENTION OF REASON AND WILL So the good nurse will not consider her work done when she has diverted mental processes into channels of co-operation. When the patient, who is capable of reasoning, knows the why of his treatment, and realizes that he can only keep well as he himself takes over the job and puts his mind on things outside of his feelings, and carries out the doctor's instructions for the sake of securing a certain end--then he has been under a good nurse. This wise helper never "preaches," but makes the healthy goal very desirable, stirs up an ambition to attain it, and prods the will to keep on after it despite anything feeling may say. This attitude on the part of the nurse presupposes that her own attention, while with her patient, is upon him and upon securing his health, and not upon her tiredness, or boredom, or headache, or the party tonight, or the man who has asked her to go to the theater with him tomorrow. She, surely, must learn to direct her thoughts where reason suggests, and to gain new interests through willed attention, or as a nurse she is less than second rate. Nor can she get the best results until she can turn with a single mind to the patient at hand as the immediate problem to be solved. And probably neither nurse nor doctor does any better service, except in saving life itself, than in keeping the patient from thinking constantly of himself and his ills. For it seems of little use to have made some people physically well, if they are to carry through prolonged years the curse of constant self-attention, self-centeredness, an ingrowing ego. There are a few simple laws of the mind hinging upon attention which are today being impressed upon teachers in every department, in kindergarten, public school, college, and university. And they are as necessary to the nurse as to the teacher. Three of them we have already discussed: 1. Attention naturally follows interest. 2. Attention may be held by will where reason directs. 3. New interests grow out of willed attention. A fourth we shall stress before considering the use the nurse can make of them: 4. The thing to which our chief attention is given becomes the most important thing. Do not contradict this too quickly. Don't say that nursing gets your chief consideration because it is, of necessity, your profession; but that you love your music infinitely more, and look forward to that through all your hours on duty. If this merely proves that music is distracting your attention, you are doing your nursing as a means, and not as an end; you give it probably all the attention necessary for good work, but your real desire is music. Your chief attention is directed toward that goal. Hence music is to you the most important thing. If your will is sufficiently trained to keep you from consciously thinking of it, still you are dreaming of it and working for it. You may make a very good nurse, but you will never be as excellent a one as the woman from whom nursing demands first and chief attention. We sometimes speak of one woman as a born nurse, and say of another, "She's a good nurse, thoroughly conscientious, but not a natural one like Miss X." It only means that Miss X's main purpose in life has always been caring for the sick, while Miss Y's secondary concern is that. There is a third, however, who may be sidetracked into nursing, but whose chiefest interest and attention in life has not been so much a certain profession or accomplishment, but a passion for people, with an ability to enter into their lives understandingly. She may not care for nursing in itself. It is only accidental that her thoughts were turned to it. But her liking for people makes it easier for her to concentrate attention on the details of nursing, as thereby she is fulfilling her life's ambition in studying and serving human beings. She may be a real success if she can only convince herself that this is her forte. If not, and she dreams of other fields of service, her concentration on the thing at hand is not perfect enough for her to compete successfully with the "born nurse." Whatever it is, the thing that gets our chief attention is the most important to us. It may be lack of appetite, or pain in the side, indigestion, general disability, discomfort, the mistreatment we once received, the mistake we once made, or the sin we committed--whatever it is that holds our attention, it is the most absorbing and interesting thing in the universe, though it may be an utterly morbid interest, an unhappy attention. But it blots out for the time the rest of the world. A big hint for the nurse exists therein. Let her try in every lawful way to divert her patient's attention from the disease-breeding stimuli toward the happy and wholesome ones. For the nurse herself in the care of patients let us draw some conclusions from these laws of the mind's working: 1. Have a goal in view for the patient's health of both body and mind. 2. Work toward instilling in your patient a health ambition--a pride in health. 3. Remember that overcrowding the mind defeats your purpose of making one clear impression. 4. Win interest by any legitimate means to the next step toward the goal, and only the next. 5. Work for attention to hopeful, courageous, and happy things. Let us as nurses remember always that it is for the patient's sake and not for our own that certain results must be obtained. Our work is usually in helping the doctor to get the best possibilities out of the material at hand, and we cannot hope to change the fabric. But we can help to repair it; we can sometimes influence the color and suggest some details of the pattern, or assist in the "making over" process; and when the fabric is substantial and beautiful we may assist in preventing its marring. So we may help to evolve a body-health and mind-health attitude from what seemed the wreckage of a disease-accepting mind; or we may have the great privilege of warding off the disease-accepting attitude. But always, in all our care of patients, let us not neglect or fail to use wisely this central fact of psychology; that anything that gains attention, even for a moment, leaves its impress on the mind; that the direction of attention determines our general reaction to life. CHAPTER XI GETTING THE PATIENT'S POINT OF VIEW WHAT DETERMINES THE POINT OF VIEW The point of view of any individual depends upon temperament, present conditions--mental and physical--and the aim of the life. That is, it depends upon his inherited tendencies plus a unique personal something, plus all the facts of his environment and experience, plus what he lives for. Richard and Jim both live in Philadelphia, Richard on Walnut Street and Jim on Sansom Street. Richard's father is of the best Quaker stock, with hundreds of years of gentle and aristocratic ancestry behind him. He followed his father and his grandfather into the profession of medicine, and is a well-known specialist, alert, keen, expert, and deservedly honored. He is at home in Greek and Latin, French, and the sciences. He selects at a glance only the conservative best in art and music and literature. His world is a gentleman's world, a scholar's world, and the world of a scientist and a humanitarian. And Richard, his son, is true to type. Jim's father is the ash man. His world is in the alleys and basements. His pastime, cheap movies, and the park on Sundays. When he is not working he is too "dead tired" for anything heavier than the Sunday Supplement or perhaps the socialist club-rooms, where he talks about the down-trodden working man and learns to hate the "idle" rich. He spends his money on food and cheap shows and showy clothes. He talks loudly, eats ravenously, works hard, is honest, and wants something better for his children than he and the "old woman" have had. His music is the street-organ, the movie piano, and the band--some of it excellent too--but none of your dreamy stuff--good and lively. And his son, Jim, is true to type. After the Armistice Jim and Richard, who have fought for months side by side, go to Paris together. Richard may "have a fling" at Jim's amusements for the sake of playing the game and "seeing how the other half lives" and all that--but before long we shall find him in the high-class theaters and restaurants, visiting the wonderful art collections and libraries, riding in luxurious automobiles, and staying in the best hotels he can find. And even though Jim may have saved Richard's life and Richard is eternally grateful, and loves Jim as a "dandy good scout," their ways will inevitably drift apart when the one big common interest of fighting together for a free world is over. They will always remember each other. Jim will decide that a "highbrow" can be a real man, and Richard will ever after have a fellow-feeling for the "other half" and think of them now as "folks." But Jim is not at home in Richard's neighborhood and circle; and Richard is a fish out of water in Jim's. The point of view of each has been largely determined by his heredity and his environment. But suppose Jim isn't true to type. From the time he was a mere youngster the ash-man life did not appeal to him. In school he liked the highbrow crowd; he "took to" Latin and literature. He has a feeling of vague disgust when he sees a vulgar picture, a shudder when the street-organ grinds. There is something in Jim different. He isn't in tune with either his immediate heredity or his environment. The contribution from some remote ancestor has overbalanced the rest, and Jim becomes a professional man. Or perhaps Richard breaks his father's heart. Instead of following the trail already made, he cuts loose, frequents vulgar resorts, hates his school work, becomes a loafer and a bum--and, finally, a second-rate day laborer. Again, what he is himself, his "vital spark" has been stronger than immediate heredity and environment, and has broken through. GETTING THE OTHER MAN'S POINT OF VIEW Our points of view are very frequently merely hereditary or acquired prejudices, hence altogether emotional rather than rational. We only with great difficulty see things through another man's eyes. It necessitates comprehending his background fully, and standing exactly where he stands, so mind and eyes can both look out from the same conditions that confront him. And this is only possible for the man or woman possessed of a vicarious imagination. Such an imagination, however, can be cultivated. You hate my father. He injured yours--unjustly, to your mind, of course, for yours can do no wrong. From my point of view this father of mine is a great, good man. From your point of view he is wicked and cruel. We are both honest in our emotion-directed opinions. Until you can know my father as I know him, and I can know yours as you know him, we shall never agree about them. But I _can_ learn to understand _why_ you feel as you do, and you _can_ learn to understand _why_ I feel as I do. I can put myself, in imagination, in your place, and see that other man as my father, and pretty well grasp your point of view, and you can likewise get mine. After all, the law is very simple. Each man is the result of the things he puts his attention chiefly upon; and he puts it naturally upon the things which his forebears and his surroundings have held before him. The rare person and the trained person can assert the "vital spark" of his own personality and tear attention away from the easy direction and force, and hold it somewhere else. So he can change his points of view by learning that there are other vantage grounds which direct to better results. With some one else to lead the way and give a bit of help, or with the urge of desire to understand the new viewpoint, or by the drive of his will, he can change his own. Let us not forget that what we see depends on whether or not our eyes are normal, on where we look, or on what kind of spectacles we wear. Two things we can change--where we look, and the spectacles. If our eyes were made wrong we probably cannot change that, but we can often correct poor vision by right artificial lenses. There are people doomed to live in most unattractive, crowded surroundings who make a flower-garden of charm and sweetness there, or, without grounds, keep a window-box of fragrance. The normal person can pretty largely either make the most impossible environment serve his ends or get into a better one. So we can usually look to something constructive, helpful, attractive, or beautiful; and we can refuse to wear blue spectacles. We nurses soon realize that there are just about as many points of view as there are people, and that if we would help cure attitudes as well as bodies, and so lessen the tendency to sickness, it behooves us to learn to see what the other man sees through his eyes or by the use of his glasses, from where he stands. Let us try just a few experiments. Hold your pain and suffering from your appendix operation, and disappointment because you can't be bridesmaid at your chum's wedding, up close to your eyes, and you cannot see anything else. They crowd the whole field of vision. Look at the world from the eyes of a spoiled woman of wealth who for twenty years has had husband, friends, and servants obedient to her every whim. She has grown selfish and demanding. What she has asked for, hitherto, has been immediately forthcoming. Now she is ill, and she naturally considers the doctors and nurses mere agents to secure her relief from discomfort. She is willing to pay any price for that--and still she is allowed to suffer. From her point of view it is utterly unreasonable, inexcusable. What are hospitals and nurses for, anyway? And she is carping, critical, and disagreeable. Her attitude is as sick as her body. How could it be otherwise? Look about you from an aching mind and body, after days of suffering and sleeplessness, and unless you are a rare person and have a soul that sees the sunshine back of everything--you will find the world a place of torture. Look out from despair and loss of the ones you love best, or from failure of will to meet disaster, and everybody may be involved in bringing about your suffering, or in effecting your disgrace. Look out on the world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud demands in a rude, ordering voice. The nurse is there to wait upon you--and finally you will have your innings. Look out from the resentful eyes and smarting mind of the negro who is just beginning in a northern city to realize that his boasted "equality" is a farce, and you will try to prove to the white nurse that you are as good as anybody. You are impossible; but back of all your bravado and swagger and rudeness and complaint of neglect because of your color, you realize that you cannot measure up. You know you belong to a different race, most of whose members are daily giving evidences of inferiority; and you are sure that the nurse is thinking that. Look from the eyes of the "new rich," or the very economical, and you are going to get your money's worth out of your nurses. The nurse who can get back of her patient's forehead and put her mind there and let it work from the patient's point of view, will learn a saving sense of humor, will be strict without antagonizing, will clear away a lot of mental clouds and help to make permanent the cure the treatment brings. One can often judge very truly a patient's real character by his reaction to his sickness. On the other hand, frequently it only indicates that he has not yet properly adapted himself to a new experience and a trying one. We hear so often, "Why, she's a different person these days, since she's feeling better. It's a joy to do things for her." She was the same person a while back, but had not learned to accept discomfort. Any of the following list of adjectives we hear applied to our patient again and again by the nurses: unreasonable stubborn lazy deluded cranky resistive unco-operative will-less hipped obsessed hypocritical of mean disposition excitable fearful exacting dissatisfied undecided wilful self-centered morbid doubtful demanding retarded abusive depressed spineless self-satisfied Unpleasant terms they are, and condemning ones if accepted as final. When the nurse realizes that under the same conditions she would probably merit them herself, she becomes more anxious to remove the conditions, and less bent upon blame. We must admit that the highest type person, when sick of any physical illness, does not deserve such descriptive terms as these. But they are the rare folks, few and far between; while the great mass of us have not acquired more than enough self-control and thoughtfulness for the ordinary routine of life. We are weakly upset by the unexpected. If it is a pleasant unexpected, we are plus in our enthusiasm, and people applaud; if the unpleasant unexpected, we fall short, and people deplore our weakness. If we learn our lesson of self-control and adaptability, and gain in beauty of character through experience, it has served a purpose. But the nurse deals with the average of human nature, and she finds their reaction faulty. Very often, if she is observant, she will discover that a patient responds in a very different way to some other nurse, who somehow finds that "trying" sick woman charming or thoughtful, likable or sweet. Of course, it may be because the other nurse weakens discipline and caters to the patient's whims; but it is just as likely to be because she has tempered her care and her strictness with understanding. She has grasped the patient's point of view; and with that start, the chances are 50 per cent. more in favor of the patient grasping and acceding to the wise nurse's point of view. Shall we not remember that our trying, cranky, stubborn patient is a sick person, and learn to treat that stubbornness or crankiness as a symptom indicating her need, just as we would a rising temperature? When we can meet her attitude with comprehension, and, if necessary, with quietly firm disregard, then we are beginning to be good nurses. Some of the most common of these sick reactions with which the nurse must deal are enhanced suggestibility, repression, oversensitiveness, stubbornness, fear, depression, and irritability. And each one demands a different method of approach if real help is to be given. Old Isaac Walton wrote a book many, many years ago called "The Complete Angler." He was a famous amateur fisherman, and he says there are only three rules to be observed and they will bring sure success: 1. Study your fish. 2. Study your fish. 3. Study your fish. If the angler follows these directions, he is not apt to offer the wrong bait. When he knows all their little peculiarities, he will know how to catch his fish. The "complete angler" has an unlimited patience and an infinite sense of repose and calm. He never hurries the fish, lest they become suspicious of his bait. And he proves that these three rules work. The nurse who accepts every patient as like every other, and treats him accordingly, will never be a great success. The nurse who "studies her fish" and learns their psychology, will be a therapeutic force. She will know the _why_ of the way that patient acts. THE DELUDED PATIENT If the patient's mind is temporarily clouded through infection or suffering, he may be reacting to a delusion, an obsession, a fixed idea of disability, a terrifying fear. Sometimes he persistently refuses food, and gives no reason for it. The unthinking nurse is tried, puzzled, and irritated. In other ways, perhaps, the patient seems quite normal. But, after all, the explanation is very simple. He probably is as confident that the food is poisoned as you are that it is as it should be. No arguing would convince him, for, to his mind, the nurse is either a complete dupe or an agent of the people whom he knows are plotting his death. And urging him only strengthens his conviction. The writer recalls one such case of a patient who had to be tube fed through many months, though a tray was set before her three times a day--and as regularly refused. Then one day she was seen slipping food from off another patient's tray and eating it greedily, not knowing she was observed. When questioned, though she had never before given a reason for refusing food served to her, she said that "they" had nothing against Mrs. B., so wouldn't try to poison her. Her reasoning was excellent when one accepted her premises. She had bitter enemies. They were not enemies of Mrs. B. and would not harm Mrs. B. Therefore she dare not touch her own food, but could eat Mrs. B.'s if no one knew. These deluded patients live in a world we often do not sense, a world whose reality we do not appreciate. The nurse, after much experience, finds that there is a key to every resistance, to every lack of co-operation, to abnormal attitudes and actions. She realizes that a powerful emotion of desire or fear, of love or hate, of ambition or self-depreciation, of hope or despair, of faith or distrust, unchecked by reason or judgment through the years, has provided a soil upon which emotional thinking alone can grow. The patient is a mere puppet of the suggestions of emotions which may not be at all pertinent to the facts. NURSING THE DELUDED PATIENT The nurse soon realizes the uselessness of attempting to argue a patient out of his delusions, of trying to convince him that the things he sees and hears and perhaps tastes and feels, are but hallucinations. Her very insistence only fastens his attention more firmly upon the false conclusion or makes him more convinced that his mind is giving him a true report from the senses of sight and hearing and taste and feeling. But often a quiet disregard of the delusions while the nurse goes on her way and holds her patient to his routine, consistently and confidently, as she would in case they were not true, will eventually cause him to question their reality just because no calamity results. The nurse acts as if these delusions and hallucinations were non-existent in reality, and when the occasion arises, through the patient's questioning, she urges him to exert his will to act also as if they were not true; to try it and see what happens. Arguing, also, she finds, usually antagonizes or makes the patient stubborn. He cannot prove by her logic his point, but he "knows" from inner experience that he sees what he sees, hears what he hears, and knows what he knows. The fact that the nurse does not is merely annoying evidence that she is blind, deaf, or stupid to these things of his reality. He knows he is lost and damned, or tainted; that he is King George, Cæsar, or the Lord, as the case may be; or that his internal organs are all wrong. He "feels" it and the nurse can't--therefore, he alone has true knowledge of it. In the end, the wise nurse who never disputes with him, but leads him on to action which utterly disregards these things, may bring about a gradual conviction in the patient's mind that a man couldn't do what he does if all these things were true; and the delusion slowly may lose its force or the hallucination fade away. Many patients drop them from their lives entirely. Many others in whom dementia is not indicated, or in whose cases it is indefinitely delayed, can come to an intellectual realization that all these things are fantasies, and do not represent reality; that despite their continued, frequent, or occasional demands upon feeling life, they can be consistently ignored. These psychopathic individuals may act as they would if the delusions never came henceforth to their consciousness, and so be enabled to live a comparatively normal life. THE OBSESSED PATIENT A patient who is suffering from obsessions must carry out certain abnormal actions, or be wretched. She cannot do otherwise. It is as though she were forced by some outside agent, though the forcing is actually from within. When the nurse realizes this, and the more essential fact--that many patients, who have not true obsessions, yet have a tendency toward obsessed ways of thinking and doing--when she comprehends it almost as she would if she were the victim, then she is ready to help the patient by gently making the action impossible, and at the same time diverting attention. THE MIND A PREY TO FALSE ASSOCIATIONS Sometimes a nurse reminds a patient of some one in the past who has complicated her life in an unhappy way, so she distrusts or dreads her or is made constantly uncomfortable in her presence. In such a case, if the nurse reports her patient as resistive, or fearful or cringing, or distrustful, she is really misrepresenting her; for under another's care that patient may show an entirely opposite reaction. The nurse can only sense the strength of the influence of heredity and environment and habit of thought, which would give the explanation of many things in her patient's attitude. Nor can she realize just what shade of meaning certain phrases and words have for her charge. To the nervously overwrought person the most innocent reference--father, sister, wife, home--may bring concepts that are unbearable. The association of the word may make for deep unhappiness, of which the nurse knows nothing. But she _can_ learn that all these things _do_ influence attitude, can appreciate the difficulty of her patient's effort at adjustment, and do all in her power to make that adjustment possible. If the patient is reasonable she can appeal to her reason. If she is too sick for that, the nurse can use happy suggestions. If the mind is deluded and obsessed she can use firm kindness. She can learn what loss of privileges will affect the rude and unco-operative patient, and may be allowed to try that. She can sometimes help the patient to self-control by making her realize that after each outburst she will be constructively ignored. But the point we wish to make is this: There are some sick reactions which the nurse, if she recognizes as such, can help the patient to transform into wholesome ones. At the very least the wise nurse can learn to simplify her own difficulties by accepting the unpleasant patient as possibly the result of her illness, and refusing to allow her trying attitude to get on her nerves. The patient may be reacting normally to the stimulus her untrained and toxic brain received. And when the nurse can see into the other's mental workings, get her point of view, she is ready to give fundamental help. CHAPTER XII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NURSE The mind can be as definitely developed and strengthened as the body. The man who has suffered for years an organic disease will never have the same force as he who has never been seriously ill; but his constitution can be built up and made as efficient as possible within its limitations. Many a man or woman who has an organic heart disorder, through treatment and the proper exercises gradually increased, can very often approximate through many years the output of a normally strong person. The individual weakened by a tuberculous infection can frequently, by following a prescribed regimen for a time, by wise, scientific diet and rest treatment and the help of the out-of-doors, then by carefully increased physical activity, finally live the useful, average life. But it takes scientific care to evolve the weak body into a strong one; and in some cases, at best, it can never stand the same strain that the uninjured one carries with ease. However, even damaged bodies can be made very productive within their limited spheres. Also the naturally perfect physique can quickly become unfit through neglect or infections or misuse. In the same way, and just as definitely, can the mind be developed and strengthened. Some are by nature keen, alert, brilliant. They may develop into masterfulness; or they, too, may degenerate, through abuse, or from the effect of body infections, into uselessness. The germ-plasm has foreordained some individuals to psychic disorders; but training and mode of life can modify many of these defects. And the average mind, like the average physical organs, can be made more efficient through partaking of the proper mental food, through careful training and wise use. No more urgent necessity faces the professional woman than this of training her mind to its highest productiveness. Argument is not needed to convince intelligent people today that the accomplishment of life depends upon mentality. Let us look into the very A, B, C's of mind development, and as nurses undertake to equip ourselves to master our profession from the ground up. The first essential is ability to think clearly. _Steps to Clear Thinking_: 1. Accurate perception, with attention to the thing that reason chooses. 2. Association of ideas. 3. Concentration, acquired by the help of emotion and will. 4. Emotional equilibrium, which refuses to allow feeling to obscure judgment by leading reason astray. 5. Self-correction. 6. Automatic habits, which free the mind of all unnecessary crowding. ACCURACY OF PERCEPTION The beginning of learning is perception. Keen, accurate perception at the time of first introduction of a new fact or thought, and the linking up of that new material with something already in consciousness, insures in the normal mind the ability to remember and use that fact or thought again. The things casually perceived and not definitely tied up with something else are soon forgotten by the conscious mind. You pass a florist shop where a score of different flowers and plants are displayed. If your thoughts are intently on your errand you may glance in, see flowers, color, perhaps a riot of colors only--and beauty; and you feel a glow of pleasure from the sight. But a moment later you cannot name the blooms in the window. Perhaps roses come to mind because you have very special feeling for them; or carnations, or sweet peas. But the window as a whole you perceive only as flowers, and color, and beauty. You cannot describe it in detail, for you gave it only passive attention. But if you went to that window to know its contents; to find out what the florist had in his shop, because you are very interested in all flowers and plants, then you can tell minutely what is there. You had a purpose in perceiving the window; your will held attention upon each object in turn; and your love of flowers (an emotion) eased the effort of volition when it might have tired. Perception, then, is of three kinds: passive, incited by interest, and directed by will. And the perception which is the basis of accurate knowledge is one of keen interest, or of will, or of interest plus will. TRAINING PERCEPTION The nurse who demands of herself that she perceive accurately paves the way for accurate, deft service in her profession. There are constant means at hand for training in the art. Suppose you try to get so definite a picture of each ward or room you enter, in a swift but attentive examination of its furnishings and their locations, and of the patients, that you can reproduce it to yourself or a friend some days later. You come into a large ward, with a row of beds on either side of the door, and a wide central space between. How many beds in each row? There is a table at the far end of the room, opposite the door, and a nurse in white is writing there. Why does she wear white? What is her name? To your right is a closet-like room opening from the ward. That is a medicine-room, you are told. How many windows has the ward? You glance from bed to bed with a rapid passing in review of the patients. Which ones seem to you very ill? There is a large white screen about one. You are told that when treatments are given the screen is put there, or that when a patient is dying the bed is screened. You look for the ventilators, and see how many are open and how they work. You see a room-thermometer, and ask at what temperature it is kept. The nurse explains that a certain degree is ordered, and that, so far as possible, the ventilators are operated to insure that. If your attention has followed all these details with careful, accurate perception; if you have grasped them clearly, one by one, at the time, you will be able to answer quickly next day when some one asks how many patients the wards accommodate, and how many beds are vacant. You can describe the lighting and ventilation, the room temperature, etc. And later on you will quickly see to it that a screen is properly placed when you know treatments are to be given. ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS After the first few years of life practically nothing enters consciousness that cannot by some likeness or contrast or kinship be connected with something already there. Were it not for this saving economy memory would be helpless. So the nurse who is in earnest and eager to master her new work will not only perceive carefully each detail of arrangement, but in two or three days at most will know each patient there; she will have worked out a system of associations, remembering not a meaningless name, but an individual with certain characteristics which she ties up with her name, and so gives it a definite personality. She thereafter recalls not merely a patient, but a very special patient; and as she comes to mind she brings a title with her, which is her symbol. Likewise when her name is spoken or thought, she herself comes into the nurse's immediate consciousness. A bed in a certain part of the room will be no longer merely a bed, but Mrs. Brown's bed. Remembering can be made easy by using some such method as this: The first bed to the right as you enter is Mrs. Meade's. She is the woman with the broken hip. The next is Mrs. Blake's, that blonde, big woman who wants more attention than any one else. The third is Mrs. Bunting's. She has wonderful, curling black hair, and a nice response to everything done for her. The next beyond is Mrs. O'Neil's. She looks as Irish as her name sounds, and you will remember her by that. So each bed comes to mean a certain patient, and each patient comes to suggest the ones on either side of her--her neighbors. Blondeness and bigness together call Mrs. Blake to mind. Broken hip means Mrs. Meade, etc. Each individual on that side of the ward becomes associated with a name which stands for definite characteristics. Then you begin at the left bed nearest the door and follow the occupants back on that side. You may remember better by jotting them down in order of the beds, with names and a brief comment on each patient. Keep that list on a small card in your pocket for reference for a day or two, then depend on memory entirely. I have personally found this an excellent method. You are expected to be able to turn quickly to any medicines needed in emergency, and you soon learn to remember them and where they are placed by the arrangement into classes or kinds, which most hospitals require. Cathartics are together, hypnotics together, etc. So when you want _cascara_ you associate it with cathartic and turn to that shelf. You learn very soon that poison medicines are kept apart from the others, and quickly associate the _poison_ label with danger to patients, necessity of locking safely away and hiding the key from any but those responsible for the care of the sick. Learning to look closely at the patient's face, instead of casually glancing at her when you care for her, makes it possible for you to note changes of expression, heightened color, dilated pupils, a trace of strain, etc. Then try to find the exact word that will express what you see. Such experiments in perception and attention, association and memory, repeatedly demanded of yourself--_i. e._, the being able to recall and describe in detail the room- or ward-arrangements and to place the patients accurately, as we have just described--will prove invaluable practice, helping you to attend to every change in your patient's demeanor and expression, which may prove significant symptoms. And remember that while the mind can only contain so many isolated facts, yet there is no limit to its possibilities when the power of association of ideas is employed. Your first step to clear thinking is accuracy of perception, with attention to the thing reason chooses; your second is association of the things perceived, a grouping of them to fit in with each other, and with what is already in the mind. And both imply the third--concentration, aided by emotion and will. For passive attention and haphazard associations assure the opposite of clear thinking. CONCENTRATION _How to Study._--You learn sooner or later from experience that the quickest and best way to learn anything new is to give it your undivided attention at the moment; to perceive one thing at a time and to perceive it as something that is definite, or as some quality that is unblurred. One of you will spend three hours on an anatomy lesson, another two hours, while a third nurse may give it a half-hour of concentrated study and know it better than either of you, if you have been day-dreaming, or talking, or rebelling at the "luck" which keeps you indoors learning about bones, when the tennis-court is so inviting. True, some minds have better natural equipment and some have better previous training than others. But the average mind could learn a lesson well in much less time than is spent upon learning it poorly. Few people hold their attention strictly to the task at hand if something more interesting beckons, or if they feel tired, or "blue." But you can learn to do it. Put aside a certain amount of time today for study; hold your undivided attention on your lesson, regardless of how many pleasanter things appeal. When your eyes or your thoughts wander from your note-book, bring them back forcibly, if need be. Your first task is to keep your eyes there, instead of letting them follow your roommate's movements, or resting them by watching the street below. But it is easier to do this than to make your mind grasp the meaning of the things you see. You may read two or three pages, and not receive one idea, not even be able to recall any words from the context. Your eyes are obeying your will and seeing the words, but your mind is "wool-gathering." Now take yourself in hand firmly. If you are really a bit fagged, try some deep-breathing exercises before the open window, bathe your face in cold water. Then read a paragraph, close your book, and write, if you are not alone, or repeat to yourself aloud, if your roommate is out, what that paragraph says--its meaning. If you cannot do it, read it again with that end in view. Repeat the process, and hold yourself to it day after day, if necessary, until finally will has won the battle, or, better still, your will to learn has been reinforced by an interest in the very competition with yourself, if not yet in the contest. Then, as you learn some facts from your notes, use your imagination to apply them in real life. The triceps muscle. What is it for? Your notes inform you, and then it is really interesting to see how it performs its function. What origins and attachments must the triceps have to make it extend the arm? Your notes say that a muscle tends to draw the part to which it is attached toward its origin. This triceps muscle straightens the arm. In that case it must oppose the flexion at the elbow. How is that likely to be done? The triceps must start somewhere above the elbow, and quite far above, too, to be able to make a straight angle of an acute one; it must start toward the back in order to draw back the forearm; and be attached to the back of the bone below. Also it must be quite a long muscle. So much reason tells you. Now let me see how it is done, in fact. And you find that the triceps has three origins high above its one attachment as a tendon, to give it a good strong pull. These are in the outside of the humerus and in the scapula. That is logical, and you will remember it. Now how does the arm bend? What pulls against the triceps? And you are interested before you know it. There is nothing, good, bad, or indifferent, but has some points of interest if the mind turns its entire attention to it. But our tendency is to grow tired of calling back our wandering thoughts again and again to the thing that is hard, dry, or stupid. And we need more incentive than just the doing of the duty because it is to be done. We need a compelling interest in the goal to encourage our wills to concentration on the less interesting. Let us first think out the _why_ of knowing anatomy if we are to be nurses. And if the profession of nursing is the goal, let anatomy become just the next stretch of the road that leads to it. Concentration can be acquired. It may require three hours at first to learn your lesson; but later on you will do it in two, then in one, and perhaps in less. And when you can sit down with your notes and learn them with voices about you--perhaps; with some one else in the room; with a party an hour ahead; when you can disregard all but the work at hand, then you can concentrate, and the big battle of your life as a student is won. Study is no longer drudgery. Lessons occupy much less of your time and leave you more free hours. Because you give them your whole mind you learn them in a fraction of the hours hitherto wasted upon them, when you studied with divided attention. When you are doing clear thinking on the thing at hand, satisfactory results are assured. SELF-TRAINING IN MEMORY Hand in hand with clear thinking goes reliable memory. But so many of us have it not, and feel its need so strongly that we shall consider for a moment some means of training it. William James holds that brain-paths cannot be deepened; that memory is not strengthened in that way. There is a natural retentiveness with which some of us are born--the men of colossal intellect--and they remember and are able to use infinitely more things acquired in the past, because they have a brain substance of greater tenacity in holding impressions than others possess. James compares some brains to wax in which the mark left by the seal is permanent; and others he compares to jelly which vibrates at every touch, but retains no dent made in it. From our study of the subconscious we know that the dent did leave an impression on the brain; but it was in the subconscious. So we beg to change the figure and liken, in all mankind, that part of the brain that handles the subconscious to wax, while granting that in some rare cases parts handling the conscious material also hold impressions, as does the wax. Consequently, according to this theory, we do not strengthen our memories by repetition of facts, lines, or phrases. We cannot grave any deeper the memory paths which nature has provided at birth. But the attention to the thing to be remembered, which repetition has required, has made a larger number of connections of the words with each other, of thought with thought, and of the new with the old. So we have tied the new together with the old by that many more strings, as it were; and any bit of the new tugs at other bits; and the old to which it is tied brings the new with it when it comes to the fore. In other words, careful attention, at the time, to the new stimulus, and its association with the already known, together with repetition, will form a whole system of relations in the mind, and the newly entered material soon become so well-known that it will be difficult to disregard it. When, in spite of determined effort to remember, the thing is forgotten, especially in the nurse's case, it is usually because the emotional reaction to weariness or to some like obstacle has interfered with proper attention. James advises us if we would improve memory, to improve our thinking processes; to pay more and keener attention, so that we will link things closely together. This in itself will help to arouse interest in the thing to be remembered; and keen interest alone, or careful attention at the time of introduction of the new, and repetition of the thing to be retained, with a will which holds the attention fast, will assure a good, workable memory in any normal mind. CHAPTER XIII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE NURSE (Continued) EMOTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM Suppose that when you first enter the ward you are wishing with all your heart you had never decided to become a probationer. Perhaps the white screen and its possible meaning has so frightened you that your thoughts refuse to go beyond it. Suppose the very sight of so much sickness has agitated you instead of strengthening your determination to help nurse it. That is, suppose your emotions, your feelings, so fill your mind that perception is necessarily inaccurate and blurred. Then tomorrow your account of the ward will be hazy, and your desire will probably be against returning to a place where so many unpleasant feelings were aroused. The emotional balance which refuses to allow feelings to obscure judgment by leading reason astray is a necessary safeguard for the work of the nurse. There is little place in the profession for the woman who is "all sentiment," but perhaps there is less for the one without sentiment. Feeling, we found, is the first expression of mind--feeling which in the early months is entirely selfish. The happiest baby you know is not sweet and winning to please you, but because he feels comfortable and happy and cannot keep from expressing it. His universe is his own little self and you exist only in your relation to him. If you give him pleasure he likes you; if pain, he does not want you. His mother often fails to please him, but satisfies him so much more frequently than anybody else that he loves her best. Then comes nurse or father--if he proves the satisfactory kind of father, or she a nurse he can love. To the baby whatever he happens to want is good. What is not desirable is bad. And such emotional responses are altogether normal in early months, yes, even until the child is old enough to use reason to choose between two desires the one that will in the end prove more satisfying. But they are defects in adult life. The nurse who would always act as her first feeling dictates would not be in training many days. Unpleasant sights and sounds, the fear of making a mistake which might harm a patient, the undesirability of long hours of hard work in caring for patients who frequently only find fault with her best efforts, would early decide her in favor of another life-work. Comparatively few so-called "grown-ups" are guided only by feeling; and most of those are in institutions that are well safeguarded. But a great many mature men and women allow feeling to unduly influence their thinking. The sentimental nurse, for instance, may find it very difficult to give an ordered hypodermic. The patient dreads the pain and the nurse fears hurting her. Suppose she were to fail to give it on such grounds. This is an almost unthinkable case. But the very nurse who agrees that such an emotional weakling should not be allowed to train, will help her patient, even when recuperating nicely, to grow inexcusably self-centered, by sympathizing with every complaint, warning her at every turn, by allowing her and even encouraging her, perhaps, to discuss her illness and suffering in the minutest detail. This nurse is more damaging than the sentimentalist who fails to give the hypodermic; for that slip is easily discovered, and the transgressor must immediately reform and obey orders, or be dismissed. But the second nurse may take perfect care of the sick body, and the doctor never realize that she is developing the sickness idea in her patient's mind. In both of these instances reason has followed the leadings of feeling. It is unpleasant to hurt the patient, and she is disagreeable, too, when you insist on carrying out the orders. It is easier to agree with her ideas and sympathize with her troubles, much easier than to find some other avenue for her thinking, or to search for feeling substitutes. It is pleasanter right now to allow her mind to slip unmolested into sick reactions than to lead her, unwilling as she is, into the ways of health. Reason follows feeling's logic, which suggests that it is much better for the patient to talk of her ills than to keep them pent up inside; and judgment is sadly obscured. The emotionally balanced nurse hears the story once, that she may have the material for helping the need. Feeling, perhaps deep and genuine sympathy with a real trouble, is aroused, and rightly. But this brings a keen desire to help the situation. Reason insists that talking of sufferings, real or fancied, only makes them more insistently felt; that there must be some better way to meet them. It suggests various methods to divert the patient's attention, to change the train of thought until she is able herself to direct it into healthful channels; judgment weighs the propositions and decides upon the one which will lead toward establishing a health attitude. The nurse is continually meeting the necessity of acting contrary to fear and discouragement and weariness of spirit. How can she secure emotional equilibrium for herself? Keep in mind the fact that most sick people are very suggestible; that you have a definite responsibility to make your suggestions to your patient wholesome; and that your mood is a constant suggestion to him. Remember that he needs your best. Then, if your own trouble seems too great to bear, determine that, so long as you remain on duty, you will not let it show. Try an experiment. See if you can go through the day carrying your load of sorrow, or disappointment or chagrin, with so serene a face that the sick for whom you are caring will not suspect that you have a burden at all. That is a triumph worth the striving. Then--if you can let it make you a little more comprehending of others' pain, a little more gentle with the sickest ones, a bit more patient with the trying ones, more kindly firm with the unco-operative, realizing that each one of them all has his burden too--you have not choked feeling, but you have fulfilled reason's counsel: that sick people are not the ones to help you in your stress; that a good nurse should rise above personal trouble to the duty at hand. Your judgment has compared your reasons, and decided that you should act before your patients as you would if all were well. And _will_ holds you to emotional equilibrium. Such a thing can be done in a very large measure; and no better opportunity for emotional control will ever be offered than the necessity of being calm and serene before your patients, no matter how you feel. But, while reason and judgment teach us to control the expression of certain feelings, they urge that this control be exercised in transforming those feelings into helpful ones and giving them an adequate outlet. Such a substitution has been suggested above. Let us not forget that nothing in existence is of personal value until it gives some one an emotion; that feeling is the beauty of life; that living, without the happy, wholesome affective glow, would not be worth the effort; that beauty and strength and sweetness of feeling make for a worthy self. Remember, too, that feeling is the curse of life. It is feeling that would make us give up the whole struggle; and ugliness and weakness and bitterness of feeling make for a despicable self. Hope lies for us all in the realization that we can choose our feelings, our responses. We can be utterly discouraged, and bitter and depressed at failure; or we can recognize it as a sign-board telling us that the other way than the one we just followed leads to the goal. And we can follow its pointing finger with faith in a new attempt because, now, we know at least how _not_ to go. We can learn despair from all the bitter and the hateful and the mean; or we can learn that they never could be called so if there were not the sweet, the lovable, and the generous with which to compare them. You can learn to search as with a microscope for all the undesirable traits of your patients, or you can calmly accept all that assert themselves as undeniable facts, but use your microscope to find their desirable characteristics which offer possibilities of being brought to the foreground. You cannot constructively help yourself or your patient by denying the existence of the less worthy traits; but you can resolve to call out the something better. And if you do not find it, as may rarely be the case, you can refuse to let it make you skeptical of finding it in others. Let us remember always that, "It is not things or conditions or people that harm us; it is only the way we respond to them that can hurt." This one great truth, if really believed and made a part of all our thinking, would save scores of people from nervous wreckage. It is a favorite saying of a wise man who has helped a great many people to endure and take new courage when life seemed too hard to meet. That big, broken-arm case on the ward cursed you yesterday because you would not loosen his splints. And you rushed from the room angry and humiliated, wishing you could quit nursing forever, and asked to be moved because you had been insulted. But that man cannot harm you. He has never known a real lady in his life before. His training from childhood has been to regard women as chattels to do man's bidding; his experience in life is that they usually do what he asks--women of his kind. Moreover, he has never had a serious pain before, and it is not to be endured. Of course, the man must be dealt with and made to realize the distinction between his new surroundings and the old. Probably the intern or the doctor is the one to do it. Also he must be brought to apologize, or leave the hospital, perhaps. But he did not hurt you. Your own reaction did that. For outside things or people cannot damage what we are in ourselves. The way we respond to them does the harm. When you can control your expression of anger and humiliation, and substitute for your intense feeling a desire that such a patient may learn that pain is often the gateway to healing; that some respect for women may be kindled in him, so that eventually such an outburst in the ward may be impossible for him or for anyone who heard it; then you are choosing between emotions the one of helpfulness, for the one of justified indignation; and feeling has followed reason, rather than leading reason astray. The judgment which decides you to try methods which will shame or inspire some manliness into the patient was one influenced by a well-balanced emotional life. If we would really acquire emotional poise, there are a few practical, proved methods we might adopt for ourselves. When we can hold back the expression of the almost overpowering impulse or passion of anger and resentment and hurt; absolutely shut tight our lips until we can think; then wait until we can think without the strain of intense feeling, we will not only keep ourselves out of trouble, but will be able to calmly state our position, right the wrong done us if wrong there was, or recognize that we ourselves were wrong. For we seldom analyze the situation properly under the influence of strong feeling. If we want to accomplish anything with our words, let us wait until we can speak them without having to choke down our sobs or cram back our hot anger, or forcibly restrain ourselves from tearing things or slamming doors. After all that "wild fire" of emotion is gone, judgment will lead us to wisely reasoned action. SELF-CORRECTION Accuracy in work, a primary essential to the nurse, can become automatic if she will demand of herself accuracy of perception, and concentrate on learning and doing until details almost take care of themselves; if she will correct her own work by the standards taught her, and recognize just why and wherein she falls short. Not that she can always do things with the nicety in which they were taught. She cannot give eighteen ward patients in eight hours the same detailed care her private patients would receive if she had only two of them for the same length of time. In such a case she must often sacrifice refinements of detail in service; but there is no excuse for sacrificing accuracy in the necessary treatments of her charges. The nurse merely chooses between the multitude of things which can be done for her ward, the important ones which must be done. Because she is rushed is no excuse for giving a poor hypodermic injection or a careless bed-bath. Accuracy in doing the essential things should be so automatic that it takes not a whit more time than inaccurate doing; and such accuracy is chiefly dependent on constant self-correction when the task is still new, and on never letting up in practice until the details of the doing become practically automatic. TRAINING THE WILL There is no better opportunity for will-training than the hospital affords the nurse. The constant necessity of acting against desire, of doing tasks which in themselves cannot be agreeable, calls for a developed will, while it gives it constant exercise. Moods of discouragement and depression cannot be indulged. The nurse must do her work no matter how tired or blue or "frazzled" she feels, if she is not too sick to be on duty; for all time lost, she knows, is to be made up to the hospital before training is completed. Can this _will to do_, despite strong desire to the contrary, this mood control and the ability to disregard physical discomfort, be acquired; and if so, how? It is a law of the mind and of the body that any task becomes easier by repetition. We found that automatic habit eases much of the strain of action. What seemed repulsive service to the probationer on her first day in the hospital, she forced herself to do because she wanted to be a nurse. She may go on through her three years unreconciled to these particular duties, yet holding herself to them because she likes other features of her work, or because she must earn her living and this seems the best avenue open to her, or because her will to become a nurse is strong enough to make her act continually against desire. And finally, for almost every nurse, the interest in the end to be attained overshadows the unpleasant incidents in its way. The tasks are actually easier by their constant repetition, and her feeling of repugnance becomes only a mild dislike. She has strengthened her will by continuing to act against desire. But there is a better way to the same goal. The woman who has thought out the reasons for and against taking training; who has considered it carefully as a profession, and has chosen to put up with any obstacles in the way of becoming a graduate nurse, can find a happy adjustment to the disagreeable incidents it involves. Realizing that the paths of learning are seldom thoroughly smooth, she can resolve to use their very roughness for firmer footholds, as a means to self-control, as a fitting for the sterner hardships of self-support, of nursing the dangerously ill, alone, of meeting suffering and death in her patients with quiet courage and faith. In other words, she can meet the thousand and one personal services which in themselves might be disagreeable and prove pure drudgery, not merely with the stern will to do them because they are a necessary part of obtaining a desired end, but also for the sake of adding to the comfort and well-being of each patient in her care. The emotion of interest and kindly desire will ease the strain which will undergoes in demanding that she not shirk the disagreeable. For there is little stress in doing what we wish to do. It is psychologically possible to find genuine pleasure in the meanest tasks if the doing is backed up by a strong desire to make life count as much for others as possible. The nurse who comes to realize the waste involved in carrying out against desire what _reason_ proposes and volition dictates, will try to secure the co-operation of desire, and save will-force for more worthy accomplishment. A constant opportunity for will-strengthening comes to many a nurse during the early weeks and months of training in the necessity of going on despite the sheer tiredness, the weary backs and swollen, tender, aching feet. The one who means to "see it through" disregards them as far as possible on duty, gets all the out-of-doors her time permits, takes special exercises to strengthen weak spots, and relaxes her body while she reads or studies or visits in her off-duty time. In the end, not only does her body adjust itself to the new work, but her will has become a better ally for the next demands upon it; her endurance is remarkably increased. When she can accept hardship, drudgery, weariness of mind and body and perhaps of soul, the nagging of unco-operative patients, and the demands on her sympathies of the suffering; when she can meet these as challenges to develop a strong will--a will not only to endure, but to find happiness and give service through it all--then the nurse has learned the art of making every circumstance a stepping-stone to mastery and achievement. CHAPTER XIV THE NURSE OF THE FUTURE The student of life and of the sciences which deal with the origin and development of the human race, and with the relations of man to man and nation to nation--such sciences as biology and anthropology, sociology and ethics and history--comes to the conclusion that life exists for the development of mind. And mind is not merely intellect, but the only gateway we know to character, to soul. The deepest students of human science see no reason for life except as it "evolves" a perfect mind--man's goal, his ideal. And this visioned perfect mind is one which adjusts itself without friction to the body, making it fulfil the laws of health that it may help and not hinder mind's progress; one which adjusts itself to people and things, co-operating with other minds to develop manners and customs and laws of the most satisfactory community living; one which forces things to be servants of its will; one which makes harmony of life by fulfilling the laws of the soul as well as of the intellect and of the body. If we believe that life exists for the development of mind into a force of intellect and character and soul, then we need not ask why a nurse should know something of the laws of mind. She does not ask why she should know anatomy or pathology. Her work is dependent upon such knowledge. But if the center of life, the thing which makes the body a living, moving, acting agent instead of a clod, is mind; if the one thing which makes a difference between animal life and mineral and vegetable life is consciousness, _i. e._, mind; and if everything that affects that body, its organ, affects mind also--then surely no nurse can afford to learn only the rules of repair or of keeping in order the instrument of consciousness, without knowing what effect her efforts have on the mind itself. It is as though an ignorant maid accepted a piano as merely a piece of furniture to be kept clean and shining, and in her zeal to that end scrubbed the keyboard with soap and water which, dripping down into the body of the instrument, swells and damages its felts, rusts and corrodes its keys, and ruins its notes. When she knows that she may thus make impossible the beautiful sounds she has heard it give, and that the more carefully the keyboard is handled the more sure is the beauty resulting, her care is to keep it as free as possible of dust, to see that the top is down and the keyboard covered when she sweeps--and to clean it hereafter in such a way as to never injure its tone. The nurse has a much greater function than merely to help in saving the body and keeping its machinery in order. If the aim of life is the strengthening and perfecting of the mind--that "urge" of life, then surely the nurse's big aim will be to help establish such health of body as leads toward health of mind. In the average man or woman this vital urge becomes temporarily blocked by the very weakness of the body it urges. The body _must_ give the life-flame some fuel, or it dies out; but with very little fuel it flickers on, waiting, hoping for the more that it may burn strongly again. In the cases the nurse handles very often the "vital spark" has been poorly fed by the disabled body, and so discouragement or depression, or "loss of grip" results, or the flame continues to shine brightly with whatever little sustenance it receives, and so encourages the body to greater effort for it; or sinks into embers, glowing steadily though dully; or it burns wildly, recklessly--it becomes what we call "wild fire," that has no direction and no purpose save to burn up everything it can find. In other words, the nurse deals with those in whom the "urge" is weakened--the depressed and discouraged; with those whose spirits never flag in their steady shining--those brave souls we could almost worship; and those others who hold grimly on with quiet grit and courage, but with no cheer; and with the unstable ones of neuropathic or psychopathic tendency who become hysteric or maniacal. What will the nurse do for them all? Will not an understanding of how to recall the ambition to live, the will to get well, and the grit to see the thing through, be an incalculable asset. THE NURSE OF THE FUTURE The nurse of the future will not be merely a handmaiden to care for the sick body by deftly carrying out the doctor's orders. She will do this almost automatically as a matter of course, and skilfully; but it will be the merest beginning of her mission. That mission itself will be to eliminate the causes of disease; to teach the ways of health, to supervise the sanitary conditions of city, town, and country. Practical ways and the wise means to this end will be taught in her hospital, which will become a community center with clinics, teaching through its doctors and nurses the way to health, instead of merely treating and advising the cases as they come. But the greatest contribution of the nurse of the future will be a wide-spread _desire for health_ and _will to health_, rather than a desire and will to avoid discomfort and pain and danger of death. This _will to health_ will doom in the sane mind the disease-accepting attitude. It will do all that common sense and applied medical science can do to strengthen the body; then it will take what life brings in the way of unavoidable disease and weakness and inability, with an uncringing mind. It will hold the mind's attitude to serenity and poise and accomplishment within the necessary limits of its disordered body. It will be master of its dwelling and make the most of the little the body can give, and force all bearable weakness and pain to be stepping-stones to endurance and will-strength and cheer. It will not accept physical limitations as final things. If life must be lived in a prison-house it will be its own jailer, and fill the rooms with flowers, music, friends, and happiness. No nurse is competent to help her patient to overcome any curable physical weakness, and keep the mind serene in the face of the incurable, until she herself has learned that the will to health is capable of transforming disease of body, from disaster, into health of mind and soul. The nurse of the future will know the laws of mind as she knows the course of disease; she will be dedicated to such wise care of existing disease as will lead to prevention of future disease; and she will be a sworn, trained ally of the health-accepting mind. INDEX Absent-mindedness, 64 Absolutes, 54 Abstract concept, 52 object concepts, 53 quality concepts, 53 Accuracy of perception, 141 Action cannot be separated from feeling, 68 Acts, compulsive, 106 Adaptability, 79 necessity of, 80 Amnesia, 103 Anesthesia, 101 Aphasia, 103 Apperception, 54 Association of ideas, 143 Attention, 79 of interest, 112 of reason and will, 118 root of disease or health attitude, 112 Autosuggestion, 84 Awareness, 15 Bad habits, 91 Beginning of reason, 69 Body and mind, relation of, 40 Borderland disorders, 107 Brain, 33 hind, 43 Censor, 31 Central and peripheral nervous systems in action, 35 Cerebellum, 43 Cerebrum, 43 functions of, 45 Clear thinking, steps to, 140 Compulsive acts, 106 ideas, 103 Concentration, 146 Concepts, 52 abstract, 52 object, 53 quality, 53 concrete, 52 Concrete concepts, 52 Consciousness, 15, 20, 21 definition, 15 flow of, 47 in delirium, 32 in sleep, 31 is complex, 29 organs of, 34 personal, 57 Delirium, consciousness in, 32 Deluded patient, 133 nursing of, 135 Delusion, 104 nihilistic, 104 of reference, 104 somatic, 104 Determination, 18 Development of reason and will, 71 Disease attitude, attention, root of, 112 Disorders, 95 borderland, 107 of emotion, 99 of functions of intellect, 96 of ideation, 97 of judgment, 99 of memory, 98 of perception, 96 of reason, 98 of sensation, 96 of will, 99 Disorientation, 103 Distractibility, 105 Effort, habit a conserver of, 90 Emotion, 18, 45, 49 disorders of, 99 the place of, 67 Emotional equilibrium, 152 reaction, normal, 77 Environment as cause of variation from normal mental processes, 109 Equilibrium, emotional, 152 False associations, mind a prey to, 137 Feeling, 49 cannot be separated from action, 68 from thinking, 67 from will, 68 Fixed idea, 103 Flight of ideas, 102 Forebrain, 43 Future, the nurse of the, 164 Getting other man's point of view, 126 patient's point of view, 124 Habit a conserver of effort, 90 bad, 91 hospital, 92 Habit-formation, 79 Hallucination, 101 Health and psychology, 79 attitude, attention, root of, 112 Heredity as course of variation from normal mental processes, 108 Hind brain, 43 Hospital habit, 92 How to study, 146 Hurt, 70 Hyperesthesia, 101 Hypersuggestability, 84 Hypochondriasis, 102, 108 Hysteria, 107 Idea, compulsive, 103 fixed, 103 Ideas, association of, 143 flight of, 102 Ideation, 52 disorders of, 97 Ideogenous pains, 103 Illusion, 101 Imagination, 58 Impulses, insane, 108 Inhibition, morbid, 104 Inorganic memory, 52 Insane impulses, 108 Insanity, 107 Instinct, 59 Instincts, list of, 61 Intellect, 18, 45 functions of, disorders of, 96 Interest, attention of, 112 Judgment, 56, 72 disorders of, 99 Life, mental, 14 conditions of, 19 phenomena of, 15 Mania, 107 Melancholia, 107 Memory, 51, 62 disorders of, 98 inorganic, 52 organic, 51 self-training in, 150 Mental disability, states of, 100 life, 14 conditions of, 19 phenomena of, 15 processes, normal, variations from, 95, 101 factors causing, 108 Mind, 14, 33 a prey to false associations, 137 and body, relation of, 40 functions of, 50 normal, 47, 77 Mood, 49 Morbid inhibition, 104 Motion, 26 Movement, 26 Mutism, 106 Necessity of adaptability, 80 Negativism, 106 Nervous systems, central and peripheral, in action, 35 sympathetic, 37 Nervousness, 106 Neurasthenia, 108 Neuropath, 108 Neurosis, 106 from psychosis, 82 Neurotic, 108 Nihilistic delusion, 104 Normal emotional reactions, 77 Normal mental processes, variations from, 95, 101 factors causing, 108 mind, 47, 77 Nurse of the future, 164 psychology of, 139 Nursing deluded patient, 135 Obsessed patient, 136 Obsession, 105 One thought replaced by another, 89 Organic memory, 51 Organs of consciousness, 34 Overactivity, psychomotor, 106 Pain, 69 ideogenous, 103 Patient, deluded, 133 nursing of, 135 obsessed, 136 Patient's point of view, getting, 124 what determines it, 124 Percept, 51, 52 Perception, 51 accuracy of, 141 disorders of, 96 training of, 142 Peripheral and central nervous systems in action, 35 Personal consciousness, 57 reactions as cause of variation from normal mental processes, 110 Personality, psychopathic, 108 shut-in, 104 Perversions, 95, 101 Phenomena of mental life, 15 Phobia, 108 Place of emotion, 67 Pleasure, 69 Point of view, getting other man's, 126 patient's, getting, 124 what determines it, 124 Poor memory, 64 Power of suggestion, 84 Premise, 72 Protozoön, consciousness in, 15 Psychasthenia, 108 Psychology and health, 79 definition, 12 of the nurse, 139 Psychomotor overactivity, 106 retardation, 106 Psychoneurosis, 106 Psychopathic personality, 108 Psychosis, 107 neurosis from, 82 Pugnacious instinct, 60 Reactions, normal emotional, 77 proportioned to stimuli, 75 Reason, 56 and will, attention of, 118 development of, 71 beginning of, 69 disorders of, 98 Reference, delusion of, 104 Relation of mind and body, 40 Retardation, psychomotor, 106 Saving power of will, 93 Science, 13 Second-nature, 90 Self-correction, 160 Self-training in memory, 150 Sensation, 51 disorders of, 96 Sense of unreality, 104 Shut-in personality, 104 Sleep, consciousness in, 31 Somatic delusion, 104 Steps to clear thinking, 140 Stimuli, reaction proportioned to, 75 Stimulus, definition, 22 Stream of thought, 50, 57 Study, how to, 146 Suggestibility, 79 Suggestion, power of, 84 Sympathetic nervous system, 37 The unconscious, 23 Thinking, 49, 58 cannot be separated from feeling, 67 clear, steps to, 140 Thought, stream of, 50, 57 Thought-substitution, 79 Tic, 105 Training perception, 142 the will, 161 Unconscious, the, 23 Universals, 53 Unreality, sense of, 104 Variations from normal mental processes, 95, 101 factors causing, 108 Volition, 45, 50 What determines patient's point of view, 124 we attend to determines what we are, 86 Will, 50, 79 and reason, attention of, 118 development of, 71 cannot be separated from feeling, 68 disorders of, 100 saving power of, 93 training of, 161 =A Short History= =of Nursing= From the Earliest Times to the Present Day By =Lavinia L. Dock, R.N.= Secretary, International Council of Nurses In Collaboration with =Isabel Maitland Stewart, A.M., R.N.= Assistant Professor, Department of Nursing and Health, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York _12^o. Price, $3.00_ =This New Volume Has Been Prepared Especially= =for the Use of Student Nurses= It is, in effect, a condensation of the four volumes of the larger _History of Nursing_, prepared by Miss Dock in collaboration with Miss Nutting, a work which has been considered standard on the subject, but which, by its very nature, was too elaborate for class use. This condition has now been overcome by condensation into this single, comprehensive, inexpensive volume of all the salient facts of the larger work. It is generally believed that the best place in the nursing curriculum for the History of Nursing is in the early part of the first year, when the student is just beginning to form her conception of nursing, and is being initiated into its traditions. =The Many Excellent Features of this= =_Short History of Nursing_= will inevitably bring it into use in a very great number of Hospital Training Schools; it should, of course, be in the library of every Hospital which does not maintain a Training School. It is believed that it will be found to be =The Best Volume on This Important Subject= (_Over_) =Some of the= =Putnam Nursing Books= =Maxwell and Pope's Practical Nursing= Price $2.50. =Cadmus' Manual of Obstetrical Nursing= Approximate price $1.50. =Dock's Materia Medica for Nurses= Price $2.25. =Higgins' Psychology of Nursing= Price $2.50. =Pope's Manual of Nursing Procedure= Price $2.40. =Pope's Essentials of Anatomy and Physiology for Nurses= 600 pages. Price $2.90. =Pope's Quiz Book for Nurses= 485 pages. Price $2.50. =Dock and Nutting's History of Nursing= In four volumes. Illustrated volumes 1 and 2, price $7.50. Volumes 3 and 4, price $7.50. =Dock and Stewart's Short History of Nursing= One volume, 400 pages. Price $3.00. =Pope's Physics and Chemistry for Nurses= 450 pages. Price $2.50. Arthur W. Isca Medical and Nurse Books Besse Building Minneapolis, Minnesota * * * * * Transcriber's Note: Here is a list of corrected errors. Line numbers count from the start of the book itself not including the Transcriber's Note. Alternatively, use the HTML version, in which the errors are marked. l780: ecstacy changed to ecstasy l1258: Missing full-stop in i. e. l1665: or changed to of l1766: pasttime changed to pastime l1867: strees changed to stress l1883: council changed to counsel l1994: , changed to . l2324: em-dash changed to hyphen l2588: hypochondrasis changed to hypochondriasis l2817: successfuly changed to successfully l3334: stubborness changed to stubbornness l4120: in changed to is l4198: weakenss changed to weakness The inconsistent hyphenation of hypo-mania is as in the original. 
20522	----	(This file was produced from images generously made available by Case Western Reserve University Preservation Department Digital Library) THE STORY OF THE MIND BY JAMES MARK BALDWIN _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_ NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1905 COPYRIGHT, 1898, 1902, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. * * * * * PREFACE. In this little book I have endeavoured to maintain the simplicity which is the ideal of this series. It is more difficult, however, to be simple in a topic which, even in its illustrations, demands of the reader more or less facility in the exploration of his own mind. I am persuaded that the attempt to make the matter of psychology more elementary than is here done, would only result in making it untrue and so in defeating its own object. In preparing the book I have secured the right and welcomed the opportunity to include certain more popular passages from earlier books and articles. It is necessary to say this, for some people are loath to see a man repeat himself. When one has once said a thing, however, about as well as he can say it, there is no good reason that he should be forced into the pretence of saying something different simply to avoid using the same form of words a second time. The question, of course, is as to whether he should not then resign himself to keeping still, and letting others do the further speaking. There is much to be said for such a course. But if one have the right to print more severe and difficult things, and think he really has something to say which would instruct the larger audience, it would seem only fair to allow him to speak in the simpler way also, even though all that he says may not have the merit of escaping the charge of infringing his own copyrights! I am indebted to the proprietors of the following magazines for the use of such passages: The Popular Science Monthly, The Century Magazine, The Inland Educator; and with them I also wish to thank The Macmillan Company and the owners of Appletons' Universal Cyclopædia. As to the scope and contents of the Story, I have aimed to include enough statement of methods and results in each of the great departments of psychological research to give the reader an intelligent idea of what is being done, and to whet his appetite for more detailed information. In the choice of materials I have relied frankly on my own experience and in debatable matters given my own opinions. This gives greater reality to the several topics, besides making it possible, by this general statement, at once to acknowledge it, and also to avoid discussion and citation of authorities in the text. At the same time, in the exposition of general principles I have endeavoured to keep well within the accepted truth and terminology of psychology. It will be remarked that in several passages the evolution theory is adopted in its application to the mind. While this great theory can not be discussed in these pages, yet I may say that, in my opinion, the evidence in favour of it is about the same, and about as strong, as in biology, where it is now made a presupposition of scientific explanation. So far from being unwelcome, I find it in psychology no less than in biology a great gain, both from the point of view of scientific knowledge and from that of philosophical theory. Every great law that is added to our store adds also to our conviction that the universe is run through with Mind. Even so-called Chance, which used to be the "bogie" behind Natural Selection, has now been found to illustrate--in the law of Probabilities--the absence of Chance. As Professor Pearson has said: "We recognise that our conception of Chance is now utterly different from that of yore.... What we are to understand by a chance distribution is one in accordance with law, and one the nature of which can, for all practical purposes, be closely predicted." If the universe be pregnant with purpose, as we all wish to believe, why should not this purpose work itself out by an evolution process under law?--and if under law, why not the law of Probabilities? We who have our lives insured provide for our children through our knowledge and use of this law; and our plans for their welfare, in most of the affairs of life, are based upon the recognition of it. Who will deny to the Great Purpose a similar resource in producing the universe and in providing for us all? I add in a concluding section on Literature some references to various books in English, classified under the headings of the chapters of the text. These works will further enlighten the reader, and, if he persevere, possibly make a psychologist of him. J. MARK BALDWIN. PRINCETON, _April, 1898_. * * * * * CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND--PSYCHOLOGY II. WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON--INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY III. THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL--COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY IV. THE MIND OF THE CHILD--CHILD PSYCHOLOGY V. THE CONNECTION OF BODY WITH MIND--PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY--MENTAL DISEASES VI. HOW WE EXPERIMENT ON THE MIND--EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY VII. SUGGESTION AND HYPNOTISM VIII. THE TRAINING OF THE MIND--EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IX. THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY--SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY X. THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT XI. LITERATURE * * * * * LIST OF DIAGRAMS. FIGURE 1. Origin of instinct by organic selection 2. Reflex and voluntary circuits 3. Outer surface of the left hemisphere of the brain 4. Inner surface or the right hemisphere of the brain 5. The speech zone (after Collins) 6. Mouth-key 7. Apparatus for optical experiment 8. Memory curves * * * * * THE STORY OF THE MIND CHAPTER I. THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND--PSYCHOLOGY, Psychology is the science of the mind. It aims to find out all about the mind--the whole story--just as the other sciences aim to find out all about the subjects of which they treat--astronomy, of the stars; geology, of the earth; physiology, of the body. And when we wish to trace out the story of the mind, as psychology has done it, we find that there are certain general truths with which we should first acquaint ourselves; truths which the science has been a very long time finding out, but which we can now realize without a great deal of explanation. These general truths, we may say, are preliminary to the story itself; they deal rather with the need of defining, first of all, the subject or topic of which the story is to be told. 1. The first such truth is that the mind is not the possession of man alone. Other creatures have minds. Psychology no longer confines itself, as it formerly did, to the human soul, denying to the animals a place in this highest of all the sciences. It finds itself unable to require any test or evidence of the presence of mind which the animals do not meet, nor does it find any place at which the story of the mind can begin higher up than the very beginnings of life. For as soon as we ask, "How much mind is necessary to start with?" we have to answer, "Any mind at all"; and all the animals are possessed of some of the actions which we associate with mind. Of course, the ascertainment of the truth of this belongs--as the ascertainment of all the truths of nature belongs--to scientific investigation itself. It is the scientific man's rule not to assume anything except as he finds facts to support the assumption. So we find a great department of psychology devoted to just this question--i.e., of tracing mind in the animals and in the child, and noting the stages of what is called its "evolution" in the ascending scale of animal life, and its "development" in the rapid growth which every child goes through in the nursery. This gives us two chapters of the story of the mind. Together they are called "Genetic Psychology," having two divisions, "Animal or Comparative Psychology" and "Child Psychology." 2. Another general truth to note at the outset is this: that we are able to get real knowledge about the mind. This may seem at first sight a useless question to raise, seeing that our minds are, in the thought of many, about the only things we are really sure of. But that sort of sureness is not what science seeks. Every science requires some means of investigation, some method of procedure, which is more exact than the mere say-so of common sense; and which can be used over and again by different investigators and under different conditions. This gives a high degree of verification and control to the results once obtained. The chemist has his acids, and reagents, and blowpipes, etc.; they constitute his instruments, and by using them, under certain constant rules, he keeps to a consistent method. So with the physiologist; he has his microscope, his staining fluids, his means of stimulating the tissues of the body, etc. The physicist also makes much of his lenses, and membranes, and electrical batteries, and X-ray apparatus. In like manner it is necessary that the psychologist should have a recognised way of investigating the mind, which he can lay before anybody saying: "There, you see my results, you can get them for yourself by the same method that I used." In fulfilling this requirement the psychologist resorts to two methods of procedure. He is able to investigate the mind in two ways, which are of such general application that anybody of sufficient training to make scientific observations at all can repeat them and so confirm the results. One of these is what is called Introspection. It consists in taking note of one's own mind, as all sorts of changes are produced in it, such as emotions, memories, associations of events now gone, etc., and describing everything that takes place. Other persons can repeat the observations with their own minds, and see that what the first reports is true. This results in a body of knowledge which is put together and called "Introspective Psychology," and one chapter of the story should be devoted to that. Then the other way we have is that of experimenting on some one else's mind. We can act on our friends and neighbours in various ways, making them feel, think, accept, refuse this and that, and then observe how they act. The differences in their action will show the differences in the feelings, etc., which we have produced. In pursuing this method the psychologist takes a person--called the "subject" or the "re-agent"--into his laboratory, asks him to be willing to follow certain directions carefully, such as holding an electric handle, blowing into a tube, pushing a button, etc., when he feels, sees, or hears certain things; this done with sufficient care, the results are found recorded in certain ways which the psychologist has arranged beforehand. This second way of proceeding gives results which are gathered under the two headings "Experimental" and "Physiological Psychology." They should also have chapters in our story. 3. There is besides another truth which the psychologist nowadays finds very fruitful for his knowledge of the mind; this is the fact that minds vary much in different individuals, or classes of individuals. First, there is the pronounced difference between healthy minds and diseased minds. The differences are so great that we have to pursue practically different methods of treating the diseased, not only as a class apart from the well minds--putting such diseased persons into institutions--but also as differing from one another. Just as the different forms of bodily disease teach us a great deal about the body--its degree of strength, its forms of organization and function, its limitations, its heredity, the inter-connection of its parts, etc.--so mental diseases teach us much about the normal mind. This gives another sphere of information which constitutes "Abnormal Psychology" or "Mental Pathology." [Illustration: PLATE I.] [Illustration: PLATE II.] There are also very striking variations between individuals even within normal life; well people are very different from one another. All that is commonly meant by character or temperament as distinguishing one person from another is evidence of these differences. But really to know all about mind we should see what its variations are, and endeavour to find out why the variations exist. This gives, then, another topic, "Individual or Variational Psychology." This subject should also have notice in the story. 4. Allied with this the demand is made upon the psychologist that he show to the teacher how to train the mind; how to secure its development in the individual most healthfully and productively, and with it all in a way to allow the variations of endowment which individuals show each to bear its ripest fruit. This is "Educational or Pedagogical Psychology." 5. Besides all these great undertakings of the psychologist, there is another department of fact which he must some time find very fruitful, although as yet he has not been able to investigate it thoroughly: he should ask about the place of the mind in the world at large. If we seek to know what the mind has done in the world, what a wealth of story comes to us from the very beginnings of history! Mind has done all that has been done: it has built human institutions, indited literature, made science, discovered the laws of Nature, used the forces of the material world, embodied itself in all the monuments which stand to testify to the presence of man. What could tell us more of what mind is than this record of what mind has done? The ethnologists are patiently tracing the records left by early man in his utensils, weapons, clothing, religious rites, architectural remains, etc., and the anthropologists are seeking to distinguish the general and essential from the accidental and temporary in all the history of culture and civilization. They are making progress very slowly, and it is only here and there that principles are being discovered which reveal to the psychologist the necessary modes of action and development of the mind. All this comes under the head of "Race Psychology." 6. Finally, another department, the newest of all, investigates the action of minds when they are thrown together in crowds. The animals herd, the insects swarm, most creatures live in companies; they are gregarious, and man no less is social in his nature. So there is a psychology of herds, crowds, mobs, etc., all put under the heading of "Social Psychology." It asks the question, What new phases of the mind do we find when individuals unite in common action?--or, on the other hand, when they are artificially separated? We now have with all this a fairly complete idea of what The Story of the Mind should include, when it is all told. Many men are spending their lives each at one or two of these great questions. But it is only as the results are all brought together in a consistent view of that wonderful thing, the mind, that we may hope to find out all that it is. We must think of it as a growing, developing thing, showing its stages of evolution in the ascending animal scale, and also in the unfolding of the child; as revealing its nature in every change of our daily lives which we experience and tell to one another or find ourselves unable to tell; as allowing itself to be discovered in the laboratory, and as willing to leave the marks of its activity on the scientist's blackened drum and the dial of the chronoscope; as subject to the limitations of health and disease, needing to be handled with all the resources of the asylum, the reformatory, the jail, as well as with the delicacy needed to rear the sensitive girl or to win the love of the bashful maid; as manifesting itself in the development of humanity from the first rude contrivances for the use of fire, the first organizations for defence, and the first inscriptions of picture writing, up to the modern inventions in electricity, the complex constitutions of government, and the classic productions of literary art; and as revealing its possibilities finally in the brutal acts of the mob, the crimes of a lynching party, and the deeds of collective righteousness performed by our humane and religious societies. It would be impossible, of course, within the limits of this little volume, to give even the main results in so many great chapters of this ambitious and growing science. I shall not attempt that; but the rather select from the various departments certain outstanding results and principles. From these as elevations the reader may see the mountains on the horizon, so to speak, which at his leisure, and with better guides, he may explore. The choice of materials from so rich a store has depended also, as the preface states, on the writer's individual judgment, and it is quite probable that no one will find the matters altogether wisely chosen. All the great departments now thus briefly described, however, are represented in the following chapters. CHAPTER II. WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON--INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY. Of all the sources now indicated from which the psychologist may draw, that of so-called Introspective Psychology--the actual reports of what we find going on in our minds from time to time--is the most important. This is true for two great reasons, which make Psychology different from all the other sciences. The first claim which the introspective method has upon us arises from the fact that it is only by it that we can examine the mind directly, and get its events in their purity. Each of us knows himself better than he knows any one else. So this department, in which we deal each with his own consciousness at first hand, is more reliable, if free from error, than any of those spheres in which we examine other persons, so long as we are dealing with the psychology of the individual. The second reason that this method of procedure is most important is found in the fact that all the other departments of psychology--and with them all the other sciences--have to use introspection, after all, to make sure of the results which they get by other methods. For example, the natural scientist, the botanist, let us say, and the physical scientist, the electrician, say, can not observe the plants or the electric sparks without really using his introspection upon what is before him. The light from the plant has to go into his brain and leave a certain effect in his mind, and then he has to use introspection to report what he sees. The astronomer who has bad eyes can not observe the stars well or discover the facts about them, because his introspection in reporting what he sees proceeds on the imperfect and distorted images coming in from his defective eyesight. So a man given to exaggeration, who is not able to report truthfully what he remembers, can not be a good botanist, since this defect in introspection will render his observation of the plants unreliable. In practice the introspective method has been most important, and the development of psychology has been up to very recently mainly due to its use. As a consequence, there are many general principles of mental action and many laws of mental growth already discovered which should in the first instance engage our attention. They constitute the main framework of the building; and we should master them well before we go on to find the various applications which they have in the other departments of the subject. The greater results of "Introspective" or, as it is very often called, "General" psychology may be summed up in a few leading principles, which sound more or less abstract and difficult, but which will have many concrete illustrations in the subsequent chapters. The facts of experience, the actual events which we find taking place in our minds, fall naturally into certain great divisions. These are very easily distinguished from one another. The first distinction is covered by the popularly recognised difference between "thought and conduct," or "knowledge and life." On the one hand, the mind is looked at as receiving, taking in, learning; and on the other hand, as acting, willing, doing this or that. Another great distinction contrasts a third mental condition, "feeling," with both of the other two. We say a man has knowledge, but little feeling, head but no heart; or that he knows and feels the right but does not live up to it. I. On the side of Reception we may first point out the avenues through which our experiences come to us: these are the senses--a great number, not simply the five special senses of which we were taught in our childhood. Besides Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, and Touch, we now know of certain others very definitely. There are Muscle sensations coming from the moving of our limbs, Organic sensations from the inner vital organs, Heat and Cold sensations which are no doubt distinct from each other, Pain sensations probably having their own physical apparatus, sensations from the Joints, sensations of Pressure, of Equilibrium of the body, and a host of peculiar sensational conditions which, for all we know, may be separate and distinct, or may arise from combinations of some of the others. Such, for example, are the sensations which are felt when a current of electricity is sent through the arm. All these give the mind its material to work upon; and it gets no material in the first instance from any other source. All the things we know, all our opinions, knowledges, beliefs, are absolutely dependent at the start upon this supply of material from our senses; although, as we shall see, the mind gets a long way from its first subjection to this avalanche of sensations which come constantly pouring in upon it from the external world. Yet this is the essential and capital function of Sensation: to supply the material on which the mind does the work in its subsequent thought and action. Next comes the process by which the mind holds its material for future use, the process of Memory; and with it the process by which it combines its material together in various useful forms, making up things and persons out of the material which has been received and remembered--called Association of Ideas, Thinking, Reasoning, etc. All these processes used to be considered as separate "faculties" of the soul and as showing the mind doing different things. But that view is now completely given up. Psychology now treats the activity of the mind in a much more simple way. It says: Mind does only one thing; in all these so-called faculties we have the mind doing this one thing only on the different materials which come and go in it. This one thing is the combining, or holding together, of the elements which first come to it as sensations, so that it can act on a group of them as if they were only one and represented only one external thing. Let me illustrate this single and peculiar sort of process as it goes on in the mind. We may ask how the child apprehends an orange out there on the table before him. It can not be said that the orange goes into the child's mind by any one of its senses. By sight he gets only the colour and shape of the orange, by smell he gets only its odour, by taste its sweetness, and by touch its smoothness, rotundity, etc. Furthermore, by none of these senses does he find out the individuality of the orange, or distinguish it from other things which involve the same or similar sensations--say an apple. It is easy to see that after each of the senses has sent in its report something more is necessary: the combining of them all together in the same place and at the same time, the bringing up of an appropriate name, and with that a sort of relating or distinguishing of this group of sensations from those of the apple. Only then can we say that the knowledge, "here is an orange," has been reached. Now this is the _one typical way the mind has of acting_, this combining of all the items or groups of items into ever larger and more fruitful combinations. This is called Apperception. The mind, we say, "apperceives" the orange when it is able to treat all the separate sensations together as standing for one thing. And the various circumstances under which the mind does this give the occasions for the different names which the earlier psychology used for marking off different "faculties." These names are still convenient, however, and it may serve to make the subject clear, as well as to inform the reader of the meaning of these terms, to show how they all refer to this one kind of mental action. The case of the orange illustrates what is usually called Perception. It is the case in which the result is the knowledge of an actual object in the outside world. When the same process goes on after the actual object has been removed it is Memory. When it goes on again in a way which is not controlled by reference to such an outside object--usually it is a little fantastic, as in dreams or fancy, but often it is useful as being so well done as to anticipate what is really true in the outside world--then it is Imagination. If it is actually untrue, but still believed in, we call it Illusion or Hallucination. When it uses mere symbols, such as words, gestures, writing, etc., to stand for whole groups of things, it is Thinking or Reasoning. So we may say that what the mind arrives at through this its one great way of acting, no matter which of these forms it takes on, except in the cases in which it is not true in its results to the realities, is Knowledge. Thus we see that the terms and faculties of the older psychology can be arranged under this doctrine of Apperception without the necessity of thinking of the mind as doing more than the one thing. It simply groups and combines its material in different ways and in ever higher degrees of complexity. Apperception, then, is the one principle of mental activity on the side of its reception and treatment of the materials of experience. There is another term very current in psychology by which this same process is sometimes indicated: the phrase Association of Ideas. This designates the fact that when two things have been perceived or thought of together, they tend to come up together in the mind in the future; and when a thing has been perceived which resembles another, or is contrasted with it, they tend to recall each other in the same way. It is plain, however, that this phrase is applied to the single thoughts, sensations, or other mental materials, in their relations or connections among themselves. They are said to be "associated" with one another. This way of speaking of the mental materials, instead of speaking of the mind's activity, is convenient; and it is quite right to do so, since it is no contradiction to say that the thoughts, etc., which the mind "apperceives" remain "associated" together. From this explanation it is evident that the Association of Ideas also comes under the mental process of Apperception of which we have been speaking. There is, however, another tendency of the mind in the treatment of its material, a tendency which shows us in actual operation the activity with which we have now become familiar. When we come to look at any particular case of apperception or association we find that the process must go on from the platform which the mind's attainments have already reached. The passing of the mental states has been likened to a stream which flows on from moment to moment with no breaks. It is so continuous that we can never say: "I will start afresh, forget the past, and be uninfluenced by my history." However we may wish this, we can never do it; for the oncoming current of the stream is just what we speak of as ourselves, and we can not avoid bringing the memories, imaginations, expectations, disappointments, etc., up to the present. So the effect which any new event or experience, happening for the first time, is to have upon us depends upon the way it fits into the current of these onflowing influences. The man I see for the first time may be so neutral to me that I pass him unregarded. But let him return after I have once remarked him, or let him resemble a man whom I know, or let him give me some reason to observe, fear, revere, think of him in any way, then he is a positive factor in my stream. He has been taken up into the flow of my mental life, and he henceforth contributes something to it. For example, a little child, after learning to draw a man's face, with two eyes, the nose and mouth, and one ear on each side, will afterward, when told to draw a profile, still put in two eyes and affix an ear to each side. The drift of mental habit tells on the new result and he can not escape it. He will still put in the two eyes and two ears when he has before him a copy showing only one ear and neither eye. In all such cases the new is said to be Assimilated to the old. The customary figure for man in the child's memory assimilates the materials of the new copy set before him. Now this tendency is universal. The mind must assimilate its new material as much as possible, thus making the old stand for the new. Otherwise there would be no containing the fragmentary details which we should have to remember and handle. Furthermore, it is through this tendency that we go on to form the great classes of objects--such as man, animal, virtue--into which numbers of similar details are put, and which we call General Notions or Concepts. We may understand by Assimilation, therefore, the general tendency of new experiences to be treated by us in the ways which similar material has been treated before, with the result that the mind proceeds from the particular case to the general class. Summing up our outcome so far, we find that general psychology has reached three great principles in its investigation of knowledge. First, we have the combining tendency of the mind, the grouping together and relating of mental states and of things, called _Apperception_. Then, second, there are the particular relations established among the various states, etc., which are combined; these are called _Associations_ of Ideas. And, third, there is the tendency of the mind to use its old experiences and habits as general patterns or nets for the sorting out and distributing of all the new details of daily life; this is called _Assimilation_. II. Let us now turn to the second great aspect of the mind, as general or introspective psychology considers it, the aspect which presents itself in Action or conduct. The fact that we act is of course as important as the fact that we think or the fact that we feel; and the distinction which separates thought and action should not be made too sharp. Yet there is a distinction. To understand action we must again go to introspection. This comes out as soon as we ask how we reach our knowledge of the actions of others. Of course, we say at once that we see them. And that is true; we do see them, while as to their thoughts we only infer them from what we see of their action. But, on the other hand, we may ask: How do we come to infer this or that thought from this or that action of another? The only reply is: Because when we act in the same way this is the way we feel. So we get back in any case to our own consciousness and must ask how is this action related to this thought in our own mind. To this question psychology has now a general answer: Our action is always the result of our thought, of the elements of knowledge which are at the time present in the mind. Of course, there are actions which we do from purely nervous reasons. These are the Instincts, which come up again when we consider the animals. But these we may neglect so long as we are investigating actions which we consider our own. Apart from the Instincts, the principle holds that behind every action which our conduct shows there must be something thought of, some sensation or knowledge then in mind, some feeling swelling within our breast, which prompts to the action. This general principle is Motor Suggestion. It simply means that we are unable to have any thought or feeling whatever, whether it comes from the senses, from memory, from the words, conduct, or command of others, which does not have a direct influence upon our conduct. We are quite unable to avoid the influence of our own thoughts upon our conduct, and often the most trivial occurrences of our daily lives act as suggestions to deeds of very great importance to ourselves and others. For example, the influence of the newspaper reports of crime stimulate other individuals to perform the same crimes by this principle of suggestion; for the fact is that the reading of the report causes us to entertain the thoughts, and these thoughts tend to arouse in us their corresponding trains of suggested action. The most interesting and striking sphere of operation of the principle of Suggestion (of other sorts as well as motor) is what is commonly known simply as Hypnotism. To that, as well as to further illustrations of Suggestion, we will return later on. We are able, however, to see a little more in detail how the law of Motor Suggestion works by asking what sort of action is prompted in each case of thought or feeling, at the different levels of the mind's activity which have been distinguished above as all illustrating Apperception--e.g., the stages known as Perception, Imagination, Reasoning, etc. We act, of course, on our perceptions constantly; most of our routine life is made up of such action on the perceptions of objects which lie about us. The positions of things in the house, in the streets, in the office, in the store, are so well known that we carry out a series of actions with reference to these objects without much supervision from our consciousness. Here the law of Motor Suggestion works along under the guidance of Perception, Memory, and the Association of Ideas. Then we find also, in much of our action, an element due to the exercise of the Imagination. We fill in the gaps in the world of perception by imagining appropriate connections; and we then act as if we knew that these imaginations were realities. This is especially true in our intercourse with our fellow-men. We never really know what they will do from time to time. Their action is still future and uncertain; but from our familiarity with their character, we surmise or imagine what they expect or think, and we then act so as to make our conduct fit into theirs. Here is suggestion of a personal kind which depends upon our ability, in a sense, to reconstruct the character of others, leading us out into appropriate action. This is the sphere of the most important affairs of our lives. It appears especially so when we consider its connection with the next great sort of action from suggestion. This next and highest sphere is action from the general or abstract thoughts which we have been able to work up by the apperceiving activity of the mind. In this sphere we have a special name for those thoughts which influence us directly and lead us to action: we call such thoughts Motives. We also have a special name for the sort of action which is prompted by clearly-thought-out motives: Will. But in spite of this emphasis given to certain actions of ours as springing from what is called Will, we must be careful to see that Will is not a new faculty, or capacity, added to mind, and which is different from the ways of action which the mind had before the Will arose. Will is only a name for the action upon suggestions of conduct which are so clear in our minds that we are able to deliberate upon them, acting only after some reflection, and so having a sense that the action springs from our own choice. The real reasons for action, however, are thoughts, in this case, just as in the earlier cases they were. In this case we call them Motives; but we are dependent upon these Motives, these Suggestions; we can not act without Motives, nor can we fail to act on those Motives which we have; just as, in the earlier cases, we could not act without some sort of Perceptions or Imaginations or Memories, and we could not fail to act on the Perceptions or other mental states which we had. Voluntary action or Will is therefore only a complex and very highly conscious case of the general law of Motor Suggestion; it is the form which suggested action takes on when Apperception is at its highest level. The converse of Suggestion is also true--that we can not perform an action without having in the mind at the time the appropriate thought, or image, or memory to suggest the action. This dependence of action upon the thought which the mind has at the time is conclusively shown in certain patients having partial paralysis. These patients find that when the eyes are bandaged they can not use their limbs, and it is simply because they can not realize without seeing the limb how it would feel to move it; but open the eyes and let them see the limb--then they move it freely. A patient can not speak when the cortex of the brain is injured in the particular spot which is used in remembering how the words feel or sound when articulated. Many such cases lead to the general position that for each of our intentional actions we must have some way of thinking about the action, of remembering how it feels, looks, etc.; we must have something in mind _equivalent_ to the experience of the movement. This is called the principle of Kinæsthetic Equivalents, an expression which loses its formidable sound when we remember that "kinæsthetic" means having the feeling of movement; so the principle expresses the truth that we must in every case have some thought or mental picture in mind which is equivalent to the feeling of the movement we desire to make; if not, we can not succeed in making it. What we mean by the "freedom" of the will is not ability to do anything without thinking, but ability to think all the alternatives together and to act on this larger thought. Free action is the fullest expression of thought and of the Self which thinks it. It is interesting to observe the child getting his Equivalents day by day. He can not perform a new movement simply by wishing to do so; he has no Equivalents in his mind to proceed upon. But as he learns the action, gradually striking the proper movements one by one--oftenest by imitation, as we will see later on--he stores the necessary Equivalents up in his memory, and afterward only needs to think how the movements feel or look, or how words sound, to be able to make the movements or speak the words forthwith. III. Introspection finds another great class of conditions in experience, again on the receptive side--conditions which convert the mind from the mere theatre of indifferent changes into the vitally interested, warmly intimate thing which our mental life is to each of us. This is the sphere of Feeling. We may see without more ado that while we are receiving sensations and thoughts and suggestions, and acting upon them in the variety of ways already pointed out, we ourselves are not indifferent spectators of this play, this come-and-go of processes. We are directly implicated; indeed, the very sense of a self, an ego, a me-and-mine, in each consciousness, arises from the fact that all this come-and-go is a personal growth. The mind is not a mere machine doing what the laws of its action prescribe. We find that nothing happens which does not affect the mind itself for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, for pleasure or for pain; and there spring up a series of attitudes of the mind itself, according as it is experiencing or expecting to experience what to it is good or bad. This is, then, the great meaning of Feeling; it is the sense in the mind that it is itself in some way influenced for good or for ill by what goes on within it. It stands midway between thought and action. We feel with reference to what we think, and we act because we feel. All action is guided by feeling. Feeling shows two well-marked characters: first, the Excitement of taking a positive attitude; and, second, the Pleasure or Pain that goes with it. Here, again, it may suffice to distinguish the stages which arise as we go from the higher to the lower, from the life of Sensation and Perception up to that of Thought. This was our method in both of the other phases of the mental life--Knowledge and Action. Doing this, therefore, in the case of Feeling also, we find different terms applied to the different phases of feeling. In the lowest sort of mental life, as we may suppose the helpless newborn child to have it, and as we also think it exists in certain low forms of animal life, feeling is not much more than Pleasures and Pains depending largely upon the physical conditions under which life proceeds. It is likely that there are both Pleasures and Pains which are actually sensations with special nerve apparatus of their own; and there are also states of the Comfortable and the Uncomfortable, or of pleasant and unpleasant feeling, due to the way the mind is immediately affected. These are conditions of Excitement added to the Sensations of Pleasure and Pain. Coming up to the life of Memory and Imagination, we find many great classes of Emotions testifying to the attitudes which the mind takes toward its experiences. They are remarkably rich and varied, these emotions. Hope gives place to its opposite despair, joy to sorrow, and regret succeeds expectation. No one can enumerate the actual phases of the emotional life. The differences which are most pronounced--as between hope and fear, joy and sorrow, anger and love--have special names, and their stimulating causes are so constant that they have also certain fixed ways of showing themselves in the body, the so-called emotional Expressions. It is by these that we see and sympathize with the emotional states of other persons. The most that we have room here to say is that there is a constant ebb and flow, and that we rarely attain a state of relative freedom from the influence of emotion. The fixed bodily Expressions of emotion are largely hereditary and common to man and the animals. It is highly probable that they first arose as attitudes useful in the animal's environments for defence, flight, seizure, embrace, etc., and have descended to man as survivals, so becoming indications of states of the mind. The final and highest manifestation of the life of feeling is what we call Sentiment. Sentiment is aroused in response to certain so-called ideal states of thought. The trend of mental growth toward constantly greater adequacy in its knowledge leads it to anticipate conditions when its attainments will be made complete. There are certain sorts of reality whose completeness, thus imagined, arouses in us emotional states of the greatest power and value. The thought of God gives rise to the Religious sentiment, that of the good to the Ethical or Moral sentiment, that of the beautiful to the Esthetic sentiment. These sentiments represent the most refined and noble fruitage of the life of feeling, as the thoughts which they accompany refer to the most elevated and ideal objects. And it is equally true that the conduct which is performed under the inspiration of Sentiment is the noblest and most useful in which man can engage. CHAPTER III. THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL--COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. It has already been pointed out that the animal has a very important share of the endowment which we call mind. Only recently has he been getting his due. He was formerly looked upon, under the teachings of a dualistic philosophy and of a jealous humanity, as a soulless machine, a mere automaton which was moved by the starting of certain springs to run on until the machine ran down. There are two reasons that this view has been given up, each possibly important enough to have accomplished the revolution and to have given rise to Animal Psychology. First, there is the rise of the evolution theory, which teaches that there is no absolute break between man and the higher animals in the matter of mental endowment, and that what difference there is must itself be the result of the laws of mental growth; and the second reason is that the more adequate the science of the human mind has become the more evident has it also become that man himself is more of a machine than had been supposed. Man grows by certain laws; his progress is conditioned by the environment, both physical and social, in which he lives; his mind is a part of the natural system of things. So with the animal. The animal fulfils, as far as he can, the same sort of function; he has his environment, both physical and social; he works under the same laws of growth which man also obeys; his mind exhibits substantially the same phenomena which the human mind exhibits in its early stages in the child. All this means that the animal has as good right to recognition, as a mind-bearing creature, so to speak, as the child; and if we exclude him we should also exclude the child. Further, this also means--what is more important for the science of psychology--that the development of the mind in its early stages and in certain of its directions of progress is revealed most adequately in the animals. _Animal Instinct._--Turning to the animals, the first thing to strike us is the remarkable series of so-called animal Instincts. Everybody knows what animal instincts are like; it is only necessary to go to a zoölogical garden to see them in operation on a large scale. Take the house cat and follow her through the life of a single day, observing her actions. She washes her face and makes her toilet in the morning by instinct. She has her peculiar instinctive ways of catching the mouse for breakfast. She whets her appetite by holding back her meal possibly for an hour, in the meantime playing most cruelly with the pitiful mouse, letting it run and catching it again, and doing this over and over. If she has children she attends to their training in the details of cat etiquette and custom with the utmost care, all by instinct; and the kittens instinctively respond to her attentions. She conducts herself during the day with remarkable cleanliness of life, making arrangements which civilized man follows with admiration. She shows just the right abhorrence of water for a creature that is not able to swim. She knows just what enemies to fly from and when to turn and fight, using with inborn dexterity her formidable claws. She prefers nocturnal excursions and sociabilities, having eyes which make it safe to be venturesome in the dark. She has certain vocal expressions of her emotions, which man in vain attempts to eradicate with all the agencies of domestication. She has special arts to attract her mate, and he in turn is able to charm her with songs which charm nobody else. And so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Observe the dog, the birds of different species, the monkeys, the hares, and you find wonderful differences of habit, each adapting the animal differently, but with equal effectiveness, to the life which he in particular is called upon to lead. The ants and bees are notoriously expert in the matter of instinct. They have colonies in which some of the latest principles of social organization seem to find analogues: slavery, sexual regulations, division of labour, centralization of resources, government distribution of food, capital punishment, etc. All this--not to stop upon details which the books on animal life give in great abundance--has furnished grounds for speculation for centuries, and it is only in the last generation that the outlines of a theory of instinct have been filled in with substantial knowledge. A rapid sketch of this theory may be drawn in the following pages. 1. In instinct in general there is a basis of inherited nervous tendency toward the performance of just the sort of action which the instinct exhibits. This nervous tendency shows itself independently of learning by the individual in a great many cases, as in the instinct of sucking by young animals, pecking for food by young fowls, the migrating actions of adult mammals and birds, the courting movements of many varieties of animal species. In all this we have what is called the "perfect" instinct. To be perfect, an instinct must be carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready, without any instruction, any model to imitate, any experience to go upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely congenital or inborn; the nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as the external conditions of life are such as to make its performance appropriate and useful. 2. On the other hand, many instincts--indeed, probably the greater number--are not perfect, but "imperfect." Imperfect instincts are those which do not fully equip the animal with the function in question, but only take him part way to the goal. He has a spontaneous tendency to do certain things, such as building a nest, singing, etc.; but he is not able to do these things adequately or perfectly if left to himself from birth. This sort of endowment with imperfect instincts has been the field of some of the most interesting research in animal psychology, and has led to a new view of the relation of instinct to intelligence. 3. It has been found that young animals, birds, etc., depend upon the example and instruction of adults for the first performance of many actions that seem to be instinctive. This dependence may exist even in cases in which there is yet a congenital tendency to perform the action. Many birds, for example, have a general instinct to build a nest; but in many cases, if put in artificial circumstances, they build imperfect nests. Birds also have an instinct to make vocal calls; but if kept from birth out of hearing of the peculiar notes of their species, they come to make cries of a different sort, or learn to make the notes of some other species with which they are thrown. 4. The principal agency for the learning of the animals, and for the supplementing of their instincts, is Imitation. The sight of certain movements on the part of the adult animals, or the hearing of their cries, calls, notes, etc., leads the young to fall into an imitation of these movements or vocal performances. The endowment which such a young animal has in the direction of making movements and cries similar to those of his species aids him, of course, in imitating these in preference to others. So the endowment and the tendency to imitate directly aid each other in all such functions, and hurry the little creature on in his acquisition of the habits of his species. We find young animals clinging even in their imitations pretty closely to their own proper fathers and mothers, who are thus enabled to bring them up _comme il faut_. 5. There is every reason to think, moreover, that the tendency to imitate is itself instinctive. Young animals, notably the monkey and the child, fall spontaneously to imitating when they reach a certain age. Imitation shows itself to be instinctive in the case of the mocking bird, the parrot, etc. Furthermore, the mechanism of this function of imitation is now very well known. The principle of psychology recognised above under the phrase Kinæsthetic Equivalents, teaches us that the idea of a movement, coming into the mind through sight or some other sense, stirs up the proper apparatus to bring about the same movement in the observer. This we see in the common tendency of an audience to repeat the gestures of a speaker, and in many similar cases. When this principle is extended to include all sorts of experiences besides those of movement, we have what is generally called Imitation. Moreover, every time that by action the child imitates, he perceives his own imitation, and this again acts as a "copy" or model for another repetition of the act, and so on. This method of keeping himself going gives the young animal or child constant practice, and renders him more and more efficient in the acts necessary to his life. 6. It is evident what great profit accrues from this arrangement whereby a general instinct like imitation takes the place of a number of special instincts, or supplements them. It gives a measure of plasticity to the creature. He can now respond suitably to changes in the environment in which he lives. The special instincts, on the contrary, are for the most part so fixed that the animal must act just as they require him to in this or that circumstance; but as soon as his instinct takes on the form of imitation, the resulting action tends to conform itself to the model actions of the other creatures which set "copies" before him. These more or less new results due to recent research in the province of Instinct have had direct bearing upon theories of the origin of instinct and of its place in animal life. _Theories of Instinct._--Apart from the older view which saw in animal instinct simply a matter of original created endowment, whereby each animal was made once for all "after his kind," and according to which there is no further reason that the instincts are what they are than that they were made so; apart from this "special creation" view, two different ideas have had currency, both based upon the theory of evolution. Each of these views assumes that the instincts have been developed from more simple animal actions by a gradual process; but they differ as to the elements originally entering into the actions which afterward became instinctive. 1. First, there is what is called the Reflex Theory. This holds that instincts are reflex actions, like the closing of the eye when an object threatens to enter it, only much more complex. They are due to the compounding and adding together of simple reflexes, in greater and greater number, and with increasing efficiency. This theory attempts to account for instinct entirely in terms of nervous action. It goes with that view of evolution which holds that the nervous system has had its growth from generation to generation by the continued reflex adjustments of the organism to its environment, whereby more and more delicate adaptations to the external world were secured. In this way, say the advocates of this theory, we may account for the fact that the animal has no adequate knowledge of what he is doing when he performs an act instinctively; he has no end or aim in his mind; he simply feels his nervous system doing what it is fitted to do by its organic adaptations to the stimulations of air, and earth, and sea, whatever these may be. But it may be asked: Why do succeeding generations improve each on its parents, so that there is a gradual tendency to perfect the instinct? The answer to this question brings up another great law of biology--the principle of Variations. This principle states the common fact that in every case of a family of offspring the individual young vary slightly in all directions from their parents. Admitting this, we will find in each group of families some young individuals which are better than their parents; these will have the advantage over others and will be the ones to grow up and have the children of the next generation again, and so on. So by constant Variation and Natural Selection--that is, the "Survival of the Fittest" in competition with the rest--there will be constant improvement in the Instinct. 2. The other theory, the rival one, holds that there are some instincts which show so plainly the marks of Reason that some degree of intelligent adjustment to the environment must be allowed to the animal in the acquiring of these functions. For example, we are told that some of the muscular movements involved in the instincts--such, for example, as the bird's nest-building--are so complex and so finely adjusted to an end, that it is straining belief to suppose that they could have arisen gradually by reflex adaptation alone. There is also a further difficulty with the reflex theory which has seemed insurmountable to many of the ablest psychologists of animal life; the difficulty, namely, that many of the instincts require the action of a great many muscles at the same time, so acting in "correlation" with or support of one another that it is impossible to suppose that the instinct has been acquired gradually. For in the very nature of these cases we can not suppose the instinct to have ever been imperfect, seeing that the partial instinct which would have preceded the perfect performance for some generations would have been not only of no use to the creature, but in many cases positively injurious. For instance, what use to an animal to be able partly to make the movements of swimming, or to the birds to build an inadequate nest? Such instincts would not be usable at all. So we are told by the second theory that the animals must have had intelligence to do these things when they first acquired them. Yet, as is everywhere admitted, after the instinct has been acquired by the species it is then carried out without knowledge and intelligent design, being handed down from generation to generation by heredity. This seems reasonable, for we do find that actions which were at first intelligent may be performed so frequently that we come to do them without thinking of them; to do them from habit. So the animals, we are told, have come to do theirs reflexly, although at first they required intelligence. From this point of view--that although intelligence was at first required, yet the actions have become instinctive and lacking in intelligent direction in later generations--this is called the theory of Lapsed Intelligence. This theory has much to commend it. It certainly meets the objection to the reflex theory which was stated just above--the objection that some of the instincts could not have arisen by gradual reflex adaptations. It also accounts for the extremely intelligent appearance which many instincts have. But this view in turn is liable to a criticism which has grown in force with the progress of biological knowledge in recent years. This criticism is based on the fact that the theory of lapsed intelligence demands that the actions which the animals of one generation have acquired by their intelligence should be handed down through heredity to the next generation, and so on. It is evident that unless this be true it does no good to the species for one generation to do things intelligently, seeing that if the effects on the nervous system are not transmitted to their children, then the next and later generations will have to start exactly where their fathers did, and the actions in question will never become ingrained in the nervous system at all. Now, the force of this criticism is overwhelming to those who believe--as the great majority of biologists now do[1]--that none of the modifications or so-called "characters" acquired by the parents, none of the effects of use or disuse of their limbs, none of the tendencies or habits of action, in short, none of the changes wrought in body or mind of the parents during their lifetime, are inherited by their children. The only sorts of modification which show themselves in subsequent generations are the deep-seated effects of disease, poison, starvation, and other causes which concern the system as a whole, but which show no tendency to reproduce by heredity any of the special actions or functions which the fathers and mothers may have learned and practised. If this difficulty could be met, the theory that intelligence has been at work in the origination of the complex instincts would be altogether the preferable one of the two; but if not, then the "lapsed intelligence" view must be thrown overboard. [Footnote 1: The matter is still under discussion, however, and I do not mean in any way to deny the authority of those who still accept the "inheritance of acquired characters."] Recent discussion of evolution has brought out a point of view under the name of Organic Selection which has a very fruitful application to this controversy over the origin of instincts. This point of view is one which in a measure reconciles the two theories. It claims that it is possible for the intelligent adaptations, or any sort of "accommodations," made by the individuals of one generation, to set the direction of subsequent evolution, even though there be no direct inheritance of acquired characters from father to son. It proceeds in the case of instinct somewhat thus: Suppose we say, with the first theory given above, that the organism has certain reflexes which show some degree of adaptation to the environment; then suppose we admit the point, urged by the advocates of the lapsed intelligence theory, that the gradual improvement of these reflexes by variations in the endowment of successive generations would not suffice for the origin of instinct, seeing that partial instincts would not be useful; and, further, suppose we agree that many of the complex instincts really involved intelligent adaptation in their acquisition. These points carefully understood, then one new and further principle will enable us to complete a theory which will avoid the objections to both the others. This principle is nothing else than what we have seen already--namely, that the intelligence supplements the partial instincts in each generation and makes them useful in the respects in which they are inadequate, and so keeps the young alive in successive generations as long as the instinct is imperfect. This gives the species time gradually to supplement its instinctive endowment, in the course of many generations each of which uses its intelligence in the same way: time to accumulate, by the occurrence of variations among the offspring, the changes in the nervous system which the perfect instinct requires. Thus as time goes on the dependence of each generation upon the aid of intelligence is less and less, until the nervous system becomes capable of performing the function quite alone. The result then will be the same as if the acquisitions made by each generation had been inherited, while in reality they have not. All that this theory requires in addition to what is admitted by both the historical views is that the species be kept alive long enough by the aid of its intelligence, which supplements imperfect instincts, to give it time to produce sufficient variations in the right direction. The instinct then achieves its independence, and intelligent supervision of it is no longer necessary (see Fig. 1). [Illustration: FIG. 1,--Origin of instinct by Organic Selection: _A n_, perfect instinct. 1, 2 ... _n_, successive generations. Solid lines, nervous equipment in the direction of the instinct. Dotted lines, intelligence supplementing the nervous equipment. The intelligence is relied upon to keep the species alive until by congenital variations the nervous equipment becomes "perfect."] This theory is directly confirmed by the facts, already spoken of, which show that many instincts are imperfect, but are pieced out and made effective by the intelligent imitations and acquisitions of the young creatures. The little chick, for example, does not know the value of water when he sees it, as essential as water is to his life; but he depends upon imitation of his mother's drinking, or upon the mere accident of wetting his bill, to stimulate his partial instinct of drinking in the peculiar fashion characteristic of fowls, by throwing back the head. So in other functions which are peculiar to a species and upon which their very lives depend, we find the delicate adjustment between intelligent adaptation by conscious action and the partially formed instincts which the creatures possess. In the theory of Organic Selection, therefore, we seem to have a positive solution of the question of the origin of instinct. It is capable of a similar application in other cases where evolution has taken certain definite directions, seemingly guided by intelligence. It shows us that mind has had a positive place in the evolution of organic nature. * * * * * _Animal Intelligence._--Coming to consider what further equipment the animals have, we light upon the fact just spoken of when we found it necessary to appeal in some measure to the animal's Intelligence to supplement his instincts. What is meant by Intelligence? This word may be used in the broad sense of denoting all use of consciousness, or mind, considered as a thing in some way additional to the reflexes of the nervous system. In the life of the animal, as in that of man, wherever we find the individual doing anything with reference to a mental picture, using knowledge or experience in any form, then he is said to be acting intelligently. The simplest form of intelligent action in the animal world and that from which most of the higher forms have arisen is illustrated in the following example: a chick will peck at a strange worm, and, finding it unpalatable, will then in the future refuse to peck at worms of that sort. This refusal to do a second time what has once had a disagreeable result is intelligent. We now say that the chick "knows" that the worm is not good to eat. The instinctive action of pecking at all worms is replaced by a refusal to peck at certain worms. Again, taking the reverse case, we find that the chick which did not respond to the sight of drinking water instinctively, but had to see the mother drink first, acted intelligently, or through a state of consciousness, when it imitated the old hen, and afterward drank of its own accord. It now "knows" that water is the thing to drink. The further question which comes upon us here concerns the animal's acquisition of the action appropriate to carry out his knowledge. How does he learn the muscular combinations which supplement or replace the earlier instinctive ways of acting? This question appears very clearly when we ask about the child's acquisition of new acts of skill. We find him constantly learning, modifying his habits, refining his ways of doing things, becoming possessed of quite new and complex functions, such as speech, handwriting, etc. All these are intelligent activities; they are learned very gradually and with much effort and pains. It is one of the most important and interesting questions of all psychology to ask how he manages to bring the nervous and muscular systems under greater and greater control by his mind. How can he modify and gradually improve his "reactions"--as we call his responses to the things and situations about him--so as to act more and more intelligently? The answer seems to be that he proceeds by what has been called Experimenting. He does not simply do things because he has intelligence,--simply that is, because he sees how to do them without first learning how; that is the older and probably quite erroneous view of intelligence. The mind can not move the body simply by its fiat. No man can do that. Man, like the little animal, has to try things and keep on trying things, in order to find out the way they work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of imitation. He imitates what he sees some other creature do; or he imitates his own instinctive actions by setting up before him in his mind the memories of the earlier performance; or, yet again, after he has struck a fortunate combination, he repeats that imitatively. Thus, by the principle already spoken of, he stores up a great mass of Kinæsthetic Equivalents, which linger in memory, and enable him to act appropriately when the proper circumstances come in his way. He also gets what we have called Associations established between the acts and the pleasure or pain which they give, and so avoids the painful and repeats the pleasurable ones. The most fruitful field of this sort of imitative learning is in connection with the "try-try-again" struggles of the young, especially children. This is called Persistent Imitation. The child sees before him some action to imitate--some complex act of manipulation with the hand, let us say. He tries to perform it in an experimental way, using the muscles of the hand and arm. With this he strains himself all over, twisting his tongue, bending his body, and grimacing from head to foot, so to speak. Thus he gets a certain way toward the correct result, but very crudely and inexactly. Then he tries again, proceeding now on the knowledge which the first effort gave him; and his trial is less uncouth because he now suppresses some of the hindering grimacing movements and retains the ones which he sees to be most nearly correct. Again he tries, and again, persistently but gradually reducing the blundering movements to the pattern of the copy, and so learning to perform the act of skill. The massive and diffused movements which he makes by wriggling and fussing are also of direct use to him. They increase remarkably the chances that among them all there will be some movements which will hit the mark, and so contribute to his stock of correct Equivalents. Dogs and monkeys learn to unlock doors, let down fence rails, and perform relatively complex actions by experimenting; persistently with many varied movements until the successful ones are finally struck. This is the type of all those acts of experimenting by which new complex movements are acquired. In children it proceeds largely without interference from others; the child persists of himself. He has greater ability than the animals to see the meaning of the completed act and to really desire to acquire it. With the animals the acquisitions do not extend very far, on account of their limitation in intelligent endowment; but in the training of the domestic animals and in the education of show-animals the trainer aids them and urges them on by making use of the associations of pleasure and pain spoken of above. He supplements the animal's feelings of pain and pleasure with the whip and with rewards of food, etc., so that each step of the animal's success or failure has acute associations with pain or pleasure. Thus the animal gradually gets a number of associations formed, avoids the actions with which pain is associated, repeats those which call up memories of pleasure all the way through an extended performance in regular steps; and in the result the performance so closely counterfeits the operations of high intelligence--such as counting, drawing cards, etc.--that the audience is excited to admiration. This first glimpse of the animal's limitations when compared with man may suggest the general question, how far the brutes go in their intelligent endowment. The proper treatment of this much-debated point requires certain further explanations. In the child we find a tendency to act in certain ways toward all objects, events, etc., which are in any respect alike. After learning to use the hands, for example, for a certain act, the same hand movements are afterward used for other similar acts which the child finds it well to perform. He thus tends, as psychologists say, to "generalize," that is, to take up certain general attitudes which will answer for a great many details of experience. On the side of the reception of his items of knowledge this was called Assimilation, as will be remembered. This saves him enormous trouble and risk; for as soon as an object or situation presents itself before him with certain general aspects, he can at once take up the attitude appropriate to these general aspects without waiting to learn the particular features of the new. The ability to do this shows itself in two rather different ways which seem respectively to characterize man on the one hand and the lower animals on the other. With the animals this tendency to generalize, to treat objects in classes rather than as individuals, takes the form of a sort of composition or direct union of brain pathways. Different experiences are had, and then because they are alike they tend to issue in the same channels of action. The animal is tied down strictly to his experience; he does not anticipate to any extent what is going to happen. He does not use one experience as a symbol and apply it beforehand to other things and events. He is in a sense passive; stimulations rain down upon him, and force him into certain attitudes and ways of action. As far as his knowledge is "general" it is called a Recept. A dog has a Recept of the whip; so far as whips are not too different from one another, the dog will act in the same way toward all of them. In man, on the other hand, the development of mind has gone a decided step further. The child very quickly begins to use symbols, words being the symbols of first importance to him. He does not have, like the brute, to wait for successive experiences of like objects to impress themselves upon him; but he goes out toward the new, expecting it to be like the old, and so acting as to anticipate it. He thus falls naturally into general ways of acting which it is the function of experience to refine and distinguish. He seems to have more of the higher sort of what was called above Apperception, as opposed to the more concrete and accidental Associations of Ideas. He gets Concepts, as opposed to the Recepts of the animals. With this goes the development of speech, which some psychologists consider the source of all the man's superiority over the animals. Words become symbols of a highly abstract sort for certain classes of experiences; and, moreover, through speech a means of social communication is afforded by which the development of the individual is enormously advanced. It is probable, in fact, that this difference--that between the Generalization which uses symbols, and mere Association--is the root of all the differences that follow later on, and give man the magnificent advantage over the animals which he has. From it is developed the faculty of thinking, reasoning, etc., in which man stands practically alone. On the brain side, it requires special developments both through the preparation of certain brain centres given over to the speech function, and also through the greater organization of the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, to which we revert again in a later chapter. Indeed, looked at from the side of the development of the brain, we see that there is no break between man and the animals in the laws of organization, but that the difference is one of evolution. Later on in the life of the child we find another contrast connected with the difference of social life and organization as between the animals and man. The animals probably do not have a highly organized sense of Self as man does; and the reason doubtless is that such a Self-consciousness is the outcome of life and experience in the very complex social relations in which the human child is brought up, and which he alone is fitted by his inherited gifts to sustain. _The Play of Animals._--Another of the most interesting questions of animal life is that which concerns their plays. Most animals are given to play. Indeed that they indulge in a remarkable variety of sports is well known even to the novice in the study of their habits. Beginning when very young, they gambol, tussle, leap, and run together, chase one another, play with inanimate objects, as the kitten with the ball, join in the games of children and adults, as the dog which plays hide and seek with his little master, and all with a knowingness and zest which makes them the best of companions. The volumes devoted to the subject give full accounts of these plays of animals, and we need not repeat them; the psychologist is interested, however, mainly in the general function of play in the life of the individual animal and child, and in the psychological states and motives which it reveals. Play, whether in animals or in man, shows certain general characteristics which we may briefly consider. 1. The plays of animals are very largely instinctive, being indulged in for the most part without instruction. The kitten leaps impulsively to the game. Little dogs romp untaught, and fall, as do other animals also, when they are strong enough, into all the playful attitudes which mark their kind. This is seen strikingly among adult animals in what are called the courtship plays. The birds, for example, indulge in elaborate and beautiful evolutions of a playful sort at the mating season. 2. It follows from their instinctive character that animal plays are peculiar to the species which perform them. We find series of sports peculiar to dogs, others to cats, and so on through all the species of the zoölogical garden, whether the creatures be wild or tame. Each shows its species as clearly by its sportive habits as by its shape, cry, or any other of what are called its "specific" habits. This is important not only to the zoölogist, as indicating differences of evolution and scale of attainment, environment, etc., but also to the psychologist, as indicating differences of what we may call animal temperament. Animals show not only the individual differences which human beings do, one liking this game and another that, one being leader in the sport and another the follower, but also the greater differences which characterize races. The Spaniards love the bull fight; other nations consider it repulsive, and take their fun in less brutal forms, although, perchance, they tolerate Rugby football! So the animals vary in their tastes, some playing incessantly at fighting, and so zealously as to injure one another, while others like the milder romp, and the game with flying leaves, rolling stones, or the incoming waves on the shore. 3. Psychologically, the most interesting characteristic of animal, as of human, play is what is called the "make-believe" state of mind which enters into it. If we consider our own sports we find that, in the midst of the game, we are in a condition of divided consciousness. We indulge in the scheme of play, whatever it be, as if it were a real situation, at the same time preserving our sense that it is not real. That is, we distinguish through it all the actual realities, but make the convention with our companions that for the time we will act together as if the playful situation were real. With it there is a sense that it is a matter of voluntary indulgence that can stop at anytime; that the whole temporary illusion to which we submit is strictly our own doing, a job which we have "put up" on ourselves. That is what is meant by make-believe. Now it is clear that the animals have this sense of make-believe in their games both with other animals and with man. The dog plays at biting the hand of his master, and actually takes the member between his teeth and mumbles it; but all the while he stops short of painful pressure, and goes through a series of characteristic attitudes which show that he distinguishes very clearly between this play biting and the real. If perchance the master shows signs of being hurt, the dog falls into attitudes of sorrow, and apologizes fulsomely. So also when the animals play together, a vigorous squeal from a companion who is "under" generally brings him his release. The principal interest of this make-believe consciousness is that it is considered by many to be an essential ingredient of Æsthetic feeling. A work of art is said to have its effect through its tendency to arouse in us a make-believe acceptance of the scene or motive presented, while it nevertheless remains contrasted with the realities of our lives. If this be true, the interesting question arises how far the animals also have the germs of Æsthetic feeling in their make-believe situations. Does the female pea-fowl consider the male bird, with all his display of colour and movement, a beautiful object? And does the animal companion say: How beautiful! when his friend in the sport makes a fine feint, and comes up serene with the knowing look, which the human on-looker can not fail to understand? In some cases, at any rate, we should have to reply to this question affirmatively, if we considered make-believe the essential thing in æsthetic enjoyment. _Theories of Animal Play._--The question of the meaning and value of play to the animals has had very enlightening discussion of late. There are two principal theories now advocated. I. The older theory considered play simply the discharge of surplus nerve force in the animal's organism. He was supposed to play when he felt fresh and vigorous. The horse is "skittish" and playful in the morning, not so much so at night. The dogs lie down and rest when they are tired, having used up their surplus energies. This is called the Surplus-Energy Theory of play. The difficulty with this theory is that it is not adequate to explain any of the characteristics of play which have been given above. Why should play be instinctive in its forms, showing certain complex and ingrained channels of expression, if it were merely the discharge of surplus force? We are more lively in the morning, but that does not explain our liking and indulging in certain sorts of complex games at all hours. Moreover, animals and children will continue to play when greatly fatigued. A dog, for example, which seems absolutely "used up," can not resist the renewed solicitations of his friends to continue the chase. Furthermore, why is it that plays are characteristic of species, different kinds of animals having plays quite peculiar to themselves? It is difficult to see how this could have come about unless there had been some deeper-going reason in accordance with which each species has learned the particular forms of sport in which it indulges. The advocates of this theory attempt to meet these objections by saying that the imitative instinct accounts for the particular directions in which the discharges of energy occur. A kitten's plays are like those of the cat tribe because the kitten is accustomed to imitate cats; when it falls to playing it is with cats, and so it sheds its superfluous energies in the customary imitative channels. In this way it grows to learn the games of its own species. There is a good deal in this point; most games are imitative in so far as they are learned at all. But it does not save the theory; for many animal plays are not learned by the individual at all, as we have seen above; on the contrary, they are instinctive. In these cases the animal does not wait to learn the games of his tribe by imitation, but starts-right-in on his own account. Besides this there are many forms of animal play which are not imitative at all. In these the animals co-operate, but do not take the same parts. The young perform actions in the game which the mother does not. All this goes to support another and most serious objection to this theory--in the mind of all those who believe in the doctrine of evolution. The Surplus-Energy Theory considers the play-impulse, which is one of the most widespread characters of animal life, as merely an accidental thing or by-product--a mere using-up of surplus energies. It is not in any way important to the animals. This makes it impossible to say that play has come to be the very complex thing that it really is by the laws of evolution; for survival by natural selection always supposes that the attribute or character which survives is important enough to keep the animal alive in the struggle for existence; otherwise it would not be continued for successive generations, and gradually perfected on account of its utility. On the whole, therefore, we find the Surplus-Energy Theory of play quite inadequate. II. Another theory therefore becomes necessary if we are to meet these difficulties. Such a theory has recently been developed. It holds that the plays of the animals are of the greatest utility to them in this way: they exercise the young animals in the very activities--though in a playful way--in which they must seriously engage later on in life. A survey of the plays of animals with a view to comparing them in each case with the adult activities of the same species, confirms this theory in a remarkably large number of cases. It shows the young anticipating, in their play, the struggles, enjoyments, co-operations, defeats, emergencies, etc., of their after lives, and by learning to cope with all these situations, so preparing themselves for the serious onset of adult responsibilities. On this theory each play becomes a beautiful case of adaptation to nature. The kitten plays with the ball as the old cat handles the mouse; the little dogs wrestle together, and so learn to fight with teeth and claws; the deer run from one another, and so test their speed and learn to escape their enemies. If we watch young animals at play we see that not a muscle or nerve escapes this preliminary training and exercise; and the instinctive tendencies which control the play direct the activities into just the performances which the animal's later life-habits are going on to require. On this view play becomes of the utmost utility. It is not a by-product, but an essential part of the animal's equipment. Just as the infancy period has been lengthened in the higher animals in order to give the young time to learn all that they require to meet the harsh conditions of life, so during this infancy period they have in the play-instinct a means of the first importance for making good use of their time. It is beautiful to see the adults playing with their young, adapting their strength to the little ones, repeating the same exercises without ceasing, drilling them with infinite pains to greater hardihood, endurance, and skill. On this theory it is also easy to see why it is that the plays are different for the different species. The actual life conditions are different, and the habits of the species are correspondingly different. So it is only another argument for the truth of this theory that we find just those games natural to the young which train them in the habits natural to the old. This view is now being very generally adopted. Many fine illustrations might be cited. A simple case may be seen in so small a thing as the habit of leaping in play; the difference, for example, between the mountain goat and the common fawn. The former, when playing on level ground makes a very ludicrous exhibition by jumping in little up-and-down leaps by which he makes no progress. In contrast with this the fawn, whose adult life is normally in the plains, takes a long graceful spring. The difference becomes clear from the point of view of this theory, when we remember that the goat is to live among the rocks, where the only useful jump is just the up-and-down sort which the little fellow is now practising; while the deer, in his life upon the plains, will always need the running jump. Finally, on this theory, play becomes a thing for evolution to cultivate for its utility in the progress of animal life, and for that reason we may suppose it has been perfected in the remarkable variety and beauty of form which it shows. On the psychological side, we find a corresponding state of things. The mind in the young animal or child gets the main education of early life through its play situations. Games have an extraordinary pedagogical influence. The more so because they are the natural and instinctive way of getting an education in practical things. This again is of supreme utility to the individuals. Both for body and mind we find that play illustrates the principle of Organic Selection explained above. It makes the young animal flexible, plastic, and adaptable; it supplements all his other instincts and imperfect functions; it gives him a new chance to live, and so determines the course of evolution in the direction which the playful animal represents. The quasi-social and gregarious habits of animals probably owe much of their strength to the play-impulse, both through the training of individual animals and through the fixing of these tendencies as instincts in various animal species in the way just mentioned. In another place below I analyze a child's game and draw some inferences from it. Here it may suffice to say that in their games the young animals acquire the flexibility of mind and muscle upon which much of the social co-operation, as well as the individual effectiveness, of their later life depends. With children, it is not the only agency, of course, though its importance is not less. We have to carry the children further by other means; but the other means should never interfere with this natural schooling. They should aim the rather by supplementing it wisely to direct its operation and to extend its sphere. CHAPTER IV. THE MIND OF THE CHILD--CHILD PSYCHOLOGY. One of the most interesting chapters of modern psychology is that which deals with the child. This is also one of the topics of general concern, since our common humanity reacts with greater geniality upon the little ones, in whom we instinctively see innocence and simplicity. The popular interest in children has been, however--as uncharitable as it may seem to say it--of very little service to the scientific investigation of childhood. Even to-day, when a greater body of valuable results are being secured, the main danger to the proper study of the child's mind comes from the over-enthusiasm and uninstructed assurance of some of its friends. Especially is this the case in America, where "child study" has become a fad to be pursued by parents and teachers who know little about the principles of scientific method, and where influential educators have enlisted so-called "observers" in taking indiscriminate notes on the doings of children with no definite problem in view, and with no criticism of their procedure. It is in place, therefore, to say clearly, at the outset, that this chapter does not mean to stimulate parents or unpsychological readers to report observations; and further to say also that in the mind of the writer the publications made lately of large numbers of replies to "syllabi" are for the most part worthless, because they heap together observations obtained by persons of every degree of competence and incompetence. On the other hand, the requisites here, as in every other sphere of exact observation, are clear enough. The student of the child's mind should have a thorough knowledge of the principles of general psychology, in order to know what is characteristic of the child when he sees it, and what is exceptional; and he should also have enough originality in his ideas and interpretations to catch the valuable in the child's doings, distinguishing it from the commonplace, and to plan situations and even experiments which will give him some control upon those actions of the child which seem to be worth it. The need of these qualities is seen in the history of the problems of the child's growth which have been taken up even by the most competent psychologists. The results show a gradual attainment of control over the problem in hand, each observer criticising the method and results of his predecessor until certain rules of observation and experiment have been evolved which allow of the repetition and repeated observation of the events of the child's life. As illustrating the sort of problems in which there has been this careful and critical work, I may instance these: the child's reflex movements, the beginnings and growth of sensation, such as colour, the rise of discrimination and preference, the origin of right and left-handedness, the rise, mechanism, and meaning of imitation, the acquisition of speech and handwriting, the growth of the child's sense of personality and of his social consciousness, and the laws of physical growth, as bearing upon mental development. In all these cases, however, there is again a greater and a less exactness. The topics with the reports of results which I am going on to give may be taken, however, as typical, and as showing the direction of complete knowledge rather than as having in any one case approached it. Before we take up particular questions, however, a word may be allowed upon the general bearings of the study of the child's mind. I do this the more willingly, since it is still true, in spite of the hopeful outlook for positive results, that it is mainly the willingness of psychology to recognise the problems and work at them that makes the topic important at present. To investigate the child by scientific methods is really to bring into psychology a procedure which has revolutionized the natural sciences; and it is destined to revolutionize the moral sciences by making them also in a great measure natural sciences. The new and important question about the mind which is thus recognised is this: _How did it grow?_ What light upon its activity and nature can we get from a positive knowledge of its early stages and processes of growth? This at once introduces other questions: How is the growth of the child related to that of the animals?--how, through heredity and social influences, to the growth of the race and of the family and society in which he is brought up? All this can be comprehended only in the light of the doctrine of evolution, which has rejuvenated the sciences of life; and we are now beginning to see a rejuvenation of the sciences of mind from the same point of view. This is what is meant when we hear it said that psychology is becoming "genetic." The advantages to be derived from the study of young children from this point of view may be briefly indicated. 1. In the first place, the facts of the infant consciousness are very simple; that is, they are the child's sensations or memories simply, not his own observations of them. In the adult mind the disturbing influence of self-observation is a matter of notorious moment. It is impossible for me to report exactly what I feel, for the observation of it by my attention alters its character. My volition also is a complex thing, involving my personal pride and self-consciousness. But the child's emotion is as spontaneous as a spring. The effects of it in the mental life come out in action, pure and uninfluenced by calculation and duplicity and adult reserve. There is around every one of us adults a web of convention and prejudice of our own making. Not only do we reflect the social formalities of our environment, and thus lose the distinguishing spontaneities of childhood, but each of us builds up his own little world of seclusion and formality with himself. We are subject, as Bacon said, not only to "idols of the forum," but also to "idols of the den." The child, on the contrary, has not learned his own importance, his pedigree, his beauty, his social place, his religion; he has not observed himself through all these and countless other lenses of time, place, and circumstance. He has not yet turned himself into an idol nor the world into a temple; and we can study him apart from the complex accretions which are the later deposits of his self-consciousness. 2. The study of children is often the only means of testing the truth of our analyses. If we decide that a certain mental state is due to a union of simpler elements, then we may appeal to the proper period of child life to see the union taking place. The range of growth is so enormous from the infant to the adult, and the beginnings of the child's mental life are so low in the scale, in the matter of mental endowment, that there is hardly a question of analysis now under debate in psychology which may not be tested by this method. At this point it is that child psychology is more valuable than the study of the mind of animals. The latter never become men, while children do. The animals represent in some few respects a branch of the tree of growth in advance of man, while being in many other respects very far behind him. In studying animals we are always haunted by the fear that the analogy from him to man may not hold; that some element essential to the development of the human mind may not be in the animal at all. Even in such a question as the localization of the functions of the brain described later on, where the analogy is one of comparative anatomy and only secondarily of psychology, the monkey presents analogies with man which dogs do not. But in the study of children we may be always sure that a normal child has in him the promise of a normal man. 3. Again, in the study of the child's mind we have the added advantage of a corresponding simplicity on the bodily side; we are able to take account of the physiological processes at a time when they are relatively simple--that is, before the nervous system has grown to maturity. For example, psychology used to hold that we have a "speech faculty," an inborn mental endowment which is incapable of further analysis; but support for the position is wanting when we turn to the brain of the infant. Not only do we fail to find the series of centres now known to be the "speech zone," but even those of them which we do find have not yet taken up this function, either alone or together. In other words, the primary object of each of the various centres involved is not speech, but some other and simpler function; and speech arises by development from a union of these separate functions. 4. In observing young children, a more direct application of experiment is possible. By "experiment" here I mean both experiment on the senses and also experiment directly on consciousness by suggestion, social influence, etc. In experimenting on adults, great difficulties arise through the fact that reactions--such as performing a voluntary movement when a signal is heard, etc.--are complicated by deliberation, habit, custom, choice, etc. The subject hears a sound, identifies it, and presses a button--_if he choose_ and agree to do so. What goes on in this interval between the advent of the incoming nerve process and the discharge of the outgoing nerve process? Something, at any rate, which represents a brain process of great complexity. Now, anything that fixes or simplifies the brain process, in so far gives greater certainty to the results. For this reason experiments on reflex actions are valuable and decisive where similar experiments on voluntary actions are uncertain and of doubtful value. Now the child's mind is relatively simple, and so offers a field for more fruitful experiment; this is seen in the reactions of the infant to strong stimuli, such as bright colours, etc., as related further on. With this inadequate review of the advantages of infant psychology, it is well also to point out the dangers of the abuse of it. Such dangers are real. The very simplicity which seems to characterize the life of the child is often extremely misleading, and this because the simplicity in question is sometimes ambiguous. Two actions of the child may appear equally simple; but one may be an adaptive action, learned with great pains and really very complex, while the other may be inadaptive and really simple. Children differ under the law of heredity very remarkably, even in the simplest manifestations of their conscious lives. It is never safe to say without qualification: "This child did, consequently all children must." The most we can usually say in observing single children is: "This child did, consequently another child may." Speaking more positively, the following remarks may be useful to those who have a mind to observe children: 1. In the first place, we can fix no absolute time in the history of the child at which a certain mental process takes its rise. The observations, now quite extensively recorded, and sometimes quoted as showing that the first year, or the second year, etc., brings such and such developments, tend, on the contrary, to show that such divisions do not hold in any strict sense. Like any other organic growth, the nervous system may develop faster under more favourable conditions, or more slowly under less favourable; and the growth of the mind is largely dependent upon the growth of the brain. Only in broad outline and within very wide limits can such periods be marked off at all. 2. The possibility of the occurrence of a mental state at a particular time must be distinguished from its necessity. The occurrence of a single clearly observed fact is decisive only against the theory according to which its occurrence under the given conditions may not occur. For example, the very early adaptive movements of the infant in receiving its food can not be due to intelligence and will; but the case is still open as to the question what is the reason of their presence--i.e., how much nervous development is present, how much experience is necessary, etc. It is well to emphasize the fact that one case may be decisive in overthrowing a theory, but the conditions are seldom simple enough to make one case decisive in establishing a theory. 3. It follows, however, from the principle of growth itself that the order of development of the main mental functions is constant, and normally free from great variations; consequently, the most fruitful observations of children are those which show that such an act was present _before another_. The complexity becomes finally so remarkable that there seems to be no before or after at all in mental things; but if the child's growth shows a stage in which any process is clearly absent, we have at once light upon the laws of growth. For instance: if a single case is conclusively established of a child's drawing an inference before it begins to use words or significant vocal sounds, the one case is as good as a thousand to show that thought may develop in some degree independently of spoken language. 4. While the most direct results are acquired by systematic experiments with a given point in view, still general observations carefully recorded by competent persons, are important for the interpretation which a great many such records may afford in the end. In the multitude of experiences here, as everywhere, there is strength. Such observations should cover everything about the child--his movements, cries, impulses, sleep, dreams, personal preferences, muscular efforts, attempts at expression, games, favourites, etc.--and should be recorded in a regular daybook at the time of occurrence. What is important and what is not, is, as I have said, something to be learned; and it is extremely desirable that any one contemplating such observations should acquaint himself beforehand with the principles of general psychology and physiology, and should seek also the practical advice of a trained observer. As yet many of the observations which we have in this field were made by the average mother, who knows less about the human body than she does about the moon or the wild flowers, or by the average father, who sees his child for an hour a day, when the boy is dressed up, and who has never slept in the same room with him--let alone the same bed!--in his life; by people who have never heard the distinction between reflex and voluntary action, or that between nervous adaptation and conscious choice. The difference between the average mother and the good psychologist is this: she has no theories, he has; he has no interests, she has. She may bring up a family of a dozen and not be able to make a single trustworthy observation; he maybe able, from one sound of one yearling, to confirm theories of the neurologist and educator, which are momentous for the future training and welfare of the child. As for experimenting with children, only the psychologist should undertake it. The connections between the body and the mind are so close in infancy, the mere animal can do so much to ape reason, and the child is so helpless under the leading of instinct, impulse, and external necessity, that the task is excessively difficult--to say nothing of the extreme delicacy and tenderness of the budding tendrils of the mind. But others do experiment! Every time we send a child out of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most serious and alarming kind. He goes into the hands of a teacher who is often not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but who is, perchance, a machine for administering a single experiment to an infinite variety of children. It is perfectly certain that a great many of our children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the school; but we can not be at all sure that they would fare any better if they were taught at home! The children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case, that possibly a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight and psychological information, would do them good. _Methods of experimenting with Children._--In endeavouring to bring such questions as the degree of memory, recognition, association, etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable embarrassment has always been experienced in understanding the child's vocal and other responses. Of course, the only way a child's mind can be studied is through its expressions, facial, lingual, vocal, muscular; and the first question--i.e., What did the infant do? must be followed by a second--i.e., What did his doing that mean? The second question is, as I have said, the harder question, and the one which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident, on the surface, that the further away we get in the child's life from simple inherited or reflex responses, the more complicated do the processes become, and the greater becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and arriving at a true picture of the real mental condition which lies back of them. To illustrate this confusion, I may cite one of the few problems which psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the different colours. The first series of experiments consisted in showing the child various colours and requiring him to name them, the results being expressed in percentages of correct answers to the whole number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different questions, and the results give absolutely no clew to their separation. It involves: 1. The child's distinguishing different colours displayed simultaneously before it, together with the complete development of the eyes for colour sensation. 2. The child's ability to recognise or identify a colour after having seen it once. 3. An association between the child's colour seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by which the proper name for the colours is brought up in his mind. 4. Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various names of the colours which he recognises; and there is the further embarrassment, that any such process which involves association of ideas, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that speech is acquired long after objects and some colours are distinguished, shows that results reached by this method have very little value as far as the problem of the first perception of colours is concerned. That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of confusion is shown by the fact that children recognise many words which they can not readily pronounce. When this was realized, a second phase in the development of the problem arose. A colour was named, and then the child was required to pick out that colour. This gave results different from those reached by the first method, blue and red leading the list in correct answers by the first method, while by this second method yellow led, and blue came near the end of the list. The further objection that colours might be distinguished before the word names are learned, or that colour words might be interchanged or confused by the child, gave rise to what we may call the third stage in the statement of the problem. The method of "recognition" took the place of the method of "naming." This consisted in showing to a child a coloured disk, without naming it, and then asking him to pick out the same colour from a number of coloured disks. This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named above. It is the usual method of testing for colour blindness, in which, from defects of vision, certain colours can not be perceived at all. It answers very well for colour blindness; for what we really want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signal-man is whether he can recognise a given signal when it is repeated; that is, does he know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or red? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question in the matter--the real question of colour perception. It is quite possible that a child might not recognise an isolated colour when he could really very well distinguish the colours lying side by side. The last question, then, is this: When does the child get the different colour _Sensations_ (not recognitions), and in what order? To solve this question it would seem that experiments should be made upon younger children. The results described above were all secured after the children had made considerable progress in learning to speak. To meet this requirement another method may be used which can be applied to children less than a year old. The colours are shown, and the child led to grasp after them. This method is of such a character as to yield a series of experiments whose results are in terms of the most fundamental movements of the infant; it can be easily and pleasantly conducted; and it is of wide application. The child's hand movements are nearly ideal in this respect. The hand reflects the child's first feelings, and becomes the most mobile organ of his volition, except his organs of speech. We find spontaneous arm and hand movements, reflex movements, reaching-out movements, grasping movements, imitative movements, manipulating movements, and voluntary efforts--all these, in order, reflecting the development of the mind. To illustrate this method, I may cite certain results reached by myself on the questions of colour and distance perception, and right-handedness in the child. _Distance and Colour Perception._--I undertook at the beginning of my child H.'s ninth month to experiment with her with a view to arriving at the exact state of her colour perception, and also to investigate her sense of distance. The arrangements consisted in this instance in giving the infant a comfortable sitting posture, kept constant by a band passing around her chest and fastened securely to the back of her chair. Her arms were left bare and quite free in their movements. Pieces of paper of different colours were exposed before her, at varying distances, front, right, and left. This was regulated by a framework, consisting of a horizontal rod graded in inches, projecting from the back of the chair at a level with her shoulder and parallel with her arm when extended straight forward, and carrying on it another rod, also graded in inches, at right angles to the first. This second rod was thus a horizontal line directly in front of the child, parallel with a line connecting her shoulders, and so equally distant for both hands. This second rod was made to slide upon the first, so as to be adjusted at any desired distance from the child. On this second rod the colours, etc., were placed in succession, the object being to excite the child to reach for them. So far from being distasteful to the infant, I found that, with pleasant suggestions thrown about the experiments, the whole procedure gave her much gratification, and the affair became one of her pleasant daily occupations. After each sitting she was given a reward of some kind. I give the results, both for colour and distance, of 217 experiments. Of these 111 were with five colours and 106 with ordinary newspaper (chosen as a relatively neutral object, which would have no colour value and no association, to the infant). _Colour._--The colours range themselves in the order of attractiveness--blue, red, white, green, and brown. Disregarding white, the difference between blue and red is very slight, compared with that between any other two. This confirms the results of the second method described above. Brown, to my child--as tested in this way--seemed to be about as neutral as could well be. A similar distaste for brown has been noticed by others. White, on the other hand, was more attractive than green. I am sorry that my list did not include yellow. The newspaper was, at reaching distance (9 to 10 inches) and a little more (up to 14 inches), as attractive as the average of the colours, and even as much so as the red; but this is probably due to the fact that the newspaper experiments came after a good deal of practice in reaching after colours, and a more exact association between the stimulus and its distance. At 15 inches and over, the newspaper was refused in 93 per cent of the cases, while blue was refused at that distance in only 75 per cent, and red in 83 per cent. _Distance._--In regard to the question of distance, the child persistently refused to reach for anything put 16 inches or more away from her. At 15 inches she refused 91 per cent of all the cases, 90 per cent of the colour cases, and, as I have said, 93 per cent of the newspaper cases. At nearer distances we find the remarkable uniformity with which the safe-distance association works at this early age. At 14 inches only 14 per cent of all the cases were refused, and at 13 inches only about 7 per cent. There was a larger percentage of refusals at 11 and 12 inches than at 13 and 14 inches, a result due to the influence of the brown, which was refused consistently when more than 10 inches away. The fact that there were no refusals to reach for anything exposed within reaching distance (10 inches)--other attractive objects being kept away--shows two things; (1) the very fine estimation visually of the distance represented by the arm-length; and (2) the great uniformity at this age of the phenomenon of Motor Suggestion upon which this method of child study is based, and which is referred to again below. In respect to the first point, it will be remembered that the child does not begin to reach for anything that it sees until about the fourth or sixth week; so it is evident at what a remarkably fast rate those obscure factors of size, perspective, light and shade, etc., which signify distance to the eye, become associated with arm movements of reaching. This method, applied with proper precautions, obviates many of the difficulties of the others. There are certain requirements of proper procedure, however, which should never be neglected by any one who experiments with young children. In the first place, the child is peculiarly susceptible to the appeals of change, novelty, chance, or happy suggestion; and often the failure to respond to a stimulus is due to distraction or to discomfort rather than to lack of intrinsic interest. Again, fatigue is a matter of considerable importance. In respect to fatigue, I should say that the first signs of restlessness, or arbitrary loss of interest, in a series of stimulations, is sufficient warning, and all attempts at further experimenting should cease. Often the child is in a state of indisposition, of trifling nervous irritability, etc.; this should be detected beforehand, and then nothing should be undertaken. No series longer than three trials should be attempted without changing the child's position, resting its attention with a song, or a game, etc., and thus leading it fresh to its task again. Furthermore, no single stimulus, as a colour, should be twice repeated without a change to some other, since the child's eagerness or alertness is somewhat satisfied by the first effort, and a new thing is necessary to bring him out to full exercise again. After each effort or two the child should be given the object reached for to hold or play with for a moment; otherwise he grows to apprehend that the whole affair is a case of "Tantalus." In all these matters very much depends upon the knowledge and care of the experimenter, and his ability to keep the child in a normal condition of pleasurable muscular exercise throughout. In performing colour experiments, several requirements would appear to be necessary for exact results. Should not the colours chosen be equal in purity, intensity, lustre, illumination, etc.? In reference to these differences, I think only that degree of care need be exercised which good comparative judgment provides. Colours of about equal objective intensity, of no gloss, of relatively evident spectral purity, under constant illumination--this is all that is required. The variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned--such as condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights, etc.--are of greater influence than any of these more recondite variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness if the colours themselves are equally bright; and lustre may be ruled out by using coloured wools or blotting-papers. The papers used in the experiments given above were coloured blotting-papers. The omission of yellow is due to the absence, in the neighbourhood, of a satisfactory yellow paper. The method now described may be further illustrated by the following experiments on the use of the hands by the young child. _The Origin of Right-handedness._--The question, "Why are we right or left-handed?" has exercised the speculative ingenuity of many men. It has come to the front anew in recent years, in view of the advances made in the general physiology of the nervous system; and certainly we are now in a better position to set the problem intelligently and to hope for its solution. Hitherto the actual conditions of the rise of "dextrality" in young children--as the general fact of uneven-handedness may be called--have not been closely observed. It was to gain light, therefore, upon the facts themselves that the experiments described in the following pages were carried out. My child H. was placed in a comfortable sitting posture, the arms left bare and free in their movement, and allowed to reach for objects placed before her in positions exactly determined and recorded by the simple arrangement of sliding rods already described. The experiments took place at the same hour daily, for a period extending from her fourth to her tenth month. These experiments were planned with very great care and with especial view to the testing of several hypotheses which, although superficial to those who have studied physiology, yet constantly recur in publications on this subject. Among these theories certain may be mentioned with regard to which my experiments were conclusive. It has frequently been held that a child's right-handedness arises from the nurse's or mother's constant method of carrying it, the child's hand which is left free being more exercised, and so becoming stronger. This theory is ambiguous as regards both mother and child. The mother, if right-handed, would carry the child on the left arm, in order to work with the right arm. This I find an invariable tendency with myself and with nurses and mothers whom I have observed. But this would leave the child's left arm free, and so a right-handed mother would be found with a left-handed child! Again, if the mother or nurse be left-handed, the child would tend to be right-handed. Or if, as is the case in civilized countries, nurses largely replace the mothers, it would be necessary that most of the nurses be left-handed in order to make most of the children right-handed. Now, none of these deductions are true. Further, the child, as a matter of fact, holds on with both hands, however it is itself held. Another theory maintains that the development of right-handedness is due to differences in weight of the two lateral halves of the body; this tends to bring more strain on one side than the other, and to give more exercise, and so more development, to that side. This evidently assumes that children are not right or left-handed before they learn to stand. This my results given below show to be false. Again, we are told that infants get right-handed by being placed on one side too much for sleep; this can be shown to have little force also when the precaution is taken to place the child alternately on its right and left sides for its sleeping periods. In the case of the child H., certain precautions were carefully enforced. She was never carried about in arms at all, never walked with when crying or sleepless; she was frequently turned over in her sleep; she was not allowed to balance herself on her feet until a later period than that covered by the experiments. Thus the conditions of the rise of the right-handed era were made as simple and uniform as possible. The experiments included, besides reaching for colours, a great many of reaching for other objects, at longer and shorter distances, and in unsymmetrical directions. I give some details of the results of the experiments in which simple objects were used, extending over a period of four months, from the fifth to the ninth in her life. The number of experiments at each sitting varied from ten to forty, the position of the child being reversed as to light from windows, position of observation, etc., after half of each series. No trace of preference for either hand was discernible during this period; indeed, the neutrality was as complete as if it had been arranged beforehand, or had followed the throwing of dice. I then conceived the idea that possibly a severer distance test might affect the result and show a marked preferential response by one hand over the other. I accordingly continued to use a neutral stimulus, but placed it from twelve to fifteen inches away from the child. This resulted in very hard straining on her part, with all the signs of physical effort (explosive breathing sounds resulting from the setting of the larynx, rush of blood to the head, seen in the flushing of the face, etc.). The number of experiments in each series was intentionally made very small, from one to twelve, in order to avoid fatigue. The results were now very interesting. During the month ending June 15th the child showed no decided preference for either hand in reaching straight before her within the easy reaching distance of ten inches, but a slight balance in favour of the left hand; yet she was right-handed to a marked degree during the same period as regards movements which required effort or strain, such as grasping for objects twelve to fifteen inches distant. For the greater distances, the left hand was used in only five cases as against seventy-four cases of the use of the right hand; and further, all these five cases were twelve-inch distances, the left hand being used absolutely not at all in the forty-five cases at longer distances. In order to test this further, I varied the point of exposure of the stimulus to the right or left, aiming thus to attract the hand on one side or the other, and so to determine whether the growth of such a preference was limited to experiences of convenience in reaching to adjacent local objects, etc. The deviation to the left in front of the body only called out the right hand to greater exertion, while the left hand fell into still greater disuse. This seems to show that "dextrality" is not derived from the experience of the individual in using either hand predominantly for reaching, grasping, holding, etc., within the easiest range of that hand. The right hand intruded regularly upon the domain of the left. Proceeding upon the clew thus obtained, a clew which seems to suggest that the hand preference is influenced by the stimulus to the eye, I introduced hand observations into a series of experiments already mentioned above on the same child's perception of the different colours; thinking that the colour stimulus which represented the strongest inducement to the child to reach might have the same effect in determining the use of the right hand as the increased distance in the experiments already described. This inference is proved to be correct by the results. It should be added that in all cases in which both hands were used together, each hand was called out with evident independence of the other, both about the same time, and both carried energetically to the goal. In many other cases in which either right or left hand is given in the results, the other hand also moved, but in a subordinate and aimless way. There was a very marked difference between the use of both hands in some cases, and of one hand followed by, or accompanied by, the other in other cases. It was very rare that the second hand did not thus follow or accompany the first; and this was extremely marked in the violent reaching for which the right hand was mainly used. This movement was almost invariably accompanied by an objectless and fruitless symmetrical movement of the other hand. The results of the entire series of experiments on the use of the hands may be stated as follows, mainly in the words in which they were summarily reported some time ago: 1. I found no continued preference for either hand as long as there were no violent muscular exertions made (based on 2,187 systematic experiments in cases of free movement of hands near the body--i. e., right hand, 577 cases; left hand, 568 cases--a difference of 9 cases; both hands, 1,042 cases; the difference of 9 cases being too slight to have any meaning); the period covered being from the child's sixth to her tenth month inclusive. 2. Under the same conditions, the tendency to use both hands together was about double the tendency to use either (seen from the number of cases of the use of both hands in the figures given above). 3. A distinct preference for the right hand in violent efforts in reaching became noticeable in the seventh and eighth months. Experiments during the eighth month on this cue gave, in 80 cases, right hand, 74 cases; left hand, 5 cases; both hands, 1 case. This was true in two very distinct classes of cases: first, reaching for objects, neutral as regards colour (newspaper, etc.), at more than the reaching distance; and, second, reaching for bright colours at any distance. Under the stimulus of bright colours, from 86 cases, 84 were right-hand cases and 2 left-hand. Right-handedness had accordingly developed under pressure of muscular effort in the sixth and seventh months, and showed itself also under the influence of a strong colour stimulus to the eye. 4. Up to this time the child had not learned to stand or to creep; hence the development of one hand more than the other is not due to differences in weight between the two longitudinal halves of the body. As she had not learned to speak or to utter articulate sounds with much distinctness, we may say also that right or left-handedness may develop while the speech centres are not yet functioning. Further, the right hand is carried over after objects on the left side, showing that habit in reaching does not determine its use. _Theoretical_.--Some interesting points arise in connection with the interpretation of these facts. If it be true that the order of rise of mental and physiological functions is constant, then for this question the results obtained in the case of one child, if accurate, would hold for others apart from any absolute time determination. We should expect, therefore, that these results would be confirmed by experiments on other children, and this is the only way their correctness can be tested. If, when tested, they should be found correct, they would be sufficient answer to several of the theories of right-handedness heretofore urged, as has been already remarked. The rise of the phenomenon must be sought, therefore, in more deep-going facts of physiology than such theories supply. Furthermore, if we go lower in the animal scale than man, analogies for the kinds of experience which are urged as reasons for right-handedness are not present; animals do not carry their young, nor pat them to sleep, nor do animals shake hands! A full discussion would lead us to the conclusion that dextrality is due to a difference in development in the two hemispheres of the brain, that these differences are hereditary, and that they show themselves toward the end of the first year. It is a singular circumstance that right-handedness and speech are controlled by the same hemisphere of the brain and from contiguous areas. It would explain this--and at the same time it seems probable from other considerations--if we found that right-handedness was first used for expression before speech; and that speech has arisen from the setting aside, for further development, of the area in the brain first used for right-handedness. Musical expression has its seat in or near the same lobe of the brain. _The Child's Mental Development in General_.--The actual development of the child, as observations from many sources indicate it, may be sketched very briefly in its main outlines. It is probable that the earliest consciousness is simply a mass of touch and muscular sensations experienced in part before birth. Shortly after birth the child begins to connect his impressions with one another and to show Memory. But both memory and Association are very weak, and depend upon intense stimulations, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. The things which most effect him at these early stages are those which bring him into conditions of sharp physical pain or give him acute pleasure. Yet it is a remarkable fact that at birth the pain reflex is wanting. His whole life up to about the fourth month turns upon his organic and vegetative needs. At three months the young child will forget his mother or nurse after a very few days. Attention begins to arise about the end of the first quarter year, appearing first in response to bright lights and loud sounds, and being for a considerable time purely reflex, drawn here and there by the successive impressions which the environment makes. With lights and sounds, however, movements also attract the infant's attention very early; and the passage from reflex attention to a sort of vague interest seems to arise first in connection with the movements of the persons about him. This interest goes on to develop very rapidly in the second half year, in connection more particularly with the movements which are associated with the child's own comfort and discomfort. The association of muscular sensations with those of touch and sight serves to give him his first clear indications of the positions of his own members and of other objects. His discrimination of what belongs to his own body is probably aided by so-called "double touch"--the fact that when he touches his own body, as in touching his foot with the hand, he has two sensations, one in the foot and the other in the hand. This is not the case when he touches other objects, and he soon learns the distinction, getting the outlines of his own body marked out in a vague way. The learning of the localities on his body which he can not see, however, lags far behind. The movements of his limbs in active exploration, accompanied by sight, enables him to build up his knowledge of the world about him. Learning this he soon falls to "experimenting" with the things of space. Thus he begins to find out how things fit together, and what their uses are. On the side of his movements we find him going through a series of remarkable adaptations to his environment. At the beginning his movements are largely random discharges, or reflexes of an instinctive character, such as sucking. Yet in the first month he shows the beginning of adaptation to the suggestions of his daily life, the first manifestations of acquired Habit. He learns when and how long he is expected to sleep, when and how much to eat; he very soon finds out the peculiar touch and vocal tones of this person or that, and acts upon these distinctions. He gets to know the meaning of his food bottle, to understand the routine movements of persons about the room, and the results of violations of their order. His hat, wraps, carriage, become in the first half year signals to him of the outdoor excursion. He no longer bobs his head about when held erect, and begins to control his natural processes. The remarkable thing about all these adaptations is that they occur before the infant can in any sense be said to have a Will; for, as has been said, the fibres of the brain necessary to voluntary action--in the cortex of the hemispheres--are not yet formed. The realization of this extraordinary adaptiveness of the very young child should save parents many an anxious day and sleepless night. There is practically nothing more easy than to impress upon the child whatever habits of daily--and nightly!--routine one wishes to give him, if he be taken early enough. The only requirements are knowledge of what is good for him, and then _inviolable regularity_ in everything that concerns him. Under this treatment he will become as "obstinate" in being "good" as the opposite so-called indulgent or capricious treatment always make him in being "bad." There is no reason whatever that he should be walked with or held, that he should be taken up when he cries, that he should be trotted when he awakes, or that he should have a light by night. Things like this are simply bad habits for which the parents have themselves to thank. The child adapts himself to his treatment, and it is his treatment that his habits reflect. During the second half-year--sooner or later in particular cases--the child is ready to begin to imitate. Imitation is henceforth, for the following few years, the most characteristic thing about his action. He first imitates movements, later sounds, especially vocal sounds. His imitations themselves also show progress, being at first what is called "simple imitation" (repeating a distinction already spoken of in the chapter on animals), as when the child lies in bed in the morning and repeats the same sound over and over again. He hears his own voice and imitates it. In this sort of imitation he simply allows his instinct to reproduce what he hears without control or interference from him. He does not improve, but goes on making the same sounds with the same mistakes again and again. But a little later he begins what is called "persistent imitation"--the "try-try-again," already spoken of--which is a very different thing. Persistent imitation shows unmistakably the presence of will. The child is not satisfied with simple imitation or mere repetition, whether it be good or bad in its results. He now sees his errors and aims consciously to improve. Note the child's struggles to speak a word right by imitation of the pronunciation of others. And he succeeds. He gradually gets his muscles under control by persistence in his try-try-again. Then he goes further--about the beginning of his second year, usually. He gets the idea that imitation is the way to learn, and turns all his effort into imitations experimentally carried out. He is now ready to learn most of the great processes of his later culture. Speech, writing, this special accomplishment and that, are all learned by experimental imitation. The example of the child's trying to draw or write has already been cited. He looks at the copy before him; sets all his muscles of hand and arm into massive contraction; turns and twists his tongue, bends his body, winds his legs together, holds his breath, and in every way concentrates his energies upon the copying of the model. In all this he is experimenting. He produces a wealth of movements, from which, very gradually, as he tries and tries again, the proper ones are selected out. These he practises, and lets the superfluous ones fall away, until he secures the requisite control over hand and arm. Or suppose a child endeavouring, in the crudest fashion, to put a rubber on the end of a pencil, after seeing some one else do it--just the sort of thing a year-old child loves to imitate. What a chaos of ineffective movements! But with repeated effort he gets nearer and nearer to it, and finally succeeds. On the side of action, two general principles have been formulated in child psychology, both illustrated in the cases and experiments now given: The one, Motor Suggestion, is, as we saw, a principle of general psychology. Its importance to the child is that by it he forms Habits, useful responses to his environment, and so saves himself many sad blunders. The other principle is that of Imitation; by it the child learns new things directly in the teeth of his habits. By exercising in an excessive way what he has already learned through his experimental imitations, he is continually modifying his habits and making new adaptations. These two principles dominate the active life of the adult man as well. _Personality Suggestion._--A further set of facts may be cited to illustrate the working of Suggestion, now in the sphere of the receptive life. They are important as showing the child's progress in learning the great features of personality. One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its responses to its environment is the tendency to recognise differences of personality. It responds to what have been called Suggestions of Personality. As early as the second month it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery depends upon the presence of certain kinds of "personality suggestion." It is quite a different thing from the child's behavior toward things which are not persons. Things come to be, with some few exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite, more and more unimportant; things may be subordinated to regular treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important, as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The sight of movement by persons, with its effects on the infant, seems to be the most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice comes to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its expressions equal the person in all his attributes. I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of personality. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in his dealings with persons--an uncertainty aroused by the moods, emotions, changes of expression, and shades of treatment of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of quite unstable experiences. This period we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the "projective" stage in the growth of the child's personal consciousness. It is from this beginning that the child goes on to become fully conscious of what persons are. And when we observe his actions more closely we find no less than four steps in his growth, which, on account of the importance of the topic, may be stated in some little detail. 1. The first thing of significance to him, as has been said, is _movement_. The first attempts of the infant at anything like steady attention are directed to moving things--a swaying curtain, a moving light, a stroking touch, etc. And further than this, the moving things soon become more than objects of curiosity; these things are just the things that affect him with pleasure or pain. It is movement that brings him his bottle, movement that regulates the stages of his bath, movement that dresses him comfortably, movement that sings to him and rocks him to sleep. In that complex of sensations, the nurse, the feature of importance to him, of immediate satisfaction or redemption from pain, is this--movements come to succour him. Change in his bodily feeling is the vital requirement of his life, for by it the rhythm of his vegetative existence is secured; and these things are accompanied and secured always in the moving presence of the one he sees and feels about him. This, I take it, is the earliest reflection in his consciousness of the world of personalities about him. At this stage his "personality suggestion" is a _pain-movement-pleasure_ state of mind; to this he reacts with a smile, and a crow, and a kick. Undoubtedly this association gets some of its value from the other similar one in which the movements are the infant's own. It is by movements that he gets rid of pains and secures pleasures. Many facts tend to bear out this position. My child cried in the dark when I handled her, although I imitated the nurse's movements as closely as possible. She tolerated a strange presence so long as it remained quietly in its place; but let it move, and especially let it usurp any of the pieces of movement-business of the nurse or mother, and her protests were emphatic. The movements tended to bring the strange elements of a new face into the vital association, pain-movement-pleasure, and so to disturb its familiar course; this constituted it a strange "personality." It is astonishing, also, what new accidental elements may become parts of this association. Part of a movement, a gesture, a peculiar habit of the nurse, may become sufficient to give assurance of the welcome presence and the pleasures which the presence brings. Two notes of my song in the night stood for my presence to H., and no song from any one else could replace it. A lighted match stopped the crying of E. for food in her fourteenth week, although it was but a signal for a process of food preparation lasting several minutes; and a simple light never stopped her crying under any other circumstances. 2. With this first start in the sense of personality we find also the beginning of the recognition of different personalities. It is evident that the sense of another's presence thus felt in the infant's consciousness rests, as all associations rest, upon regularity or repetition; his sense of expectancy is aroused whenever the chain of events is started. This is soon embodied largely in two indications: the face and the voice. But it is easy to see that this is a very meagre sense of personality; a moving machine which brought pain and alleviated suffering might serve as well. So the child begins to learn, in addition, the fact that persons are in a measure individual in their treatment of him; that their individuality has elements of uncertainty or _irregularity_ about it. This growing sense is very clear to one who watches an infant in its second half year. Sometimes its mother gives it a biscuit, but sometimes she does not. Sometimes the father smiles and tosses the child; sometimes he does not. Even the indulgence of the grandmother has its times and seasons. The child looks for signs of these varying moods and methods of treatment; for his pains of disappointment arise directly on the basis of that former sense of regular personal presence upon which his expectancy goes forth. This new element of the child's sense of persons becomes, at one period of its development, quite the controlling element. His action in the presence of the persons of the household becomes hesitating and watchful. Especially does he watch the face, for any expressive indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression is now the most regular as well as the most delicate indication. Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle sensibility to these differences; and normal children all do. Animals are also very expert at this. All through the child's second year, and longer, his sense of the persons around him is in this stage. The incessant "why?" with which he greets any action affecting him, or any information given him, is witness to the simple puzzle of the apparent capriciousness of persons. Of course he can not understand "why"; so the simple fact to him is that mamma will or won't, he knows not beforehand which. He is unable to anticipate the treatment in detail, and he has not of course learned any principles of interpretation of the conduct of father or mother lying back of the details. But in all this period there is germinating in his consciousness--and this very uncertainty is an important element of it--the seed of a far-reaching thought. His sense of persons--moving, pleasure-or-pain-giving, uncertain but self-directing persons--is now to become a sense of agency, of power, which is yet not the power of the regular-moving door on its hinges or the rhythmic swinging of the pendulum of the clock. The sense of _personal agency_ is now forming, and it again is potent for still further development of the social consciousness. It is just here, I think, that imitation becomes so important in the child's life. This is imitation's opportunity. The infant watches to see how others act, because his own weal and woe depends upon this "how"; and inasmuch as he knows not what to anticipate, his mind is open to every suggestion of movement. So he falls to imitating. His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for himself. It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes. Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes "contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard, and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality. For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else. 3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence and another, so now he learns the difference between one _character_ and another. Every character is more or less regular in its irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud, pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no adult is present who has authority or will to punish him. This stage in his "knowledge of man" leads to very marked differences of conduct on his part. 4. He now goes on to acquire real _self-consciousness_ and _social feeling_. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate heading below. It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare distinction _of persons from things_ on the ground of peculiar pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests _personal agency_. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of behaviour or _personal characters_ of different persons. 4. After his sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, he gets what is really _self-consciousness_ and _social feeling_. [Footnote 2: It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is curious to note that, besides the general gregariousness which many animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem to recognise dogs by _smell_. So with cats, which also respond instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem to be guided by _sight_. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.] _Self-consciousness._--So far as we have now gone the child has only a very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons who move about him. The persons are "projective" to him, mere bodies or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun, as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes about from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of others. Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others, he finds himself gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same actions with them, to discover what they are feeling, what their motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees his father handle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the child's curiosity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the impulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive of the action. This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the development of the child; and because of this twofold significance it is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social philosophy. 1. By such imitation the child learns to associate his own sense of physical power, together with his own private pleasures and pains, with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be characteristic of the persons of his social circle, become his, in his own thought. He is now _for himself_ an agent who has the marks of a Person or a Self. He now understands _from_ _the inside_ all the various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer "projective"--simply there, outside, in the environment; it has become what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles. This is what we mean by Self-consciousness. It is not an inborn thing with the child. He gradually acquires it. And it is not a sense of a distinct and separate self, first known and then compared with other persons. On the contrary, it is gradually built up in the child's mind from the same material exactly as that of which he makes up his thought of other persons. The deeds he can do he first sees others doing; only then can he imitate them and find out that he also is a being who can perform them. So it goes all through our lives. Our sense of Self is constantly changing, constantly being enriched. We have not the same thought of self two days in succession. To-day I think of myself as something to be proud of, to-morrow as something to be ashamed of. To-day I learn something from you, and the thought that it is common to you and to me is the basis of my sympathy with you. To-morrow I learn to commit the unworthy act which Mr. A. commits, and the thought that he and I are so far the same is the basis of the common disapproval which I feel of him and me. 2. The second result of this imitative learning about personality is of equal importance. When the child has taken up an action by imitation and made it subjective, finding out that personality has an inside, something more than the mere physical body, then he reads this fact back into the other persons also. He says to himself: "He too, my little brother, must have _in him_ a sense of agency similar to this of mine. He acts imitatively, too; he has pleasures and pains; he shows sympathy for me, just as I do for him. So do all the persons with whom I have become so far acquainted. They are, then, 'subjects' as I am--something richer than the mere 'projects' which I had supposed." So other persons become essentially like himself; and not only like himself, but identical with himself so far as the particular marks are concerned which he has learned from them. For it will be remembered that all these marks were at first actually taken up by imitation from these very persons. The child is now giving back to his parents, teachers, etc., only the material which he himself took from them. He has enriched it, to be sure; with it he now reads into the other persons the great fact of subjective agency; but still whatever he thinks of them has come by way of his thought of himself, and that in turn was made up from them. This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when they speak of the "ejective" self. It is the self of some one else as I think of it; in other words, it is myself "ejected" out by me and lodged in him. _The Social and Ethical Sense._--From this we see what the Social Sense is. It is the feeling which arises in the child or man of the real identity, through its imitative origin, of all possible thoughts of self, whether yourself, myself, or some one else's self. The bond between you and me is not an artificial one; it is as natural as is the recognition of personal individuality. And it is doing violence to this fundamental fact to say, as social science so often assumes, that the individual naturally separates himself or his interests from the self or the interests of others. He is, on the contrary, bound up with others from the start by the very laws of his growth. His social action and feeling are natural to him. The child can not be selfish only nor generous only; he may seem to be this or that, in this circumstance or that, but he is really social all the time. Furthermore, his sense of right and wrong, his Ethical Sense, grows up upon this sense of the social bond. This I can not stop to explain further. But it is only when social relationships are recognised as essential in the child's growth that we can understand the mutual obligations and duties which the moral life imposes upon us all. _How to Observe Children, with Especial Reference to Observations of Imitation._--There are one or two considerations of such practical importance to all those who wish to observe children that I venture to throw them together--only saying, by way of introduction, that nothing less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitations. The Self is really the form in which the personal influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality. 1. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected the child. This is the more important since the child sees few persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely--it is inevitable--that he _make up his personality_, under limitations of heredity, by imitation, out of the "copy" set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal "copy"--to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree their dispositions are; whether he is growing to be a person of subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits?--they are character! 2. A point akin to the first is this: the observation of each child should describe with great accuracy the child's relations to other children. Has he brothers or sisters? how many of each, and of what age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child has only adult "copy." He can not interpret his father's actions, or his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children, especially to separate off one or two children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next. 3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favoritism, "platonic friendships," "chumming," in school or home, etc. We have in these facts--and there is a very great variety of them--an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences. It has never been studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers have been alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but that has been with view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders of our children, must go deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and roommate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all isolated children are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social tree, is placed in a new environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self--her very personality; it is nothing less than that--utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she is allowed to meet, eat, walk, talk, lie down at night, and rise in the morning, with one other person, a "copy" set before her, as immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room! They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety; variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social continence. So impressively true is this from the human point of view that, in my opinion--formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion--friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social exercise. One of the merits of the great English schools and of the free schools of America is that in them the boys acquire, from necessity, the independence of sturdy character, and the self-restraint which is self-imposed. The youth brought up to mind a tutor often fails of the best discipline. 4. The remainder of this section may be devoted to the further emphasis of the need of close observation of children's games, especially those which may be best described as "society games." All those who have given even casual observation to the doings of the nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary facility of the child's mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however, to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they were observing in these fancy plays the putting together anew of fragments, or larger pieces, of the adult's mental history. Here, in these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the personal "copy" material which they get from you and me. If a man study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out, he gradually sees emerge from within the inner consciousness a picture of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions he seeks to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, setting up a box for one of their number to sit on and "take off" the teacher? Was there ever a child who did not play "church," and force the improvised "papa" into the pulpit? Were there ever children who did not "buy" things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, after they had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market? The point is this: the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of the parent's life and acts them out; so he grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to perform. In order to be of more direct service to observers of games of this character, let me give a short account of an observation of the kind made some time ago--one of the simplest of many actual situations which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out together. It is a very commonplace case, a game the elements of which are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find the elementary the more instructive. On May 2 I was sitting on the porch alone with the children--the two mentioned above, aged respectively four and a half and two and a half years. Helen, the elder, told Elizabeth that she was her little baby; that is, Helen became "mamma," and Elizabeth the "baby." The younger responded by calling her sister "mamma," and the play began. "You have been asleep, baby. Now it is time to get up," said mamma. Baby rose from the floor--first falling down in order to rise!--was seized upon by "mamma," taken to the railing to an imaginary washstand, and her face washed by rubbing. Her articles of clothing were then named in imagination, and put on, one by one, in the most detailed and interesting fashion. During all this "mamma" kept up a stream of baby talk to her infant: "Now your stockings, my darling; now your skirt, sweetness--O! no--not yet--your shoes first," etc., etc. Baby acceded to all the details with more than the docility which real infants usually show. When this was done--"Now we must go tell papa good-morning, dearie," said mamma. "Yes, mamma," came the reply; and hand in hand they started to find papa. I, the spectator, carefully read my newspaper, thinking, however, that the reality of papa, seeing that he was so much in evidence, would break in upon the imagined situation. But not so. Mamma led her baby directly past me to the end of the piazza, to a column in the corner. "There's papa," said mamma; "now tell him good-morning."--"Good-morning, papa; I am very well," said baby, bowing low to the column. "That's good," said mamma, in a _gruff, low voice_, which caused in the real papa a thrill of amused self-consciousness most difficult to contain. "Now you must have your breakfast," said mamma. The seat of a chair was made a breakfast table, the baby's feigned bib put on, and her porridge carefully administered, with all the manner of the nurse who usually directs their breakfast. "Now" (after the meal, which suddenly became dinner instead of breakfast), "you must take your nap," said mamma. "No, mamma; I don't want to," said baby. "But you must."--"No; you be baby, and take the nap."--"But all the other children have gone to sleep, dearest, _and the doctor says you must_," said mamma. This convinced baby, and she lay down on the floor. "But I haven't undressed you." So then came all the detail of undressing; and mamma carefully covered her up on the floor with a light shawl, saying: "Spring is coming now; that'll be enough. Now shut your eyes, and go to sleep."--"But you haven't kissed me, mamma," said the little one. "Oh, of course, my darling!"--so a long siege of kissing! Then baby closed her eyes very tight, while mamma went on tiptoe away to the end of the porch. "Don't go away, mamma," said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't leave her darling," came the reply. So this went on. The nap over, a walk was proposed, hats put on, etc., the mamma exercising great care and solicitude for her baby. One further incident to show this: when the baby's hat was put on--the real hat--mamma tied the strings rather tight. "Oh! you hurt, mamma," said baby. "No; mamma wouldn't draw the strings too tight. Let mamma kiss it. There, is that better, my darling?"--all comically true to a certain sweet maternal tenderness which I had no difficulty in tracing. Now in such a case what is to be reported, of course, is the facts. Yet knowledge of more than the facts is necessary, as I have said above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the information which concerns the rest of the family and the social influences of the children's lives. I recognised at once every phrase which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in this process, called in a figure "social heredity." But as that story is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake four-year-old? Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a more direct lesson--a lived-out exercise--in sympathy, in altruistic self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency, in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to ends--and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we personate other characters? What could further all this highest mental growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily life are read into the child's little self? Then, in the case of Elizabeth also, certain things appear. She obeys without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms. Certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are learned by the same process. All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty also. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this sort of symbolic representation. Play has its dangers also--very serious ones. The adults sometimes set bad examples. The game gives practise in cunning no less than in forbearance. Possibly the best service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to the proper recognition and avoidance of the dangers. Finally, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of no use whatever to psychologists--to say nothing of the actual damage you may be to the children--unless you _know your babies through and through_. Especially the fathers! They are willing to study everything else. They know every corner of the house familiarly, and what is done in it, except the nursery. A man labours for his children ten hours a day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet he lets their mental growth, the formation of their characters, the evolution of their personality, go on by absorption--if no worse--from common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral attendants! Plato said the state should train the children; and added that the wisest man should rule the state. This is to say that the wisest man should tend his children! Hugo gives us, in Jean Valjean and Cosette, a picture of the true paternal relationship. We hear a certain group of studies called the _humanities_, and it is right. But the best school in the humanities for every man is in his own house. With this goes, finally, the highest lesson of sport, drama, make-believe, even when we trace it up into the art-impulse--the lesson of _personal freedom_. The child himself sets the limitations of the game, makes the rules, and subjects himself to them, and then in time pierces the bubble for himself, saying, "I will play no more." All this is the germ of self-regulation, of the control of the impulses, of the voluntary adoption of the ideal, which becomes in later life--if so be that he cling to it--the pearl of great price. CHAPTER V. THE CONNECTION OF BODY WITH MIND--PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY--MENTAL DISEASES. In the foregoing pages we have had intimations of some of the important questions which arise about the connection of mind with body. The avenues of the senses are the normal approaches to the mind through the body; and, taking advantage of this, experiments are made upon the senses. This gives rise to Experimental Psychology, to which the chapter after this is devoted. Besides this, however, we find the general fact that a normal body must in all cases be present with a normal mind, and this makes it possible to arrange so to manipulate the body that changes may be produced in the mind in other ways than through the regular channels of sense. For example, we influence the mind when we drink too much tea or coffee, not to mention the greater changes of the same kind which are produced in the mind of the drinker of too much alcohol or other poisonous substances. All the methodical means of procedure by which the psychologist produces effects of this kind by changing the condition or functions of the body within itself belong to Physiological Psychology. So he modifies the respiration, changes the heart beat, stimulates or slows the circulation of the blood, paralyzes the muscles, etc. The ways of procedure may be classified under a few heads, each called a method. 1. _Method of Extirpation._--This means simply the cutting away of a part of the body, so that any effect which the loss of the part makes upon the mind may be noted. It is used especially upon the brain. Pieces of the brain, great or small--indeed, practically the whole brain mass--may be removed in many animals without destroying life. Either of the cerebral hemispheres entire, together with large portions of the other, may be taken from the human brain without much effect upon the vital processes, considered as a whole; the actual results being the loss of certain mental functions, such as sight, hearing, power of movement of particular limbs, etc., according to the location of the part which is removed. Many of the facts given below under the heading of Localization were discovered in this way, the guiding principle being that if the loss of a function follows the removal of a certain piece of the brain, then that portion of the brain is directly concerned in the healthy performance of that function. 2. _Method of Artificial Stimulation._--As the term indicates, this method proceeds by finding some sort of agent by which the physiological processes may be started artificially; that is, without the usual normal starting of these processes. For example, the physician who stimulates the heart by giving digitalis pursues this method. For psychological purposes this method has also been fruitful in studying the brain, and electricity is the agent customarily used. The brain is laid bare by removing part of the skull of the animal, and the two electrodes of a battery are placed upon a particular point of the brain whose function it is wished to determine. The current passes out along the nerves which are normally set in action from this particular region, and movements of the muscles follow in certain definite parts and directions. This is an indication of the normal function of the part of the brain which is stimulated. Besides this method of procedure a new one, also by brain stimulation, has recently been employed. It consists in stimulating a spot of the brain as before, but instead of observing the character of the movement which follows, the observer places galvanometers in connection with various members of the body and observes in which of the galvanometers the current comes out of the animal's body (the galvanometer being a very delicate instrument for indicating the presence of an electric current). In this way it is determined along what pathways and to what organs the ordinary vital stimulation passes from the brain, provided it be granted that the electric current takes the same course. 3. _Method of Intoxication, called the "Toxic Method._"--The remarks above may suffice for a description of this method. The results of the administration of toxic or poisonous agents upon the mind are so general and serious in their character, as readers of De Quincy know, that very little precise knowledge has been acquired by their use. 4. _Method of Degeneration._--This consists in observing the progress of natural or artificially produced disease or damage to the tissues, mainly the nervous tissues, with a view to discovering the directions of pathways and the locations of connected functions. The degeneration or decay following disease or injury follows the path of normal physiological action, and so discloses it to the observer. This method is of importance to psychology as affording a means of locating and following up the course of a brain injury which accompanies this or that mental disease or defect. _Results_--_Localization of Brain Functions._--The more detailed results of this sort of study, when considered on the side of the nervous organism, may be thrown together under the general head of Localization. The greatest result of all is just the discovery that there is such a thing as localization in the nervous system of the different mental functions of sensation and movement. We find particular parts of the nervous organism contributing each its share, in a more or less independent way, to the whole flow of the mental life; and in cases of injury or removal of this part or that, there is a corresponding impairment of the mind. First of all, it is found that the nervous system has a certain up-and-down arrangement from the segments of the spinal cord up to the gray matter of the rind or "cortex" of the large masses or hemispheres in the skull, to which the word brain is popularly applied. This up-and-down arrangement shows three so-called "levels" of function. Beginning with the spinal cord, we find the simplest processes, and they grow more complex as we go up toward the brain. The lowest, or "third level," includes all the functions which the spinal cord, and its upper termination, called the "medulla," are able to perform alone--that is, without involving necessarily the activity of the nervous centres and brain areas which lie above them. Such "third-level" functions are those of the life-sustaining processes generally: breathing, heart-beat, vasomotor action (securing the circulation of the blood), etc. These are all called Automatic processes. They go regularly on from day to day, being constantly stimulated by the normal changes in the physiological system itself, and having no need of interference from the mind of the individual. In addition to the automatic functions, there is a second great class of processes which are also managed from the third level; that is, by the discharge of nervous energy from particular parts of the spinal cord. These are the so-called Reflex functions. They include all those responses which the nervous system makes to stimulations from the outside, in which the mind has no alternative or control. They happen whether or no. For example, when an object comes near the eye the lid flies to reflexly. If a tap be made upon the knee while one sits with the legs crossed the foot flies up reflexly. Various reflexes may be brought out in a sleeper by slight stimulations to this or that region of his body. Furthermore, each of the senses has its own set of reflex adjustments to the stimulations which come to it. The eye accommodates itself in the most delicate way to the intensity of the light, the distance of the object, the degree of elevation, and the angular displacement of what one looks at. The taking of food into the mouth sets up all sorts of reflex movements which do not cease until the food is safely lodged in the stomach, and so on through a series of physiological adaptations which are simply marvellous in their variety and extent. These processes belong to the third level; and it may surprise the uninitiated to know that not only is the mind quite "out of it" so far as these functions are concerned, but that the brain proper is "out of it" also. Most of these reflexes not only go on when the brain is removed from the skull, but it is an interesting detail that they are generally exaggerated under these conditions. This shows that while the third or lowest level does its own work, it is yet in a sense under the weight--what physiologists call the inhibiting action--of the higher brain masses. It is not allowed to magnify its part too much, nor to work out of its proper time and measure. The nervous apparatus involved in these "third-level" functions may be called the "reflex circuit" (see Fig. 2), the path being from the sense organ up to the centre by a "sensory" nerve, and then out by a "motor" nerve to the muscle. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--_s c mt_ = reflex circuit; _s c sp mp c mt_ = voluntary circuit.] Going upward in the nervous system, we next find a certain group of bodies within the gross mass of the brain, certain centres lying between the hemispheres above and the medulla and spinal cord below, and in direct connection by nervous tracts with both of these. The technical names of the more important of these organs are these: the "corpora striata," or striped bodies, of which there are two, the "optic thalami," also two in number, and the "cerebellum" or little brain, situated behind. These make up what is called the "second level" in the system. They seem to be especially concerned with the life of sensation. When the centres lying above them, the hemispheres, are removed, the animal is still able to see, hear, etc., and still able to carry out his well-knit habits of action in response to what he sees and hears. But that is about all. A bird treated thus, for example, these second-level centres being still intact while the hemispheres are removed, retains his normal appearance, being quite able to stand upon his feet, to fly, walk, etc. His reflexes are also unimpaired and his inner physiological processes; but it soon becomes noticeable that his mental operations are limited very largely to sensations. He sees his food as usual, but does not remember its use, and makes no attempt to eat it. He sees other birds, but does not respond to their advances. He seems to have forgotten all his education, to have lost all the meanings of things, to have practically no intelligence. A dog in this condition no longer fears the whip, no longer responds to his name, no longer steals food. On the side of his conduct we find that all the actions which he had learned by training now disappear; the trick dog loses all his tricks. What was called Apperception in the earlier chapter seems to have been taken away with the hemispheres. Coming to the "first level," the highest of all, both in anatomical position and in the character of the functions over which it presides, we see at once what extraordinary importance it has. It comprises the cortex of the hemispheres, which taken together are called the cerebrum. It consists of the parts which we supposed cut out of the pigeon and dog just mentioned; and when we remember what these animals lose by its removal, we see what the normal animal or man owes to the integrity of this organ. It is above all the organ of mind. If we had to say that the mind as such is located anywhere, we should say in the gray matter of the cortex of the hemispheres of the brain. For although, as we saw, animals without this organ can still see and hear and feel, yet we also saw that they could do little else and could learn to do nothing more. All the higher operations of mind come back only when we think of the animal as having normal brain hemispheres. Further, we find this organ in some degree duplicating the function of the second-level centres, for fibres go out from these intermediate masses to certain areas of the hemispheres, which reproduce locally the senses of hearing, sight, etc. By these fibres the functions of the senses are "projected" out to the surface of the brain, and the term "projection fibres" is applied to the nerves which make these connections. The hemispheres are not content even with the most important of all functions--the strictly intelligent--but they are jealous, so to speak, of the simple sensations which the central brain masses are capable of awaking. And in the very highest animals, probably only monkeys and man, we find that the hemispheres have gone so far with their jealousy as to usurp the function of sensation. This is seen in the singular fact that with a monkey or man the removal of the cortical centres makes the animal permanently blind or deaf, as the case may be, while in the lower animals such removal does not have this result, so long as the "second-level" organs are unimpaired. The brain paths of the functions of the second and first levels taken together constitute the so-called "voluntary circuit" (see Fig. 2). In addition to this general demarcation of functions as higher and lower--first, second, and third level--in their anatomical seat, many interesting discoveries have been made in the localization of the simpler functions in the cortex itself. The accompanying figures (Figs. 3 and 4) will show the principle centres which have been determined; and it is not necessary to dwell upon additional details which are still under discussion. The areas marked out are in general the same on both hemispheres, and that is to say that most of the centres are duplicated. The speech centres, however, are on one side only. And in certain cases the nervous fibres which connect the cortex with the body-organs cross below the brain to the opposite side of the body. This is always true in cases of muscular movement; the movements of the right side of the body are controlled by the left hemisphere, and _vice versa_. The stimulations coming in from the body to the brain generally travel on the same side, although in certain cases parallel impulses are also sent over to the other hemisphere as well. For example, the very important optic nerve, which is necessary to vision, comes from each eye separately in a large bunch of fibres, and divides at the base of the brain, so that each eye sends impulses directly to the visual centres of both hemispheres. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--Outer surface of left hemisphere of the brain (modified from Exner): _a_, fissure of Rolando; _b_, fissure of Sylvius.] [Illustration: FIG. 4.--Inner (mesial) surface of the right hemisphere of the brain (modified from Schäfer and Horsley). In both figures the shaded area is the motor zone.] Of all the special questions which have arisen about the localization of functions in the nervous system, that of the function of certain areas known as "motor centres" has been eagerly discussed. The region on both sides of the fissure of Rolando in Fig. 3 contains a number of areas which give, when stimulated with electricity, very definite and regular movements of certain muscles on the opposite side of the body. By careful exploration of these areas the principal muscular combinations--those for facial movements, neck movements, movements of the arm, trunk, legs, tail, etc.--have been very precisely ascertained. It was concluded from these facts that these areas were respectively the centres for the discharge of the nervous impulses running in each case to the muscles which were moved. The evidence recently forthcoming, however, is leading investigators to think that there is no cortical centre for the "motor" or outgoing processes properly so called, and that these Rolandic areas, although called "motor," are really centres for the incoming reports of the movements of the respective muscles after the movements take place, and also for the preservation of the memories of movement which the mind must have before a particular movement can be brought about (the mental images of movement which we called on an earlier page Kinæsthetic Equivalents). These centres being aroused in the thought of the movement desired, which is the necessary mental preparation for the movement, they in turn stimulate the real motor centres which lie below the cortex at the second level. This is in the present writer's judgment the preferable interpretation of the evidence which we now have. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--The speech zone (after Collins).] _The Speech Zone._--Many interesting facts of the relation of body and mind have come to light in connection with the speech functions. Speech is complex, both on the psychological and also on the physiological side, and easily deranged in ways that take on such remarkable variety that they are a source of very fruitful indications to the inquirer. It is now proved that speech is not a faculty, a single definite capacity which a man either has or has not. It is rather a complex thing resulting from the combined action of many brain centres, and, on the mental side, of many so-called faculties, or functions. In order to speak a man normally requires what is called a "zone" in his brain, occupying a large portion of the outside lateral region (see Fig. 5). It extends, as in the figure, from the Rolandic region (_K_), where the kinæsthetic lip-and-tongue memories of words are aroused, backward into the temporal region (_A_), where the auditory memories of words spring up; then upward to the angular gyrus in the rear or occipital region (_V_), where in turn the visual pictures of the written or printed words rise to perform their part in the performance; and with all this combination there is associated the centre for the movements of the hand and arm employed in writing, an area higher up in the Rolandic region (above _K_). In the same general zone we also find the music function located, the musical sounds being received in the auditory centre very near the area for words heard (_A_) while the centre for musical expression is also in the Rolandic region. Furthermore, as may be surmised, the reading of musical notation requires the visual centre, just as does the reading of words. In addition to this, we find the curious fact that the location of the whole speech zone is in one hemisphere only. Its location on the left or the right, in particular cases, is also an indication as to whether the person is right-or left-handed; this means that the process which makes the individual either right or left-handed is probably located in the speech zone, or near it. A large majority of persons have the speech zone in the left hemisphere, and are right-handed; it will be seen that the figure (5) shows the left hemisphere of the brain, and with it the right hand holding the pen. _Defects of Speech--Aphasia._--The sorts of injury which may befall a large zone of the brain are so many that well-nigh endless forms of speech defect occur. All impairment of speech is called Aphasia, and it is called Motor Aphasia when the apparatus is damaged on the side of movement. If the fibres coming out from the speech zone be impaired, so that the impulses can not go to the muscles of articulation and breathing, we have Subcortical Motor Aphasia. Its peculiarity is that the person knows perfectly what he wants to say, but yet can not speak the words. He is able to read silently, can understand the speech of others, and can remember music; but, with his inability to speak, he is generally also unable to write or to perform on a musical instrument (yet this last is not always the case). Then we find new variations if his "lesion"--as all kinds of local nervous defects are called--is in the brain centre in the Rolandic region, where arise the memories of the movements required. In this latter case the aphasic patient can readily imitate speech so long as he hears it, can imitate writing so long as it lies before him, but can not do any independent speaking or writing for himself. With this there goes another fact which characterizes this form of aphasia, and which is called Cortical, as opposed to the Subcortical Motor Aphasia described above, that the person may not be able even to think of the words which are appropriate to express his meaning. This is the case when those persons who depend upon the memories of the movements of lip and tongue in their normal speech are injured as described. Besides the two forms of Motor Aphasia now spoken of, there are certain other speech defects which are called Sensory Aphasia. When a lesion occurs in one of the areas of the brain in the speech zone in which the requisite memories of words seen or heard have their seat--as when a ball player is struck over the sight centre in the back of the head--special forms of sensory aphasia show themselves. The ball player will, in this case, have Visual Aphasia, being unable to speak in proportion as he is accustomed in his speaking to depend upon the images of written or printed words. He is quite unable to read or write from a copy which he sees; but he may be able, nevertheless, to write from dictation, and also to repeat words which are spoken to him. This is because in these latter performances he uses his auditory centre, and not the visual. There are, indeed, some persons who are so independent of vision that the loss of the visual centre does not much impair their normal speech. When, again, an injury comes to the auditory centre in the temporal region, we find the converse of the case just described; the defect is then called Auditory Aphasia. The patient can not now speak or write words which he hears, and can not speak spontaneously in proportion as he is accustomed to depend upon his memories of the word sounds. But in most cases he can still both speak and write printed or written words which he sees before him. These cases may serve to give the reader an idea of the remarkable delicacy and complexity of the function of speech. It becomes more evident when, instead of cases of gross lesion, which destroy a whole centre, or cut the connections between centres, we have disease of the brain which merely destroys a few cells in the gray matter here or there. We then find partial loss of speech, such as is seen in patients who lack only certain classes of words; perhaps the verbs, or the conjunctions, or proper names, etc.; or in the patients who speak, but yet do not say what they mean; or, again, in persons who have two verbal series going on at once, one of which they can not control, and which they often attribute to an enemy inside them, in control of the vocal organs, or to a persecutor outside whose abuse they can not avoid hearing. In cases of violent sick headache we often miscall objects without detecting it ourselves, and in delirium the speech mechanism works from violent organic discharges altogether without control. The senile old man talks nonsense--so-called gibberish--thinking he is discoursing properly. In the main cases of Aphasia of distinct sensory and motor types psychological analysis is now so adequate and the anatomical localization so far advanced that the physicians have sufficient basis for their diagnosis, and make inferences looking toward treatment. Many cases of tumour, of clot on the brain, of local pressure from the skull, and of hæmorrhage or stopping up of the blood vessels in a limited area, have been cured through the indications given by the particular forms and degrees of aphasia shown by the patients. The skull is opened at the place indicated by the defect of speech, the lesion found where the diagnosis suggested, and the cause removed. This account of Localization will suggest to the reader the truth that there is no science of Phrenology. No progress has been made in localizing the intelligence; and the view is now very general that the whole brain, with all its interchange of impulses from part to part, is involved in thinking. As for locating particular emotions and qualities of temperament, it is quite absurd. Furthermore, the irregularities of the skull do not indicate local brain differences. It is thought that the relative weight of the brain may be an indication of intellectual endowment, especially when the brain weight is compared with the weight of the rest of the body, and that culture in particular lines increases the surface of the cortex by deepening and multiplying the convolutions. But these statements can not be applied off-hand to individuals, as the practise of phrenology would require. _Defects of Memory--Amnesia._--The cases given just above, where the failure of speech was seen to be due to the loss of certain memories of words, illustrate also a series of mental defects, which are classed together as Amnesias. Any failure in memory, except the normal lapses which we call forgetfulness, is included under this term. Just as the loss of word memories occasions inability to speak, so that of other sorts of memories occasions other functional disturbances. A patient may forget objects, and so not know how to use his penknife or to put on his shoes. He may forget events, and so give false witness as to the past. One may forget himself also, and so have, in some degree, a different character, as is seen, in an exaggerated way, in persons who have so-called Dual Personality. These patients suddenly fall into a secondary state, in which they forget all the events of their ordinary lives, but remember all the events of the earlier periods of the secondary personality. This state may be described as "general" amnesia, in contrast to the "partial" amnesia of the other cases given, in which only particular classes of memories are impaired. The impairment of memory with advancing years also illustrates both "general" and "partial" Amnesia. The old man loses his memory of names, then of other words, then of events, and so gradually becomes incapable of much retention of any sort. _Defects of Will--Aboulia._--A few words may suffice to characterize the great class of mental defects which arise on the side of action. All inability to perform intentional acts is called Aboulia, or lack of Will. Certain defects of speech mentioned above illustrate this: cases in which the patient knows what he wishes to say and yet can not say it. This is the type of all the "partial" Aboulias. There may be no lack in determination and effort, yet the action may be impossible. But, in contrast with this, there is a more grave defect called "general" Aboulia. Here we find a weakening of resolution, of determination, associated with some lack of self-control showing itself frequently by a certain hesitation or indecision. The patient says: "I can not make up my mind," "I can not decide." In exaggerated cases it becomes a form of mania called "insanity of doubt." The patient stands before a door for an hour hesitating as to whether he can open it or not, or carries to its extreme the experience we all sometimes have of finding it necessary to return again and again to make sure that we have locked the door or shut the draught of the furnace. With these illustrations our notice of mental defects may terminate. The more complex troubles, the various insanities, manias, phobias, etc., can not be briefly described. Moreover, they are still wrapped in the profoundest obscurity. To the psychologist, however, there are certain guiding principles through the maze of facts, and I may state them in conclusion. First, all mental troubles involve diseases of the brain and can be cured only as the brain is cured. It does not follow, of course, that in certain cases treatment by mental agencies, such as suggestion, arousing of expectation, faith, etc., may not be more helpful here, when wisely employed, than in troubles which do not involve the mind; but yet the end to be attained is a physical as well as a mental cure, and the means in the present state of knowledge, at any rate, are mainly physical means. The psychologist knows practically nothing about the laws which govern the influence of mind on body. The principle of Suggestion is so obscure in its concrete working that the most practised and best-informed operators find it impossible to control its use or to predict its results. To give countenance, in this state of things, to any pretended system or practice of mind cure, Christian science, spiritual healing, etc., which leads to the neglect of ordinary medical treatment, is to discredit the legitimate practice of medicine and to let loose an enemy dangerous to the public health. Moreover, such things produce a form of hysterical subjectivism which destroys sound judgment, and dissolves the sense of reality which it has taken modern science many generations to build up. Science has all along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to supplement the inadequate evidence of "thought-transference," to support the claims of spiritualism, or to justify in the name of "personal liberty" the substitution of a "healer" for the trained physician. The parent who allows his child to die under the care of a "Christian Science healer" is as much a criminal from neglect as the one who, going but a step further in precisely the same direction, brings his child to starvation on a diet of faith. In France and Russia experimenting in hypnotism on well persons has been restricted by law to licensed experts; what, compared with that, shall we say to this wholly amateurish experimenting with the diseased? Let the "healer" heal all he can, but let him not experiment to the extremity of life and death with the credulity and superstition of the people who think one "doctor" is as good as another. Second, many experts agree that diseases of the mind, whatever their brain seat may be, all involve impairment of the Attention. This, at any rate, is a general mark of a deranged or defective mind. The idiot lacks power of attention. The maniac lacks control of his attention. The deluded lacks grasp and flexibility of attention. The crank can only attend to one thing. The old man is feeble in the attention, having lost his hold. So it goes. The attention is the instrument of the one sort of normal mental activity called Apperception, and so impairment of the attention shows itself at once in some particular form of defect. Third, it is interesting to know that in progressive mental failure the loss of the powers of the mind takes place in an order which is the reverse of that of their original acquisition. The most complex functions, which are acquired last, are the first to show impairment. In cases of general degeneration, softening of the brain, etc., the intelligence and moral nature are first affected, then memory, association, and acquired actions of all sorts, while there remain, latest of all, actions of the imitative kind, most of the deep-set habits, and the instinctive, reflex, and automatic functions, This last condition is seen in the wretched victim of dementia and in the congenital idiot. The latter has, in addition to his life processes and instincts, little more than the capacity for parrot-like imitation. By this he acquires the very few items of his education. The recovery of the patient shows the same stages again, but in the reversed direction; he pursues the order of the original acquisition, a process which physicians call Re-evolution. CHAPTER VI. HOW WE EXPERIMENT ON THE MIND--EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. In recent years the growth of the method of experimenting with bodies in laboratories in the different sciences has served to raise the question whether the mind may not be experimented with also. This question has been solved in so far that psychologists produce artificial changes in the stimulations to the senses and in the arrangements of the objects and conditions existing about a person, and so secure changes also in his mental states. What we have seen of Physiological Psychology illustrates this general way of proceeding, for in such studies, changes in the physiological processes, as in breathing, etc., are considered as causing changes in the mind. In Experimental Psychology, however, as distinguished from Physiological Psychology, we agree to take only those influences which are outside the body, such as light, sound, temperature, etc., keeping the subject as normal as possible in all respects. A great many laboratories have now been established in connection with the universities in Germany, France, and the United States. They differ very much from one another, but their common purpose is so to experiment upon the mind, through changes in the stimulations to which the individual is subjected, that tests may be made of his sensations, his ability to remember, the exactness and kind of movements, etc. The working of these laboratories and the sort of research carried out in them may be illustrated best, perhaps, by a description of some of the results, apparatus, methods, etc., employed in my own laboratory during the past year. The end in view will, I trust, be considered sufficient justification for the degree of personal reference which this occasions; since greater concreteness and reality attach to definite descriptions such as this. The other laboratories, as those at Harvard and Columbia Universities, take up similar problems by similar methods. I shall therefore go on to describe some recent work in the Princeton laboratory. Of the problems taken up in the laboratory, certain ones may be selected for somewhat detailed explanation, since they are from widely different spheres and illustrate different methods of procedure. I. _Experiments on the Temperature Sense._--For a score of years it has been suspected that we have a distinct sense, with a nerve apparatus of its own, for the feeling of different temperatures on the skin. Certain investigators found that this was probably true; it is proved by the fact that certain drugs alter the sensibility of the skin to hot and cold stimulations. Another advance was made when it was found that sensations of either hot or cold may be had from regions which are insensible at the same time to the other sort of stimulation, cold or hot. Certain minute points were discovered which report cold when touched with a cold point, but give no feeling from a hot object; while other points would respond only with a sensation from heat, never giving cold. It was concluded that we have two temperature senses, one for hot and the other for cold. Taking the problem at this point, Mr. C.[3] wished to define more closely the relation of the two sorts of sensation to each other, and thought he could do so by a method by which he might repeat the stimulation of a series of exact spots, very minute points on the skin, over and over again, thus securing a number of records of the results for both hot and cold over a given area. He chose an area of skin on the forearm, shaved it carefully, and proceeded to explore it with the smallest points of metals which could be drawn along the skin without pricking or tearing. These points were attached to metallic cylinders, and around the cylinders rubber bands were placed; the cylinders were then thrust in hot or cold water kept at certain regular temperatures, and lifted by the rubber bands. They were placed point down, with equal pressure, upon the points of the skin in the area chosen. In this way, points which responded only to hot, and also those responding only to cold, were found, marked with delicate ink marks in each case, until the whole area was explored and marked in different colours. This had often been done before. It remained to devise a way of keeping these records, so that the markings might all be removed from the skin, and new explorations made over the same surface. This was necessary in order to see whether the results secured were always the same. The theory that there were certain nervous endings in the skin corresponding to the little points required that each spot should be in exactly the same place whenever the experiment was repeated. [Footnote 3: Mr. J. F. Crawford, graduate student.] Mr. C. made a number of so-called "transparent transfer frames." They are rectangular pieces of cardboard, with windows cut in them. The windows are covered with thin architect's paper, which is very transparent. This frame is put over the forearm in such a way that the paper in the window comes over the markings made on the arm. The markings show through very clearly, and the points are copied on the paper. Then certain boundary marks at the corners are made, both on the paper and on the arm, at exactly the same places, the frame is removed, and all the markings on the arm are erased except the boundary points. The result is that at any time the frames can be put over the arm again by matching the boundary points, and then the original temperature spots on the skin will be shown by the markings on the paper window. Proceeding to repeat the exploration of the same area in this way, Mr. C makes records of many groupings of points for both hot and cold sensations on the same area; he then puts the frames one upon another, holds them up before a window so that they have a bright background, and is thus able to see at a glance how nearly the results of the different sittings correspond. His results, put very briefly, fail to confirm the theory that the sense of temperature has an apparatus of fixed spots for heat and other fixed spots for cold. For when he puts the different markings for heat together he finds that the spots are not the same, but that those of one frame fall between those of another, and if several are put together the points fill up a greater or smaller area. The same for the cold spots; they fill a continuous area. He finds, however, as other investigators have found, that the heat areas are generally in large measure separate from the cold areas, only to a certain extent overlapping here and there, and also that there are regions of the skin where we have very little sense of either sort of temperature. The general results will show, therefore, if they should be confirmed by other investigators, that our temperature sense is located in what might be called somewhat large blotches on the skin, and not in minute spots; while the evidence still remains good, however, to show that we have two senses for temperature, one for cold and the other for hot. II. _Reaction-Time Experiments._--Work in so-called "reaction times" constitutes one of the most important and well-developed chapters in experimental psychology. In brief, the experiment involved is this: To find how long it takes a person to receive a sense impression of any kind--for example, to hear a sound-signal--and to move his hand or other member in response to the impression. A simple arrangement is as follows: Sit the subject comfortably, tap a bell in such a way that the tapping also makes an electric current and starts a clock, and instruct the subject to press a button with his finger as soon as possible after he hears the bell. The pressing of the button by him breaks the current and stops the clock. The dial of the clock indicates the actual time which has elapsed between the bell (signal) and his response with his finger (reaction). The clock used for exact work is likely to be the Hipp chronoscope, which gives on its dials indications of time intervals in thousandths of a second. For the sake of keeping the conditions constant and preventing disturbance, the wires are made long, so that the clock and the experimenter may be in one room, while the bell, the punch key, and the subject are in another, with the door closed. This method of getting reaction times has been in use for a number of years, especially by the astronomers who need to know, in making their observations, how much time is taken by the observer in recording a transit or other observation. It is part of the astronomer's "personal equation." Proceeding with this "simple-reaction" experiment as a basis, the psychologists have varied the instructions to the subject so as to secure from him the different times which he takes for more complicated mental processes, such as distinguishing between two or more impressions, counting, multiplying, dividing, etc., before reacting; or they have him wait for an associated idea to come up before giving his response, with many other variations. By comparing these different times among themselves, interesting results are reached concerning the mental processes involved and also about the differences of different individuals in the simpler operations of their daily lives. The following research carried out by Mr. B.[4] serves to illustrate both of these assertions. [Footnote 4: The writer.] Mr. B. wished to inquire further into a fact found out by several persons by this method: the fact that there is an important difference in the length of a person's reaction time according to the direction of his attention during the experiment. If, for example, Mr. X. be tested, it is possible that he may prefer to attend strictly to the signal, letting his finger push the key without direct care and supervision. If this be true, and we then interfere with his way of proceeding, by telling him that he must attend to his finger, and allow the signal to take care of itself, we find that he has great difficulty in doing so, grows embarrassed, and his reaction time becomes very irregular and much longer. Yet another person, say Y, may show just the opposite state of things; he finds it easier to pay attention to his hand, and when he does so he gets shorter and also more regular times than when he attends to the signal-sound. It occurred to Mr. B. that the striking differences given by different persons in this matter of the most favourable direction of the attention might be connected with the facts brought out by the physiological psychologists in connection with speech; namely, that one person is a "visual," in speaking, using mainly sight images of words, while another is a "motor," using mainly muscular images, and yet another an "auditive," using mainly sound images. If the differences are so marked in the matter of speech, it seemed likely that they might also extend to other functions, and the so-called "type" of a person in his speech might show itself in the relative lengths of his reaction times according as he attended to one class of images or another. Calling this the "type theory" of reaction times, and setting about testing four different persons in the laboratory, the problem was divided into two parts; first, to direct all the individuals selected to find out, by examining their mental preferences in speaking, reading, writing, dreaming, etc., the class of images which they ordinarily depended most upon; and then to see by a series of experiments whether their reaction times to these particular classes of images were shorter than to others, and especially whether the times were shorter when attention was given to these images than when it was given to the muscles used in the reactions. The meaning of this would be that if the reaction should be shorter to these images than to the corresponding muscle images, or to the other classes of images, then the reaction time of an individual would show his mental type and be of use in testing it. This would be a very important matter if it should hold, seeing that many questions both in medicine and in education, which involve the ascertaining of the mental character of the individual person, would profit by such an exact method. The results on all the subjects confirmed the supposition. For example, one of them, Mr. C., found from an independent examination of himself, most carefully made, that he depended very largely upon his hearing in all the functions mentioned. When he thought of words, he remembered how they sounded; when he dreamed, his dreams were full of conversation and other sounds. When he wrote, he thought continually of the way the words and sentences would sound if spoken. Without knowing of this, many series of reaction experiments were made on him; the result showed a remarkable difference between the lengths of his reactions, according as he directed his attention to the sound or to his hand; a difference showing his time to be one half shorter when he paid attention to the sound. The same was seen when he reacted to lights; the attention went preferably to the light, not to the hand; but the difference was less than in the case of sounds. So it was an unmistakable fact in his case that the results of the reaction experiments agreed with his independent decision as to his mental type. In none of the cases did this correspondence fail, although all were not so pronounced in their type preferences as was Mr. C. The second part of the research had in view the question whether reaction times taken upon speech would show the same thing; that is, whether in Mr. C.'s case, for example, it would be found that his reaction made by speaking, as soon as he heard the signal or saw the light, would be shorter when he paid attention to the signal than when he gave attention to his mouth and lips. For this purpose a mouth key was used which made it possible for the subject simply by emitting a puff of breath from the lips, to break an electric current and thus stop the chronoscope as soon as possible after hearing the signal. The mouth key is figured herewith (Fig. 6). [Illustration: FIG. 6.--Mouth-key (Isometric drawing) The metallic tongue E swings over the mercury H, making or breaking the circuit A H E D B or C E H A. The tongue is moved by a puff of air through the funnel F. (Devised by Prof. W. Libbey.)] This experiment was also carried out on all the subjects, none of them having any knowledge of the end in view, and the experimenters also not having, as yet, worked out the results of the earlier research. In all the cases, again, the results showed that, for speech, the same thing held as for the hand--namely, that the shortest reaction times were secured when the subject paid attention to the class of images for which he had a general preference. In Mr. C.'s case, for example, it was found that the time it took him to speak was much shorter when he paid strict attention to the expected sound than when he attended to his vocal organs. So for the other cases. If the individual's general preference is for muscular images, we find that the quickest time is made when attention is given to the mouth and lips. Such is the case with Mr. B. The general results go to show, therefore--and four cases showing no exception, added to the indications found by other writers, make a general conclusion very probable--that in the differences in reaction times, as secured by giving the attention this way or that, we have general indications of the individual's temperament, or at least of his mental preferences as set by his education. These indications agree with those found in the cases of aphasia known as "motor," "visual," "auditory," etc., already mentioned. The early examination of children by this method would probably be of great service in determining proper courses of treatment, subjects of study, modes of discipline, tendencies to fatigue and embarrassment, and the direction of best progress in education. This research may be taken to illustrate the use of the reaction-time method in investigating such complex processes as attention, temperament, etc. The department which includes the various time measurements in psychology is now called Mental Chronometry, the older term, Psychometry, being less used on account of its ambiguity. III. _An Optical Illusion._--In the sphere of vision many very interesting facts are constantly coming to light. Sight is the most complex of the senses, the most easily deranged, and, withal, the most necessary to our normal existence. The report of the following experimental study will have the greater utility, since, apart from any intrinsic novelty or importance the results may prove to have, it shows some of the general bearings of the facts of vision in relation to Æsthetics, to the theory of Illusions, and to the function of Judgment. Illusion of the senses is due either to purely physiological causes or to the operation of the principle of Assimilation, which has already been remarked upon. In the latter case it illustrates the fact that at any time there is a general disposition of the mind to look upon a thing under certain forms, patterns, etc., to which it has grown accustomed; and to do this it is led sometimes to distort what it sees or hears unconsciously to itself. So it falls into errors of judgment through the trap which is set by its own manner of working. Nowhere is the matter better illustrated than in the sphere of vision. The number of illusions of vision is remarkable. We are constantly taking shapes and forms for something slightly different from what, by measurement, we actually find them to be. And psychologists are attempting--with rather poor success so far--to find some general principles of the mechanism of vision which will account for the great variety of its illusions. Among these principles one is known as Contrast. It is hardly a principle as yet. It is rather a word used to cover all illusions which spring up when surfaces of different sizes and shapes, looked at together or successively, are misjudged with reference to one another. Wishing to investigate this in a simple way, the following experiment was planned and carried out by Mr. B. He wished to find out whether, if two detached surfaces of different sizes be gazed at together, the linear distances of the field of vision (the whole scene visible at once) would be at all misjudged. To test this, he put in the window (W)[5] of the dark room a filling of white cardboard in which two square holes had been cut (S S'). The sides of the squares were of certain very unequal lengths. Then a slit was made between the middle points of the sides of the squares next to each other, so that there was a narrow path or trough joining the squares between their adjacent sides. Inside the dark room he arranged a bright light so that it would illuminate this trough, but not be seen by a person seated some distance in front of the window in the next room. A needle (D) was hung on a pivot behind the cardboard, so that its point could move along the bright trough in either direction; and on the needle was put the armature (A) of an electro-magnet which, when a current passed, would be drawn instantly to the magnet (E), and so stop the needle exactly at the point which it had then reached. A clock motor (Cm) was arranged in such a way as to carry the needle back and forth regularly over the slit; and the electro-magnet was connected by wires with a punch key (K) on a table beside the subject in the next room. All being now ready, the subject, Mr. S., is told to watch the needle which appears as a bead of light travelling along the slit, and stop it when it comes to the middle point of the line, by pressing the electric key. The experimenter, who stands behind the window in the dark room, reads on a scale (mm.) marked in millimetres the exact point at which the needle stops, releases the needle by breaking the current, thus allowing it to return slowly over the line again. This gives the subject another opportunity to stop it at what he judges to be the exact middle of the line, and so on. The accompanying figure (Fig. 7) shows the entire arrangement. [Footnote 5: This and the following letters in parentheses refer to Fig. 7] [Illustration: FIG. 7] A great many experiments performed in this way, with the squares set both vertically and horizontally, and with several persons, brought a striking and very uniform result. The point selected by the subject as the middle is regularly too far toward the smaller square. Not a little, indeed, but a very appreciable amount. The amount of the displacement, or, roughly speaking, of the illusion, increases as the larger square is made larger and the smaller one smaller; or, put in a sentence, the amount varies directly with the ratio of the smaller to the larger square side. Finding such an unmistakable illusion by this method, Mr. B. thought that if it could be tested by an appeal to people generally, it would be of great gain. It occurred to him that the way to do this would be to reverse the conditions of the experiment in the following way: He prepared the figures given in Plate I, in which the two squares are made of suitable relative size, a line is drawn between them, and a point on the line is plainly marked. This he had printed in a weekly journal, and asked the readers of the journal to get their friends, after merely looking at the figure (i. e., without knowing the result to be expected), to say--as the reader may now do before reading further--whether the point on the line (Plate I) is in the middle or not; and if not, in which direction from the true middle it lies. The results from hundreds of persons of all manner of occupations, ages, and of both sexes, agree in saying that the point lies too far toward the larger square. In reality it is in the exact middle. This is just the opposite of the result of the experiments in the laboratory, where the conditions were the reverse, i. e., to find the middle as it appears to the eye. Here, therefore, we have a complete confirmation of the illusion; and it is now fully established that in all cases in which the conditions of this experiment are realized we make a constant mistake in estimating distances by the eye.[6] [Footnote 6: In redrawing the figure on a larger sheet (which is recommended), the connecting line may be omitted, only the mid-point being marked. Some get a better effect with two circles, the intervening distance being divided midway by a dot, as in Plate II.] For instance, if a town committee wish to erect a statue to their local hero in the public square, and if on two opposite sides of the square there are buildings of very different heights, the statue should not be put in the exact middle of the square, if it is to give the best effect from a distance. It should be placed a little toward the smaller building. A colleague of the writer found, when this was first made public, that the pictures in his house had actually been hung in such a way as to allow for this illusion. Whenever a picture was to be put up between two others of considerable difference of size, or between a door (large) and a window (small), it had actually been hung a little nearer to the smaller--toward the small picture or toward the window--and not in the true middle. It is probable that interesting applications of this illusion may be discovered in æsthetics. For wherever in drawing or painting it is wished to indicate to the observer that a point is midway between two lines of different lengths, we should find that the artist, in order to produce this effect most adequately, deviates a little from the true middle. So in architecture, the effect of a contrast of masses often depends upon the sense of bilateral balance, symmetry, or equality, in which this visual error would naturally come into play. Indeed, it is only necessary to recall to mind that one of the principal laws of æsthetic effect in the matter of right line proportion is the relation of "one to one," as it is called, or equal division, to see the wide sphere of application of this illusion. In all such cases the mistake of judgment would have to be allowed for if masses of unequal size lie at the ends of the line which is to be divided. IV. _The Accuracy of Memory._--Another investigation may be cited to illustrate quite a different department. It aimed to find out something about the rate at which memory fades with the lapse of time. Messrs. W., S., and B.[7] began by formulating the different ways in which tests may be made on individuals to see how accurate their memories are after different periods of time. They found that three different tests might be employed, and called them "methods" of investigating memory. These are, first, the method of Reproduction. The individual is asked to reproduce, as in an oral or written examination, what he remembers of something told him a certain time before. This is the ordinary method of the schools and colleges, of civil-service examinations, etc. Second, the method of Identification, which calls upon the person to identify a thing, sentence, report, etc., a second or third time, as being the same in all respects as that which he experienced the first time it appeared. Third, the method of Selection, in which we show to the person a number of things, sentences, reports, descriptions of objects, etc., and require him to select from them the ones which are exactly the same as those he has had before. These methods will be better understood from the account now to be given of the way they were carried out on a large number of students. [Footnote 7: Prof. H. C. Warren, Mr. W. J. Shaw, and the writer.] The first experiments were made by Messrs. S. and B. in the University of Toronto on a class of students numbering nearly three hundred, of whom about one third were women. The instructors showed to the class certain squares of cardboard of suitable size, and asked them to do the following three things on different days: First, to reproduce from memory, with pencil on paper, squares of the same size as those shown, after intervals of one, ten, twenty, and forty minutes (this gives results by the method of Reproduction); second, to say whether a new set of squares, which were shown to them after the same intervals, were the same in size as those which they had originally seen, smaller, or larger (illustrating the method of Identification); third, they were shown a number of squares of slightly different sizes, again at the same intervals, and asked to select from them the ones which they found to be the same size as those originally seen (method of Selection). The results from all these experiments were combined with those of another series, secured from a large class of Princeton students; and the figure (Fig. 8) shows by curves something of the result. The figure is given in order that the reader may understand by its explanation the "graphic method" of plotting statistical results, which, with various complications, is now employed in psychology as well as in the other positive sciences. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--Memory curves: I. Method of Selection. II. Method of Identification.] Briefly described in words, it was found that the three methods agreed (the curves are parallel)[8] in showing that during the first ten minutes there was a great falling off in the accuracy of memory (slant in the curves from 0 to 10); that then, between ten and twenty minutes, memory remained relatively faithful (the curves are nearly level from 10 to 20), and that a rapid falling off in accuracy occurred after twenty minutes (shown by the slant in the lines from 20 to 40). [Footnote 8: This figure shows curves for two of the methods only, Selection and Identification.] Further, the different positions of the curves show certain things when properly understood. The curve secured by the method of Reproduction (not given in the figure) shows results which are least accurate, because most variable. The reason of this is that in drawing the squares to reproduce the one remembered, the student is influenced by the size of the paper he uses, by the varying accuracy of his control over his hand and arm (the results vary, for example, according as he uses his right or left hand), and by all sorts of associations with square objects which may at the time be in his mind. In short, this method gives his memory of the square a chance to be fully assimilated to his current mental state during the interval, and there is no corrective outside of him to keep him true. That this difficulty is a real one no one who has examined students will be disposed to deny. When we ask them to reproduce what the text-book or the professor's lectures have taught, we also ask them to express themselves accurately. Now the science of correct expression is a thing in which the average student has had no training. With his difficulty in remembering is connected his difficulty of expression; and with it all goes a certain embarrassment, due to responsibility, personal fear, and dread of disgrace. So the results finally obtained by this method are really very complex. One of the curves, that given by the method of Selection (I), also shows memory to be interfered with by a certain influence. We saw in connection with the experiments reported above that, even in the most elementary arrangements of squares in the visual fields, an element of contrast comes in to interfere with our judgment of size. This we find confirmed in these experiments when the method of Selection is used. By this method we show a number of squares side by side, asking the individual to select the one he saw before. All the squares, being shown at once, come into contrast with one another on the background; and so his judgment of the size of the one he remembers is distorted. This, again, is a real influence in our mental lives, leading to actual illusion. An unscrupulous lawyer may gradually modify the story which his client or a witness tells by constantly adding to what is really remembered, other details so expertly contrasted with the facts, or so neatly interposed among them, that the witness gradually incorporates them in his memory and so testifies more nearly as the lawyer desires. In our daily lives another element of contrast is also very strong--that due to social opinion. We constantly modify our memories to agree more closely with the truths of social belief, paring down unconsciously the difference between our own and others' reports of things. If several witnesses of an event be allowed to compare notes from time to time, they will gradually come to tell more nearly the same story. The other curve (II) in the figure, that secured by the method of Identification, seemed to the investigators to be the most accurate. It is not subject to the errors due to expression and to contrast, and it has the advantage of allowing the subject the right to recognise the square. It is shown to him again, with no information that it is the same, and he decides whether from his remembrance of the earlier one, it is the same or not. The only objection to this method is that it requires a great many experiments in order to get an average result. To be reliable, an average must be secured, seeing that, for one or two or a few trials, the student may guess right without remembering the original square at all. By taking a large number of persons, such as the three hundred students, this objection may be overcome. Comparing the averages, for example, of the results given by the men and women respectively, we found practically no difference between them. This last point may serve to introduce a distinction which is important in all work in experimental psychology, and one which is recognised also in many other sciences--the distinction between results obtained respectively from one individual and from many. Very often the only way to learn truth about a single individual is to investigate a number together. In all large classes of things, especially living things, there are great individual differences, and in any particular case this personal variation may be so large that it obscures the real nature of the normal. For example, three large sons may be born to two small parents; and from this case alone it might be inferred that all small parents have large sons. Or three girls might have better memories than three boys in the same family or school, and from this it might be argued that girls are better endowed in this direction than boys. In all such cases the proper thing to do is to get a large number of cases and combine them; then the preponderance which the first cases examined may have shown, in one direction or the other, is corrected. This gives rise to what is called the statistical method; it is used in many practical matters, such as life insurance, but its application to the facts of life, mind, variation, evolution, etc., is only begun. Its neglect in psychology is one of the crying defects of much recent work. Its use in complicated problems involves a mathematical training which people generally do not possess; and its misuse through lack of exactness of observation or ignorance of the requirements is worse than its neglect. Another result came out in connection with these experiments on memory, which, apart from its practical interest, may serve to show an additional resource of experimental psychology. In making up the results of a series of experiments it is very important to observe the way in which the different cases differ from one another. Some cases may be so nearly alike that the most extreme of them are not far from the average of them all; as we find, for example, if we measure a thousand No. 10 shot. But now suppose we mix in with the No. 10 some No. 6 and some No. 14, and then take the average size; we may now get just the same average, and we can tell that this pile is different from the other only by observing the individual measurements of the single shot and setting down the relative frequency of each particular size. Or, again, we may get a different average size in one of two ways: either by taking another lot of uniform No. 14 shot, let us say, or by mixing with the No. 10 a few very large bullets. Which is actually the case would be shown only by the examination of the individual cases. This is usually done by comparing each case with the average of the whole lot, and taking the average of the differences thus secured--a quantity called the "mean variation." In the case of the experiments with the squares, the errors in the judgments of the students were found to lie always in one direction. The answers all tended to show that they took, for the one originally shown, a square which was really too large. Casting about for the reason of this, it was considered necessary to explain it by the supposition that the square remembered had in the interval become enlarged in memory. The image was larger when called up after ten or twenty minutes than it was before. This might be due to a purely mental process; or possibly to a sort of spreading-out of the brain process in the visual centre, giving the result that whenever, by the revival of the brain process, the mental image is brought back again to mind, this spreading out shows itself by an enlargement of the memory image. However it may be explained, the indications of it were unmistakable--unless, of course, some other reason can be given for the uniform direction of the errors; and it is further seen in other experiments carried out by Messrs. W. and B. and by Dr. K.[9] at a later date. [Footnote 9: Dr. F. Kennedy, demonstrator, now professor in the University of Colorado (results not yet published).] If this tendency to the enlargement of our memories with the lapse of time should be found to be a general law of memory, it would have interesting bearings. It would suggest, for instance, an explanation of the familiar fact that the scenes of the past seem to us, when we return to them, altogether too small. Our childhood home, the old flower garden, the height of house and trees, and even that of our hero uncle, all seem to the returning traveller of adult life ridiculously small. That we expect them to be larger may result from the fact that the memory images have undergone change in the direction of enlargement. V. _Suggestion._--Space permits only the mention of another research, which, however, should not be altogether omitted, since it illustrates yet other problems and the principles of their solution. This is an investigation by Messrs. T. and H.,[10] which shows the remarkable influence of mental suggestions upon certain bodily processes which have always been considered purely physiological. These investigators set out to repeat certain experiments of others which showed that if two points, say those of a pair of compasses, be somewhat separated and put upon the skin, two sensations of contact come from the points. But if while the experiment is being performed the points be brought constantly nearer to each other, a time arrives when the two are felt as only one, although they may be still some distance apart. The physiologists argued from this that there were minute nerve endings in the skin at least so far apart as the least distance at which the points were felt as two; and that when the points were so close together that they only touched one of these nerve endings, only one sensation was produced. Mr. T. had already found, working in Germany, that, with practice, the skin gradually became more and more able to discriminate the two points--that is, to feel the two at smaller distances; and, further, that the exercise of the skin in this way on one side of the body not only made that locality more sensitive to minute differences, but had the same effect, singularly, on the corresponding place on the other side of the body. This, our experimenters inferred, could only be due to the continued suggestion in the mind of the subject that he should feel two points, the result being an actual heightening of the sensibility of the skin. When he thought that he was becoming more sensitive on one side--and really was--this sense or belief of his took effect in some way in both hemispheres of his brain, and so both sides of the body were alike affected. [Footnote 10: G. A. Tawney, now professor in Beloit College, and C. W. Hodge, now professor in Lafayette College.] This led to other experiments in Princeton in which suggestions were actually made to the subjects that they were to become more or less sensitive to distance and direction between the points on the skin, with the striking result that these suggestions actually took effect all over the body. This was so accurately determined that from the results of the experiments with the compasses on the skin in this case or that, pretty accurate inferences could be made as to what mental suggestions the subject was getting at the time. There was no chance for deception in the results, for the experiments were so controlled that the subject did not know until afterward of the correspondences actually reached between his states of mind and the variations in sensibility of the skin. This slight report of the work done in one laboratory in about two sessions, involving a considerable variety of topics, may give an idea, so far as it goes, of the sort of work which experimental psychology is setting itself to do. It will be seen that there is as yet no well-knit body of results on which new experiments may proceed, and no developed set of experimental arrangements, such as other positive sciences show. The procedure is, in many important matters, still a matter of the individual worker's judgment and ability. Even for the demonstrations attempted for undergraduate students, good and cheap apparatus is still lacking. For these reasons it is premature as yet to expect that this branch of the science will cut much of a figure in education. There can be no doubt, however, that it is making many interesting contributions to our knowledge of the mind, and that when it is more adequately organized and developed in its methods and apparatus, It will become the basis of discipline of a certain kind lying between that of physical science and that of the humanities, since it will have features in common with the biological and natural sciences. Its results may be expected also to lead to better results than we now have in the theory and practice of education. CHAPTER VII. SUGGESTION IN CHILDREN AND ADULTS--HYPNOTISM. In an earlier place certain illustrations of Suggestion have been given. By Suggestion we mean the fact that all sorts of hints from without disturb and modify the beliefs and actions of the individual. Certain cases from my own observation may be given which will make the matter clear. _Physiological Suggestion._--Observation of an infant for the first month or six weeks after birth leads to the conviction that his life is mainly physiological. When the actions which are purely reflex, together with certain random impulsive movements, are noted, we seem to exhaust the case. Yet even at this remarkably early stage H. was found to be in some degree receptive to certain Suggestions conveyed by repeated stimulation under uniform conditions. In the first place, the suggestions of sleep began to tell upon her before the end of the first month. Her nurse put her to sleep by laying her face down and patting gently upon the end of her spine. This position soon became itself not only suggestive to the child of sleep, but sometimes necessary to sleep, even when she was laid across the nurse's lap in what seemed to be an uncomfortable position. This case illustrates what may be called Physiological Suggestion. It shows the law of physiological habit as it borders on the conscious. The same sort of phenomena appear also in adult life. Positions given to the limbs of a sleeper lead to movements ordinarily associated with these positions. The sleeper defends himself, withdraws himself from cold, etc. Children learn gradually to react upon conditions of position, lack of support, etc., of the body, with those actions necessary to keep from falling, which adults have so perfectly. All secondary automatic reactions may be classed here; the sensations coming from one action, as in walking, being suggestions to the next movement, unconsciously acted upon. The consciousness at any stage in the chain of movements, if present at all, must be similar to the baby's in the case above--a mere internal glimmering. The most we can say of such physiological suggestion is, that there is probably some consciousness, and that the ordinary reflexes seem to be abbreviated and improved. _Subconscious Adult Suggestion._--There are certain phenomena of a rather striking kind coming under this head whose classification is so evident that we may enumerate them without discussion of the general principles which they involve. _Tune Suggestion._--It has been pointed out recently that dream states are largely indebted for their visual elements--what we see in our dreams--to accidental lines, patches, etc., in the field of vision when the eyes are shut, due to the distended blood vessels of the cornea and lids, to changes in the external illumination, to the presence of dust particles of different configuration, etc. The other senses also undoubtedly contribute to the texture of our dreams by equally subconscious suggestions. There is no doubt, further, that our waking life is constantly influenced by such trivial stimulations. I have tested in detail, for example, the conditions of the rise of so-called "internal tunes"--we speak of "tunes in our head" or "in our ears"--and find certain suggestive influences which in most cases cause these tunes to rise and take their course. Often, when a tune springs up "in my head," the same tune has been lately sung or whistled in my hearing, though quite unnoticed at the time. Often the tunes are those heard in church the previous day or earlier. Such a tune I am entirely unable to recall voluntarily; yet when it comes into the mind's ear, so to speak, I readily recognise it as belonging to an earlier day's experience. Other cases show various accidental suggestions, such as the tune Mozart suggested by the composer's name, the tune Gentle Annie suggested by the name Annie, etc. In all these cases it is only after the tune has taken possession of consciousness and after much seeking that the suggesting influence is discovered. Closer analysis reveals certain additional facts: The "time" of such internal tunes is usually dictated by some rhythmical subconscious occurrence. After hearty meals it is always the time of the heart beat, unless there be "in the air" some more impressive stimulus; as, for example, when on shipboard, the beat is with me invariably that of the engine throbs. When walking it is the rhythm of the footfall. On one occasion a knock of four beats on the door started the Marseillaise in my ear; following up this clew, I found that at any time different divisions of musical time being struck on the table at will by another person, tunes would spring up and run on, getting their cue from the measures suggested. Further, when a tune dies away, its last notes often suggest, some time after, another having a similar movement--just as we pass from one tune to another in a "medley." It may also be noted that in my case the tune memories are auditive: they run in my head when I have no words for them and have never sung them--an experience which is consistent with the fact that these "internal tunes" arise in childhood before the faculty of speech. They also have distinct pitch. For example, I once found a tune "in my head" which was perfectly familiar, but for which I could find no words. Tested on the piano, the pitch was F-sharp and the time was my heart beat. Finally, after much effort, I got the unworthy words "Wait till the clouds roll by" by humming the tune over repeatedly. The pitch is determined probably by the accidental condition of the auditory centre in the brain or by the pitch of the external sound which serves as stimulus to the tune. _Normal Auto-Suggestion._--A further class of Suggestions, which fall under the general phrase Auto-suggestion, or Self-suggestion of a normal type, may be illustrated. In experimenting upon the possibility of suggesting sleep to another I have found certain strong reactive influences upon my own mental condition. Such an effort, which involves the picturing of another as asleep, is a strong Auto-suggestion of sleep, taking effect in my own case in about five minutes if the conditions be kept constant. The more clearly the patient's sleep is pictured the stronger becomes the subjective feeling of drowsiness. After about ten minutes the ability to give strong concentration seems to disintegrate, attention is renewed only by fits and starts and in the presence of great, mental inertia, and the oncoming of sleep is almost overpowering. An unfailing cure for insomnia, speaking for myself, is the persistent effort to put some one else asleep by hard thinking of the end in view, with a continued gentle movement, such as stroking the other with the hand. On the other hand, it is impossible to bring on a state of drowsiness by imagining myself asleep. The first effort at this, indeed, is promising, for it leads to a state of restfulness and ease akin to the mental composure which is the usual preliminary to sleep; but it goes no further. It is succeeded by a state of steady wakefulness, which effort of attention or effort not to attend only intensifies. If the victim of insomnia could only forget that he is thus afflicted, could forget himself altogether, his case would be more hopeful. The contrast between this condition and that already described shows that it is the Self-idea, with the emotions it awakens,[11] which prevents the suggestion from realizing itself and probably accounts for many cases of insomnia. [Footnote 11: A friend informs me that when he pictures himself dead he can not help feeling gratified that he makes so handsome a corpse.] _Sense Exaltation._--Recent discussions of Hypnotism have shown the remarkable "exaltation" which the senses may attain in somnambulism, together with a corresponding refinement in the interpretative faculty. This is described more fully below. Events, etc., quite subconscious, usually become suggestions of direct influence upon the subject. Unintended gestures, habitual with the experimenter, may suffice to hypnotize his accustomed subject. The possibility of such training of the senses in the normal state has not had sufficient emphasis. The young child's subtle discriminations of facial and other personal indications are remarkable. The prolonged experience of putting H. to sleep--extending over a period of more than six months, during which I slept beside her bed--served to make me alive to a certain class of suggestions otherwise quite beyond notice. It is well known that mothers are awake to the needs of their infants when they are asleep to everything else. In the first place, we may note the intense auto-suggestion of sleep already pointed out, under the stimulus of repeated nursery rhymes or other regular devices regularly resorted to in putting the child asleep. Second, surprising progressive exaltation of the hearing and interpretation of sounds coming from her in a dark room. At the end of four or five months, her movements in bed awoke me or not according as she herself was awake or not. Frequently after awaking I was distinctly aware of what movements of hers had awaked me.[12] A movement of her head by which it was held up from the pillow was readily distinguished from the restless movements of her sleep. It was not so much, therefore, exaltation of hearing as exaltation of the function of the recognition of sounds heard and of their discrimination. [Footnote 12: This fact is analogous to our common experience of being awaked by a loud noise and then hearing it after we awake; yet the explanation is not the same.] Again, the same phenomenon to an equally marked degree attended the sound of her breathing. It is well enough known that the smallest functional bodily changes induce changes in both the rapidity and the quality of the respiration. In sleep the muscles of inhalation and exhalation are relaxed, inhalation becomes long and deep, exhalation short and exhaustive, and the rhythmic intervals of respiration much lengthened. Now degrees of relative wakefulness are indicated with surprising delicacy by the slight respiration sounds given forth by the sleeper. Professional nurses learn to interpret these indications with great skill. This exaltation of hearing became very pronounced in my operations with the child. After some experience the peculiar breathing of advancing or actual wakefulness in her was sufficient to wake me. And when awake myself the change in the infant's respiration sounds to those indicative of oncoming sleep was sufficient to suggest or bring on sleep in myself. In the dark, also, the general character of her breathing sounds was interpreted with great accuracy in terms of her varied needs, her comfort or discomfort, etc. The same kind of suggestion from the respiration sounds now troubles me whenever one of the children is sleeping within hearing distance.[13] [Footnote 13: This is an unpleasant result which is confirmed by professional infants' nurses. They complain of loss of sleep when off duty. Mrs. James Murray, an infants' nurse in Toronto, informs me that she finds it impossible to sleep when she has no infant in hearing distance, and for that reason she never asks for a vacation. Her normal sleep has evidently come to depend upon continuous soporific suggestions from a child. In another point, also, her experience confirms my observations, viz., the child's movements, preliminary to waking, awake her, when no other movements of the child do so--the consequence being that she is ready for the infant when it gets fully awake and cries out.] The reactions in movement upon these suggestions are very marked and appropriate, in customary or habitual lines, although the stimulations are quite subconscious. The clearest illustrations in this body of my experiences were afforded by my responses in crude songs to the infant's waking movements and breathing sounds. I have often waked myself by myself singing one of two nursery rhymes, which by endless repetition night after night had become so habitual as to follow in an automatic way upon the stimulus from the child. It is certainly astonishing that among the things which one may get to do automatically, we should find singing; but writers on the subject have claimed that the function of musical or semi-musical expression may be reflex. The principle of subconscious suggestion, of which these simple facts are less important illustrations, has very interesting applications in the higher reaches of social, moral, and educational theory. _Inhibitory Suggestion._--An interesting class of phenomena which figure perhaps at all the levels of nervous action now described, may be known as Inhibitory Suggestions. The phrase, in its broadest use, refers to all cases in which the suggesting stimulus tends to suppress, check, or inhibit movement. We find this in certain cases just as strongly marked as the positive movement--bringing kind of suggestion. The facts may be put under certain heads which follow. _Pain Suggestion._--Of course, the fact that pain inhibits movement occurs at once to the reader. So far as this is general, and is a native inherited thing, it is organic, and so falls under the head of Physiological Suggestion of a negative sort. The child shows contracting movements, crying movements, starting and jumping movements, shortly after birth, and so plainly that we need not hesitate to say that these pain responses belong purely to his nervous system; and that, in general, they are inhibitory and contrary to those other native reactions which indicate pleasure. The influence of pain extends everywhere through mental development, however. Its general effect is to dampen down or suppress the function which brings the pain; and in this its action is just the contrary to that of pleasure, which furthers the pleasurable function. _Control Suggestion._--This covers all cases which show any kind of restraint set upon the movements of the body short of that which comes from voluntary intention. The infant brings the movements of his legs, arms, head, etc., gradually into some sort of order and system. It is accomplished by a system of organic checks and counter-checks, by which associations are formed between muscular sensations on the one hand and certain other sensations, as of sight, touch, hearing, etc., on the other hand. The latter serve as suggestions to the performance of these movements, and these alone. The infant learns to balance his head and trunk, to direct his hands, to grasp with thumb opposite the four fingers--all largely by such control suggestions, aided, of course, by his native reflexes. _Contrary Suggestion._--By this is meant a tendency of a very striking kind observable in many children, no less than in many adults, to do the contrary when any course is suggested. The very word "contrary" is used in popular talk to describe an individual who shows this type of conduct. Such a child or man is rebellious whenever rebellion is possible; he seems to kick constitutionally against the pricks. The fact of "contrariness" in older children--especially boys--is so familiar to all who have observed school children with any care that I need not cite further details. And men and women often become so enslaved to suggestions of the contrary that they seem only to wait for indications of the wishes of others in order to oppose and thwart them. Contrary suggestions are to be explained as exaggerated instances of control. It is easy to see that the checks and counter-checks already spoken of as constituting the method of control of muscular movement may themselves become so habitual and intense as to dominate the reactions which they should only regulate. The associations between the muscular series and the visual series, let us say, which controls it, comes to work backward, so that the drift of the organic processes is toward certain contrary reverse movements. In the higher reaches of conduct and life we find interesting cases of very refined contrary suggestion. In the man of ascetic temperament, the duty of self-denial takes the form of a regular contrary suggestion in opposition to every invitation to self-indulgence, however innocent. The over-scrupulous mind, like the over-precise, is a prey to the eternal remonstrances from the contrary which intrude their advice into all his decisions. In matters of thought and belief also cases are common of stubborn opposition to evidence, and persistence in opinion, which are in no way due to the cogency of the contrary arguments or to real force of conviction. _Hypnotic Suggestion._--The facts upon which the current theories of hypnotism are based may be summed up under a few headings, and the recital of them will serve to bring this class of phenomena into the general lines of classification drawn out in this chapter. _The Facts._--When by any cause the attention is held fixed upon an object, say a bright button, for a sufficient time without distraction, the subject begins to lose consciousness in a peculiar way. Generalizing this simple experiment, we may say that any method or device which serves to secure undivided and prolonged attention to any sort of Suggestion--be it object, idea, anything that is clear and striking--brings on what is called Hypnosis to a person normally constituted. The Paris school of interpreters find three stages of progress in the hypnotic sleep: First, Catalepsy, characterized by rigid fixity of the muscles in any position in which the limbs may be put by the experimenter, with great Suggestibility on the side of consciousness, and Anæsthesia (lack of sensation) in certain areas of the skin and in certain of the special senses; second, Lethargy, in which consciousness seems to disappear entirely; the subject not being sensitive to any stimulations by eye, ear, skin, etc., and the body being flabby and pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary mesmeric exhibitions at which travelling mesmerists "control" persons before audiences and make them obey their commands. While other scientists properly deny that these three stages are really distinct, they may yet be taken as representing extreme instances of the phenomena, and serve as points of departure for further description. On the mental side the general characteristics of hypnotic Somnambulism are as follows: 1. _The impairment of memory_ in a peculiar way. In the hypnotic condition all affairs of the ordinary life are forgotten; on the other hand, after waking the events of the hypnotic condition are forgotten. Further, in any subsequent period of Hypnosis the events of the former similar periods are remembered. So a person who is frequently hypnotized has two continuous memories: one for the events of his normal life, exercised only when he is normal; and one for the events of his hypnotic periods, exercised only when he is hypnotized. 2. _Suggestibility_ to a remarkable degree. By this is meant the tendency of the subject to have in reality any mental condition which is suggested to him. He is subject to Suggestions both on the side of his sensations and ideas and also on the side of his actions. He will see, hear, remember, believe, refuse to see, hear, etc., anything, with some doubtful exceptions, which may be suggested to him by word or deed, or even by the slightest and perhaps unconscious indications of those about him. On the side of conduct his suggestibility is equally remarkable. Not only will he act in harmony with the illusions of sight, etc., into which he is led, but he will carry out, like an automaton, the actions suggested to him. Further, pain and pleasure, with their organic accompaniments may be produced by Suggestion. The skin may be actually scarred with a lead pencil if the patient be told that it is red-hot iron. The suggested pain brings about vasomotor and other bodily changes that prove, as similar tests in the other cases prove, that simulation is impossible and the phenomena are real. These truths and those given below are no longer based on the mere reports of the "mesmerists," but are the recognised property of legitimate psychology. Again, such suggestions may be for a future time, and be performed only when a suggested interval has elapsed; they are then called Deferred or Post-hypnotic Suggestions. Post-hypnotic Suggestions are those which include the command not to perform them until a certain time after the subject has returned to his normal condition; such suggestions--if of reasonably trifling character--are actually carried out afterward in the normal state, although the person is conscious of no reason why he should act in such a way, having no remembrance whatever that he has received the suggestion when hypnotized. Such post-hypnotic performances may be deferred by suggestion for many months. 3. So-called _Exaltation_ of the mental faculties, especially of the senses: increased acuteness of vision, hearing, touch, memory, and the mental functions generally. By reason of this great "exaltation," hypnotized patients may get suggestions from the experimenters which are not intended, and discover their intentions when every effort is made to conceal them. Often emotional changes in expression are discerned by them; and if it be admitted that their power of logical and imaginative insight is correspondingly exalted, there is hardly a limit to the patient's ability to read, simply from physical indications, the mental states of those who experiment with him. 4. So-called _Rapport_. This term covers all the facts known, before the subject was scientifically investigated, by such expressions as "personal magnetism," "will power over the subject", etc. It is true that one particular operator alone may be able to hypnotize a particular patient; and in this case the patient is, when hypnotized, open to suggestions from that person only. He is deaf and blind to everything enjoined by anyone else. It is easy to see from what has already been said that this does not involve any occult nerve influence or mental power. A sensitive patient anybody can hypnotize, provided only that the patient have the idea or conviction that the experimenter possesses such power. Now, let a patient get the idea that only one man can hypnotize him, and that is the beginning of the hypnotic suggestion itself. It is a part of the suggestion that a certain personal _Rapport_ is necessary; so the patient must have this _Rapport_. This is shown by the fact that when such a patient is hypnotized, the operator _en rapport_ with him can transfer the so-called control to any one else simply by suggesting to the patient that this third party can also hypnotize him. _Rapport_, therefore, and all the amazing claims of charlatans to powers of charming, stealing another's personality, controlling his will at a distance--all such claims are explained, so far as they have anything to rest upon, by suggestion under conditions of mental hyperæsthesia or exaltation. I may now add certain practical remarks on the subject. In general, any method which fixes the attention upon a single stimulus long enough is probably sufficient to produce Hypnosis; but the result is quick and profound in proportion as the patient has the idea that it is going to succeed, i. e., gets the suggestion of sleep. It may be said, therefore, that the elaborate performances, such as passes, rubbings, mysterious incantations, etc., often resorted to, have no physiological effect whatever, and only serve to work in the way of suggestion upon the mind of the subject. In view of this it is probable that any person in normal health can be hypnotized, provided he is not too sceptical of the operator's knowledge and power; and, on the contrary, any one can hypnotize another, provided he do not arouse too great scepticism, and is not himself wavering and clumsy. It is probable, however, that susceptibility varies greatly in degree, and that race exerts an important influence. Thus in Europe the French seem to be most susceptible, and the English and Scandinavians least so. The impression that weak-minded persons are most available is quite mistaken. On the contrary, patients in the insane asylums, idiots, etc., are the most refractory. This is to be expected, from the fact that in these cases power of strong, steady attention is wanting. The only class of pathological cases which seem peculiarly open to the hypnotic influence is that of the hystero-epileptics, whose tendencies are toward extreme suggestibility. Further, one may hypnotize himself--what we have called above Auto-suggestion--especially after having been put into the trance more than once by others. When let alone after being hypnotized, the patient usually passes into a normal sleep and wakes naturally. It is further evident that frequent hypnotization is very damaging if done by the same operator, since then the patient contracts a habit of responding to the same class of suggestions; and this may influence his normal life. A further danger arises from the possibility that all suggestions have not been removed from the patient's mind before his awaking. Competent scientific observers always make it a point to do this. It is possible also that damaging effects result directly to a man from frequent hypnotizing; and this is in some degree probable, simply from the fact that, while it lasts, the state is abnormal. Consequently, all general exhibitions in public, as well as all individual hypnotizing by amateurs, should be prohibited by law, and the whole practical application as well as observation of Hypnosis should be left in the hands of physicians or experts who have proved their fitness by an examination and secured a certificate of licence. In Russia a decree (summer, 1893) permits physicians to practise hypnotism for purposes of cure under official certificates. In France public exhibitions are forbidden. So-called Criminal Suggestions may be made, with more or less effect, in the hypnotic state. Cases have been tried in the French courts, in which evidence for and against such influence of a third person over the criminal has been admitted. The reality of the phenomenon, however, is in dispute. The Paris school claim that criminal acts may be suggested to the hypnotized subject, which are just as certain to be performed by him as any other acts. Such a subject will discharge a blank-loaded pistol at one, when told to do so, or stab him with a paper dagger. While admitting the facts, the Nancy theorists claim that the subject knows the performance to be a farce; gets suggestions of the unreality of it from the experimenters, and so acquiesces. This is probably true, as is seen in frequent cases in which patients have refused, in hypnotic sleep, to perform suggested acts which shocked their modesty, veracity, etc. This goes to show that the Nancy school are right in saying that while in Hypnosis suggestibility is exaggerated to an enormous degree, still it has limits in the more well-knit habits, moral sentiments, social opinions, etc., of the subject. And it further shows that Hypnosis is probably, as they claim, a temporary disturbance, rather than a pathological condition of mind or body. There have been many remarkable and sensational cases of cure of disease by hypnotic suggestion, reported especially in France. That hysteria in many of its manifestations has been relieved is certainly true; but that any organic, structural disease has ever been cured by hypnotism is unproved. It is not regarded by medical authorities as an agent of much therapeutic value, and is rarely employed; but it is doubtful, in view of the natural prejudice caused by the pretensions of charlatans, whether its merits have been fairly tested. On the European Continent it has been successfully applied in a great variety of cases; and Bernheim has shown that minor nervous troubles, insomnia, migraines, drunkenness, lighter cases of rheumatism, sexual and digestive disorders, together with a host of smaller temporary causes of pain--corns, cricks in back and side, etc.--may be cured or very materially alleviated by suggestions conveyed in the hypnotic state. In many cases such cures are permanently effected with aid from no other remedies. In a number of great city hospitals patients of recognised classes are at once hypnotized, and suggestions of cure made. Liébeault, the founder of the Nancy school, has the credit of having first made use of hypnosis as a remedial agent. It is also becoming more and more recognised as a method of controlling refractory and violent patients in asylums and reformatory institutions. It must be added, however, that psychological theory rather than medical practice is seriously concerning itself with this subject. _Theory._--Two rival theories are held as to the general character of Hypnosis. The Paris school already referred to, led by the late Dr. Charcot, hold that it is a pathological condition which is most readily induced in patients already mentally diseased or having neuropathic tendencies. They claim that the three stages described above are a discovery of great importance. The so-called Nancy school, on the other hand, led by Bernheim, deny the pathological character of Hypnosis altogether, claiming that the hypnotic condition is nothing more than a special form of ordinary sleep brought on artificially by suggestion. Hypnotic suggestion, say they, is only an exaggeration of an influence to which all persons are normally subject. All the variations, stages, curious phenomena, etc., of the Paris school, they claim, can be explained by this "suggestion" hypothesis. The Nancy school must be considered completely victorious apart from some facts which no theory has yet explained. Hypnotism shows an intimacy of interaction between mind and body to which current psychology is only beginning to do justice; and it is this aspect of the whole matter which should be emphasized in this connection. The hypnotic condition of consciousness may be taken to represent the working of Suggestion most remarkably. CHAPTER VIII. THE TRAINING OF THE MIND--EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. A great deal has been said and written about the physical and mental differences shown by the young; and one of the most oft-repeated of all the charges which we hear brought against the current methods of teaching is that all children are treated alike. The point is carried so far that a teacher is judged from the way he has or has not of getting at the children under him as individuals. All this is a move in the right direction; and yet the subject is still so vague that many of the very critics who declaim against the similar treatment which diverse pupils get at school have no clear idea of what is needed; they merely make demands that the treatment shall suit the child. How each child is to be suited, and the inquiry still back of that, what peculiarity it is in this child or that which is to be "suited"--these things are left to settle themselves. It is my aim in this chapter to indicate some of the variations which are shown by different children; and on the basis of such facts to endeavour to arrive at a more definite idea of what variations of treatment are called for in the several classes into which the children are divided. I shall confine myself at first to those differences which are more hereditary and constitutional. _First Period--Early Childhood._--The first and most comprehensive distinction is that based on the division of the life of man into the two great spheres of reception and action. The "sensory" and the "motor" are becoming the most common descriptive terms of current psychology. We hear all the while of sensory processes, sensory contents, sensory centres, sensory attention, etc.; and, on the other hand, of motor processes, motor centres, motor ataxy, motor attention, motor consciousness, etc. And in the higher reaches of mental function, the same antithesis comes out in the contrast of sensory and motor aphasia, alexia, sensory and motor types of memory and imagination, etc. Indeed the tendency is now strong to think that when we have assigned a given function of consciousness to one or other side of the nervous apparatus, making it either sensory or motor, then our duty to it is done. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the distinction is throwing great light on the questions of mind which involve also the correlative questions of the nervous system. This is true of all questions of educational psychology. This first distinction between children--as having general application--is that which I may cover by saying that some are more active, or motile, while others are more passive, or receptive. This is a common enough distinction; but possibly a word or two on its meaning in the constitution of the child may give it more actual value. The "active" person to the psychologist is one who is very responsive to what we have called Suggestions. Suggestions may be described in most general terms as any and all the influences from outside, from the environment, both physical and personal, which get a lodgment in consciousness and lead to action. A child who is "suggestible" to a high degree shows it in what we call "motility." The suggestions which take hold of him translate themselves very directly into action. He tends to act promptly, quickly, unreflectively, assimilating the newer elements of the suggestions of the environment to the ways of behaviour fixed by his earlier habits. Generally such a person, child or adult, is said to "jump" at conclusions; he is anxious to know in order to act; he acts in some way on all events or suggestions, even when no course of action is explicitly suggested, and even when one attempts to keep him from acting. Psychologically such a person is dominated by habit. And this means that his nervous system sets, either by its hereditary tendencies or by the undue predominance of certain elements in his education, quickly in the direction of motor discharge. The great channels of readiest out-pouring from the brain into the muscles have become fixed and pervious; it is hard for the processes once started in the sense centres, such as those of sight, hearing, etc., to hold in their energies. They tend to unstable equilibrium in the direction of certain motor combinations, which in their turn represent certain classes of acts. This is habit; and the person of the extreme motor type is always a creature of habit. Now what is the line of treatment that such a child should have? The necessity for getting an answer to this question is evident from what was said above--i. e., that the very rise of the condition itself is due, apart from heredity, oftener than not to the fact that he has not had proper treatment from his teachers. The main point for a teacher to have in mind in dealing with such a boy or girl--the impulsive, active one, always responsive, but almost always in error in what he says and does--is that here is a case of habit. Habit is good; indeed, if we should go a little further we should see that all education is the forming of habits; but here, in this case, what we have is not habits, but habit. This child shows a tendency to habit _as such_: to habits of any and every kind. The first care of the teacher in order to the control of the formation of habits is in some way to bring about a little inertia of habit, so to speak--a short period of organic hesitation, during which the reasons pro and con for each habit may be brought into the consciousness of the child. The means by which this tendency to crude, inconsiderate action on the part of the child is to be controlled and regulated is one of the most typical questions for the intelligent teacher. Its answer must be different for children of different ages. The one thing to do, in general, however, from the psychologist's point of view, is in some way to bring about greater complications in the motor processes which the child uses most habitually, and with this complication to get greater inhibition along the undesirable lines of his activity. Inhibition is the damming up of the processes for a period, causing some kind of a "setback" of the energies of movement into the sensory centres, or the redistribution of this energy in more varied and less habitual discharges. With older children a rational method is to analyze for them the mistakes they have made, showing the penalties they have brought upon themselves by hasty action. This requires great watchfulness. In class work, the teacher may profitably point out the better results reached by the pupil who "stops to think." This will bring to the reform of the hasty scholar the added motive of semi-public comparison with the more deliberate members of the class. Such procedure is quite unobjectionable if made a recognised part of the class method; yet care should be taken that no scholar suffer mortification from such comparisons. The matter may be "evened up" by dwelling also on the merit of promptness which the scholar in question will almost always be found to show. For younger pupils as well as older more indirect methods of treatment are more effective. The teacher should study the scholar to find the general trend of his habits. Then oversight should be exercised over both his tasks and his sports with certain objects in view. His habitual actions should be made as complicated as his ability can cope with; this in order to educate his habits and keep them from working back into mere mechanism. If he shows his fondness for drawing by marking his desk, see that he has drawing materials at hand and some intelligent tasks in this line to do; not as tasks, but for himself. Encourage him to make progress always, not simply to repeat himself. If he has awkward habits of movement with his hands and feet, try to get him interested in games that exercise these members in regular and skilful ways. Furthermore, in his intellectual tasks such a pupil should be trained, as far as may be, on the more abstract subjects, which do not give immediate openings for action. Mathematics is the best possible discipline for him. Grammar also is good; it serves at once to interest him, if it is well taught, in certain abstract relationships, and also to send out his motor energies in the exercise of speech, which is the function which always needs exercise, and which is always under the observation of the teacher. Grammar, in fact, is one of the very best of primary-school subjects, because instruction in it issues at once in the very motor functions which embody the relationships which the teacher seeks to impress. The teacher has in his ear, so to speak, the evidence as to whether his instruction is understood or not. This gives him a valuable opportunity to keep his instruction well ahead of its motor expression--thus leading the pupil to think rather than to act without thinking--and at the same time to point out the errors of performance which follow from haste in passing from thought to action. These indirect methods of reaching the impulsive pupil should never be cast aside for the direct effort to "control" such a scholar. The very worst thing that can be done to such a boy or girl is to command him or her to sit still or not to act; and a still worse thing--to make a comparative again on the head of the superlative--is to affix to the command painful penalties. This is a direct violation of the principle of Suggestion. Such a command only tends to empty the pupil's mind of other objects of thought and interest, and so to keep his attention upon his own movements. This, then, amounts to a continual suggestion to him to do just what you want to keep him from doing. On the contrary, unless you give him suggestions and interests which lead his thought away from his acts, it is impossible not to aggravate his bad tendencies by your very efforts. This is the way, as I intimated above, that many teachers create or confirm bad habits in their pupils, and so render any amount of well-intended positive instruction abortive. It seems well established that a suggestion of the negative--that is, not to do a thing--has no negative force; but, on the contrary, in the early period, it amounts only to a stronger suggestion in the positive sense, since it adds emphasis, to the thing which is forbidden. The "not" in a prohibition is no addition to the pictured course to which it is attached, and the physiological fact that the attention tends to set up action upon that which is attended to comes in to put a premium on disobedience. Indeed, the philosophy of all punishment rests in this consideration, i. e., that unless the penalty tends to fill the mind with some object other than the act punished, it does more harm than good. The punishment must be actual and its nature diverting; never a threat which terminates there, nor a penalty which fixes the thought of the offence more strongly in mind. This is to say, that the permanent inhibition of a movement at this period is best secured by establishing some different movement. The further consideration of the cases of great motility would lead to the examination of the kinds of memory and imagination and their treatment; to that we return below. We may now take up the instances of the sensory type considered with equal generality. The sensory children are in the main those which seem more passive, more troubled with physical inertia, more contemplative when a little older, less apt in learning to act out new movements, less quick at taking a hint, etc. These children are generally further distinguished as being--and here the antithesis to the motor ones is very marked--much less suggestible. They seem duller when young. Boys often get credit for dulness compared with girls on this account. Even as early as the second year can this distinction among children be readily observed in many instances. The motor child will show sorrow by loud crying and vigorous action, while the sensory child will grieve in quiet, and continue to grieve when the other has forgotten the disagreeable occurrence altogether. The motor one it is that asks a great many questions and seems to learn little from the answers; while the sensory one learns simply from hearing the questions of the other and the answers given to them. The motor child, again, gets himself hurt a great many times in the same way, without developing enough self-control to restrain himself from the same mistake again and again; the sensory child tends to be timid in the presence of the unknown and uncertain, to learn from one or a few experiences, and to hold back until he gets satisfactory assurances that danger is absent. The former tends to be more restless in sitting, standing, etc., more demonstrative in affection, more impulsive in action, more forgiving in disposition. As to the treatment of the sensory child, it is a problem of even greater difficulty and danger than that of his motor brother. The very nature of the distinction makes it evident that while the motor individual "gives himself away," so to speak, by constantly acting out his impressions, and so revealing his progress and his errors, with the other it is not so. All knowledge that we are ever able to get of the mental condition of another individual is through his movements, expressive, in a technical sense, or of other kinds, such as his actions, attitudes, lines of conduct, etc. We have no way to read thought directly. So just in so far as the sensory individual is less active, to that degree he is less expressive, less self-revealing. To the teacher, therefore, he is more of an enigma. It is harder to tell in his case what instruction he has appreciated and made his own; and what, on the other hand, has been too hard for him; what wise, and what unwise. Where the child of movement speaks out his impulsive interpretations, this one sinks into himself and gives no answer. So we are deprived of the best way of interpreting him--that afforded by his own interpretation of himself. A general policy of caution is therefore strongly to be recommended. Let the teacher wait in every case for some positive indication of the child's real state of mind. Even the directions given the child may not have been understood, or the quick word of admonition may have wounded him, or a duty which is so elementary as to be a commonplace in the mental life of the motor child may yet be so vaguely apprehended that to insist upon its direct performance may cost the teacher all his influence with the pupil of this type. It is better to wait even at the apparent risk of losing valuable days than to proceed a single step upon a mistaken estimate of the child's measure of assimilation. And, further, the effect of wrong treatment upon this boy or girl is very different from that of a similar mistake in the other case. He becomes more silent, retired, even secretive, when once an unsympathetic relationship is suggested between him and his elder. Then more positively--his instruction should be well differentiated. He should in every possible case be given inducements to express himself. Let him recite a great deal. Give him simple verses to repeat. Keep him talking all you can. Show him his mistakes with the utmost deliberation and kindliness of manner; and induce him to repeat his performances in your hearing after the correction has been suggested. Cultivate the imitative tendency in him; it is the handmaid to the formation of facile habits of action. In arranging the children's games, see that he gets the very active parts, even though he be backward and hesitating about assuming them. Make him as far as possible a leader, in order to cultivate his sense of responsibility for the doing of things, and to lead to the expression of his understanding of arrangements, etc. In it all, the essential thing is to bring him out in some kind of expression; both for the sake of the improved balance it gives himself, and as an indication to the observant teacher of his progress and of the next step to be taken in his development. It is for the sensory child, I think, that the kindergarten has its great utility. It gives him facility in movement and expression, and also some degree of personal and social confidence. But for the same reasons the kindergarten over-stimulates the motor scholars at the corresponding age. There should really be two kindergarten methods--one based on the idea of deliberation, the other on that of expression. The task of the educator here, it is evident, is to help nature correct a tendency to one-sided development; just as the task is this also in the former case; but here the variation is on the side of idiosyncrasy ultimately, and of genius immediately. For genius, I think, is the more often developed from the contemplative mind, with the relatively dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the smooth-working machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if the damming-up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into eccentricity, and the blame is possibly ours. It seems true--although great caution is necessary in drawing inferences--that here a certain distinction may be found to hold also between the sexes. It is possible that the apparent precocious alertness of girls in their school years, and earlier, may be simply a predominance among them of the motor individuals. This is borne out by the examination of the kinds of performance in which they seem to be more forward than boys. It resolves itself, so far as my observation goes, into greater quickness of response and greater agility in performance; not greater constructiveness, nor greater power of concentrated attention. The boys seem to need more instruction because they do not learn as much for themselves by acting upon what they already know. In later years, the distinction gets levelled off by the common agencies of education, and by the setting of tasks requiring more thought than the mere spontaneities of either type avail to furnish. Yet all the way through, I think there is something in the ordinary belief that woman is relatively more impulsive and more prone to the less reflective forms of action. What has now been said may be sufficient to give some concrete force to the common opinion that education should take account of the individual character at this earliest stage. The general distinction between sensory and motor has, however, a higher application in the matter of memory and imagination at later stages of growth, to which we may now turn. _Second Period._--The research is of course more difficult as the pupil grows older, since the influences of heredity tend to become blurred by the more constant elements of the child's home, school, and general social environment. The child whom I described just above as sensory in his type is constantly open to influences from the stimulating behaviour of his motor companion, as well as from the direct measures which parent and teacher take to overcome his too-decided tendencies and to prevent one-sided development. So, too, the motor child tends to find correctives in his environment. The analogy, however, between the more organic and hereditary differences in individuals, and the intellectual and moral variations which they tend to develop with advance in school age, is very marked; and we find a similar series of distinctions in the later period. The reason that there is a correspondence between the variations given in heredity and those due in the main to the educative influences of the single child's social environment is in itself very suggestive, but space does not permit its exposition here. The fact is this: the child tends, under the influence of his home, school, social surroundings, etc., to develop a marked character either in the sensory or in the motor direction, in his memory, imagination, and general type of mind. Taking up the "motor" child first, as before, we find that his psychological growth tends to confirm him in his hereditary type. In all his social dealing with other children he is more or less domineering and self-assertive; or at least his conduct leads one to form that opinion of him. He seems to be constantly impelled to act so as to show himself off. He "performs" before people, shows less modesty than may be thought desirable in one of his tender years, impresses the forms of his own activity upon the other children, who come to stand about him with minds constrained to follow him. He is an object lesson in both the advantages and the risks of an aggressive life policy. He has a suggestion to make in every emergency, a line of conduct for each of his company, all marked out or supplied on the spur of the moment by his own quick sense of appropriate action; and for him, as for no one else, to hesitate is to be lost. Now what this general policy or method of growth means to his consciousness is becoming more and more clear in the light of the theory of mental types. The reason a person is motor is that his mind tends always to be filled up most easily with memories or revived images of the twitchings, tensions, contractions, expansions, of the activities of the muscular system. He is a motor because the means of his thought generally, the mental coins which pass current in his thought exchange, are muscular sensations or the traces which such sensations have left in his memory. The very means by which he thinks of a situation, an event, a duty, is not the way it looked, or the way it sounded, or the way it smelt, tasted, or felt to the touch--in any of the experiences to which these senses are involved--but the means, the representatives, the instruments of his thought, are the feelings of the way he has acted. He has a tendency--and he comes to have it more and more--to get a muscular representation of everything; and his gauge of the value of this or that is this muscular measure of it, in terms of the action which it is calculated to draw out. It is then this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in the case of very young children, and aim to ascertain the mental peculiarity which accompanies it and carries on the type through the individual's maturer years, we see our way to its meaning. The fact is that a peculiar kind of mental imagery tends to swell up in consciousness and monopolize the theatre of thought. This is only another way of saying that the attention is more or less educated in the direction represented by this sort of imagery. Every time a movement is thought of, in preference to a sound or a sight which is also available, the habit of giving the attention to the muscular equivalents of things becomes more firmly fixed. This continues until the motor habit of attention becomes the only easy and normal way of attending; and then the person is fixed in his type for one, many, or all of his activities of thinking and action. So now it is no longer difficult to see, I trust, why it is that the child or youth of this sort has the characteristics which he has. It is a familiar principle that attention to the thought of a movement tends to start that very movement. I defy any of my readers to think hard and long of winking the left eye and not have an almost irresistible impulse to wink that eye. There is no better way to make it difficult for a child to sit still than to tell him to sit still; for your words fill up his attention, as I had occasion to say above, with the thought of movements, and these thoughts bring on the movements, despite the best intentions of the child in the way of obedience. Watch an audience of little children--and children of an older growth will also do--when an excited speaker harangues them with many gestures, and see the comical reproduction of the gestures by the children's hands. They picture the movements, the attention is fixed on them, and appropriate actions follow. It is only the generalizing of these phenomena that we find realized in the boy or girl of the motor type. Such a child is constantly thinking of things by their movement equivalents. Muscular sensations throng up in consciousness at every possible signal and by every train of association; so it is not at all surprising that all informations, instructions, warnings, reproofs, suggestions, pass right through such a child's consciousness and express themselves by the channels of movement. Hence the impulsive, restless, domineering, unmeditative character of the child. We may now endeavour to describe a little more closely his higher mental traits. 1. In the first place the motor mind tends to _very quick generalization_. Every teacher knows the boys in school who anticipate their conclusions, on the basis of a single illustration. They reach the general notion which is most broad in extent, in application, but most shallow in intent, in richness, in real explaining or descriptive meaning. For example, such a boy will hear the story of Napoleon, proceed to define heroism in terms of military success, and then go out and try the Napoleon act upon his playfellows. This tendency to generalize is the mental counterpart of the tendency to act seen in his conduct. The reason he generalizes is that the brain energies are not held back in the channels of perception, but pour themselves right out toward the motor equivalents of former perceptions which were in any way similar; then the present perceptions are lost in the old ones toward which attention is held by habit, and action follows. To the child all heroes are Napoleons because Napoleon was the first hero, and the channels of action inspired by him suffice now for the appropriate conduct. 2. Such a scholar is very _poor at noting and remembering distinctions_. This follows naturally from the hasty generalizations which he makes. Having once identified a new fact as the same as an old one, and having so reached a defective sense of the general class, it is then more and more hard for him to retrace his steps and sort out the experiences more carefully. Even when he discovers his mistake, his old impulse to act seizes him again, and he rushes to some new generalization wherewith to replace the old, again falling into error by his stumbling haste to act. The teacher is oftener perhaps brought to the verge of impatience by scholars of this class than by any others. 3. Following, again, from these characteristics, there is a third remark to be made about the youth of this type; and it bears upon a peculiarity which it is very hard for the teacher to estimate and control. These motor boys and girls have what I may characterize as _fluidity of the attention_. By this is meant a peculiar quality of mind which all experienced teachers are in some degree familiar with, and which they find baffling and unmanageable. By "fluidity" of the attention I mean the state of hurry, rush, inadequate inspection, quick transition, all-too-ready-assimilation, hear-but-not-heed, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other habit of mind. The best way to get an adequate sense of the state is to recall the pupil who has it to the most marked degree, and picture his mode of dealing with your instructions. Such a pupil hears your words, says "yes," even acts appropriately so far as your immediate instructions go; but when he comes to the same situation again, he is as virginly innocent of your lesson as if his teacher had never been born. Psychologically, the state differs from preoccupation, which characterizes quite a different type of mind. The motor boy is not preoccupied. Far from that, he is quite ready to attend to you. But when he attends, it is with a momentary concentration--with a rush like the flow of a mountain stream past the point of the bank on which you sit. His attention is flowing, always in transition, leaping from "it to that," with superb agility and restlessness. But the exercise it gains from its movements is its only reward. Its acquisitions are slender in the extreme. It illustrates, on the mental plane, the truth of the "rolling stone." It corresponds, as a mental character, to the muscular restlessness which the same type of child shows in the earlier period previously spoken of. The psychological explanation of this "fluid attention" is more or less plain, but I can not take space to expound it. Suffice it to say that the attention is itself, probably, in its brain seat, a matter of the motor centres; its physical seat both "gives and takes" in co-operation with the processes which shed energy out into the muscles. So it follows that, in the ready muscular revivals, discharges, transitions, which we have seen to be prominent in the motor temperament the attention is carried along, and its "fluidity" is only an incident to the fluidity of the motor symbols of which this sort of a mind continually makes use. Coming a little closer to the pedagogical problems which this type of pupil raises before us, we find, in the first place, that it is excessively difficult for this scholar to give continuous or adequate attention to anything of any complexity. The movements of attention are so easy, the outlets of energy, to use the physical figure, so large and well used, that the minor relationships of the thing are passed over. The variations of the object from its class are swept away in the onrush of his motor tendencies. He assumes the facts which he does not understand, and goes right on to express himself in action on these assumptions. So while he seems to take in what is told him, with an intuition that is surprisingly swift, and a personal adaptation no less surprising, the disappointment is only the more keen when the instructor finds the next day that he has not penetrated at all into the inner current of this scholar's mental processes. Again, as marked as this is in its early stages, the continuance of it leads to results which are nothing short of deplorable. When such a student has gone through a preparatory school without overcoming this tendency to "fluid attention" and comes to college, the instructors in the higher institutions are practically helpless before him. We say of him that "he has never learned to study," that he does not know "how to apply himself," that he has no "power of assimilation." All of which simply means that his channels of reaction are so formed already that no instruction can get sufficient lodgment in him to bring about any modification of his "apperceptive systems." The embarrassment is the more marked because such a youth, all through his education period, is willing, ready, evidently receptive, prompt, and punctual in all his tasks. Now what shall be done with such a student in his early school years? This is a question for the secondary teacher especially, apart from the more primary measures recommended above. It is in the years between eight and fifteen that this type of mind has its rapid development; before that the treatment is mainly preventive, and consists largely in suggestions which aim to make the muscular discharges more deliberate and the general tone less explosive. But when the boy or girl comes to school with the dawning capacity for independent self-direction and personal application, then it is that the problem of the motor scholar becomes critical. The "let-alone" method puts a premium upon the development of his tendencies and the eventual playing out of his mental possibilities in mere motion. Certain positive ways of giving some indirect discipline to the mind of this type may be suggested. Give this student relatively difficult and complex tasks. There is no way to hinder his exuberant self-discharges except by measures which embarrass and baffle him. We can not "lead him into all truth"; we have to drive him back from all error. The lessons of psychology are to the effect that the normal way to teach caution and deliberation is the way of failure, repulse, and unfortunate, even painful, consequences. Personal appeals to him do little good, since it is a part of his complaint that he is too ready to hear all appeals; and also, since he is not aware of his own lack nor able to carry what he hears into effect. So keep him in company of scholars a little more advanced than he is. Keep him out of the concert recitations, where his tendency to haste would work both personal and social harm. Refrain from giving him assistance in his tasks until he has learned from them something of the real lesson of discouragement, and then help him only by degrees, and by showing him one step at a time, with constant renewals of his own efforts. Shield him with the greatest pains from distractions of all kinds, for even the things and events about him may carry his attention off at the most critical moments. Give him usually the secondary parts in the games of the school, except when real planning, complex execution, and more or less generalship are required; then give him the leading parts: they exercise his activities in new ways not covered by habit, and if he do not rise to their complexity, then the other party to the sport will, and his haste will have its own punishment, and so be a lesson to him. Besides these general checks and regulations, there remains the very important question as to what studies are most available for this type of mind. I have intimated already the general answer that ought to be given to this question. The aim of the studies of the motor student should be discipline in the direction of correct generalization, and, as helpful to this, discipline in careful observation of concrete facts. On the other hand, the studies which involve principles simply of a descriptive kind should have little place in his daily study. They call out largely the more mechanical operations of memory, and their command can be secured for the most part by mere repetition of details all similar in character and of equal value. The measure of the utility to him of the different studies of the schoolroom is found in the relative demand they make upon him to modify his hasty personal reactions, to suspend his thoughtless rush to general results, and back of it all, to hold the attention long enough upon the facts as they arise to get some sense of the logical relationships which bind them together. Studies which do not afford any logical relationships, and which tend, on the contrary, to foster the habit of learning by repetition, only tend to fix the student in the quality of attention which I have called "fluidity." In particular, therefore: give this student all the mathematics he can absorb, and pass him from arithmetic into geometry, leaving his algebra till later. Give him plenty of grammar, taught inductively. Start him early in the elements of physics and chemistry. And as opposed to this, keep him out of the classes of descriptive botany and zoölogy. Rather let him join exploring parties for the study of plants, stones, and animals. A few pet animals are a valuable adjunct to any school museum. If there be an industrial school or machine shop near at hand, try to get him interested in the way things are made, and encourage him to join in such employments. A false generalization in the wheels of a cart supplies its own corrective very quickly, or in the rigging and sails of a toy boat. Drawing from models is a fine exercise for such a youth, and drawing from life, as soon as he gets a little advanced in the control of his pencil. All this, it is easy to see, trains his impulsive movements into some degree of subjection to the deliberative processes. With this general line of treatment in mind, the details of which the reader will work out in the light of the boy's type, space allows me only two more points before I pass to the sensory scholar. First, in all the teaching of the type of mind now in question, pursue a method which proceeds from the particular to the general. The discussion of pedagogical method with all its ins and outs needs to take cognizance of the differences of students in their type. The motor student should never, in normal cases, be given a general formula and told to work out particular instances; that is too much his tendency already--to approach facts from the point of view of their resemblances. What he needs rather is a sense of the dignity of the single fact, and of the necessity of giving it its separate place, before hastening on to lose it in the flow of a general statement. So whether the teacher have in hand mathematics, grammar, or science, let him disclose the principles only gradually, and always only so far as they are justified by the observations which the boy has been led to make for himself. For the reason that such a method is practically impossible in the descriptive sciences, and some other branches, as taught in the schoolbooks--botany, zoölogy, and, worse than all, history and geography--we should restrict their part in the discipline studies of such a youth. They require simple memory, without observation, and put a premium on hasty and temporary acquisition. As I have said, algebra should be subordinated to geometry. Algebra has as its distinctive method the principle of substitution, whereby symbols of equal and, for the most part, absolute generality are substituted for one another, and the results stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study generally, I think the value of it, at this period, and later, is extraordinarily overrated. The proportion of time given to language study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in its effect upon students of this type--and indeed of any type. This, however, is a matter to which we return below. The average student comes to college with his sense of exploration, his inductive capacity, stifled at its birth. He stands appalled when confronted with the unassimilated details of any science which does not give him a "key" in the shape of general formulas made up beforehand. Were it not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life. Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, i. e., to fall into elaborate guessing at results. Take a little child of about seven or eight years of age, especially one who has the marks of motor heredity, and observe the method of his acquisition of new words in reading. First he speaks the word which his habit dictates, and, that being wrong, he rolls his eyes away from the text and makes a guess of the first word that comes into his mind; this he keeps up as long as the teacher persists in asking him to try again. Here is the same tendency that carries him later on in his education to a general conclusion by a short cut. He has not learned to interpret the data of a deliberate judgment, and his attention does not dwell on the necessary details. So with him all through his training; he is always ready with a guess. Here, again, the teacher can do him good only by patiently employing the inductive method. Lead him back to the simplest elements of the problem in hand, and help him gradually to build up a result step by step. I think in this, as in most of the work with these scholars, the association with children of the opposite type is one of the best correctives, provided the companionship is not made altogether one-sided by the motor boy's perpetual monopolizing of all the avenues of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social lesson which is valuable may be taught him by submitting the same question to a pupil of the plodding, deliberate kind, and waiting for the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any supervision over the playground, similar treatment can be employed there. Coming to consider the so-called "sensory" youth of the age between eight, let us say, and sixteen--the age during which the training of the secondary school presents its great problems--we find certain interesting contrasts between this type and that already characterized as "motor." The study of this type of youth is the more pressing for reasons which I have already hinted in considering the same type in the earlier childhood period. It is necessary, first, to endeavour to get a fairly adequate view of the psychological characteristics of this sort of pupil. The current psychological doctrine of mental "types" rests upon a great mass of facts, drawn in the first instance from the different kinds of mental trouble, especially those which involve derangements of speech--the different kinds of Aphasia. The broadest generalization which is reached from these facts is that which marks the distinction, of which I have already said so much, between the motor and the sensory types. But besides this general distinction there are many finer ones; and in considering the persons of the sensory type, it is necessary to inquire into these finer distinctions. Not only do men and children differ in the matter of the sort of mental material which they find requisite, as to whether it is pictures of movements on the one hand, or pictures from the special senses on the other hand; but they differ also in the latter case with respect to which of the special senses it is, in this case or that, which gives the particular individual his necessary cue, and his most perfect function. So we find inside of the general group called "sensory" several relatively distinct cases, all of which the teacher is likely to come across in varying numbers in a class of pupils. Of these the "visual" and the "auditory" are most important. There are certain aspects of the case which are so common to all the cases of sensory minds, whether they be visual, auditory, or other, that I may set them out before proceeding further. First, in all these matters of type distinction, one of the essential things to observe is the behaviour of the Attention. We have already seen that the attention is implicated to a remarkable degree--in what I called "fluid attention" above--in the motor scholar. The same implication of the attention occurs in all the sensory cases, but presents very different aspects; and the common fact that the attention is directly involved affords us one of the best rules of judgment and distinction. We may say, generally, of the sensory children, that the attention is best, most facile, most interest-carrying for some one preferred sense, leading for this sense into preoccupation and ready distraction. This tendency manifests itself, as we saw above, in the motor persons also, taking effect in action, speed, vivacity, hasty generalization, etc.; but in the sensory one it takes on varying forms. This first aspect of our typical distinction of minds we may call "the relation of the 'favoured function' to the attention." Then, second, there is another and somewhat contrasted relation which also assumes importance when we come to consider individual cases; and that is the relation of the "favoured function"--say movement, vision, hearing, etc.--to Habit. It is a common enough observation, that habit renders functions easy, and that habits are hard to break; indeed, all treatment of habits is likely to degenerate into the commonplace. But, when looked at as related to the attention, certain truths emerge from the consideration of habit. In general, we may say that habit bears a twofold relation to attention: on the one hand, _facile attention shows the reign of habit_. The solid acquisitions are those with which attention is at home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other hand, it is equally true that _attention is in inverse ratio to habit_. We need to attend least to these functions which are most habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, indeed, by strained attention. So we have a contrast of possible interpretations in all cases of sharp and exclusive attention by the children: _does the attention represent a Habit in this particular action of the child_?--or, _does it represent the breaking up of a habit, an act of Accommodation_? In each case these questions have to be intelligently considered. The motor person, usually, when uninstructed and not held back, uses his attention under the lead of habit. It is largely the teacher's business in his case, as we saw, to get him to hold, conserve, and direct his attention steadily to the novel and the complex. The sensory person, on the other hand, shows the attention obstructed by details, hindered by novelties, unable to pass smoothly over its acquisitions, and in general lacking the regular influence of habit in leading him to summarize and utilize his mental store in general ways. The third general aspect of the topic is this: the person of the sensory type is more likely to be the one in whom positive derangement occurs in the higher levels, and in response to the more refined social and personal influences. This, for the reason that this type represents brain processes of greater inertia and complexity, with greater liability to obstruction. They are slower, and proceed over larger brain areas. With these general remarks, then, on the wider aspects of the distinction of types, we may now turn to one of the particular cases which occurs among sensory individuals. This is all that our space will allow. _The Visual Type._--The so-called "visuals," or "eye-minded" people among us, are numerically the largest class of the sensory population. They resort to visual imagery whenever possible, either because that is the prevailing tendency with them, or because, in the particular function in question in any special act, the visual material comes most readily to mind. The details of fact regarding the "visuals" are very interesting; but I shall not take space to dwell upon them. The sphere in which the facts regarding the pupil of this type are important to the teacher is that of language, taken with the group of problems which arise about instruction in language. The question of his symbolism, and its relations to mathematics, logic, etc., is important. And finally, the sphere of the pupil's _expression_ in all its forms. Then, from all his discoveries in these things, the teacher is called upon to make his method of teaching and his general treatment suitable to this student. The visual pupil usually shows himself to be so predominately in his speech and language functions; he learns best and fastest from copies which he sees. He delights in illustrations put in terms of vision, as when actually drawn out on the blackboard for him to see. He understands what he reads better than what he hears; and he uses his visual symbols as a sort of common coin into which to convert the images which come to him through his other senses. In regard to the movements of attention, we may say that this boy or girl illustrates both the aspects of the attention-function which I pointed out above; he attends best--that is, most effectively--to visual instruction provided he exert himself; but on the other hand, it is just here that the drift of habit tends to make him superficial. As attention to the visual is the most easy for him, and as the details of his visual stock are most familiar, so he tends to pass too quickly over the new matters which are presented to him, assimilating the details to the old schemes of his habit. It is most important to observe this distinction, since it is analogous to the "fluid attention" of the motor scholar; and some of the very important questions regarding correlation of studies, the training of attention, and the stimulation of interest depend upon its recognition. _Acquisition best just where it is most likely to go wrong_; that is the state of things. The voluntary use of the visual function gives the best results; but the habitual, involuntary, slipshod use of it gives bad results, and tends to the formation of injurious habits. For example, I set a strongly visual boy a "copy" to draw. Seeing this visual copy he will quickly recognise it, take it to be very easy, dash it off quickly, all under the lead of habit; but his result is poor, because his habit has taken the place of effort. Once get him to make effort upon it, however, and his will be the best result of all the scholars, perhaps, just because the task calls him out in the line of his favoured function. The same antithesis comes out in connection with other varieties of sensory scholars. We may say, therefore, in regard to two of the general aspects of mental types--the relation of the favoured function to attention, on the one hand, and to habit, on the other--that they both find emphatic illustration in the pupil of the visual type. He is, more than any other sensory pupil, a special case. His mental processes set decidedly toward vision. He is the more important, also, because he is so common. Statistics are lacking, but possibly half of the entire human family in civilized life are visual in their type for most of the language functions. This is due, no doubt, to the emphasis that civilization puts upon sight as the means of social acquisition generally, and to our predominantly visual methods of instruction. The third fact mentioned is also illustrated by this type; the fact that mental instruction and derangement may come easily, through the stress laid upon vision in the person's mental economy. I need not enlarge upon the different forms of special defect which come through impairment of sight by central lesion or degeneration of the visual centers and connections. Suffice it to say that they are very common, and very difficult of recovery. The visual person is often so completely a slave to his sight that when that fails either in itself or through weakness of attention he becomes a wreck off the shore of the ocean of intellect. When we consider the large proportion just mentioned of pupils of this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, before the child goes to school, and regular tests afterward. School examiners and boards should have qualifications for reporting on the hygienic conditions of the school as regards lighting. The bright glare of a neighbouring wall before a window toward which children with weak eyes face when at their desks may result not only in common defects of vision but also in resulting mental and moral damage; and the results are worse to those who depend mainly on vision for the food, drink, and exercise, so to speak, of their growing minds. As to the methods of teaching these and also the other sensory pupils, the indications already given must suffice. The statement of some of these far-reaching problems of educational psychology, and of the directions in which their answers are to be sought, exhausts the purpose of this chapter. In general it may be said that the recommendations made for the treatment of sensory children at the earlier stage may be extended to later periods also, and that the treatment should be, for the most part, in intelligent contrast to that which the motor pupils receive. _Language Study._--From this general consideration of the child's training it becomes evident that the great subjects which are most useful for discipline in the period of secondary education are the mathematical studies on the one hand, which exercise the faculty of abstraction, and the positive sciences, which train the power of observation and require truth to detail. If we should pursue the subject into the collegiate period, we should find mental and moral science, literature, and history coming to their rights. If this be in the main psychological, we see that language study, as such, should have no great place in secondary education. The study of grammar, as has been already said, is very useful in the early periods of development if taught vocally; it brings the child out in self-expression, and carries its own correctives, from the fact that its results are always open to social control. These are, in my mind, the main functions of the study of language. What, then, is the justification for devoting ten or twelve years of the youth's time to study of a dead language, as is commonly done in the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it, and the discipline of truth to elegant literary copy can be even so well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically, stoop-shouldered and near-sighted. It seems to be one of those mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class rivalry that soundness of culture is artificially identified with its maintenance. Yet there is no reason that the spirit of classical culture and the durable elements of Greek and Roman life should not be as well acquired--nay, better--from the study of history, archæology, and literature. For this language work is not study of literature. Not one in one hundred of the students who are forced through the periodical examinations in these languages ever gets any insight into their æsthetic quality or any inspiration from their form. But more than this. At least one positively vicious effect follows from language study with grammar and lexicon, no matter what the language be. The habit of intellectual guessing grows with the need of continuous effort in putting together elements which go together for no particular reason. When a thing can not be reasoned out, it may just as well be guessed out. The guess is always easier than the dictionary, and, if successful, it answers just as well. Moreover, the teacher has no way of distinguishing the pupil's replies which are due to the guess from those due to honest work. I venture to say, from personal experience, that no one who has been through the usual classical course in college and before it has not more than once staked his all upon the happy guess at the stubborn author's meaning. This shallow device becomes a substitute for honest struggle. And it is more than shallow; to guess is dishonest. It is a servant to unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and to conscious moral cowardice. The guess is a bluff to fortune when the honest gauntlet of ignorance should be thrown down to the issue. The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit. Yet why guess? Why be content with an impression? Why hint of a "certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean anything, commonly means the uncertain? Things worth writing about should be formulated clearly enough to be understood. Why let the personal reaction of the individual's feeling suffice? Our youth need to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant of research, that the private impression instructs nobody, that presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to the fear of ghosts, and that the reply "I guess so" betrays itself, whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these things is the training which does not, with all the sanctions at its command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the intellectual dice box. Any study which tends to make the difference between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which leads the student to be content with a result he can not verify, has somewhat the function in his education of the puzzle in our society amusements or the game of sliced animals in the nursery. CHAPTER IX. THE INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY--SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. THE series of questions which arise when we consider the individual as a member of society fall together under the general theory of what has been called, in a figure, Social Heredity. The treatment of this topic will show something of the normal relation of the individual's mind to the social environment; and the chapter following will give some hints as to the nature and position of that exceptional man in whom we are commonly so much interested--the Genius. The theory of social heredity has been worked up through the contributions, from different points of view, of several authors. What, then, is social heredity? This is a very easy question to answer, since the group of facts which the phrase describes are extremely familiar--so much so that the reader may despair, from such a commonplace beginning, of getting any novelty from it. The social heritage is, of course, all that a man or woman gets from the accumulated wisdom of society. All that the ages have handed down--the literature, the art, the habits of social conformity, the experience of social ills, the treatment of crime, the relief of distress, the education of the young, the provision for the old--all, in fact, however described, that we men owe to the ancestors whom we reverence, and to the parents whose presence with us perhaps we cherish still. Their struggles, the orator has told us, have bought our freedom; we enter into the heritage of their thought and wisdom and heroism. All true; we do. We all breathe a social atmosphere; and our growth is by this breathing-in of the tradition and example of the past. Now, if this be the social heritage, we may go on to ask: Who are to inherit it? To this we may again add the further question: How does the one who is born to such a heritage as this come into his inheritance? And with this yet again: How may he use his inheritance--to what end and under what limitations? These questions come so readily into the mind that we naturally wish the discussion to cover them. Generally, then, who is eligible for the social inheritance? This heir to society we are, all of us. Society does not make a will, it is true; nor does society die intestate. To say that it is we who inherit the riches of the social past of the race, is to say that we are the children of the past in a sense which comes upon us with all the force that bears in upon the natural heir when he finds his name in will or law. But there are exceptions. And before we seek the marks of the legitimacy of our claim to be the heirs of the hundreds of years of accumulated thought and action, it may be well to advise ourselves as to the poor creatures who do not enter into the inheritance with us. They are those who people our asylums, our reformatories, our jails and penitentiaries; those who prey upon the body of our social life by demands for charitable support, or for the more radical treatment by isolation in institutions; indeed, some who are born to fail in this inheritance are with us no more, even though they were of our generation; they have paid the penalty which their effort to wrest the inheritance from us has cost, and the grave of the murderer, the burglar, the suicide, the red-handed rebel against the law of social inheritance, is now their resting place. Society then is, when taken in the widest sense, made up of two classes of people--the heirs who possess and the delinquents by birth or conduct who have forfeited the inheritance. We may get a clear idea of the way a man attains his social heritage by dropping figure for the present and speaking in the terms of plain natural science. Ever since Darwin propounded the law of Natural Selection the word Variation has been current in the sense explained on an earlier page. The student in natural science has come to look for variations as the necessary preliminary to any new step of progress and adaptation in the sphere of organic life. Nature, we now know, is fruitful to an extraordinary degree. She produces many specimens of everything. It is a general fact of reproduction that the offspring of plant or animal is quite out of proportion in numbers to the parents that produce them, and often also to the means of living which await them. One plant produces seeds which are carried far and near--to the ocean and to the desert rocks, no less than to the soil in which they may take root and grow. Insects multiply at a rate which is simply inconceivable to our limited capacity for thinking in figures. Animals also produce more abundantly, and man has children in numbers which allow him to bury half his offspring yearly and yet increase the adult population from year to year. This means, of course, that whatever the inheritance is, all do not inherit it; some must go without a portion whenever the resources of nature, or the family, are in any degree limited and when competition is sharp. Now Nature solves the problem among the animals in the simplest of ways. All the young born in the same family are not exactly alike; "variations" occur. There are those that are better nourished, those that have larger muscles, those that breathe deeper and run faster. So the question who of these shall inherit the earth, the fields, the air, the water--this is left to itself. The best of all the variations live, and the others die. Those that do live have thus, to all intents and purposes, been "selected" for the inheritance, just as really as if the parents of the species had left a will and had been able to enforce it. This is the principle of "Natural Selection." Now, this way of looking at problems which involve aggregates of individuals and their distribution is becoming a habit of the age. Wherever the application of the principles of probability do not explain a statistical result--that is, wherever there seem to be influences which favour particular individuals at the expense of others--men turn at once to the occurrence of Variations for the justification of this seeming partiality of Nature. And what it means is that Nature is partial to individuals _in making them_, in their natural heredity, rather than after they are born. The principle of heredity with variations is a safe assumption to make also in regard to mankind; and we see at once that in order to come in for a part in the social heritage of our fathers we must be born fit for it. We must be born so endowed for the race of social life that we assimilate, from our birth up, the spirit of the society into which we are reared. The unfittest, socially, are suppressed. In this there is a distinction between this sphere of survival and that of the animal world. In it the fittest survive, the others are lost; but in society the unfittest are lost, all the others survive. Social selection weeds out the unfit, the murderer, the most unsocial man, and says to him: "You must die"; natural selection seeks out the most fit and says: "You alone are to live." The difference is important, for it marks a prime series of distinctions, when the conceptions drawn from biology are applied to social phenomena; but for the understanding of variations we need not now pursue it further. The contrast may be put, however, in a sentence: in organic evolution we have the natural selection of the fit; in social progress we have the social suppression of the unfit. Given social variations, therefore, differences among men, what becomes of this man or that? We see at once that if society is to live there must be limits set somewhere to the degree of variation which a given man may show from the standards of society. And we may find out something of these limits by looking at the evident, and marked differences which actually appear about us. First, there is the idiot. He is not available, from a social point of view, because he varies too much on the side of defect. He shows from infancy that he is unable to enter into the social heritage because he is unable to learn to do social things. His intelligence does not grow with his body. Society pities him if he be without natural protection, and puts him away in an institution. So of the insane, the pronounced lunatic; he varies too much to sustain in any way the wide system of social relationships which society requires of each individual. Either he is unable to take care of himself, or he attempts the life of some one else, or he is the harmless, unsocial thing that wanders among us like an animal or stands in his place like a plant. He is not a factor in social life; he has not come into the inheritance. Then there is the extraordinary class of people whom we may describe by a stronger term than those already employed. We find not only the unsocial, the negatively unfit, those whom society puts away with pity in its heart; there are also the antisocial, the class whom we usually designate as criminals. These persons, like the others, are variations; but they seem to be variations in quite another way. They do not represent lack on the intellectual side always or alone, but on the moral side, on the social side, as such. The least we can say of the criminals is that they tend, by heredity or by evil example, to violate the rules which society has seen fit to lay down for the general security of men living together in the enjoyment of the social heritage. So far, then, they are factors of disintegration, of destruction; enemies of the social progress which proceeds from generation to generation by just this process of social inheritance. So society says to the criminal also: "You must perish." We kill off the worst, imprison the bad for life, attempt to reform the rest. They, too, then, are excluded from the heritage of the past. So our lines of eligibility get more and more narrowly drawn. The instances of exclusion now cited serve to give us some insight into the real qualities of the man who lives a social part, and the way he comes to live it. Passing on to take up the second of the informal topics suggested, we have to find the best description that we can of the social man--the one who is fitted for the social life. This question concerns the process by which any one of us comes into the wealth of relationships which the social life represents. For to say that a man does this is in itself to say that he is the man society is looking for. Indeed, this is the only way to describe the man--to actually find him. Society is essentially a growing, shifting thing. It changes from age to age, from country to country. The Greeks had their social conditions, and the Romans theirs. Even the criminal lines are drawn differently, somewhat, here and there; and in a low stage of civilization a man may pass for normal who, in our time, would be described as weak in mind. This makes it necessary that the standards of judgment of a given society should be determined by an actual examination of the society, and forbids us to say that the limits of variation which society in general will tolerate must be this or that. We may say, then, that the man who is fit for social life _must be born to learn_. The need of learning is his essential need. It comes upon him from his birth. Speech is the first great social function which he must learn, and with it all the varieties of verbal accomplishment--reading and writing. This brings to the front the great method of all his learning--imitation. In order to be social he must be imitative, imitative, imitative. He must realize for himself by action the forms, conventions, requirements, co-operations of his social group. All is learning; and learning not by himself and at random, but under the leading of the social conditions which surround him. Plasticity is his safety and the means of his progress. So he grows into the social organization, takes his place as a Socius in the work of the world, and lays deep the sense of values, upon the basis of which his own contributions--if he be destined to make contributions--to the wealth of the world are to be wrought out. This great fact that he is open to the play of the personal influences which are about him is just the "suggestibleness" which we have already described in an earlier chapter; and the influences themselves are "suggestions"--social suggestions. These influences differ in different communities, as we so often remark. The Turk learns to live in a very different system of relations of "give and take" from ours, and ours differ as much from those of the Chinese. All that is characteristic of the race or tribe or group or family--all this sinks into the child and youth by his simple presence there in it, with the capacity to learn by imitation. He is suggestible, and here are the suggestions; he is made to inherit and he inherits. So it makes no difference what his tribe or kindred be; let him be a learner by imitation, and he becomes in turn possessor and teacher. The case becomes more interesting still when we give the matter another turn, and say that in this learning all the members of society agree; _all must be born to learn the same things_. They enter, if so be that they do, into the same social inheritance. This again seems like a very commonplace remark; but certain things flow from it. Each member of society gives and gets the same set of social suggestions; the differences being the degree of progress each has made, and the degree of variation which each one gives to what he has before received. This last difference is treated below where we consider the genius. There grows up, in all this give and take, in all the interchange of suggestions among you, me, and the other, an obscure sense of a certain social understanding about ourselves generally--a _Zeitgeist_, an atmosphere, a taste, or, in minor matters, a style. It is a very peculiar thing, this social spirit. The best way to understand that you have it, and something of what it is, is to get into a circle in which it is different. The common phrase "fish out of water" is often heard in reference to it. But that does not serve for science. The next best thing that I can do in the way of rendering it is to appeal to another word which has a popular sense, the word Judgment. Let us say that there exists in every society a general system of values, found in social usages, conventions, institutions, and formulas, and that our judgments of social life are founded on our habitual recognition of these values, and of the arrangement of them which has become more or less fixed in our society. For example, to be cordial to a disagreeable neighbour shows good social judgment in a small matter; not to quarrel with the homoeopathic enthusiast who meets you in the street and wishes to doctor your rheumatism out of a symptom book--that is good judgment. In short, the man gets to show more and more, as he grows up from childhood, a certain good judgment; and his good judgment is also the good judgment of his social set, community, or nation. The psychologist might prefer to say that a man "feels" this; perhaps it would be better for psychological readers to say simply that he has a "sense" of it; but the popular use of the word "judgment" fits so accurately into the line of distinction we are now making that we may adhere to it. So we reach the general position that the eligible candidate for social life must have good judgment as represented by the common standards of judgment of his people. It may be doubted, however, by some of my readers whether this sense of social values called judgment is the outcome of suggestions operating throughout the term of one's social education. This is an essential point, and I must just assume it. It follows from what we said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the pains to observe the child's tentative endeavours to act up to social usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are coming to see that even the child's sense of his own personal self is a gradual attainment, achieved step by step through his imitative responses to his personal environment. His thought of himself is an interpretation of his thought of others, and his thought of another is doe to further accommodation of his active processes to changes in his thought of a possible self. Around this fundamental movement in his personal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I say that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his environment is the outcome of his very gradual learning of his personal place in these relationships. We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our study, that the socially unfit person is the person of poor judgment. He may have learned a great deal; he may in the main reproduce the activities required by his social tradition; but with it all he is to a degree out of joint with the general system of estimated values by which society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad strain of heredity, what the theologians call "original sin"; he then is an "habitual criminal" in the current distinction of criminal types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teachings of society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed. Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is carried away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in social judgment is forgotten: he is then the "occasional" criminal. It is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents the level of social rightness in his time and place. Then, as to the idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no good judgment, for the very adequate but pitiful reason that they have no judgment at all. This, then, is the doctrine of Social Heredity; it illustrates the side of conformity, of personal acquiescence on the part of the individual in the rules of social life. Another equally important side, that of the personal initiative and influence of the individual mind in society, remains to be spoken of in the next chapter. Social Heredity emphasizes _Imitation_; the Genius, to whom we now turn, illustrates _Invention_. CHAPTER X. THE GENIUS AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. The facts concerning the genius seem to indicate that he is a being somewhat exceptional and apart. Common mortals stand about him with expressions of awe. The literature of him is embodied in the alcoves of our libraries most accessible to the public, and even the wayfaring man, to whom life is a weary round, and his conquests over nature and his fellows only the division of honours on a field that usually witnesses drawn battles or bloody defeats, loves to stimulate his courage by hearing of the lives of those who put nature and society so utterly to rout. He hears of men who swayed the destinies of Europe, who taught society by outraging her conventions, whose morality even was reached sometimes by scorn of the peccadilloes which condemn the ordinary man. Every man has in him in some degree the hero worshipper, and gets inflamed somewhat by reading Carlyle's Frederick the Great. Of course, this popular sense can not be wholly wrong. The genius does accomplish the world movements. Napoleon did set the destiny of Europe, and Frederick did reveal, in a sense, a new phase of moral conduct. The truth of these things is just what makes the enthusiasm of the common man so healthy and stimulating. It is not the least that the genius accomplishes that he thus elevates the traditions of man and inspires the literature that the people read. He sows the seeds of effort in the fertile soil of the newborn of his own kind, while he leads those who do not have the same gifts to rear and tend the growing plant in their own social gardens. This is true; and a philosophy of society should not overlook either of the facts--the actual deeds of the great man with his peculiar influence upon his own time, and his lasting place in the more inspiring social tradition which is embodied in literature and art. Yet the psychologist has to present just the opposite aspect of these apparent exceptions to the Canons of our ordinary social life. He has to oppose the extreme claim made by the writers who attempt to lift the genius quite out of the normal social movement. For it only needs a moment's consideration to see that if the genius has no reasonable place in the movement of social progress in the world, then there can be no possible doctrine or philosophy of such progress. To the hero worshipper his hero comes in simply to "knock out," so to speak, all the regular movement of the society which is so fortunate, or so unfortunate, as to have given him birth; and by his initiative the aspirations, beliefs, struggles of the community or state get a push in a new direction--a tangent to the former movement or a reversal of it. If this be true, and it be farther true that no genius who is likely to appear can be discounted by any human device before his abrupt appearance upon the stage of action, then the history of facts must take the place of the science or philosophy of them, and the chronicler become the only historian with a right to be. For of what value can we hold the contribution which the genius makes to thought if this contribution runs so across the acquisitions of the earlier time and the contributions of earlier genius that no line of common truth can be discovered between him and them? Then each society would have its own explanation of itself, and that only so long as it produced no new genius. It may be, of course, that society is so constituted--or, rather, so lacking in constitution--that simple variations in brain physiology are the sufficient reason for its cataclysms; but a great many efforts will be made to prove the contrary before this highest of all spheres of human activity is declared to have no meaning--no thread which runs from age to age and links mankind, the genius and the man who plods, in a common and significant development. In undertaking this task we must try to judge the genius with reference to the sane social man, the normal Socius. What he is we have seen. He is a person _who learns to judge by the judgments of society_. What, then, shall we say of the genius from this point of view? Can the hero worshipper be right in saying that the genius teaches society to judge; or shall we say that the genius, like other men, must learn to judge by the judgments of society? The most fruitful point of view is, no doubt, that which considers the genius a variation. And unless we do this it is evidently impossible to get any theory which will bring him into a general scheme. But how great a variation? And in what direction?--these are the questions. The great variations found in the criminal by heredity, the insane, the idiotic, etc., we have found excluded from society; so we may well ask why the genius is not excluded also. If our determination of the limits within which society decides who is to be excluded is correct, then the genius must come within these limits. He can not escape them and live socially. _The Intelligence of the Genius._--The directions in which the genius actually varies from the average man are evident as a matter of fact. He is, first of all, a man of great power of thought, of great "constructive imagination," as the psychologists say. So let us believe, first, that a genius is a man who has occasionally greater thoughts than other men have. Is this a reason for excluding him from society? Certainly not; for by great thoughts we mean true thoughts, thoughts which will work, thoughts which will bring in a new area in the discovery of principles, or of their application. This is just what all development depends upon, this attainment of novelty, which is consistent with older knowledge and supplementary to it. But suppose a man have thoughts which are not true, which do not fit the topic of their application, which contradict established knowledges, or which result in bizarre and fanciful combinations of them; to that man we deny the name genius; he is a crank, an agitator, an anarchist, or what not. The test, then, which we bring to bear upon the intellectual variations which men show is that of truth, practical workability--in short, to sum it up, "fitness." Any thought, to live and germinate, must be a fit thought. And the community's sense of the fitness of the thought is their rule of judgment. Now, the way the community got this sense--that is the great result we have reached above. Their sense of fitness is just what I called above their judgment. So far, at least, as it relates to matters of social import, it is of social origin. It reflects the outcome of all social heredity, tradition, education. The sense of social truth is their criterion of social thoughts, and unless the social reformer's thought be in some way fit to go into the setting thus made by earlier social development, he is not a genius but a crank. I may best show the meaning of the claim that society makes upon the genius by asking in how far in actual life he manages to escape this account of himself to society. The facts are very plain, and this is the class of facts which some writers urge, as supplying an adequate rule for the application of the principles of their social philosophy. The simple fact is, say they, that without the consent of society the thoughts of your hero, whether he be genius or fool, are practically valueless. The fulness of time must come; and the genius before his time, if judged by his works, can not be a genius at all. His thought may be great, so great that, centuries after, society may attain to it as its richest outcome and its profoundest intuition; but before, that time, it is as bizarre as a madman's fancies and as useless. What would be thought, we might be asked by writers of this school, of a rat which developed upon its side the hand of a man, with all its mechanism of bone, muscle, tactile sensibility, and power of delicate manipulation, if the remainder of the creature were true to the pattern of a rat? Would not the rest of the rat tribe be justified in leaving this anomaly behind to starve in the hole where his singular appendage held him fast? Is such a rat any the less a monster because man finds use for his hands. To a certain extent this argument is forcible and true. If social utility be our rule of definition, then certainly the premature genius is no genius. And this rule of definition may be put in another way which renders it still more plausible. The variations which occur in intellectual endowment, in a community, vary about a mean; there is, theoretically, an average man. The differences among men which can be taken account of in any philosophy of life must be in some way referable to this mean. The variation which does not find its niche at all in the social environment, but which strikes all the social fellows with disapproval, getting no sympathy whatever, is thereby exposed to the charge of being the "sport" of Nature and the fruit of chance. The lack of hearing which awaits such a man sets him in a form of isolation, and stamps him not only as a social crank, but also as a cosmic tramp. Put in its positive and usual form, this view simply claims that man is always the outcome of the social movement. The reception he gets is a measure of the degree in which he adequately represents this movement. Certain variations are possible--men who are forward in the legitimate progress of society--and these men are the true and only geniuses. Other variations, which seem to discount the future too much, are "sports"; for the only permanent discounting of the future is that which is projected from the elevation of the past. The great defect of this view is found in its definitions. We exclaim at once: who made the past the measure of the future? and who made social approval the measure of truth? What is there to eclipse the vision of the poet, the inventor, the seer, that he should not see over the heads of his generation, and raise his voice for that which, to all men else, lies behind the veil? The social philosophy of this school can not answer these questions, I think; nor can it meet the appeal we all make to history when we cite the names of Aristotle, Pascal, and Newton, or of any of the men who single-handed and alone have set guide-posts to history, and given to the world large portions of its heritage of truth. What can set limit to the possible variations of fruitful intellectual power? Rare such variations--that is their law: the greater the variation, the more rare! But so is genius; the greater, the more rare. As to the rat with the human hand, he would not be left to starve and decay in his hole; he would be put in alcohol when he died, and kept in a museum! And the lesson which he would teach to the wise biologist would be that here in this rat Nature had shown her genius by discounting in advance the slow processes of evolution! It is, indeed, the force of such considerations as these which have led to many justifications of the positions that the genius is quite out of connection with the social movement of his time. The genius brings his variations to society whether society will or no; and as to harmony between them, that is a matter of outcome rather than of expectation or theory. We are told the genius comes as a brain-variation; and between the physical heredity which produces him and the social heredity which sets the tradition of his time there is no connection. But this is not tenable, as we have reason to think, from the interaction which actually takes place between physical and social heredity. To be sure, the heredity of the individual is a physiological matter, in the sense that the son must inherit from his parents and their ancestors alone. But granted that two certain parents are his parents, we may ask how these two certain parents came to be his parents. How did his father come to marry his mother, and the reverse? This is distinctly a social question; and to its solution all the currents of social influence and suggestion contribute. Who is free from social considerations in selecting his wife? Does the coachman have an equal chance to get the heiress, or the blacksmith the clergyman's daughter? Do we find inroads made in Newport society by the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk? And are not the inroads which we do find, the inroads made by the counts and the marquises, due to influences which are quite social and psychological? Again, on the other hand, what leads the count and the marquis, to lay their titles at Newport doors, while the ranchman and the dry-goods clerk keep away, but the ability of both these types of suitors to estimate their chances just on social and psychological grounds? Novelists have rung the changes on this intrusion of social influences into the course of physical heredity. Bourget's Cosmopolis is a picture of the influence of social race characteristics on natural heredity, with the reaction of natural heredity again upon the new social conditions. A speech of a character of Balzac's is to the point, as illustrating a certain appreciation of these social considerations which we all to a degree entertain. The Duchesse de Carigliano says to Madame de Sommervieux: "I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion of a too superior man. You should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry them--that is a mistake! Never--no, no. It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions." To be sure, we do not generally deliberate in this wise when we fall in love; but that is not necessary, since our social environment sets the style by the kind of intangible deliberation which I have called judgment and fitness. Suppose a large number of Northern advocates of social equality should migrate to the Southern United States, and, true to their theory, intermarry with the blacks. Would it not then be true that a social theory had run athwart the course of physiological descent, leading to the production of a legitimate mulatto society? A new race might spring from such a purely psychological or social initiation. While not agreeing, therefore, with the theory which makes the genius independent of the social movement--least of all with the doctrine that physical heredity is uninfluenced by social conditions--the hero worshipper is right, nevertheless, in saying that we can not set the limitations of the genius on the side of variations toward high intellectual endowment. So if the general position be true that he is a variation of some kind, we must look elsewhere for the direction of those peculiar traits whose excess would be his condemnation. This we can find only in connection with the other demand that we make of the ordinary man--the demand that he be a man of good judgment. And to this we may now turn. _The Judgment of the Genius._--We should bear in mind in approaching this topic the result which follows from the reciprocal character of social relationships. No genius ever escapes the requirements laid down for his learning, his social heredity. Mentally he is a social outcome, as well as are the fellows who sit in judgment on him. He must judge his own thoughts therefore as they do. And his own proper estimate of things and thoughts, his relative sense of fitness, gets application, by a direct law of his own mental processes, to himself and to his own creations. The limitations which, in the judgment of society, his variations must not overstep, are set by his own judgment also. If the man in question have thoughts which are socially true, _he must himself know that they are true_. So we reach a conclusion regarding the selection of the particular thoughts which the genius may have: _he and society must agree in regard to the fitness of them_, although in particular cases this agreement ceases to be the emphatic thing. The essential thing comes to be the reflection of the social standard in the thinker's own judgment; _the thoughts thought must always be critically judged by the thinker himself; and for the most part his judgment is at once also the social judgment_. This may be illustrated further. Suppose we take the man of striking thoughts and withal no sense of fitness--none of the judgment about them which society has. He will go through a mighty host of discoveries every hour. The very eccentricity of his imaginations will only appeal to him for the greater admiration. He will bring his most chimerical schemes out and air them with the same assurance with which the real inventor exhibits his. But such a man is not pronounced a genius. If his ravings about this and that are harmless, we smile and let him talk; but if his lack of judgment extend to things of grave import, or be accompanied by equal illusions regarding himself and society in other relationships, then we classify his case and put him into the proper ward for the insane. Two of the commonest forms of such impairment of judgment are seen in the victims of "fixed ideas" on the one hand, and the _exaltés_ on the other. These men have no true sense of values, no way of selecting the fit combinations of imagination from the unfit; and even though some transcendently true and original thought were to flit through the diseased mind of such a one, it would go as it came, and the world would wait for a man with a sense of fitness to arise and rediscover it. The other class, the _exaltés_, are somewhat the reverse; the illusion of personal greatness is so strong that their thoughts seem to them infallible and their persons divine. Men of such perversions of judgment are common among us. We all know the man who seems to be full of rich and varied thought, who holds us sometimes by the power of his conceptions or the beauty of his creations, but in whose thought we yet find some incongruity, some eminently unfit element, some grotesque application, some elevation or depression from the level of commonplace truth, some ugly strain in the æsthetic impression. The man himself does not know it, and that is the reason he includes it. His sense of fitness is dwarfed or paralyzed. We in the community come to regret that he is so "visionary," with all his talent; so we accommodate ourselves to his unfruitfulness, and at the best only expect an occasional hour's entertainment under the spell of his presence. This certainly is not the man to produce a world movement. Most of the men we call "cranks" are of this type. They are essentially lacking in judgment, and the popular estimate of them is exactly right. It is evident, therefore, from this last explanation, that there is a second direction of variation among men: _variation in their sense of the truth and value of their own thoughts_, and with them of the thoughts of others. This is the great limitation which the man of genius shares with men generally--a limitation in the amount of variation which he may show in his social judgments, especially as these variations affect the claim which he makes upon society for recognition. It is evident that this must be an important factor in our estimate of the claims of the hero to our worship, especially since it is the more obscure side of his temperament, and the side generally overlooked altogether. This let us call, in our further illustrations, the "social sanity" of the man of genius. The first indication of the kind of social variation which oversteps even the degree of indulgence society is willing to accord to the great thinker is to be found in the effect which education has upon character. The discipline of social development is, as we have seen, mainly conducive to the reduction of eccentricities, the levelling off of personal peculiarities. All who come into the social heritage learn the same great series of lessons derived from the past, and all get the sort of judgment required in social life from the common exercises of the home and school in the formative years of their education. So we should expect that the greater singularities of disposition which represent insuperable difficulty in the process of social assimilation would show themselves early. Here it is that the actual conflict comes--the struggle between impulse and social restraint. Many a genius owes the redemption of his intellectual gifts to legitimate social uses to the victory gained by a teacher and the discipline learned through obedience. And thus it is also that many who give promise of great distinction in early life fail to achieve it. They run off after a phantom, and society pronounces them mad. In their case the personal factor has overcome the social factor; they have failed in the lessons they should have learned, their own self-criticism is undisciplined, and they miss the mark. These two extremes of variation, however, do not exhaust the case. One of them tends in a measure to the blurring of the light of genius, and the other to the rejection of social restraint to a degree which makes the potential genius over into a crank. The average man is the mean. Put the greatest reach of human attainment, and with it the greatest influence ever exercised by man, is yet more than either of these. It is not enough, the hero worshipper may still say, that the genius should have sane and healthy judgment, as society reckons sanity. The fact still remains that even in his social judgments he may instruct society. He may stand alone and, by sheer might, left his fellow-men up to his point of vantage, to their eternal gain and to his eternal praise. Even let it be that he must have self-criticism, the sense of fitness you speak of, that very sense may transcend the vulgar judgment of his fellows. His judgment may be saner than theirs; and as his intellectual creations are great and unique, so may his sense of their truth be full and unique. Wagner led the musical world by his single-minded devotion to the ideas of Wagner; and Darwin had to be true to his sense of truth and to the formulations of his thought, though no man accorded him the right to instruct his generation either in the one or in the other. To be sure, this divine assurance of the man of genius may be counterfeited; the vulgar dreamer often has it. But, nevertheless, when a genius has it, he is not a vulgar dreamer. This is true, I think, and the explanation of it leads us to the last fruitful application of the doctrine of variations. Just as the intellectual endowment of men may vary within very wide limits, so may the social qualifications of men. There are men who find it their meat to do society service. There are men so naturally born to take the lead in social reform, in executive matters, in organization, in planning our social campaigns for us, that we turn to them as by instinct. They have a kind of insight to which we can only bow. They gain the confidence of men, win the support of women, and excite the acclamations of children. These people are the social geniuses. They seem to anticipate the discipline of social education. They do not need to learn the lessons of the social environment. Now, such persons undoubtedly represent a variation toward suggestibility of the most delicate and singular kind. They surpass the teachers from whom they learn. It is hard to say that they "learn to judge by the judgments of society." They so judge without seeming to learn, yet they differ from the man whose eccentricities forbid him to learn through the discipline of society. The two are opposite extremes of variation; that seems to me the only possible construction of them. It is the difference between the ice boat which travels faster than the wind and the skater who braves the wind and battles up-current in it. The latter is soon beaten by the opposition; the former outruns its ally. The crank, the eccentric, the enthusiast--all these run counter to sane social judgment; but the genius leads society to his own point of view, and interprets the social movement so accurately, sympathetically, and with such profound insight that his very singularity gives greater relief to his inspiration. Now let a man combine with this insight--this extraordinary sanity of social judgment--the power of great inventive and constructive thought, and then, at last, we have our genius, our hero, and one that we well may worship! To great thought he adds balance; to originality, judgment. This is the man to start the world movements if we want a single man to start them. For as he thinks profoundly, so he discriminates his thoughts justly, and assigns them values. His fellows judge with him, or learn to judge after him, and they lend to him the motive forces of success--enthusiasm, reward. He may wait for recognition, he may suffer imprisonment, he may be muzzled for thinking his thoughts, he may die and with him the truth to which he gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his thought was recorded, posterity revives it in regretful sentences on his tomb. The two things to be emphasized, therefore, on the rational side of the phenomenally great man--I mean on the side of our means of accounting for him in reasonable terms--are these: first, his intellectual originality; and, second, the sanity of his judgment. And it is the variations in this second sort of endowment which give the ground which various writers have for the one-sided views now current in popular literature. We are told, on the one hand, that the genius is a "degenerate"; on another hand, that he is to be classed with those of "insane" temper; and yet again, that his main characteristic is his readiness to outrage society by performing criminal acts. All these so-called theories rely upon facts--so far as they have any facts to rest upon--which, if space permitted, we might readily estimate from our present point of view. In so far as a really great man busies himself mainly with things that are objective, which are socially and morally neutral--such as electricity, natural history, mechanical theory, with the applications of these--of course, the mental capacity which he possesses is the main thing, and his absorption in these things may lead to a warped sense of the more ideal and refined relationships which are had in view by the writer in quest for degeneracy. It will still be admitted, however, by those who are conversant with the history of science, that the greatest scientific geniuses have been men of profound quietness of life and normal social development. It is to the literary and artistic genius that the seeker after abnormality has to turn; and in this field, again, the facts serve to show their own meaning. As a general rule, these artistic prodigies do not represent the union of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of emotional experience which crystallize into single creations of art. They depend upon "inspiration"--a word which is responsible for much of the overrating of such men, and for a good many of their illusions. Not that they do not perform great feats in the several spheres in which their several "inspirations" come; but with it all they often present the sort of unbalance and fragmentary intellectual endowment which allies them, in particular instances, to the classes of persons whom the theories we are noticing have in view. It is only to be expected that the sharp jutting variation in the emotional and æsthetic realm which the great artist often shows should carry with it irregularities in heredity in other respects. Moreover, the very habit of living by inspiration brings prominently into view any half-hidden peculiarities which he may have in the remark of his associates, and in the conduct of his own social duties. But mark you, I do not discredit the superb art of many examples of the artistic "degenerate," so-called; that would be to brand some of the highest ministrations of genius, to us men, as random and illegitimate, and to consider impure some of our most exalting and intoxicating sources of inspiration. But I do still say that wherein such men move us and instruct us they are _in these spheres_ above all things sane with our own sanity, and wherein they are insane they do discredit to that highest of all offices to which their better gifts make legitimate claim--the instruction of mankind. Again one of Balzac's characters hits the nail on the head. "My dear mother," says Augustine, in the Sign of the Cat and Racket, "you judge superior people too severely. If their ideas were the same as other folks they would not be men of genius." "Very well," replies Madame Guillaume, "then let men of genius stop at home and not get married. What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he is a genius it is all right! Genius! genius! It is not so very clever to say black one minute and white the next, as he does, to interrupt other people, to dance such rigs at home, never to let you know which foot you are to stand on, to compel his wife never to be amused unless my lord is in gay spirits, and to be dull when he is dull." "But his imaginations...." "What are such imaginations?" Madame Guillaume went on, interrupting her daughter again. "Fine ones are his, my word! What possesses a man, that all on a sudden, without consulting a doctor, he takes it into his head to eat nothing but vegetables? There, get along! if he were not so grossly immoral, he would be fit to shut up in a lunatic asylum." "O mother, can you believe?" "Yes, I do believe. I met him in the Champs Élysées. He was on horseback. Well, at one minute he was galloping as hard as he could tear, and then pulled up to a walk. I said to myself at that moment, 'There is a man devoid of judgment!'" * * * * * The main consideration which this chapter aims to present, that of the responsibility of all men, be they great or be they small, to the same standards of social judgment, and to the same philosophical treatment, is illustrated in the very man to whose genius we owe the principle upon which my remarks are based--Charles Darwin; and it is singularly appropriate that we should also find the history of this very principle, that of variations with the correlative principle of natural selection, furnishing a capital illustration of our inferences. Darwin was, with the single exception of Aristotle, possibly the man with the sanest judgment that the human mind has ever brought to the investigation of nature. He represented, in an exceedingly adequate way, the progress of scientific method up to his day. He was disciplined in all the natural science of his predecessors. His judgment was an epitome of the scientific insight of the ages which culminated then. The time was ripe for just such a great constructive thought as his--ripe, that is, so far as the accumulation of scientific data was concerned. His judgment differed then from the judgment of his scientific contemporaries mainly in that it was sounder and safer than theirs. And with it Darwin was a great constructive thinker. He had the intellectual strength which put the judgment of his time to the strain--everybody's but his own. This is seen in the fact that Darwin was not the first to speculate in the line of his great discovery, nor to reach formulas; but with the others guessing took the place of induction. The formula was an uncriticised thought. The unwillingness of society to embrace the hypothesis was justified by the same lack of evidence which prevented the thinkers themselves from giving it proof. And if no Darwin had appeared, the problem of evolution would have been left about where it had been left by the speculations of the Greek mind. Darwin reached his conclusion by what that other great scientific genius in England, Newton, described as the essential of discovery, "patient thought"; and having reached it, he had no alternative but to judge it true and pronounce it to the world. But the principle of variations with natural selection had the reception which shows that good judgment may rise higher than the level of its own social origin. Even yet the principle of Darwin is but a spreading ferment in many spheres of human thought in which it is destined to bring the same revolution that it has worked in the sciences of organic life. And it was not until other men, who had both authority with the public and sufficient information to follow Darwin's thought, seconded his judgment, that his formula began to have currency in scientific circles. Now we may ask: Does not any theory of man which loses sight of the supreme sanity of Darwin, and with him of Aristotle, and Angelo, and Leonardo, and Newton, and Leibnitz, and Shakespeare, seem weak and paltry? Do not delicacy of sentiment, brilliancy of wit, fineness of rhythmical and æsthetic sense, the beautiful contributions of the talented special performer, sink into something like apologies--something even like profanation of that name to conjure by, the name of genius? And all the more if the profanation is made real by the moral irregularities or the social shortcomings which give some colour of justification to the appellation "degenerate"! But, on the other hand, why run to the other extreme and make this most supremely human of all men an anomaly, a prodigy, a bolt from the blue, an element of extreme disorder, born to further or to distract the progress of humanity by a chance which no man can estimate? The resources of psychological theory are adequate, as I have endeavoured to show, to the construction of a doctrine of society which is based upon the individual, in all the possibilities of variation which his heredity may bring forth, and which yet does not hide nor veil those heights of human greatness on which the halo of genius is wont to rest. Let us add knowledge to our surprise in the presence of such a man, and respect to our knowledge, and worship, if you please, to our respect, and with it all we then begin to see that because of him the world is the better place for us to live and work in. We find that, after all, we may be social psychologists and hero worshippers as well. And by being philosophers we have made our worship more an act of tribute to human nature. The heathen who bows in apprehension or awe before the image of an unknown god may be rendering all the worship he knows; but the soul that finds its divinity by knowledge and love has communion of another kind. So the worship which many render to the unexplained, the fantastic, the cataclysmal--this is the awe that is born of ignorance. Given a philosophy that brings the great into touch with the commonplace, that delineates the forces which arise to their highest grandeur only in a man here and there, that enables us to contrast the best in us with the poverty of him, and then we may do intelligent homage. To know that the greatest men of earth are men who think as I do, but deeper, and see the real as I do, but clearer, who work to the goal that I do, but faster, and serve humanity as I do, but better--that may be an incitement to my humility, but it is also an inspiration to my life. LITERATURE[14] [Footnote 14: Only books in English. The order of mention is without significance.] GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY--SYSTEMATIC TREATISES. Bain, _The Senses and the Intellect_ (New York: Appletons London: Longmans). ----, _The Emotions and the Will_ (the same). James, _Principles of Psychology_, 2 vols. (New York: Holt & Co. London: Macmillans. Abridged in Briefer Course). Ladd, _Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory_ (New York: Scribners. London: Longmans. Abridged in _Elements of Descriptive Psychology_). Stout, _Analytic Psychology_, 2 vols. (London: Sonnenschein. New York: Macmillans). Wundt, _Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology_ (the same). Höffding, _Outlines of Psychology_ (Macmillans). Sterrett, _The Power of Thought_ (New York: Scribners). Baldwin, _Handbook of Psychology_, 2 vols. (New York: Holt. London: Macmillans. Abridged in _Elements of Psychology_). ----, Articles in _Appletons' Universal Cyclopædia_ (New York: Appletons). PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CHILD. Preyer, _The Mind of the Child_, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons). Compayré, _Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child_, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons). Sully, _Studies of Childhood_ (New York: Appletons. London: Longmans). Baldwin, _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_ (New York and London: Macmillans). PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. Ziehen, _Introduction to Physiological Psychology_ (London: Sonnenschein. New York: Macmillans). Ladd, _Elements of Physiological Psychology_ (New York: Scribners. London: Longmans. Abridged in _Outlines_). Donaldson, _The Growth of the Brain_ (London: Walter Scott. New York: Scribners). EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. Külpe, _Outline of Psychology_ (London: Sonnenschein New York: Macmillans). Sanford, _Course in Experimental Psychology_ (Boston: Heath & Co.). Scripture, _The New Psychology_ (London: Walter Scott. New York: Scribners). ANIMAL AND EVOLUTION PSYCHOLOGY. Romanes _Mental Evolution in Animals and Man_, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons). ----, _Animal Intelligence_ (New York: Appletons). ----, _Darwin and After Darwin_, 3 parts (Chicago: Open Court Company. London: Longmans). C. Lloyd Morgan, _Comparative Psychology_ (London: W. Scott. New York: Scribners). ----, _Animal Life and Intelligence_ (London and New York: Arnold). ----, _Habit and Instinct_ (the same). Groos, _The Play of Animals_ (New York: Appletons. London: Chapman & Hall). Spencer, _Principles of Psychology_, 2 vols. (New York: Appletons). Hudson, _The Naturalist in La Plata_ (London: Chapman & Hall). Darwin, _Descent of Man_ (New York: Appletons). -----, _Origin of Species_ (the same). Wallace, _Darwinism_ (New York and London: Macmillans), Stanley, _The Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling_ (London: Sonnenschein, New York: Macmillans). Baldwin, _Mental Development in the Child and the Race_ (New York and London: Macmillans). MENTAL DEFECT AND DISEASE. Maudsley, _Pathology of Mind_ (Macmillans). Starr, _Familiar Forms of Nervous Disease_ (New York: Wood). Collins, _The Faculty of Speech_ (Macmillans). Hirsch, _Genius and Degeneration_ (Appletons). Tuke, _Dictionary of Psychological Medicine_ (Philadelphia: Blakiston). HYPNOTISM AND ALLIED TOPICS. Moll, _Hypnotism_ (London: Scott. New York: Scribners). Binet, _Alterations of Personality_ (New York: Appletons. London: Chapman & Hall). Parish, _Hallucinations and Illusions_ (London: Scott. New York: Scribners). SOCIAL AND ETHICAL PSYCHOLOGY. Tarde, _The Laws of Imitation_ (New York: Holt). Le Bon, _The Crowd_ (London: Scott. New York: Scribners) Royce, _Studies in Good and Evil_ (Appletons). Baldwin, _Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development_ (Macmillans). EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. Spencer, _On Education_ (Appletons). Guyau, _Education and Heredity_ (Scribners). Herbart, _The Application of Psychology to Education_ (Scribners). Harris, _The Psychologic Foundations of Education_ (Appletons). PHILOSOPHY. Paulsen, _Introduction to Philosophy_ (Holt). Royce, _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_ (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.). Ormond, _Basal Concepts in Philosophy_ (Scribners). James, _The Will to Believe_ (Longmans). PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY (over the whole field), _Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, with full bibliographies, French, German, and Italian equivalents, etc. (Macmillans). UNCLASSIFIED. Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_ (Appletons). Giddings, _Principles of Sociology_ (Macmillans). Mackensie, _Introduction to Social Philosophy_ (Macmillans). Marshall, _Pain, Pleasure, and Æsthetics_ (Macmillans). Galton, _Inquiries into Human Faculty_ (Macmillans). ----, _Natural Inheritance_ (Macmillans). Pearson, _The Chances of Death_ (Arnold). JOURNALS. _The Psychological Review_ (Macmillans, all departments). _The American Journal of Psychology_ (Worcester: Orpha, experimental). _Mind_ (London: Williams & Norgate, mainly for philosophy). INDEX A. Abnormal psychology, 4. Aboulia, 119. Action, 16, 22. See Conduct. Æsthetic feeling, 46, 133. Algebra, study of, 187, 188. Amnesia, 118. Anæsthesia, 158. Animal psychology, 2, 24, 55. Animals, instinct of, 25; intelligence of, 36; mind in, 1, 24; play of, 43. Ants, instinct of, 26. Aphasia, 114, 132, 190; auditory, 116, 132; motor, 114, 132; sensory, 115; visual, 116, 132. Apperception, 12, 15, 17, 42, 108, 121. Assimilation, 14, 41, 133. Association of ideas, 11, 13, 15, 18, 39, 42, 76. Attention, 76, 121, 182, 191. Auto-suggestion, 151, 163. B. Bashfulness, 87 note. Bees, instinct of, 26. Birds, instinct of, 26. Body, relation of mind to, 101. Brain, 102. C. Cat, instinct of, 25. Catalepsy, 158. Cerebellum, 107. Chance, vii. Child, development of the, 28, 37, 50, 76, 167. Child Psychology, 2, 25, 37, 51. Children, play games of, 95. Christian Science, 120. "Chumming," 93. Cold sensations, 124. Colour blindness, 63. Colour sensations, 62, 64. Comparative psychology, 2, 24. Concept, the, 42. Conduct, 9, 16. See Action. Contrariness in children, 86, 157. Contrary suggestion, 157. Contrast, law of visual, 136. Control suggestion, 156. Copora striata, 107. Cortex of brain, 105, 108. Criminals, 205. Cures, mental, 120. D. Darwin, Charles, 229. Degeneracy, 104, 122, 226. Dextrality, 53, 69. Diseases of mind, 4, 101, 114. Distance, perception of, 64, 66. Dog, instinct of, 26, 39. Doubting insanity, 139. Dual personality, 118. E. Eccentricity, 176. Educational psychology, 5, 166. Ejective self, 90. Electric stimulus, 103. Emotional expressions, 22. Environment, 24. Equivalents, kinesthetic, 20, 28, 38, 112. Ethical sense, the, 90. Evolution, theory of, vi, 24, 31, 33, 54, 202, 229. Exaltation, sense, 153. Exaltation of the faculties in hypnosis, 160. Excitement, 21. Experimental psychology, 4, 101, 122. Experimenting with children, 6, 57, 61. Expressions of emotions, 22. Extirpation method, 102. F. Feeling, 10, 21. Fluid attention, 182. G. Galvanometer experiment, 103. Games, of animals, 42; of children, 95; value of, 50. Generalization, 41, 181. Genetic psychology, 2. Genius, 208, 211. Geometry, study of, 187, 188. Grammar, study of, 187, 188, 197. Guessing, 189, 198. H. Habit, 77, 80, 168, 192. Hallucination, 12. Heating, 10. Heat and cold sensations, 10, 124. Heredity, 32, 58, 75,95, 169, 177, 200, 204, 218. Heredity, social, 200. Hypnotic cures, 164. Hypnotism, 17, 121, 148, 158. I. Idiocy, 205. Illusions, 12; optical, 132. Imagination, 12, 17, 22, 214. Imitation, 28, 38, 47, 53, 78, 80, 88, 91, 211; persistent, 39. Individual psychology, 5. Inhibitory suggestion, 155, 170. Insanity, 205. Inspiration, 227. Instinct, 17, 25; lapsed intelligence theory, 31; reflex theory, 30, 34; theory of, 26. Intelligence, 36, 214; animal, 36. Intoxication, 102, 104. Introspection, 3, 8. Invention, 211. J. Judgement, 133, 208, 220. K. Kinæsthetic equivalents, 20, 28, 38, 112. Kindergarten, value of, 175. Knowledge, 9, 13, 22. L. Laboratories, psychological, 132. Language, study of, 183, 197. Lapsed intelligence theory of instinct, 31. Left-handedness, 53, 69. Levels, of brain functions, 105. Life, sensory and motor periods of, 167. Localization of brain inactions, 102, 104. M. "Make-believe," in animals and children, 45. Mathematics, study of, 187, 197. Medulla, 105. Memory, 11, 12, 18, 22, 76, 138, 150; defects of, 118. Mental pathology, 4, 101. Mind cure, 120. Mind, of animals, 1, 24; relation of body to, 101. Monkeys, instinct of, 26, 39. Motives, 18. Motor centres of brain, 111 Motor period, 167. Motor suggestion, 17, 67, 80. Muscle sensations, 10. Musical expression, 76. N. Natural selection, 202. O. Optic thalami, 107. Optical illusion, 132. Organic selection, principle of, 34, 50. Organic sensations, 10. P. Pain, 21, 156. Pain-movement-pleasure, 83. Pathology, mental, 4, 101. Pedagogical psychology, 5. Perception, 12, 17, 22. Personality, dual, 118. Personality suggestion, 80. Phrenology, unreliableness of, 117. Physiological psychology, 4, 101, 122. Play of animals, 43; of children, 95. Pleasure, 21, 156. Post-hypnotic suggestion, 160. Projection fibres, 109. Psychology, 1, 55; abnormal, 4; animal, 2, 24; child, 2, 25, 37, 51; comparative, 2, 24; educational, 5, 166; experimental, 4, 101, 122; genetic, 2; individual, 5; introspective, 3, 8; pedagogical, 5; physiological, 4, 101, 122; race, 6; social, 6, 200; variational, 5. Punishment, effect of, 172. R. Race psychology, 6. Rapport, 161. Reaction-time experiments, 126. Reason in animals, 31. Reasoning, 11, 13, 17. Recept, the, 41. Reception, 10. Re-evolution, 122. Reflex actions, 57, 105, 53. Reflex theory of instinct, 30, 34. Right-handedness, 53, 69. Rolandic region, 112. S. Schools, public, advantages of, 95; dangers of, 61. Selection, natural, 31, 202; organic, 34, 50. Self-consciousness, 43, 54, 80, 86. Self-suggestion, 151. Sensation, 10, 21, 22, 107, 109, 146, 179. Senses, the, 10, 101, 107, 109. Sense exaltation, 153. Sensory period, 167. Sentiment, 23. Sexes, difference in mental disposition, 176. Sight, 10; experiments on, 132. Smell, 10. Social heredity, 200; social psychology, 6, 200. Social sense, the, 90. Somnambulism, 153, 159. Speech, 75, 79; defects of, 114. Speech zone, 56, 109, 112. Spinal cord, 105. Spiritual healing, 120. Statistical method of investigation, 143. Stimulation, artificial, 103. Subconscious suggestion, 149. Suggestion, 17, 21, 67, 80, 120, 145, 148, 168, 172. Suggestion, motor, 80. T. Taste, 10. Temperature sense, 10, 124. Thought, 9, 11, 12, 21, 23. Thought-transference, 120. Touch, 10. Toxic method, 104. Tune suggestions, 149. V. Variation, 202; theory of, 30, 218. Variational psychology, 5. Vision, 133. Visual type of mind, 128, 193. W. Will, 19, 78; defects of, 119 Writing, 14, 79. 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40744	----	TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. A list of corrections to the text can be found at the end of the document. Inconsistencies in spelling or hyphenation have not been corrected. CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION NUMBER II THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION NUMBER II PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PRACTICE BY JOHN DEWEY PROFESSOR AND HEAD OF DEPARTMENTS OF PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION CHICAGO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO, ILL. PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PRACTICE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL PRACTICE.[1] [1] Address of the President before the American Psychological Association, New Haven, 1899. In coming before you I had hoped to deal with the problem of the relation of psychology to the social sciences--and through them to social practice, to life itself. Naturally, in anticipation, I had conceived a systematic exposition of fundamental principles covering the whole ground, and giving every factor its due rating and position. That discussion is not ready today. I am loath, however, completely to withdraw from the subject, especially as there happens to be a certain phase of it with which I have been more or less practically occupied within the last few years. I have in mind the relation of psychology to education. Since education is primarily a social affair, and since educational science is first of all a social science, we have here a section of the whole field. In some respects there may be an advantage in approaching the more comprehensive question through the medium of one of its special cases. The absence of elaborated and coherent view may be made up for by a background of experience, which shall check the projective power of reflective abstraction, and secure a translation of large words and ideas into specific images. This special territory, moreover, may be such as to afford both sign-posts and broad avenues to the larger sphere--the place of psychology among the social sciences. Because I anticipate such an outcome, and because I shall make a survey of the broad field from the special standpoint taken, I make no apology for presenting this discussion to an association of psychologists rather than to a gathering of educators. In dealing with this particular question, it is impossible not to have in mind the brilliant and effective discourses recently published by my predecessor in this chair. I shall accordingly make free to refer to points, and at times to words, in his treatment of the matter. Yet, as perhaps I hardly need say, it is a problem of the most fundamental importance for both psychology and social theory that I wish to discuss, not any particular book or article. Indeed, with much of what Dr. Münsterberg says about the uselessness and the danger for the teacher of miscellaneous scraps of child study, of unorganized information regarding the nervous system, and of crude and uninterpreted results of laboratory experiment, I am in full agreement. It is doubtless necessary to protest against a hasty and violent bolting of psychological facts and principles which, of necessity, destroys their scientific form. It is necessary to point out the need of a preliminary working over of psychological material, adapting it to the needs of education. But these are minor points. The main point is whether the standpoint of psychological science, as a study of _mechanism_, is indifferent and opposed to the demands of education with its free interplay of personalities in their vital attitudes and aims. I. The school practice of today has a definite psychological basis. Teachers are already possessed by specific psychological assumptions which control their theory and their practice. The greatest obstacle to the introduction of certain educational reforms is precisely the permeating persistence of the underlying psychological creed. Traced back to its psychological ultimates, there are two controlling bases of existing methods of instruction. One is the assumption of a fundamental distinction between child psychology and the adult psychology where in reality identity reigns, viz., in the region of the motives and conditions which make for mental power. The other is the assumption of likeness where marked difference is the feature most significant for educational purposes; I mean the specialization of aims and habits in the adult, compared with the absence of specialization in the child, and the connection of undifferentiated status with the full and free growth of the child. The adult is primarily a person with a certain calling and position in life. These devolve upon him certain _specific_ responsibilities which he has to meet, and call into play certain formed habits. The child is primarily one whose calling is _growth_. He is concerned with arriving at specific ends and purposes--instead of having a general framework already developed. He is engaged in _forming_ habits rather than in definitely utilizing those already formed. Consequently he is absorbed in getting that all-around contact with persons and things, that range of acquaintance with the physical and ideal factors of life, which shall afford the background and material for the specialized aims and pursuits of later life. He is, or should be, busy in the formation of a flexible variety of habits whose sole immediate criterion is their relation to _full growth_, rather than in acquiring certain _skills_ whose value is measured by their reference to specialized technical accomplishments. This is the radical psychological and biological distinction, I take it, between the child and the adult. It is because of this distinction that children are neither physiologically nor mentally describable as "little men and women." The full recognition of this distinction means of course the selection and arrangement of all school materials and methods for the facilitation of full normal growth, trusting to the result in growth to provide the instrumentalities of later specialized adaptation. If education means the period of prolonged infancy, it means nothing less than this. But look at our school system and ask whether the three R's are taught, either as to subject-matter or as to method, with reference to growth, to its present demands and opportunities; or as technical acquisitions which are to be needed in the specialized life of the adult. Ask the same questions about geography, grammar, and history. The gap between psychological theory and the existing school practice becomes painfully apparent. We readily realize the extent to which the present school system is dominated by carrying over into child life a standpoint and method which are significant in the psychology of the adult. The narrow scope of the traditional elementary curriculum, the premature and excessive use of logical analytic methods, the assumption of ready-made faculties of observation, memory, attention, etc., which can be brought into play if only the child chooses to do so, the ideal of formal discipline--all these find a large measure of their explanation in neglect of just this psychological distinction between the child and the adult. The hold of these affairs upon the school is so fixed that it is impossible to shake it in any fundamental way, excepting by a thorough appreciation of the actual psychology of the case. This appreciation cannot be confined to the educational leaders and theorists. No individual instructor can be sincere and whole-hearted, to say nothing of intelligent, in carrying into effect the needed reforms, save as he genuinely understands the scientific basis and necessity of the change. But in another direction there is the assumption of a fundamental difference: namely, as to the _conditions_ which secure intellectual and moral progress and power.[2] No one seriously questions that, with an adult, power and control are obtained through realization of personal ends and problems, through personal selection of means and materials which are relevant, and through personal adaptation and application of what is thus selected, together with whatever of experimentation and of testing is involved in this effort. Practically every one of these three conditions of increase in power for the adult is denied for the child. For him problems and aims are determined by another mind. For him the material that is relevant and irrelevant is selected in advance by another mind. And, upon the whole, there is such an attempt to teach him a ready-made method for applying his material to the solution of his problems, or the reaching of his ends, that the factor of experimentation is reduced to the minimum. With the adult we unquestioningly assume that an attitude of personal inquiry, based upon the possession of a problem which interests and absorbs, is a necessary precondition of mental growth. With the child we assume that the precondition is rather the willing disposition which makes him ready to submit to any problem and material presented from without. _Alertness_ is our ideal in one case; _docility_ in the other. With one we assume that power of attention develops in dealing with problems which make a personal appeal, and through personal responsibility for determining what is relevant. With the other we provide next to no opportunities for the evolution of problems out of immediate experience, and allow next to no free mental play for selecting, assorting, and adapting the experiences and ideas that make for their solution. How profound a revolution in the position and service of text-book and teacher, and in methods of instruction depending therefrom, would be effected by a sincere recognition of the psychological identity of child and adult in these respects can with difficulty be realized. [2] I owe this point specifically (as well as others more generally) to my friend and colleague, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young. Here again it is not enough that the educational commanders should be aware of the correct educational psychology. The rank and file, just because they are persons dealing with persons, must have a sufficient grounding in the psychology of the matter to realize the necessity and the significance of what they are doing. Any reform instituted without such conviction on the part of those who have to carry it into effect would never be undertaken in good faith, nor in the spirit which its ideal inevitably demands; consequently it could lead only to disaster. At this point, however, the issue defines itself somewhat more narrowly. It may be true, it is true, we are told, that some should take hold of psychological methods and conclusions, and organize them with reference to the assistance which they may give to the cause of education. But this is not the work of the teacher. It belongs to the general educational theorist: the middleman between the psychologist and the educational practitioner. He should put the matter into such shape that the teacher may take the net results in the form of advice and rules for action; but the teacher who comes in contact with the living personalities must not assume the psychological attitude. If he does, he reduces persons to objects, and thereby distorts, or rather destroys, the ethical relationship which is the vital nerve of instruction (_Psychology and Life_, p. 122, and pp. 136-8). That there is some legitimate division of labor between the general educational theorist and the actual instructor, there is, of course, no doubt. As a rule, it will not be the one actively employed in instruction who will be most conscious of the psychological basis and equivalents of the educational work, nor most occupied in finding the pedagogical rendering of psychological facts and principles. Of necessity, the stress of interest will be elsewhere. But we have already found reason for questioning the possibility of making the somewhat different direction of interest into a rigid dualism of a legislative class on one side and an obedient subject class on the other. Can the teacher ever receive "obligatory prescriptions"? Can he receive from another a statement of the means by which he is to reach his ends, and not become hopelessly servile in his attitude? Would not such a result be even worse than the existing mixture of empiricism and inspiration?--just because it would forever fossilize the empirical element and dispel the inspiration which now quickens routine. Can a passive, receptive attitude on the part of the instructor (suggesting the soldier awaiting orders from a commanding general) be avoided, unless the teacher, as a student of psychology, himself sees the reasons and import of the suggestions and rules that are proffered him? I quote a passage that seems of significance: "Do we not lay a special linking science everywhere else between the theory and practical work? We have engineering between physics and the practical workingmen in the mills; we have a scientific medicine between the natural science and the physician" (p. 138). The sentences suggest, in an almost startling way, that the real essence of the problem is found in an _organic_ connection between the two extreme terms--between the theorist and the practical worker--through the medium of the linking science. The decisive matter is the extent to which the ideas of the theorist actually project themselves, through the kind offices of the middleman, into the consciousness of the practitioner. It is the participation by the practical man in the theory, through the agency of the linking science, that determines at once the effectiveness of the work done, and the moral freedom and personal development of the one engaged in it. It is because the physician no longer follows rules, which, however rational in themselves, are yet arbitrary to him (because grounded in principles that he does not understand), that his work is becoming liberal, attaining the dignity of a profession, instead of remaining a mixture of _empiricism and quackery_. It is because, alas, engineering makes only a formal and not a real connection between physics and the practical workingmen in the mills that our industrial problem is an ethical problem of the most serious kind. The question of the amount of wages the laborer receives, of the purchasing value of this wage, of the hours and conditions of labor, are, after all, secondary. The problem primarily roots in the fact that the mediating science does not connect with his _consciousness_, but merely with his outward actions. He does not appreciate the significance and bearing of what he does; and he does not perform his work because of sharing in a larger scientific and social consciousness. If he did, he would be free. All other proper accompaniments of wage, and hours, healthful and inspiring conditions, would be added unto him, because he would have entered into the ethical kingdom. Shall we seek analogy with the teacher's calling in the workingmen in the mill, or in the scientific physician? It is quite likely that I shall be reminded that I am overlooking an essential difference. The physician, it will be said, is dealing with a body which either is in itself a pure object, a causal interplay of anatomical elements, or is something which lends itself naturally and without essential loss to treatment from this point of view; while the case is quite different in the material with which the teacher deals. Here is personality, which is destroyed when regarded as an object. But the gap is not so pronounced nor so serious as this objection implies. The physician, after all, is not dealing with a lifeless body; with a simple anatomical structure, or interplay of mechanical elements. Life-functions, active operations, are the reality which confronts him. We do not have to go back many centuries in the history of medicine to find a time when the physician attempted to deal with these functions directly and immediately. They were so overpoweringly present, they forced themselves upon him so obviously and so constantly, that he had no resource save a mixture of magic and empiricism: magic so far as he followed methods derived from uncritical analogy, or from purely general speculation on the universe and life; empiricism so long as he just followed procedures which had been found helpful before in cases which somewhat resembled the present. We have only to trace the intervening history of medicine to appreciate that it is precisely the ability to state function in terms of structure, to reduce life in its active operations to terms of a causal mechanism, which has taken the medical calling out of this dependence upon a vibration between superstition and routine. Progress has come by taking what is really an activity _as if_ it were only an object. It is the capacity to effect this transformation of life-activity which measures both the scientific character of the physician's procedure and his practical control, the certainty and efficacy of what he, as a living man, does in relation to some other living man. It is an old story, however, that we must not content ourselves with analogies. We must find some specific reason in the principles of the teacher's own activities for believing that psychology--the ability to transform a living personality into an objective mechanism for the time being--is not merely an incidental help, but an organic necessity. Upon the whole, the best efforts of teachers at present are partly paralyzed, partly distorted, and partly rendered futile precisely from the fact that they are in such immediate contact with sheer, unanalyzed personality. The relation is such a purely ethical and personal one that the teacher cannot get enough outside the situation to handle it intelligently and effectively. He is in precisely the condition in which the physician was when he had no recourse save to deal with health as entity or force on one side, and disease as opposing agency or invading influence upon the other. The teacher reacts _en bloc_, in a gross wholesale way, to something which he takes in an equally undefined and total way in the child. It is the inability to regard, upon occasion, both himself and the child as just objects working upon each other in specific ways that compels him to resort to purely arbitrary measures, to fall back upon mere routine traditions of school-teaching, or to fly to the latest fad of pedagogical theorists--the latest panacea peddled out in school journals or teachers' institutes--just as the old physician relied upon his magic formula. I repeat, it is the fundamental weakness of our teaching force today (putting aside teachers who are actually incompetent by reason either of wrong motives or inadequate preparation) that they react in gross to the child's exhibitions in gross without analyzing them into their detailed and constituent elements. If the child is angry, he is dealt with simply as an angry being; anger is an entity, a force, not a symptom. If a child is inattentive, this again is treated as a mere case of refusal to use the faculty or function of attention, of sheer unwillingness to act. Teachers tell you that a child is careless or inattentive in the same final way in which they would tell you that a piece of paper is white. It is just a fact, and that is all there is of it. Now, it is only through some recognition of attention as a mechanism, some awareness of the interplay of sensations, images, and motor impulses which constitute it as an objective fact, that the teacher can deal effectively with attention as a function. And, of course, the same is true of memory, quick and useful observation, good judgment, and all the other practical powers the teacher is attempting to cultivate. Consideration of the abstract concepts of mechanism and personality is important. Too much preoccupation with them in a general fashion, however, without translation into relevant imagery of actual conditions, is likely to give rise to unreal difficulties. The ethical personality does not go to school naked; it takes with it the body as the instrument through which all influences reach it, and through control of which its ideas are both elaborated and expressed. The teacher does not deal with personality at large, but as expressed in intellectual and practical impulses and habits. The ethical personality is not formed--it is forming. The teacher must provide stimuli leading to the equipment of personality with active habits and interests. When we consider the problem of forming habits and interests, we find ourselves at once confronted with matters of this sort: What stimuli shall be presented to the sense-organs and how? What stable complexes of associations shall be organized? What motor impulses shall be evoked, and to what extent? How shall they be induced in such a way as to bring favorable stimuli under greater control, and to lessen the danger of excitation from undesirable stimuli? In a word, the teacher is dealing with the psychical factors that are concerned with furtherance of certain habits, and the inhibition of others--habits intellectual, habits emotional, habits in overt action. Moreover, all the instruments and materials with which the teacher deals must be considered as psychical stimuli. Such consideration involves of necessity a knowledge of their reciprocal reactions--of what goes by the name of _causal mechanism_. The introduction of certain changes into a network of associations, the reinforcement of certain sensori-motor connections, the weakening or displacing of others--this is the psychological rendering of the greater part of the teacher's actual business. It is not that one teacher employs mechanical considerations, and that the other does not, appealing to higher ends; it is that one does not know his mechanism, and consequently acts servilely, superstitiously, and blindly, while the other, knowing what he is about, acts freely, clearly, and effectively.[3] [3] That some teachers get their psychology by instinct more effectively than others by any amount of reflective study may be unreservedly stated. It is not a question of manufacturing teachers, but of reinforcing and enlightening those who have a right to teach. The same thing is true on the side of materials of instruction--the school studies. No amount of exaltation of teleological personality (however true, and however necessary the emphasis) can disguise from us the fact that instruction is an affair of bringing a child into intimate relations with concrete objects, positive facts, definite ideas, and specific symbols. The symbols are objective things in arithmetic, reading, and writing. The ideas are truths of history and of science. The facts are derived from such specific disciplines as geography and language, botany and astronomy. To suppose that by some influence of pure personality upon pure personality, conjoined with a knowledge of rules formulated by an educational theorist, an effective interplay of this body of physical and ideal objects with the life of the child can be effective, is, I submit, nothing but an appeal to magic, plus dependence upon servile routine. Symbols in reading and writing and number are, both in themselves and in the way in which they stand for ideas, elements in a mechanism which has to be rendered operative within the child. To bring about this influence in the most helpful and economical way, in the most fruitful and liberating way, is absolutely impossible save as the teacher has some power to transmute symbols and contents into their working psychical equivalents; and save as he also has the power to see what it is in the child, as a psychical mechanism, that affords maximum leverage. Probably I shall now hear that at present the danger is not of dealing with acts and persons in a gross, arbitrary way, but (so far as what is called new education is concerned) in treating the children too much as mechanism, and consequently seeking for all kinds of stimuli to stir and attract--that, in a word, the tendency to reduce instruction to a merely agreeable thing, weakening the child's personality and indulging his mere love of excitement and pleasure, is precisely the result of taking the psycho-mechanical point of view. I welcome the objection, for it serves to clear up the precise point. It is through a partial and defective psychology that the teacher, in his reaction from dead routine and arbitrary moral and intellectual discipline, has substituted an appeal to the satisfaction of momentary impulse. It is not because the teacher has a knowledge of the psycho-physical mechanism, but because he has a _partial_ knowledge of it. He has come to consciousness of certain sensations and certain impulses, and of the ways in which these may be stimulated and directed, but he is in ignorance of the larger mechanism (just as a mechanism), and of the causal relations which subsist between the unknown part and the elements upon which he is playing. What is needed to correct his errors is not to inform him that he gets only misleading from taking the psychical point of view, but to reveal to him the scope and intricate interactions of the mechanism as a whole. Then he will realize that, while he is gaining apparent efficacy in some superficial part of the mechanism, he is disarranging, dislocating, and disintegrating much more fundamental factors in it. In a word, he is operating, not as a psychologist, but as a poor psychologist, and the only cure for a partial psychology is a fuller one. He is gaining the momentary attention of the child through an appeal to pleasant color, or exciting tone, or agreeable association, but at the expense of isolating one cog and ratchet in the machinery, and making it operate independently of the rest. In theory, it is as possible to demonstrate this to a teacher, showing how the faulty method reacts unhappily into the personality, as it is to locate the points of wrong construction and of ineffective transfer of energy in a physical apparatus. This suggests the admission made by writers, in many respects as far apart as Dr. Harris and Dr. Münsterberg, that scientific psychology is of use on the pathological side, where questions of "physical and mental health" are concerned. But is there anything with which the teacher has concern that is not included in the ideal of physical and mental health? Does health define to us anything less than the teacher's whole end and aim? Where does pathology leave off in the scale and series of vicious aims and defective means? I see no line between the more obvious methods and materials which result in nervous irritation and fatigue, in weakening the power of vision, in establishing spinal curvatures, and others which, in more remote and subtle, but equally real, ways leave the child with, say, a muscular system which is only partially at the service of his ideas, with blocked and inert brain paths between eye and ear, and with a partial and disconnected development of the cerebral paths of visual imagery. What error in instruction is there which could not, with proper psychological theory, be stated in just such terms as these? A wrong method of teaching reading, wrong, I mean, in the full educational and ethical sense, is also a case of pathological use of the psycho-physical mechanism. A method is ethically defective that, while giving the child a glibness in the mechanical facility of reading, leaves him at the mercy of suggestion and chance environment to decide whether he reads the "yellow journal," the trashy novel, or the literature which inspires and makes more valid his whole life. Is it any less certain that this failure on the ethical side is repeated in some lack of adequate growth and connection in the psychical and physiological factors involved? If a knowledge of psychology is important to the teacher in the grosser and more overt cases of mental pathology, is it not even more important in these hidden and indirect matters--just because they are less evident, and more circuitous in their operation and manifestation? The argument may be summarized by saying that there is controversy neither as to the ethical character of education, nor as to the abstraction which psychology performs in reducing personality to an object. The teacher is, indeed, a person occupied with other persons. He lives in a social sphere--he is a member and an organ of a social life. His aims are social aims; the development of individuals taking ever more responsible positions in a circle of social activities continually increasing in radius and in complexity. Whatever he as a teacher effectively does, he does as a person; and he does with and toward persons. His methods, like his aims, when actively in operation, are practical, are social, are ethical, are anything you please--save merely _psychical_. In comparison with this, the material and the data, the standpoint and the methods of psychology, are abstract. They transform specific acts and relations of individuals into a flow of processes in consciousness; and these processes can be adequately identified and related only through reference to a biological organism. I do not think there is danger of going too far in asserting the social and teleological nature of the work of the teacher; or in asserting the abstract and partial character of the mechanism into which the psychologist, as a psychologist, transmutes the play of vital values. Does it follow from this that any attempt on the part of the teacher to perform this abstraction, to see the pupil as a mechanism, to define his own relations and that of the study taught in terms of causal influences acting upon this mechanism, is useless and harmful? On the face of it, I cannot understand the logic which says that because mechanism is mechanism, and because acts, aims, values are vital, therefore a statement in terms of one is alien to the comprehension and proper management of the other. Ends are not compromised when referred to the means necessary to realize them. Values do not cease to be values when they are minutely and accurately measured. Acts are not destroyed when their operative machinery is made manifest. The statement of the disparity of mechanism and actual life, be it never so true, solves no problem. It is no distinction that may be used off-hand to decide the question of the relation of psychology to any form of practice. It is a valuable and necessary distinction; but it is only preliminary. The purport of our discussion has, indeed, led us strongly to suspect any ideal which exists purely at large, out of relation to machinery of execution, and equally a machinery that operates in no particular direction. The proposition that a description and explanation of stones, iron, and mortar, as an absolutely necessary causal nexus of mechanical conditions, makes the results of physical science unavailable for purposes of practical life, would hardly receive attention today. Every sky-scraper, every railway bridge, is a refutation, compared with which oceans of talk are futile. One would not find it easy to stir up a problem, even if he went on to include, in this same mechanical system, the steam derricks that hoist the stones and iron, and the muscles and nerves of architect, mason, and steel worker. The simple fact is still too obvious: the more thoroughgoing and complete the mechanical and causal statement, the more controlled, the more economical, are the discovery and realization of human aims. It is not in spite of, nor in neglect of, but because of, the mechanical statement that human activity has been freed, and made effective in thousands of new practical directions, upon a scale and with a certainty hitherto undreamed of. Our discussion tends to suggest that we entertain a similar question regarding psychology only because we have as yet made so little headway--just because there is so little scientific control of our practice in these directions; that at bottom our difficulty is local and circumstantial, not intrinsic and doctrinal. If our teachers were trained as architects are trained; if our schools were actually managed on a psychological basis as great factories are run on the basis of chemical and physical science; if our psychology were sufficiently organized and coherent to give as adequate a mechanical statement of human nature as physics does of its material, we should never dream of discussing this question. I cannot pass on from this phase of the discussion without at least incidental remark of the obverse side of the situation. The difficulties of psychological observation and interpretation are great enough in any case. We cannot afford to neglect any possible auxiliary. The great advantage of the psycho-physical laboratory is paid for by certain obvious defects. The completer control of conditions, with resulting greater accuracy of determination, demands an isolation, a ruling out of the usual media of thought and action, which leads to a certain remoteness, and easily to a certain artificiality. When the result of laboratory experiment informs us, for example, that repetition is the chief factor influencing recall, we must bear in mind that the result is obtained with nonsense material, _i. e._, by excluding the conditions of ordinary memory. The result is pertinent if we state it thus: The more we exclude the usual environmental adaptations of memory, the greater importance attaches to sheer repetition. It is dubious (and probably perverse) if we say: Repetition is the prime influence in memory. Now, this illustrates a general principle. Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual reapproximation to conditions of life. The results may be very accurate, very definitive in form; but the task of re-viewing them so as to see their actual import is clearly one of great delicacy and liability to error. The laboratory, in a word, affords no final refuge that enables us to avoid the ordinary scientific difficulties of forming hypotheses, interpreting results, etc. In some sense (from the very accuracy and limitations of its results) it adds to our responsibilities in this direction. Now the school, for psychological purposes, stands in many respects midway between the extreme simplifications of the laboratory and the confused complexities of ordinary life. Its conditions are those of life at large; they are social and practical. But it approaches the laboratory in so far as the ends aimed at are reduced in number, are definite, and thus simplify the conditions; and their psychological phase is uppermost--the formation of habits of attention, observation, memory, etc.--while in ordinary life these are secondary and swallowed up. If the biological and evolutionary attitude is right in looking at mind as fundamentally an instrument of adaptation, there are certainly advantages in any mode of approach which brings us near to its various adaptations while they are still forming, and under conditions selected with special reference to promoting these adaptations (or faculties). And this is precisely the situation we should have in a properly organized system of education. While the psychological theory would guide and illuminate the practice, acting upon the theory would immediately test it, and thus criticise it, bringing about its revision and growth. In the large and open sense of the words, psychology becomes a working hypothesis, instruction is the experimental test and demonstration of the hypothesis; the result is both greater practical control and continued growth in theory. II. I must remind myself that my purpose does not conclude with a statement of the auxiliary relation of psychology to education; but that we are concerned with this as a type case of a wider problem--the relation of psychology to social practice in general. So far I have tried to show that it is not in spite of its statement of personal aims and social relations in terms of mechanism that psychology is useful, but because of this transformation and abstraction. Through reduction of ethical relations to presented objects we are enabled to get outside of the existing situation; to see it objectively, not merely in relation to our traditional habits, vague aspirations, and capricious desires. We are able to see clearly the factors which shape it, and therefore to get an idea of how it may be modified. The assumption of an identical relationship of physics and psychology to practical life is justified. Our freedom of action comes through its statement in terms of necessity. By this translation our control is enlarged, our powers are directed, our energy conserved, our aims illuminated. The school is an especially favorable place in which to study the availability of psychology for social practice; because in the school the formation of a certain type of social personality, with a certain attitude and equipment of working powers, is the express aim. In idea, at least, no other purpose restricts or compromises the dominance of the single purpose. Such is not the case in business, politics, and the professions. All these have upon their surface, taken directly, other ends to serve. In many instances these other aims are of far greater immediate importance; the ethical result is subordinate or even incidental. Yet as it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his own self, so indirectly and ultimately all these other social institutions must be judged by the contribution which they make to the value of human life. Other ends may be immediately uppermost, but these ends must in turn be means; they must subserve the interests of conscious life or else stand condemned. In other words, the moment we apply an ethical standard to the consideration of social institutions, that moment they stand on exactly the same level as does the school, viz., as organs for the increase in depth and area of the realized values of life. In both cases the statement of the mechanism, through which the ethical ends are realized, is not only permissible, but absolutely required. It is not merely incidentally, as a grateful addition to its normal task, that psychology serves us. The essential nature of the standpoint which calls it into existence, and of the abstraction which it performs, is to put in our possession the method by which values are introduced and effected in life. The statement of personality as an object, of social relations as a mechanism of stimuli and inhibitions, is precisely the statement of ends in terms of the method of their realization. It is remarkable that men are so blind to the futility of a morality which merely blazons ideals, erects standards, asserts laws without finding in them any organic provision for their own realization. For ideals are held up to follow; standards are given to work by; laws are provided to guide action. The sole and only reason for their conscious moral statement is, in a word, that they may influence and direct conduct. If they cannot do this, not merely by accident, but of their own intrinsic nature, they are worse than inert. They are impudent impostors and logical self-contradictions. When men derive their moral ideals and laws from custom, they also realize them through custom; but when they are in any way divorced from habit and tradition, when they are consciously proclaimed, there must be some substitute for custom as an organ of execution. We must know the method of their operation and know it in detail. Otherwise the more earnestly we insist upon our categorical imperatives, and upon their supreme right of control, the more flagrantly helpless we are as to their actual domination. The fact that conscious, as distinct from customary, morality and psychology have had a historic parallel march is just the concrete recognition of the necessary equivalence between ends consciously conceived, and interest in the means upon which the ends depend. We have the same reality stated twice over: once as value to be realized, and once as mechanism of realization. So long as custom reigns, as tradition prevails, so long as social values are determined by instinct and habit, there is no conscious question as to the method of their achievement, and hence no need of psychology. Social institutions work of their own inertia, they take the individual up into themselves and carry him along in their own sweep. The individual is dominated by the mass life of his group. Institutions and the customs attaching to them take care of society both as to its ideals and its methods. But when once the values come to consciousness, when once a Socrates insists upon the organic relation of a reflective life and morality, then the means, the machinery by which ethical ideals are projected and manifested, comes to consciousness also. Psychology must needs be born as soon as morality becomes reflective. Moreover, psychology, as an account of the mechanism of workings of personality, is the only alternative to an arbitrary and class view of society, to an aristocratic view in the sense of restricting the realization of the full worth of life to a section of society. The growth of a psychology that, as applied to history and sociology, tries to state the interactions of groups of men in familiar psychical categories of stimulus and inhibition, is evidence that we are ceasing to take existing social forms as final and unquestioned. The application of psychology to social institutions is the only scientific way of dealing with their ethical values in their present unequal distribution, their haphazard execution, and their thwarted development. It marks just the recognition of the principle of sufficient reason in the large matters of social life. It is the recognition that the existing order is determined neither by fate nor by chance, but is based on law and order, on a system of existing stimuli and modes of reaction, through knowledge of which we can modify the practical outcome. There is no logical alternative, save either to recognize and search for the mechanism of the interplay of personalities that controls the existing distributions of values, _or_ to accept as final a fixed hierarchy of persons in which the leaders assert, on no basis save their own supposed superior personality, certain ends and laws which the mass of men passively receive and imitate. The effort to apply psychology to social affairs means that the determination of ethical values lies, not in any set or class, however superior, but in the workings of the social whole; that the explanation is found in the complex interactions and interrelations which constitute this whole. To save personality in all, we must serve all alike--state the achievements of all in terms of mechanism, that is, of the exercise of reciprocal influence. To affirm personality independent of mechanism is to restrict its full meaning to a few, and to make its expression in the few irregular and arbitrary. The anomaly in our present social life is obvious enough. With tremendous increase in control of nature, in ability to utilize nature for the indefinite extension and multiplication of commodities for human use and satisfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values, growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as if we were caught in a contradiction; the more we multiply means, the less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them. No wonder a Carlyle or a Ruskin puts our whole industrial civilization under a ban, while a Tolstoi proclaims a return to the desert. But the only way to see the situation steadily, and to see it as a whole, is to keep in mind that the entire problem is one of the development of science, _and of its application to life_. Our control of nature, with the accompanying output of material commodities, is the necessary result of the growth of physical science--of our ability to state things as interconnected parts of a mechanism. Physical science has for the time being far outrun psychical. We have mastered the physical mechanism sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have not gained a knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life, and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and hence of force. Psychology, after all, simply states the mechanism through which conscious value and meaning are introduced into human experience. As it makes its way, and is progressively applied to history and all the social sciences, we can anticipate no other outcome than increasing control in the ethical sphere--the nature and extent of which can be best judged by considering the revolution that has taken place in the control of physical nature through a knowledge of her order. Psychology will never provide ready-made materials and prescriptions for the ethical life, any more than physics dictates off-hand the steam-engine and the dynamo. But science, both physical and psychological, makes known the conditions upon which certain results depend, and therefore puts at the disposal of life a method for controlling them. Psychology will never tell us just what to do ethically, nor just how to do it. But it will afford us insight into the conditions which control the formation and execution of aims, and thus enable human effort to expend itself sanely, rationally, and with assurance. We are not called upon to be either boasters or sentimentalists regarding the possibilities of our science. It is best, for the most part, that we should stick to our particular jobs of investigation and reflection as they come to us. But we certainly are entitled in this daily work to be sustained by the conviction that we are not working in indifference to or at cross-purposes with the practical strivings of our common humanity. The psychologist, in his most remote and technical occupation with mechanism, is contributing his bit to that ordered knowledge which alone enables mankind to secure a larger and to direct a more equal flow of values in life. CORRECTIONS: page original text correction 34 II II. 40 reciprocal influence reciprocal influence. The following sentence on page 26 is left unchanged: "... he gets only misleading from taking the psychical point of view," A reprint of the essay in Educational Essays by John Dewey (edited by J. J. Finlay) has "... he is only misled by taking the psychical point of view," 
13695	----	PREPARER'S NOTE This eBook was prepared from the edition published by the Societe des Beaux-Arts in 1905 for the Comedie d'Amour Series. Registered copy Number 153 of 500. [Illustration: Comedie d'Amour Series] A LOVE EPISODE BY EMILE ZOLA ILLUSTRATED BY DANTAN [Illustration: Emile Zola] ZOLA AND HIS WRITINGS Emile Zola was born in Paris, April 2, 1840. His father was Francois Zola, an Italian engineer, who constructed the Canal Zola in Provence. Zola passed his early youth in the south of France, continuing his studies at the Lycee St. Louis, in Paris, and at Marseilles. His sole patrimony was a lawsuit against the town of Aix. He became a clerk in the publishing house of Hachette, receiving at first the modest honorarium of twenty-five francs a week. His journalistic career, though marked by immense toil, was neither striking nor remunerative. His essays in criticism, of which he collected and published several volumes, were not particularly successful. This was evidently not his field. His first stories, _Les Mysteres de Marseilles_ and _Le Voeu d'Une Morte_ fell flat, disclosing no indication of remarkable talent. But in 1864 appeared _Les Contes a Ninon_, which attracted wide attention, the public finding them charming. _Les Confessions de Claude_ was published in 1865. In this work Zola had evidently struck his gait, and when _Therese Raquin_ followed, in 1867, Zola was fully launched on his great career as a writer of the school which he called "Naturalist." _Therese Raquin_ was a powerful study of the effects of remorse preying upon the mind. In this work the naturalism was generally characterized as "brutal," yet many critics admitted that it was absolutely true to nature. It had, in fact, all the gruesome accuracy of a clinical lecture. In 1868 came _Madeleine Ferat_, an exemplification of the doctrine of heredity, as inexorable as the "Destiny" of the Greek tragedies of old. And now dawned in Zola's teeming brain the vast conception of a "Naturalistic Comedy of Life." It was to be Balzac "naturalized," so to speak. The great cycle should run through the whole gamut of human passions, foibles, motives and interests. It should consist of human documents, of painstaking minuteness of detail and incontrovertible truth. The idea of destiny or heredity permeates all the works of this portentously ambitious series. Details may be repellant. One should not "smell" a picture, as the artists say. If one does, he gets an impression merely of a small blotch of paint. The vast canvas should be studied as a whole. Frailties are certainly not the whole of human nature. But they cannot be excluded from a comprehensive view of it. The "_Rougon-Macquart_ series" did not carry Zola into the Academy. But the reputation of Moliere has managed to survive a similar exclusion, and so will the fame of Zola, who will be bracketed with Balzac in future classifications of artistic excellence. For twenty-two years, from _La Fortune des Rougon_, in 1871, to _Docteur Pascal_ in 1893, the series continued to focus the attention of the world, and Zola was the most talked about man in the literature of the epoch. _La Fortune des Rougon_ was introductory. _La Curee_ discussed society under the second Empire. _Le Ventre de Paris_ described the great market of Paris. _La Conquete de Plassans_ spoke of life in the south of France. _La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_ treated of the results of celibacy. _Son Excellence Eugene Rougon_ dealt with official life. _L'Assommoir_ was a tract against the vice of drunkenness. Some think this the strongest of the naturalist series. Its success was prodigious. In this the marvellous talent of Zola for minute description is evinced. _Une Page d'Amour_ (A Love Episode) appeared in 1878. Of _Nana_, 1880, three hundred thousand copies were quickly sold. _Pot-Bouille_ portrayed the lower _bourgeoisie_ and their servants. _Au Bonheur des Dames_ treated of the great retail shops. _La Joie de Vivre_ came in 1884. _Germinal_ told of mining and the misery of the proletariat. _L'Oeuvre_ pictured the life of artists and authors. _La Terre_ portrayed, with startling realism, the lowest peasant life. _Le Reve_, which followed, was a reaction. It was a graceful idyl. _Le Reve_ was termed "a symphony in white," and was considered as a concession to the views of the majority of the French Academy. _La Bete Humaine_ exhausted the details of railway life. _L'Argent_ treats of financial scandals and panics. _La Debacle_, 1892, is a realistic picture of the desperate struggles of the Franco-Prussian war. _Le Docteur Pascal_, 1893, a story of the emotions, wound up the series. Through it all runs the thread of heredity and environment in their influence on human character. But Zola's work was not finished. A series of three romances on cities showed a continuance of power. They are _Lourdes_, _Rome_, and _Paris_. After the books on the three cities Zola planned a sort of tetralogy, intended to sum up his social philosophy, which he called the "Four Gospels." _Feconditie_ is a tract against race suicide. The others of this series are entitled _Travail_, _Verite_ and _Justice_, the latter projected but not begun. The attitude which Zola took in reference to the wretched Dreyfus scandal will add greatly to his fame as a man of courage and a lover of truth. From this filthy mess of perjury and forgery Zola's intrepidity and devotion to justice arise clear and white as a lily from a cesspool. Several of Zola's books have been dramatized. Zola died suddenly at his home in Paris, in September, 1902. He received a public funeral, Anatole France delivering an oration at the grave. There is every indication that Zola's great reputation as an artist and philosopher will increase with the passing of the years. C. C. STARKWEATHER. A LOVE EPISODE CHAPTER I. The night-lamp with a bluish shade was burning on the chimney-piece, behind a book, whose shadows plunged more than half the chamber in darkness. There was a quiet gleam of light cutting across the round table and the couch, streaming over the heavy folds of the velvet curtains, and imparting an azure hue to the mirror of the rosewood wardrobe placed between the two windows. The quiet simplicity of the room, the blue tints on the hangings, furniture, and carpet, served at this hour of night to invest everything with the delightful vagueness of cloudland. Facing the windows, and within sweep of the shadow, loomed the velvet-curtained bed, a black mass, relieved only by the white of the sheets. With hands crossed on her bosom, and breathing lightly, lay Helene, asleep--mother and widow alike personified by the quiet unrestraint of her attitude. In the midst of the silence one o'clock chimed from the timepiece. The noises of the neighborhood had died away; the dull, distant roar of the city was the only sign of life that disturbed those Trocadero heights. Helene's breathing, so light and gentle, did not ruffle the chaste repose of her bosom. She was in a beauteous sleep, peaceful yet sound, her profile perfect, her nut-brown hair twisted into a knot, and her head leaning forward somewhat, as though she had fallen asleep while eagerly listening. At the farther end of the room the open door of an adjoining closet seemed but a black square in the wall. Still there was not a sound. The half-hour struck. The pendulum gave but a feeble tick-tack amid the general drowsiness that brooded over the whole chamber. Everything was sleeping, night-lamp and furniture alike; on the table, near an extinguished lamp, some woman's handiwork was disposed also in slumber. Helene in her sleep retained her air of gravity and kindliness. Two o'clock struck, and the stillness was broken. A deep sigh issued from the darkness of the closet. There was a rustling of linen sheets, and then silence reigned again. Anon labored breathing broke through the gloom. Helene had not moved. Suddenly, however, she started up, for the moanings and cries of a child in pain had roused her. Dazed with sleep, she pressed her hands against her temples, but hearing a stifled sob, she leaped from her couch on to the carpet. "Jeanne! my Jeanne! what ails you? tell me, love," she asked; and as the child remained silent, she murmured, while running towards the night-light, "Gracious Heaven! why did I go to bed when she was so ill?" Quickly she entered the closet, where deep silence had again fallen. The feeble gleam of the lamp threw but a circular patch of light on the ceiling. Bending over the iron cot, she could at first make out nothing, but amidst the bed-clothes, tossed about in disorder, the dim light soon revealed Jeanne, with limbs quite stiff, her head flung back, the muscles of her neck swollen and rigid. Her sweet face was distorted, her eyes were open and fixed on the curtain-rod above. "My child!" cried Helene. "My God! my God! she is dying." Setting down the lamp, Helene touched her daughter with trembling hands. The throbbing of the pulse and the heart's action seemed to have died away. The child's puny arms and legs were stretched out convulsively, and the mother grew frantic at the sight. "My child is dying! Help, help!" she stammered. "My child! my child!" She wandered back to her room, brushing against the furniture, and unconscious of her movements; then, distracted, she again returned to the little bed, throwing herself on her knees, and ever appealing for help. She took Jeanne in her arms, rained kisses on her hair, and stroked her little body, begging her to answer, and seeking one word --only one word--from her silent lips. Where was the pain? Would she have some of the cooling drink she had liked the other day? Perhaps the fresh air would revive her? So she rattled on, bent on making the child speak. "Speak to me, Jeanne! speak to me, I entreat you!" Oh, God! and not to know what to do in this sudden terror born of the night! There was no light even. Then her ideas grew confused, though her supplications to the child continued--at one moment she was beseeching, at another answering in her own person. Thus, the pain gripped her in the stomach; no, no, it must be in the breast. It was nothing at all; she need merely keep quiet. Then Helene tried to collect her scattered senses; but as she felt her daughter stark and stiff in her embrace, her heart sickened unto death. She tried to reason with herself, and to resist the yearning to scream. But all at once, despite herself, her cry rang out "Rosalie, Rosalie! my child is dying. Quick, hurry for the doctor." Screaming out these words, she ran through dining-room and kitchen to a room in the rear, where the maid started up from sleep, giving vent to her surprise. Helene speeded back again. Clad only in her night-dress she moved about, seemingly not feeling the icy cold of the February night. Pah! this maid would loiter, and her child would die! Back again she hurried through the kitchen to the bedroom before a minute had elapsed. Violently, and in the dark, she slipped on a petticoat, and threw a shawl over her shoulders. The furniture in her way was overturned; the room so still and silent was filled with the echoes of her despair. Then leaving the doors open, she rushed down three flights of stairs in her slippers, consumed with the thought that she alone could bring back a doctor. After the house-porter had opened the door Helene found herself upon the pavement, with a ringing in her ears and her mind distracted. However, she quickly ran down the Rue Vineuse and pulled the door-bell of Doctor Bodin, who had already tended Jeanne; but a servant--after an interval which seemed an eternity--informed her that the doctor was attending a woman in childbed. Helene remained stupefied on the footway; she knew no other doctor in Passy. For a few moments she rushed about the streets, gazing at the houses. A slight but keen wind was blowing, and she was walking in slippers through the light snow that had fallen during the evening. Ever before her was her daughter, with the agonizing thought that she was killing her by not finding a doctor at once. Then, as she retraced her steps along the Rue Vineuse, she rang the bell of another house. She would inquire, at all events; some one would perhaps direct her. She gave a second tug at the bell; but no one seemed to come. The wind meanwhile played with her petticoat, making it cling to her legs, and tossed her dishevelled hair. At last a servant answered her summons. "Doctor Deberle was in bed asleep." It was a doctor's house at which she had rung, so Heaven had not abandoned her! Straightway, intent upon entering, she pushed the servant aside, still repeating her prayer: "My child, my child is dying! Oh, tell him he must come!" The house was small and seemed full of hangings. She reached the first floor, despite the servant's opposition, always answering his protest with the words, "My child is dying!" In the apartment she entered she would have been content to wait; but the moment she heard the doctor stirring in the next room she drew near and appealed to him through the doorway: "Oh, sir, come at once, I beseech you. My child is dying!" When the doctor at last appeared in a short coat and without a neckcloth, she dragged him away without allowing him to finish dressing. He at once recognized her as a resident in the next-door house, and one of his own tenants; so when he induced her to cross a garden--to shorten the way by using a side-door between the two houses --memory suddenly awoke within her. "True, you are a doctor!" she murmured, "and I knew it. But I was distracted. Oh, let us hurry!" On the staircase she wished him to go first. She could not have admitted the Divinity to her home in a more reverent manner. Upstairs Rosalie had remained near the child, and had lit the large lamp on the table. After the doctor had entered the room he took up this lamp and cast its light upon the body of the child, which retained its painful rigidity; the head, however, had slipped forward, and nervous twitchings were ceaselessly drawing the face. For a minute he looked on in silence, his lips compressed. Helene anxiously watched him, and on noticing the mother's imploring glance, he muttered: "It will be nothing. But she must not lie here. She must have air." Helene grasped her child in a strong embrace, and carried her away on her shoulder. She could have kissed the doctor's hand for his good tidings, and a wave of happiness rippled through her. Scarcely, however, had Jeanne been placed in the larger bed than her poor little frame was again seized with violent convulsions. The doctor had removed the shade from the lamp, and a white light was streaming through the room. Then, opening a window, he ordered Rosalie to drag the bed away from the curtains. Helene's heart was again filled with anguish. "Oh, sir, she is dying," she stammered. "Look! look! Ah! I scarcely recognize her." The doctor did not reply, but watched the paroxysm attentively. "Step into the alcove," he at last exclaimed. "Hold her hands to prevent her from tearing herself. There now, gently, quietly! Don't make yourself uneasy. The fit must be allowed to run its course." They both bent over the bed, supporting and holding Jeanne, whose limbs shot out with sudden jerks. The doctor had buttoned up his coat to hide his bare neck, and Helene's shoulders had till now been enveloped in her shawl; but Jeanne in her struggles dragged a corner of the shawl away, and unbuttoned the top of the coat. Still they did not notice it; they never even looked at one another. [Illustration: Jeanne's Illness] At last the convulsion ceased, and the little one then appeared to sink into deep prostration. Doctor Deberle was evidently ill at ease, though he had assured the mother that there was no danger. He kept his gaze fixed on the sufferer, and put some brief questions to Helene as she stood by the bedside. "How old is the child?" "Eleven years and six months, sir," was the reply. Silence again fell between them. He shook his head, and stooped to raise one of Jeanne's lowered eyelids and examine the mucus. Then he resumed his questions, but without raising his eyes to Helene. "Did she have convulsions when she was a baby?" "Yes, sir; but they left her after she reached her sixth birthday. Ah! she is very delicate. For some days past she had seemed ill at ease. She was at times taken with cramp, and plunged in a stupor." "Do you know of any members of your family that have suffered from nervous affections?" "I don't know. My mother was carried off by consumption." Here shame made her pause. She could not confess that she had a grandmother who was an inmate of a lunatic asylum.[*] There was something tragic connected with all her ancestry. [*] This is Adelaide Fouque, otherwise Aunt Dide, the ancestress of the Rougon-Macquart family, whose early career is related in the "Fortune of the Rougons," whilst her death is graphically described in the pages of "Dr. Pascal." "Take care! the convulsions are coming on again!" now hastily exclaimed the doctor. Jeanne had just opened her eyes, and for a moment she gazed around her with a vacant look, never speaking a word. Her glance then grew fixed, her body was violently thrown backwards, and her limbs became distended and rigid. Her skin, fiery-red, all at once turned livid. Her pallor was the pallor of death; the convulsions began once more. "Do not loose your hold of her," said the doctor. "Take her other hand!" He ran to the table, where, on entering, he had placed a small medicine-case. He came back with a bottle, the contents of which he made Jeanne inhale; but the effect was like that of a terrible lash; the child gave such a violent jerk that she slipped from her mother's hands. "No, no, don't give her ether," exclaimed Helene, warned by the odor. "It drives her mad." The two had now scarcely strength enough to keep the child under control. Her frame was racked and distorted, raised by the heels and the nape of the neck, as if bent in two. But she fell back again and began tossing from one side of the bed to the other. Her fists were clenched, her thumbs bent against the palms of her hands. At times she would open the latter, and, with fingers wide apart, grasp at phantom bodies in the air, as though to twist them. She touched her mother's shawl and fiercely clung to it. But Helene's greatest grief was that she no longer recognized her daughter. The suffering angel, whose face was usually so sweet, was transformed in every feature, while her eyes swam, showing balls of a nacreous blue. "Oh, do something, I implore you!" she murmured. "My strength is exhausted, sir." She had just remembered how the child of a neighbor at Marseilles had died of suffocation in a similar fit. Perhaps from feelings of pity the doctor was deceiving her. Every moment she believed she felt Jeanne's last breath against her face; for the child's halting respiration seemed suddenly to cease. Heartbroken and overwhelmed with terror, Helene then burst into tears, which fell on the body of her child, who had thrown off the bedclothes. The doctor meantime was gently kneading the base of the neck with his long supple fingers. Gradually the fit subsided, and Jeanne, after a few slight twitches, lay there motionless. She had fallen back in the middle of the bed, with limbs outstretched, while her head, supported by the pillow, inclined towards her bosom. One might have thought her an infant Jesus. Helene stooped and pressed a long kiss on her brow. "Is it over?" she asked in a whisper. "Do you think she'll have another fit?" The doctor made an evasive gesture, and then replied: "In any case the others will be less violent." He had asked Rosalie for a glass and water-bottle. Half-filling the glass with water, he took up two fresh medicine phials, and counted out a number of drops. Helene assisted in raising the child's head, and the doctor succeeded in pouring a spoonful of the liquid between the clenched teeth. The white flame of the lamp was leaping up high and clear, revealing the disorder of the chamber's furnishings. Helene's garments, thrown on the back of an arm-chair before she slipped into bed, had now fallen, and were littering the carpet. The doctor had trodden on her stays, and had picked them up lest he might again find them in his way. An odor of vervain stole through the room. The doctor himself went for the basin, and soaked a linen cloth in it, which he then pressed to Jeanne's temples. "Oh, madame, you'll take cold!" expostulated Rosalie as she stood there shivering. "Perhaps the window might be shut? The air is too raw." "No, no!" cried Helene; "leave the window open. Should it not be so?" she appealed to the doctor. The wind entered in slight puffs, rustling the curtains to and fro; but she was quite unconscious of it. Yet the shawl had slipped off her shoulders, and her hair had become unwound, some wanton tresses sweeping down to her hips. She had left her arms free and uncovered, that she might be the more ready; she had forgotten all, absorbed entirely in her love for her child. And on his side, the doctor, busy with his work, no longer thought of his unbuttoned coat, or of the shirt-collar that Jeanne's clutch had torn away. "Raise her up a little," said he to Helene. "No, no, not in that way! Give me your hand." He took her hand and placed it under the child's head. He wished to give Jeanne another spoonful of the medicine. Then he called Helene close to him, made use of her as his assistant; and she obeyed him reverently on seeing that her daughter was already more calm. "Now, come," he said. "You must let her head lean against your shoulder, while I listen." Helene did as he bade her, and he bent over her to place his ear against Jeanne's bosom. He touched her bare shoulder with his cheek, and as the pulsation of the child's heart struck his ear he could also have heard the throbbing of the mother's breast. As he rose up his breath mingled with Helene's. "There is nothing wrong there," was the quiet remark that filled her with delight. "Lay her down again. We must not worry her more." However, another, though much less violent, paroxysm followed. From Jeanne's lips burst some broken words. At short intervals two fresh attacks seemed about to convulse her, and then a great prostration, which again appeared to alarm the doctor, fell on the child. He had placed her so that her head lay high, with the clothes carefully tucked under her chin; and for nearly an hour he remained there watching her, as though awaiting the return of a healthy respiration. On the other side of the bed Helene also waited, never moving a limb. Little by little a great calm settled on Jeanne's face. The lamp cast a sunny light upon it, and it regained its exquisite though somewhat lengthy oval. Jeanne's fine eyes, now closed, had large, bluish, transparent lids, which veiled--one could divine it--a sombre, flashing glance. A light breathing came from her slender nose, while round her somewhat large mouth played a vague smile. She slept thus, amidst her outspread tresses, which were inky black. "It has all passed away now," said the doctor in a whisper; and he turned to arrange his medicine bottles prior to leaving. "Oh, sir!" exclaimed Helene, approaching him, "don't leave me yet; wait a few minutes. Another fit might come on, and you, you alone, have saved her!" He signed to her that there was nothing to fear; yet he tarried, with the idea of tranquillizing her. She had already sent Rosalie to bed; and now the dawn soon broke, still and grey, over the snow which whitened the housetops. The doctor proceeded to close the window, and in the deep quiet the two exchanged a few whispers. "There is nothing seriously wrong with her, I assure you," said he; "only with one so young great care must be taken. You must see that her days are spent quietly and happily, and without shocks of any kind." "She is so delicate and nervous," replied Helene after a moment's pause. "I cannot always control her. For the most trifling reasons she is so overcome by joy or sorrow that I grow alarmed. She loves me with a passion, a jealousy, which makes her burst into tears when I caress another child." "So, so--delicate, nervous, and jealous," repeated the doctor as he shook his head. "Doctor Bodin has attended her, has he not? I'll have a talk with him about her. We shall have to adopt energetic treatment. She has reached an age that is critical in one of her sex." Recognizing the interest he displayed, Helene gave vent to her gratitude. "How I must thank you, sir, for the great trouble you have taken!" The loudness of her tones frightened her, however; she might have woke Jeanne, and she bent down over the bed. But no; the child was sound asleep, with rosy cheeks, and a vague smile playing round her lips. The air of the quiet chamber was charged with languor. The whilom drowsiness, as if born again of relief, once more seized upon the curtains, furniture, and littered garments. Everything was steeped restfully in the early morning light as it entered through the two windows. Helene again stood up close to the bed; on the other side was the doctor, and between them lay Jeanne, lightly sleeping. "Her father was frequently ill," remarked Helene softly, continuing her answer to his previous question. "I myself enjoy the best of health." The doctor, who had not yet looked at her, raised his eyes, and could scarcely refrain from smiling, so hale and hearty was she in every way. She greeted his gaze with her own sweet and quiet smile. Her happiness lay in her good health. However, his looks were still bent on her. Never had he seen such classical beauty. Tall and commanding, she was a nut-brown Juno, of a nut-brown sunny with gleams of gold. When she slowly turned her head, its profile showed the severe purity of a statue. Her grey eyes and pearly teeth lit up her whole face. Her chin, rounded and somewhat pronounced, proved her to be possessed of commonsense and firmness. But what astonished the doctor was the superbness of her whole figure. She stood there, a model of queenliness, chastity, and modesty. On her side also she scanned him for a moment. Doctor Deberle's years were thirty-five; his face was clean-shaven and a little long; he had keen eyes and thin lips. As she gazed on him she noticed for the first time that his neck was bare. Thus they remained face to face, with Jeanne asleep between them. The distance which but a short time before had appeared immense, now seemed to be dwindling away. Then Helene slowly wrapped the shawl about her shoulders again, while the doctor hastened to button his coat at the neck. "Mamma! mamma!" Jeanne stammered in her sleep. She was waking, and on opening her eyes she saw the doctor and became uneasy. "Mamma, who's that?" was her instant question; but her mother kissed her, and replied: "Go to sleep, darling, you haven't been well. It's only a friend." The child seemed surprised; she did not remember anything. Drowsiness was coming over her once more, and she fell asleep again, murmuring tenderly: "I'm going to by-by. Good-night, mamma, dear. If he is your friend he will be mine." The doctor had removed his medicine-case, and, with a silent bow, he left the room. Helene listened for a while to the child's breathing, and then, seated on the edge of the bed, she became oblivious to everything around her; her looks and thoughts wandering far away. The lamp, still burning, was paling in the growing sunlight. CHAPTER II. Next day Helene thought it right and proper to pay a visit of thanks to Doctor Deberle. The abrupt fashion in which she had compelled him to follow her, and the remembrance of the whole night which he had spent with Jeanne, made her uneasy, for she realized that he had done more than is usually compassed within a doctor's visit. Still, for two days she hesitated to make her call, feeling a strange repugnance towards such a step. For this she could give herself no reasons. It was the doctor himself who inspired her with this hesitancy; one morning she met him, and shrunk from his notice as though she were a child. At this excess of timidity she was much annoyed. Her quiet, upright nature protested against the uneasiness which was taking possession of her. She decided, therefore, to go and thank the doctor that very day. Jeanne's attack had taken place during the small hours of Wednesday morning; it was now Saturday, and the child was quite well again. Doctor Bodin, whose fears concerning her had prompted him to make an early call, spoke of Doctor Deberle with the respect that an old doctor with a meagre income pays to another in the same district, who is young, rich, and already possessed of a reputation. He did not forget to add, however, with an artful smile, that the fortune had been bequeathed by the elder Deberle, a man whom all Passy held in veneration. The son had only been put to the trouble of inheriting fifteen hundred thousand francs, together with a splendid practice. "He is, though, a very smart fellow," Doctor Bodin hastened to add, "and I shall be honored by having a consultation with him about the precious health of my little friend Jeanne!" About three o'clock Helene made her way downstairs with her daughter, and had to take but a few steps along the Rue Vineuse before ringing at the next-door house. Both mother and daughter still wore deep mourning. A servant, in dress-coat and white tie, opened the door. Helene easily recognized the large entrance-hall, with its Oriental hangings; on each side of it, however, there were now flower-stands, brilliant with a profusion of blossoms. The servant having admitted them to a small drawing-room, the hangings and furniture of which were of a mignonette hue, stood awaiting their pleasure, and Helene gave her name--Madame Grandjean. Thereupon the footman pushed open the door of a drawing-room, furnished in yellow and black, of dazzling effect, and, moving aside, announced: "Madame Grandjean!" Helene, standing on the threshold, started back. She had just noticed at the other end of the room a young woman seated near the fireplace on a narrow couch which was completely covered by her ample skirts. Facing her sat an elderly person, who had retained her bonnet and shawl, and was evidently paying a visit. "I beg pardon," exclaimed Helene. "I wished to see Doctor Deberle." She had made the child enter the room before her, and now took her by the hand again. She was both astonished and embarrassed in meeting this young lady. Why had she not asked for the doctor? She well knew he was married. Madame Deberle was just finishing some story, in a quick and rather shrill voice. "Oh! it's marvellous, marvellous! She dies with wonderful realism. She clutches at her bosom like this, throws back her head, and her face turns green. I declare you ought to see her, Mademoiselle Aurelie!" Then, rising up, she sailed towards the doorway, rustling her skirts terribly. "Be so kind as to walk in, madame," she said with charming graciousness. "My husband is not at home, but I shall be delighted to receive you, I assure you. This must be the pretty little girl who was so ill a few nights ago. Sit down for a moment, I beg of you." Helene was forced to accept the invitation, while Jeanne timidly perched herself on the edge of another chair. Madame Deberle again sank down on her little sofa, exclaiming with a pretty laugh, "Yes, this is my day. I receive every Saturday, you see, and Pierre then announces all comers. A week or two ago he ushered in a colonel suffering from the gout." "How silly you are, my dear Juliette!" expostulated Mademoiselle Aurelie, the elderly lady, an old friend in straitened circumstances, who had seen her come into the world. There was a short silence, and Helene gazed round at the luxury of the apartment, with its curtains and chairs in black and gold, glittering like constellations. Flowers decorated mantel-shelf, piano, and tables alike, and the clear light streamed through the windows from the garden, in which could be seen the leafless trees and bare soil. The room had almost a hot-house temperature; in the fireplace one large log was glowing with intense heat. After another glance Helene recognized that the gaudy colors had a happy effect. Madame Deberle's hair was inky-black, and her skin of a milky whiteness. She was short, plump, slow in her movements, and withal graceful. Amidst all the golden decorations, her white face assumed a vermeil tint under her heavy, sombre tresses. Helene really admired her. "Convulsions are so terrible," broke in Madame Deberle. "My Lucien had them when a mere baby. How uneasy you must have been, madame! However, the dear little thing appears to be quite well now." As she drawled out these words she kept her eyes on Helene, whose superb beauty amazed and delighted her. Never had she seen a woman with so queenly an air in the black garments which draped the widow's commanding figure. Her admiration found vent in an involuntary smile, while she exchanged glances with Mademoiselle Aurelie. Their admiration was so ingenuously and charmingly expressed, that a faint smile also rippled over Helene's face. Then Madame Deberle stretched herself on the sofa. "You were not at the first night at the Vaudeville yesterday, madame?" she asked, as she played with the fan that hung from her waist. "I never go to the theatre," was Helene's reply. "Oh! little Noemi was simply marvellous! Her death scene is so realistic! She clutches her bosom like this, throws back her head, and her face turns green. Oh! the effect is prodigious." Thereupon she entered into a minute criticism of the actress's playing, which she upheld against the world; and then she passed to the other topics of the day--a fine art exhibition, at which she had seen some most remarkable paintings; a stupid novel about which too much fuss was being made; a society intrigue which she spoke of to Mademoiselle Aurelie in veiled language. And so she went on from one subject to another, without wearying, her tongue ever ready, as though this social atmosphere were peculiarly her own. Helene, a stranger to such society, was content to listen, merely interjecting a remark or brief reply every now and then. At last the door was again thrown open and the footman announced: "Madame de Chermette! Madame Tissot!" Two ladies entered, magnificently dressed. Madame Deberle rose eagerly to meet them, and the train of her black silk gown, heavily decked with trimmings, trailed so far behind her that she had to kick it out of her way whenever she happened to turn round. A confused babel of greetings in shrill voices arose. "Oh! how kind of you! I declare I never see you!" "You know we come about that lottery." "Yes: I know, I know." "Oh! we cannot sit down. We have to call at twenty houses yet." "Come now, you are not going to run away at once!" And then the visitors finished by sitting down on the edge of a couch; the chatter beginning again, shriller than ever. "Well! what do you think of yesterday at the Vaudeville?" "Oh! it was splendid!" "You know she unfastens her dress and lets down her hair. All the effect springs from that." "People say that she swallows something to make her green." "No, no, every action is premeditated; but she had to invent and study them all, in the first place." "It's wonderful." The two ladies rose and made their exit, and the room regained its tranquil peacefulness. From some hyacinths on the mantel-shelf was wafted an all-pervading perfume. For a time one could hear the noisy twittering of some sparrows quarrelling on the lawn. Before resuming her seat, Madame Deberle proceeded to draw down the embroidered tulle blind of a window facing her, and then returned to her sofa in the mellowed, golden light of the room. "I beg pardon," she now said. "We have had quite an invasion." Then, in an affectionate way, she entered into conversation with Helene. She seemed to know some details of her history, doubtless from the gossip of her servants. With a boldness that was yet full of tact, and appeared instinct with much friendliness, she spoke to Helene of her husband, and of his sad death at the Hotel du Var, in the Rue de Richelieu. "And you had just arrived, hadn't you? You had never been in Paris before. It must be awful to be plunged into mourning, in a strange room, the day after a long journey, and when one doesn't know a single place to go to." Helene assented with a slow nod. Yes, she had spent some very bitter hours. The disease which carried off her husband had abruptly declared itself on the day after their arrival, just as they were going out together. She knew none of the streets, and was wholly unaware what district she was in. For eight days she had remained at the bedside of the dying man, hearing the rumble of Paris beneath her window, feeling she was alone, deserted, lost, as though plunged in the depths of an abyss. When she stepped out on the pavement for the first time, she was a widow. The mere recalling of that bare room, with its rows of medicine bottles, and with the travelling trunks standing about unpacked, still made her shudder. "Was your husband, as I've been told, nearly twice your age?" asked Madame Deberle with an appearance of profound interest, while Mademoiselle Aurelie cocked her ears so as not to lose a syllable of the conversation. "Oh, no!" replied Helene. "He was scarcely six years older." Then she ventured to enter into the story of her marriage, telling in a few brief sentences how her husband had fallen deeply in love with her while she was living with her father, Monsieur Mouret, a hatter in the Rue des Petites-Maries, at Marseilles; how the Grandjean family, who were rich sugar-refiners, were bitterly opposed to the match, on account of her poverty. She spoke, too, of the ill-omened and secret wedding after the usual legal formalities, and of their hand-to-mouth existence, till the day an uncle on dying left them some ten thousand francs a year. It was then that Grandjean, within whom an intense hatred of Marseilles was growing, had decided on coming to Paris, to live there for good. "And how old were you when you were married?" was Madame Deberle's next question. "Seventeen." "You must have been very beautiful." The conversation suddenly ceased, for Helene had not seemed to hear the remark. "Madame Manguelin!" announced the footman. A young, retiring woman, evidently ill at ease, was ushered in. Madame Deberle scarcely rose. It was one of her dependents, who had called to thank her for some service performed. The visitor only remained for a few minutes, and left the room with a courtesy. Madame Deberle then resumed the conversation, and spoke of Abbe Jouve, with whom both were acquainted. The Abbe was a meek officiating priest at Notre-Dame-de-Grace, the parish church of Passy; however, his charity was such that he was more beloved and more respectfully hearkened to than any other priest in the district. "Oh, he has such pious eloquence!" exclaimed Madame Deberle, with a sanctimonious look. "He has been very kind to us," said Helene. "My husband had formerly known him at Marseilles. The moment he heard of my misfortune he took charge of everything. To him we owe our settling in Passy." "He has a brother, hasn't he?" questioned Juliette. "Yes, a step-brother, for his mother married again. Monsieur Rambaud was also acquainted with my husband. He has started a large business in the Rue de Rambuteau, where he sells oils and other Southern produce. I believe he makes a large amount of money by it." And she added, with a laugh: "The Abbe and his brother make up my court." Jeanne, sitting on the edge of her chair, and wearied to death, now cast an impatient look at her mother. Her long, delicate, lamb-like face wore a pained expression, as if she disliked all this conversation; and she appeared at times to sniff the heavy, oppressive odors floating in the room, while casting suspicious side-glances at the furniture, as though her own exquisite sensibility warned her of some undefined dangers. Finally, however, she turned a look of tyrannical worship on her mother. Madame Deberle noticed the child's uneasiness. "Here's a little girl," she said, "who feels tired at being serious, like a grown-up person. There are some picture-books on the table, dear; they will amuse you." Jeanne took up an album, but her eyes strayed from it to glance imploringly at her mother. Helene, charmed by her hostess's excessive kindness, did not move; there was nothing of the fidget in her, and she would of her own accord remain seated for hours. However, as the servant announced three ladies in succession--Madame Berthier, Madame de Guiraud, and Madame Levasseur--she thought she ought to rise. "Oh! pray stop," exclaimed Madame Deberle; "I must show you my son." The semi-circle round the fireplace was increasing in size. The ladies were all gossiping at the same time. One of them declared that she was completely broken down, as for five days she had not gone to bed till four o'clock in the morning. Another indulged in a diatribe against wet nurses; she could no longer find one who was honest. Next the conversation fell on dressmakers. Madame Deberle affirmed no woman tailor could fit you properly; a man was requisite. Two of the ladies, however, were mumbling something under their breath, and, a silence intervening, two or three words became audible. Every one then broke into a laugh, while languidly waving their fans. "Monsieur Malignon!" announced the servant. A tall young man, dressed in good style, was ushered in. Some exclamations greeted him. Madame Deberle, not taking the trouble to rise, stretched out her hand and inquired: "Well! what of yesterday at the Vaudeville?" "Vile!" was his reply. "What! vile! She's marvellous when she clutches her bosom and throws back her head--" "Stop! stop! The whole thing is loathsome in its realism." And then quite a dispute commenced. It was easy to talk of realism, but the young man would have no realism at all. "I would not have it in anything, you hear!" said he, raising his voice. "No, not in anything! it degrades art." People would soon be seeing some fine things on the stage, indeed! Why didn't Noemi follow out her actions to their logical conclusion? And he illustrated his remark with a gesture which quite scandalized the ladies. Oh, how horrible! However, when Madame Deberle had declared that the actress produced a great effect, and Madame Levasseur had related how a lady had fainted in the balcony, everybody agreed that the affair was a great success; and with this the discussion stopped short. The young man sat in an arm-chair, with his legs stretched out among the ladies' flowing skirts. He seemed to be quite at home in the doctor's house. He had mechanically plucked a flower from a vase, and was tearing it to pieces with his teeth. Madame Deberle interrupted him: "Have you read that novel which--" He did not allow her to finish, but replied, with a superior air, that he only read two novels in the year. As for the exhibition of paintings at the Art Club, it was not worth troubling about; and then, every topic being exhausted, he rose and leaned over Juliette's little sofa, conversing with her in a low voice, while the other ladies continued chatting together in an animated manner. At length: "Dear me! he's gone," exclaimed Madame Berthier turning round. "I met him only an hour ago in Madame Robinot's drawing-room." "Yes, and he is now going to visit Madame Lecomte," said Madame Deberle. "He goes about more than any other man in Paris." She turned to Helene, who had been following the scene, and added: "A very distinguished young fellow he is, and we like him very much. He has some interest in a stockbroking business; he's very rich besides, and well posted in everything." The other ladies, however, were now going off. "Good-bye, dear madame. I rely upon you for Wednesday." "Yes, to be sure; Wednesday." "Oh, by the way, will you be at that evening party? One doesn't know whom one may meet. If you go, I'll go." "Ah, well! I'll go, I promise you. Give my best regards to Monsieur de Guiraud." When Madame Deberle returned she found Helene standing in the middle of the drawing-room. Jeanne had drawn close to her mother, whose hands she firmly grasped; and thus clinging to her caressingly and almost convulsively, she was drawing her little by little towards the doorway. "Ah, I was forgetting!" exclaimed the lady of the house; and ringing the bell for the servant, she said to him: "Pierre, tell Miss Smithson to bring Lucien here." During the short interval of waiting that ensued the door was again opened, but this time in a familiar fashion and without any formal announcement. A good-looking girl of some sixteen years of age entered in company with an old man, short of stature but with a rubicund, chubby face. "Good-day, sister," was the girl's greeting, as she kissed Madame Deberle. "Good-day, Pauline! good-day, father!" replied the doctor's wife. Mademoiselle Aurelie, who had not stirred from her seat beside the fire, rose to exchange greetings with Monsieur Letellier. He owned an extensive silk warehouse on the Boulevard des Capucines. Since his wife's death he had been taking his younger daughter about everywhere, in search of a rich husband for her. "Were you at the Vaudeville last night?" asked Pauline. "Oh, it was simply marvellous!" repeated Juliette in parrot-fashion, as, standing before a mirror, she rearranged a rebellious curl. "It is annoying to be so young; one can't go to anything!" said Pauline, pouting like a spoiled child. "I went with papa to the theatre-door at midnight, to find out how the piece had taken." "Yes, and we tumbled upon Malignon," said the father. "He was extremely pleased with it." "Really!" exclaimed Juliette. "He was here a minute ago, and declared it vile. One never knows how to take him." "Have you had many visitors to-day?" asked Pauline, rushing off to another subject. "Oh, several ladies; quite a crowd! The room was never once empty. I'm dead-beat--" Here she abruptly broke off, remembering she had a formal introduction to make "My father, my sister--Madame Grandjean." The conversation was turning on children and the ailments which give mothers so much worry when Miss Smithson, an English governess, appeared with a little boy clinging to her hand. Madame Deberle scolded her in English for having kept them waiting. "Ah! here's my little Lucien!" exclaimed Pauline as she dropped on her knees before the child, with a great rustling of skirts. "Now, now, leave him alone!" said Juliette. "Come here, Lucien; come and say good-day to this little lady." The boy came forward very sheepishly. He was no more than seven years old, fat and dumpy, and dressed as coquettishly as a doll. As he saw that they were all looking at him with smiles, he stopped short, and surveyed Jeanne, his blue eyes wide open with astonishment. "Go on!" urged his mother. He turned his eyes questioningly on her and advanced a step, evincing all the sullenness peculiar to lads of his age, his head lowered, his thick lips pouting, and his eyebrows bent into a growing frown. Jeanne must have frightened him with the serious look she wore standing there in her black dress. She had not ceased holding her mother's hand, and was nervously pressing her fingers on the bare part of the arm between the sleeve and glove. With head lowered she awaited Lucien's approach uneasily, like a young and timid savage, ready to fly from his caress. But a gentle push from her mother prompted her to step forward. "Little lady, you will have to kiss him first," Madame Deberle said laughingly. "Ladies always have to begin with him. Oh! the little stupid." "Kiss him, Jeanne," urged Helene. The child looked up at her mother; and then, as if conquered by the bashful looks of the little noodle, seized with sudden pity as she gazed on his good-natured face, so dreadfully confused--she smiled divinely. A sudden wave of hidden tenderness rose within her and brightened her features, and she whispered: "Willingly, mamma!" Then, taking Lucien under the armpits, almost lifting him from the ground, she gave him a hearty kiss on each cheek. He had no further hesitation in embracing her. "Bravo! capital!" exclaimed the onlookers. With a bow Helene turned to leave, accompanied to the door by Madame Deberle. "I beg you, madame," said she, "to present my heartiest thanks to the doctor. He relieved me of such dreadful anxiety the other night." "Is Henri not at home?" broke in Monsieur Letellier. "No, he will be away some time yet," was Juliette's reply. "But you're not going away; you'll dine with us," she continued, addressing Mademoiselle Aurelie, who had risen as if to leave with Madame Grandjean. The old maid with each Saturday expected a similar invitation, then decided to relieve herself of shawl and bonnet. The heat in the drawing-room was intense, and Monsieur Letellier hastened to open a window, at which he remained standing, struck by the sight of a lilac bush which was already budding. Pauline, meantime, had begun playfully running after Lucien behind the chairs and couches, left in confusion by the visitors. On the threshold Madame Deberle held out her hand to Helene with a frank and friendly movement. "You will allow me," said she. "My husband spoke to me about you, and I felt drawn to you. Your bereavement, your lonely life--in short, I am very glad to have seen you, and you must not be long in coming back." "I give you my promise, and I am obliged to you," said Helene, moved by these tokens of affection from a woman whom she had imagined rather flighty. They clasped hands, and each looked into the other's face with a happy smile. Juliette's avowal of her sudden friendship was given with a caressing air. "You are too lovely not to be loved!" she said. Helene broke into a merry laugh, for her beauty never engaged her thoughts, and she called Jeanne, whose eyes were busy watching the pranks of Lucien and Pauline. But Madame Deberle detained the girl for a moment longer. "You are good friends henceforth," she said; "you must just say _au revoir_." Thereupon the two children blew one another a kiss with their finger-tips. CHAPTER III. Every Tuesday Helene had Monsieur Rambaud and Abbe Jouve to dine with her. It was they who, during the early days of her bereavement, had broken in on her solitude, and drawn up their chairs to her table with friendly freedom; their object being to extricate her, at least once a week, from the solitude in which she lived. The Tuesday dinners became established institutions, and the partakers in these little feasts appeared punctually at seven o'clock, serenely happy in discharging what they deemed a duty. That Tuesday Helene was seated at the window, profiting by the last gleams of the twilight to finish some needle work, pending the arrival of her guests. She here spent her days in pleasant peacefulness. The noises of the street died away before reaching such a height. She loved this large, quiet chamber, with its substantial luxury, its rosewood furniture and blue velvet curtains. When her friends had attended to her installation, she not having to trouble about anything, she had at first somewhat suffered from all this sombre luxury, in preparing which Monsieur Rambaud had realized his ideal of comfort, much to the admiration of his brother, who had declined the task. She was not long, however, in feeling happy in a home in which, as in her heart, all was sound and simple. Her only enjoyment during her long hours of work was to gaze before her at the vast horizon, the huge pile of Paris, stretching its roofs, like billows, as far as the eye could reach. Her solitary corner overlooked all that immensity. "Mamma, I can no longer see," said Jeanne, seated near her on a low chair. And then, dropping her work, the child gazed at Paris, which was darkening over with the shadows of night. She rarely romped about, and her mother even had to exert authority to induce her to go out. In accordance with Doctor Bodin's strict injunction, Helene made her stroll with her two hours each day in the Bois de Boulogne, and this was their only promenade; in eighteen months they had not gone three times into Paris.[*] Nowhere was Jeanne so evidently happy as in their large blue room. Her mother had been obliged to renounce her intention of having her taught music, for the sound of an organ in the silent streets made her tremble and drew tears from her eyes. Her favorite occupation was to assist her mother in sewing linen for the children of the Abbe's poor. [*] Passy and the Trocadero are now well inside Paris, but at the time fixed for this story they were beyond the _barrieres_. Night had quite fallen when the lamp was brought in by Rosalie, who, fresh from the glare of her range, looked altogether upset. Tuesday's dinner was the one event of the week, which put things topsy-turvy. "Aren't the gentlemen coming here to-night, madame?" she inquired. Helene looked at the timepiece: "It's a quarter to seven; they will be here soon," she replied. Rosalie was a gift from Abbe Jouve, who had met her at the station on the day she arrived from Orleans, so that she did not know a single street in Paris. A village priest, an old schoolmate of Abbe Jouve's, had sent her to him. She was dumpy and plump, with a round face under her narrow cap, thick black hair, a flat nose, and deep red lips; and she was expert in preparing savory dishes, having been brought up at the parsonage by her godmother, servant to the village priest. "Here is Monsieur Rambaud at last!" she exclaimed, rushing to open the door before there was even a ring. Full and broad-shouldered, Monsieur Rambaud entered, displaying an expansive countenance like that of a country notary. His forty-five years had already silvered his hair, but his large blue eyes retained a wondering, artless, gentle expression, akin to a child's. "And here's his reverence; everybody has come now!" resumed Rosalie, as she opened the door once more. Whilst Monsieur Rambaud pressed Helene's hand and sat down without speaking, smiling like one who felt quite at home, Jeanne threw her arms round the Abbe's neck. "Good-evening, dear friend," said she. "I've been so ill!" "So ill, my darling?" The two men at once showed their anxiety, the Abbe especially. He was a short, spare man, with a large head and awkward manners, and dressed in the most careless way; but his eyes, usually half-closed, now opened to their full extent, all aglow with exquisite tenderness. Jeanne relinquished one of her hands to him, while she gave the other to Monsieur Rambaud. Both held her and gazed at her with troubled looks. Helene was obliged to relate the story of her illness, and the Abbe was on the point of quarrelling with her for not having warned him of it. And then they each questioned her. "The attack was quite over now? She had not had another, had she?" The mother smiled as she listened. "You are even fonder of her than I am, and I think you'll frighten me in the end," she replied. "No, she hasn't been troubled again, except that she has felt some pains in her limbs and had some headaches. But we shall get rid of these very soon." The maid then entered to announce that dinner was ready. The table, sideboard, and eight chairs furnishing the dining-room were of mahogany. The curtains of red reps had been drawn close by Rosalie, and a hanging lamp of white porcelain within a plain brass ring lighted up the tablecloth, the carefully-arranged plates, and the tureen of steaming soup. Each Tuesday's dinner brought round the same remarks, but on this particular day Dr. Deberle served naturally as a subject of conversation. Abbe Jouve lauded him to the skies, though he knew that he was no church-goer. He spoke of him, however, as a man of upright character, charitable to a fault, a good father, and a good husband--in fact, one who gave the best of examples to others. As for Madame Deberle she was most estimable, in spite of her somewhat flighty ways, which were doubtless due to her Parisian education. In a word, he dubbed the couple charming. Helene seemed happy to hear this; it confirmed her own opinions; and the Abbe's remarks determined her to continue the acquaintance, which had at first rather frightened her. "You shut yourself up too much!" declared the priest. "No doubt," echoed his brother. Helene beamed on them with her quiet smile, as though to say that they themselves sufficed for all her wants, and that she dreaded new acquaintances. However, ten o'clock struck at last, and the Abbe and his brother took up their hats. Jeanne had just fallen asleep in an easy-chair in the bedroom, and they bent over her, raising their heads with satisfied looks as they observed how tranquilly she slumbered. They stole from the room on tiptoe, and in the lobby whispered their good-byes: "Till next Tuesday!" "O, by the way," said the Abbe, returning a step or two, "I was forgetting: Mother Fetu is ill. You should go to see her." "I will go to-morrow," answered Helene. The Abbe had a habit of commissioning her to visit his poor. They engaged in all sorts of whispered talk together on this subject, private business which a word or two enabled them to settle together, and which they never referred to in the presence of other persons. On the morrow Helene went out alone. She decided to leave Jeanne in the house, as the child had been troubled with fits of shivering since paying a visit of charity to an old man who had become paralyzed. Once out of doors, she followed the Rue Vineuse, turned down the Rue Raynouard, and soon found herself in the Passage des Eaux, a strange, steep lane, like a staircase, pent between garden walls, and conducting from the heights of Passy to the quay. At the bottom of this descent was a dilapidated house, where Mother Fetu lived in an attic lighted by a round window, and furnished with a wretched bed, a rickety table, and a seatless chair. "Oh! my good lady, my good lady!" she moaned out, directly she saw Helene enter. The old woman was in bed. In spite of her wretchedness, her body was plump, swollen out, as it were, while her face was puffy, and her hands seemed numbed as she drew the tattered sheet over her. She had small, keen eyes and a whimpering voice, and displayed a noisy humility in a rush of words. "Ah! my good lady, how I thank you! Ah, ah! oh, how I suffer! It's just as if dogs were tearing at my side. I'm sure I have a beast inside me--see, just there! The skin isn't broken; the complaint is internal. But, oh! oh! the pain hasn't ceased for two days past. Good Lord, how is it possible to suffer so much? Ah, my good lady, thank you! You don't forget the poor. It will be taken into account up above; yes, yes, it will be taken into account!" Helene had sat down. Noticing on the table a jug of warm _tisane_, she filled a cup which was near at hand, and gave it to the sufferer. Near the jug were placed a packet of sugar, two oranges, and some other comfits. "Has any one been to see you?" Helene asked. "Yes, yes,--a little lady. But she doesn't know. That isn't the sort of stuff I need. Oh, if I could get a little meat! My next-door neighbor would cook it for me. Oh! oh! this pain is something dreadful! A dog is tearing at me--oh, if only I had some broth!" In spite of the pains which were racking her limbs, she kept her sharp eyes fixed on Helene, who was now busy fumbling in her pocket, and on seeing her visitor place a ten-franc piece on the table, she whimpered all the more, and tried to rise to a sitting posture. Whilst struggling, she extended her arm, and the money vanished, as she repeated: "Gracious Heaven! this is another frightful attack. Oh! oh! I cannot stand such agony any longer! God will requite you, my good lady; I will pray to Him to requite you. Bless my soul, how these pains shoot through my whole body! His reverence Abbe Jouve promised me you would come. It's only you who know what I want. I am going to buy some meat. But now the pain's going down into my legs. Help me; I have no strength left--none left at all!" The old woman wished to turn over, and Helene, drawing off her gloves, gently took hold of her and placed her as she desired. As she was still bending over her the door opened, and a flush of surprise mounted to her cheeks as she saw Dr. Deberle entering. Did he also make visits to which he never referred? "It's the doctor!" blurted out the old woman. "Oh! Heaven must bless you both for being so good!" The doctor bowed respectfully to Helene. Mother Fetu had ceased whining on his entrance, but kept up a sibilant wheeze, like that of a child in pain. She had understood at once that the doctor and her benefactress were known to one another; and her eyes never left them, but travelled from one to the other, while her wrinkled face showed that her mind was covertly working. The doctor put some questions to her, and sounded her right side; then, turning to Helene, who had just sat down, he said: "She is suffering from hepatic colic. She will be on her feet again in a few days." And, tearing from his memorandum book a leaf on which he had written some lines, he added, addressing Mother Fetu: "Listen to me. You must send this to the chemist in the Rue de Passy, and every two hours you must drink a spoonful of the draught he will give you." The old woman burst out anew into blessings. Helene remained seated. The doctor lingered gazing at her; but when their eyes had met, he bowed and discreetly took his leave. He had not gone down a flight ere Mother Fetu's lamentations were renewed. "Ah! he's such a clever doctor! Ah! if his medicine could do me some good! Dandelions and tallow make a good simple for removing water from the body. Yes, yes, you can say you know a clever doctor. Have you known him long? Gracious goodness, how thirsty I am! I feel burning hot. He has a wife, hasn't he? He deserves to have a good wife and beautiful children. Indeed, it's a pleasure to see kind-hearted people good acquaintances." Helene had risen to give her a drink. "I must go now, Mother Fetu," she said. "Good-bye till to-morrow." "Ah! how good you are! If I only had some linen! Look at my chemise --it's torn in half; and this bed is so dirty. But that doesn't matter. God will requite you, my good lady!" Next day, on Helene's entering Mother Fetu's room, she found Dr. Deberle already there. Seated on the chair, he was writing out a prescription, while the old woman rattled on with whimpering volubility. "Oh, sir, it now feels like lead in my side--yes, just like lead! It's as heavy as a hundred-pound weight, and prevents me from turning round." Then, having caught sight of Helene, she went on without a pause: "Ah! here's the good lady! I told the kind doctor you would come. Though the heavens might fall, said I, you would come all the same. You're a very saint, an angel from paradise, and, oh! so beautiful that people might fall on their knees in the streets to gaze on you as you pass! Dear lady, I am no better; just now I have a heavy feeling here. Oh, I have told the doctor what you did for me! The emperor could have done no more. Yes, indeed, it would be a sin not to love you--a great sin." These broken sentences fell from her lips as, with eyes half closed, she rolled her head on the bolster, the doctor meantime smiling at Helene, who felt very ill at ease. "Mother Fetu," she said softly, "I have brought you a little linen." "Oh, thank you, thank you; God will requite you! You're just like this kind, good gentleman, who does more good to poor folks than a host of those who declare it their special work. You don't know what great care he has taken of me for four months past, supplying me with medicine and broth and wine. One rarely finds a rich person so kind to a poor soul! Oh, he's another of God's angels! Dear, dear, I seem to have quite a house in my stomach!" In his turn the doctor now seemed to be embarrassed. He rose and offered his chair to Helene; but although she had come with the intention of remaining a quarter of an hour, she declined to sit down, on the plea that she was in a great hurry. Meanwhile, Mother Fetu, still rolling her head to and fro, had stretched out her hand, and the parcel of linen had vanished in the bed. Then she resumed: "Oh, what a couple of good souls you are! I don't wish to offend you; I only say it because it's true. When you have seen one, you have seen the other. Oh, dear Lord! give me a hand and help me to turn round. Kind-hearted people understand one another. Yes, yes, they understand one another." "Good-bye, Mother Fetu," said Helene, leaving the doctor in sole possession. "I don't think I shall call to-morrow." The next day, however, found her in the attic again. The old woman was sound asleep, but scarcely had she opened her eyes and recognized Helene in her black dress sitting on the chair than she exclaimed: "He has been here--oh, I really don't know what he gave me to take, but I am as stiff as a stick. We were talking about you. He asked me all kinds of questions; whether you were generally sad, and whether your look was always the same. Oh, he's such a good man!" Her words came more slowly, and she seemed to be waiting to see by the expression of Helene's face what effect her remarks might have on her, with that wheedling, anxious air of the poor who are desirous of pleasing people. No doubt she fancied she could detect a flush of displeasure mounting to her benefactress's brow, for her huge, puffed-up face, all eagerness and excitement, suddenly clouded over; and she resumed, in stammering accents: "I am always asleep. Perhaps I have been poisoned. A woman in the Rue de l'Annonciation was killed by a drug which the chemist gave her in mistake for another." That day Helene lingered for nearly half an hour in Mother Fetu's room, hearing her talk of Normandy, where she had been born, and where the milk was so good. During a silence she asked the old woman carelessly: "Have you known the doctor a long time?" Mother Fetu, lying on her back, half-opened her eyes and again closed them. "Oh, yes!" she answered, almost in a whisper. "For instance, his father attended to me before '48, and he accompanied him then." "I have been told the father was a very good man." "Yes, but a little cracked. The son is much his superior. When he touches you you would think his hands were of velvet." Silence again fell. "I advise you to do everything he tells you," at last said Helene. "He is very clever; he saved my daughter." "To be sure!" exclaimed Mother Fetu, again all excitement. "People ought to have confidence in him. Why, he brought a boy to life again when he was going to be buried! Oh, there aren't two persons like him; you won't stop me from saying that! I am very lucky; I fall in with the pick of good-hearted people. I thank the gracious Lord for it every night. I don't forget either of you. You are mingled together in my prayers. May God in His goodness shield you and grant your every wish! May He load you with His gifts! May He keep you a place in Paradise!" She was now sitting up in bed with hands clasped, seemingly entreating Heaven with devout fervor. Helene allowed her to go on thus for a considerable time, and even smiled. The old woman's chatter, in fact, ended by lulling her into a pleasant drowsiness, and when she went off she promised to give her a bonnet and gown, as soon as she should be able to get about again. Throughout that week Helene busied herself with Mother Fetu. Her afternoon visit became an item in her daily life. She felt a strange fondness for the Passage des Eaux. She liked that steep lane for its coolness and quietness and its ever-clean pavement, washed on rainy days by the water rushing down from the heights. A strange sensation thrilled her as she stood at the top and looked at the narrow alley with its steep declivity, usually deserted, and only known to the few inhabitants of the neighboring streets. Then she would venture through an archway dividing a house fronting the Rue Raynouard, and trip down the seven flights of broad steps, in which lay the bed of a pebbly stream occupying half of the narrow way. The walls of the gardens on each side bulged out, coated with a grey, leprous growth; umbrageous trees drooped over, foliage rained down, here and there an ivy plant thickly mantled the stonework, and the chequered verdure, which only left glimpses of the blue sky above, made the light very soft and greeny. Halfway down Helene would stop to take breath, gazing at the street-lamp which hung there, and listening to the merry laughter in the gardens, whose doors she had never seen open. At times an old woman panted up with the aid of the black, shiny, iron handrail fixed in the wall to the right; a lady would come, leaning on her parasol as on a walking-stick; or a band of urchins would run down, with a great stamping of feet. But almost always Helene found herself alone, and this steep, secluded, shady descent was to her a veritable delight --like a path in the depths of a forest. At the bottom she would raise her eyes, and the sight of the narrow, precipitous alley she had just descended made her feel somewhat frightened. She glided into the old woman's room with the quiet and coolness of the Passage des Eaux clinging to her garments. This woefully wretched den no longer affected her painfully. She moved about there as if in her own rooms, opening the round attic window to admit the fresh air, and pushing the table into a corner if it came in her way. The garret's bareness, its whitewashed walls and rickety furniture, realized to her mind an existence whose simplicity she had sometimes dreamt of in her girlhood. But what especially charmed her was the kindly emotion she experienced there. Playing the part of sick nurse, hearing the constant bewailing of the old woman, all she saw and felt within the four walls left her quivering with deep pity. In the end she awaited with evident impatience Doctor Deberle's customary visit. She questioned him as to Mother Fetu's condition; but from this they glided to other subjects, as they stood near each other, face to face. A closer acquaintance was springing up between them, and they were surprised to find they possessed similar tastes. They understood one another without speaking a word, each heart engulfed in the same overflowing charity. Nothing to Helene seemed sweeter than this mutual feeling, which arose in such an unusual way, and to which she yielded without resistance, filled as she was with divine pity. At first she had felt somewhat afraid of the doctor; in her own drawing-room she would have been cold and distrustful, in harmony with her nature. Here, however, in this garret they were far from the world, sharing the one chair, and almost happy in the midst of the wretchedness and poverty which filled their souls with emotion. A week passed, and they knew one another as though they had been intimate for years. Mother Fetu's miserable abode was filled with sunshine, streaming from this fellowship of kindliness. The old woman grew better very slowly. The doctor was surprised, and charged her with coddling herself when she related that she now felt a dreadful weight in her legs. She always kept up her monotonous moaning, lying on her back and rolling her head to and fro; but she closed her eyes, as though to give her visitors an opportunity for unrestrained talk. One day she was to all appearance sound asleep, but beneath their lids her little black eyes continued watching. At last, however, she had to rise from her bed; and next day Helene presented her with the promised bonnet and gown. When the doctor made his appearance that afternoon the old woman's laggard memory seemed suddenly stirred. "Gracious goodness!" said she, "I've forgotten my neighbor's soup-pot; I promised to attend to it!" Then she disappeared, closing the door behind her and leaving the couple alone. They did not notice that they were shut in, but continued their conversation. The doctor urged Helene to spend the afternoon occasionally in his garden in the Rue Vineuse. "My wife," said he, "must return your visit, and she will in person repeat my invitation. It would do your daughter good." "But I don't refuse," she replied, laughing. "I do not require to be fetched with ceremony. Only--only--I am afraid of being indiscreet. At any rate, we will see." Their talk continued, but at last the doctor exclaimed in a tone of surprise: "Where on earth can Mother Fetu have gone? It must be a quarter of an hour since she went to see after her neighbor's soup-pot." Helene then saw that the door was shut, but it did not shock her at the moment. She continued to talk of Madame Deberle, of whom she spoke highly to her husband; but noticing that the doctor constantly glanced towards the door, she at last began to feel uncomfortable. "It's very strange that she does not come back!" she remarked in her turn. Their conversation then dropped. Helene, not knowing what to do, opened the window; and when she turned round they avoided looking at one another. The laughter of children came in through the circular window, which, with its bit of blue sky, seemed like a full round moon. They could not have been more alone--concealed from all inquisitive looks, with merely this bit of heaven gazing in on them. The voices of the children died away in the distance; and a quivering silence fell. No one would dream of finding them in that attic, out of the world. Their confusion grew apace, and in the end Helene, displeased with herself, gave the doctor a steady glance. "I have a great many visits to pay yet," he at once exclaimed. "As she doesn't return, I must leave." He quitted the room, and Helene then sat down. Immediately afterwards Mother Fetu returned with many protestations: "Oh! oh! I can scarcely crawl; such a faintness came over me! Has the dear good doctor gone? Well, to be sure, there's not much comfort here! Oh, you are both angels from heaven, coming to spend your time with one so unfortunate as myself! But God in His goodness will requite you. The pain has gone down into my feet to-day, and I had to sit down on a step. Oh, I should like to have some chairs! If I only had an easy-chair! My mattress is so vile too that I am quite ashamed when you come. The whole place is at your disposal, and I would throw myself into the fire if you required it. Yes. Heaven knows it; I always repeat it in my prayers! Oh, kind Lord, grant their utmost desires to these good friends of mine--in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" As Helene listened she experienced a singular feeling of discomfort. Mother Fetu's bloated face filled her with disgust. Never before in this stifling attic had she been affected in a like way; its sordid misery seemed to stare her in the face; the lack of fresh air, the surrounding wretchedness, quite sickened her. So she made all haste to leave, feeling hurt by the blessings which Mother Fetu poured after her. In the Passage des Eaux an additional sorrow came upon her. Halfway up, on the right-hand side of the path, the wall was hollowed out, and here there was an excavation, some disused well, enclosed by a railing. During the last two days when passing she had heard the wailings of a cat rising from this well, and now, as she slowly climbed the path, these wailings were renewed, but so pitifully that they seemed instinct with the agony of death. The thought that the poor brute, thrown into the disused well, was slowly dying there of hunger, quite rent Helene's heart. She hastened her steps, resolving that she would not venture down this lane again for a long time, lest the cat's death-call should reach her ears. The day was a Tuesday. In the evening, on the stroke of seven, as Helene was finishing a tiny bodice, the two wonted rings at the bell were heard, and Rosalie opened the door. "His reverence is first to-night!" she exclaimed. "Oh, here comes Monsieur Rambaud too!" They were very merry at dinner. Jeanne was nearly well again now, and the two brothers, who spoiled her, were successful in procuring her permission to eat some salad, of which she was excessively fond, notwithstanding Doctor Bodin's formal prohibition. When she was going to bed, the child in high spirits hung round her mother's neck and pleaded: "Oh! mamma, darling! let me go with you to-morrow to see the old woman you nurse!" But the Abbe and Monsieur Rambaud were the first to scold her for thinking of such a thing. They would not hear of her going amongst the poor, as the sight affected her too grieviously. The last time she had been on such an expedition she had twice swooned, and for three days her eyes had been swollen with tears, that had flowed even in her sleep. "Oh! I will be good!" she pleaded. "I won't cry, I promise." "It is quite useless, my darling," said her mother, caressing her. "The old woman is well now. I shall not go out any more; I'll stay all day with you!" CHAPTER IV. During the following week Madame Deberle paid a return visit to Madame Grandjean, and displayed an affability that bordered on affection. "You know what you promised me," she said, on the threshold, as she was going off. "The first fine day we have, you must come down to the garden, and bring Jeanne with you. It is the doctor's strict injunction." "Very well," Helene answered, with a smile, "it is understood; we will avail ourselves of your kindness." Three days later, on a bright February afternoon, she accompanied her daughter down to the garden. The porter opened the door connecting the two houses. At the near end of the garden, in a kind of greenhouse built somewhat in the style of a Japanese pavilion, they found Madame Deberle and her sister Pauline, both idling away their time, for some embroidery, thrown on the little table, lay there neglected. "Oh, how good of you to come!" cried Juliette. "You must sit down here. Pauline, move that table away! It is still rather cool you know to sit out of doors, but from this pavilion we can keep a watch on the children. Now, little ones, run away and play; but take care not to fall!" The large door of the pavilion stood open, and on each side were portable mirrors, whose covers had been removed so that they allowed one to view the garden's expanse as from the threshold of a tent. The garden, with a green sward in the centre, flanked by beds of flowers, was separated from the Rue Vineuse by a plain iron railing, but against this grew a thick green hedge, which prevented the curious from gazing in. Ivy, clematis, and woodbine clung and wound around the railings, and behind this first curtain of foliage came a second one of lilacs and laburnums. Even in the winter the ivy leaves and the close network of branches sufficed to shut off the view. But the great charm of the garden lay in its having at the far end a few lofty trees, some magnificent elms, which concealed the grimy wall of a five-story house. Amidst all the neighboring houses these trees gave the spot the aspect of a nook in some park, and seemed to increase the dimensions of this little Parisian garden, which was swept like a drawing-room. Between two of the elms hung a swing, the seat of which was green with damp. Helene leaned forward the better to view the scene. "Oh, it is a hole!" exclaimed Madame Deberle carelessly. "Still, trees are so rare in Paris that one is happy in having half a dozen of one's own." "No, no, you have a very pleasant place," murmured Helene. The sun filled the pale atmosphere that day with a golden dust, its rays streaming slowly through the leafless branches of the trees. These assumed a ruddier tint, and you could see the delicate purple gems softening the cold grey of the bark. On the lawn and along the walks the grass and gravel glittered amidst the haze that seemed to ooze from the ground. No flower was in blossom; only the happy flush which the sunshine cast upon the soil revealed the approach of spring. "At this time of year it is rather dull," resumed Madame Deberle. "In June it is as cozy as a nest; the trees prevent any one from looking in, and we enjoy perfect privacy." At this point she paused to call: "Lucien, you must come away from that watertap!" The lad, who was doing the honors of the garden, had led Jeanne towards a tap under the steps. Here he had turned on the water, which he allowed to splash on the tips of his boots. It was a game that he delighted in. Jeanne, with grave face, looked on while he wetted his feet. "Wait a moment!" said Pauline, rising. "I'll go and stop his nonsense!" But Juliette held her back. "You'll do no such thing; you are even more of a madcap than he is. The other day both of you looked as if you had taken a bath. How is it that a big girl like you cannot remain two minutes seated? Lucien!" she continued directing her eyes on her son, "turn off the water at once!" The child, in his fright, made an effort to obey her. But instead of turning the tap off, he turned it on all the more, and the water gushed forth with a force and a noise that made him lose his head. He recoiled, splashed up to the shoulders. "Turn off the water at once!" again ordered his mother, whose cheeks were flushing with anger. Jeanne, hitherto silent, then slowly, and with the greatest caution, ventured near the tap; while Lucien burst into loud sobbing at sight of this cold stream, which terrified him, and which he was powerless to stop. Carefully drawing her skirt between her legs, Jeanne stretched out her bare hands so as not to wet her sleeves, and closed the tap without receiving a sprinkle. The flow instantly ceased. Lucien, astonished and inspired with respect, dried his tears and gazed with swollen eyes at the girl. "Oh, that child puts me beside myself!" exclaimed Madame Deberle, her complexion regaining its usual pallor, while she stretched herself out, as though wearied to death. Helene deemed it right to intervene. "Jeanne," she called, "take his hand, and amuse yourselves by walking up and down." Jeanne took hold of Lucien's hand, and both gravely paced the paths with little steps. She was much taller than her companion, who had to stretch his arm up towards her; but this solemn amusement, which consisted in a ceremonious circuit of the lawn, appeared to absorb them and invest them with a sense of great importance. Jeanne, like a genuine lady, gazed about, preoccupied with her own thoughts; Lucien every now and then would venture a glance at her; but not a word was said by either. "How droll they are!" said Madame Deberle, smiling, and again at her ease. "I must say that your Jeanne is a dear, good child. She is so obedient, so well behaved--" "Yes, when she is in the company of others," broke in Helene. "She is a great trouble at times. Still, she loves me, and does her best to be good so as not to vex me." Then they spoke of children; how girls were more precocious than boys; though it would be wrong to deduce too much from Lucien's unintelligent face. In another year he would doubtless lose all his gawkiness and become quite a gallant. Finally, Madame Deberle resumed her embroidery, making perhaps two stitches in a minute. Helene, who was only happy when busy, begged permission to bring her work the next time she came. She found her companions somewhat dull, and whiled away the time in examining the Japanese pavilion. The walls and ceiling were hidden by tapestry worked in gold, with designs showing bright cranes in full flight, butterflies, and flowers and views in which blue ships were tossing upon yellow rivers. Chairs, and ironwood flower-stands were scattered about; on the floor some fine mats were spread; while the lacquered furnishings were littered with trinkets, small bronzes and vases, and strange toys painted in all the hues of the rainbow. At the far end stood a grotesque idol in Dresden china, with bent legs and bare, protruding stomach, which at the least movement shook its head with a terrible and amusing look. "Isn't it horribly ugly?" asked Pauline, who had been watching Helene as she glanced round. "I say, sister, you know that all these purchases of yours are so much rubbish! Malignon calls your Japanese museum 'the sixpenny bazaar.' Oh, by the way, talking of him, I met him. He was with a lady, and such a lady--Florence, of the Varietes Theatre." "Where was it?" asked Juliette immediately. "How I shall tease him!" "On the boulevards. He's coming here to-day, is he not?" She was not vouchsafed any reply. The ladies had all at once become uneasy owing to the disappearance of the children, and called to them. However, two shrill voices immediately answered: "We are here!" Half hidden by a spindle tree, they were sitting on the grass in the middle of the lawn. "What are you about?" "We have put up at an inn," answered Lucien. "We are resting in our room." Greatly diverted, the women watched them for a time. Jeanne seemed quite contented with the game. She was cutting the grass around her, doubtless with the intention of preparing breakfast. A piece of wood, picked up among the shrubs, represented a trunk. And now they were talking. Jeanne, with great conviction in her tone, was declaring that they were in Switzerland, and that they would set out to see the glaciers, which rather astonished Lucien. "Ha, here he is!" suddenly exclaimed Pauline. Madame Deberle turned, and caught sight of Malignon descending the steps. He had scarcely time to make his bow and sit down before she attacked him. "Oh," she said, "it is nice of you to go about everywhere saying that I have nothing but rubbishy ornaments about me!" "You mean this little saloon of yours? Oh yes," said he, quite at his ease. "You haven't anything worth looking at here!" "What! not my china figure?" she asked, quite hurt. "No, no, everything is quite _bourgeois_. It is necessary for a person to have some taste. You wouldn't allow me to select the things--" "Your taste, forsooth! just talk about your taste!" she retorted, flushing crimson and feeling quite angry. "You have been seen with a lady--" "What lady?" he asked, surprised by the violence of the attack. "A fine choice, indeed! I compliment you on it. A girl whom the whole of Paris knows--" She suddenly paused, remembering Pauline's presence. "Pauline," she said, "go into the garden for a minute." "Oh no," retorted the girl indignantly. "It's so tiresome; I'm always being sent out of the way." "Go into the garden," repeated Juliette, with increased severity in her tone. The girl stalked off with a sullen look, but stopped all at once, to exclaim: "Well, then, be quick over your talk!" As soon as she was gone, Madame Deberle returned to the charge. "How can you, a gentleman, show yourself in public with that actress Florence? She is at least forty. She is ugly enough to frighten one, and all the gentlemen in the stalls thee and thou her on first nights." "Have you finished?" called out Pauline, who was strolling sulkily under the trees. "I'm not amusing myself here, you know." Malignon, however, defended himself. He had no knowledge of this girl Florence; he had never in his life spoken a word to her. They had possibly seen him with a lady: he was sometimes in the company of the wife of a friend of his. Besides, who had seen him? He wanted proofs, witnesses. "Pauline," hastily asked Madame Deberle, raising her voice, "did you not meet him with Florence?" "Yes, certainly," replied her sister. "I met them on the boulevards opposite Bignon's." Thereupon, glorying in her victory over Malignon, whose face wore an embarrassed smile, Madame Deberle called out: "You can come back, Pauline; I have finished." Malignon, who had a box at the Folies-Dramatiques for the following night, now gallantly placed it at Madame Deberle's service, apparently not feeling the slightest ill-will towards her; moreover, they were always quarreling. Pauline wished to know if she might go to see the play that was running, and as Malignon laughed and shook his head, she declared it was very silly; authors ought to write plays fit for girls to see. She was only allowed such entertainments as _La Dame Blanche_ and the classic drama could offer. Meantime, the ladies had ceased watching the children, and all at once Lucien began to raise terrible shrieks. "What have you done to him, Jeanne?" asked Helene. "I have done nothing, mamma," answered the little girl. "He has thrown himself on the ground." The truth was, the children had just set out for the famous glaciers. As Jeanne pretended that they were reaching the mountains, they had lifted their feet very high, as though to step over the rocks. Lucien, however, quite out of breath with his exertions, at last made a false step, and fell sprawling in the middle of an imaginary ice-field. Disgusted, and furious with child-like rage, he no sooner found himself on the ground than he burst into tears. "Lift him up," called Helene. "He won't let me, mamma. He is rolling about." And so saying, Jeanne drew back, as though exasperated and annoyed by such a display of bad breeding. He did not know how to play; he would certainly cover her with dirt. Her mouth curled, as though she were a duchess compromising herself by such companionship. Thereupon Madame Deberle, irritated by Lucien's continued wailing, requested her sister to pick him up and coax him into silence. Nothing loth, Pauline ran, cast herself down beside the child, and for a moment rolled on the ground with him. He struggled with her, unwilling to be lifted, but she at last took him up by the arms, and to appease him, said, "Stop crying, you noisy fellow; we'll have a swing!" Lucien at once closed his lips, while Jeanne's solemn looks vanished, and a gleam of ardent delight illumined her face. All three ran towards the swing, but it was Pauline who took possession of the seat. "Push, push!" she urged the children; and they pushed with all the force of their tiny hands; but she was heavy, and they could scarcely stir the swing. "Push!" she urged again. "Oh, the big sillies, they can't!" In the pavilion, Madame Deberle had just felt a slight chill. Despite the bright sunshine she thought it rather cold, and she requested Malignon to hand her a white cashmere burnous that was hanging from the handle of a window fastening. Malignon rose to wrap the burnous round her shoulders, and they began chatting familiarly on matters which had little interest for Helene. Feeling fidgety, fearing that Pauline might unwittingly knock the children down, she therefore stepped into the garden, leaving Juliette and the young man to wrangle over some new fashion in bonnets which apparently deeply interested them. Jeanne no sooner saw her mother than she ran towards her with a wheedling smile, and entreaty in every gesture. "Oh, mamma, mamma!" she implored. "Oh, mamma!" "No, no, you mustn't!" replied Helene, who understood her meaning very well. "You know you have been forbidden." Swinging was Jeanne's greatest delight. She would say that she believed herself a bird; the breeze blowing in her face, the lively rush through the air, the continued swaying to and fro in a motion as rythmic as the beating of a bird's wings, thrilled her with an exquisite pleasure; in her ascent towards cloudland she imagined herself on her way to heaven. But it always ended in some mishap. On one occasion she had been found clinging to the ropes of the swing in a swoon, her large eyes wide open, fixed in a vacant stare; at another time she had fallen to the ground, stiff, like a swallow struck by a shot. "Oh, mamma!" she implored again. "Only a little, a very, very little!" In the end her mother, in order to win peace, placed her on the seat. The child's face lit up with an angelic smile, and her bare wrists quivered with joyous expectancy. Helene swayed her very gently. "Higher, mamma, higher!" she murmured. But Helene paid no heed to her prayer, and retained firm hold of the rope. She herself was glowing all over, her cheeks flushed, and she thrilled with excitement at every push she gave to the swing. Her wonted sedateness vanished as she thus became her daughter's playmate. "That will do," she declared after a time, taking Jeanne in her arms. "Oh, mamma, you must swing now!" the child whispered, as she clung to her neck. She took a keen delight in seeing her mother flying through the air; as she said, her pleasure was still more intense in gazing at her than in having a swing herself. Helene, however, asked her laughingly who would push her; when she went in for swinging, it was a serious matter; why, she went higher than the treetops! While she was speaking it happened that Monsieur Rambaud made his appearance under the guidance of the doorkeeper. He had met Madame Deberle in Helene's rooms, and thought he would not be deemed presuming in presenting himself here when unable to find her. Madame Deberle proved very gracious, pleased as she was with the good-natured air of the worthy man; however, she soon returned to a lively discussion with Malignon. "_Bon ami_[*] will push you, mamma! _Bon ami_ will push you!" Jeanne called out, as she danced round her mother. [*] Literally "good friend;" but there is no proper equivalent for the expression in English. "Be quiet! We are not at home!" said her mother with mock gravity. "Bless me! if it will please you, I am at your disposal," exclaimed Monsieur Rambaud. "When people are in the country--" Helene let herself be persuaded. When a girl she had been accustomed to swing for hours, and the memory of those vanished pleasures created a secret craving to taste them once more. Moreover, Pauline, who had sat down with Lucien at the edge of the lawn, intervened with the boldness of a girl freed from the trammels of childhood. "Of course he will push you, and he will swing me after you. Won't you, sir?" This determined Helene. The youth which dwelt within her, in spite of the cold demureness of her great beauty, displayed itself in a charming, ingenuous fashion. She became a thorough school-girl, unaffected and gay. There was no prudishness about her. She laughingly declared that she must not expose her legs, and asked for some cord to tie her skirts securely round her ankles. That done, she stood upright on the swing, her arms extended and clinging to the ropes. "Now, push, Monsieur Rambaud," she exclaimed delightedly. "But gently at first!" Monsieur Rambaud had hung his hat on the branch of a tree. His broad, kindly face beamed with a fatherly smile. First he tested the strength of the ropes, and, giving a look at the trees, determined to give a slight push. That day Helene had for the first time abandoned her widow's weeds; she was wearing a grey dress set off with mauve bows. Standing upright, she began to swing, almost touching the ground, and as if rocking herself to sleep. "Quicker! quicker!" she exclaimed. Monsieur Rambaud, with his hands ready, caught the seat as it came back to him, and gave it a more vigorous push. Helene went higher, each ascent taking her farther. However, despite the motion, she did not lose her sedateness; she retained almost an austre demeanor; her eyes shone very brightly in her beautiful, impassive face; her nostrils only were inflated, as though to drink in the air. Not a fold of her skirts was out of place, but a plait of her hair slipped down. "Quicker! quicker!" she called. An energetic push gave her increased impetus. Up in the sunshine she flew, even higher and higher. A breeze sprung up with her motion, and blew through the garden; her flight was so swift that they could scarcely distinguish her figure aright. Her face was now all smiles, and flushed with a rosy red, while her eyes sparkled here, then there, like shooting stars. The loosened plait of hair rustled against her neck. Despite the cords which bound them, her skirts now waved about, and you could divine that she was at her ease, her bosom heaving in its free enjoyment as though the air were indeed her natural place. "Quicker! quicker!" Monsieur Rambaud, his face red and bedewed with perspiration, exerted all his strength. A cry rang out. Helene went still higher. "Oh, mamma! Oh, mamma!" repeated Jeanne in her ecstasy. She was sitting on the lawn gazing at her mother, her little hands clasped on her bosom, looking as though she herself had drunk in all the air that was stirring. Her breath failed her; with a rythmical movement of the shoulders she kept time with the long strokes of the swing. And she cried, "Quicker! quicker!" while her mother still went higher, her feet grazing the lofty branches of the trees. "Higher, mamma! oh, higher, mamma!" But Helene was already in the very heavens. The trees bent and cracked as beneath a gale. Her skirts, which were all they could see, flapped with a tempestuous sound. When she came back with arms stretched out and bosom distended she lowered her head slightly and for a moment hovered; but then she rose again and sank backwards, her head tilted, her eyes closed, as though she had swooned. These ascensions and descents which made her giddy were delightful. In her flight she entered into the sunshine--the pale yellow February sunshine that rained down like golden dust. Her chestnut hair gleamed with amber tints; and a flame seemed to have leaped up around her, as the mauve bows on her whitening dress flashed like burning flowers. Around her the springtide was maturing into birth, and the purple-tinted gems of the trees showed like delicate lacquer against the blue sky. Jeanne clasped her hands. Her mother seemed to her a saint with a golden glory round her head, winging her way to paradise, and she again stammered: "Oh, mamma! oh! mamma!" Madame Deberle and Malignon had now grown interested, and had stepped under the trees. Malignon declared the lady to be very bold. "I should faint, I'm sure," said Madame Deberle, with a frightened air. Helene heard them, for she dropped these words from among the branches: "Oh, my heart is all right! Give a stronger push, Monsieur Rambaud!" And indeed her voice betrayed no emotion. She seemed to take no heed of the two men who were onlookers. They were doubtless nothing to her. Her tress of hair had become entangled, and the cord that confined her skirts must have given way, for the drapery flapped in the wind like a flag. She was going still higher. All at once, however, the exclamation rang out: "Enough, Monsieur Rambaud, enough!" Doctor Deberle had just appeared on the house steps. He came forward, embraced his wife tenderly, took up Lucien and kissed his brow. Then he gazed at Helene with a smile. "Enough, enough!" she still continued exclaiming. "Why?" asked he. "Do I disturb you?" She made no answer; a look of gravity had suddenly come over her face. The swing, still continuing its rapid flights, owing to the impetus given to it, would not stop, but swayed to and fro with a regular motion which still bore Helene to a great height. The doctor, surprised and charmed, beheld her with admiration; she looked so superb, so tall and strong, with the pure figure of an antique statue whilst swinging thus gently amid the spring sunshine. But she seemed annoyed, and all at once leaped down. "Stop! stop!" they all cried out. From Helene's lips came a dull moan; she had fallen upon the gravel of a pathway, and her efforts to rise were fruitless. "Good heavens!" exclaimed the doctor, his face turning very pale. "How imprudent!" They all crowded round her. Jeanne began weeping so bitterly that Monsieur Rambaud, with his heart in his mouth, was compelled to take her in his arms. The doctor, meanwhile, eagerly questioned Helene. "Is it the right leg you fell on? Cannot you stand upright?" And as she remained dazed, without answering, he asked: "Do you suffer?" "Yes, here at the knee; a dull pain," she answered, with difficulty. He at once sent his wife for his medicine case and some bandages, and repeated: "I must see, I must see. No doubt it is a mere nothing." He knelt down on the gravel and Helene let him do so; but all at once she struggled to her feet and said: "No, no!" "But I must examine the place," he said. A slight quiver stole over her, and she answered in a yet lower tone: "It is not necessary. It is nothing at all." He looked at her, at first astounded. Her neck was flushing red; for a moment their eyes met, and seemed to read each other's soul; he was disconcerted, and slowly rose, remaining near her, but without pressing her further. Helene had signed to Monsieur Rambaud. "Fetch Doctor Bodin," she whispered in his ear, "and tell him what has happened to me." Ten minutes later, when Doctor Bodin made his appearance, she, with superhuman courage, regained her feet, and leaning on him and Monsieur Rambaud, contrived to return home. Jeanne followed, quivering with sobs. "I shall wait," said Doctor Deberle to his brother physician. "Come down and remove our fears." In the garden a lively colloquy ensued. Malignon was of opinion that women had queer ideas. Why on earth had that lady been so foolish as to jump down? Pauline, excessively provoked at this accident, which deprived her of a pleasure, declared it was silly to swing so high. On his side Doctor Deberle did not say a word, but seemed anxious. "It is nothing serious," said Doctor Bodin, as he came down again --"only a sprain. Still, she will have to keep to an easy-chair for at least a fortnight." Thereupon Monsieur Deberle gave a friendly slap on Malignon's shoulder. He wished his wife to go in, as it was really becoming too cold. For his own part, taking Lucien in his arms, he carried him into the house, covering him with kisses the while. CHAPTER V. Both windows of the bedroom were wide open, and in the depths below the house, which was perched on the very summit of the hill, lay Paris, rolling away in a mighty flat expanse. Ten o'clock struck; the lovely February morning had all the sweetness and perfume of spring. Helene reclined in an invalid chair, reading in front of one of the windows, her knee still in bandages. She suffered no pain; but she had been confined to her room for a week past, unable even to take up her customary needlework. Not knowing what to do, she had opened a book which she had found on the table--she, who indulged in little or no reading at any time. This book was the one she used every night as a shade for the night-lamp, the only volume which she had taken within eighteen months from the small but irreproachable library selected by Monsieur Rambaud. Novels usually seemed to her false to life and puerile; and this one, Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe," had at first wearied her to death. However, a strange curiosity had grown upon her, and she was finishing it, at times affected to tears, and at times rather bored, when she would let it slip from her hand for long minutes and gaze fixedly at the far-stretching horizon. That morning Paris awoke from sleep with a smiling indolence. A mass of vapor, following the valley of the Seine, shrouded the two banks from view. This mist was light and milky, and the sun, gathering strength, was slowly tinging it with radiance. Nothing of the city was distinguishable through this floating muslin. In the hollows the haze thickened and assumed a bluish tint; while over certain broad expanses delicate transparencies appeared, a golden dust, beneath which you could divine the depths of the streets; and up above domes and steeples rent the mist, rearing grey outlines to which clung shreds of the haze which they had pierced. At times cloudlets of yellow smoke would, like giant birds, heavy of wing, slowly soar on high, and then mingle with the atmosphere which seemed to absorb them. And above all this immensity, this mass of cloud, hanging in slumber over Paris, a sky of extreme purity, of a faint and whitening blue, spread out its mighty vault. The sun was climbing the heavens, scattering a spray of soft rays; a pale golden light, akin in hue to the flaxen tresses of a child, was streaming down like rain, filling the atmosphere with the warm quiver of its sparkle. It was like a festival of the infinite, instinct with sovereign peacefulness and gentle gaiety, whilst the city, chequered with golden beams, still remained lazy and sleepy, unwilling to reveal itself by casting off its coverlet of lace. For eight days it had been Helene's diversion to gaze on that mighty expanse of Paris, and she never wearied of doing so. It was as unfathomable and varying as the ocean--fair in the morning, ruddy with fire at night, borrowing all the joys and sorrows of the heavens reflected in its depths. A flash of sunshine came, and it would roll in waves of gold; a cloud would darken it and raise a tempest. Its aspect was ever changing. A complete calm would fall, and all would assume an orange hue; gusts of wind would sweep by from time to time, and turn everything livid; in keen, bright weather there would be a shimmer of light on every housetop; whilst when showers fell, blurring both heaven and earth, all would be plunged in chaotic confusion. At her window Helene experienced all the hopes and sorrows that pertain to the open sea. As the keen wind blew in her face she imagined it wafted a saline fragrance; even the ceaseless noise of the city seemed to her like that of a surging tide beating against a rocky cliff. The book fell from her hands. She was dreaming, with a far-away look in her eyes. When she stopped reading thus it was from a desire to linger and understand what she had already perused. She took a delight in denying her curiosity immediate satisfaction. The tale filled her soul with a tempest of emotion. Paris that morning was displaying the same vague joy and sorrow as that which disturbed her heart. In this lay a great charm--to be ignorant, to guess things dimly, to yield to slow initiation, with the vague thought that her youth was beginning again. How full of lies were novels! She was assuredly right in not reading them. They were mere fables, good for empty heads with no proper conception of life. Yet she remained entranced, dreaming unceasingly of the knight Ivanhoe, loved so passionately by two women--Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess, and the noble Lady Rowena. She herself thought she could have loved with the intensity and patient serenity of the latter maiden. To love! to love! She did not utter the words, but they thrilled her through and through in the very thought, astonishing her, and irradiating her face with a smile. In the distance some fleecy cloudlets, driven by the breeze, now floated over Paris like a flock of swans. Huge gaps were being cleft in the fog; a momentary glimpse was given of the left bank, indistinct and clouded, like a city of fairydom seen in a dream; but suddenly a thick curtain of mist swept down, and the fairy city was engulfed, as though by an inundation. And then the vapors, spreading equally over every district, formed, as it were, a beautiful lake, with milky, placid waters. There was but one denser streak, indicating the grey, curved course of the Seine. And slowly over those milky, placid waters shadows passed, like vessels with pink sails, which the young woman followed with a dreamy gaze. To love! to love! She smiled as her dream sailed on. However, she again took up her book. She had reached the chapter describing the attack on the castle, wherein Rebecca nurses the wounded Ivanhoe, and recounts to him the incidents of the fight, which she gazes at from a window. Helene felt that she was in the midst of a beautiful falsehood, but roamed through it as through some mythical garden, whose trees are laden with golden fruit, and where she imbibed all sorts of fancies. Then, at the conclusion of the scene, when Rebecca, wrapped in her veil, exhales her love beside the sleeping knight, Helene again allowed the book to slip from her hand; her heart was so brimful of emotion that she could read no further. Heavens! could all those things be true? she asked, as she lay back in her easy-chair, numbed by her enforced quiescence, and gazing on Paris, shrouded and mysterious, beneath the golden sun. The events of her life now arose before her, conjured up by the perusal of the novel. She saw herself a young girl in the house of her father, Mouret, a hatter at Marseilles. The Rue des Petites-Maries was black and dismal, and the house, with its vat of steaming water ready to the hand of the hatter, exhaled a rank odor of dampness, even in fine weather. She also saw her mother, who was ever an invalid, and who kissed her with pale lips, without speaking. No gleam of the sun penetrated into her little room. Hard work went on around her; only by dint of toil did her father gain a workingman's competency. That summed up her early life, and till her marriage nothing intervened to break the monotony of days ever the same. One morning, returning from market with her mother, a basketful of vegetables on her arm, she jostled against young Grandjean. Charles turned round and followed them. The love-romance of her life was in this incident. For three months she was always meeting him, while he, bashful and awkward, could not pluck up courage to speak to her. She was sixteen years of age, and a little proud of her lover, who, she knew, belonged to a wealthy family. But she deemed him bad-looking, and often laughed at him, and no thought of him disturbed her sleep in the large, gloomy, damp house. In the end they were married, and this marriage yet filled her with surprise. Charles worshipped her, and would fling himself on the floor to kiss her bare feet. She beamed on him, her smile full of kindness, as she rebuked him for such childishness. Then another dull life began. During twelve years no event of sufficient interest had occurred for her to bear in mind. She was very quiet and very happy, tormented by no fever either of body or heart; her whole attention being given to the daily cares of a poor household. Charles was still wont to kiss her fair white feet, while she showed herself indulgent and motherly towards him. But other feeling she had none. Then there abruptly came before her the room in the Hotel du Var, her husband in his coffin, and her widow's robe hanging over a chair. She had wept that day as on the winter's night when her mother died. Then once more the days glided on; for two months with her daughter she had again enjoyed peace and happiness. Heaven! did that sum up everything? What, then, did that book mean when it spoke of transcendent loves which illumine one's existence? While she thus reflected prolonged quivers were darting over the sleeping lake of mist on the horizon. Suddenly it seemed to burst, gaps appeared, a rending sped from end to end, betokening a complete break-up. The sun, ascending higher and higher, scattering its rays in glorious triumph, was victoriously attacking the mist. Little by little the great lake seemed to dry up, as though some invisible sluice were draining the plain. The fog, so dense but a moment before, was losing its consistency and becoming transparent, showing all the bright hues of the rainbow. On the left bank of the Seine all was of a heavenly blue, deepening into violet over towards the Jardin des Plantes. Upon the right bank a pale pink, flesh-like tint suffused the Tuileries district; while away towards Montmartre there was a fiery glow, carmine flaming amid gold. Then, farther off, the working-men's quarters deepened to a dusty brick-color, changing more and more till all became a slatey, bluish grey. The eye could not yet distinguish the city, which quivered and receded like those subaqueous depths divined through the crystalline waves, depths with awful forests of huge plants, swarming with horrible things and monsters faintly espied. However, the watery mist was quickly falling. It became at last no more than a fine muslin drapery; and bit by bit this muslin vanished, and Paris took shape and emerged from dreamland. To love! to love! Why did these words ring in Helene's ears with such sweetness as the darkness of the fog gave way to light? Had she not loved her husband, whom she had tended like a child? But a bitter memory stirred within her--the memory of her dead father, who had hung himself three weeks after his wife's decease in a closet where her gowns still dangled from their hooks. There he had gasped out his last agony, his body rigid, and his face buried in a skirt, wrapped round by the clothes which breathed of her whom he had ever worshipped. Then Helene's reverie took a sudden leap. She began thinking of her own home-life, of the month's bills which she had checked with Rosalie that very morning; and she felt proud of the orderly way in which she regulated her household. During more than thirty years she had lived with self-respect and strength of mind. Uprightness alone impassioned her. When she questioned her past, not one hour revealed a sin; in her mind's eye she saw herself ever treading a straight and level path. Truly, the days might slip by; she would walk on peacefully as before, with no impediment in her way. The very thought of this made her stern, and her spirit rose in angry contempt against those lying lives whose apparent heroism disturbs the heart. The only true life was her own, following its course amidst such peacefulness. But over Paris there now only hung a thin smoke, a fine, quivering gauze, on the point of floating away; and emotion suddenly took possession of her. To love! to love! everything brought her back to that caressing phrase --even the pride born of her virtue. Her dreaming became so light, she no longer thought, but lay there, steeped in springtide, with moist eyes. At last, as she was about to resume her reading, Paris slowly came into view. Not a breath of wind had stirred; it was as if a magician had waved his wand. The last gauzy film detached itself, soared and vanished in the air; and the city spread out without a shadow, under the conquering sun. Helene, with her chin resting on her hand, gazed on this mighty awakening. A far-stretching valley appeared, with a myriad of buildings huddled together. Over the distant range of hills were scattered close-set roofs, and you could divine that the sea of houses rolled afar off behind the undulating ground, into the fields hidden from sight. It was as the ocean, with all the infinity and mystery of its waves. Paris spread out as vast as the heavens on high. Burnished with the sunshine that lovely morning, the city looked like a field of yellow corn; and the huge picture was all simplicity, compounded of two colors only, the pale blue of the sky, and the golden reflections of the housetops. The stream of light from the spring sun invested everything with the beauty of a new birth. So pure was the light that the minutest objects became visible. Paris, with its chaotic maze of stonework, shone as though under glass. From time to time, however, a breath of wind passed athwart this bright, quiescent serenity; and then the outlines of some districts grew faint, and quivered as if they were being viewed through an invisible flame. Helene took interest at first in gazing on the large expanse spread under her windows, the slope of the Trocadero, and the far-stretching quays. She had to lean out to distinguish the deserted square of the Champ-de-Mars, barred at the farther end by the sombre Military School. Down below, on thoroughfare and pavement on each side of the Seine, she could see the passers-by--a busy cluster of black dots, moving like a swarm of ants. A yellow omnibus shone out like a spark of fire; drays and cabs crossed the bridge, mere child's toys in the distance, with miniature horses like pieces of mechanism; and amongst others traversing the grassy slopes was a servant girl, with a white apron which set a bright spot in all the greenery. Then Helene raised her eyes; but the crowd scattered and passed out of sight, and even the vehicles looked like mere grains of sand; there remained naught but the gigantic carcass of the city, seemingly untenanted and abandoned, its life limited to the dull trepidation by which it was agitated. There, in the foreground to the left, some red roofs were shining, and the tall chimneys of the Army Bakehouse slowly poured out their smoke; while, on the other side of the river, between the Esplanade and the Champ-de-Mars, a grove of lofty elms clustered, like some patch of a park, with bare branches, rounded tops, and young buds already bursting forth, quite clear to the eye. In the centre of the picture, the Seine spread out and reigned between its grey banks, to which rows of casks, steam cranes, and carts drawn up in line, gave a seaport kind of aspect. Helene's eyes were always turning towards this shining river, on which boats passed to and fro like birds with inky plumage. Her looks involuntarily followed the water's stately course, which, like a silver band, cut Paris atwain. That morning the stream rolled liquid sunlight; no greater resplendency could be seen on the horizon. And the young woman's glance encountered first the Pont des Invalides, next the Pont de la Concorde, and then the Pont Royal. Bridge followed bridge, they appeared to get closer, to rise one above the other like viaducts forming a flight of steps, and pierced with all kinds of arches; while the river, wending its way beneath these airy structures, showed here and there small patches of its blue robe, patches which became narrower and narrower, more and more indistinct. And again did Helene raise her eyes, and over yonder the stream forked amidst a jumble of houses; the bridges on either side of the island of La Cite were like mere films stretching from one bank to the other; while the golden towers of Notre-Dame sprang up like boundary-marks of the horizon, beyond which river, buildings, and clumps of trees became naught but sparkling sunshine. Then Helene, dazzled, withdrew her gaze from this the triumphant heart of Paris, where the whole glory of the city appeared to blaze. On the right bank, amongst the clustering trees of the Champs-Elysees she saw the crystal buildings of the Palace of Industry glittering with a snowy sheen; farther away, behind the roof of the Madeleine, which looked like a tombstone, towered the vast mass of the Opera House; then there were other edifices, cupolas and towers, the Vendome Column, the church of Saint-Vincent de Paul, the tower of Saint-Jacques; and nearer in, the massive cube-like pavilions of the new Louvre and the Tuileries, half-hidden by a wood of chestnut trees. On the left bank the dome of the Invalides shone with gilding; beyond it the two irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice paled in the bright light; and yet farther in the rear, to the right of the new spires of Sainte-Clotilde, the bluish Pantheon, erect on a height, its fine colonnade showing against the sky, overlooked the city, poised in the air, as it were, motionless, with the silken hues of a captive balloon. Helene's gaze wandered all over Paris. There were hollows, as could be divined by the lines of roofs; the Butte des Moulins surged upward, with waves of old slates, while the line of the principal boulevards dipped downward like a gutter, ending in a jumble of houses whose tiles even could no longer be seen. At this early hour the oblique sun did not light up the house-fronts looking towards the Trocadero; not a window-pane of these threw back its rays. The skylights on some roofs alone sparkled with the glittering reflex of mica amidst the red of the adjacent chimney-pots. The houses were mostly of a sombre grey, warmed by reflected beams; still rays of light were transpiercing certain districts, and long streets, stretching in front of Helene, set streaks of sunshine amidst the shade. It was only on the left that the far-spreading horizon, almost perfect in its circular sweep, was broken by the heights of Montmartre and Pere-Lachaise. The details so clearly defined in the foreground, the innumerable denticles of the chimneys, the little black specks of the thousands of windows, grew less and less distinct as you gazed farther and farther away, till everything became mingled in confusion--the pell-mell of an endless city, whose faubourgs, afar off, looked like shingly beaches, steeped in a violet haze under the bright, streaming, vibrating light that fell from the heavens. Helene was watching the scene with grave interest when Jeanne burst gleefully into the room. "Oh, mamma! look here!" The child had a big bunch of wall-flowers in her hand. She told, with some laughter, how she had waylaid Rosalie on her return from market to peep into her basket of provisions. To rummage in this basket was a great delight to her. "Look at it, mamma! It lay at the very bottom. Just smell it; what a lovely perfume!" From the tawny flowers, speckled with purple, there came a penetrating odor which scented the whole room. Then Helene, with a passionate movement, drew Jeanne to her breast, while the nosegay fell on her lap. To love! to love! Truly, she loved her child. Was not that intense love which had pervaded her life till now sufficient for her wants? It ought to satisfy her; it was so gentle, so tranquil; no lassitude could put an end to its continuance. Again she pressed her daughter to her, as though to conjure away thoughts which threatened to separate them. In the meantime Jeanne surrendered herself to the shower of kisses. Her eyes moist with tears, she turned her delicate neck upwards with a coaxing gesture, and pressed her face against her mother's shoulder. Then she slipped an arm round her waist and thus remained, very demure, her cheek resting on Helene's bosom. The perfume of the wall-flowers ascended between them. For a long time they did not speak; but at length, without moving, Jeanne asked in a whisper: "Mamma, you see that rosy-colored dome down there, close to the river; what is it?" It was the dome of the Institute, and Helene looked towards it for a moment as though trying to recall the name. "I don't know, my love," she answered gently. The child appeared content with this reply, and silence again fell. But soon she asked a second question. "And there, quite near, what beautiful trees are those?" she said, pointing with her finger towards a corner of the Tuileries garden. "Those beautiful trees!" said her mother. "On the left, do you mean? I don't know, my love." "Ah!" exclaimed Jeanne; and after musing for a little while she added with a pout: "We know nothing!" Indeed they knew nothing of Paris. During eighteen months it had lain beneath their gaze every hour of the day, yet they knew not a stone of it. Three times only had they gone down into the city; but on returning home, suffering from terrible headaches born of all the agitation they had witnessed, they could find in their minds no distinct memory of anything in all that huge maze of streets. However, Jeanne at times proved obstinate. "Ah! you can tell me this!" said she: "What is that glass building which glitters there? It is so big you must know it." She was referring to the Palais de l'Industrie. Helene, however, hesitated. "It's a railway station," said she. "No, I'm wrong, I think it is a theatre." Then she smiled and kissed Jeanne's hair, at last confessing as before: "I do not know what it is, my love." So they continued to gaze on Paris, troubling no further to identify any part of it. It was very delightful to have it there before them, and yet to know nothing of it; it remained the vast and the unknown. It was as though they had halted on the threshold of a world which ever unrolled its panorama before them, but into which they were unwilling to descend. Paris often made them anxious when it wafted them a hot, disturbing atmosphere; but that morning it seemed gay and innocent, like a child, and from its mysterious depths only a breath of tenderness rose gently to their faces. Helene took up her book again while Jeanne, clinging to her, still gazed upon the scene. In the dazzling, tranquil sky no breeze was stirring. The smoke from the Army Bakehouse ascended perpendicularly in light cloudlets which vanished far aloft. On a level with the houses passed vibrating waves of life, waves of all the life pent up there. The loud voices of the streets softened amidst the sunshine into a languid murmur. But all at once a flutter attracted Jeanne's notice. A flock of white pigeons, freed from some adjacent dovecot, sped through the air in front of the window; with spreading wings like falling snow, the birds barred the line of view, hiding the immensity of Paris. With eyes again dreamily gazing upward, Helene remained plunged in reverie. She was the Lady Rowena; she loved with the serenity and intensity of a noble mind. That spring morning, that great, gentle city, those early wall-flowers shedding their perfume on her lap, had little by little filled her heart with tenderness. CHAPTER VI. One morning Helene was arranging her little library, the various books of which had got out of order during the past few days, when Jeanne skipped into the room, clapping her hands. "A soldier, mamma! a soldier!" she cried. "What? a soldier?" exclaimed her mother. "What do you want, you and your soldier?" But the child was in one of her paroxysms of extravagant delight; she only jumped about the more, repeating: "A soldier! a soldier!" without deigning to give any further explanation. She had left the door wide open behind her, and so, as Helene rose, she was astonished to see a soldier--a very little soldier too--in the ante-room. Rosalie had gone out, and Jeanne must have been playing on the landing, though strictly forbidden to do so by her mother. "What do you want, my lad?" asked Helene. The little soldier was very much confused on seeing this lady, so lovely and fair, in her dressing-gown trimmed with lace; he shuffled one foot to and fro over the floor, bowed, and at last precipitately stammered: "I beg pardon--excuse--" But he could get no further, and retreated to the wall, still shuffling his feet. His retreat was thus cut off, and seeing the lady awaited his reply with an involuntary smile, he dived into his right-hand pocket, from which he dragged a blue handkerchief, a knife, and a hunk of bread. He gazed on each in turn, and thrust them all back again. Then he turned his attention to the left-hand pocket, from which were produced a twist of cord, two rusty nails, and some pictures wrapped in part of a newspaper. All these he pushed back to their resting-place, and began tapping his thighs with an anxious air. And again he stammered in bewilderment: "I beg pardon--excuse--" But all at once he raised his finger to his nose, and exclaimed with a loud laugh: "What a fool I am! I remember now!" He then undid two buttons of his greatcoat, and rummaged in his breast, into which he plunged his arm up to the elbow. After a time he drew forth a letter, which he rustled violently before handing to Helene, as though to shake some dust from it. "A letter for me! Are you sure?" said she. On the envelope were certainly inscribed her name and address in a heavy rustic scrawl, with pothooks and hangers tumbling over one another. When at last she made it all out, after being repeatedly baffled by the extraordinary style and spelling, she could not but smile again. It was a letter from Rosalie's aunt, introducing Zephyrin Lacour, who had fallen a victim to the conscription, "in spite of two masses having been said by his reverence." However, as Zephyrin was Rosalie's "intended" the aunt begged that madame would be so good as to allow the young folks to see each other on Sundays. In the three pages which the letter comprised this question was continually cropping up in the same words, the confusion of the epistle increasing through the writer's vain efforts to say something she had not said before. Just above the signature, however, she seemed to have hit the nail on the head, for she had written: "His reverence gives his permission"; and had then broken her pen in the paper, making a shower of blots. Helene slowly folded the letter. Two or three times, while deciphering its contents, she had raised her head to glance at the soldier. He still remained close to the wall, and his lips stirred, as though to emphasize each sentence in the letter by a slight movement of the chin. No doubt he knew its contents by heart. "Then you are Zephyrin Lacour, are you not?" asked Helene. He began to laugh and wagged his head. "Come in, my lad; don't stay out there." He made up his mind to follow her, but he continued standing close to the door, while Helene sat down. She had scarcely seen him in the darkness of the ante-room. He must have been just as tall as Rosalie; a third of an inch less, and he would have been exempted from service. With red hair, cut very short, he had a round, freckled, beardless face, with two little eyes like gimlet holes. His new greatcoat, much too large for him, made him appear still more dumpy, and with his red-trousered legs wide apart, and his large peaked cap swinging before him, he presented both a comical and pathetic sight--his plump, stupid little person plainly betraying the rustic, although he wore a uniform. Helene desired to obtain some information from him. "You left Beauce a week ago?" she asked. "Yes, madame!" "And here you are in Paris. I suppose you are not sorry?" "No, madame." He was losing his bashfulness, and now gazed all over the room, evidently much impressed by its blue velvet hangings. "Rosalie is out," Helene began again, "but she will be here very soon. Her aunt tells me you are her sweetheart." To this the little soldier vouchsafed no reply, but hung his head, laughing awkwardly, and scraping the carpet with the tip of his boot. "Then you will have to marry her when you leave the army?" Helene continued questioning. "Yes, to be sure!" exclaimed he, his face turning very red. "Yes, of course; we are engaged!" And, won over by the kindly manners of the lady, he made up his mind to speak out, his fingers still playing with his cap. "You know it's an old story. When we were quite children, we used to go thieving together. We used to get switched; oh yes, that's true! I must tell you that the Lacours and the Pichons lived in the same lane, and were next-door neighbors. And so Rosalie and myself were almost brought up together. Then her people died, and her aunt Marguerite took her in. But she, the minx, was already as strong as a demon." He paused, realizing that he was warming up, and asked hesitatingly: "But perhaps she has told you all this?" "Yes, yes; but go on all the same," said Helene, who was greatly amused. "In short," continued he, "she was awfully strong, though she was no bigger than a tomtit. It was a treat to see her at her work! How she did get through it! One day she gave a slap to a friend of mine--by Jove! such a slap! I had the mark of it on my arm for a week! Yes, that was the way it all came about. All the gossips declared we must marry one another. Besides, we weren't ten years old before we had agreed on that! And, we have stuck to it, madame, we have stuck to it!" He placed one hand upon his heart, with fingers wide apart. Helene, however, had now become very grave. The idea of allowing a soldier in her kitchen somewhat worried her. His reverence, no doubt, had given his sanction, but she thought it rather venturesome. There is too much license in the country, where lovers indulge in all sorts of pleasantries. So she gave expression to her apprehensions. When Zephyrin at last gathered her meaning, his first inclination was to laugh, but his awe for Helene restrained him. "Oh, madame, madame!" said he, "you don't know her, I can see! I have received slaps enough from her! Of course young men like to laugh! isn't that so? Sometimes I pinched her, and she would turn round and hit me right on the nose. Her aunt's advice always was, 'Look here, my girl, don't put up with any nonsense!' His reverence, too, interfered in it, and maybe that had a lot to do with our keeping up sweethearting. We were to have been married after I had drawn for a soldier. But it was all my eye! Things turned out badly. Rosalie declared she would go to service in Paris, to earn a dowry while she was waiting for me. And so, and so--" He swung himself about, dangling his cap, now from one hand now from the other. But still Helene never said a word, and he at last fancied that she distrusted him. This pained him dreadfully. "You think, perhaps, that I shall deceive her?" he burst out angrily. "Even, too, when I tell you we are betrothed? I shall marry her, as surely as the heaven shines on us. I'm quite ready to pledge my word in writing. Yes, if you like, I'll write it down for you." Deep emotion was stirring him. He walked about the room gazing around in the hope of finding pen and ink. Helene quickly tried to appease him, but he still went on: "I would rather sign a paper for you. What harm would it do you? Your mind would be all the easier with it." However, just at that moment Jeanne, who had again run away, returned, jumping and clapping her hands. "Rosalie! Rosalie! Rosalie!" she chanted in a dancing tune of her own composition. Through the open doorway one could hear the panting of the maid as she climbed up the stairs laden with her basket. Zephyrin started back into a corner of the room, his mouth wide agape from ear to ear in silent laughter, and the gimlet holes of his eyes gleaming with rustic roguery. Rosalie came straight into the room, as was her usual practice, to show her mistress her morning's purchase of provisions. "Madame," said she, "I've brought some cauliflowers. Look at them! Only eighteen sous for two; it isn't dear, is it?" She held out the basket half open, but on lifting her head noticed Zephyrin's grinning face. Surprise nailed her to the carpet. Two or three seconds slipped away; she had doubtless at first failed to recognize him in his uniform. But then her round eyes dilated, her fat little face blanched, and her coarse black hair waved in agitation. "Oh!" she simply said. But her astonishment was such that she dropped her basket. The provisions, cauliflowers, onions, apples, rolled on to the carpet. Jeanne gave a cry of delight, and falling on her knees, began hunting for the apples, even under the chairs and the wardrobe. Meanwhile Rosalie, as though paralyzed, never moved, though she repeated: "What! it's you! What are you doing here? what are you doing here? Say!" Then she turned to Helene with the question: "Was it you who let him come in?" Zephyrin never uttered a word, but contented himself with winking slily. Then Rosalie gave vent to her emotion in tears; and, to show her delight at seeing him again, could hit on nothing better than to quiz him. "Oh! go away!" she began, marching up to him. "You look neat and pretty I must say in that guise of yours! I might have passed you in the street, and not even have said: 'God bless you.' Oh! you've got a nice rig-out. You just look as if you had your sentry-box on your back; and they've cut your hair so short that folks might take you for the sexton's poodle. Good heavens! what a fright you are; what a fright!" Zephyrin, very indignant, now made up his mind to speak. "It's not my fault, that's sure! Oh! if you joined a regiment we should see a few things." They had quite forgotten where they were; everything had vanished--the room, Helene and Jeanne, who was still gathering the apples together. With hands folded over her apron, the maid stood upright in front of the little soldier. "Is everything all right down there?" she asked. "Oh, yes, excepting Guignard's cow is ill. The veterinary surgeon came and said she'd got the dropsy." "If she's got the dropsy, she's done for. Excepting that, is everything all right?" "Yes, yes! The village constable has broken his arm. Old Canivet's dead. And, by the way, his reverence lost his purse with thirty sous in it as he was a-coming back from Grandval. But otherwise, things are all right." Then silence fell on them, and they looked at one another with sparkling eyes, their compressed lips slowly making an amorous grimace. This, indeed, must have been the manner in which they expressed their love, for they had not even stretched out their hands in greeting. Rosalie, however, all at once ceased her contemplation, and began to lament at sight of the vegetables on the floor. Such a nice mess! and it was he who had caused it all! Madame ought to have made him wait on the stairs! Scolding away as fast as she could, she dropped on her knees and began putting the apples, onions, and cauliflowers into the basket again, much to the disgust of Jeanne, who would fain have done it all herself. And as she turned, with the object of betaking herself into her kitchen, never deigning another look in Zephyrin's direction, Helene, conciliated by the healthy tranquillity of the lovers, stopped her to say: "Listen a moment, my girl. Your aunt has asked me to allow this young man to come and see you on Sundays. He will come in the afternoon, and you will try not to let your work fall behind too much." Rosalie paused, merely turning her head. Though she was well pleased, she preserved her doleful air. "Oh, madame, he will be such a bother," she declared. But at the same time she glanced over her shoulder at Zephyrin, and again made an affectionate grimace at him. The little soldier remained for a minute stock-still, his mouth agape from ear to ear with its silent laugh. Then he retired backwards, with his cap against his heart as he thanked Helene profusely. The door had been shut upon him, when on the landing he still continued bowing. "Is that Rosalie's brother, mamma?" asked Jeanne. Helene was quite embarrassed by the question. She regretted the permission which she had just given in a sudden impulse of kindliness which now surprised her. She remained thinking for some seconds, and then replied, "No, he is her cousin." "Ah!" said the child gravely. Rosalie's kitchen looked out on the sunny expanse of Doctor Deberle's garden. In the summer the branches of the elms swayed in through the broad window. It was the cheeriest room of the suite, always flooded with light, which was sometimes so blinding that Rosalie had put up a curtain of blue cotton stuff, which she drew of an afternoon. The only complaint she made about the kitchen was its smallness; and indeed it was a narrow strip of a place, with a cooking-range on the right-hand side, while on the left were the table and dresser. The various utensils and furnishings, however, had all been so well arranged that she had contrived to keep a clear corner beside the window, where she worked in the evening. She took a pride in keeping everything, stewpans, kettles, and dishes, wonderfully clean; and so, when the sun veered round to the window, the walls became resplendent, the copper vessels sparkled like gold, the tin pots showed bright discs like silver moons, while the white-and-blue tiles above the stove gleamed pale in the fiery glow. On the evening of the ensuing Saturday Helene heard so great a commotion in the kitchen that she determined to go and see what was the matter. "What is it?" asked she: "are you fighting with the furniture?" "I am scouring, madame," replied Rosalie, who, sweating and dishevelled, was squatting on the tiled floor and scrubbing it with all the strength of her arms. This over, she sponged it with clear water. Never had the kitchen displayed such perfection of cleanliness. A bride might have slept in it; all was white as for a wedding. So energetically had she exerted her hands that it seemed as if table and dresser had been freshly planed. And the good order of everything was a sight to see; stewpans and pots taking rank by their size, each on its own hook, even the frying-pan and gridiron shining brightly without one grimy stain. Helene looked on for a moment in silence, and then with a smile disappeared. Every Saturday afterwards there was a similar furbishing, a tornado of dust and water lasting for four hours. It was Rosalie's wish to display her neatness to Zephyrin on the Sunday. That was her reception day. A single cobweb would have filled her with shame; but when everything shone resplendent around her she became amiable, and burst into song. At three o'clock she would again wash her hands and don a cap gay with ribbons. Then the curtain being drawn halfway, so that only the subdued light of a boudoir came in, she awaited Zephyrin's arrival amidst all this primness, through which a pleasant scent of thyme and laurel was borne. At half-past three exactly Zephyrin made his appearance; he would walk about the street until the clocks of the neighborhood had struck the half-hour. Rosalie listened to the beat of his heavy shoes on the stairs, and opened the door the moment he halted on the landing. She had forbidden him to ring the bell. At each visit the same greeting passed between them. "Is it you?" "Yes, it's me!" And they stood face to face, their eyes sparkling and their lips compressed. Then Zephyrin followed Rosalie; but there was no admission vouchsafed to him till she had relieved him of shako and sabre. She would have none of these in her kitchen; and so the sabre and shako were hidden away in a cupboard. Next she would make him sit down in the corner she had contrived near the window, and thenceforth he was not allowed to budge. "Sit still there! You can look on, if you like, while I get madame's dinner ready." But he rarely appeared with empty hands. He would usually spend the morning in strolling with some comrades through the woods of Meudon, lounging lazily about, inhaling the fresh air, which inspired him with regretful memories of his country home. To give his fingers something to do he would cut switches, which he tapered and notched with marvelous figurings, and his steps gradually slackening he would come to a stop beside some ditch, his shako on the back of his head, while his eyes remained fixed on the knife with which he was carving the stick. Then, as he could never make up his mind to discard his switches, he carried them in the afternoon to Rosalie, who would throw up her hands, and exclaim that they would litter her kitchen. But the truth was, she carefully preserved them; and under her bed was gathered a bundle of these switches, of all sorts and sizes. One day he made his appearance with a nest full of eggs, which he had secreted in his shako under the folds of a handkerchief. Omelets made from the eggs of wild birds, so he declared, were very nice--a statement which Rosalie received with horror; the nest, however, was preserved and laid away in company with the switches. But Zephyrin's pockets were always full to overflowing. He would pull curiosities from them, transparent pebbles found on the banks of the Seine, pieces of old iron, dried berries, and all sorts of strange rubbish, which not even a rag-picker would have cared for. His chief love, however, was for pictures; as he sauntered along he would seize on all the stray papers that had served as wrappers for chocolate or cakes of soap, and on which were black men, palm-trees, dancing-girls, or clusters of roses. The tops of old broken boxes, decorated with figures of languid, blonde ladies, the glazed prints and silver paper which had once contained sugar-sticks and had been thrown away at the neighboring fairs, were great windfalls that filled his bosom with pride. All such booty was speedily transferred to his pockets, the choicer articles being enveloped in a fragment of an old newspaper. And on Sunday, if Rosalie had a moment's leisure between the preparation of a sauce and the tending of the joint, he would exhibit his pictures to her. They were hers if she cared for them; only as the paper around them was not always clean he would cut them out, a pastime which greatly amused him. Rosalie got angry, as the shreds of paper blew about even into her plates; and it was a sight to see with what rustic cunning he would at last gain possession of her scissors. At times, however, in order to get rid of him, she would give them up without any asking. Meanwhile some brown sauce would be simmering on the fire. Rosalie watched it, wooden spoon in hand; while Zephyrin, his head bent and his breadth of shoulder increased by his epaulets, continued cutting out the pictures. His head was so closely shaven that the skin of his skull could be seen; and the yellow collar of his tunic yawned widely behind, displaying his sunburnt neck. For a quarter of an hour at a time neither would utter a syllable. When Zephyrin raised his head, he watched Rosalie while she took some flour, minced some parsley, or salted and peppered some dish, his eyes betraying the while intense interest. Then, at long intervals, a few words would escape him: "By Jove! that does smell nice!" The cook, busily engaged, would not vouchsafe an immediate reply; but after a lengthy silence she perhaps exclaimed: "You see, it must simmer properly." Their talk never went beyond that. They no longer spoke of their native place even. When a reminiscence came to them a word sufficed, and they chuckled inwardly the whole afternoon. This was pleasure enough, and by the time Rosalie turned Zephyrin out of doors both of them had enjoyed ample amusement. "Come, you will have to go! I must wait on madame," said she; and restoring him his shako and sabre, she drove him out before her, afterwards waiting on madame with cheeks flushed with happiness; while he walked back to barracks, dangling his arms, and almost intoxicated by the goodly odors of thyme and laurel which still clung to him. During his earlier visits Helene judged it right to look after them. She popped in sometimes quite suddenly to give an order, and there was Zephyrin always in his corner, between the table and the window, close to the stone filter, which forced him to draw in his legs. The moment madame made her appearance he rose and stood upright, as though shouldering arms, and if she spoke to him his reply never went beyond a salute and a respectful grunt. Little by little Helene grew somewhat easier; she saw that her entrance did not disturb them, and that their faces only expressed the quiet content of patient lovers. At this time, too, Rosalie seemed even more wide awake than Zephyrin. She had already been some months in Paris, and under its influence was fast losing her country rust, though as yet she only knew three streets--the Rue de Passy, the Rue Franklin, and the Rue Vineuse. Zephyrin, soldier though he was, remained quite a lubber. As Rosalie confided to her mistress, he became more of a blockhead every day. In the country he had been much sharper. But, added she, it was the uniform's fault; all the lads who donned the uniform became sad dolts. The fact is, his change of life had quite muddled Zephyrin, who, with his staring round eyes and solemn swagger, looked like a goose. Despite his epaulets he retained his rustic awkwardness and heaviness; the barracks had taught him nothing as yet of the fine words and victorious attitudes of the ideal Parisian fire-eater. "Yes, madame," Rosalie would wind up by saying, "you don't need to disturb yourself; it is not in him to play any tricks!" Thus the girl began to treat him in quite a motherly way. While dressing her meat on the spit she would preach him a sermon, full of good counsel as to the pitfalls he should shun; and he in all obedience vigorously nodded approval of each injunction. Every Sunday he had to swear to her that he had attended mass, and that he had solemnly repeated his prayers morning and evening. She strongly inculcated the necessity of tidiness, gave him a brush down whenever he left her, stitched on a loose button of his tunic, and surveyed him from head to foot to see if aught were amiss in his appearance. She also worried herself about his health, and gave him cures for all sorts of ailments. In return for her kindly care Zephyrin professed himself anxious to fill her filter for her; but this proposal was long-rejected, through the fear that he might spill the water. One day, however, he brought up two buckets without letting a drop of their contents fall on the stairs, and from that time he replenished the filter every Sunday. He would also make himself useful in other ways, doing all the heavy work and was extremely handy in running to the greengrocer's for butter, had she forgotten to purchase any. At last, even, he began to share in the duties of kitchen-maid. First he was permitted to peel the vegetables; later on the mincing was assigned to him. At the end of six weeks, though still forbidden to touch the sauces, he watched over them with wooden spoon in hand. Rosalie had fairly made him her helpmate, and would sometimes burst out laughing as she saw him, with his red trousers and yellow collar, working busily before the fire with a dishcloth over his arm, like some scullery-servant. One Sunday Helene betook herself to the kitchen. Her slippers deadened the sound of her footsteps, and she reached the threshold unheard by either maid or soldier. Zephyrin was seated in his corner over a basin of steaming broth. Rosalie, with her back turned to the door, was occupied in cutting some long sippets of bread for him. "There, eat away, my dear!" she said. "You walk too much; it is that which makes you feel so empty! There! have you enough? Do you want any more?" Thus speaking, she watched him with a tender and anxious look. He, with his round, dumpy figure, leaned over the basin, devouring a sippet with each mouthful of broth. His face, usually yellow with freckles, was becoming quite red with the warmth of the steam which circled round him. "Heavens!" he muttered, "what grand juice! What do you put in it?" "Wait a minute," she said; "if you like leeks--" However, as she turned round she suddenly caught sight of her mistress. She raised an exclamation, and then, like Zephyrin, seemed turned to stone. But a moment afterwards she poured forth a torrent of excuses. "It's my share, madame--oh, it's my share! I would not have taken any more soup, I swear it! I told him, 'If you would like to have my bowl of soup, you can have it.' Come, speak up, Zephyrin; you know that was how it came about!" The mistress remained silent, and the servant grew uneasy, thinking she was annoyed. Then in quavering tones she continued: "Oh, he was dying of hunger, madame; he stole a raw carrot for me! They feed him so badly! And then, you know, he had walked goodness knows where all along the river-side. I'm sure, madame, you would have told me yourself to give him some broth!" Gazing at the little soldier, who sat with his mouth full, not daring to swallow, Helene felt she could no longer remain stern. So she quietly said: "Well, well, my girl, whenever the lad is hungry you must keep him to dinner--that's all. I give you permission" Face to face with them, she had again felt within her that tender feeling which once already had banished all thoughts of rigor from her mind. They were so happy in that kitchen! The cotton curtain, drawn half-way, gave free entry to the sunset beams. The burnished copper pans set the end wall all aglow, lending a rosy tint to the twilight lingering in the room. And there, in the golden shade, the lovers' little round faces shone out, peaceful and radiant, like moons. Their love was instinct with such calm certainty that no neglect was even shown in keeping the kitchen utensils in their wonted good order. It blossomed amidst the savory odors of the cooking-stove, which heightened their appetites and nourished their hearts. "Mamma," asked Jeanne, one evening after considerable meditation, "why is it Rosalie's cousin never kisses her?" "And why should they kiss one another?" asked Helene in her turn. "They will kiss on their birthdays." CHAPTER VII. The soup had just been served on the following Tuesday evening, when Helene, after listening attentively, exclaimed: "What a downpour! Don't you hear? My poor friends, you will get drenched to-night!" "Oh, it's only a few drops," said the Abbe quietly, though his old cassock was already wet about the shoulders. "I've got a good distance to go," said Monsieur Rambaud. "But I shall return home on foot all the same; I like it. Besides, I have my umbrella." Jeanne was reflecting as she gazed gravely on her last spoonful of vermicelli; and at last her thoughts took shape in words: "Rosalie said you wouldn't come because of the wretched weather; but mamma said you would come. You are very kind; you always come." A smile lit up all their faces. Helene addressed a nod of affectionate approval to the two brothers. Out of doors the rain was falling with a dull roar, and violent gusts of wind beat angrily against the window-shutters. Winter seemed to have returned. Rosalie had carefully drawn the red repp curtains; and the small, cosy dining-room, illumined by the steady light of the white hanging-lamp, looked, amidst the buffeting of the storm, a picture of pleasant, affectionate intimacy. On the mahogany sideboard some china reflected the quiet light; and amidst all this indoor peacefulness the four diners leisurely conversed, awaiting the good pleasure of the servant-maid, as they sat round the table, where all, if simple, was exquisitely clean. "Oh! you are waiting; so much the worse!" said Rosalie familiarly, as she entered with a dish. "These are fillets of sole _au gratin_ for Monsieur Rambaud; they require to be lifted just at the last moment." Monsieur Rambaud pretended to be a gourmand, in order to amuse Jeanne, and give pleasure to Rosalie, who was very proud of her accomplishments as a cook. He turned towards her with the question: "By the way, what have you got for us to-day? You are always bringing in some surprise or other when I am no longer hungry." "Oh," said she in reply, "there are three dishes as usual, and no more. After the sole you will have a leg of mutton and then some Brussels sprouts. Yes, that's the truth; there will be nothing else." From the corner of his eye Monsieur Rambaud glanced towards Jeanne. The child was boiling over with glee, her hands over her mouth to restrain her laughter, while she shook her head, as though to insinuate that the maid was deceiving them. Monsieur Rambaud thereupon clacked his tongue as though in doubt, and Rosalie pretended great indignation. "You don't believe me because Mademoiselle Jeanne laughs so," said she. "Ah, very well! believe what you like. Stint yourself, and see if you won't have a craving for food when you get home." When the maid had left the room, Jeanne, laughing yet more loudly, was seized with a longing to speak out. "You are really too greedy!" she began. "I myself went into the kitchen--" However, she left her sentence unfinished: "No, no, I won't tell; it isn't right, is it, mamma? There's nothing more--nothing at all! I only laughed to cheat you." This interlude was re-enacted every Tuesday with the same unvarying success. Helene was touched by the kindliness with which Monsieur Rambaud lent himself to the fun; she was well aware that, with Provencal frugality, he had long limited his daily fare to an anchovy and half-a-dozen olives. As for Abbe Jouve, he never knew what he was eating, and his blunders and forgetfulness supplied an inexhaustible fund of amusement. Jeanne, meditating some prank in this respect, was even now stealthily watching him with her glittering eyes. "How nice this whiting is!" she said to him, after they had all been served. "Very nice, my dear," he answered. "Bless me, you are right--it is whiting; I thought it was turbot." And then, as every one laughed, he guilelessly asked why. Rosalie, who had just come into the room again, seemed very much hurt, and burst out: "A fine thing indeed! The priest in my native place knew much better what he was eating. He could tell the age of the fowl he was carving to a week or so, and didn't require to go into the kitchen to find out what there was for dinner. No, the smell was quite sufficient. Goodness gracious! had I been in the service of a priest like your reverence, I should not know yet even how to turn an omelet." The Abbe hastened to excuse himself with an embarrassed air, as though his inability to appreciate the delights of the table was a failing he despaired of curing. But, as he said, he had too many other things to think about. "There! that is a leg of mutton!" exclaimed Rosalie, as she placed on the table the joint referred to. Everybody once more indulged in a peal of laughter, the Abbe Jouve being the first to do so. He bent forward to look, his little eyes twinkling with glee. "Yes, certainly," said he; "it is a leg of mutton. I think I should have known it." Despite this remark, there was something about the Abbe that day which betokened unusual absent-mindedness. He ate quickly, with the haste of a man who is bored by a long stay at table, and lunches standing when at home. And, having finished, himself, he would wait the convenience of the others, plunged in deep thought, and simply smiling in reply to the questions put to him. At every moment he cast on his brother a look in which encouragement and uneasiness were mingled. Nor did Monsieur Rambaud seen possessed of his wonted tranquillity that evening; but his agitation manifested itself in a craving to talk and fidget on his chair, which seemed rather inconsistent with his quiet disposition. When the Brussels sprouts had disappeared, there was a delay in the appearance of the dessert, and a spell of silence ensued. Out of doors the rain was beating down with still greater force, rattling noisily against the house. The dining-room was rather close, and it suddenly dawned on Helene that there was something strange in the air--that the two brothers had some worry of which they did not care to speak. She looked at them anxiously, and at last spoke: "Dear, dear! What dreadful rain! isn't it? It seems to be influencing both of you, for you look out of sorts." They protested, however, that such was not the case, doing their utmost to clear her mind of the notion. And as Rosalie now made her appearance with an immense dish, Monsieur Rambaud exclaimed, as though to veil his emotion: "What did I say! Still another surprise!" The surprise of the day was some vanilla cream, one of the cook's triumphs. And thus it was a sight to see her broad, silent grin, as she deposited her burden on the table. Jeanne shouted and clapped her hands. "I knew it, I knew it! I saw the eggs in the kitchen!" "But I have no more appetite," declared Monsieur Rambaud, with a look of despair. "I could not eat any of it!" Thereupon Rosalie became grave, full of suppressed wrath. With a dignified air, she remarked: "Oh, indeed! A cream which I made specially for you! Well, well! just try not to eat any of it--yes, try!" He had to give in and accept a large helping of the cream. Meanwhile the Abbe remained thoughtful. He rolled up his napkin and rose before the dessert had come to an end, as was frequently his custom. For a little while he walked about, with his head hanging down; and when Helene in her turn quitted the table, he cast at Monsieur Rambaud a look of intelligence, and led the young woman into the bedroom.[*] The door being left open behind them, they could almost immediately afterwards be heard conversing together, though the words which they slowly exchanged were indistinguishable. [*] Helene's frequent use of her bedroom may seem strange to the English reader who has never been in France. But in the _petite bourgeoisie_ the bedchamber is often the cosiest of the whole suite of rooms, and whilst indoors, when not superintending her servant, it is in the bedroom that madame will spend most of her time. Here, too, she will receive friends of either sex, and, the French being far less prudish than ourselves, nobody considers that there is anything wrong or indelicate in the practice. "Oh, do make haste!" said Jeanne to Monsieur Rambaud, who seemed incapable of finishing a biscuit. "I want to show you my work." However, he evinced no haste, though when Rosalie began to clear the table it became necessary for him to leave his chair. "Wait a little! wait a little!" he murmured, as the child strove to drag him towards the bedroom, And, overcome with embarrassment and timidity, he retreated from the doorway. Then, as the Abbe raised his voice, such sudden weakness came over him that he had to sit down again at the table. From his pocket he drew a newspaper. "Now," said he, "I'm going to make you a little coach." Jeanne at once abandoned her intention of entering the adjoining room. Monsieur Rambaud always amazed her by his skill in turning a sheet of paper into all sorts of playthings. Chickens, boats, bishops' mitres, carts, and cages, were all evolved under his fingers. That day, however, so tremulous were his hands that he was unable to perfect anything. He lowered his head whenever the faintest sound came from the adjacent room. Nevertheless, Jeanne took interest in watching him, and leaned on the table at his side. "Now," said she, "you must make a chicken to harness to the carriage." Meantime, within the bedroom, Abbe Jouve remained standing in the shadow thrown by the lamp-shade upon the floor. Helene had sat down in her usual place in front of the round table; and, as on Tuesdays she refrained from ceremony with her friends, she had taken up her needlework, and, in the circular glare of light, only her white hands could be seen sewing a child's cap. "Jeanne gives you no further worry, does she?" asked the Abbe. Helene shook her head before making a reply. "Doctor Deberle seems quite satisfied," said she. "But the poor darling is still very nervous. Yesterday I found her in her chair in a fainting fit." "She needs exercise," resumed the priest. "You stay indoors far too much; you should follow the example of other folks and go about more than you do." He ceased speaking, and silence followed. He now, without doubt, had what he had been seeking,--a suitable inlet for his discourse; but the moment for speaking came, and he was still communing with himself. Taking a chair, he sat down at Helene's side. "Hearken to me, my dear child," he began. "For some time past I have wished to talk with you seriously. The life you are leading here can entail no good results. A convent existence such as yours is not consistent with your years; and this abandonment of worldly pleasures is as injurious to your child as it is to yourself. You are risking many dangers--dangers to health, ay, and other dangers, too." Helene raised her head with an expression of astonishment. "What do you mean, my friend?" she asked. "Dear me! I know the world but little," continued the priest, with some slight embarrassment, "yet I know very well that a woman incurs great risk when she remains without a protecting arm. To speak frankly, you keep to your own company too much, and this seclusion in which you hide yourself is not healthful, believe me. A day must come when you will suffer from it." "But I make no complaint; I am very happy as I am," she exclaimed with spirit. The old priest gently shook his large head. "Yes, yes, that is all very well. You feel completely happy. I know all that. Only, on the downhill path of a lonely, dreamy life, you never know where you are going. Oh! I understand you perfectly; you are incapable of doing any wrong. But sooner or later you might lose your peace of mind. Some morning, when it is too late, you will find that blank which you now leave in your life filled by some painful feeling not to be confessed." As she sat there in the shadow, a blush crimsoned Helene's face. Had the Abbe, then, read her heart? Was he aware of this restlessness which was fast possessing her--this heart-trouble which thrilled her every-day life, and the existence of which she had till now been unwilling to admit? Her needlework fell on her lap. A sensation of weakness pervaded her, and she awaited from the priest something like a pious complicity which would allow her to confess and particularize the vague feelings which she buried in her innermost being. As all was known to him, it was for him to question her, and she would strive to answer. "I leave myself in your hands, my friend," she murmured. "You are well aware that I have always listened to you." The priest remained for a moment silent, and then slowly and solemnly said: "My child, you must marry again." She remained speechless, with arms dangling, in a stupor this counsel brought upon her. She awaited other words, failing, as it were, to understand him. And the Abbe continued putting before her the arguments which should incline her towards marriage. "Remember, you are still young. You must not remain longer in this out-of-the-way corner of Paris, scarcely daring to go out, and wholly ignorant of the world. You must return to the every-day life of humanity, lest in the future you should bitterly regret your loneliness. You yourself have no idea how the effects of your isolation are beginning to tell on you, but your friends remark your pallor, and feel uneasy." With each sentence he paused, in the hope that she might break in and discuss his proposition. But no; she sat there as if lifeless, seemingly benumbed with astonishment. "No doubt you have a child," he resumed. "That is always a delicate matter to surmount. Still, you must admit that even in Jeanne's interest a husband's arm would be of great advantage. Of course, we must find some one good and honorable, who would be a true father--" However, she did not let him finish. With violent revolt and repulsion she suddenly spoke out: "No, no; I will not! Oh, my friend, how can you advise me thus? Never, do you hear, never!" Her whole heart was rising; she herself was frightened by the violence of her refusal. The priest's proposal had stirred up that dim nook in her being whose secret she avoided reading, and, by the pain she experienced, she at last understood all the gravity of her ailment. With the open, smiling glance of the priest still bent on her, she plunged into contention. "No, no; I do not wish it! I love nobody!" And, as he still gazed at her, she imagined he could read her lie on her face. She blushed and stammered: "Remember, too, I only left off my mourning a fortnight ago. No, it could not be!" "My child!" quietly said the priest, "I thought over this a great deal before speaking. I am sure your happiness is wrapped up in it. Calm yourself; you need never act against your own wishes." The conversation came to a sudden stop. Helene strove to keep pent within her bosom the angry protests that were rushing to her lips. She resumed her work, and, with head lowered, contrived to put in a few stitches. And amid the silence, Jeanne's shrill voice could be heard in the dining-room. "People don't put a chicken to a carriage; it ought to be a horse! You don't know how to make a horse, do you?" "No, my dear; horses are too difficult," said Monsieur Rambaud. "But if you like I'll show you how to make carriages." This was always the fashion in which their game came to an end. Jeanne, all ears and eyes, watched her kindly playfellow folding the paper into a multitude of little squares, and afterwards she followed his example; but she would make mistakes and then stamp her feet in vexation. However, she already knew how to manufacture boats and bishops' mitres. "You see," resumed Monsieur Rambaud patiently, "you make four corners like that; then you turn them back--" With his ears on the alert, he must during the last moment have heard some of the words spoken in the next room; for his poor hands were now trembling more and more, while his tongue faltered, so that he could only half articulate his sentences. Helene, who was unable to quiet herself, now began the conversation anew. "Marry again! And whom, pray?" she suddenly asked the priest, as she laid her work down on the table. "You have some one in view, have you not?" Abbe Jouve rose from his chair and stalked slowly up and down. Without halting, he nodded assent. "Well! tell me who he is," she said. For a moment he lingered before her erect, then, shrugging his shoulders, said: "What's the good, since you decline?" "No matter, I want to know," she replied. "How can I make up my mind when I don't know?" He did not answer her immediately, but remained standing there, gazing into her face. A somewhat sad smile wreathed his lips. At last he exclaimed, almost in a whisper: "What! have you not guessed?" No, she could not guess. She tried to do so, with increasing wonder, whereupon he made a simple sign--nodding his head in the direction of the dining-room. "He!" she exclaimed, in a muffled tone, and a great seriousness fell upon her. She no longer indulged in violent protestations; only sorrow and surprise remained visible on her face. She sat for a long time plunged in thought, her gaze turned to the floor. Truly, she had never dreamed of such a thing; and yet, she found nothing in it to object to. Monsieur Rambaud was the only man in whose hand she could put her own honestly and without fear. She knew his innate goodness; she did not smile at his _bourgeois_ heaviness. But despite all her regard for him, the idea that he loved her chilled her to the soul. Meanwhile the Abbe had again begun walking from one to the other end of the room, and on passing the dining-room door he gently called Helene. "Come here and look!" She rose and did as he wished. Monsieur Rambaud had ended by seating Jeanne in his own chair; and he, who had at first been leaning against the table, had now slipped down at the child's feet. He was on his knees before her, encircling her with one of his arms. On the table was the carriage drawn by the chicken, with some boats, boxes, and bishops' mitres. "Now, do you love me well?" he asked her. "Tell me that you love me well!" "Of course, I love you well; you know it." He stammered and trembled, as though he were making some declaration of love. "And what would you say if I asked you to let me stay here with you always?" "Oh, I should be quite pleased. We would play together, wouldn't we? That would be good fun." "Ah, but you know I should always be here." Jeanne had taken up a boat which she was twisting into a gendarme's hat. "You would need to get mamma's leave," she murmured. By this reply all his fears were again stirred into life. His fate was being decided. "Of course," said he. "But if mamma gave me leave, would you say yes, too?" Jeanne, busy finishing her gendarme's hat, sang out in a rapturous strain: "I would say yes! yes! yes! I would say yes! yes! yes! Come, look how pretty my hat is!" Monsieur Rambaud, with tears in his eyes, rose to his knees and kissed her, while she threw her arms round his neck. He had entrusted the asking of Helene's consent to his brother, whilst he himself sought to secure that of Jeanne. "You see," said the priest, with a smile, "the child is quite content." Helene still retained her grave air, and made no further inquiry. The Abbe, however, again eloquently took up his plea, and emphasized his brother's good qualities. Was he not a treasure-trove of a father for Jeanne? She was well acquainted with him; in trusting him she gave no hostages to fortune. Then, as she still remained silent, the Abbe with great feeling and dignity declared that in the step he had taken he had not thought of his brother, but of her and her happiness. "I believe you; I know how you love me," Helene promptly answered. "Wait; I want to give your brother his answer in your presence." The clock struck ten. Monsieur Rambaud made his entry into the bedroom. With outstretched hands she went to meet him. "I thank you for your proposal, my friend," said she. "I am very grateful; and you have done well in speaking--" She was gazing calmly into his face, holding his big hand in her grasp. Trembling all over, he dared not lift his eyes. "Yet I must have time to consider," she resumed. "You will perhaps have to give me a long time." "Oh! as long as you like--six months, a year, longer if you please," exclaimed he with a light heart, well pleased that she had not forthwith sent him about his business. His excitement brought a faint smile to her face. "But I intend that we shall still continue friends," said she. "You will come here as usual, and simply give me your promise to remain content till I speak to you about the matter. Is that understood?" He had withdrawn his hand, and was now feverishly hunting for his hat, signifying his acquiescence by a continuous bobbing of the head. Then, at the moment of leaving, he found his voice once more. "Listen to me," said he. "You now know that I am there--don't you? Well, whatever happens I shall always be there. That's all the Abbe should have told you. In ten years, if you like; you will only have to make a sign. I shall obey you!" And it was he who a last time took Helene's hand and gripped it as though he would crush it. On the stairs the two brothers turned round with the usual good-bye: "Till next Tuesday!" "Yes, Tuesday," answered Helene. On returning to her room a fresh downfall of rain beating against the shutters filled her with grave concern. Good heavens! what an obstinate downpour, and how wet her poor friends would get! She opened the window and looked down into the street. Sudden gusts of wind were making the gaslights flicker, and amid the shiny puddles and shimmering rain she could see the round figure of Monsieur Rambaud, as he went off with dancing gait, exultant in the darkness, seemingly caring nothing for the drenching torrent. Jeanne, however, was very grave, for she had overheard some of her playfellow's last words. She had just taken off her little boots, and was sitting on the edge of the bed in her nightgown, in deep cogitation. On entering the room to kiss her, her mother discovered her thus. "Good-night, Jeanne; kiss me." Then, as the child did not seem to hear her, Helene sank down in front of her, and clasped her round the waist, asking her in a whisper: "So you would be glad if he came to live with us?" The question seemed to bring no surprise to Jeanne. She was doubtless pondering over this very matter. She slowly nodded her head. "But you know," said her mother, "he would be always beside us--night and day, at table--everywhere!" A great trouble dawned in the clear depths of the child's eyes. She nestled her cheek against her mother's shoulder, kissed her neck, and finally, with a quiver, whispered in her ear: "Mamma, would he kiss you?" A crimson flush rose to Helene's brow. In her first surprise she was at a loss to answer, but at last she murmured: "He would be the same as your father, my darling!" Then Jeanne's little arms tightened their hold, and she burst into loud and grievous sobbing. "Oh! no, no!" she cried chokingly. "I don't want it then! Oh! mamma, do please tell him I don't. Go and tell him I won't have it!" She gasped, and threw herself on her mother's bosom, covering her with tears and kisses. Helene did her utmost to appease her, assuring her she would make it all right; but Jeanne was bent on having a definite answer at once. "Oh! say no! say no, darling mother! You know it would kill me. Never! Oh, never! Eh?" "Well, I'll promise it will never be. Now, be good and lie down." For some minutes longer the child, speechless with emotion, clasped her mother in her arms, as though powerless to tear herself away, and intent on guarding her against all who might seek to take her from her. After some time Helene was able to put her to bed; but for a part of the night she had to watch beside her. Jeanne would start violently in her sleep, and every half-hour her eyes would open to make sure of her mother's presence, and then she would doze off again, with her lips pressed to Helene's hand. CHAPTER VIII. It was a month of exquisite mildness. The April sun had draped the garden in tender green, light and delicate as lace. Twining around the railing were the slender shoots of the lush clematis, while the budding honeysuckle filled the air with its sweet, almost sugary perfume. On both sides of the trim and close-shaven lawn red geraniums and white stocks gave the flower beds a glow of color; and at the end of the garden the clustering elms, hiding the adjacent houses, reared the green drapery of their branches, whose little leaves trembled with the least breath of air. For more than three weeks the sky had remained blue and cloudless. It was like a miraculous spring celebrating the new youth and blossoming that had burst into life in Helene's heart. Every afternoon she went down into the garden with Jeanne. A place was assigned her against the first elm on the right. A chair was ready for her; and on the morrow she would still find on the gravel walk the scattered clippings of thread that had fallen from her work on the previous afternoon. "You are quite at home," Madame Deberle repeated every evening, displaying for Helene one of those affections of hers, which usually lasted some six months. "You will come to-morrow, of course; and try to come earlier, won't you?" Helene, in truth, felt thoroughly at her ease there. By degrees she became accustomed to this nook of greenery, and looked forward to her afternoon visit with the longing of a child. What charmed her most in this garden was the exquisite trimness of the lawn and flower beds. Not a single weed interfered with the symmetry of the plants. Helene spent her time there, calmly and restfully. The neatly laid out flower beds, and the network of ivy, the withered leaves of which were carefully removed by the gardener, could exercise no disturbing influence on her spirit. Seated beneath the deep shadow of the elm-trees, in this quiet spot which Madame Deberle's presence perfumed with a faint odor of musk, she could have imagined herself in a drawing-room; and only the sight of the blue sky, when she raised her head, reminded her that she was out-of-doors, and prompted her to breathe freely. Often, without seeing a soul, the two women would thus pass the afternoon. Jeanne and Lucien played at their feet. There would be long intervals of silence, and then Madame Deberle, who disliked reverie, would chatter for hours, quite satisfied with the silent acquiescence of Helene, and rattling off again if the other even so much as nodded. She would tell endless stories concerning the ladies of her acquaintance, get up schemes for parties during the coming winter, vent magpie opinions on the day's news and the society trifling which filled her narrow brain, the whole intermingled with affectionate outbursts over the children, and sentimental remarks on the delights of friendship. Helene allowed her to squeeze her hands. She did not always lend an attentive ear; but, in this atmosphere of unceasing tenderness, she showed herself greatly touched by Juliette's caresses, and pronounced her to be a perfect angel of kindness. Sometimes, to Madame Deberle's intense delight, a visitor would drop in. Since Easter she had ceased receiving on Saturdays, as was usual at this time of the year. But she dreaded solitude, and a casual unceremonious visit paid her in her garden gave her the greatest pleasure. She was now busily engaged in settling on the watering-place where she would spend her holiday in August. To every visitor she retailed the same talk; discoursed on the fact that her husband would not accompany her to the seaside; and then poured forth a flood of questions, as she could not make up her mind where to go. She did not ask for herself, however; no, it was all on Lucien's account. When the foppish youth Malignon came he seated himself astride a rustic chair. He, indeed, loathed the country; one must be mad, he would declare, to exile oneself from Paris with the idea of catching influenza beside the sea. However, he took part in the discussions on the merits of the various watering-places, all of which were horrid, said he; apart from Trouville there was not a place worthy of any consideration whatever. Day after day Helene listened to the same talk, yet without feeling wearied; indeed, she even derived pleasure from this monotony, which lulled her into dreaming of one thing only. The last day of the month came, and still Madame Deberle had not decided where to go. As Helene was leaving one evening, her friend said to her: "I must go out to-morrow; but that needn't prevent you from coming down here. Wait for me; I shan't be back late." Helene consented; and, alone in the garden, there spent a delicious afternoon. Nothing stirred, save the sparrows fluttering in the trees overhead. This little sunny nook entranced her, and, from that day, her happiest afternoons were those on which her friend left her alone. A closer intimacy was springing up between the Deberles and herself. She dined with them like a friend who is pressed to stay when the family sits down to table; when she lingered under the elm-trees and Pierre came down to announce dinner, Juliette would implore her to remain, and she sometimes yielded. They were family dinners, enlivened by the noisy pranks of the children. Doctor Deberle and Helene seemed good friends, whose sensible and somewhat reserved natures sympathized well. Thus it was that Juliette frequently declared: "Oh, you two would get on capitally! Your composure exasperates me!" The doctor returned from his round of visits at about six o'clock every evening. He found the ladies in the garden, and sat down beside them. On the earlier occasions, Helene started up with the idea of leaving her friends to themselves, but her sudden departure displeased Juliette greatly, and she now perforce had to remain. She became almost a member of this family, which appeared to be so closely united. On the doctor's arrival his wife held up her cheek to him, always with the same loving gesture, and he kissed her; then, as Lucien began clambering up his legs, he kept him on his knees while chatting away. The child would clap his tiny hands on his father's mouth, pull his hair, and play so many pranks that in the upshot he had to be put down, and told to go and play with Jeanne. The fun would bring a smile to Helene's face, and she neglected her work for the moment, to gaze at father, mother, and child. The kiss of the husband and wife gave her no pain, and Lucien's tricks filled her with soft emotion. It might have been said that she had found a haven of refuge amidst this family's quiet content. Meanwhile the sun would sink into the west, gilding the tree tops with its rays. Serene peacefulness fell from the grey heavens. Juliette, whose curiosity was insatiable, even in company with strangers, plagued her husband with ceaseless questions, and often lacked the patience to wait his replies. "Where have you been? What have you been about?" Thereupon he would describe his round of visits to them, repeat any news of what was going on, or speak of some cloth or piece of furniture he had caught a glimpse of in a shop window. While he was speaking, his eyes often met those of Helene, but neither turned away the head. They gazed into each other's face for a moment with grave looks, as though heart were being revealed to heart; but after a little they smiled and their eyes dropped. Juliette, fidgety and sprightly, though she would often assume a studied languor, allowed them no opportunity for lengthy conversation, but burst with her interruptions into any talk whatever. Still they exchanged a few words, quite commonplace, slowly articulated sentences which seemed to assume a deep meaning, and to linger in the air after having been spoken. They approvingly punctuated each word the other uttered, as though they had thoughts in common. It was an intimate sympathy that was growing up between them, springing from the depths of their beings, and becoming closer even when they were silent. Sometimes Juliette, rather ashamed of monopolizing all the talk, would cease her magpie chatter. "Dear me!" she would exclaim, "you are getting bored, aren't you? We are talking of matters which can have no possible interest for you." "Oh, never mind me," Helene answered blithely. "I never tire. It is a pleasure to me to listen and say nothing." She was uttering no untruth. It was during the lengthy periods of silence that she experienced most delight in being there. With her head bent over her work, only lifting her eyes at long intervals to exchange with the doctor those interminable looks that riveted their hearts the closer, she willingly surrendered herself to the egotism of her emotion. Between herself and him, she now confessed it, there existed a secret sentiment, a something very sweet--all the sweeter because no one in the world shared it with them. But she kept her secret with a tranquil mind, her sense of honor quite unruffled, for no thought of evil ever disturbed her. How good he was to his wife and child! She loved him the more when he made Lucien jump or kissed Juliette on the cheek. Since she had seen him in his own home their friendship had greatly increased. She was now as one of the family; she never dreamt that the intimacy could be broken. And within her own breast she called him Henri--naturally, too, from hearing Juliette address him so. When her lips said "Sir," through all her being "Henri" was re-echoed. One day the doctor found Helene alone under the elms. Juliette now went out nearly every afternoon. "Hello! is my wife not with you?" he exclaimed. "No, she has left me to myself," she answered laughingly. "It is true you have come home earlier than usual." The children were playing at the other end of the garden. He sat down beside her. Their _tete-a-tete_ produced no agitation in either of them. For nearly an hour they spoke of all sorts of matters, without for a moment feeling any desire to allude to the tenderness which filled their hearts. What was the good of referring to that? Did they not well know what might have been said? They had no confession to make. Theirs was the joy of being together, of talking of many things, of surrendering themselves to the pleasure of their isolation without a shadow of regret, in the very spot where every evening he embraced his wife in her presence. That day he indulged in some jokes respecting her devotion to work. "Do you know," said he, "I do not even know the color of your eyes? They are always bent on your needle." She raised her head and looked straight into his face, as was her custom. "Do you wish to tease me?" she asked gently. But he went on. "Ah! they are grey--grey, tinged with blue, are they not?" This was the utmost limit to which they dared go; but these words, the first that had sprung to his lips, were fraught with infinite tenderness. From that day onwards he frequently found her alone in the twilight. Despite themselves, and without their having any knowledge of it, their intimacy grew apace. They spoke in an altered voice, with caressing inflections, which were not apparent when others were present. And yet, when Juliette came in, full of gossip about her day in town, they could keep up the talk they had already begun without even troubling themselves to draw their chairs apart. It seemed as though this lovely springtide and this garden, with its blossoming lilac, were prolonging within their hearts the first rapture of love. Towards the end of the month, Madame Deberle grew excited over a grand idea. The thought of giving a children's ball had suddenly struck her. The season was already far advanced, but the scheme took such hold on her foolish brain that she hurried on the preparations with reckless haste. She desired that the affair should be quite perfect; it was to be a fancy-dress ball. And, in her own home, and in other people's houses, everywhere, in short, she now spoke of nothing but her ball. The conversations on the subject which took place in the garden were endless. The foppish Malignon thought the project rather stupid, still he condescended to take some interest in it, and promised to bring a comic singer with whom he was acquainted. One afternoon, while they were all sitting under the trees, Juliette introduced the grave question of the costumes which Lucien and Jeanne should wear. "It is so difficult to make up one's mind," said she. "I have been thinking of a clown's dress in white satin." "Oh, that's too common!" declared Malignon. "There will be a round dozen of clowns at your ball. Wait, you must have something novel." Thereupon he began gravely pondering, sucking the head of his cane all the while. Pauline came up at the moment, and proclaimed her desire to appear as a soubrette. "You!" screamed Madame Deberle, in astonishment. "You won't appear in costume at all! Do you think yourself a child, you great stupid? You will oblige me by coming in a white dress." "Oh, but it would have pleased me so!" exclaimed Pauline, who, despite her eighteen years and plump girlish figure, liked nothing better than to romp with a band of little ones. Meanwhile Helene sat at the foot of her tree working away, and raising her head at times to smile at the doctor and Monsieur Rambaud, who stood in front of her conversing. Monsieur Rambaud had now become quite intimate with the Deberle family. "Well," said the doctor, "and how are you going to dress, Jeanne?" He got no further, for Malignon burst out: "I've got it! I've got it! Lucien must be a marquis of the time of Louis XV." He waved his cane with a triumphant air; but, as no one of the company hailed his idea with enthusiasm, he appeared astonished. "What, don't you see it? Won't it be for Lucien to receive his little guests? So you place him, dressed as a marquis, at the drawing-room door, with a large bouquet of roses on his coat, and he bows to the ladies." "But there will be dozens of marquises at the ball!" objected Juliette. "What does that matter?" replied Malignon coolly. "The more marquises the greater the fun. I tell you it is the best thing you can hit upon. The master of the house must be dressed as a marquis, or the ball will be a complete failure." Such was his conviction of his scheme's success that at last it was adopted by Juliette with enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, a dress in the Pompadour style, white satin embroidered with posies, would be altogether charming. "And what about Jeanne?" again asked the doctor. The little girl had just buried her head against her mother's shoulder in the caressing manner so characteristic of her; and as an answer was about to cross Helene's lips, she murmured: "Oh! mamma, you know what you promised me, don't you?" "What was it?" asked those around her. Then, as her daughter gave her an imploring look, Helene laughingly replied: "Jeanne does not wish her dress to be known." "Yes, that's so," said the child; "you don't create any effect when you tell your dress beforehand." Every one was tickled with this display of coquetry, and Monsieur Rambaud thought he might tease the child about it. For some time past Jeanne had been ill-tempered with him, and the poor man, at his wits' end to hit upon a mode of again gaining her favor, thought teasing her the best method of conciliation. Keeping his eyes on her face, he several times repeated: "I know; I shall tell, I shall tell!" Jeanne, however, became quite livid. Her gentle, sickly face assumed an expression of ferocious anger; her brow was furrowed by two deep wrinkles, and her chin drooped with nervous agitation. "You!" she screamed excitedly; "you will say nothing!" And, as he still feigned a resolve to speak, she rushed at him madly, and shouted out: "Hold your tongue! I will have you hold your tongue! I will! I will!" Helene had been unable to prevent this fit of blind anger, such as sometimes took possession of the child, and with some harshness exclaimed: "Jeanne, take care; I shall whip you!" But Jeanne paid no heed, never once heard her. Trembling from head to foot, stamping on the ground, and choking with rage, she again and again repeated, "I will! I will!" in a voice that grew more and more hoarse and broken; and her hands convulsively gripped hold of Monsieur Rambaud's arm, which she twisted with extraordinary strength. In vain did Helene threaten her. At last, perceiving her inability to quell her by severity, and grieved to the heart by such a display before so many people, she contented herself by saying gently: "Jeanne, you are grieving me very much." The child immediately quitted her hold and turned her head. And when she caught sight of her mother, with disconsolate face and eyes swimming with repressed tears, she on her side burst into loud sobs, and threw herself on Helene's neck, exclaiming in her grief: "No, mamma! no, mamma!" She passed her hands over her mother's face, as though to prevent her weeping. Helene, however, slowly put her from her, and then the little one, broken-hearted and distracted, threw herself on a seat a short distance off, where her sobs broke out louder than ever. Lucien, to whom she was always held up as an example to follow, gazed at her surprised and somewhat pleased. And then, as Helene folded up her work, apologizing for so regrettable an incident, Juliette remarked to her: "Dear me! we have to pardon children everything. Besides, the little one has the best of hearts, and is grieved so much, poor darling, that she has been already punished too severely." So saying she called Jeanne to come and kiss her; but the child remained on her seat, rejecting the offer of forgiveness, and still choking with tears. Monsieur Rambaud and the doctor, however, walked to her side, and the former, bending over her, asked, in tones husky with emotion: "Tell me, my pet, what has vexed you? What have I done to you?" "Oh!" she replied, drawing away her hands and displaying a face full of anguish, "you wanted to take my mamma from me!" The doctor, who was listening, burst into laughter. Monsieur Rambaud at first failed to grasp her meaning. "What is this you're talking of?" "Yes, indeed, the other Tuesday! Oh! you know very well; you were on your knees, and asked me what I should say if you were to stay with us!" The smile vanished from the doctor's face; his lips became ashy pale, and quivered. A flush, on the other hand, mounted to Monsieur Rambaud's cheek, and he whispered to Jeanne: "But you said yourself that we should always play together?" "No, no; I did not know at the time," the child resumed excitedly. "I tell you I don't want it. Don't ever speak to me of it again, and then we shall be friends." Helene was on her feet now, with her needlework in its basket, and the last words fell on her ear. "Come, let us go up, Jeanne," she said; "your tears are not pleasant company." She bowed, and pushed the child before her. The doctor, with livid face, gazed at her fixedly. Monsieur Rambaud was in dismay. As for Madame Deberle and Pauline, they had taken hold of Lucien, and were making him turn between them, while excitedly discussing the question of his Pompadour dress. On the morrow Helene was left alone under the elms. Madame Deberle was running about in the interests of her ball, and had taken Lucien and Jeanne with her. On the doctor's return home, at an earlier hour than usual, he hurried down the garden steps. However, he did not seat himself, but wandered aimlessly round the young woman, at times tearing strips of bark from the trees with his finger-nails. She lifted her eyes for a moment, feeling anxious at sight of his agitation; and then again began plying her needle with a somewhat trembling hand. "The weather is going to break up," said she, feeling uncomfortable as the silence continued. "The afternoon seems quite cold." "We are only in April, remember," he replied, with a brave effort to control his voice. Then he appeared to be on the point of leaving her, but turned round, and suddenly asked: "So you are going to get married?" This abrupt question took her wholly by surprise, and her work fell from her hands. Her face blanched, but by a supreme effort of will remained unimpassioned, as though she were a marble statue, fixing dilated eyes upon him. She made no reply, and he continued in imploring tones: "Oh! I pray you, answer me. One word, one only. Are you going to get married?" "Yes, perhaps. What concern is it of yours?" she retorted, in a tone of icy indifference. He made a passionate gesture, and exclaimed: "It is impossible!" "Why should it be?" she asked, still keeping her eyes fixed on his face. Her glance stayed the words upon his lips, and he was forced to silence. For a moment longer he remained near her, pressing his hands to his brow, and then fled away, with a feeling of suffocation in his throat, dreading lest he might give expression to his despair; while she, with assumed tranquillity, once more turned to her work. But the spell of those delicious afternoons was gone. Next day shone fair and sunny, and Helene seemed ill at ease from the moment she found herself alone with him. The pleasant intimacy, the happy trustfulness, which sanctioned their sitting side by side in blissful security, and revelling in the unalloyed joy of being together, no longer existed. Despite his intense carefulness to give her no cause for alarm, he would sometimes gaze at her and tremble with sudden excitement, while his face crimsoned with a rush of blood. From her own heart had fled its wonted happy calm; quivers ran through her frame; she felt languid; her hands grew weary, and forsook their work. She now no longer allowed Jeanne to wander from her side. Between himself and her the doctor found this constant onlooker, watching him with large, clear eyes. But what pained Helene most was that she now felt ill at ease in Madame Deberle's company. When the latter returned of an afternoon, with her hair swept about by the wind, and called her "my dear" while relating the incidents of some shopping expedition, she no longer listened with her former quiet smile. A storm arose from the depths of her soul, stirring up feelings to which she dared not give a name. Shame and spite seemed mingled in them. However, her honorable nature gained the mastery, and she gave her hand to Juliette, but without being able to repress the shudder which ran through her as she pressed her friend's warm fingers. The weather had now broken up. Frequent rain forced the ladies to take refuge in the Japanese pavilion. The garden, with its whilom exquisite order, became transformed into a lake, and no one dared venture on the walks, on account of the mud. However, whenever the sun peeped out from behind the clouds, the dripping greenery soon dried; pearls hung from each little blossom of the lilac trees; and under the elms big drops fell splashing on the ground. "At last I've arranged it; it will be on Saturday," said Madame Deberle one day. "My dear, I'm quite tired out with the whole affair. Now, you'll be here at two o'clock, won't you? Jeanne will open the ball with Lucien." And thereupon, surrendering to a flow of tenderness, in ecstasy over the preparations for her ball, she embraced both children, and, laughingly catching hold of Helene, pressed two resounding kisses on her cheeks. "That's my reward!" she exclaimed merrily. "You know I deserve it; I have run about enough. You'll see what a success it will be!" But Helene remained chilled to the heart, while the doctor, with Lucien clinging to his neck, gazed at them over the child's fair head. CHAPTER IX. In the hall of the doctor's house stood Pierre, in dress coat and white cravat, throwing open the door as each carriage rolled up. Puffs of dank air rushed in; the afternoon was rainy, and a yellow light illumined the narrow hall, with its curtained doorways and array of green plants. It was only two o'clock, but the evening seemed as near at hand as on a dismal winter's day. However, as soon as the servant opened the door of the first drawing-room, a stream of light dazzled the guests. The shutters had been closed, and the curtains carefully drawn, and no gleam from the dull sky could gain admittance. The lamps standing here and there on the furniture, and the lighted candles of the chandelier and the crystal wall-brackets, gave the apartment somewhat the appearance of a brilliantly illuminated chapel. Beyond the smaller drawing-room, whose green hangings rather softened the glare of the light, was the large black-and-gold one, decorated as magnificently as for the ball which Madame Deberle gave every year in the month of January. The children were beginning to arrive, while Pauline gave her attention to the ranging of a number of chairs in front of the dining-room doorway, where the door had been removed from its hinges and replaced by a red curtain. "Papa," she cried, "just lend me a hand! We shall never be ready." Monsieur Letellier, who, with his arms behind his back, was gazing at the chandelier, hastened to give the required assistance. Pauline carried the chairs about herself. She had paid due deference to her sister's request, and was robed in white; only her dress opened squarely at the neck and displayed her bosom. "At last we are ready," she exclaimed: "they can come when they like. But what is Juliette dreaming about? She has been ever so long dressing Lucien!" Just at that moment Madame Deberle entered, leading the little marquis, and everybody present began raising admiring remarks. "Oh! what a love! What a darling he is!" His coat was of white satin embroidered with flowers, his long waistcoat was embroidered with gold, and his knee-breeches were of cherry-colored silk. Lace clustered round his chin, and delicate wrists. A sword, a mere toy with a great rose-red knot, rattled against his hip. "Now you must do the honors," his mother said to him, as she led him into the outer room. For eight days past he had been repeating his lesson, and struck a cavalier attitude with his little legs, his powdered head thrown slightly back, and his cocked hat tucked under his left arm. As each of his lady-guests was ushered into the room, he bowed low, offered his arm, exchanged courteous greetings, and returned to the threshold. Those near him laughed over his intense seriousness in which there was a dash of effrontery. This was the style in which he received Marguerite Tissot, a little lady five years old, dressed in a charming milkmaid costume, with a milk-can hanging at her side; so too did he greet the Berthier children, Blanche and Sophie, the one masquerading as Folly, the other dressed in soubrette style; and he had even the hardihood to tackle Valentine de Chermette, a tall young lady of some fourteen years, whom her mother always dressed in Spanish costume, and at her side his figure appeared so slight that she seemed to be carrying him along. However, he was profoundly embarrassed in the presence of the Levasseur family, which numbered five girls, who made their appearance in a row of increasing height, the youngest being scarcely two years old, while the eldest was ten. All five were arrayed in Red Riding-Hood costumes, their head-dresses and gowns being in poppy-colored satin with black velvet bands, with which their lace aprons strikingly contrasted. At last Lucien, making up his mind, bravely flung away his three-cornered hat, and led the two elder girls, one hanging on each arm, into the drawing-room, closely followed by the three others. There was a good deal of laughter at it, but the little man never lost his self-possession for a moment. In the meantime Madame Deberle was taking her sister to task in a corner. "Good gracious! is it possible! what a fearfully low-necked dress you are wearing!" "Dear, dear! what have I done now? Papa hasn't said a word," answered Pauline coolly. "If you're anxious, I'll put some flowers at my breast." She plucked a handful of blossoms from a flower-stand where they were growing and allowed them to nestle in her bosom; while Madame Deberle was surrounded by several mammas in stylish visiting-dresses, who were already profuse in their compliments about her ball. As Lucien was passing them, his mother arranged a loose curl of his powdered hair, while he stood on tip-toe to whisper in her ear: "Where's Jeanne?" "She will be here immediately, my darling. Take good care not to fall. Run away, there comes little Mademoiselle Guiraud. Ah! she is wearing an Alsatian costume." The drawing-room was now filling rapidly; the rows of chairs fronting the red curtain were almost all occupied, and a hubbub of children's voices was rising. The boys were flocking into the room in groups. There were already three Harlequins, four Punches, a Figaro, some Tyrolese peasants, and a few Highlanders. Young Master Berthier was dressed as a page. Little Guiraud, a mere bantling of two-and-a-half summers, wore his clown's costume in so comical a style that every one as he passed lifted him up and kissed him. "Here comes Jeanne," exclaimed Madame Deberle, all at once. "Oh, she is lovely!" A murmur ran round the room; heads were bent forward, and every one gave vent to exclamations of admiration. Jeanne was standing on the threshold of the outer room, awaiting her mother, who was taking off her cloak in the hall. The child was robed in a Japanese dress of unusual splendor. The gown, embroidered with flowers and strange-looking birds, swept to her feet, which were hidden from view; while beneath her broad waist-ribbon the flaps, drawn aside, gave a glimpse of a green petticoat, watered with yellow. Nothing could be more strangely bewitching than her delicate features seen under the shadow of her hair, coiled above her head with long pins thrust through it, while her chin and oblique eyes, small and sparkling, pictured to the life a young lady of Yeddo, strolling amidst the perfume of tea and benzoin. And she lingered there hesitatingly, with all the sickly languor of a tropical flower pining for the land of its birth. Behind her, however, appeared Helene. Both, in thus suddenly passing from the dull daylight of the street into the brilliant glare of the wax candles, blinked their eyes as though blinded, while their faces were irradiated with smiles. The rush of warm air and the perfumes, the scent of violets rising above all else, almost stifled them, and brought a flush of red to their cheeks. Each guest, on passing the doorway, wore a similar air of surprise and hesitancy. "Why, Lucien! where are you?" exclaimed Madame Deberle. The boy had not caught sight of Jeanne. But now he rushed forward and seized her arm, forgetting to make his bow. And they were so dainty, so loving, the little marquis in his flowered coat, and the Japanese maiden in her purple embroidered gown, that they might have been taken for two statuettes of Dresden china, daintily gilded and painted, into which life had been suddenly infused. "You know, I was waiting for you," whispered Lucien. "Oh, it is so nasty to give everybody my arm! Of course, we'll keep beside each other, eh?" And he sat himself down with her in the first row of chairs, wholly oblivious of his duties as host. "Oh, I was so uneasy!" purred Juliette into Helene's ear. "I was beginning to fear that Jeanne had been taken ill." Helene proffered apology; dressing children, said she, meant endless labor. She was still standing in a corner of the drawing-room, one of a cluster of ladies, when her heart told her that the doctor was approaching behind her. He was making his way from behind the red curtain, beneath which he had dived to give some final instructions. But suddenly he came to a standstill. He, too, had divined her presence, though she had not yet turned her head. Attired in a dress of black grenadine, she had never appeared more queenly in her beauty; and a thrill passed through him as he breathed the cool air which she had brought with her from outside, and wafted from her shoulders and arms, gleaming white under their transparent covering. "Henri has no eyes for anybody," exclaimed Pauline, with a laugh. "Ah, good-day, Henri!" Thereupon he advanced towards the group of ladies, with a courteous greeting. Mademoiselle Aurelie, who was amongst them, engaged his attention for the moment to point out to him a nephew whom she had brought with her. He was all complaisance. Helene, without speaking, gave him her hand, encased in its black glove, but he dared not clasp it with marked force. "Oh! here you are!" said Madame Deberle, as she appeared beside them. "I have been looking for you everywhere. It is nearly three o'clock; they had better begin." "Certainly; at once," was his reply. The drawing-room was now crowded. All round it, in the brilliant glare thrown from the chandelier, sat the fathers and mothers, their walking costumes serving to fringe the circle with less vivid colors. Some ladies, drawing their chairs together, formed groups; men standing motionless along the walls filled up the gaps; while in the doorway leading to the next room a cluster of frock-coated guests could be seen crowding together and peering over each other's shoulders. The light fell wholly on the little folks, noisy in their glee, as they rustled about in their seats in the centre of the large room. There were almost a hundred children packed together; in an endless variety of gay costumes, bright with blue and red. It was like a sea of fair heads, varying from pale yellow to ruddy gold, with here and there bows and flowers gleaming vividly--or like a field of ripe grain, spangled with poppies and cornflowers, and waving to and fro as though stirred by a breeze. At times, amidst this confusion of ribbons and lace, of silk and velvet, a face was turned round--a pink nose, a pair of blue eyes, a smiling or pouting little mouth. There were some, no higher than one's boots, who were buried out of sight between big lads of ten years of age, and whom their mothers sought from a distance, but in vain. A few of the boys looked bored and foolish by the side of girls who were busy spreading out their skirts. Some, however, were already very venturesome, jogging the elbows of their fair neighbors with whom they were unacquainted, and laughing in their faces. But the royalty of the gathering remained with the girls, some of whom, clustering in groups, stirred about in such a way as to threaten destruction to their chairs, and chattered so loudly that the grown-up folks could no longer hear one another speaking. And all eyes were intently gazing at the red curtain. Slowly was it drawn aside, and in the recess of the doorway appeared a puppet-show. There was a hushed silence. Then all at once Punch sprang in, with so ferocious a yell that baby Guiraud could not restrain a responsive cry of terror and delight. It was one of those bloodthirsty dramas in which Punch, having administered a sound beating to the magistrate, murders the policeman, and tramples with ferocious glee on every law, human and divine. At every cudgelling bestowed on the wooden heads the pitiless audience went into shrieks of laughter; and the sharp thrusts delivered by the puppets at each other's breasts, the duels in which they beat a tattoo on one another's skulls as though they were empty pumpkins, the awful havoc of legs and arms, reducing the characters to a jelly, served to increase the roars of laughter which rang out from all sides. But the climax of enjoyment was reached when Punch sawed off the policeman's head on the edge of the stage; an operation provocative of such hysterical mirth that the rows of juveniles were plunged into confusion, swaying to and fro with glee till they all but fell on one another. One tiny girl, but four years old, all pink and white, considered the spectacle so entrancing that she pressed her little hands devoutly to her heart. Others burst into applause, while the boys laughed, with mouths agape, their deeper voices mingling with the shrill peals from the girls. "How amused they are!" whispered the doctor. He had returned to his place near Helene. She was in high spirits like the children. Behind her, he sat inhaling the intoxicating perfume which came from her hair. And as one puppet on the stage dealt another an exceptionally hard knock she turned to him and exclaimed: "Do you know, it is awfully funny!" The youngsters, crazy with excitement, were now interfering with the action of the drama. They were giving answers to the various characters. One young lady, who must have been well up in the plot, was busy explaining what would next happen. "He'll beat his wife to death in a minute! Now they are going to hang him!" The youngest of the Levasseur girls, who was two years old, shrieked out all at once: "Mamma, mamma, will they put him on bread and water?" All sorts of exclamations and reflections followed. Meanwhile Helene, gazing into the crowd of children, remarked: "I cannot see Jeanne. Is she enjoying herself?" Then the doctor bent forward, with head perilously near her own, and whispered: "There she is, between that harlequin and the Norman peasant maiden! You can see the pins gleaming in her hair. She is laughing very heartily." He still leaned towards her, her cool breath playing on his cheek. Till now no confession had escaped them; preserving silence, their intimacy had only been marred for a few days past by a vague sensation of discomfort. But amidst these bursts of happy laughter, gazing upon the little folks before her, Helene became once more, in sooth, a very child, surrendering herself to her feelings, while Henri's breath beat warm upon her neck. The whacks from the cudgel, now louder than ever, filled her with a quiver which inflated her bosom, and she turned towards him with sparkling eyes. "Good heavens! what nonsense it all is!" she said each time. "See how they hit one another!" "Oh! their heads are hard enough!" he replied, trembling. This was all his heart could find to say. Their minds were fast lapsing into childhood once more. Punch's unedifying life was fostering languor within their breasts. When the drama drew to its close with the appearance of the devil, and the final fight and general massacre ensued, Helene in leaning back pressed against Henri's hand, which was resting on the back of her arm-chair; while the juvenile audience, shouting and clapping their hands, made the very chairs creak with their enthusiasm. The red curtain dropped again, and the uproar was at its height when Malignon's presence was announced by Pauline, in her customary style: "Ah! here's the handsome Malignon!" He made his way into the room, shoving the chairs aside, quite out of breath. "Dear me! what a funny idea to close the shutters!" he exclaimed, surprised and hesitating. "People might imagine that somebody in the house was dead." Then, turning towards Madame Deberle, who was approaching him, he continued: "Well, you can boast of having made me run about! Ever since the morning I have been hunting for Perdiguet; you know whom I mean, my singer fellow. But I haven't been able to lay my hands on him, and I have brought you the great Morizot instead." The great Morizot was an amateur who entertained drawing-rooms by conjuring with juggler-balls. A gipsy table was assigned to him, and on this he accomplished his most wonderful tricks; but it all passed off without the spectators evincing the slightest interest. The poor little darlings were pulling serious faces; some of the tinier mites fell fast asleep, sucking their thumbs. The older children turned their heads and smiled towards their parents, who were themselves yawning behind their hands. There was thus a general feeling of relief when the great Morizot decided to take his table away. "Oh! he's awfully clever," whispered Malignon into Madame Deberle's neck. But the red curtain was drawn aside once again, and an entrancing spectacle brought all the little folks to their feet. Along the whole extent of the dining-room stretched the table, laid and bedecked as for a grand dinner, and illumined by the bright radiance of the central lamp and a pair of large candelabra. There were fifty covers laid; in the middle and at either end were shallow baskets, full of flowers; between these towered tall _epergnes_, filled to overflowing with crackers in gilded and colored paper. Then there were mountains of decorated cakes, pyramids of iced fruits, piles of sandwiches, and, less prominent, a whole host of symmetrically disposed plates, bearing sweetmeats and pastry: buns, cream puffs, and _brioches_ alternating with dry biscuits, cracknals, and fancy almond cakes. Jellies were quivering in their glass dishes. Whipped creams waited in porcelain bowls. And round the table sparkled the silver helmets of champagne bottles, no higher than one's hand, made specially to suit the little guests. It all looked like one of those gigantic feasts which children conjure up in dreamland--a feast served with the solemnity that attends a repast of grown-up folks--a fairy transformation of the table to which their own parents sat down, and on which the horns of plenty of innumerable pastry-cooks and toy dealers had been emptied. "Come, come, give the ladies your arms!" said Madame Deberle, her face covered with smiles as she watched the delight of the children. But the filing off in couples proved a lure. Lucien, who had triumphantly taken Jeanne's arm, went first. But the others following behind fell somewhat into confusion, and the mothers were forced to come and assign them places, remaining close at hand, especially behind the babies, whom they watched lest any mischance should befall them. Truth to tell, the guests at first seemed rather uncomfortable; they looked at one another, felt afraid to lay hands on the good things, and were vaguely disquieted by this new social organization in which everything appeared to be topsy-turvy, the children seated at table while their parents remained standing. At length the older ones gained confidence and commenced the attack. And when the mothers entered into the fray, and cut up the large cakes, helping those in their vicinity, the feast speedily became very animated and noisy. The exquisite symmetry of the table was destroyed as though by a tempest. The two Berthier girls, Blanche and Sophie, laughed at the sight of their plates, which had been filled with something of everything--jam, custard, cake, and fruit. The five young ladies of the Levasseur family took sole possession of a corner laden with dainties, while Valentine, proud of her fourteen years, acted the lady's part, and looked after the comfort of her little neighbors. Lucien, however, impatient to display his politeness, uncorked a bottle of champagne, but in so clumsy a way that the whole contents spurted over his cherry silk breeches. There was quite a to-do about it. "Kindly leave the bottles alone! I am to uncork the champagne," shouted Pauline. She bustled about in an extraordinary fashion, purely for her own amusement. On the entry of a servant with the chocolate pot, she seized it and filled the cups with the greatest glee, as active in the performance as any restaurant waiter. Next she took round some ices and glasses of syrup and water, set them down for a moment to stuff a little baby-girl who had been overlooked, and then went off again, asking every one questions. "What is it you wish, my pet? Eh? A cake? Yes, my darling, wait a moment; I am going to pass you the oranges. Now eat away, you little stupids, you shall play afterwards." Madame Deberle, calm and dignified, declared that they ought to be left alone, and would acquit themselves very well. At one end of the room sat Helene and some other ladies laughing at the scene which the table presented; all the rosy mouths were eating with the full strength of their beautiful white teeth. And nothing could eclipse in drollery the occasional lapses from the polished behavior of well-bred children to the outrageous freaks of young savages. With both hands gripping their glasses, they drank to the very dregs, smeared their faces, and stained their dresses. The clamor grew worse. The last of the dishes were plundered. Jeanne herself began dancing on her chair as she heard the strains of a quadrille coming from the drawing-room; and on her mother approaching to upbraid her with having eaten too much, she replied: "Oh! mamma, I feel so happy to-day!" But now the other children were rising as they heard the music. Slowly the table thinned, until there only remained a fat, chubby infant right in the middle. He seemingly cared little for the attractions of the piano; with a napkin round his neck, and his chin resting on the tablecloth--for he was a mere chit--he opened his big eyes, and protruded his lips each time that his mamma offered him a spoonful of chocolate. The contents of the cup vanished, and he licked his lips as the last mouthful went down his throat, with eyes more agape than ever. "By Jove! my lad, you eat heartily!" exclaimed Malignon, who was watching him with a thoughtful air. Now came the division of the "surprise" packets. Each child, on leaving the table, bore away one of the large gilt paper twists, the coverings of which were hastily torn off and from them poured forth a host of toys, grotesque hats made of tissue paper, birds and butterflies. But the joy of joys was the possession of a cracker. Every "surprise" packet had its cracker; and these the lads pulled at gallantly, delighted with the noise, while the girls shut their eyes, making many tries before the explosion took place. For a time the sharp crackling of all this musketry alone could be heard; and the uproar was still lasting when the children returned to the drawing-room, where lively quadrille music resounded from the piano. "I could enjoy a cake," murmured Mademoiselle Aurelie, as she sat down. At the table, which was now deserted, but covered with all the litter of the huge feast, a few ladies--some dozen or so, who had preferred to wait till the children had retired--now sat down. As no servant could be found, Malignon bustled hither and thither in attendance. He poured out all that remained in the chocolate pot, shook up the dregs of the bottles, and was even successful in discovering some ices. But amidst all these gallant doings of his, he could not quit one idea, and that was--why had they decided on closing the shutters? "You know," he asserted, "the place looks like a cellar." Helene had remained standing, engaged in conversation with Madame Deberle. As the latter directed her steps towards the drawing-room, her companion prepared to follow, when she felt a gentle touch. Behind her was the doctor, smiling; he was ever near her. "Are you not going to take anything?" he asked. And the trivial question cloaked so earnest an entreaty that her heart was filled with profound emotion. She knew well enough that each of his words was eloquent of another thing. The excitement springing from the gaiety which pulsed around her was slowly gaining on her. Some of the fever of all these little folks, now dancing and shouting, coursed in her own veins. With flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, she at first declined. "No, thank you, nothing at all." But he pressed her, and in the end, ill at ease and anxious to get rid of him, she yielded. "Well, then, a cup of tea." He hurried off and returned with the cup, his hands trembling as he handed it to her. While she was sipping the tea he drew nearer to her, his lips quivering nervously with the confession springing from his heart. She in her turn drew back from him, and, returning him the empty cup, made her escape while he was placing it on a sideboard, thus leaving him alone in the dining-room with Mademoiselle Aurelie, who was slowly masticating, and subjecting each dish in succession to a close scrutiny. Within the drawing-room the piano was sending forth its loudest strains, and from end to end of the floor swept the ball with its charming drolleries. A circle of onlookers had gathered round the quadrille party with which Lucien and Jeanne were dancing. The little marquis became rather mixed over the figures; he only got on well when he had occasion to take hold of Jeanne; and then he gripped her by the waist and whirled around. Jeanne preserved her equilibrium, somewhat vexed by his rumpling her dress; but the delights of the dance taking full possession of her, she caught hold of him in her turn and lifted him off his feet. The white satin coat embroidered with nosegays mingled with the folds of the gown woven with flowers and strange birds, and the two little figures of old Dresden ware assumed all the grace and novelty of some whatnot ornaments. The quadrille over, Helene summoned Jeanne to her side, in order to rearrange her dress. "It is his fault, mamma," was the little one's excuse. "He rubs against me--he's a dreadful nuisance." Around the drawing-room the faces of the parents were wreathed with smiles. As soon as the music began again all the little ones were once more in motion. Seeing, however, that they were observed they felt distrustful, remained grave, and checked their leaps in order to keep up appearances. Some of them knew how to dance; but the majority were ignorant of the steps, and their limbs were evidently a source of embarrassment to them. But Pauline interposed: "I must see to them! Oh, you little stupids!" She threw herself into the midst of the quadrille, caught hold of two of them, one grasping her right hand the other her left, and managed to infuse such life into the dance that the wooden flooring creaked beneath them. The only sounds now audible rose from the hurrying hither and thither of tiny feet beating wholly out of time, the piano alone keeping to the dance measure. Some more of the older people joined in the fun. Helene and Madame Deberle, noticing some little maids who were too bashful to venture forth, dragged them into the thickest of the throng. It was they who led the figures, pushed the lads forward, and arranged the dancing in rings; and the mothers passed them the youngest of the babies, so that they might make them skip about for a moment, holding them the while by both hands. The ball was now at its height. The dancers enjoyed themselves to their hearts' content, laughing and pushing each other about like some boarding school mad with glee over the absence of the teacher. Nothing, truly, could surpass in unalloyed gaiety this carnival of youngsters, this assemblage of miniature men and women--akin to a veritable microcosm, wherein the fashions of every people mingled with the fantastic creations of romance and drama. The ruddy lips and blue eyes, the faces breathing love, invested the dresses with the fresh purity of childhood. The scene realized to the mind the merrymaking of a fairy-tale to which trooped Cupids in disguise to honor the betrothal of some Prince Charming. "I'm stifling!" exclaimed Malignon. "I'm off to inhale some fresh air." As he left the drawing-room he threw the door wide open. The daylight from the street then entered in a lurid stream, bedimming the glare of lamps and candles. In this fashion every quarter of an hour Malignon opened the door to let in some fresh air. Still there was no cessation of the piano-playing. Little Guiraud, in her Alsatian costume, with a butterfly of black ribbon in her golden hair, swung round in the dance with a harlequin twice her height. A Highlander whirled Marguerite Tissot round so madly that she lost her milk-pail. The two Berthier girls, Blanche and Sophie, who were inseparables, were dancing together; the soubrette in the arms of Folly, whose bells were jingling merrily. A glance could not be thrown over the assemblage without one of the Levasseur girls coming into view; the Red Riding-Hoods seemed to increase in number; caps and gowns of gleaming red satin slashed with black velvet everywhere leaped into sight. Meanwhile some of the older boys and girls had found refuge in the adjacent saloon, where they could dance more at their ease. Valentine de Chermette, cloaked in the mantilla of a Spanish senorita, was executing some marvellous steps in front of a young gentleman who had donned evening dress. Suddenly there was a burst of laughter which drew every one to the sight; behind a door in a corner, baby Guiraud, the two-year-old clown, and a mite of a girl of his own age, in peasant costume, were holding one another in a tight embrace for fear of tumbling, and gyrating round and round like a pair of slyboots, with cheek pressed to cheek. "I'm quite done up," remarked Helene, as she leaned against the dining-room door. She fanned her face, flushed with her exertions in the dance. Her bosom rose and fell beneath the transparent grenadine of her bodice. And she was still conscious of Henri's breath beating on her shoulders; he was still close to her--ever behind her. Now it flashed on her that he would speak, yet she had no strength to flee from his avowal. He came nearer and whispered, breathing on her hair: "I love you! oh, how I love you!" She tingled from head to foot, as though a gust of flame had beaten on her. O God! he had spoken; she could no longer feign the pleasurable quietude of ignorance. She hid behind her fan, her face purple with blushes. The children, whirling madly in the last of the quadrilles, were making the floor ring with the beating of their feet. There were silvery peals of laughter, and bird-like voices gave vent to exclamations of pleasure. A freshness arose from all that band of innocents galloping round and round like little demons. "I love you! oh, how I love you!" She shuddered again; she would listen no further. With dizzy brain she fled into the dining-room, but it was deserted, save that Monsieur Letellier sat on a chair, peacefully sleeping. Henri had followed her, and had the hardihood to seize her wrists even at the risk of a scandal, his face convulsed with such passion that she trembled before him. And he still repeated the words: "I love you! I love you!" "Leave me," she murmured faintly. "You are mad--" And, close by, the dancing still went on, with the trampling of tiny feet. Blanche Berthier's bells could be heard ringing in unison with the softer notes of the piano; Madame Deberle and Pauline were clapping their hands, by way of beating time. It was a polka, and Helene caught a glimpse of Jeanne and Lucien, as they passed by smiling, with arms clasped round each other. But with a sudden jerk she freed herself and fled to an adjacent room --a pantry into which streamed the daylight. That sudden brightness blinded her. She was terror-stricken--she dared not return to the drawing-room with the tale of passion written so legibly on her face. So, hastily crossing the garden, she climbed to her own home, the noises of the ball-room still ringing in her ears. CHAPTER X. Upstairs, in her own room, in the peaceful, convent-like atmosphere she found there, Helene experienced a feeling of suffocation. Her room astonished her, so calm, so secluded, so drowsy did it seem with its blue velvet hangings, while she came to it hotly panting with the emotion which thrilled her. Was this indeed her room, this dreary, lifeless nook, devoid of air? Hastily she threw open a window, and leaned out to gaze on Paris. The rain had ceased, and the clouds were trooping off like some herd of monsters hurrying in disorderly array into the gloom of the horizon. A blue gap, that grew larger by degrees, had opened up above the city. But Helene, her elbows trembling on the window-rail, still breathless from her hasty ascent, saw nothing, and merely heard her heart beating against her swelling breast. She drew a long breath, but it seemed to her that the spreading valley with its river, its two millions of people, its immense city, its distant hills, could not hold air enough to enable her to breathe peacefully and regularly again. For some minutes she remained there distracted by the fever of passion which possessed her. It seemed as though a torrent of sensations and confused ideas were pouring down on her, their roar preventing her from hearing her own voice or understanding aught. There was a buzzing in her ears, and large spots of light swam slowly before her eyes. Then she suddenly found herself examining her gloved hands, and remembering that she had omitted to sew on a button that had come off the left-hand glove. And afterwards she spoke aloud, repeating several times, in tones that grew fainter and fainter: "I love you! I love you! oh, how I love you!" Instinctively she buried her face in her hands, and pressed her fingers to her eyelids as though to intensify the darkness in which she sought to plunge. It was a wish to annihilate herself, to see no more, to be utterly alone, girt in by the gloom of night. Her breathing grew calmer. Paris blew its mighty breath upon her face; she knew it lay before her, and though she had no wish to look on it, she felt full of terror at the thought of leaving the window, and of no longer having beneath her that city whose vastness lulled her to rest. Ere long she grew unmindful of all around her. The love-scene and confession, despite her efforts, again woke to life in her mind. In the inky darkness Henri appeared to her, every feature so distinct and vivid that she could perceive the nervous twitching of his lips. He came nearer and hung over her. And then she wildly darted back. But, nevertheless, she felt a burning breath on her shoulders and a voice exclaimed: "I love you! I love you!" With a mighty effort she put the phantom to flight, but it again took shape in the distance, and slowly swelled to its whilom proportions; it was Henri once more following her into the dining-room, and still murmuring: "I love you! I love you!" These words rang within her breast with the sonorous clang of a bell; she no longer heard anything but them, pealing their loudest throughout her frame. Nevertheless, she desired to reflect, and again strove to escape from the apparition. He had spoken; never would she dare to look on his face again. The brutal passion of the man had tainted the tenderness of their love. She conjured up past hours, in which he had loved her without being so cruel as to say it; hours spent in the garden amidst the tranquillity of the budding springtime God! he had spoken--the thought clung to her so stubbornly, lowered on her in such immensity and with such weight, that the instant destruction of Paris by a thunderbolt before her eyes would have seemed a trivial matter. Her heart was rent by feelings of indignant protest and haughty anger, commingling with a secret and unconquerable pleasure, which ascended from her inner being and bereft her of her senses. He had spoken, and was speaking still, he sprang up unceasingly before her, uttering those passionate words: "I love you! I love you!"--words that swept into oblivion all her past life as wife and mother. In spite of her brooding over this vision, she retained some consciousness of the vast expanse which stretched beneath her, beyond the darkness that curtained her sight. A loud rumbling arose, and waves of life seemed to surge up and circle around her. Echoes, odors, and even light streamed against her face, though her hands were still nervously pressed to it. At times sudden gleams appeared to pierce her closed eyelids, and amidst the radiance she imagined she saw monuments, steeples, and domes standing out in the diffuse light of dreamland. Then she lowered her hands and, opening her eyes, was dazzled. The vault of heaven expanded before her, and Henri had vanished. A line of clouds, a seeming mass of crumbling chalk-hills, now barred the horizon far away. Across the pure, deep blue heavens overhead, merely a few light, fleecy cloudlets were slowly drifting, like a flotilla of vessels with full-blown sails. On the north, above Montmartre, hung a network of extreme delicacy, fashioned as it were of pale-hued silk, and spread over a patch of sky as though for fishing in those tranquil waters. Westward, however, in the direction of the slopes of Meudon, which Helene could not see, the last drops of the downpour must still have been obscuring the sun, for, though the sky above was clear, Paris remained gloomy, dismal beneath the vapor of the drying house-roofs. It was a city of uniform hue--the bluey-grey of slate, studded with black patches of trees--but withal very distinct, with the sharp outlines and innumberable windows of its houses. The Seine gleamed with the subdued brightness of old silver. The edifices on either bank looked as though they had been smeared with soot. The Tower of St. Jacques rose up like some rust-eaten museum curio, whilst the Pantheon assumed the aspect of a gigantic catafalque above the darkened district which it overlooked. Gleams of light peeped only from the gilding of the dome of the Invalides, like lamps burning in the daytime, sad and vague amidst the crepuscular veil of mourning in which the city was draped. All the usual effects of distance had vanished; Paris resembled a huge yet minutely executed charcoal drawing, showing very vigorously through its cloudy veil, under the limpid heavens. Gazing upon this dismal city, Helene reflected that she really knew nothing of Henri. She felt strong and brave now that his image no longer pursued her. A rebellious impulse stirred her soul to reject the mastery which this man had gained over her within a few weeks. No, she did not know him. She knew nothing of him, of his actions or his thoughts; she could not even have determined whether he possessed talent. Perhaps he was even more lacking in qualities of the heart than of the mind. And thus she gave way to every imagining, her heart full of bitterness, ever finding herself confronted by her ignorance, that barrier which separated her from Henri, and checked her in her efforts to know him. She knew nothing, she would never know anything. She pictured him, hissing out those burning words, and creating within her the one trouble which had, till now, broken in on the quiet happiness of her life. Whence had he sprung to lay her life desolate in this fashion? She suddenly thought that but six weeks before she had had no existence for him, and this thought was insufferable. Angels in heaven! to live no more for one another, to pass each other without recognition, perhaps never to meet again! In her despair she clasped her hands, and her eyes filled with tears. Then Helene gazed fixedly on the towers of Notre-Dame in the far distance. A ray of light from between two clouds tinged them with gold. Her brain was heavy, as though surcharged with all the tumultuous thoughts hurtling within it. It made her suffer; she would fain have concerned herself with the sight of Paris, and have sought to regain her life-peace by turning on that sea of roofs the tranquil glances of past days. To think that at other times, at the same hour, the infinitude of the city--in the stillness of a lovely twilight--had lulled her into tender musing! At present Paris was brightening in the sunshine. After the first ray had fallen on Notre-Dame, others had followed, streaming across the city. The luminary, dipping in the west, rent the clouds asunder, and the various districts spread out, motly with ever-changing lights and shadows. For a time the whole of the left bank was of a leaden hue, while the right was speckled with spots of light which made the verge of the river resemble the skin of some huge beast of prey. Then these resemblances varied and vanished at the mercy of the wind, which drove the clouds before it. Above the burnished gold of the housetops dark patches floated, all in the same direction and with the same gentle and silent motion. Some of them were very large, sailing along with all the majestic grace of an admiral's ship, and surrounded by smaller ones, preserving the regular order of a squadron in line of battle. Then one vast shadow, with a gap yawning like a serpent's mouth, trailed along, and for a while hid Paris, which it seemed ready to devour. And when it had reached the far-off horizon, looking no larger than a worm, a gush of light streamed from a rift in a cloud, and fell into the void which it had left. The golden cascade could be seen descending first like a thread of fine sand, then swelling into a huge cone, and raining in a continuous shower on the Champs-Elysees district, which it inundated with a splashing, dancing radiance. For a long time did this shower of sparks descend, spraying continuously like a fusee. Ah, well! this love was her fate, and Helene ceased to resist. She could battle no longer against her feelings. And in ceasing to struggle she tasted immeasurable delight. Why should she grudge herself happiness any longer? The memory of her past life inspired her with disgust and aversion. How had she been able to drag on that cold, dreary existence, of which she was formerly so proud? A vision rose before her of herself as a young girl living in the Rue des Petites-Maries, at Marseilles, where she had ever shivered; she saw herself a wife, her heart's blood frozen in the companionship of a big child of a husband, with little to take any interest in, apart from the cares of her household; she saw herself through every hour of her life following the same path with the same even tread, without a trouble to mar her peace; and now this monotony in which she had lived, her heart fast asleep, enraged her beyond expression. To think that she had fancied herself happy in thus following her path for thirty years, her passions silent, with naught but the pride of virtue to fill the blank in her existence. How she had cheated herself with her integrity and nice honor, which had girt her round with the empty joys of piety! No, no; she had had enough of it; she wished to live! And an awful spirit of ridicule woke within her as she thought of the behests of reason. Her reason, forsooth! she felt a contemptuous pity for it; during all the years she had lived it had brought her no joy to be compared with that she had tasted during the past hour. She had denied the possibility of stumbling, she had been vain and idiotic enough to think that she would go on to the end without her foot once tripping against a stone. Ah, well! to-day she almost longed to fall. Oh that she might disappear, after tasting for one moment the happiness which she had never enjoyed! Within her soul, however, a great sorrow lingered, a heart-burning and a consciousness of a gloomy blank. Then argument rose to her lips. Was she not free? In her love for Henri she deceived nobody; she could deal as she pleased with her love. Then, did not everything exculpate her? What had been her life for nearly two years? Her widowhood, her unrestricted liberty, her loneliness--everything, she realized, had softened and prepared her for love. Love must have been smouldering within her during the long evenings spent between her two old friends, the Abbe and his brother, those simple hearts whose serenity had lulled it to rest; it had been growing whilst she remained shut up within those narrow walls, far away from the world, and gazed on Paris rumbling noisily on the horizon; it had been growing even when she leaned from that window in the dreamy mood which she had scarce been conscious of, but which little by little had rendered her so weak. And a recollection came to her of that radiant spring morning when Paris had shone out fair and clear, as though in a glass mirror, when it had worn the pure, sunny hue of childhood, as she lazily surveyed it, stretched in her easy-chair with a book upon her knees. That morning love had first awoke--a scarcely perceptible feeling that she had been unable to define, and against which she had believed herself strongly armed. To-day she was in the same place, but devoured by overpowering passion, while before her eyes the dying sun illumined the city with flame. It seemed to her that one day had sufficed for all, that this was the ruddy evening following upon that limpid morning; and she imagined she could feel those fiery beams scorching her heart. But a change had come over the sky. The sun, in its descent towards the slopes of Meudon, had just burst through the last clouds in all its splendor. The azure vault was illuminated with glory; deep on the horizon the crumbling ridge of chalk clouds, blotting out the distant suburbs of Charenton and Choisy-le-Roi, now reared rocks of a tender pink, outlined with brilliant crimson; the flotilla of cloudlets drifting slowly through the blue above Paris, was decked with purple sails; while the delicate network, seemingly fashioned of white silk thread, above Montmartre, was suddenly transformed into golden cord, whose meshes would snare the stars as soon as they should rise. Beneath the flaming vault of heaven lay Paris, a mass of yellow, striped with huge shadows. On the vast square below Helene, in an orange-tinted haze, cabs and omnibuses crossed in all directions, amidst a crowd of pedestrians, whose swarming blackness was softened and irradiated by splashes of light. The students of a seminary were hurrying in serried ranks along the Quai de Billy, and the trail of cassocks acquired an ochraceous hue in the diffuse light. Farther away, vehicles and foot-passengers faded from view; it was only by their gleaming lamps that you were made aware of the vehicles which, one behind the other, were crossing some distant bridge. On the left the straight, lofty, pink chimneys of the Army Bakehouse were belching forth whirling clouds of flesh-tinted smoke; whilst, across the river, the beautiful elms of the Quai d'Orsay rose up in a dark mass transpierced by shafts of light. The Seine, whose banks the oblique rays were enfilading, was rolling dancing wavelets, streaked with scattered splashes of blue, green, and yellow; but farther up the river, in lieu of this blotchy coloring, suggestive of an Eastern sea, the waters assumed a uniform golden hue, which became more and more dazzling. You might have thought that some ingot were pouring forth from an invisible crucible on the horizon, broadening out with a coruscation of bright colors as it gradually grew colder. And at intervals over this brilliant stream, the bridges, with curves growing ever more slender and delicate, threw, as it were, grey bars, till there came at last a fiery jumble of houses, above which rose the towers of Notre-Dame, flaring red like torches. Right and left alike the edifices were all aflame. The glass roof of the Palais de l'Industrie appeared like a bed of glowing embers amidst the Champs-Elysees groves. Farther on, behind the roof of the Madeline, the huge pile of the Opera House shone out like a mass of burnished copper; and the summits of other buildings, cupolas, and towers, the Vendome column, the church of Saint-Vincent de Paul, the tower of Saint-Jacques, and, nearer in, the pavilions of the new Louvre and the Tuileries, were crowned by a blaze, which lent them the aspect of sacrificial pyres. The dome of the Invalides was flaring with such brilliancy that you instinctively feared lest it should suddenly topple down and scatter burning flakes over the neighborhood. Beyond the irregular towers of Saint-Sulpice, the Pantheon stood out against the sky in dull splendor, like some royal palace of conflagration reduced to embers. Then, as the sun declined, the pyre-like edifices gradually set the whole of Paris on fire. Flashes sped over the housetops, while black smoke lingered in the valleys. Every frontage turned towards the Trocadero seemed to be red-hot, the glass of the windows glittering and emitting a shower of sparks, which darted upwards as though some invisible bellows were ever urging the huge conflagration into greater activity. Sheaves of flame were also ever rising afresh from the adjacent districts, where the streets opened, now dark and now all ablaze. Even far over the plain, from a ruddy ember-like glow suffusing the destroyed faubourgs, occasional flashes of flame shot up as from some fire struggling again into life. Ere long a furnace seemed raging, all Paris burned, the heavens became yet more empurpled, and the clouds hung like so much blood over the vast city, colored red and gold. With the ruddy tints falling upon her, yielding to the passion which was devouring her, Helene was still gazing upon Paris all ablaze, when a little hand was placed on her shoulder, and she gave a start. It was Jeanne, calling her. "Mamma! mamma!" She turned her head, and the child went on: "At last! Didn't you hear me before? I have called you at least a dozen times." The little girl, still in her Japanese costume, had sparkling eyes, and cheeks flushed with pleasure. She gave her mother no time for answer. "You ran away from me nicely! Do you know, they were hunting for you everywhere? Had it not been for Pauline, who came with me to the bottom of the staircase, I shouldn't have dared to cross the road." With a pretty gesture, she brought her face close to her mother's lips, and, without pausing, whispered the question: "Do you love me?" Helene kissed her somewhat absently. She was amazed and impatient at her early return. Had an hour really gone by since she had fled from the ball-room? However, to satisfy the child, who seemed uneasy, she told her that she had felt rather unwell. The fresh air was doing her good; she only needed a little quietness. "Oh! don't fear; I'm too tired," murmured Jeanne. "I am going to stop here, and be very, very good. But, mamma dear, I may talk, mayn't I?" She nestled close to Helene, full of joy at the prospect of not being undressed at once. She was in ecstasies over her embroidered purple gown and green silk petticoat; and she shook her head to rattle the pendants hanging from the long pins thrust through her hair. At last there burst from her lips a rush of hasty words. Despite her seeming demureness, she had seen everything, heard everything, and remembered everything; and she now made ample amends for her former assumed dignity, silence, and indifference. "Do you know, mamma, it was an old fellow with a grey beard who made Punch move his arms and legs? I saw him well enough when the curtain was drawn aside. Yes, and the little boy Guiraud began to cry. How stupid of him, wasn't it? They told him the policeman would come and put some water in his soup; and at last they had to carry him off, for he wouldn't stop crying. And at lunch, too, Marguerite stained her milkmaid's dress all over with jam. Her mamma wiped it off and said to her: 'Oh, you dirty girl!' She even had a lot of it in her hair. I never opened my mouth, but it did amuse me to see them all rush at the cakes! Were they not bad-mannered, mamma dear?" She paused for a few seconds, absorbed in some reminiscence, and then asked, with a thoughtful air: "I say, mamma, did you eat any of those yellow cakes with white cream inside? Oh! they were nice! they were nice! I kept the dish beside me the whole time." Helene was not listening to this childish chatter. But Jeanne talked to relieve her excited brain. She launched out again, giving the minutest details about the ball, and investing each little incident with the greatest importance. "You did not see that my waistband came undone just as we began dancing. A lady, whose name I don't know, pinned it up for me. So I said to her: 'Madame, I thank you very much.' But while I was dancing with Lucien the pin ran into him, and he asked me: 'What have you got in front of you that pricks me so?' Of course I knew nothing about it, and told him I had nothing there to prick him. However, Pauline came and put the pin in its proper place. Ah! but you've no idea how they pushed each other about; and one great stupid of a boy gave Sophie a blow on the back which made her fall. The Levasseur girls jumped about with their feet close together. I am pretty certain that isn't the way to dance. But the best of it all came at the end. You weren't there; so you can't know. We all took one another by the arms, and then whirled round; it was comical enough to make one die laughing. Besides, some of the big gentlemen were whirling around as well. It's true; I am not telling fibs. Why, don't you believe me, mamma dear?" Helene's continued silence was beginning to vex Jeanne. She nestled closer, and gave her mother's hand a shake. But, perceiving that she drew only a few words from her, she herself, by degrees, lapsed into silence, into thought of the incidents of that ball of which her heart was full. Both mother and daughter now sat mutely gazing on Paris all aflame. It seemed to them yet more mysterious than ever, as it lay there illumined by blood-red clouds, like some city of an old-world tale expiating its lusts under a rain of fire. "Did you have any round dances?" all at once asked Helene, as if wakening with a start. "Yes, yes!" murmured Jeanne, engrossed in her turn. "And the doctor--did he dance!" "I should think so; he had a turn with me. He lift me up and asked me: 'Where is your mamma? where is your mamma?' and then he kissed me." Helene unconsciously smiled. What need had she of knowing Henri well? It appeared sweeter to her not to know him--ay, never to know him well --and to greet him simply as the one whose coming she had awaited so long. Why should she feel astonished or disquieted? At the fated hour he had met her on her life-journey. Her frank nature accepted whatever might be in store; and quietude, born of the knowledge that she loved and was beloved, fell on her mind. She told her heart that she would prove strong enough to prevent her happiness from being marred. But night was coming on and a chilly breeze arose. Jeanne, still plunged in reverie, began to shiver. She reclined her head on her mother's bosom, and, as though the question were inseparably connected with her deep meditation, she murmured a second time: "Do you love me?" Then Helene, her face still glad with smiles, took her head within her hands and for a moment examined her face closely. Next she pressed a long kiss near her mouth, over a ruddy spot on her skin. It was there, she could divine it, that Henri had kissed the child! The gloomy ridge of the Meudon hills was already partially concealing the disc of the sun. Over Paris the slanting beams of light had yet lengthened. The shadow cast by the dome of the Invalides--increased to stupendous proportions--covered the whole of the Saint-Germain district; while the Opera-House, the Saint-Jacques tower, the columns and the steeples, threw streaks of darkness over the right bank dwellings. The lines of house-fronts, the yawning streets, the islands of roofs, were burning with a more sullen glow. The flashes of fire died away in the darkening windows, as though the houses were reduced to embers. Distant bells rang out; a rumbling noise fell on the ears, and then subsided. With the approach of night the expanse of sky grew more vast, spreading a vault of violet, streaked with gold and purple, above the ruddy city. But all at once the conflagration flared afresh with formidable intensity, a last great flame shot up from Paris, illumining its entire expanse, and even its hitherto hidden suburbs. Then it seemed as if a grey, ashy dust were falling; and though the clustering districts remained erect, they wore the gloomy, unsubstantial aspect of coals which had ceased to burn. CHAPTER XI. One morning in May, Rosalie ran in from the kitchen, dish-cloth in hand, screaming out in the familiar fashion of a favorite servant: "Oh, madame, come quick! His reverence the Abbe is digging the ground down in the doctor's garden." Helene made no responsive movement, but Jeanne had already rushed to have a look. On her return, she exclaimed: "How stupid Rosalie is! he is not digging at all. He is with the gardener, who is putting some plants into a barrow. Madame Deberle is plucking all her roses." "They must be for the church," quietly said Helene, who was busy with some tapestry-work. A few minutes later the bell rang, and Abbe Jouve made his appearance. He came to say that his presence must not be expected on the following Tuesday. His evenings would be wholly taken up with the ceremonies incident to the month of Mary. The parish priest had assigned him the task of decorating the church. It would be a great success. All the ladies were giving him flowers. He was expecting two palm-trees about fourteen feet high, and meant to place them to the right and left of the altar. "Oh! mamma, mamma!" murmured Jeanne, listening, wonderstruck. "Well," said Helene, with a smile, "since you cannot come to us, my old friend, we will go to see you. Why, you've quite turned Jeanne's head with your talk about flowers." She had few religious tendencies; she never even went to mass, on the plea that her daughter's health suffered from the shivering fits which seized her when she came out of a church. In her presence the old priest avoided all reference to religion. It was his wont to say, with good-natured indulgence, that good hearts carve out their own salvation by deeds of loving kindness and charity. God would know when and how to touch her. Till the evening of the following day Jeanne thought of nothing but the month of Mary. She plagued her mother with questions; she dreamt of the church adorned with a profusion of white roses, filled with thousands of wax tapers, with the sound of angels' voices, and sweet perfumes. And she was very anxious to go near the altar, that she might have a good look at the Blessed Virgin's lace gown, a gown worth a fortune, according to the Abbe. But Helene bridled her excitement with a threat not to take her should she make herself ill beforehand. However, the evening came at last, and they set out. The nights were still cold, and when they reached the Rue de l'Annonciation, where the church of Notre-Dame-de-Grace stands, the child was shivering all over. "The church is heated," said her mother. "We must secure a place near a hot-air pipe." She pushed open the padded door, and as it gently swung back to its place they found themselves in a warm atmosphere, with brilliant lights streaming on them, and chanting resounding in their ears. The ceremony had commenced, and Helene, perceiving that the nave was crowded, signified her intention of going down one of the aisles. But there seemed insuperable obstacles in her way; she could not get near the altar. Holding Jeanne by the hand, she for a time patiently pressed forward, but at last, despairing of advancing any farther, took the first unoccupied chairs she could find. A pillar hid half of the choir from view. "I can see nothing," said the child, grievously discontented. "This is a very nasty place." However, Helene signed to her to keep silent, and she lapsed into a fit of sulks. In front of her she could only perceive the broad back of a fat old lady. When her mother next turned towards her she was standing upright on her chair. "Will you come down!" said Helene in a low voice. "You are a nuisance." But Jeanne was stubborn. "Hist! mamma," she said, "there's Madame Deberle. Look! she is down there in the centre, beckoning to us." The young woman's annoyance on hearing this made her very impatient, and she shook her daughter, who still refused to sit down. During the three days that had intervened since the ball, Helene had avoided any visit to the doctor's house on the plea of having a great deal to do. "Mamma," resumed Jeanne with a child's wonted stubbornness, "she is looking at you; she is nodding good-day to you." At this intimation Helene was forced to turn round and exchange greetings; each bowed to the other. Madame Deberle, in a striped silk gown trimmed with white lace, sat in the centre of the nave but a short distance from the choir, looking very fresh and conspicuous. She had brought her sister Pauline, who was now busy waving her hand. The chanting still continued, the elder members of the congregation pouring forth a volume of sound of falling scale, while now and then the shrill voice of the children punctuated the slow, monotonous rhythm of the canticle. "They want us to go over to them, you see," exclaimed Jeanne, with some triumph in her remark. "It is useless; we shall be all right here." "Oh, mamma, do let us go over to them! There are two chairs empty." "No, no; come and sit down." However, the ladies smilingly persisted in making signs, heedless to the last degree of the slight scandal they were causing; nay, delighted at being the observed of all observers. Helene thus had to yield. She pushed the gratified Jeanne before her, and strove to make her way through the congregation, her hands all the while trembling with repressed anger. It was no easy business. Devout female worshippers, unwilling to disturb themselves, glared at her with furious looks, whilst all agape they kept on singing. She pressed on in this style for five long minutes, the tempest of voices ringing around her with ever-increasing violence. Whenever she came to a standstill, Jeanne, squeezing close beside her, gazed at those cavernous, gaping mouths. However, at last they reached the vacant space in front of the choir, and then had but a few steps to make. "Come, be quick," whispered Madame Deberle. "The Abbe told me you would be coming, and I kept two chairs for you." Helene thanked her, and, to cut the conversation short, at once began turning over the leaves of her missal. But Juliette was as worldly here as elsewhere; as much at her ease, as agreeable and talkative, as in her drawing-room. She bent her head towards Helene and resumed: "You have become quite invisible. I intended to pay you a visit to-morrow. Surely you haven't been ill, have you?" "No, thank you. I've been very busy." "Well, listen to me. You must come and dine with us to-morrow. Quite a family dinner, you know." "You are very kind. We will see." She seemed to retire within herself, intent on following the service, and on saying nothing more. Pauline had taken Jeanne beside her that she might be nearer the hot-air flue over which she toasted herself luxuriously, as happy as any chilly mortal could be. Steeped in the warm air, the two girls raised themselves inquisitively and gazed around on everything, the low ceiling with its woodwork panels, the squat pillars, connected by arches from which hung chandeliers, and the pulpit of carved oak; and over the ocean of heads which waved with the rise and fall of the canticle, their eyes wandered towards the dark corners of the aisles, towards the chapels whose gilding faintly gleamed, and the baptistery enclosed by a railing near the chief entrance. However, their gaze always returned to the resplendent choir, decorated with brilliant colors and dazzling gilding. A crystal chandelier, flaming with light, hung from the vaulted ceiling; immense candelabra, filled with rows of wax tapers, that glittered amidst the gloom of the church like a profusion of stars in orderly array, brought out prominently the high altar, which seemed one huge bouquet of foliage and flowers. Over all, standing amidst a profusion of roses, a Virgin, dressed in satin and lace, and crowned with pearls, was holding a Jesus in long clothes on her arm. "I say, are you warm?" asked Pauline. "It's nice, eh?" But Jeanne, in ecstasy, was gazing on the Virgin amongst the flowers. The scene thrilled her. A fear crept over her that she might do something wrong, and she lowered her eyes in the endeavor to restrain her tears by fixing her attention on the black-and-white pavement. The vibrations of the choir-boys' shrill voices seemed to stir her tresses like puffs of air. Meanwhile Helene, with face bent over her prayer-book, drew herself away whenever Juliette's lace rustled against her. She was in no wise prepared for this meeting. Despite the vow she had sworn within herself, to be ever pure in her love for Henri, and never yield to him, she felt great discomfort at the thought that she was a traitoress to the confiding, happy woman who sat by her side. She was possessed by one idea--she would not go to that dinner. She sought for reasons which would enable her to break off these relations so hateful to her honor. But the swelling voices of the choristers, so near to her, drove all reflection from her mind; she could decide on no precise course, and surrendered herself to the soothing influences of the chant, tasting a pious joy such as she had never before found inside a church. "Have you been told about Madame de Chermette?" asked Juliette, unable any longer to restrain her craving for a gossip. "No, I know nothing." "Well, well; just imagine. You have seen her daughter, so womanish and tall, though she is only fifteen, haven't you? There is some talk about her getting married next year to that dark young fellow who is always hanging to her mother's skirts. People are talking about it with a vengeance." "Ah!" muttered Helene, who was not paying the least attention. Madame Deberle went into particulars, but of a sudden the chant ceased, and the organ-music died away in a moan. Astounded at the loudness of her own voice breaking upon the stillness which ensued, she lapsed into silence. A priest made his appearance at this moment in the pulpit. There was a rustling, and then he spoke. No, certainly not, Helene would not join that dinner-party. With her eyes fixed on the priest she pictured to herself the next meeting with Henri, that meeting which for three days she had contemplated with terror; she saw him white with anger, reproaching her for hiding herself, and she dreaded lest she might not display sufficient indifference. Amidst her dream the priest had disappeared, his thrilling tones merely reaching her in casual sentences: "No hour could be more ineffable than that when the Virgin, with bent head, answered: 'I am the handmaiden of the Lord!'" Yes, she would be brave; all her reason had returned to her. She would taste the joy of being loved, but would never avow her love, for her heart told her that such an avowal would cost her peace. And how intensely would she love, without confessing it, gratified by a word, a look from Henri, exchanged at lengthy intervals on the occasion of a chance meeting! It was a dream that brought her some sense of the infinite. The church around her became a friend and comforter. The priest was now exclaiming: "The angel vanished and Mary plunged into contemplation of the divine mystery working within her, her heart bathed in sunshine and love." "He speaks very well," whispered Madame Deberle, leaning towards her. "And he's quite young, too, scarcely thirty, don't you think?" Madame Deberle was affected. Religion pleased her because the emotions it prompted were in good taste. To present flowers for the decoration of churches, to have petty dealings with the priests, who were so polite and discreet, to come to church attired in her best and assume an air of worldly patronage towards the God of the poor--all this had for her special delights; the more so as her husband did not interest himself in religion, and her devotions thus had all the sweetness of forbidden fruit. Helene looked at her and answered with a nod; her face was ashy white with faintness, while the other's was lit up by smiles. There was a stirring of chairs and a rustling of handkerchiefs, as the priest quitted the pulpit with the final adjuration "Oh! give wings unto your love, souls imbued with Christian piety. God has made a sacrifice of Himself for your sakes, your hearts are full of His presence, your souls overflow with His grace!" Of a sudden the organ sounded again, and the litanies of the Virgin began with their appeals of passionate tenderness. Faint and distant the chanting rolled forth from the side-aisles and the dark recesses of the chapels, as though the earth were giving answer to the angel voices of the chorister-boys. A rush of air swept over the throng, making the flames of the tapers leap, while amongst the flowers, fading as they exhaled their last perfume, the Divine Mother seemed to incline her head to smile on her infant Jesus. All at once, seized with an instinctive dread, Helene turned. "You're not ill, Jeanne, are you?" she asked. The child, with face ashy white and eyes glistening, her spirit borne aloft by the fervent strains of the litanies, was gazing at the altar, where in imagination she could see the roses multiplying and falling in cascades. "No, no, mamma," she whispered; "I am pleased, I am very well pleased." And then she asked: "But where is our dear old friend?" She spoke of the Abbe. Pauline caught sight of him; he was seated in the choir, but Jeanne had to be lifted up in order that she might perceive him. "Oh! He is looking at us," said she; "he is blinking." According to Jeanne, the Abbe blinked when he laughed inwardly. Helene hastened to exchange a friendly nod with him. And then the tranquillity within her seemed to increase, her future serenity appeared to be assured, thus endearing the church to her and lulling her into a blissful condition of patient endurance. Censers swung before the altar and threads of smoke ascended; the benediction followed, and the holy monstrance was slowly raised and waved above the heads lowered to the earth. Helene was still on her knees in happy meditation when she heard Madame Deberle exclaiming: "It's over now; let us go." There ensued a clatter of chairs and a stamping of feet which reverberated along the arched aisles. Pauline had taken Jeanne's hand, and, walking away in front with the child, began to question her: "Have you ever been to the theatre?" "No. Is it finer than this?" As she spoke, the little one, giving vent to great gasps of wonder, tossed her head as though ready to express the belief that nothing could be finer. To her question, however, Pauline deigned no reply, for she had just come to a standstill in front of a priest who was passing in his surplice. And when he was a few steps away she exclaimed aloud, with such conviction in her tones that two devout ladies of the congregation turned around: "Oh! what a fine head!" Helene, meanwhile, had risen from her knees. She stepped along by the side of Juliette among the crowd which was making its way out with difficulty. Her heart was full of tenderness, she felt languid and enervated, and her soul no longer rebelled at the other being so near. At one moment their bare hands came in contact and they smiled. They were almost stifling in the throng, and Helene would fain have had Juliette go first. All their old friendship seemed to blossom forth once more. "Is it understood that we can rely on you for to-morrow evening?" asked Madame Deberle. Helene no longer had the will to decline. She would see whether it were possible when she reached the street. It finished by their being the last to leave. Pauline and Jeanne already stood on the opposite pavement awaiting them. But a tearful voice brought them to a halt. "Ah, my good lady, what a time it is since I had the happiness of seeing you!" It was Mother Fetu, who was soliciting alms at the church door. Barring Helene's way, as though she had lain in wait for her, she went on: "Oh, I have been so very ill always here, in the stomach, you know. Just now I feel as if a hammer were pounding away inside me; and I have nothing at all, my good lady. I didn't dare to send you word about it--May the gracious God repay you!" Helene had slipped a piece of money into her hand, and promised to think about her. "Hello!" exclaimed Madame Deberle, who had remained standing within the porch, "there's some one talking with Pauline and Jeanne. Why, it is Henri." "Yes, yes" Mother Fetu hastened to add as she turned her ferret-like eyes on the ladies, "it is the good doctor. I have seen him there all through the service; he has never budged from the pavement; he has been waiting for you, no doubt. Ah! he's a saint of a man! I swear that to be the truth in the face of God who hears us. Yes, I know you, madame; he is a husband who deserves to be happy. May Heaven hearken to your prayers, may every blessing fall on you! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" Amidst the myriad furrows of her face, which was wrinkled like a withered apple, her little eyes kept gleaming in malicious unrest, darting a glance now on Juliette, now on Helene, so that it was impossible to say with any certainty whom she was addressing while speaking of "the good doctor." She followed them, muttering on without a stop, mingling whimpering entreaty with devout outbursts. Henri's reserve alike astonished and moved Helene. He scarcely had the courage to raise his eyes towards her. On his wife quizzing him about the opinions which restrained him from entering a church, he merely explained that to smoke a cigar was his object in coming to meet them; but Helene understood that he had wished to see her again, to prove to her how wrong she was in fearing some fresh outrage. Doubtless, like herself, he had sworn to keep within the limits of reason. She never questioned whether his sincerity could be real. She simply experienced a feeling of unhappiness at seeing him unhappy. Thus it came about, that on leaving them it the Rue Vineuse, she said cheerfully: "Well, it is settled then; to-morrow at seven." In this way the old friendship grew closer than ever, and a charming life began afresh. To Helene it seemed as if Henri had never yielded to that moment of folly; it was but a dream of hers; each loved the other, but they would never breathe a word of their love, they were content with knowing its existence. They spent delicious hours, in which, without their tongues giving evidence of their passion, they displayed it constantly; a gesture, an inflexion of the voice sufficed, ay, even a silence. Everything insensibly tended towards their love, plunged them more and more deeply into a passion which they bore away with them whenever they parted, which was ever with them, which formed, as it were, the only atmosphere they could breathe. And their excuse was their honesty; with eyes wide open they played this comedy of affection; not even a hand-clasp did they allow each other and their restraint infused unalloyed delight into the simple greetings with which they met. Every evening the ladies went to church. Madame Deberle was enchanted with the novel pleasure she was enjoying. It was so different from evening dances, concerts, and first nights; she adored fresh sensations, and nuns and priests were now constantly in her company. The store of religion which she had acquired in her school-days now found new life in her giddy brain, taking shape in all sorts of trivial observances, as though she were reviving the games of her childhood. Helene, who on her side had grown up without any religious training, surrendered herself to the bliss of these services of the month of Mary, happy also in the delight with which they appeared to inspire Jeanne. They now dined earlier; they gave Rosalie no peace lest she should cause them to be late, and prevent their securing good seats. Then they called for Juliette on the way. One day Lucien was taken, but he behaved so badly that he was afterward left at home. On entering the warm church, with its glare of wax candles, a feeling of tenderness and calm, which by degrees grew necessary to Helene, came over her. When doubts sprang up within her during the day, and the thought of Henri filled her with indefinable anxiety, with the evening the church once more brought her peace. The chants arose overflowing with divine passion; the flowers, newly culled, made the close atmosphere of the building still heavier. It was here that she breathed all the first rapture of springtide, amidst that adoration of woman raised to the status of a cult; and her senses swam as she contemplated the mystery of love and purity--Mary, virgin and mother, beaming beneath her wreath of white roses. Each day she remained longer on her knees. She found herself at times with hands joined in entreaty. When the ceremony came to an end, there followed the happiness of the return home. Henri awaited their appearance at the door; the evenings grew warmer, and they wended their way through the dark, still streets of Passy, while scarce a word passed between them. "How devout you are getting, my dear!" said Madame Deberle one night, with a laugh. Yes, it was true; Helene was widely opening the portals of her heart to pious thoughts. Never could she have fancied that such happiness would attend her love. She returned to the church as to a spot where her heart would melt, for under its roof she could give free vent to her tears, remain thoughtless, plunged in speechless worship. For an hour each evening she put no restraint on herself. The bursting love within her, prisoned throughout the day, at length escaped from her bosom on the wings of prayer, amidst the pious quiver of the throng. The muttered supplications, the bendings of the knee, the reverences --words and gestures seemingly interminable--all lulled her to rest; to her they ever expressed the same thing; it was always the same passion speaking in the same phrase, or the same gesture. She felt a need of faith, and basked enraptured by the Divine goodness. Helene was not the only person whom Juliette twitted; she feigned a belief that Henri himself was becoming religious. What, had he not now entered the church to wait for them?--he, atheist and scoffer, who had been wont to assert that he had sought for the soul with his scalpel, and had not yet discovered its existence! As soon as she perceived him standing behind a pillar in the shadow of the pulpit, she would instantly jog Helene's arm. "Look, look, he is there already! Do you know, he wouldn't confess when we got married! See how funny he looks; he gazes at us with so comical an expression; quick, look!" Helene did not at the moment raise her head. The service was coming to an end, clouds of incense were rising, and the organ-music pealed forth joyfully. But her neighbor was not a woman to leave her alone, and she was forced to speak in answer. "Yes, yes, I see him," she whispered, albeit she never turned her eyes. She had on her own side divined his presence amidst the song of praise that mounted from the worshipping throng. It seemed to her that Henri's breath was wafted on the wings of the music and beat against her neck, and she imagined she could see behind her his glances shedding their light along the nave and haloing her, as she knelt, with a golden glory. And then she felt impelled to pray with such fervor that words failed her. The expression on his face was sober, as unruffled as any husband might wear when looking for ladies in a church, the same, indeed, as if he had been waiting for them in the lobby of a theatre. But when they came together, in the midst of the slowly-moving crowd of worshippers, they felt that the bonds of their love had been drawn closer by the flowers and the chanting; and they shunned all conversation, for their hearts were on their lips. A fortnight slipped away, and Madame Deberle grew wearied. She ever jumped from one thing to the other, consumed with the thirst of doing what every one else was doing. For the moment charity bazaars had become her craze; she would toil up sixty flights of stairs of an afternoon to beg paintings of well-known artists, while her evenings were spent in presiding over meetings of lady patronesses, with a bell handy to call noisy members to order. Thus it happened that one Thursday evening Helene and her daughter went to church without their companions. On the conclusion of the sermon, while the choristers were commencing the _Magnificat_, the young woman, forewarned by some impulse of her heart, turned her head. Henri was there, in his usual place. Thereupon she remained with looks riveted to the ground till the service came to an end, waiting the while for the return home. "Oh, how kind of you to come!" said Jeanne, with all a child's frankness, as they left the church. "I should have been afraid to go alone through these dark streets." Henri, however, feigned astonishment, asserting that he had expected to meet his wife. Helene allowed the child to answer him, and followed them without uttering a word. As the trio passed under the porch a pitiful voice sang out: "Charity, charity! May God repay you!" Every night Jeanne dropped a ten-sou piece into Mother Fetu's hand. When the latter saw the doctor alone with Helene, she nodded her head knowingly, instead of breaking out into a storm of thanks, as was her custom. The church was now empty, and she began to follow them, mumbling inaudible sentences. Sometimes, instead of returning by the Rue de Passy, the ladies, when the night was fine, went homewards by the Rue Raynouard, the way being thus lengthened by five or six minutes' walk. That night also Helene turned into the Rue Raynouard, craving for gloom and stillness, and entranced by the loneliness of the long thoroughfare, which was lighted by only a few gas-lamps, without the shadow of a single passer-by falling across its pavement. At this hour Passy seemed out of the world; sleep had already fallen over it; it had all the quietude of a provincial town. On each side of the street loomed mansions, girls' schools, black and silent, and dining places, from the kitchens of which lights still streamed. There was not, however, a single shop to throw the glare of its frontage across the dimness. To Henri and Helene the loneliness was pregnant with intense charm. He had not ventured to offer her his arm. Jeanne walked between them in the middle of the road, which was gravelled like a walk in some park. At last the houses came to an end, and then on each side were walls, over which spread mantling clematis and clusters of lilac blossoms. Immense gardens parted the mansions, and here and there through the railings of an iron gate they could catch glimpses of a gloomy background of verdure, against which the tree-dotted turf assumed a more delicate hue. The air was filled with the perfume of irises growing in vases which they could scarce distinguish. All three paced on slowly through the warm spring night, which was steeping them in its odors, and Jeanne, with childish artlessness, raised her face to the heavens, and exclaimed: "Oh, mamma, see what a number of stars!" But behind them, like an echo of their own, came the footfall of Mother Fetu. Nearer and nearer she approached, till they could hear her muttering the opening words of the Angelic Salutation "_Ave Marie, gratia plena_," repeating them over and over again with the same confused persistency. She was telling her beads on her homeward way. "I have still something left--may I give it to her?" Jeanne asked her mother. And thereupon, without waiting for a reply, she left them, running towards the old woman, who was on the point of entering the Passage des Eaux. Mother Fetu clutched at the coin, calling upon all the angels of Heaven to bless her. As she spoke, however, she grasped the child's hand and detained her by her side, then asking in changed tones: "The other lady is ill, is she not?" "No," answered Jeanne, surprised. "May Heaven shield her! May it shower its favors on her and her husband! Don't run away yet, my dear little lady. Let me say an _Ave Maria_ for your mother's sake, and you will join in the 'Amen' with me. Oh! your mother will allow you; you can catch her up." Meanwhile Henri and Helene trembled as they found themselves suddenly left alone in the shadow cast by a line of huge chestnut trees that bordered the road. They quietly took a few steps. The chestnut trees had strewn the ground with their bloom, and they were walking upon this rosy-tinted carpet. On a sudden, however, they came to a stop, their hearts filled with such emotion that they could go no farther. "Forgive me," said Henri simply. "Yes, yes," ejaculated Helene. "But oh! be silent, I pray you." She had felt his hand touch her own, and had started back. Fortunately Jeanne ran towards them at the moment. "Mamma, mamma!" she cried; "she made me say an _Ave_; she says it will bring you good luck." The three then turned into the Rue Vineuse, while Mother Fetu crept down the steps of the Passage des Eaux, busy completing her rosary. The month slipped away. Two or three more services were attended by Madame Deberle. One Sunday, the last one, Henri once more ventured to wait for Helene and Jeanne. The walk home thrilled them with joy. The month had been one long spell of wondrous bliss. The little church seemed to have entered into their lives to soothe their love and render its way pleasant. At first a great peace had settled on Helene's soul; she had found happiness in this sanctuary where she imagined she could without shame dwell on her love; however, the undermining had continued, and when her holy rapture passed away she was again in the grip of her passion, held by bonds that would have plucked at her heartstrings had she sought to break them asunder. Henri still preserved his respectful demeanor, but she could not do otherwise than see the passion burning in his face. She dreaded some outburst, and even grew afraid of herself. One afternoon, going homewards after a walk with Jeanne, she passed along the Rue de l'Annonciation and entered the church. The child was complaining of feeling very tired. Until the last day she had been unwilling to admit that the evening services exhausted her, so intense was the pleasure she derived from them; but her cheeks had grown waxy-pale, and the doctor advised that she should take long walks. "Sit down here," said her mother. "It will rest you; we'll only stay ten minutes." She herself walked towards some chairs a short way off, and knelt down. She had placed Jeanne close to a pillar. Workmen were busy at the other end of the nave, taking down the hangings and removing the flowers, the ceremonials attending the month of Mary having come to an end the evening before. With her face buried in her hands Helene saw nothing and heard nothing; she was eagerly catechising her heart, asking whether she ought not to confess to Abbe Jouve what an awful life had come upon her. He would advise her, perhaps restore her lost peace. Still, within her there arose, out of her very anguish, a fierce flood of joy. She hugged her sorrow, dreading lest the priest might succeed in finding a cure for it. Ten minutes slipped away, then an hour. She was overwhelmed by the strife raging within her heart. At last she raised her head, her eyes glistening with tears, and saw Abbe Jouve gazing at her sorrowfully. It was he who was directing the workmen. Having recognized Jeanne, he had just come forward. "Why, what is the matter, my child?" he asked of Helene, who hastened to rise to her feet and wipe away her tears. She was at a loss what answer to give; she was afraid lest she should once more fall on her knees and burst into sobs. He approached still nearer, and gently resumed: "I do not wish to cross-question you, but why do you not confide in me? Confide in the priest and forget the friend." "Some other day," she said brokenly, "some other day, I promise you." Jeanne meantime had at first been very good and patient, finding amusement in looking at the stained-glass windows, the statues over the great doorway, and the scenes of the journey to the Cross depicted in miniature bas-reliefs along the aisles. By degrees, however, the cold air of the church had enveloped her as with a shroud; and she remained plunged in a weariness that even banished thought, a feeling of discomfort waking within her with the holy quiet and far-reaching echoes, which the least sound stirred in this sanctuary where she imagined she was going to die. But a grievous sorrow rankled in her heart--the flowers were being borne away. The great clusters of roses were vanishing, and the altar seemed to become more and more bare and chill. The marble looked icy-cold now that no wax-candle shone on it and there was no smoking incense. The lace-robed Virgin moreover was being moved, and after suddenly tottering fell backward into the arms of two workmen. At the sight Jeanne uttered a faint cry, stretched out her arms, and fell back rigid; the illness that had been threatening her for some days had at last fallen upon her. And when Helene, in distraction, carried her child, with the assistance of the sorrowing Abbe, into a cab, she turned towards the porch with outstretched, trembling hands. "It's all this church! it's all this church!" she exclaimed, with a vehemence instinct with regret and self-reproach as she thought of the month of devout delight which she herself had tasted there. CHAPTER XII. When evening came Jeanne was somewhat better. She was able to get up, and, in order to remove her mother's fears, persisted in dragging herself into the dining-room, where she took her seat before her empty plate. "I shall be all right," she said, trying to smile. "You know very well that the least thing upsets me. Get on with your dinner, mamma; I want you to eat." And in the end she pretended an appetite she did not feel, for she observed that her mother sat watching her paling and trembling, without being able to swallow a morsel. She promised to take some jam, and Helene then hurried through her dinner, while the child, with a never-fading smile and her head nodding tremblingly, watched her with worshipping looks. On the appearance of the dessert she made an effort to carry out her promise, but tears welled into her eyes. "You see I can't get it down my throat," she murmured. "You mustn't be angry with me." The weariness that overwhelmed her was terrible. Her legs seemed lifeless, her shoulders pained her as though gripped by a hand of iron. But she was very brave through it all, and choked at their source the moans which the shooting pains in her neck awakened. At one moment, however, she forgot herself, her head felt too heavy, and she was bent double by pain. Her mother, as she gazed on her, so faint and feeble, was wholly unable to finish the pear which she was trying to force down her throat. Her sobs choked her, and throwing down her napkin, she clasped Jeanne in her arms. "My child! my child!" she wailed, her heart bursting with sorrow, as her eyes ranged round the dining-room where her darling, when in good health, had so often enlivened her by her fondness for tid-bits. At last Jeanne woke to life again, and strove to smile as of old. "Don't worry, mamma," said she; "I shall be all right soon. Now that you have done you must put me to bed. I only wanted to see you have your dinner. Oh! I know you; you wouldn't have eaten as much as a morsel of bread." Helene bore her away in her arms. She had brought the little crib close to her own bed in the blue room. When Jeanne had stretched out her limbs, and the bedclothes were tucked up under her chin, she declared she felt much better. There were no more complaints about dull pains at the back of her head; but she melted into tenderness, and her passionate love seemed to grow more pronounced. Helene was forced to caress her, to avow intense affection for her, and to promise that she would again kiss her when she came to bed. "Never mind if I'm sleeping," said Jeanne. "I shall know you're there all the same." She closed her eyes and fell into a doze. Helene remained near her, watching over her slumber. When Rosalie entered on tip-toe to ask permission to go to bed, she answered "Yes" with a nod. At last eleven o'clock struck, and Helene was still watching there, when she imagined she heard a gentle tapping at the outer door. Bewildered with astonishment, she took up the lamp and left the room to make sure. "Who is there?" "'Tis I; open the door," replied a voice in stifled tones. It was Henri's voice. She quickly opened the door, thinking his coming only natural. No doubt he had but now been informed of Jeanne's illness, and had hastened to her, although she had not summoned him to her assistance, feeling a certain shame at the thought of allowing him to share in attending on her daughter. However, he gave her no opportunity to speak. He followed her into the dining-room, trembling, with inflamed visage. "I beseech you, pardon me," he faltered, as he caught hold of her hand. "I haven't seen you for three days past, and I cannot resist the craving to see you." Helene withdrew her hand. He stepped back, but, with his gaze still fixed on her, continued: "Don't be afraid; I love you. I would have waited at the door had you not opened it. Oh! I know very well it is simple madness, but I love you, I love you all the same!" Her face was grave as she listened, eloquent with a dumb reproach which tortured him, and impelled him to pour forth his passionate love. But Helene still remained standing, wholly unmoved. At last she spoke. "You know nothing, then?" asked she. He had taken her hand, and was raising it to his lips, when she started back with a gesture of impatience. "Oh! leave me!" she exclaimed. "You see that I am not even listening to you. I have something far different to think about!" Then becoming more composed, she put her question to him a second time. "You know nothing? Well, my daughter is ill. I am pleased to see you; you will dispel my fears." She took up the lamp and walked on before him, but as they were passing through the doorway, she turned, and looking at him, said firmly: "I forbid you beginning again here. Oh! you must not!" He entered behind her, scarcely understanding what had been enjoined on him. His temples throbbed convulsively, as he leaned over the child's little crib. "She is asleep; look at her," said Helene in a whisper. He did not hear her; his passion would not be silenced. She was hanging over the bed in front of him, and he could see her rosy neck, with its wavy hair. He shut his eyes that he might escape the temptation of kissing her, as she said to him: "Doctor, look at her, she is so feverish. Oh, tell me whether it is serious!" Then, yielding to professional habit, despite the tempest raging in his brain, he mechanically felt Jeanne's pulse. Nevertheless, so fierce was the struggle that he remained for a time motionless, seemingly unaware that he held this wasted little hand in his own. "Is it a violent fever?" asked Helene. "A violent fever! Do you think so?" he repeated. The little hand was scorching his own. There came another silence; the physician was awakening within him, and passion was dying from his eyes. His face slowly grew paler; he bent down uneasily, and examined Jeanne. "You are right; this is a very severe attack," he exclaimed. "My God! the poor child!" His passion was now dead; he was solely consumed by a desire to be of service to her. His coolness at once returned; he sat down, and was questioning the mother respecting the child's condition previous to this attack of illness, when Jeanne awoke, moaning loudly. She again complained of a terrible pain in the head. The pangs which were darting through her neck and shoulders had attained such intensity that her every movement wrung a sob from her. Helene knelt on the other side of the bed, encouraging her, and smiling on her, though her heart almost broke at the sight of such agony. "There's some one there, isn't there, mamma?" Jeanne asked, as she turned round and caught sight of the doctor. "It is a friend, whom you know." The child looked at him for a time with thoughtful eyes, as if in doubt; but soon a wave of affection passed over her face. "Yes, yes, I know him; I love him very much." And with her coaxing air she added: "You will have to cure me, won't you, sir, to make mamma happy? Oh, I'll be good; I'll drink everything you give me." The doctor again felt her pulse, while Helene grasped her other hand; and, as she lay there between them, her eyes travelled attentively from one to the other, as though no such advantageous opportunity of seeing and comparing them had ever occurred before. Then her head shook with a nervous trembling; she grew agitated; and her tiny hands caught hold of her mother and the doctor with a convulsive grip. "Do not go away; I'm so afraid. Take care of me; don't let all the others come near me. I only want you, only you two, near me. Come closer up to me, together!" she stammered. Drawing them nearer, with a violent effort she brought them close to her, still uttering the same entreaty: "Come close, together, together!" Several times did she behave in the same delirious fashion. Then came intervals of quiet, when a heavy sleep fell on her, but it left her breathless and almost dead. When she started out of these short dozes she heard nothing, saw nothing--a white vapor shrouded her eyes. The doctor remained watching over her for a part of the night, which proved a very bad one. He only absented himself for a moment to procure some medicine. Towards morning, when he was about to leave, Helene, with terrible anxiety in her face accompanied him into the ante-room. "Well?" asked she. "Her condition is very serious," he answered; "but you must not fear; rely on me; I will give you every assistance. I shall come back at ten o'clock." When Helene returned to the bedroom she found Jeanne sitting up in bed, gazing round her with bewildered looks. "You left me! you left me!" she wailed. "Oh! I'm afraid; I don't want to be left all alone." To console her, her mother kissed her, but she still gazed round the room: "Where is he?" she faltered. "Oh! tell him not to go away; I want him to be here, I want him--" "He will come back, my darling!" interrupted Helene, whose tears were mingling with Jeanne's own. "He will not leave us, I promise you. He loves us too well. Now, be good and lie down. I'll stay here till he comes back." "Really? really?" murmured the child, as she slowly fell back into deep slumber. Terrible days now began, three weeks full of awful agony. The fever did not quit its victim for an hour. Jeanne only seemed tranquil when the doctor was present; she put one of her little hands in his, while her mother held the other. She seemed to find safety in their presence; she gave each of them an equal share of her tyrannical worship, as though she well knew beneath what passionate kindness she was sheltering herself. Her nervous temperament, so exquisite in its sensibility, the keener since her illness, inspired her, no doubt, with the thought that only a miraculous effort of their love could save her. As the hours slipped away she would gaze on them with grave and searching looks as they sat on each side of her crib. Her glances remained instinct with human passion, and though she spoke not she told them all she desired by the warm pressure of her hands, with which she besought them not to leave her, giving them to understand what peace was hers when they were present. Whenever the doctor entered after having been away her joy became supreme, and her eyes, which never quitted the door, flashed with light; and then she would fall quietly asleep, all her fears fleeing as she heard her mother and him moving around her and speaking in whispers. On the day after the attack Doctor Bodin called. But Jeanne suddenly turned away her head and refused to allow him to examine her. "I don't want him, mamma," she murmured, "I don't want him! I beg of you." As he made his appearance on the following day, Helene was forced to inform him of the child's dislike, and thus it came about that the venerable doctor made no further effort to enter the sick-room. Still, he climbed the stairs every other day to inquire how Jeanne was getting on, and sometimes chatted with his brother professional, Doctor Deberle, who paid him all the deference due to an elder. Moreover, it was useless to try to deceive Jeanne. Her senses had become wondrously acute. The Abbe and Monsieur Rambaud paid a visit every night; they sat down and spent an hour in sad silence. One evening, as the doctor was going away, Helene signed to Monsieur Rambaud to take his place and clasp the little one's hand, so that she might not notice the departure of her beloved friend. But two or three minutes had scarcely passed ere Jeanne opened her eyes and quickly drew her hand away. With tears flowing she declared that they were behaving ill to her. "Don't you love me any longer? won't you have me beside you?" asked poor Monsieur Rambaud, with tears in his eyes. She looked at him, deigning no reply; it seemed as if her heart was set on knowing him no more. The worthy man, grievously pained, returned to his corner. He always ended by thus gliding into a window-recess, where, half hidden behind a curtain, he would remain during the evening, in a stupor of grief, his eyes the while never quitting the sufferer. The Abbe was there as well, with his large head and pallid face showing above his scraggy shoulders. He concealed his tears by blowing his nose loudly from time to time. The danger in which he saw his little friend lying wrought such havoc within him that his poor were for the time wholly forgotten. But it was useless for the two brothers to retire to the other end of the room; Jeanne was still conscious of their presence. They were a source of vexation to her, and she would turn round with a harassed look, even though drowsy with fever. Her mother bent over her to catch the words trembling on her lips. "Oh! mamma, I feel so ill. All this is choking me; send everybody away --quick, quick!" Helene with the utmost gentleness then explained to the two brothers the child's wish to fall asleep; they understood her meaning, and quitted the room with drooping heads. And no sooner had they gone than Jeanne breathed with greater freedom, cast a glance round the chamber, and once more fixed a look of infinite tenderness on her mother and the doctor. "Good-night," she whispered; "I feel well again; stay beside me." For three weeks she thus kept them by her side. Henri had at first paid two visits each day, but soon he spent the whole night with them, giving every hour he could spare to the child. At the outset he had feared it was a case of typhoid fever; but so contradictory were the symptoms that he soon felt himself involved in perplexity. There was no doubt he was confronted by a disease of the chlorosis type, presenting the greatest difficulty in treatment, with the possibility of very dangerous complications, as the child was almost on the threshold of womanhood. He dreaded first a lesion of the heart and then the setting in of consumption. Jeanne's nervous excitement, wholly beyond his control, was a special source of uneasiness; to such heights of delirium did the fever rise, that the strongest medicines were of no avail. He brought all his fortitude and knowledge to bear on the case, inspired with the one thought that his own happiness and life were at stake. On his mind there had now fallen a great stillness; not once during those three anxious weeks did his passion break its bonds. Helene's breath no longer woke tremors within him, and when their eyes met they were only eloquent of the sympathetic sadness of two souls threatened by a common misfortune. Nevertheless every moment brought their hearts nearer. They now lived only with the one idea. No sooner had he entered the bed-chamber than by a glance he gathered how Jeanne had spent the night; and there was no need for him to speak for Helene to learn what he thought of the child's condition. Besides, with all the innate bravery of a mother, she had forced from him a declaration that he would not deceive her, but allow her to know his fears. Always on her feet, not having had three hours' uninterrupted sleep for three weeks past, she displayed superhuman endurance and composure, and quelled her despair without a tear in order that she might concentrate her whole soul upon the struggle with the dread enemy. Within and without her heart there was nothing but emptiness; the world around her, the usual thoughts of each hour, the consciousness of life itself, had all faded into darkness. Existence held nothing for her. Nothing now bound her to life but her suffering darling and this man who promised her a miracle. It was he, and he only, to whom she looked, to whom she listened, whose most trivial words were to her of the first importance, and into whose breast she would fain have transfused her own soul in order to increase his energy. Insensibly, and without break, this idea wrought out its own accomplishment. Almost every evening, when the fever was raging at its worst and Jeanne lay in imminent peril, they were there beside her in silence; and as though eager to remind themselves that they stood shoulder to shoulder struggling against death, their hands met on the edge of the bed in a caressing clasp, while they trembled with solicitude and pity till a faint smile breaking over the child's face, and the sound of quiet and regular breathing, told them that the danger was past. Then each encouraged the other by an inclination of the head. Once again had their love triumphed; and every time the mute caress grew more demonstrative their hearts drew closer together. One night Helene divined that Henri was concealing something from her. For ten minutes, without a word crossing his lips, he had been examining Jeanne. The little one complained of intolerable thirst; she seemed choking, and there was an incessant wheezing in her parched throat. Then a purple flush came over her face, and she lapsed into a stupor which prevented her even from raising her eyelids. She lay motionless; it might have been imagined she was dead but for the sound coming from her throat. "You consider her very ill, do you not?" gasped Helene. He answered in the negative; there was no change. But his face was ashy-white, and he remained seated, overwhelmed by his powerlessness. Thereupon she also, despite the tension of her whole being, sank upon a chair on the other side of the bed. "Tell me everything. You promised to tell me all. Is she beyond hope?" He still sat silent, and she spoke again more vehemently: "You know how brave I am. Have I wept? have I despaired? Speak: I want to know the truth." Henri fixed his eyes on her. The words came slowly from his lips. "Well," said he, "if in an hour hence she hasn't awakened from this stupor, it will be all over." Not a sob broke from Helene; but icy horror possessed her and raised her hair on end. Her eyes turned on Jeanne; she fell on her knees and clasped her in her arms with a superb gesture eloquent of ownership, as though she could preserve her from ill, nestling thus against her shoulder. For more than a minute she kept her face close to the child's, gazing at her intently, eager to give her breath from her own nostrils, ay, and her very life too. The labored breathing of the little sufferer grew shorter and shorter. "Can nothing be done?" she exclaimed, as she lifted her head. "Why do you remain there? Do something!" But he made a disheartened gesture. "Do something!" she repeated. "There must be something to be done. You are not going to let her die oh, surely not!" "I will do everything possible," the doctor simply said. He rose up, and then a supreme struggle began. All the coolness and nerve of the practitioner had returned to him. Till now he had not ventured to try any violent remedies, for he dreaded to enfeeble the little frame already almost destitute of life. But he no longer remained undecided, and straightway dispatched Rosalie for a dozen leeches. And he did not attempt to conceal from the mother that this was a desperate remedy which might save or kill her child. When the leeches were brought in, her heart failed her for a moment. "Gracious God! gracious God!" she murmured. "Oh, if you should kill her!" He was forced to wring consent from her. "Well, put them on," said she; "but may Heaven guide your hand!" She had not ceased holding Jeanne, and refused to alter her position, as she still desired to keep the child's little head nestling against her shoulder. With calm features he meantime busied himself with the last resource, not allowing a word to fall from his lips. The first application of the leeches proved unsuccessful. The minutes slipped away. The only sound breaking the stillness of the shadowy chamber was the merciless, incessant tick-tack of the timepiece. Hope departed with every second. In the bright disc of light cast by the lamp, Jeanne lay stretched among the disordered bedclothes, with limbs of waxen pallor. Helene, with tearless eyes, but choking with emotion, gazed on the little body already in the clutches of death, and to see a drop of her daughter's blood appear, would willingly have yielded up all her own. And at last a ruddy drop trickled down--the leeches had made fast their hold; one by one they commenced sucking. The child's life was in the balance. These were terrible moments, pregnant with anguish. Was that sigh the exhalation of Jeanne's last breath, or did it mark her return to life? For a time Helene's heart was frozen within her; she believed that the little one was dead; and there came to her a violent impulse to pluck away the creatures which were sucking so greedily; but some supernatural power restrained her, and she remained there with open mouth and her blood chilled within her. The pendulum still swung to and fro; the room itself seemed to wait the issue in anxious expectation. At last the child stirred. Her heavy eyelids rose, but dropped again, as though wonder and weariness had overcome her. A slight quiver passed over her face; it seemed as if she were breathing. Finally there was a trembling of the lips; and Helene, in an agony of suspense, bent over her, fiercely awaiting the result. "Mamma! mamma!" murmured Jeanne. Henri heard, and walking to the head of the bed, whispered in the mother's ear: "She is saved." "She is saved! she is saved!" echoed Helene in stammering tones, her bosom filled with such joy that she fell on the floor close to the bed, gazing now at her daughter and now at the doctor with distracted looks. But she rose and giving way to a mighty impulse, threw herself on Henri's neck. "I love you!" she exclaimed. This was her avowal--the avowal imprisoned so long, but at last poured forth in the crisis of emotion which had come upon her. Mother and lover were merged in one; she proffered him her love in a fiery rush of gratitude. Through her sobs she spoke to him in endearing words. Her tears, dried at their source for three weeks, were now rolling down her cheeks. But at last she fell upon her knees, and took Jeanne in her arms to lull her to deeper slumber against her shoulder; and at intervals whilst her child thus rested she raised to Henri's eyes glistening with passionate tears. Stretched in her cot, the bedclothes tucked under her chin, and her head, with its dark brown tresses, resting in the centre of the pillow, Jeanne lay, relieved, but prostrate. Her eyelids were closed, but she did not sleep. The lamp, placed on the table, which had been rolled close to the fireplace, lit but one end of the room, and the shade encompassed Helene and Henri, seated in their customary places on each side of the bed. But the child did not part them; on the contrary, she served as a closer bond between them, and her innocence was intermingled with their love on this first night of its avowal. At times Helene rose on tiptoe to fetch the medicine, to turn up the lamp, or give some order to Rosalie; while the doctor, whose eyes never quitted her, would sign to her to walk gently. And when she had sat down again they smiled at one another. Not a word was spoken; all their interest was concentrated on Jeanne, who was to them as their love itself. Sometimes when the coverlet was being pulled up, or the child's head was being raised, their hands met and rested together in sweet forgetfulness. This undesigned, stealthy caress was the only one in which they indulged. "I am not sleeping," murmured Jeanne. "I know very well you are there." On hearing her speak they were overjoyed. Their hands parted; beyond this they had no desires. The improvement in the child's condition was to them satisfaction and peace. "Are you feeling better, my darling?" asked Helene, when she saw her stirring. Jeanne made no immediate reply, and when she spoke it was dreamingly. "Oh, yes! I don't feel anything now. But I can hear you, and that pleases me." After the lapse of a moment, she opened her eyes with an effort and looked at them. Then an angelic smile crossed her face, and her eyelids dropped once more. On the morrow, when the Abbe and Monsieur Rambaud made their appearance, Helene gave way to a shrug of impatience. They were now a disturbing element in her happy nest. As they went on questioning her, shaking with fear lest they might receive bad tidings, she had the cruelty to reply that Jeanne was no better. She spoke without consideration, driven to this strait by the selfish desire of treasuring for herself and Henri the bliss of having rescued Jeanne from death, and of alone knowing this to be so. What was their reason for seeking a share in her happiness? It belonged to Henri and herself, and had it been known to another would have seemed to her impaired in value. To her imagination it would have been as though a stranger were participating in her love. The priest, however, approached the bed. "Jeanne, 'tis we, your old friends. Don't you know us?" She nodded gravely to them in recognition, but she was unwilling to speak to them; she was in a thoughtful mood, and she cast a look full of meaning on her mother. The two poor men went away more heartbroken than on any previous evening. Three days later Henri allowed his patient her first boiled egg. It was a matter of the highest importance. Jeanne's mind was made up to eat it with none present but her mother and the doctor, and the door must be closed. As it happened, Monsieur Rambaud was present at the moment; and when Helene began to spread a napkin, by way of tablecloth, on the bed, the child whispered in her ear: "Wait a moment--when he has gone." And as soon as he had left them she burst out: "Now, quick! quick! It's far nicer when there's nobody but ourselves." Helene lifted her to a sitting posture, while Henri placed two pillows behind her to prop her up; and then, with the napkin spread before her and a plate on her knees, Jeanne waited, smiling. "Shall I break the shell for you?" asked her mother. "Yes, do, mamma." "And I will cut you three little bits of bread," added the doctor. "Oh! four; you'll see if I don't eat four." It was now the doctor's turn to be addressed endearingly. When he gave her the first slice, she gripped his hand, and as she still clasped her mother's, she rained kisses on both with the same passionate tenderness. "Come, come; you will have to be good," entreated Helene, who observed that she was ready to burst into tears; "you must please us by eating your egg." At this Jeanne ventured to begin; but her frame was so enfeebled that with the second sippet of bread she declared herself wearied. As she swallowed each mouthful, she would say, with a smile, that her teeth were tender. Henri encouraged her, while Helene's eyes were brimful of tears. Heaven! she saw her child eating! She watched the bread disappear, and the gradual consumption of this first egg thrilled her to the heart. To picture Jeanne stretched dead beneath the sheets was a vision of mortal terror; but now she was eating, and eating so prettily, with all an invalid's characteristic dawdling and hesitancy! "You won't be angry, mamma? I'm doing my best. Why, I'm at my third bit of bread! Are you pleased?" "Yes, my darling, quite pleased. Oh! you don't know all the joy the sight gives me!" And then, in the happiness with which she overflowed, Helene forgetfully leaned against Henri's shoulder. Both laughed gleefully at the child, but over her face there suddenly crept a sullen flush; she gazed at them stealthily, and drooped her head, and refused to eat any more, her features glooming the while with distrust and anger. At last they had to lay her back in bed again. CHAPTER XIII. Months slipped away, and Jeanne was still convalescent. August came, and she had not quitted her bed. When evening fell she would rise for an hour or two; but even the crossing of the room to the window--where she reclined on an invalid-chair and gazed out on Paris, flaming with the ruddy light of the dying sun--seemed too great a strain for her wearied frame. Her attenuated limbs could scarce bear their burden, and she would declare with a wan smile that the blood in her veins would not suffice for a little bird, and that she must have plenty of soup. Morsels of raw meat were dipped in her broth. She had grown to like this mixture, as she longed to be able to go down to play in the garden. The weeks and the months which slipped by were ever instinct with the same delightful monotony, and Helene forgot to count the days. She never left the house; at Jeanne's side she forgot the whole world. No news from without reached her ears. Her retreat, though it looked down on Paris, which with its smoke and noise stretched across the horizon, was as secret and secluded as any cave of holy hermit amongst the hills. Her child was saved, and the knowledge of it satisfied all her desires. She spent her days in watching over her return to health, rejoicing in a shade of bright color returning to her cheeks, in a lively look, or in a gesture of gladness. Every hour made her daughter more like what she had been of old, with lovely eyes and wavy hair. The slower Jeanne's recovery, the greater joy was yielded to Helene, who recalled the olden days when she had suckled her, and, as she gazed on her gathering strength, felt even a keener emotion than when in the past she had measured her two little feet in her hand to see if she would soon be able to walk. At the same time some anxiety remained to Helene. On several occasions she had seen a shadow come over Jeanne's face--a shadow of sudden distrust and sourness. Why was her laughter thus abruptly turned to sulkiness? Was she suffering? was she hiding some quickening of the old pain? "Tell me, darling, what is the matter? You were laughing just a moment ago, and now you are nearly crying! Speak to me: do you feel a pain anywhere?" But Jeanne abruptly turned away her head and buried her face in the pillow. "There's nothing wrong with me," she answered curtly. "I want to be left alone." And she would lie brooding the whole afternoon, with her eyes fixed on the wall, showing no sign of affectionate repentance, but plunged in a sadness which baffled her forlorn mother. The doctor knew not what to say; these fits of gloom would always break out when he was there, and he attributed them to the sufferer's nervousness. He impressed on Helene the necessity of crossing her in nothing. One afternoon Jeanne had fallen asleep. Henri, who was pleased with her progress, had lingered in the room, and was carrying on a whispered conversation with Helene, who was once more busy with her everlasting needlework at her seat beside the window. Since the terrible night when she had confessed she loved him both had lived on peacefully in the consciousness of their mutual passions, careless of the morrow, and without a thought of the world. Around Jeanne's bed, in this room that still reverberated with her agony, there was an atmosphere of purity which shielded them from any outburst. The child's innocent breath fell on them with a quieting influence. But as the little invalid slowly grew well again, their love in very sympathy took new strength, and they would sit side by side with beating hearts, speaking little, and then only in whispers, lest the little one might be awakened. Their words were without significance, but struck re-echoing chords within the breast of each. That afternoon their love revealed itself in a thousand ways. "I assure you she is much better," said the doctor. "In a fortnight she will be able to go down to the garden." Helene went on stitching quickly. "Yesterday she was again very sad," she murmured, "but this morning she was laughing and happy. She has given me her promise to be good." A long silence followed. The child was still plunged in sleep, and their souls were enveloped in a profound peace. When she slumbered thus, their relief was intense; they seemed to share each other's hearts the more. "Have you not seen the garden yet?" asked Henri. "Just now it's full of flowers." "The asters are out, aren't they?" she questioned. "Yes; the flower-bed looks magnificent. The clematises have wound their way up into the elms. It is quite a nest of foliage." There was another silence. Helene ceased sewing, and gave him a smile. To their fancy it seemed as though they were strolling together along high-banked paths, dim with shadows, amidst which fell a shower of roses. As he hung over her he drank in the faint perfume of vervain that arose from her dressing-gown. However, all at once a rustling of the sheets disturbed them. "She is wakening!" exclaimed Helene, as she started up. Henri drew himself away, and simultaneously threw a glance towards the bed. Jeanne had but a moment before gripped the pillow with her arms, and, with her chin buried in it, had turned her face towards them. But her eyelids were still shut, and judging by her slow and regular breathing, she had again fallen asleep. "Are you always sewing like this?" asked Henri, as he came nearer to Helene. "I cannot remain with idle hands," she answered. "It is mechanical enough, but it regulates my thoughts. For hours I can think of the same thing without wearying." He said no more, but his eye dwelt on the needle as the stitching went on almost in a melodious cadence; and it seemed to him as if the thread were carrying off and binding something of their lives together. For hours she could have sewn on, and for hours he could have sat there, listening to the music of the needle, in which, like a lulling refrain, re-echoed one word that never wearied them. It was their wish to live their days like this in that quiet nook, to sit side by side while the child was asleep, never stirring from their places lest they might awaken her. How sweet was that quiescent silence, in which they could listen to the pulsing of hearts, and bask in the delight of a dream of everlasting love! "How good you are!" were the words which came several times from his lips, the joy her presence gave him only finding expression in that one phrase. Again she raised her head, never for a moment deeming it strange that she should be so passionately worshipped. Henri's face was near her own, and for a second they gazed at one another. "Let me get on with my work," she said in a whisper. "I shall never have it finished." But just then an instinctive dread prompted her to turn round, and indeed there lay Jeanne, lowering upon them with deadly pale face and great inky-black eyes. The child had not made the least movement; her chin was still buried in the downy pillow, which she clasped with her little arms. She had only opened her eyes a moment before and was contemplating them. "Jeanne, what's the matter?" asked Helene. "Are you ill? do you want anything?" The little one made no reply, never stirred, did not even lower the lids of her great flashing eyes. A sullen gloom was on her brow, and in her pallid cheeks were deep hollows. She seemed about to throw back her hands as though a convulsion was imminent. Helene started up, begging her to speak; but she remained obstinately stiff, darting such black looks on her mother that the latter's face became purple with blushes, and she murmured: "Doctor, see; what is the matter with her?" Henri had drawn his chair away from Helene's. He ventured near the bed, and was desirous of taking hold of one of the little hands which so fiercely gripped the pillow. But as he touched Jeanne she trembled in every limb, turned with a start towards the wall, and exclaimed: "Leave me alone; you, I mean! You are hurting me!" She pulled the coverlet over her face, and for a quarter of an hour they attempted, without success, to soothe her with gentle words. At last, as they still persevered, she sat up with her hands clasped in supplication: "Oh, please leave me alone; you are tormenting me! Leave me alone!" Helene, in her bewilderment, once more sat down at the window, but Henri did not resume his place beside her. They now understood: Jeanne was devoured by jealousy. They were unable to speak another word. For a minute or two the doctor paced up and down in silence, and then slowly quitted the room, well understanding the meaning of the anxious glances which the mother was darting towards the bed. As soon as he had gone, she ran to her daughter's side and pressed her passionately to her breast, with a wild outburst of words. "Hear me, my pet, I am alone now; look at me, speak to me. Are you in pain? Have I vexed you then? Tell me everything! Is it I whom you are angry with? What are you troubled about?" But it was useless to pray for an answer, useless to plead with all sorts of questions; Jeanne declared that she was quite well. Then she started up with a frenzied cry: "You don't love me any more, mamma! you don't love me any more!" She burst into grievous sobbing, and wound her arms convulsively round her mother's neck, raining greedy kisses on her face. Helene's heart was rent within her, she felt overwhelmed with unspeakable sadness, and strained her child to her bosom, mingling her tears with her own, and vowing to her that she would never love anybody save herself. From that day onward a mere word or glance would suffice to awaken Jeanne's jealousy. While she was in the perilous grip of death some instinct had led her to put her trust in the loving tenderness with which they had shielded and saved her. But now strength was returning to her, and she would allow none to participate in her mother's love. She conceived a kind of spite against the doctor, a spite which stealthily grew into hate as her health improved. It was hidden deep within her self-willed brain, in the innermost recesses of her suspicious and silent nature. She would never consent to explain things; she herself knew not what was the matter with her; but she felt ill whenever the doctor drew too near to her mother; and would press her hands violently to her bosom. Her torment seemed to sear her very heart, and furious passion choked her and made her cheeks turn pale. Nor could she place any restraint on herself; she imagined every one unjust, grew stiff and haughty, and deigned no reply when she was charged with being very ill-tempered. Helene, trembling with dismay, dared not press her to explain the source of her trouble; indeed, her eyes turned away whenever this eleven-year-old child darted at her a glance in which was concentrated the premature passion of a woman. "Oh, Jeanne, you are making me very wretched!" she would sometimes say to her, the tears standing in her eyes as she observed her stifling in her efforts to restrain a sudden bubbling up of mad anger. But these words, once so potent for good, which had so often drawn the child weeping to Helene's arms, were now wholly without influence. There was a change taking place in her character. Her humors varied ten times a day. Generally she spoke abruptly and imperiously, addressing her mother as though she were Rosalie, and constantly plaguing her with the pettiest demands, ever impatient and loud in complaint. "Give me a drink. What a time you take! I am left here dying of thirst!" And when Helene handed the glass to her she would exclaim: "There's no sugar in it; I won't have it!" Then she would throw herself back on her pillow, and a second time push away the glass, with the complaint that the drink was too sweet. They no longer cared to attend to her, she would say; they were doing it purposely. Helene, dreading lest she might infuriate her to a yet greater extent, made no reply, but gazed on her with tears trembling on her cheeks. However, Jeanne's anger was particularly visible when the doctor made his appearance. The moment he entered the sick-room she would lay herself flat in bed, or sullenly hang her head in the manner of savage brutes who will not suffer a stranger to come near. Sometimes she refused to say a word, allowing him to feel her pulse or examine her while she remained motionless with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. On other days she would not even look at him, but clasp her hands over her eyes with such a gust of passion that to remove them would have necessitated the violent twisting of her arms. One night, as her mother was about to give her a spoonful of medicine, she burst out with the cruel remark: "I won't have it; it will poison me." Helene's heart, pierced to the quick, sank within her, and she dreaded to elicit what the remark might mean. "What are you saying, my child?" she asked. "Do you understand what you are talking about? Medicine is never nice to take. You must drink this." But Jeanne lay there in obstinate silence, and averted her head in order to get rid of the draught. From that day onward she was full of caprices, swallowing or rejecting her medicines according to the humor of the moment. She would sniff at the phials and examine them suspiciously as they stood on the night-table. Should she have refused to drink the contents of one of them she never forgot its identity, and would have died rather than allow a drop from it to pass her lips. Honest Monsieur Rambaud alone could persuade her at times. It was he whom she now overwhelmed with the most lavish caresses, especially if the doctor were looking on; and her gleaming eyes were turned towards her mother to note if she were vexed by this display of affection towards another. "Oh, it's you, old friend!" she exclaimed the moment he entered. "Come and sit down near me. Have you brought me any oranges?" She sat up and laughingly fumbled in his pockets, where goodies were always secreted. Then she embraced him, playing quite a love comedy, while her revenge found satisfaction in the anguish which she imagined she could read on her mother's pallid face. Monsieur Rambaud beamed with joy over his restoration to his little sweetheart's good graces. But Helene, on meeting him in the ante-room, was usually able to acquaint him with the state of affairs, and all at once he would look at the draught standing on the table and exclaim: "What! are you having syrup?" Jeanne's face clouded over, and, in a low voice, she replied: "No, no, it's nasty, it's nauseous; I can't take it." "What! you can't drink this?" questioned Monsieur Rambaud gaily. "I can wager it's very good. May I take a little of it?" Then without awaiting her permission he poured out a large spoonful, and swallowed it with a grimace that seemed to betoken immeasurable satisfaction. "How delicious!" he murmured. "You are quite wrong; see, just take a little to try." Jeanne, amused, then made no further resistance. She would drink whatever Monsieur Rambaud happened to taste. She watched his every motion greedily, and appeared to study his features with a view to observing the effects of the medicine. The good man for a month gorged himself in this way with drugs, and, on Helene gratefully thanking him, merely shrugged his shoulders. "Oh! it's very good stuff!" he declared, with perfect conviction, making it his pleasure to share the little one's medicines. He passed his evenings at her bedside. The Abbe, on the other hand, came regularly every second day. Jeanne retained them with her as long as possible, and displayed vexation when she saw them take up their hats. Her immediate dread lay in being left alone with her mother and the doctor, and she would fain have always had company in the room to keep these two apart. Frequently, without reason, she called Rosalie to her. When they were alone with her, her eyes never quitted them, but pursued them into every corner of the bedroom. Whenever their hands came together, her face grew ashy white. If a whispered word was exchanged between them, she started up in anger, demanding to know what had been said. It was a grievance to her that her mother's gown should sweep against the doctor's foot. They could not approach or look at one another without the child falling immediately into violent trembling. The extreme sensitiveness of her innocent little being induced in her an exasperation which would suddenly prompt her to turn round, should she guess that they were smiling at one another behind her. She could divine the times when their love was at its height by the atmosphere wafted around her. It was then that her gloom became deeper, and her agonies were those of nervous women at the approach of a terrible storm. Every one about Helene now looked on Jeanne as saved, and she herself had slowly come to recognize this as a certainty. Thus it happened that Jeanne's fits were at last regarded by her as the bad humors of a spoilt child, and as of little or no consequence. A craving to live sprang up within her after the six weeks of anguish which she had just spent. Her daughter was now well able to dispense with her care for hours; and for her, who had so long become unconscious of life, these hours opened up a vista of delight, of peace, and pleasure. She rummaged in her drawers, and made joyous discoveries of forgotten things; she plunged into all sorts of petty tasks, in the endeavor to resume the happy course of her daily existence. And in this upwelling of life her love expanded, and the society of Henri was the reward she allowed herself for the intensity of her past sufferings. In the shelter of that room they deemed themselves beyond the world's ken, and every hindrance in their path was forgotten. The child, to whom their love had proved a terror, alone remained a bar between them. Jeanne became, indeed, a veritable scourge to their affections. An ever-present barrier, with her eyes constantly upon them, she compelled them to maintain a continued restraint, an affectation of indifference, with the result that their hearts were stirred with even greater motion than before. For days they could not exchange a word; they knew intuitively that she was listening even when she was seemingly wrapped in slumber. One evening, when Helene had quitted the room with Henri, to escort him to the front door, Jeanne burst out with the cry, "Mamma! mamma!" in a voice shrill with rage. Helene was forced to return, for she heard the child leap from her bed; and she met her running towards her, shivering with cold and passion. Jeanne would no longer let her remain away from her. From that day forward they could merely exchange a clasp of the hand on meeting and parting. Madame Deberle was now spending a month at the seaside, and the doctor, though he had all his time at his own command, dared not pass more than ten minutes in Helene's company. Their long chats at the window had come to an end. What particularly tortured their hearts was the fickleness of Jeanne's humor. One night, as the doctor hung over her, she gave way to tears. For a whole day her hate changed to feverish tenderness, and Helene felt happy once more; but on the morrow, when the doctor entered the room, the child received him with such a display of sourness that the mother besought him with a look to leave them. Jeanne had fretted the whole night in angry regret over her own good-humor. Not a day passed but what a like scene was enacted. And after the blissful hours the child brought them in her moods of impassioned tenderness these hours of misery fell on them with the torture of the lash. A feeling of revulsion at last awoke within Helene. To all seeming her daughter would be her death. Why, when her illness had been put to flight, did the ill-natured child work her utmost to torment her? If one of those intoxicating dreams took possession of her imagination--a mystic dream in which she found herself traversing a country alike unknown and entrancing with Henri by her side Jeanne's face, harsh and sullen, would suddenly start up before her and thus her heart was ever being rent in twain. The struggle between her maternal affection and her passion became fraught with the greatest suffering. One evening, despite Helene's formal edict of banishment, the doctor called. For eight days they had been unable to exchange a word together. She would fain that he had not entered; but he did so on learning that Jeanne was in a deep sleep. They sat down as of old, near the window, far from the glare of the lamp, with the peaceful shadows around them. For two hours their conversation went on in such low whispers that scarcely a sound disturbed the silence of the large room. At times they turned their heads and glanced at the delicate profile of Jeanne, whose little hands, clasped together, were reposing on the coverlet. But in the end they grew forgetful of their surroundings, and their talk incautiously became louder. Then, all at once, Jeanne's voice rang out. "Mamma! mamma!" she cried, seized with sudden agitation, as though suffering from nightmare. She writhed about in her bed, her eyelids still heavy with sleep, and then struggled to reach a sitting posture. "Hide, I beseech you!" whispered Helene to the doctor in a tone of anguish. "You will be her death if you stay here." In an instant Henri vanished into the window-recess, concealed by the blue velvet curtain; but it was in vain, the child still kept up her pitiful cry: "Oh, mamma! mamma! I suffer so much." "I am here beside you, my darling; where do you feel the pain?" "I don't know. Oh, see, it is here! Oh, it is scorching me!" With eyes wide open and features distorted, she pressed her little hands to her bosom. "It came on me in a moment. I was asleep, wasn't I? But I felt something like a burning coal." "But it's all gone now. You're not pained any longer, are you?" "Yes, yes, I feel it still." She glanced uneasily round the room. She was now wholly awake; the sullen gloom crept over her face once more, and her cheeks became livid. "Are you by yourself, mamma?" she asked. "Of course I am, my darling!" Nevertheless Jeanne shook her head and gazed about, sniffing the air, while her agitation visibly increased. "No, you're not; I know you're not. There's some one--Oh, mamma! I'm afraid, I'm afraid! You are telling me a story; you are not by yourself." She fell back in bed in an hysterical fit, sobbing loudly and huddling herself beneath the coverlet, as though to ward off some danger. Helene, crazy with alarm, dismissed Henri without delay, despite his wish to remain and look after the child. But she drove him out forcibly, and on her return clasped Jeanne in her arms, while the little one gave vent to the one pitiful cry, with every utterance of which her sobbing was renewed louder than ever: "You don't love me any more! You don't love me any more!" "Hush, hush, my angel! don't say that," exclaimed the mother in agony. "You are all the world to me. You'll see yet whether I love you or not." She nursed her until the morning broke, intent on yielding up to her all her heart's affections, though she was appalled at realizing how completely the love of herself possessed this darling child. Next day she deemed a consultation necessary. Doctor Bodin, dropping in as though by chance, subjected the patient with many jokes to a careful examination; and a lengthy discussion ensued between him and Doctor Deberle, who had remained in the adjacent room. Both readily agreed that there were no serious symptoms apparent at the moment, but they were afraid of complex developments, and cross-questioned Helene for some time. They realized that they were dealing with one of those nervous affections which have a family history, and set medical skill at defiance. She told them, what they already partly knew, that her grandmother[*] was confined in the lunatic asylum of Les Tulettes at a short distance from Plassans, and that her mother had died from galloping consumption, after many years of brain affection and hysterical fits. She herself took more after her father; she had his features and the same gravity of temperament. Jeanne, on the other hand, was the facsimile of her grandmother; but she never would have her strength, commanding figure, or sturdy, bony frame. The two doctors enjoined on her once more that the greatest care was requisite. Too many precautions could not be taken in dealing with chloro-anaemical affections, which tend to develop a multitude of dangerous diseases. [*] Adelaide Fouque, already mentioned, who figures so prominently in "The Fortune of the Rougons," and dies under such horrible circumstances in "Doctor Pascal." Henri had listened to old Doctor Bodin with a deference which he had never before displayed for a colleague. He besought his advice on Jeanne's case with the air of a pupil who is full of doubt. Truth to tell, this child inspired him with dread; he felt that her case was beyond his science, and he feared lest she might die under his hands and her mother be lost to him for ever. A week passed away. He was no longer admitted by Helene into the little one's presence; and in the end, sad and sick at heart, he broke off his visits of his own accord. As the month of August verged on its close, Jeanne recovered sufficient strength to rise and walk across the room. The lightness of her heart spoke in her laughter. A fortnight had elapsed since the recurrence of any nervous attack. The thought that her mother was again all her own and would ever cling to her had proved remedy enough. At first distrust had rankled in her mind; while letting Helene kiss her she had remained uneasy at her least movement, and had imperiously besought her hand before she fell asleep, anxious to retain it in her own during her slumber. But at last, with the knowledge that nobody came near, she had regained confidence, enraptured by the prospect of a reopening of the old happy life when they had sat side by side, working at the window. Every day brought new roses to her cheeks; and Rosalie declared that she was blossoming brighter and brighter every hour. There were times, however, as night fell, when Helene broke down. Since her daughter's illness her face had remained grave and somewhat pale, and a deep wrinkle, never before visible, furrowed her brow. When Jeanne caught sight of her in these hours of weariness, despair, and voidness, she herself would feel very wretched, her heart heavy with vague remorse. Gently and silently she would then twine her arms around her neck. "Are you happy, mother darling?" came the whisper. A thrill ran through Helene's frame, and she hastened to answer: "Yes, of course, my pet." Still the child pressed her question: "Are you, oh! are you happy? Quite sure?" "Quite sure. Why should I feel unhappy?" With this Jeanne would clasp her closer in her little arms, as though to requite her. She would love her so well, she would say--so well, indeed, that nowhere in all Paris could a happier mother be found. CHAPTER XIV. During August Doctor Deberle's garden was like a well of foliage. The railings were hidden both by the twining branches of the lilac and laburnum trees and by the climbing plants, ivy, honeysuckle, and clematis, which sprouted everywhere in luxuriance, and glided and intermingled in inextricable confusion, drooping down in leafy canopies, and running along the walls till they reached the elms at the far end, where the verdure was so profuse that you might have thought a tent were stretched between the trees, the elms serving as its giant props. The garden was so small that the least shadow seemed to cover it. At noon the sun threw a disc of yellow light on the centre, illumining the lawn and its two flower-beds. Against the garden steps was a huge rose-bush, laden with hundreds of large tea-roses. In the evening when the heat subsided their perfume became more penetrating, and the air under the elms grew heavy with their warm breath. Nothing could exceed the charm of this hidden, balmy nook, into which no neighborly inquisition could peep, and which brought one a dream of the forest primeval, albeit barrel-organs were playing polkas in the Rue Vineuse, near by. "Why, madame, doesn't mademoiselle go down to the garden?" Rosalie daily asked. "I'm sure it would do her good to romp about under the trees." One of the elms had invaded Rosalie's kitchen with its branches. She would pull some of the leaves off as she gazed with delight on the clustering foliage, through which she could see nothing. "She isn't strong enough yet," was Helene's reply. "The cold, shady garden might be harmful to her." Rosalie was in no wise convinced. A happy thought with her was not easily abandoned. Madame must surely be mistaken in imagining that it would be cold or harmful. Perhaps madame's objection sprang rather from the fear that she would be in somebody's way; but that was nonsense. Mademoiselle would of a truth be in nobody's way; not a living soul made any appearance there. The doctor shunned the spot, and as for madame, his wife, she would remain at the seaside till the middle of September. This was so certain that the doorkeeper had asked Zephyrin to give the garden a rake over, and Zephyrin and she herself had spent two Sunday afternoons there already. Oh! it was lovely, lovelier than one could imagine. Helene, however, still declined to act on the suggestion. Jeanne seemed to have a great longing to enjoy a walk in the garden, which had been the ceaseless topic of her discourse during her illness; but a vague feeling of embarrassment made her eyes droop and closed her mouth on the subject in her mother's presence. At last when Sunday came round again the maid hurried into the room exclaiming breathlessly: "Oh! madame, there's nobody there, I give you my word! Only myself and Zephyrin, who is raking! Do let her come. You can't imagine how fine it is outside. Come for a little, only a little while, just to see!" Her conviction was such that Helene gave way. She cloaked Jeanne in a shawl, and told Rosalie to take a heavy wrap with her. The child was in an ecstasy, which spoke silently from the depths of her large sparkling eyes; she even wished to descend the staircase without help in order that her strength might be made plain. However, her mother's arms were stretched out behind her, ready to lend support. When they had reached the foot of the stairs and entered the garden, they both gave vent to an exclamation. So little did this umbrageous, thicket-girt spot resemble the trim nook they had seen in the springtime that they failed to recognize it. "Ah! you wouldn't believe me!" declared Rosalie, in triumphant tones. The clumps of shrubbery had grown to great proportions, making the paths much narrower, and, in walking, their skirts caught in some of the interwoven branches. To the fancy it seemed some far-away recess in a wood, arched over with foliage, from which fell a greeny light of delightful charm and mystery. Helene directed her steps towards the elm beneath which she had sat in April. "But I don't wish her to stay here," said she. "It is shady and coldish." "Well, well, you will see in a minute," answered the maid. Three steps farther on they emerged from the seeming forest, and, in the midst of the leafy profusion they found the sun's golden rays streaming on the lawn, warm and still as in a woodland clearing. As they looked up they saw the branches standing out against the blue of the sky with the delicacy of guipure. The tea-roses on the huge bush, faint in the heat, dropped slumberously from their stems. The flower-beds were full of red and white asters, looking with their old-world air like blossoms woven in some ancient tapestry. "Now you'll see," said Rosalie. "I'm going to put her all right myself." She had folded and placed the wrap on the edge of a walk, where the shadow came to an end. Here she made Jeanne sit down, covering her shoulders with a shawl, and bidding her stretch out her little legs. In this fashion the shade fell on the child's head, while her feet lay in the sunshine. "Are you all right, my darling?" Helene asked. "Oh, yes," was her answer. "I don't feel cold a bit, you know. I almost think I am sweltering before a big fire. Ah! how well one can breathe! How pleasant it is!" Thereupon Helene, whose eyes had turned uneasily towards the closed window-shutters of the house, expressed her intention of returning upstairs for a little while, and loaded Rosalie with a variety of injunctions. She would have to watch the sun; she was not to leave Jeanne there for more than half an hour; and she must not lose sight of her for a moment. "Don't be alarmed, mamma," exclaimed the child, with a laugh. "There are no carriages to pass along here." Left to amuse herself, she gathered a handful of gravel from the path at her side, and took pleasure in letting it fall from her clasped hands like a shower of rain. Zephyrin meantime was raking. On catching sight of madame and her daughter he had slipped on his great-coat, which he had previously hung from the branch of a tree; and in token of respect had stood stock-still, with his rake idle in his hand. Throughout Jeanne's illness he had come every Sunday as usual; but so great had been the caution with which he had slipped into the kitchen, that Helene would scarcely have dreamt of his presence had not Rosalie on each occasion been deputed as his messenger to inquire about the invalid's progress, and convey his condolences. Yes, so ran her comments, he was now laying claim to good manners; Paris was giving him some polish! And at present here he was, leaning on his rake, and mutely addressing Jeanne with a sympathetic nod. As soon as she saw him, her face broke into smiles. "I have been very ill," she said. "Yes, I know, mademoiselle," he replied as he placed his hand on his heart. And inspired with the wish to say something pretty or comical, which might serve to enliven the meeting, he added: "You see, your health has been taking a rest. Now it will indulge in a snore." Jeanne had again gathered up a handful of gravel, while he, perfectly satisfied, and opening his mouth wide from ear to ear in a burst of silent laughter, renewed his raking with all the strength of his arms. As the rake travelled over the gravel a regular, strident sound arose. When a few minutes had elapsed Rosalie, seeing her little charge absorbed in her amusement, seemingly happy and at ease, drew gradually farther away from her, as though lured by the grating of this rake. Zephyrin was now working away in the full glare of the sun, on the other side of the lawn. "You are sweating like an ox," she whispered to him. "Take off your great-coat. Be quick; mademoiselle won't be offended." He relieved himself of the garment, and once more suspended it from a branch. His red trousers, supported by a belt round the waist, reached almost to his chest, while his shirt of stout, unbleached linen, held at the neck by a narrow horsehair band, was so stiff that it stuck out and made him look even rounder than he was. He tucked up his sleeves with a certain amount of affectation, as though to show Rosalie a couple of flaming hearts, which, with the inscription "For Ever," had been tattooed on them at the barracks. "Did you go to mass this morning?" asked Rosalie, who usually tackled him with this question every Sunday. "To mass! to mass!" he repeated, with a chuckle. His red ears seemed to stand out from his head, shorn to the very skin, and the whole of his diminutive barrel-like body expressed a spirit of banter. At last the confession came. "Of course I went to mass." "You are lying," Rosalie burst out violently. "I know you are lying; your nose is twitching. Oh, Zephyrin, you are going to the dogs--you have left off going to church! Beware!" His answer, lover-like, was an attempt to put his arm round her waist, but to all appearance she was shocked, for she exclaimed: "I'll make you put on your coat again if you don't behave yourself. Aren't you ashamed? Why, there's mademoiselle looking at you!" Thereupon Zephyrin turned to his raking once more. In truth, Jeanne had raised her eyes towards them. Her amusement was palling on her somewhat; the gravel thrown aside, she had been gathering leaves and plucking grass; but a feeling of indolence crept over her, and now she preferred to do nothing but gaze at the sunshine as it fell on her more and more. A few moments previously only her legs, as far as the knees, had been bathed in this warm cascade of sunshine, but now it reached her waist, the heat increasing like an entrancing caress. What particularly amused her were the round patches of light, of a beautiful golden yellow, which danced over her shawl, for all the world like living creatures. She tossed back her head to see if they were perchance creeping towards her face, and meanwhile clasped her little hands together in the glare of the sunshine. How thin and transparent her hands seemed! The sun's rays passed through them, but all the same they appeared to her very pretty, pinky like shells, delicate and attenuated like the tiny hands of an infant Christ. Then too the fresh air, the gigantic trees around her, and the warmth, had lulled her somewhat into a trance. Sleep, she imagined, had come upon her, and yet she could still see and hear. It all seemed to her very nice and pleasant. "Mademoiselle, please draw back a bit," said Rosalie, who had approached her. "The sun's heat is too warm for you." But with a wave of her hand Jeanne declined to stir. For the time her attention was riveted on the maid and the little soldier. She pretended to direct her glances towards the ground, with the intention of making them believe that she did not see them; but in reality, despite her apparent drowsiness, she kept watching them from beneath her long eyelashes. Rosalie stood near her for a minute or two longer, but was powerless against the charms of the grating rake. Once more she slowly dragged herself towards Zephyrin, as if in spite of her will. She resented the change in manner which he was now displaying, and yet her heart was bursting with mute admiration. The little soldier had used to good purpose his long strolls with his comrades in the Jardin des Plantes and round the Place du Chateau-d'Eau, where his barracks stood, and the result was the acquisition of the swaying, expansive graces of the Parisian fire-eater. He had learnt the flowery talk, gallant readiness, and involved style of language so dear to the hearts of the ladies. At times she was thrilled with intense pleasure as she listened to the phrases which he repeated to her with a swagger of the shoulders, phrases full of incomprehensible words that inflamed her cheeks with a flush of pride. His uniform no longer sat awkwardly on him; he swung his arms to and fro with a knowing air, and had an especially noticeable style of wearing his shako on the back of his head, with the result that his round face with its tip of a nose became extremely prominent, while his headgear swayed gently with the rolling of his body. Besides, he was growing quite free and easy, quaffed his dram, and ogled the fair sex. With his sneering ways and affectation of reticence, he now doubtless knew a great deal more than she did. Paris was fast taking all the remaining rust off him; and Rosalie stood before him, delighted yet angry, undecided whether to scratch his face or let him give utterance to foolish prattle. Zephyrin, meanwhile, raking away, had turned the corner of the path. He was now hidden by a big spindle-tree, and was darting side-glances at Rosalie, luring her on against her will with the strokes of his rake. When she had got near him, he pinched her roughly. "Don't cry out; that's only to show you how I love you!" he said in a husky whisper. "And take that over and above." So saying he kissed her where he could, his lips lighting somewhere on her ear. Then, as Rosalie gave him a fierce nip in reply, he retaliated by another kiss, this time on her nose. Though she was well pleased, her face turned fiery-red; she was furious that Jeanne's presence should prevent her from giving him a box on the ear. "I have pricked my finger," she declared to Jeanne as she returned to her, by way of explaining the exclamation that escaped her lips. However, betwixt the spare branches of the spindle-tree the child had seen the incident. Amid the surrounding greenery the soldier's red trousers and greyish shirt were clearly discernible. She slowly raised her eyes to Rosalie, and looked at her for a moment, while the maid blushed the more. Then Jeanne's gaze fell to the ground again, and she gathered another handful of pebbles, but lacked the will or strength to play with them, and remained in a dreamy state, with her hands resting on the warm ground, amidst the vibrations of the sunrays. Within her a wave of health was swelling and stifling her. The trees seemed to take Titanic shape, and the air was redolent of the perfume of roses. In wonder and delight, she dreamt of all sorts of vague things. "What are you thinking of, mademoiselle?" asked Rosalie uneasily. "I don't know--of nothing," was Jeanne's reply. "Yes, I do know. You see, I should like to live to be very old." However, she could not explain these words. It was an idea, she said, that had come into her head. But in the evening, after dinner, as her dreamy fit fell on her again, and her mother inquired the cause, she suddenly put the question: "Mamma, do cousins ever marry?" "Yes, of course," said Helene. "Why do you ask me that?" "Oh, nothing; only I wanted to know." Helene had become accustomed to these extraordinary questions. The hour spent in the garden had so beneficial an effect on the child that every sunny day found her there. Helene's reluctance was gradually dispelled; the house was still shut up. Henri never ventured to show himself, and ere long she sat down on the edge of the rug beside Jeanne. However, on the following Sunday morning she found the windows thrown open, and felt troubled at heart. "Oh! but of course the rooms must be aired," exclaimed Rosalie, as an inducement for them to go down. "I declare to you nobody's there!" That day the weather was still warmer. Through the leafy screen the sun's rays darted like golden arrows. Jeanne, who was growing strong, strolled about for ten minutes, leaning on her mother's arm. Then, somewhat tired, she turned towards her rug, a corner of which she assigned to Helene. They smiled at one another, amused at thus finding themselves side by side on the ground. Zephyrin had given up his raking, and was helping Rosalie to gather some parsley, clumps of which were growing along the end wall. All at once there was an uproar in the house, and Helene was thinking of flight, when Madame Deberle made her appearance on the garden-steps. She had just arrived, and was still in her travelling dress, speaking very loudly, and seemingly very busy. But immediately she caught sight of Madame Grandjean and her daughter, sitting on the ground in the front of the lawn, she ran down, overwhelmed them with embraces, and poured a deafening flood of words into their ears. "What, is it you? How glad I am to see you! Kiss me, my little Jeanne! Poor puss, you've been very ill, have you not? But you're getting better; the roses are coming back to your cheeks! And you, my dear, how often I've thought of you! I wrote to you: did my letters reach you? You must have spent a terrible time: but it's all over now! Will you let me kiss you?" Helene was now on her feet, and was forced to submit to a kiss on each cheek and return them. This display of affection, however, chilled her to the heart. "You'll excuse us for having invaded your garden," she said. "You're joking," retorted Juliette impetuously. "Are you not at home here?" But she ran off for a moment, hastened up the stairs, and called across the open rooms: "Pierre, don't forget anything; there are seventeen packages!" Then, at once coming back, she commenced chattering about her holiday adventures. "Oh! such a splendid season! We went to Trouville, you know. The beach was always thronged with people. It was quite a crush. and people of the highest spheres, you know. I had visitors too. Papa came for a fortnight with Pauline. All the same, I'm glad to get home again. But I haven't given you all my news. Oh! I'll tell you later on!" She stooped down and kissed Jeanne again; then suddenly becoming serious, she asked: "Am I browned by the sun?" "No; I don't see any signs of it," replied Helene as she gazed at her. Juliette's eyes were clear and expressionless, her hands were plump, her pretty face was full of amiability; age did not tell on her; the sea air itself was powerless to affect her expression of serene indifference. So far as appearances went, she might have just returned from a shopping expedition in Paris. However, she was bubbling over with affection, and the more loving her outbursts, the more weary, constrained, and ill became Helene. Jeanne meantime never stirred from the rug, but merely raised her delicate, sickly face, while clasping her hands with a chilly air in the sunshine. "Wait, you haven't seen Lucien yet," exclaimed Juliette. "You must see him; he has got so fat." When the lad was brought on the scene, after the dust of the journey had been washed from his face by a servant girl, she pushed and turned him about to exhibit him. Fat and chubby-cheeked, his skin tanned by playing on the beach in the salt breeze, Lucien displayed exuberant health, but he had a somewhat sulky look because he had just been washed. He had not been properly dried, and one check was still wet and fiery-red with the rubbing of the towel. When he caught sight of Jeanne he stood stock-still with astonishment. She looked at him out of her poor, sickly face, as colorless as linen against the background of her streaming black hair, whose tresses fell in clusters to her shoulders. Her beautiful, sad, dilated eyes seemed to fill up her whole countenance; and, despite the excessive heat, she shivered somewhat, and stretched out her hands as though chilled and seeking warmth from a blazing fire. "Well! aren't you going to kiss her?" asked Juliette. But Lucien looked rather afraid. At length he made up his mind, and very cautiously protruded his lips so that he might not come too near the invalid. This done, he started back expeditiously. Helene's eyes were brimming over with tears. What health that child enjoyed! whereas her Jeanne was breathless after a walk round the lawn! Some mothers were very fortunate! Juliette all at once understood how cruel Lucien's conduct was, and she rated him soundly. "Good gracious! what a fool you are! Is that the way to kiss young ladies? You've no idea, my dear, what a nuisance he was at Trouville." She was getting somewhat mixed. But fortunately for her the doctor now made his appearance, and she extricated herself from her difficulty by exclaiming: "Oh, here's Henri." He had not been expecting their return until the evening, but she had travelled by an earlier train. She plunged into a discursive explanation, without in the least making her reasons clear. The doctor listened with a smiling face. "At all events, here you are," he said. "That's all that's necessary." A minute previously he had bowed to Helene without speaking. His glance for a moment fell on Jeanne, but feeling embarrassed he turned away his head. Jeanne bore his look with a serious face, and unclasping her hands instinctively grasped her mother's gown and drew closer to her side. "Ah! the rascal," said the doctor, as he raised Lucien and kissed him on each cheek. "Why, he's growing like magic." "Yes; and am I to be forgotten?" asked Juliette, as she held up her head. Then, without putting Lucien down, holding him, indeed, on one arm, the doctor leaned over to kiss his wife. Their three faces were lit up with smiles. Helene grew pale, and declared she must now go up. Jeanne, however, was unwilling; she wished to see what might happen, and her glances lingered for a while on the Deberles and then travelled back to her mother. When Juliette had bent her face upwards to receive her husband's kiss, a bright gleam had come into the child's eyes. "He's too heavy," resumed the doctor as he set Lucien down again. "Well, was the season a good one? I saw Malignon yesterday, and he was telling me about his stay there. So you let him leave before you, eh?" "Oh! he's quite a nuisance!" exclaimed Juliette, over whose face a serious, embarrassed expression had now crept. "He tormented us to death the whole time." "Your father was hoping for Pauline's sake--He hasn't declared his intentions then?" "What! Malignon!" said she, as though astonished and offended. And then with a gesture of annoyance she added, "Oh! leave him alone; he's cracked! How happy I am to be home again!" Without any apparent transition, she thereupon broke into an amazing outburst of tenderness, characteristic of her bird-like nature. She threw herself on her husband's breast and raised her face towards him. To all seeming they had forgotten that they were not alone. Jeanne's eyes, however, never quitted them. Her lips were livid and trembled with anger; her face was that of a jealous and revengeful woman. The pain she suffered was so great that she was forced to turn away her head, and in doing so she caught sight of Rosalie and Zephyrin at the bottom of the garden, still gathering parsley. Doubtless with the intent of being in no one's way, they had crept in among the thickest of the bushes, where both were squatting on the ground. Zephyrin, with a sly movement, had caught hold of one of Rosalie's feet, while she, without uttering a syllable, was heartily slapping him. Between two branches Jeanne could see the little soldier's face, chubby and round as a moon and deeply flushed, while his mouth gaped with an amorous grin. Meantime the sun's rays were beating down vertically, and the trees were peacefully sleeping, not a leaf stirring among them all. From beneath the elms came the heavy odor of soil untouched by the spade. And elsewhere floated the perfume of the last tea-roses, which were casting their petals one by one on the garden steps. Then Jeanne, with swelling heart, turned her gaze on her mother, and seeing her motionless and dumb in presence of the Deberles, gave her a look of intense anguish--a child's look of infinite meaning, such as you dare not question. But Madame Deberle stepped closer to them, and said: "I hope we shall see each other frequently now. As Jeanne is feeling better, she must come down every afternoon." Helene was already casting about for an excuse, pleading that she did not wish to weary her too much. But Jeanne abruptly broke in: "No, no; the sun does me a great deal of good. We will come down, madame. You will keep my place for me, won't you?" And as the doctor still remained in the background, she smiled towards him. "Doctor, please tell mamma that the fresh air won't do me any harm." He came forward, and this man, inured to human suffering, felt on his cheeks a slight flush at being thus gently addressed by the child. "Certainly not," he exclaimed; "the fresh air will only bring you nearer to good health." "So you see, mother darling, we must come down," said Jeanne, with a look of ineffable tenderness, whilst a sob died away in her throat. But Pierre had reappeared on the steps and announced the safe arrival of madame's seventeen packages. Then, followed by her husband and Lucien, Juliette retired, declaring that she was frightfully dirty, and intended to take a bath. When they were alone, Helene knelt down on the rug, as though about to tie the shawl round Jeanne's neck, and whispered in the child's ear: "You're not angry any longer with the doctor, then?" With a prolonged shake of the head the child replied "No, mamma." There was a silence. Helene's hands were seized with an awkward trembling, and she was seemingly unable to tie the shawl. Then Jeanne murmured: "But why does he love other people so? I won't have him love them like that." And as she spoke, her black eyes became harsh and gloomy, while her little hands fondled her mother's shoulders. Helene would have replied, but the words springing to her lips frightened her. The sun was now low, and mother and daughter took their departure. Zephyrin meanwhile had reappeared to view, with a bunch of parsley in his hand, the stalks of which he continued pulling off while darting murderous glances at Rosalie. The maid followed at some distance, inspired with distrust now that there was no one present. Just as she stooped to roll up the rug he tried to pinch her, but she retaliated with a blow from her fist which made his back re-echo like an empty cask. Still it seemed to delight him, and he was yet laughing silently when he re-entered the kitchen busily arranging his parsley. Thenceforth Jeanne was stubbornly bent on going down to the garden as soon as ever she heard Madame Deberle's voice there. All Rosalie's tittle-tattle regarding the next-door house she drank in greedily, ever restless and inquisitive concerning its inmates and their doings; and she would even slip out of the bedroom to keep watch from the kitchen window. In the garden, ensconced in a small arm-chair which was brought for her use from the drawing-room by Juliette's direction, her eyes never quitted the family. Lucien she now treated with great reserve, annoyed it seemed by his questions and antics, especially when the doctor was present. On those occasions she would stretch herself out as if wearied, gazing before her with her eyes wide open. For Helene the afternoons were pregnant with anguish. She always returned, however, returned in spite of the feeling of revolt which wrung her whole being. Every day when, on his arrival home, Henri printed a kiss on Juliette's hair, her heart leaped in its agony. And at those moments, if to hide the agitation of her face she pretended to busy herself with Jeanne, she would notice that the child was even paler than herself, with her black eyes glaring and her chin twitching with repressed fury. Jeanne shared in her suffering. When the mother turned away her head, heartbroken, the child became so sad and so exhausted that she had to be carried upstairs and put to bed. She could no longer see the doctor approach his wife without changing countenance; she would tremble, and turn on him a glance full of all the jealous fire of a deserted mistress. "I cough in the morning," she said to him one day. "You must come and see for yourself." Rainy weather ensued, and Jeanne became quite anxious that the doctor should commence his visits once more. Yet her health had much improved. To humor her, Helene had been constrained to accept two or three invitations to dine with the Deberles. At last the child's heart, so long torn by hidden sorrow, seemingly regained quietude with the complete re-establishment of her health. She would again ask Helene the old question--"Are you happy, mother darling?" "Yes, very happy, my pet," was the reply. And this made her radiant. She must be pardoned her bad temper in the past, she said. She referred to it as a fit which no effort of her own will could prevent, the result of a headache that came on her suddenly. Something would spring up within her--she wholly failed to understand what it was. She was tempest-tossed by a multitude of vague imaginings--nightmares that she could not even have recalled to memory. However, it was past now; she was well again, and those worries would nevermore return. CHAPTER XV. The night was falling. From the grey heaven, where the first of the stars were gleaming, a fine ashy dust seemed to be raining down on the great city, raining down without cessation and slowly burying it. The hollows were already hidden deep in gloom, and a line of cloud, like a stream of ink, rose upon the horizon, engulfing the last streaks of daylight, the wavering gleams which were retreating towards the west. Below Passy but a few stretches of roofs remained visible; and as the wave rolled on, darkness soon covered all. "What a warm evening!" ejaculated Helene, as she sat at the window, overcome by the heated breeze which was wafted upwards from Paris. "A grateful night for the poor," exclaimed the Abbe, who stood behind her. "The autumn will be mild." That Tuesday Jeanne had fallen into a doze at dessert, and her mother, perceiving that she was rather tired, had put her to bed. She was already fast asleep in her cot, while Monsieur Rambaud sat at the table gravely mending a toy--a mechanical doll, a present from himself, which both spoke and walked, and which Jeanne had broken. He excelled in such work as this. Helene on her side feeling the want of fresh air--for the lingering heats of September were oppressive--had thrown the window wide open, and gazed with relief on the vast gloomy ocean of darkness that rolled before her. She had pushed an easy-chair to the window in order to be alone, but was suddenly surprised to hear the Abbe speaking to her. "Is the little one warmly covered?" he gently asked. "On these heights the air is always keen." She made no reply, however; her heart was craving for silence. She was tasting the delights of the twilight hour, the vanishing of all surrounding objects, the hushing of every sound. Gleams, like those of night-lights, tipped the steeples and towers; that on Saint-Augustin died out first, the Pantheon for a moment retained a bluish light, and then the glittering dome of the Invalides faded away, similar to a moon setting in a rising sea of clouds. The night was like the ocean, its extent seemingly increased by the gloom, a dark abyss wherein you divined that a world lay hid. From the unseen city blew a mighty yet gentle wind. There was still a hum; sounds ascended faint yet clear to Helene's ears--the sharp rattle of an omnibus rolling along the quay, the whistle of a train crossing the bridge of the Point-du-Jour; and the Seine, swollen by the recent storms, and pulsing with the life of a breathing soul, wound with increased breadth through the shadows far below. A warm odor steamed upwards from the scorched roofs, while the river, amidst this exhalation of the daytime heat, seemed to give forth a cooling breeze. Paris had vanished, sunk in the dreamy repose of a colossus whose limbs the night has enveloped, and who lies motionless for a time, but with eyes wide open. Nothing affected Helene more than this momentary pause in the great city's life. For the three months during which she had been a close prisoner, riveted to Jeanne's bedside, she had had no other companion in her vigil than the huge mass of Paris spreading out towards the horizon. During the summer heats of July and August the windows had almost always been left open; she could not cross the room, could not stir or turn her head, without catching a glimpse of the ever-present panorama. It was there, whatever the weather, always sharing in her griefs and hopes, like some friend who would never leave her side. She was still quite ignorant respecting it; never had it seemed farther away, never had she given less thought to its streets and its citizens, and yet it peopled her solitude. The sick-room, whose door was kept shut to the outside world, looked out through its two windows upon this city. Often, with her eyes fixed on its expanse, Helene had wept, leaning on the window-rail in order to hide her tears from her ailing child. One day, too--the very day when she had imagined her daughter to be at the point of death--she had remained for a long time, overcome and choked with grief, watching the smoke which curled up from the Army Bakehouse. Frequently, moreover, in hours of hopefulness she had here confided the gladsome feelings of her heart to the dim and distant suburbs. There was not a single monument which did not recall to her some sensation of joy or sorrow. Paris shared in her own existence; and never did she love it better than when the twilight came, and its day's work over, it surrendered itself to an hour's quietude, forgetfulness, and reverie, whilst waiting for the lighting of its gas. "What a multitude of stars!" murmured Abbe Jouve. "There are thousands of them gleaming." He had just taken a chair and sat down at her side. On hearing him, she gazed upwards into the summer night. The heaven was studded with golden lights. On the very verge of the horizon a constellation was sparkling like a carbuncle, while a dust of almost invisible stars sprinkled the vault above as though with glittering sand. Charles's-Wain was slowly turning its shaft in the night. "Look!" said Helene in her turn, "look at that tiny bluish star! See --far away up there. I recognize it night after night. But it dies and fades as the night rolls on." The Abbe's presence no longer annoyed her. With him by her side, she imagined the quiet was deepening around. A few words passed between them after long intervals of silence. Twice she questioned him on the names of the stars--the sight of the heavens had always interested her --but he was doubtful and pleaded ignorance. "Do you see," she asked, "that lovely star yonder whose lustre is so exquisitely clear?" "On the left, eh?" he replied, "near another smaller, greenish one? Ah! there are so many of them that my memory fails me." They again lapsed into silence, their eyes still turned upwards, dazzled, quivering slightly at the sight of that stupendous swarming of luminaries. In the vast depths of the heavens, behind thousands of stars, thousands of others twinkled in ever-increasing multitudes, with the clear brilliancy of gems. The Milky Way was already whitening, displaying its solar specks, so innumerable and so distant that in the vault of the firmament they form but a trailing scarf of light. "It fills me with fear," said Helene in a whisper; and that she might see it all no more she bent her head and glanced down on the gaping abyss in which Paris seemed to be engulfed. In its depths not a light could yet be seen; night had rolled over it and plunged it into impenetrable darkness. Its mighty, continuous rumble seemed to have sunk into a softer key. "Are you weeping?" asked the Abbe, who had heard a sound of sobbing. "Yes," simply answered Helene. They could not see each other. For a long time she continued weeping, her whole being exhaling a plaintive murmur. Behind them, meantime, Jeanne lay at rest in innocent sleep, and Monsieur Rambaud, his whole attention engrossed, bent his grizzled head over the doll which he had dismembered. At times he could not prevent the loosened springs from giving out a creaking noise, a childlike squeaking which his big fingers, though plied with the utmost gentleness, drew from the disordered mechanism. If the doll vented too loud a sound, however, he at once stopped working, distressed and vexed with himself, and turning towards Jeanne to see if he had roused her. Then once more he would resume his repairing, with great precautions, his only tools being a pair of scissors and a bodkin. "Why do you weep, my daughter?" again asked the Abbe. "Can I not afford you some relief?" "Ah! let me be," said Helene; "these tears do me good. By-and-by, by-and-by--" A stifling sensation checked any further words. Once before, in this very place, she had been convulsed by a storm of tears; but then she had been alone, free to sob in the darkness till the emotion that wrung her was dried up at its source. However, she knew of no cause of sorrow; her daughter was well once more, and she had resumed the old monotonous delightful life. But it was as though a keen sense of awful grief had abruptly come upon her; it seemed as if she were rolling into a bottomless abyss which she could not fathom, sinking with all who were dear to her in a limitless sea of despair. She knew not what misfortune hung over her head; but she was without hope, and could only weep. Similar waves of feeling had swept over her during the month of the Virgin in the church laden with the perfume of flowers. And, as twilight fell, the vastness of Paris filled her with a deep religious impression. The stretch of plain seemed to expand, and a sadness rose up from the two millions of living beings who were being engulfed in darkness. And when it was night, and the city with its subdued rumbling had vanished from view, her oppressed heart poured forth its sorrow, and her tears overflowed, in presence of that sovereign peace. She could have clasped her hands and prayed. She was filled with an intense craving for faith, love, and a lapse into heavenly forgetfulness; and the first glinting of the stars overwhelmed her with sacred terror and enjoyment. A lengthy interval of silence ensued, and then the Abbe spoke once more, this time more pressingly. "My daughter, you must confide in me. Why do you hesitate?" She was still weeping, but more gently, like a wearied and powerless child. "The Church frightens you," he continued. "For a time I thought you had yielded your heart to God. But it has been willed otherwise. Heaven has its own purposes. Well, since you mistrust the priest, why should you refuse to confide in the friend?" "You are right," she faltered. "Yes, I am sad at heart, and need your consolation. I must tell you of it all. When I was a child I seldom, if ever, entered a church; now I cannot be present at a service without feeling touched to the very depths of my being. Yes; and what drew tears from me just now was that voice of Paris, sounding like a mighty organ, that immeasurable night, and those beauteous heavens. Oh! I would fain believe. Help me; teach me." Abbe Jouve calmed her somewhat by lightly placing his hand on her own. "Tell me everything," he merely said. She struggled for a time, her heart wrung with anguish. "There's nothing to tell, I assure you. I'm hiding nothing from you. I weep without cause, because I feel stifled, because my tears gush out of their own accord. You know what my life has been. No sorrow, no sin, no remorse could I find in it to this hour. I do not know--I do not know--" Her voice died away, and from the priest's lips slowly came the words, "You love, my daughter!" She started; she dared not protest. Silence fell on them once more. In the sea of shadows that slumbered before them a light had glimmered forth. It seemed at their feet, somewhere in the abyss, but at what precise spot they would have been unable to specify. And then, one by one, other lights broke through the darkness, shooting into instant life, and remaining stationary, scintillating like stars. It seemed as though thousands of fresh planets were rising on the surface of a gloomy lake. Soon they stretched out in double file, starting from the Trocadero, and nimbly leaping towards Paris. Then these files were intersected by others, curves were described, and a huge, strange, magnificent constellation spread out. Helene never breathed a word, but gazed on these gleams of light, which made the heavens seemingly descend below the line of the horizon, as though indeed the earth had vanished and the vault of heaven were on every side. And Helene's heart was again flooded with emotion, as a few minutes before when Charles's-Wain had slowly begun to revolve round the Polar axis, its shaft in the air. Paris, studded with lights, stretched out, deep and sad, prompting fearful thoughts of a firmament swarming with unknown worlds. Meanwhile the priest, in the monotonous, gentle voice which he had acquired by years of duty in the confessional, continued whispering in her ear. One evening in the past he had warned her; solitude, he had said, would be harmful to her welfare. No one could with impunity live outside the pale of life. She had imprisoned herself too closely, and the door had opened to perilous thoughts. "I am very old now, my daughter," he murmured, "and I have frequently seen women come to us weeping and praying, with a craving to find faith and religion. Thus it is that I cannot be deceiving myself to-day. These women, who seem to seek God in so zealous a manner, are but souls rendered miserable by passion. It is a man whom they worship in our churches." She was not listening; a strife was raging in her bosom, amidst her efforts to read her innermost thoughts aright. And at last confession came from her in a broken whisper: "Oh! yes, I love, and that is all! Beyond that I know nothing --nothing!" He now forbore to interrupt her; she spoke in short feverish sentences, taking a mournful pleasure in thus confessing her love, in sharing with that venerable priest the secret which had so long burdened her. "I swear I cannot read my thoughts. This has come to me without my knowing its presence. Perhaps it came in a moment. Only in time did I realize its sweetness. Besides, why should I deem myself stronger than I am? I have made no effort to flee from it; I was only too happy, and to-day I have yet less power of resistance. My daughter was ill; I almost lost her. Well! my love has been as intense as my sorrow; it came back with sovereign power after those days of terror--and it possesses me, I feel transported--" She shivered and drew a breath. "In short, my strength fails me. You were right, my friend, in thinking it would be a relief to confide in you. But, I beseech you, tell me what is happening in the depths of my heart. My life was once so peaceful; I was so happy. A thunderbolt has fallen on me. Why on me? Why not on another? I had done nothing to bring it on; I imagined myself well protected. Ah, if you only knew--I know myself no longer! Help me, save me!" Then as she became silent, the priest, with the wonted freedom of the confessor, mechanically asked the question: "The name? tell me his name?" She was hesitating, when a peculiar noise prompted her to turn her head. It came from the doll which, in Monsieur Rambaud's hands, was by degrees renewing its mechanical life, and had just taken three steps on the table, with a creaking of wheels and springs which showed that there was still something faulty in its works. Then it had fallen on its back, and but for the worthy man would have rebounded onto the ground. He followed all its movements with outstretched hands, ready to support it, and full of paternal anxiety. The moment he perceived Helene turn, he smiled confidently towards her, as if to give her an assurance that the doll would recover its walking powers. And then he once more dived with scissors and bodkin into the toy. Jeanne still slept on. Thereupon Helene, her nerves relaxing under the influence of the universal quiet, whispered a name in the priest's ear. He never stirred; in the darkness his face could not be seen. A silence ensued, and he responded: "I knew it, but I wanted to hear it from your own lips. My daughter, yours must be terrible suffering." He gave utterance to no truisms on the subject of duty. Helene, overcome, saddened to the heart by this unemotional pity, gazed once more on the lights which spangled the gloomy veil enshrouding Paris. They were flashing everywhere in myriads, like the sparks that dart over the blackened refuse of burnt paper. At first these twinkling dots had started from the Trocadero towards the heart of the city. Soon another coruscation had appeared on the left in the direction of Montmartre; then another had burst into view on the right behind the Invalides, and still another, more distant near the Pantheon. From all these centres flights of flames were simultaneously descending. "You remember our conversation," slowly resumed the Abbe. "My opinion has not changed. My daughter, you must marry." "I!" she exclaimed, overwhelmed with amazement. "But I have just confessed to you--Oh, you know well I cannot--" "You must marry," he repeated with greater decision. "You will wed an honest man." Within the folds of his old cassock he seemed to have grown more commanding. His large comical-looking head, which, with eyes half-closed, was usually inclined towards one shoulder, was now raised erect, and his eyes beamed with such intensity that she saw them sparkling in the darkness. "You will marry an honest man, who will be a father to Jeanne, and will lead you back to the path of goodness." "But I do not love him. Gracious Heaven! I do not love him!" "You will love him, my daughter. He loves you, and he is good in heart." Helene struggled, and her voice sank to a whisper as she heard the slight noise that Monsieur Rambaud made behind them. He was so patient and so strong in his hope, that for six months he had not once intruded his love on her. Disposed by nature to the most heroic self-sacrifice, he waited in serene confidence. The Abbe stirred, as though about to turn round. "Would you like me to tell him everything? He would stretch out his hand and save you. And you would fill him with joy beyond compare." She checked him, utterly distracted. Her heart revolted. Both of these peaceful, affectionate men, whose judgment retained perfect equilibrium in presence of her feverish passion, were sources of terror to her. What world could they abide in to be able to set at naught that which caused her so much agony? The priest, however, waved his hand with an all-comprehensive gesture. "My daughter," said he, "look on this lovely night, so supremely still in presence of your troubled spirit. Why do you refuse happiness?" All Paris was now illumined. The tiny dancing flames had speckled the sea of shadows from one end of the horizon to the other, and now, as in a summer night, millions of fixed stars seemed to be serenely gleaming there. Not a puff of air, not a quiver of the atmosphere stirred these lights, to all appearance suspended in space. Paris, now invisible, had fallen into the depths of an abyss as vast as a firmament. At times, at the base of the Trocadero, a light--the lamp of a passing cab or omnibus--would dart across the gloom, sparkling like a shooting star; and here amidst the radiance of the gas-jets, from which streamed a yellow haze, a confused jumble of house-fronts and clustering trees--green like the trees in stage scenery--could be vaguely discerned. To and fro, across the Pont des Invalides, gleaming lights flashed without ceasing; far below, across a band of denser gloom, appeared a marvellous train of comet-like coruscations, from whose lustrous tails fell a rain of gold. These were the reflections in the Seine's black waters of the lamps on the bridge. From this point, however, the unknown began. The long curve of the river was merely described by a double line of lights, which ever and anon were coupled to other transverse lines, so that the whole looked like some glittering ladder, thrown across Paris, with its ends on the verge of the heavens among the stars. To the left there was another trench excavated athwart the gloom; an unbroken chain of stars shone forth down the Champs-Elysees from the Arc-de-Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, where a new cluster of Pleiades was flashing; next came the gloomy stretches of the Tuileries and the Louvre, the blocks of houses on the brink of the water, and the Hotel-de-Ville away at the extreme end--all these masses of darkness being parted here and there by bursts of light from some large square or other; and farther and farther away, amidst the endless confusion of roofs, appeared scattered gleams, affording faint glimpses of the hollow of a street below, the corner of some boulevard, or the brilliantly illuminated meeting-place of several thoroughfares. On the opposite bank, on the right, the Esplanade alone could be discerned with any distinctness, its rectangle marked out in flame, like an Orion of a winter's night bereft of his baldrick. The long streets of the Saint-Germain district seemed gloomy with their fringe of infrequent lamps; but the thickly populated quarters beyond were speckled with a multitude of tiny flames, clustering like nebulae. Away towards the outskirts, girdling the whole of the horizon, swarmed street-lamps and lighted windows, filling these distant parts with a dust, as it were, of those myriads of suns, those planetary atoms which the naked eye cannot discover. The public edifices had vanished into the depths of the darkness; not a lamp marked out their spires and towers. At times you might have imagined you were gazing on some gigantic festival, some illuminated cyclopean monument, with staircases, balusters, windows, pediments, and terraces --a veritable cosmos of stone, whose wondrous architecture was outlined by the gleaming lights of a myriad lamps. But there was always a speedy return of the feeling that new constellations were springing into being, and that the heavens were spreading both above and below. Helene, in compliance with the all-embracing sweep of the priest's hand, cast a lingering look over illumined Paris. Here too she knew not the names of those seeming stars. She would have liked to ask what the blaze far below on the left betokened, for she saw it night after night. There were others also which roused her curiosity, and some of them she loved, whilst some inspired her with uneasiness or vexation. "Father," said she, for the first time employing that appellation of affection and respect, "let me live as I am. The loveliness of the night has agitated me. You are wrong; you would not know how to console me, for you cannot understand my feelings." The priest stretched out his arms, then slowly dropped them to his side resignedly. And after a pause he said in a whisper: "Doubtless that was bound to be the case. You call for succor and reject salvation. How many despairing confessions I have received! What tears I have been unable to prevent! Listen, my daughter, promise me one thing only; if ever life should become too heavy a burden for you, think that one honest man loves you and is waiting for you. To regain content you will only have to place your hand in his." "I promise you," answered Helene gravely. As she made the avowal a ripple of laughter burst through the room. Jeanne had just awoke, and her eyes were riveted on her doll pacing up and down the table. Monsieur Rambaud, enthusiastic over the success of his tinkering, still kept his hands stretched out for fear lest any accident should happen. But the doll retained its stability, strutted about on its tiny feet, and turned its head, whilst at every step repeating the same words after the fashion of a parrot. "Oh! it's some trick or other!" murmured Jeanne, who was still half asleep. "What have you done to it--tell me? It was all smashed, and now it's walking. Give it me a moment; let me see. Oh, you _are_ a darling!" Meanwhile over the gleaming expanse of Paris a rosy cloud was ascending higher and higher. It might have been thought the fiery breath of a furnace. At first it was shadowy-pale in the darkness--a reflected glow scarcely seen. Then slowly, as the evening progressed, it assumed a ruddier hue; and, hanging in the air, motionless above the city, deriving its being from all the lights and noisy life which breathed from below, it seemed like one of those clouds, charged with flame and lightning, which crown the craters of volcanoes. CHAPTER XVI. The finger-glasses had been handed round the table, and the ladies were daintily wiping their hands. A momentary silence reigned, while Madame Deberle gazed on either side to see if every one had finished; then, without speaking, she rose, and amidst a noisy pushing back of chairs, her guests followed her example. An old gentleman who had been seated at her right hand hastened to offer her his arm. "No, no," she murmured, as she led him towards a doorway. "We will now have coffee in the little drawing-room." The guests, in couples, followed her. Two ladies and two gentlemen, however, lagged behind the others, continuing their conversation, without thought of joining the procession. The drawing-room reached, all constraint vanished, and the joviality which had marked the dessert made its reappearance. The coffee was already served on a large lacquer tray on a table. Madame Deberle walked round like a hostess who is anxious to satisfy the various tastes of her guests. But it was Pauline who ran about the most, and more particularly waited on the gentlemen. There were a dozen persons present, about the regulation number of people invited to the house every Wednesday, from December onwards. Later in the evening, at ten o'clock, a great many others would make their appearance. "Monsieur de Guiraud, a cup of coffee," exclaimed Pauline, as she halted in front of a diminutive, bald-headed man. "Ah! no, I remember, you don't take any. Well, then, a glass of Chartreuse?" But she became confused in discharging her duties, and brought him a glass of cognac. Beaming with smiles, she made the round of the guests, perfectly self-possessed, and looking people straight in the face, while her long train dragged with easy grace behind her. She wore a magnificent gown of white Indian cashmere trimmed with swan's-down, and cut square at the bosom. When the gentlemen were all standing up, sipping their coffee, each with cup in hand and chin high in the air, she began to tackle a tall young fellow named Tissot, whom she considered rather handsome. Helene had not taken any coffee. She had seated herself apart, with a somewhat wearied expression on her face. Her black velvet gown, unrelieved by any trimming, gave her an air of austerity. In this small drawing-room smoking was allowed, and several boxes of cigars were placed beside her on the pier-table. The doctor drew near; as he selected a cigar he asked her: "Is Jeanne well?" "Yes, indeed," she replied. "We walked to the Bois to-day, and she romped like a madcap. Oh, she must be sound asleep by now." They were both chatting in friendly tones, with the smiling intimacy of people who see each other day after day, when Madame Deberle's voice rose high and shrill: "Stop! stop! Madame Grandjean can tell you all about it. Didn't I come back from Trouville on the 10th of September? It was raining, and the beach had become quite unbearable!" Three or four of the ladies were gathered round her while she rattled on about her holdiday at the seaside. Helene found it necessary to rise and join the group. "We spent a month at Dinard," said Madame de Chermette. "Such a delightful place, and such charming society!" "Behind our chalet was a garden, and we had a terrace overlooking the sea," went on Madame Deberle. "As you know, I decided on taking my landau and coachman with me. It was very much handier when I wanted a drive. Then Madame Levasseur came to see us--" "Yes, one Sunday," interrupted that lady. "We were at Cabourg. Your establishment was perfect, but a little too dear, I think." "By the way," broke in Madame Berthier, addressing Juliette, "didn't Monsieur Malignon give you lessons in swimming?" Helene noticed a shadow of vexation, of sudden annoyance, pass over Madame Deberle's face. Several times already she had fancied that, on Malignon's name being brought unexpectedly into the conversation, Madame Deberle suddenly seemed perturbed. However, the young woman immediately regained her equanimity. "A fine swimmer, indeed!" she exclaimed. "The idea of him ever giving lessons to any one! For my part, I have a mortal fear of cold water --the very sight of people bathing curdles my blood." She gave an eloquent shiver, with a shrug of her plump shoulders, as though she were a duck shaking water from her back. "Then it's a fable?" questioned Madame de Guiraud. "Of course; and one, I presume, of his own invention. He detests me since he spent a month with us down there." People were now beginning to pour in. The ladies, with clusters of flowers in their hair, and round, plump arms, entered smiling and nodding; while the men, each in evening dress and hat in hand, bowed and ventured on some commonplace remark. Madame Deberle, never ceasing her chatter for a moment, extended the tips of her fingers to the friends of the house, many of whom said nothing, but passed on with a bow. However, Mademoiselle Aurelie had just appeared on the scene, and at once went into raptures over Juliette's dress, which was of dark-blue velvet, trimmed with faille silk. At this all the ladies standing round seemed to catch their first glimpse of the dress, and declared it was exquisite, truly exquisite. It came, they learned, from Worth's, and they discussed it for five minutes. The guests who had drunk their coffee had placed their empty cups here and there on the tray and on the pier-tables; only one old gentleman had not yet finished, as between every mouthful he paused to converse with a lady. A warm perfume, the aroma of the coffee and the ladies' dresses intermingled, permeated the apartment. "You know I have had nothing," remonstrated young Monsieur Tissot with Pauline, who had been chatting with him about an artist to whose studio her father had escorted her with a view to examining the pictures. "What! have you had nothing? Surely I brought you a cup of coffee?" "No, mademoiselle, I assure you." "But I insist on your having something. See, here is some Chartreuse." Madame Deberle had just directed a meaning nod towards her husband. The doctor, understanding her, thereupon opened the door of a large drawing-room, into which they all filed, while a servant removed the coffee-tray. There was almost a chill atmosphere in this spacious apartment, through which streamed the white light of six lamps and a chandelier with ten wax candles. There were already some ladies there, sitting in a semi-circle round the fireplace, but only two or three men were present, standing amidst the sea of outspread skirts. And through the open doorway of the smaller drawing-room rang the shrill voice of Pauline, who had lingered behind in company with young Tissot. "Now that I have poured it out, I'm determined you shall drink it. What would you have me do with it? Pierre has carried off the tray." Then she entered the larger room, a vision in white, with her dress trimmed with swan's-down. Her ruddy lips parted, displaying her teeth, as she smilingly announced: "Here comes Malignon, the exquisite!" Hand-shaking and bowing were now the order of the day. Monsieur Deberle had placed himself near the door. His wife, seated with some other ladies on an extremely low couch, rose every other second. When Malignon made his appearance, she affected to turn away her head. He was dressed to perfection; his hair had been curled, and was parted behind, down to his very neck. On the threshold he had stuck an eye-glass in his right eye with a slight grimace, which, according to Pauline, was just the thing; and now he cast a glance around the room. Having nonchalantly and silently shaken hands with the doctor, he made his way towards Madame Deberle, in front of whom he respectfully bent his tall figure. "Oh, it's you!" she exclaimed, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody. "It seems you go in for swimming now." He did not guess her meaning, but nevertheless replied, by way of a joke: "Certainly; I once saved a Newfoundland dog from drowning." The ladies thought this extremely funny, and even Madame Deberle seemed disarmed. "Well, I'll allow you to save Newfoundlands," she answered, "but you know very well I did not bathe once at Trouville." "Oh! you're speaking of the lesson I gave you!" he exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you one night in your dining-room how to move your feet and hands about?" All the ladies were convulsed with mirth--he was delightful! Juliette shrugged her shoulders; it was impossible to engage him in a serious talk. Then she rose to meet a lady whose first visit this was to her house, and who was a superb pianist. Helene, seated near the fire, her lovely face unruffled by any emotion, looked on and listened. Malignon, especially, seemed to interest her. She saw him execute a strategical movement which brought him to Madame Deberle's side, and she could hear the conversation that ensued behind her chair. Of a sudden there was a change in the tones, and she leaned back to gather the drift of what was being said. "Why didn't you come yesterday?" asked Malignon. "I waited for you till six o'clock." "Nonsense; you are mad," murmured Juliette. Thereupon Malignon loudly lisped: "Oh! you don't believe the story about my Newfoundland! Yet I received a medal for it, and I'll show it to you." Then he added, in a whisper: "You gave me your promise--remember." A family group now entered the drawing-room, and Juliette broke into complimentary greetings, while Malignon reappeared amongst the ladies, glass in eye. Helene had become quite pale since overhearing those hastily spoken words. It was as though a thunderbolt, or something equally unforeseen and horrible, had fallen on her. How could thoughts of treachery enter into the mind of that woman whose life was so happy, whose face betrayed no signs of sorrow, whose cheeks had the freshness of the rose? She had always known her to be devoid of brains, displaying an amiable egotism which seemed a guarantee that she would never commit a foolish action. And over such a fellow as Malignon, too! The scenes in the garden of an afternoon flashed back on her memory--she recalled Juliette smiling lovingly as the doctor kissed her hair. Their love for one another had seemed real enough. An inexplicable feeling of indignation with Juliette now pervaded Helene, as though some wrong had been done herself. She felt humiliated for Henri's sake; she was consumed with jealous rage; and her perturbed feelings were so plainly mirrored in her face that Mademoiselle Aurelie asked her: "What is the matter with you? Do you feel ill?" The old lady had sunk into a seat beside her immediately she had observed her to be alone. She had conceived a lively friendship for Helene, and was charmed with the kindly manner in which so sedate and lovely a woman would listen for hours to her tittle-tattle. But Helene made no reply. A wild desire sprang up within her to gaze on Henri, to know what he was doing, and what was the expression of his face. She sat up, and glancing round the drawing-room, at last perceived him. He stood talking with a stout, pale man, and looked completely at his ease, his face wearing its customary refined smile. She scanned him for a moment, full of a pity which belittled him somewhat, though all the while she loved him the more with an affection into which entered some vague idea of watching over him. Her feelings, still in a whirl of confusion, inspired her with the thought that she ought to bring him back the happiness he had lost. "Well, well!" muttered Mademoiselle Aurelie; "it will be pleasant if Madame de Guiraud's sister favors us with a song. It will be the tenth time I have heard her sing the 'Turtle-Doves.' That is her stock song this winter. You know that she is separated from her husband. Do you see that dark gentleman down there, near the door? They are most intimate together, I believe. Juliette is compelled to have him here, for otherwise she wouldn't come!" "Indeed!" exclaimed Helene. Madame Deberle was bustling about from one group to another, requesting silence for a song from Madame de Guiraud's sister. The drawing-room was now crowded, some thirty ladies being seated in the centre whispering and laughing together; two, however, had remained standing, and were talking loudly and shrugging their shoulders in a pretty way, while five or six men sat quite at home amongst the fair ones, almost buried beneath the folds of their skirts and trains. A low "Hush!" ran round the room, the voices died away, and a stolid look of annoyance crept into every face. Only the fans could be heard rustling through the heated atmosphere. Madame de Guiraud's sister sang, but Helene never listened. Her eyes were now riveted on Malignon, who feigned an intense love of music, and appeared to be enraptured with the "Turtle Doves." Was it possible? Could Juliette have turned a willing ear to the amorous chatter of the young fop? It was at Trouville, no doubt, that some dangerous game had been played. Malignon now sat in front of Juliette, marking the time of the music by swaying to and fro with the air of one who is enraptured. Madame Deberle's face beamed in admiring complacency, while the doctor, good-natured and patient, silently awaited the last notes of the song in order to renew his talk with the stout, pale man. There was a murmur of applause as the singer's voice died away, and two or three exclaimed in tones of transport: "Delightful! magnificent!" Malignon, however, stretching his arms over the ladies' head-dresses, noiselessly clapped his gloved hands, and repeated "Brava! brava!" in a voice that rose high above the others. The enthusiasm promptly came to an end, every face relaxed and smiled, and a few of the ladies rose, while, with the feeling of general relief, the buzz of conversation began again. The atmosphere was growing much warmer, and the waving fans wafted an odor of musk from the ladies' dresses. At times, amidst the universal chatter, a peal of pearly laughter would ring out, or some word spoken in a loud tone would cause many to turn round. Thrice already had Juliette swept into the smaller drawing-room to request some gentleman who had escaped thither not to desert the ladies in so rude a fashion. They returned at her request, but ten minutes afterwards had again vanished. "It's intolerable," she muttered, with an air of vexation; "not one of them will stay here." In the meantime Mademoiselle Aurelie was running over the ladies' names for Helene's benefit, as this was only the latter's second evening visit to the doctor's house. The most substantial people of Passy, some of them rolling in riches, were present. And the old maid leaned towards Helene and whispered in her ear: "Yes, it seems it's all arranged. Madame de Chermette is going to marry her daughter to that tall fair fellow with whom she has flirted for the last eighteen months. Well, never mind, that will be one mother-in-law who'll be fond of her son-in-law." She stopped short, and then burst out in a tone of intense surprise: "Good gracious! there's Madame Levasseur's husband speaking to that man. I thought Juliette had sworn never to have them here together." Helene's glances slowly travelled round the room. Even amongst such seemingly estimable and honest people as these could there be women of irregular conduct? With her provincial austerity she was astounded at the manner in which wrongdoing was winked at in Paris. She railed at herself for her own painful repugnance when Juliette had shaken hands with her. Madame Deberle had now seemingly become reconciled with Malignon; she had curled up her little plump figure in an easy-chair, where she sat listening gleefully to his jests. Monsieur Deberle happened to pass them. "You're surely not quarrelling to-night?" asked he. "No," replied Juliette, with a burst of merriment. "He's talking too much silly nonsense. If you had heard all the nonsense he's been saying!" There now came some more singing, but silence was obtained with greater difficulty. The aria selected was a duet from _La Favorita_, sung by young Monsieur Tissot and a lady of ripened charms, whose hair was dressed in childish style. Pauline, standing at one of the doors, amidst a crowd of black coats, gazed at the male singer with a look of undisguised admiration, as though she were examining a work of art. "What a handsome fellow!" escaped from her lips, just as the accompaniment subsided into a softer key, and so loud was her voice that the whole drawing-room heard the remark. As the evening progressed the guests' faces began to show signs of weariness. Ladies who had occupied the same seat for hours looked bored, though they knew it not,--they were even delighted at being able to get bored here. In the intervals between the songs, which were only half listened to, the murmur of conversation again resounded, and it seemed as though the deep notes of the piano were still echoing. Monsieur Letellier related how he had gone to Lyons for the purpose of inspecting some silk he had ordered, and how he had been greatly impressed by the fact that the Saone did not mingle its waters with those of the Rhone. Monsieur de Guiraud, who was a magistrate, gave vent to some sententious observations on the need of stemming the vice of Paris. There was a circle round a gentleman who was acquainted with a Chinaman, and was giving some particulars of his friend. In a corner two ladies were exchanging confidences about the failings of their servants; whilst literature was being discussed by those among whom Malignon sat enthroned. Madame Tissot declared Balzac to be unreadable, and Malignon did not deny it, but remarked that here and there, at intervals far and few, some very fine passages occurred in Balzac. "A little silence, please!" all at once exclaimed Pauline; "she's just going to play." The lady whose talent as a musician had been so much spoken of had just sat down to the piano. In accordance with the rules of politeness, every head was turned towards her. But in the general stillness which ensued the deep voices of the men conversing in the small drawing-room could be heard. Madame Deberle was in despair. "They are a nuisance!" she muttered. "Let them stay there, if they don't want to come in; but at least they ought to hold their tongues!" She gave the requisite orders to Pauline, who, intensely delighted, ran into the adjacent apartment to carry out her instructions. "You must know, gentlemen, that a lady is going to play," she said, with the quiet boldness of a maiden in queenly garb. "You are requested to keep silence." She spoke in a very loud key, her voice being naturally shrill. And, as she lingered with the men, laughing and quizzing, the noise grew more pronounced than ever. There was a discussion going on among these males, and she supplied additional matter for argument. In the larger drawing-room Madame Deberle was in agony. The guests, moreover, had been sated with music, and no enthusiasm was displayed; so the pianist resumed her seat, biting her lips, notwithstanding the laudatory compliments which the lady of the house deemed it her duty to lavish on her. Helene was pained. Henri scarcely seemed to see her; he had made no attempt to approach her, and only at intervals smiled to her from afar. At the earlier part of the evening she had felt relieved by his prudent reserve; but since she had learnt the secret of the two others she wished for something--she knew not what--some display of affection, or at least interest, on his part. Her breast was stirred with confused yearnings, and every imaginable evil thought. Did he no longer care for her, that he remained so indifferent to her presence? Oh! if she could have told him everything! If she could apprise him of the unworthiness of the woman who bore his name! Then, while some short, merry catches resounded from the piano, she sank into a dreamy state. She imagined that Henri had driven Juliette from his home, and she was living with him as his wife in some far-away foreign land, the language of which they knew not. All at once a voice startled her. "Won't you take anything?" asked Pauline. The drawing-room had emptied, and the guests were passing into the dining-room to drink some tea. Helene rose with difficulty. She was dazed; she thought she had dreamt it all--the words she had heard, Juliette's secret intrigue, and its consequences. If it had all been true, Henri would surely have been at her side and ere this both would have quitted the house. "Will you take a cup of tea?" She smiled and thanked Madame Deberle, who had kept a place for her at the table. Plates loaded with pastry and sweetmeats covered the cloth, while on glass stands arose two lofty cakes, flanking a large _brioche_. The space was limited, and the cups of tea were crowded together, narrow grey napkins with long fringes lying between each two. The ladies only were seated. They held biscuits and preserved fruits with the tips of their ungloved fingers, and passed each other the cream-jugs and poured out the cream with dainty gestures. Three or four, however, had sacrificed themselves to attend on the men, who were standing against the walls, and, while drinking, taking all conceivable precautions to ward off any push which might be unwittingly dealt them. A few others lingered in the two drawing-rooms, waiting for the cakes to come to them. This was the hour of Pauline's supreme delight. There was a shrill clamor of noisy tongues, peals of laughter mingled with the ringing clatter of silver plate, and the perfume of musk grew more powerful as it blended with the all-pervading fragrance of the tea. "Kindly pass me some cake," said Mademoiselle Aurelie to Helene, close to whom she happened to find herself. "These sweetmeats are frauds!" She had, however, already emptied two plates of them. And she continued, with her mouth full: "Oh! some of the people are beginning to go now. We shall be a little more comfortable." In truth, several ladies were now leaving, after shaking hands with Madame Deberle. Many of the gentlemen had already wisely vanished, and the room was becoming less crowded. Now came the opportunity for the remaining gentlemen to sit down at table in their turn. Mademoiselle Aurelie, however, did not quit her place, though she would much have liked to secure a glass of punch. "I will get you one," said Helene, starting to her feet. "No, no, thank you. You must not inconvenience yourself so much." For a short time Helene had been watching Malignon. He had just shaken hands with the doctor, and was now bidding farewell to Juliette at the doorway. She had a lustrous face and sparkling eyes, and by her complacent smile it might have been imagined that she was receiving some commonplace compliments on the evening's success. While Pierre was pouring out the punch at a sideboard near the door, Helene stepped forward in such wise as to be hidden from view by the curtain, which had been drawn back. She listened. [Illustration: Malignon appoints a Rendezvous with Juliette] "I beseech you," Malignon was saying, "come the day after to-morrow. I shall wait for you till three o'clock." "Why cannot you talk seriously," replied Madame Deberle, with a laugh. "What foolish things you say!" But with greater determination he repeated: "I shall wait for you--the day after to-morrow." Then she hurriedly gave a whispered reply: "Very well--the day after to-morrow." Malignon bowed and made his exit. Madame de Chermette followed in company with Madame Tissot. Juliette, in the best of spirits, walked with them into the hall, and said to the former of these ladies with her most amiable look: "I shall call on you the day after to-morrow. I have a lot of calls to make that day." Helene stood riveted to the floor, her face quite white. Pierre, in the meanwhile, had poured out the punch, and now handed the glass to her. She grasped it mechanically and carried it to Mademoiselle Aurelie, who was making an inroad on the preserved fruits. "Oh, you are far too kind!" exclaimed the old maid. "I should have made a sign to Pierre. I'm sure it's a shame not offering the punch to ladies. Why, when people are my age--" She got no further, however, for she observed the ghastliness of Helene's face. "You surely are in pain! You must take a drop of punch!" "Thank you, it's nothing. The heat is so oppressive--" She staggered, and turned aside into the deserted drawing-room, where she dropped into an easy-chair. The lamps were shedding a reddish glare; and the wax candles in the chandelier, burnt to their sockets, threatened imminent destruction to the crystal sconces. From the dining-room were wafted the farewells of the departing guests. Helene herself had lost all thoughts of going; she longed to linger where she was, plunged in thought. So it was no dream after all; Juliette would visit that man the day after to-morrow--she knew the day. Then the thought struck her that she ought to speak to Juliette and warn her against sin. But this kindly thought chilled her to the heart, and she drove it from her mind as though it were out of place, and deep in meditation gazed at the grate, where a smouldering log was crackling. The air was still heavy and oppressive with the perfumes from the ladies' hair. "What! you are here!" exclaimed Juliette as she entered. "Well, you are kind not to run away all at once. At last we can breathe!" Helene was surprised, and made a movement as though about to rise; but Juliette went on: "Wait, wait, you are in no hurry. Henri, get me my smelling-salts." Three or four persons, intimate friends, had lingered behind the others. They sat before the dying fire and chatted with delightful freedom, while the vast room wearily sank into a doze. The doors were open, and they saw the smaller drawing-room empty, the dining-room deserted, the whole suite of rooms still lit up and plunged in unbroken silence. Henri displayed a tender gallantry towards his wife; he had run up to their bedroom for her smelling-salts, which she inhaled with closed eyes, whilst he asked her if she had not fatigued herself too much. Yes, she felt somewhat tired; but she was delighted --everything had gone off so well. Next she told them that on her reception nights she could not sleep, but tossed about till six o'clock in the morning. Henri's face broke into a smile, and some quizzing followed. Helene looked at them, and quivered amidst the benumbing drowsiness which little by little seemed to fall upon the whole house. However, only two guests now remained. Pierre had gone in search of a cab. Helene remained the last. One o'clock struck. Henri, no longer standing on ceremony, rose on tiptoe and blew out two candles in the chandelier which were dangerously heating their crystal sconces. As the lights died out one by one, it seemed like a bedroom scene, the gloom of an alcove spreading over all. "I am keeping you up!" exclaimed Helene, as she suddenly rose to her feet. "You must turn me out." A flush of red dyed her face; her blood, racing through her veins, seemed to stifle her. They walked with her into the hall, but the air there was chilly, and the doctor was somewhat alarmed for his wife in her low dress. "Go back; you will do yourself harm. You are too warm." "Very well; good-bye," said Juliette, embracing Helene, as was her wont in her most endearing moments. "Come and see me oftener." Henri had taken Helene's fur coat in his hand, and held it outstretched to assist her in putting it on. When she had slipped her arms into the sleeves, he turned up the collar with a smile, while they stood in front of an immense mirror which covered one side of the hall. They were alone, and saw one another in the mirror's depths. For three months, on meeting and parting they had simply shaken hands in friendly greeting; they would fain that their love had died. But now Helene was overcome, and sank back into his arms. The smile vanished from his face, which became impassioned, and, still clasping her, he kissed her on the neck. And she, raising her head, returned his kiss. CHAPTER XVII. That night Helene was unable to sleep. She turned from side to side in feverish unrest, and whenever a drowsy stupor fell on her senses, the old sorrows would start into new life within her breast. As she dozed and the nightmare increased, one fixed thought tortured her--she was eager to know where Juliette and Malignon would meet. This knowledge, she imagined, would be a source of relief to her. Where, where could it be? Despite herself, her brain throbbed with the thought, and she forgot everything save her craving to unravel this mystery, which thrilled her with secret longings. When day dawned and she began to dress, she caught herself saying loudly: "It will be to-morrow!" With one stocking on, and hands falling helpless to her side, she lapsed for a while into a fresh dreamy fit. "Where, where was it that they had agreed to meet?" "Good-day, mother, darling!" just then exclaimed Jeanne who had awakened in her turn. As her strength was now returning to her, she had gone back to sleep in her cot in the closet. With bare feet and in her nightdress she came to throw herself on Helene's neck, as was her every-day custom; then back again she rushed, to curl herself up in her warm bed for a little while longer. This jumping in and out amused her, and a ripple of laughter stole from under the clothes. Once more she bounded into the bedroom, saying: "Good-morning, mammy dear!" And again she ran off, screaming with laughter. Then she threw the sheet over her head, and her cry came, hoarse and muffled, from beneath it: "I'm not there! I'm not there!" But Helene was in no mood for play, as on other mornings; and Jeanne, dispirited, fell asleep again. The day was still young. About eight o'clock Rosalie made her appearance to recount the morning's chapter of accidents. Oh! the streets were awful outside; in going for the milk her shoes had almost come off in the muddy slush. All the ice was thawing; and it was quite mild too, almost oppressive. Oh! by the way, she had almost forgotten! an old woman had come to see madame the night before. "Why!" she said, as there came a pull at the bell, "I expect that's she!" It was Mother Fetu, but Mother Fetu transformed, magnificent in a clean white cap, a new gown, and tartan shawl wrapped round her shoulders. Her voice, however, still retained its plaintive tone of entreaty. "Dear lady, it's only I, who have taken the liberty of calling to ask you about something!" Helene gazed at her, somewhat surprised by her display of finery. "Are you better, Mother Fetu?" "Oh yes, yes; I feel better, if I may venture to say so. You see I always have something queer in my inside; it knocks me about dreadfully, but still I'm better. Another thing, too; I've had a stroke of luck; it was a surprise, you see, because luck hasn't often come in my way. But a gentleman has made me his housekeeper--and oh! it's such a story!" Her words came slowly, and her small keen eyes glittered in her face, furrowed by a thousand wrinkles. She seemed to be waiting for Helene to question her; but the young woman sat close to the fire which Rosalie had just lit, and paid scant attention to her, engrossed as she was in her own thoughts, with a look of pain on her features. "What do you want to ask me?" she at last said to Mother Fetu. The old lady made no immediate reply. She was scrutinizing the room, with its rosewood furniture and blue velvet hangings. Then, with the humble and fawning air of a pauper, she muttered: "Pardon me, madame, but everything is so beautiful here. My gentleman has a room like this, but it's all in pink. Oh! it's such a story! Just picture to yourself a young man of good position who has taken rooms in our house. Of course, it isn't much of a place, but still our first and second floors are very nice. Then, it's so quiet, too! There's no traffic; you could imagine yourself in the country. The workmen have been in the house for a whole fortnight; they have made such a jewel of his room!" She here paused, observing that Helene's attention was being aroused. "It's for his work," she continued in a drawling voice; "he says it's for his work. We have no doorkeeper, you know, and that pleases him. Oh! my gentleman doesn't like doorkeepers, and he is quite right, too!" Once more she came to a halt, as though an idea had suddenly occurred to her. "Why, wait a minute; you must know him--of course you must. He visits one of your lady friends!" "Ah!" exclaimed Helene, with colorless face. "Yes, to be sure; the lady who lives close by--the one who used to go with you to church. She came the other day." Mother Fetu's eyes contracted, and from under the lids she took note of her benefactress's emotion. But Helene strove to question her in a tone that would not betray her agitation. "Did she go up?" "No, she altered her mind; perhaps she had forgotten something. But I was at the door. She asked for Monsieur Vincent, and then got back into her cab again, calling to the driver to return home, as it was too late. Oh! she's such a nice, lively, and respectable lady. The gracious God doesn't send many such into the world. Why, with the exception of yourself, she's the best--well, well, may Heaven bless you all!" In this way Mother Fetu rambled on with the pious glibness of a devotee who is perpetually telling her beads. But the twitching of the myriad wrinkles of her face showed that her mind was still working, and soon she beamed with intense satisfaction. "Ah!" she all at once resumed in inconsequent fashion, "how I should like to have a pair of good shoes! My gentleman has been so very kind, I can't ask him for anything more. You see I'm dressed; still I must get a pair of good shoes. Look at those I have; they are all holes; and when the weather's muddy, as it is to-day, one's apt to get very ill. Yes, I was down with colic yesterday; I was writhing all the afternoon, but if I had a pair of good shoes--" "I'll bring you a pair, Mother Fetu," said Helene, waving her towards the door. Then, as the old woman retired backwards, with profuse curtseying and thanks, she asked her: "At what hour are you alone?" "My gentleman is never there after six o'clock," she answered. "But don't give yourself the trouble; I'll come myself, and get them from your doorkeeper. But you can do as you please. You are an angel from heaven. God on high will requite you for all your kindness!" When she had reached the landing she could still be heard giving vent to her feelings. Helene sat a long time plunged in the stupor which the information, supplied by this woman with such fortuitous seasonableness, had brought upon her. She now knew the place of assignation. It was a room, with pink decorations, in that old tumbledown house! She once more pictured to herself the staircase oozing with damp, the yellow doors on each landing, grimy with the touch of greasy hands, and all the wretchedness which had stirred her heart to pity when she had gone during the previous winter to visit Mother Fetu; and she also strove to conjure up a vision of that pink chamber in the midst of such repulsive, poverty-stricken surroundings. However, whilst she was still absorbed in her reverie, two tiny warm hands were placed over her eyes, which lack of sleep had reddened, and a laughing voice inquired: "Who is it? who is it?" It was Jeanne, who had slipped into her clothes without assistance. Mother Fetu's voice had awakened her; and perceiving that the closet door had been shut, she had made her toilet with the utmost speed in order to give her mother a surprise. "Who is it? who is it?" she again inquired, convulsed more and more with laughter. She turned to Rosalie, who entered at the moment with the breakfast. "You know; don't you speak. Nobody is asking you any question." "Be quiet, you little madcap!" exclaimed Helene. "I suppose it's you!" The child slipped on to her mother's lap, and there, leaning back and swinging to and fro, delighted with the amusement she had devised, she resumed: "Well, it might have been another little girl! Eh? Perhaps some little girl who had brought you a letter of invitation to dine with her mamma. And she might have covered your eyes, too!" "Don't be silly," exclaimed Helene, as she set her on the floor. "What are you talking about? Rosalie, let us have breakfast." The maid's eyes, however, were riveted on the child, and she commented upon her little mistress being so oddly dressed. To tell the truth, so great had been Jeanne's haste that she had not put on her shoes. She had drawn on a short flannel petticoat which allowed a glimpse of her chemise, and had left her morning jacket open, so that you could see her delicate, undeveloped bosom. With her hair streaming behind her, stamping about in her stockings, which were all awry, she looked charming, all in white like some child of fairyland. She cast down her eyes to see herself, and immediately burst into laughter. "Look, mamma, I look nice, don't I? Won't you let me be as I am? It is nice!" Repressing a gesture of impatience, Helene, as was her wont every morning, inquired: "Are you washed?" "Oh, mamma!" pleaded the child, her joy suddenly dashed. "Oh, mamma! it's raining; it's too nasty!" "Then, you'll have no breakfast. Wash her, Rosalie." She usually took this office upon herself, but that morning she felt altogether out of sorts, and drew nearer to the fire, shivering, although the weather was so balmy. Having spread a napkin and placed two white china bowls on a small round table, Rosalie had brought the latter close to the fireplace. The coffee and milk steamed before the fire in a silver pot, which had been a present from Monsieur Rambaud. At this early hour the disorderly, drowsy room seemed delightfully homelike. "Mamma, mamma!" screamed Jeanne from the depths of the closet, "she's rubbing me too hard. It's taking my skin off. Oh dear! how awfully cold!" Helene, with eyes fixed on the coffee-pot, remained engrossed in thought. She desired to know everything, so she would go. The thought of that mysterious place of assignation in so squalid a nook of Paris was an ever-present pain and vexation. She judged such taste hateful, but in it she identified Malignon's leaning towards romance. "Mademoiselle," declared Rosalie, "if you don't let me finish with you, I shall call madame." "Stop, stop: you are poking the soap into my eyes," answered Jeanne, whose voice was hoarse with sobs. "Leave me alone; I've had enough of it. The ears can wait till to-morrow." But the splashing of water went on, and the squeezing of the sponge into the basin could be heard. There was a clamor and a struggle, the child was sobbing; but almost immediately afterward she made her appearance, shouting gaily: "It's over now; it's over now!" Her hair was still glistening with wet, and she shook herself, her face glowing with the rubbing it had received and exhaling a fresh and pleasant odor. In her struggle to get free her jacket had slipped from her shoulders, her petticoat had become loosened, and her stockings had tumbled down, displaying her bare legs. According to Rosalie, she looked like an infant Jesus. Jeanne, however, felt very proud that she was clean; she had no wish to be dressed again. "Look at me, mamma; look at my hands, and my neck, and my ears. Oh! you must let me warm myself; I am so comfortable. You don't say anything; surely I've deserved my breakfast to-day." She had curled herself up before the fire in her own little easy-chair. Then Rosalie poured out the coffee and milk. Jeanne took her bowl on her lap, and gravely soaked her toast in its contents with all the airs of a grown-up person. Helene had always forbidden her to eat in this way, but that morning she remained plunged in thought. She did not touch her own bread, and was satisfied with drinking her coffee. Then Jeanne, after swallowing her last morsel, was stung with remorse. Her heart filled, she put aside her bowl, and gazing on her mother's pale face, threw herself on her neck: "Mamma, are you ill now? I haven't vexed you, have I?--say." "No, no, my darling, quite the contrary; you're very good," murmured Helene as she embraced her. "I'm only a little wearied; I haven't slept well. Go on playing: don't be uneasy." The thought occurred to her that the day would prove a terribly long one. What could she do whilst waiting for the night? For some time past she had abandoned her needlework; sewing had become a terrible weariness. For hours she lingered in her seat with idle hands, almost suffocating in her room, and craving to go out into the open air for breath, yet never stirring. It was this room which made her ill; she hated it, in angry exasperation over the two years which she had spent within its walls; its blue velvet and the vast panorama of the mighty city disgusted her, and her thoughts dwelt on a lodging in some busy street, the uproar of which would have deafened her. Good heavens! how long were the hours! She took up a book, but the fixed idea that engrossed her mind continually conjured up the same visions between her eyes and the page of print. In the meantime Rosalie had been busy setting the room in order; Jeanne's hair also had been brushed, and she was dressed. While her mother sat at the window, striving to read, the child, who was in one of her moods of obstreperous gaiety, began playing a grand game. She was all alone; but this gave her no discomfort; she herself represented three or four persons in turn with comical earnestness and gravity. At first she played the lady going on a visit. She vanished into the dining-room, and returned bowing and smiling, her head nodding this way and that in the most coquettish style. "Good-day, madame! How are you, madame? How long it is since I've seen you! A marvellously long time, to be sure! Dear me, I've been so ill, madame! Yes; I've had the cholera; it's very disagreeable. Oh! it doesn't show; no, no, it makes you look younger, on my word of honor. And your children, madame? Oh! I've had three since last summer!" So she rattled on, never ceasing her curtseying to the round table, which doubtless represented the lady she was visiting. Next she ventured to bring the chairs closer together, and for an hour carried on a general conversation, her talk abounding in extraordinary phrases. "Don't be silly," said her mother at intervals, when the chatter put her out of patience. "But, mamma, I'm paying my friend a visit. She's speaking to me, and I must answer her. At tea nobody ought to put the cakes in their pockets, ought they?" Then she turned and began again: "Good-bye, madame; your tea was delicious. Remember me most kindly to your husband." The next moment came something else. She was going out shopping in her carriage, and got astride of a chair like a boy. "Jean, not so quick; I'm afraid. Stop! stop! here is the milliner's! Mademoiselle, how much is this bonnet? Three hundred francs; that isn't dear. But it isn't pretty. I should like it with a bird on it--a bird big like that! Come, Jean, drive me to the grocer's. Have you some honey? Yes, madame, here is some. Oh, how nice it is! But I don't want any of it; give me two sous' worth of sugar. Oh! Jean, look, take care! There! we have had a spill! Mr. Policeman, it was the cart which drove against us. You're not hurt, madame, are you? No, sir, not in the least. Jean, Jean! home now. Gee-up! gee-up. Wait a minute; I must order some chemises. Three dozen chemises for madame. I want some boots too and some stays. Gee-up! gee-up! Good gracious, we shall never get back again." Then she fanned herself, enacting the part of the lady who has returned home and is finding fault with her servants. She never remained quiet for a moment; she was in a feverish ecstasy, full of all sorts of whimsical ideas; all the life she knew surged up in her little brain and escaped from it in fragments. Morning and afternoon she thus moved about, dancing and chattering; and when she grew tired, a footstool or parasol discovered in a corner, or some shred of stuff lying on the floor, would suffice to launch her into a new game in which her effervescing imagination found fresh outlet. Persons, places, and incidents were all of her own creation, and she amused herself as much as though twelve children of her own age had been beside her. But evening came at last. Six o'clock was about to strike. And Helene, rousing herself from the troubled stupor in which she had spent the afternoon, hurriedly threw a shawl over her shoulders. "Are you going out, mamma?" asked Jeanne in her surprise. "Yes, my darling, just for a walk close by. I won't be long; be good." Outside it was still thawing. The footways were covered with mud. In the Rue de Passy, Helene entered a boot shop, to which she had taken Mother Fetu on a previous occasion. Then she returned along the Rue Raynouard. The sky was grey, and from the pavement a mist was rising. The street stretched dimly before her, deserted and fear-inspiring, though the hour was yet early. In the damp haze the infrequent gas-lamps glimmered like yellow spots. She quickened her steps, keeping close to the houses, and shrinking from sight as though she were on the way to some assignation. However, as she hastily turned into the Passage des Eaux, she halted beneath the archway, her heart giving way to genuine terror. The passage opened beneath her like some black gulf. The bottom of it was invisible; the only thing she could see in this black tunnel was the quivering gleam of the one lamp which lighted it. Eventually she made up her mind, and grasped the iron railing to prevent herself from slipping. Feeling her way with the tip of her boots she landed successively on the broad steps. The walls, right and left, grew closer, seemingly prolonged by the darkness, while the bare branches of the trees above cast vague shadows, like those of gigantic arms with closed or outstretched hands. She trembled as she thought that one of the garden doors might open and a man spring out upon her. There were no passers-by, however, and she stepped down as quickly as possible. Suddenly from out of the darkness loomed a shadow which coughed, and she was frozen with fear; but it was only an old woman creeping with difficulty up the path. Then she felt less uneasy, and carefully raised her dress, which had been trailing in the mud. So thick was the latter that her boots were constantly sticking to the steps. At the bottom she turned aside instinctively. From the branches the raindrops dripped fast into the passage, and the lamp glimmered like that of some miner, hanging to the side of a pit which infiltrations have rendered dangerous. Helene climbed straight to the attic she had so often visited at the top of the large house abutting on the Passage. But nothing stirred, although she rapped loudly. In considerable perplexity she descended the stairs again. Mother Fetu was doubtless in the rooms on the first floor, where, however, Helene dared not show herself. She remained five minutes in the entry, which was lighted by a petroleum lamp. Then again she ascended the stairs hesitatingly, gazing at each door, and was on the point of going away, when the old woman leaned over the balusters. "What! it's you on the stairs, my good lady!" she exclaimed. "Come in, and don't catch cold out there. Oh! it is a vile place--enough to kill one." "No, thank you," said Helene; "I've brought you your pair of shoes, Mother Fetu." She looked at the door which Mother Fetu had left open behind her, and caught a glimpse of a stove within. "I'm all alone, I assure you," declared the old woman. "Come in. This is the kitchen here. Oh! you're not proud with us poor folks; we can talk to you!" Despite the repugnance which shame at the purpose of her coming created within her, Helene followed her. "God in Heaven! how can I thank you! Oh, what lovely shoes! Wait, and I'll put them on. There's my whole foot in; it fits me like a glove. Bless the day! I can walk with these without being afraid of the rain. Oh! my good lady, you are my preserver; you've given me ten more years of life. No, no, it's no flattery; it's what I think, as true as there's a lamp shining on us. No, no, I don't flatter!" She melted into tears as she spoke, and grasping Helene's hands kissed them. In a stewpan on the stove some wine was being heated, and on the table, near the lamp, stood a half-empty bottle of Bordeaux with its tapering neck. The only other things placed there were four dishes, a glass, two saucepans, and an earthenware pot. It could be seen that Mother Fetu camped in this bachelor's kitchen, and that the fires were lit for herself only. Seeing Helene's glance turn towards the stewpan, she coughed, and once more put on her dolorous expression. "It's gripping me again," she groaned. "Oh! it's useless for the doctor to talk; I must have some creature in my inside. And then, a drop of wine relieves me so. I'm greatly afflicted, my good lady. I wouldn't have a soul suffer from my trouble; it's too dreadful. Well, I'm nursing myself a bit now; and when a person has passed through so much, isn't it fair she should do so? I have been so lucky in falling in with a nice gentleman. May Heaven bless him!" With this outburst she dropped two large lumps of sugar into her wine. She was now getting more corpulent than ever, and her little eyes had almost vanished from her fat face. She moved slowly with a beatifical expression of felicity. Her life's ambition was now evidently satisfied. For this she had been born. When she put her sugar away again Helene caught a glimpse of some tid-bits secreted at the bottom of a cupboard--a jar of preserves, a bag of biscuits, and even some cigars, all doubtless pilfered from the gentleman lodger. "Well, good-bye, Mother Fetu, I'm going away," she exclaimed. The old lady, however, pushed the saucepan to one side of the stove and murmured: "Wait a minute; this is far too hot, I'll drink it by-and-by. No, no; don't go out that way. I must beg pardon for having received you in the kitchen. Let us go round the rooms." She caught up the lamp, and turned into a narrow passage. Helene, with beating heart, followed close behind. The passage, dilapidated and smoky, was reeking with damp. Then a door was thrown open, and she found herself treading a thick carpet. Mother Fetu had already advanced into a room which was plunged in darkness and silence. "Well?" she asked, as she lifted up the lamp; "it's very nice, isn't it?" There were two rooms, each of them square, communicating with one another by folding-doors, which had been removed, and replaced by curtains. Both were hung with pink cretonne of a Louis Quinze pattern, picturing chubby-checked cupids disporting themselves amongst garlands of flowers. In the first apartment there was a round table, two lounges, and some easy-chairs; and in the second, which was somewhat smaller, most of the space was occupied by the bed. Mother Fetu drew attention to a crystal lamp with gilt chains, which hung from the ceiling. To her this lamp was the veritable acme of luxury. Then she began explaining things: "You can't imagine what a funny fellow he is! He lights it up in mid-day, and stays here, smoking a cigar and gazing into vacancy. But it amuses him, it seems. Well, it doesn't matter; I've an idea he must have spent a lot of money in his time." Helene went through the rooms in silence. They seemed to her in bad taste. There was too much pink everywhere; the furniture also looked far too new. "He calls himself Monsieur Vincent," continued the old woman, rambling on. "Of course, it's all the same to me. As long as he pays, my gentleman--" "Well, good-bye, Mother Fetu," said Helene, in whose throat a feeling of suffocation was gathering. She was burning to get away, but on opening a door she found herself threading three small rooms, the bareness and dirt of which were repulsive. The paper hung in tatters from the walls, the ceilings were grimy, and old plaster littered the broken floors. The whole place was pervaded by a smell of long prevalent squalor. "Not that way! not that way!" screamed Mother Fetu. "That door is generally shut. These are the other rooms which they haven't attempted to clean. My word! it's cost him quite enough already! Yes, indeed, these aren't nearly so nice! Come this way, my good lady--come this way!" On Helene's return to the pink boudoir, she stopped to kiss her hand once more. "You see, I'm not ungrateful! I shall never forget the shoes. How well they fit me! and how warm they are! Why, I could walk half-a-dozen miles with them. What can I beg Heaven to grant you? O Lord, hearken to me, and grant that she may be the happiest of women--in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" A devout enthusiasm had suddenly come upon Mother Fetu; she repeated the sign of the cross again and again, and bowed the knee in the direction of the crystal lamp. This done, she opened the door conducting to the landing, and whispered in a changed voice into Helene's ear: "Whenever you like to call, just knock at the kitchen door; I'm always there!" Dazed, and glancing behind her as though she were leaving a place of dubious repute, Helene hurried down the staircase, reascended the Passage des Eaux, and regained the Rue Vineuse, without consciousness of the ground she was covering. The old woman's last words still rang in her ears. In truth, no; never again would she set foot in that house, never again would she bear her charity thither. Why should she ever rap at the kitchen door again? At present she was satisfied; she had seen what was to be seen. And she was full of scorn for herself --for everybody. How disgraceful to have gone there! The recollection of the place with its tawdry finery and squalid surroundings filled her with mingled anger and disgust. "Well, madame," exclaimed Rosalie, who was awaiting her return on the staircase, "the dinner will be nice. Dear, oh dear! it's been burning for half an hour!" At table Jeanne plagued her mother with questions. Where had she been? what had she been about? However, as the answers she received proved somewhat curt, she began to amuse herself by giving a little dinner. Her doll was perched near her on a chair, and in a sisterly fashion she placed half of her dessert before it. "Now, mademoiselle, you must eat like a lady. See, wipe your mouth. Oh, the dirty little thing! She doesn't even know how to wear her napkin! There, you're nice now. See, here is a biscuit. What do you say? You want some preserve on it. Well, I should think it better as it is! Let me pare you a quarter of this apple!" She placed the doll's share on the chair. But when she had emptied her own plate she took the dainties back again one after the other and devoured them, speaking all the time as though she were the doll. "Oh! it's delicious! I've never eaten such nice jam! Where did you get this jam, madame? I shall tell my husband to buy a pot of it. Do those beautiful apples come from your garden, madame?" She fell asleep while thus playing, and stumbled into the bedroom with the doll in her arms. She had given herself no rest since morning. Her little legs could no longer sustain her--she was helpless and wearied to death. However, a ripple of laughter passed over her face even in sleep; in her dreams she must have been still continuing her play. At last Helene was alone in her room. With closed doors she spent a miserable evening beside the dead fire. Her will was failing her; thoughts that found no utterance were stirring within the innermost recesses of her heart. At midnight she wearily sought her bed, but there her torture passed endurance. She dozed, she tossed from side to side as though a fire were beneath her. She was haunted by visions which sleeplessness enlarged to a gigantic size. Then an idea took root in her brain. In vain did she strive to banish it; it clung to her, surged and clutched her at the throat till it entirely swayed her. About two o'clock she rose, rigid, pallid, and resolute as a somnambulist, and having again lighted the lamp she wrote a letter in a disguised hand; it was a vague denunciation, a note of three lines, requesting Doctor Deberle to repair that day to such a place at such an hour; there was no explanation, no signature. She sealed the envelope and dropped the letter into the pocket of her dress which was hanging over an arm-chair. Then returning to bed, she immediately closed her eyes, and in a few minutes was lying there breathless, overpowered by leaden slumber. CHAPTER XVIII. It was nearly nine o'clock the next morning before Rosalie was able to serve the coffee. Helene had risen late. She was weary and pale with the nightmare that had broken her rest. She rummaged in the pocket of her dress, felt the letter there, pressed it to the very bottom, and sat down at the table without opening her lips. Jeanne too was suffering from headache, and had a pale, troubled face. She quitted her bed regretfully that morning, without any heart to indulge in play. There was a sooty color in the sky, and a dim light saddened the room, while from time to time sudden downpours of rain beat against the windows. "Mademoiselle is in the blues," said Rosalie, who monopolized all the talk. "She can't keep cheerful for two days running. That's what comes of dancing about too much yesterday." "Do you feel ill, Jeanne?" asked Helene. "No, mamma," answered the child. "It's only the nasty weather." Helene lapsed once more into silence. She finished her coffee, and sat in her chair, plunged in thought, with her eyes riveted on the flames. While rising she had reflected that it was her duty to speak to Juliette and bid her renounce the afternoon assignation. But how? She could not say. Still, the necessity of the step was impressed on her, and now her one urgent, all-absorbing thought was to attempt it. Ten o'clock struck, and she began to dress. Jeanne gazed at her, and, on seeing her take up her bonnet, clasped her little hands as though stricken with cold, while over her face crept a pained look. It was her wont to take umbrage whenever her mother went out; she was unwilling to quit her side, and craved to go with her everywhere. "Rosalie," said Helene, "make haste and finish the room. Don't go out. I'll be back in a moment." She stooped and gave Jeanne a hasty kiss, not noticing her vexation. But the moment she had gone a sob broke from the child, who had hitherto summoned all her dignity to her aid to restrain her emotion. "Oh, mademoiselle, how naughty!" exclaimed the maid by way of consolation. "Gracious powers! no one will rob you of your mamma. You must allow her to see after her affairs. You can't always be hanging to her skirts!" Meanwhile Helene had turned the corner of the Rue Vineuse, keeping close to the wall for protection against the rain. It was Pierre who opened the door; but at sight of her he seemed somewhat embarrassed. "Is Madame Deberle at home?" "Yes, madame; but I don't know whether--" Helene, in the character of a family friend, was pushing past him towards the drawing-room; but he took the liberty of stopping her. "Wait, madame; I'll go and see." He slipped into the room, opening the door as little as he could; and immediately afterwards Juliette could be heard speaking in a tone of irritation. "What! you've allowed some one to come in? Why, I forbade it peremptorily. It's incredible!! I can't be left quiet for an instant!" Helene, however, pushed open the door, strong in her resolve to do that which she imagined to be her duty. "Oh, it's you!" said Juliette, as she perceived her. "I didn't catch who it was!" The look of annoyance did not fade from her face, however, and it was evident that the visit was ill-timed. "Do I disturb you?" asked Helene. "Not at all, not at all," answered the other. "You'll understand in a moment. We have been getting up a surprise. We are rehearsing _Caprice_[*] to play it on one of my Wednesdays. We had selected this morning for rehearsal, thinking nobody would know of it. But you'll stay now? You will have to keep silence about it, that's all." [*] One of Alfred de Musset's plays. Then, clapping her hands and addressing herself to Madame Berthier, who was standing in the middle of the drawing-room, she began once more, without paying any further attention to Helene: "Come, come; we must get on. You don't give sufficient point to the sentence 'To make a purse unknown to one's husband would in the eyes of most people seem rather more than romantic.' Say that again." Intensely surprised at finding her engaged in this way, Helene had sat down. The chairs and tables had been pushed against the wall, the carpet thus being left clear. Madame Berthier, a delicate blonde, repeated her soliloquy, with her eyes fixed on the ceiling in her effort to recall the words; while plump Madame de Guiraud, a beautiful brunette, who had assumed the character of Madame de Lery, reclined in an arm-chair awaiting her cue. The ladies, in their unpretentious morning gowns, had doffed neither bonnets nor gloves. Seated in front of them, her hair in disorder and a volume of Musset in her hand, was Juliette, in a dressing-gown of white cashmere. Her face wore the serious expression of a stage-manager tutoring his actors as to the tones they should speak in and the by-play they should introduce. The day being dull, the small curtains of embroidered tulle had been pulled aside and swung across the knobs of the window-fastenings, so that the garden could be seen, dark and damp. "You don't display sufficient emotion," declared Juliette. "Put a little more meaning into it. Every word ought to tell. Begin again: 'I'm going to finish your toilette, my dear little purse.'" "I shall be an awful failure," said Madame Berthier languidly. "Why don't you play the part instead of me? You would make a delicious Mathilda." "I! Oh, no! In the first place, one needs to be fair. Besides, I'm a very good teacher, but a bad pupil. But let us get on--let us get on!" Helene sat still in her corner. Madame Berthier, engrossed in her part, had not even turned round. Madame de Guiraud had merely honored her with a slight nod. She realized that she was in the way, and that she ought to have declined to stay. If she still remained, it was no longer through the sense of a duty to be fulfilled, but rather by reason of a strange feeling stirring vaguely in her heart's depth's--a feeling which had previously thrilled her in this selfsame spot. The unkindly greeting which Juliette had bestowed on her pained her. However, the young woman's friendships were usually capricious; she worshipped people for three months, threw herself on their necks, and seemed to live for them alone; then one morning, without affording any explanation, she appeared to lose all consciousness of being acquainted with them. Without doubt, in this, as in everything else, she was simply yielding to a fashionable craze, an inclination to love the people who were loved by her own circle. These sudden veerings of affection, however, deeply wounded Helene, for her generous and undemonstrative heart had its ideal in eternity. She often left the Deberles plunged in sadness, full of despair when she thought how fragile and unstable was the basis of human love. And on this occasion, in this crisis in her life, the thought brought her still keener pain. "We'll skip the scene with Chavigny," said Juliette. "He won't be here this morning. Let us see Madame de Lery's entrance. Now, Madame de Guiraud, here's your cue." Then she read from her book: "'Just imagine my showing him this purse.'" "'Oh! it's exceedingly pretty. Let me look at it,'" began Madame de Guiraud in a falsetto voice, as she rose with a silly expression on her face. When the servant had opened the door to her, Helene had pictured a scene entirely different from this. She had imagined that she would find Juliette displaying excessive nervousness, with pallid cheeks, hesitating and yet allured, shivering at the very thought of assignation. She had pictured herself imploring her to reflect, till the young woman, choked with sobs, threw herself into her arms. Then they would have mingled their tears together, and Helene would have quitted her with the thought that Henri was henceforward lost to her, but that she had secured his happiness. However, there had been nothing of all this; she had merely fallen on this rehearsal, which was wholly unintelligible to her; and she saw Juliette before her with unruffled features, like one who has had a good night's rest, and with her mind sufficiently at ease to discuss Madame Berthier's by-play, without troubling herself in the least degree about what she would do in the afternoon. This indifference and frivolity chilled Helene, who had come to the house with passion consuming her. A longing to speak fell on her. At a venture she inquired: "Who will play the part of Chavigny?" "Why, Malignon, of course," answered Juliette, turning round with an air of astonishment. "He played Chavigny all last winter. It's a nuisance he can't come to the rehearsals. Listen, ladies; I'm going to read Chavigny's part. Unless that's done, we shall never get on." Thereupon she herself began acting the man's part, her voice deepening unconsciously, whilst she assumed a cavalier air in harmony with the situation. Madame Berthier renewed her warbling tones, and Madame de Guiraud took infinite pains to be lively and witty. When Pierre came in to put some more wood on the fire he slyly glanced at the ladies, who amused him immensely. Helene, still fixed in her resolve, despite some heart-shrinking, attempted however to take Juliette aside. "Only a minute. I've something to say to you." "Oh, impossible, my dear! You see how much I am engaged. To-morrow, if you have the time." Helene said no more. The young woman's unconcern displeased her. She felt anger growing within her as she observed how calm and collected Juliette was, when she herself had endured such intense agony since the night before. At one moment she was on the point of rising and letting things take their course. It was exceedingly foolish of her to wish to save this woman; her nightmare began once more; her hands slipped into her pocket, and finding the letter there, clasped it in a feverish grasp. Why should she have any care for the happiness of others, when they had no care for her and did not suffer as she did? "Oh! capital, capital," exclaimed Juliette of a sudden. Madame Berthier's head was now reclining on Madame de Guiraud's shoulder, and she was declaring through her sobs: "'I am sure that he loves her; I am sure of it!'" "Your success will be immense," said Juliette. "Say that once more: 'I am sure that he loves her; I am sure of it.' Leave your head as it is. You're divine. Now, Madame de Guiraud, your turn." "'No, no, my child, it cannot be; it is a caprice, a fancy,'" replied the stout lady. "Perfect! but oh, the scene is a long one, isn't it? Let us rest a little while. We must have that incident in proper working order." Then they all three plunged into a discussion regarding the arrangement of the drawing-room. The dining-room door, to the left, would serve for entrances and exits; an easy-chair could be placed on the right, a couch at the farther end, and the table could be pushed close to the fireplace. Helene, who had risen, followed them about, as though she felt an interest in these scenic arrangements. She had now abandoned her idea of eliciting an explanation, and merely wished to make a last effort to prevent Juliette from going to the place of meeting. "I intended asking you," she said to her, "if it isn't to-day that you mean to pay Madame de Chermette a visit?" "Yes, this afternoon." "Then, if you'll allow me, I'll go with you; it's such a long time since I promised to go to see her." For a moment Juliette betrayed signs of embarrassment, but speedily regained her self-possession. "Of course, I should be very happy. Only I have so many things to look after; I must do some shopping first, and I have no idea at what time I shall be able to get to Madame de Chermette's." "That doesn't matter," said Helene; "it will enable me to have a walk." "Listen; I will speak to you candidly. Well, you must not press me. You would be in my way. Let it be some other Monday." This was said without a trace of emotion, so flatly and with so quiet a smile that Helene was dumbfounded and uttered not another syllable. She was obliged to lend some assistance to Juliette, who suddenly decided to bring the table close to the fireplace. Then she drew back, and the rehearsal began once more. In a soliloquy which followed the scene, Madame de Guiraud with considerable power spoke these two sentences: "'But what a treacherous gulf is the heart of man! In truth, we are worth more than they!'" And Helene, what ought she to do now? Within her breast the question raised a storm that stirred her to vague thoughts of violence. She experienced an irresistible desire to be revenged on Juliette's tranquillity, as if that self-possession were an insult directed against her own fevered heart. She dreamed of facilitating her fall, that she might see whether she would always retain this unruffled demeanor. And she thought of herself scornfully as she recalled her delicacy and scruples. Twenty times already she ought to have said to Henri: "I love you; let us go away together." Could she have done so, however, without the most intense emotion? Could she have displayed the callous composure of this woman, who, three hours before her first assignation, was rehearsing a comedy in her own home? Even at this moment she trembled more than Juliette; what maddened her was the consciousness of her own passion amidst the quiet cheerfulness of this drawing-room; she was terrified lest she should burst out into some angry speech. Was she a coward, then? But all at once a door opened, and Henri's voice reached her ear: "Do not disturb yourselves. I'm only passing." The rehearsal was drawing to a close. Juliette, who was still reading Chavigny's part, had just caught hold of Madame de Guiraud's hand. "Ernestine, I adore you!" she exclaimed with an outburst of passionate earnestness. "Then Madame de Blainville is no longer beloved by you?" inquired Madame de Guiraud. However, so long as her husband was present Juliette declined to proceed. There was no need of the men knowing anything about it. The doctor showed himself most polite to the ladies; he complimented them and predicted an immense success. With black gloves on his hands and his face clean-shaven he was about to begin his round of visits. On his entry he had merely greeted Helene with a slight bow. At the Comedie Francais he had seen some very great actress in the character of Madame de Lery, and he acquainted Madame de Guiraud with some of the usual by-play of the scene. "At the moment when Chavigny is going to throw himself at your feet, you fling the purse into the fire. Dispassionately, you know, without any anger, like a woman who plays with love." "All right; leave us alone," said Juliette. "We know all about it." At last, when they had heard him close his study door, she began once more: "Ernestine, I adore you!" Prior to his departure Henri had saluted Helene with the same slight bow. She sat dumb, as though awaiting some catastrophe. The sudden appearance of the husband had seemed to her ominous; but when he had gone, his courtesy and evident blindness made him seem to her ridiculous. So he also gave attention to this idiotic comedy! And there was no loving fire in his eye as he looked at her sitting there! The whole house had become hateful and cold to her. Here was a downfall; there was nothing to restrain her any longer, for she abhorred Henri as much as Juliette. Within her pocket she held the letter in her convulsive grasp. At last, murmuring "Good-bye for the present," she quitted the room, her head swimming and the furniture seeming to dance around her. And in her ears rang these words, uttered by Madame de Guiraud: "Adieu. You will perhaps think badly of me to-day, but you will have some kindly feeling for me to-morrow, and, believe me, that is much better than a caprice." When Helene had shut the house door and reached the pavement, she drew the letter with a violent, almost mechanical gesture from her pocket, and dropped it into the letter-box. Then she stood motionless for a few seconds, still dazed, her eyes glaring at the narrow brass plate which had fallen back again in its place. "It is done," she exclaimed in a whisper. Once more she pictured the rooms hung with pink cretonne. Malignon and Juliette were there together; but all of a sudden the wall was riven open, and the husband entered. She was conscious of no more, and a great calm fell on her. Instinctively she looked around to see if any one had observed her dropping the letter in the box. But the street was deserted. Then she turned the corner and went back home. "Have you been good, my darling?" she asked as she kissed Jeanne. The child, still seated on the same chair, raised a gloomy face towards her, and without answering threw both arms around her neck, and kissed her with a great gasp. Her grief indeed had been intense. At lunch-time Rosalie seemed greatly surprised. "Madame surely went for a long walk!" said she. "Why do you think so?" asked Helene. "Because madame is eating with such an appetite. It is long since madame ate so heartily." It was true; she was very hungry; with her sudden relief she had felt her stomach empty. She experienced a feeling of intense peace and content. After the shocks of these last two days a stillness fell upon her spirit, her limbs relaxed and became as supple as though she had just left a bath. The only sensation that remained to her was one of heaviness somewhere, an indefinable load that weighed upon her. When she returned to her bedroom her eyes were at once directed towards the clock, the hands of which pointed to twenty-five minutes past twelve. Juliette's assignation was for three o'clock. Two hours and a half must still elapse. She made the reckoning mechanically. Moreover, she was in no hurry; the hands of the clock were moving on, and no one in the world could stop them. She left things to their own accomplishment. A child's cap, long since begun, was lying unfinished on the table. She took it up and began to sew at the window. The room was plunged in unbroken silence. Jeanne had seated herself in her usual place, but her arms hung idly beside her. "Mamma," she said, "I cannot work; it's no fun at all." "Well, my darling, don't do anything. Oh! wait a minute, you can thread my needles!" In a languid way the child silently attended to the duty assigned her. Having carefully cut some equal lengths of cotton, she spent a long time in finding the eyes of the needles, and was only just ready with one of them threaded when her mother had finished with the last. "You see," said the latter gently, "this will save time. The last of my six little caps will be finished to-night." She turned round to glance at the clock--ten minutes past one. Still nearly two hours. Juliette must now be beginning to dress. Henri had received the letter. Oh! he would certainly go. The instructions were precise; he would find the place without delay. But it all seemed so far off still, and she felt no emotional fever, but went on sewing with regular stitches as industriously as a work-girl. The minutes slipped by one by one. At last two o'clock struck. A ring at the bell came as a surprise. "Who can it be, mother darling?" asked Jeanne, who had jumped on her chair. "Oh! it's you!" she continued, as Monsieur Rambaud entered the room. "Why did you ring so loudly? You gave me quite a fright." The worthy man was in consternation--to tell the truth, his tug at the bell had been a little too violent. "I am not myself to-day, I'm ill," the child resumed. "You must not frighten me." Monsieur Rambaud displayed the greatest solicitude. What was the matter with his poor darling? He only sat down, relieved, when Helene had signed to him that the child was in her dismals, as Rosalie was wont to say. A call from him in the daytime was a rare occurrence, and so he at once set about explaining the object of his visit. It concerned some fellow-townsman of his, an old workman who could find no employment owing to his advanced years, and who lived with his paralytic wife in a tiny little room. Their wretchedness could not be pictured. He himself had gone up that morning to make a personal investigation. Their lodging was a mere hole under the tiles, with a swing window, through whose broken panes the wind beat in. Inside, stretched on a mattress, he had found a woman wrapped in an old curtain, while the man squatted on the floor in a state of stupefaction, no longer finding sufficient courage even to sweep the place. "Oh! poor things, poor things!" exclaimed Helene, moved to tears. It was not the old workman who gave Monsieur Rambaud any uneasiness. He would remove him to his own house and find him something to do. But there was the wife with palsied frame, whom the husband dared not leave for a moment alone, and who had to be rolled up like a bundle; where could she be put? what was to be done with her? "I thought of you," he went on. "You must obtain her instant admission to an asylum. I should have gone straight to Monsieur Deberle, but I imagined you knew him better and would have greater influence with him. If he would be kind enough to interest himself in the matter, it could all be arranged to-morrow." Trembling with pity, her cheeks white, Jeanne listened to the tale. "Oh, mamma!" she murmured with clasped hands, "be kind--get the admission for the poor woman!" "Yes, yes, of course!" said Helene, whose emotion was increasing. "I will speak to the doctor as soon as I can; he will himself take every requisite step. Give me their names and the address, Monsieur Rambaud." He scribbled a line on the table, and said as he rose: "It is thirty-five minutes past two. You would perhaps find the doctor at home now." She had risen at the same time, and as she looked at the clock a fierce thrill swept through her frame. In truth it was already thirty-five minutes past two, and the hands were still creeping on. She stammered out that the doctor must have started on his round of visits. Her eyes were riveted on the dial. Meantime, Monsieur Rambaud remained standing hat in hand, and beginning his story once more. These poor people had sold everything, even their stove, and since the setting in of winter had spent their days and nights alike without a fire. At the close of December they had been four days without food. Helene gave vent to a cry of compassion. The hands of the clock now marked twenty minutes to three. Monsieur Rambaud devoted another two minutes to his farewell: "Well, I depend on you," he said. And stooping to kiss Jeanne, he added: "Good-bye, my darling." "Good-bye; don't worry; mamma won't forget. I'll make her remember." When Helene came back from the ante-room, whither she had gone in company with Monsieur Rambaud, the hands of the clock pointed to a quarter to three. Another quarter of an hour and all would be over. As she stood motionless before the fireplace, the scene which was about to be enacted flashed before her eyes: Juliette was already there; Henri entered and surprised her. She knew the room; she could see the scene in its minutest details with terrible vividness. And still affected by Monsieur Rambaud's awful story she felt a mighty shudder rise from her limbs to her face. A voice cried out within her that what she had done--the writing of that letter, that cowardly denunciation--was a crime. The truth came to her with dazzling clearness. Yes, it was a crime she had committed! She recalled to memory the gesture with which she had flung the letter into the box; she recalled it with a sense of stupor such as might come over one on seeing another commit an evil action, without thought of intervening. She was as if awaking from a dream. What was it that had happened? Why was she here, with eyes ever fixed on the hands of that dial? Two more minutes had slipped away. "Mamma," said Jeanne, "if you like, we'll go to see the doctor together to-night. It will be a walk for me. I feel stifling to-day." Helene, however, did not hear; thirteen minutes must yet elapse. But she could not allow so horrible a thing to take place! In this stormy awakening of her rectitude she felt naught but a furious craving to prevent it. She must prevent it; otherwise she would be unable to live. In a state of frenzy she ran about her bedroom. "Ah, you're going to take me!" exclaimed Jeanne joyously. "We're going to see the doctor at once, aren't we, mother darling?" "No, no," Helene answered, while she hunted for her boots, stooping to look under the bed. They were not to be found; but she shrugged her shoulders with supreme indifference when it occurred to her that she could very well run out in the flimsy house-slippers she had on her feet. She was now turning the wardrobe topsy-turvy in her search for her shawl. Jeanne crept up to her with a coaxing air: "Then you're not going to the doctor's, mother darling?" "No." "Say that you'll take me all the same. Oh! do take me; it will be such a pleasure!" But Helene had at last found her shawl, and she threw it over her shoulders. Good heavens! only twelve minutes left--just time to run. She would go--she would do something, no matter what. She would decide on the way. "Mamma dear, do please take me with you," said Jeanne in tones that grew lower and more imploring. "I cannot take you," said Helene; "I'm going to a place where children don't go. Give me my bonnet." Jeanne's face blanched. Her eyes grew dim, her words came with a gasp. "Where are you going?" she asked. The mother made no reply--she was tying the strings of her bonnet. Then the child continued: "You always go out without me now. You went out yesterday, you went out to-day, and you are going out again. Oh, I'm dreadfully grieved, I'm afraid to be here all alone. I shall die if you leave me here. Do you hear, mother darling? I shall die." Then bursting into loud sobs, overwhelmed by a fit of grief and rage, she clung fast to Helene's skirts. "Come, come, leave me; be good, I'm coming back," her mother repeated. "No, no! I won't have it!" the child exclaimed through her sobs. "Oh! you don't love me any longer, or you would take me with you. Yes, yes, I am sure you love other people better. Take me with you, take me with you, or I'll stay here on the floor; you'll come back and find me on the floor." She wound her little arms round her mother's legs; she wept with face buried in the folds of her dress; she clung to her and weighed upon her to prevent her making a step forward. And still the hands of the clock moved steadily on; it was ten minutes to three. Then Helene thought that she would never reach the house in time, and, nearly distracted, she wrenched Jeanne from her grasp, exclaiming: "What an unbearable child! This is veritable tyranny! If you sob any more, I'll have something to say to you!" She left the room and slammed the door behind her. Jeanne had staggered back to the window, her sobs suddenly arrested by this brutal treatment, her limbs stiffened, her face quite white. She stretched her hands towards the door, and twice wailed out the words: "Mamma! mamma!" And then she remained where she had fallen on a chair, with eyes staring and features distorted by the jealous thought that her mother was deceiving her. On reaching the street, Helene hastened her steps. The rain had ceased, but great drops fell from the housetops on to her shoulders. She had resolved that she would reflect outside and fix on some plan. But now she was only inflamed with a desire to reach the house. When she reached the Passage des Eaux, she hesitated for just one moment. The descent had become a torrent; the water of the gutters of the Rue Raynouard was rushing down it. And as the stream bounded over the steps, between the close-set walls, it broke here and there into foam, whilst the edges of the stones, washed clear by the downpour, shone out like glass. A gleam of pale light, falling from the grey sky, made the Passage look whiter between the dusky branches of the trees. Helene went down it, scarcely raising her skirts. The water came up to her ankles. She almost lost her flimsy slippers in the puddles; around her, down the whole way, she heard a gurgling sound, like the murmuring of brooklets coursing through the grass in the depths of the woods. All at once she found herself on the stairs in front of the door. She stood there, panting in a state of torture. Then her memory came back, and she decided to knock at the kitchen. "What! is it you?" exclaimed Mother Fetu. There was none of the old whimper in her voice. Her little eyes were sparkling, and a complacent grin had spread over the myriad wrinkles of her face. All the old deference vanished, and she patted Helene's hands as she listened to her broken words. The young woman gave her twenty francs. "May God requite you!" prayed Mother Fetu in her wonted style. "Whatever you please, my dear!" CHAPTER XIX. Leaning back in an easy-chair, with his legs stretched out before the huge, blazing fire, Malignon sat waiting. He had considered it a good idea to draw the window-curtains and light the wax candles. The outer room, in which he had seated himself, was brilliantly illuminated by a small chandelier and a pair of candelabra; whilst the other apartment was plunged in shadow, the swinging crystal lamp alone casting on the floor a twilight gleam. Malignon drew out his watch. "The deuce!" he muttered. "Is she going to keep me waiting again?" He gave vent to a slight yawn. He had been waiting for an hour already, and it was small amusement to him. However, he rose and cast a glance over his preparations. The arrangement of the chairs did not please him, and he rolled a couch in front of the fireplace. The cretonne hangings had a ruddy glow, as they reflected the light of the candles; the room was warm, silent, and cozy, while outside the wind came and went in sudden gusts. All at once the young man heard three hurried knocks at the door. It was the signal. "At last!" he exclaimed aloud, his face beaming jubilantly. He ran to open the door, and Juliette entered, her face veiled, her figure wrapped in a fur mantle. While Malignon was gently closing the door, she stood still for a moment, with the emotion that checked the words on her lips undetected. However, before the young man had had time to take her hand, she raised her veil, and displayed a smiling face, rather pale, but quite unruffled. "What! you have lighted up the place!" she exclaimed. "Why? I thought you hated candles in broad daylight!" Malignon, who had been making ready to clasp her with a passionate gesture that he had been rehearsing, was put somewhat out of countenance by this remark, and hastened to explain that the day was too wretched, and that the windows looked on to waste patches of ground. Besides, night was his special delight. "Well, one never knows how to take you," she retorted jestingly. "Last spring, at my children's ball, you made such a fuss, declaring that the place was like some cavern, some dead-house. However, let us say that your taste has changed." She seemed to be paying a mere visit, and affected a courage which slightly deepened her voice. This was the only indication of her uneasiness. At times her chin twitched somewhat, as though she felt some uneasiness in her throat. But her eyes were sparkling, and she tasted to the full the keen pleasure born of her imprudence. She thought of Madame de Chermette, of whom such scandalous stories were related. Good heavens! it seemed strange all the same. "Let us have a look round," she began. And thereupon she began inspecting the apartment. He followed in her footsteps, while she gazed at the furniture, examined the walls, looked upwards, and started back, chattering all the time. "I don't like your cretonne; it is so frightfully common!" said she. "Where did you buy that abominable pink stuff? There's a chair that would be nice if the wood weren't covered with gilding. Not a picture, not a nick-nack--only your chandelier and your candelabra, which are by no means in good style! Ah well, my dear fellow; I advise you to continue laughing at my Japanese pavilion!" She burst into a laugh, thus revenging herself on him for the old affronts which still rankled in her breast. "Your taste is a pretty one, and no mistake! You don't know that my idol is worth more than the whole lot of your things! A draper's shopman wouldn't have selected that pink stuff. Was it your idea to fascinate your washerwoman?" Malignon felt very much hurt, and did not answer. He made an attempt to lead her into the inner room; but she remained on the threshold, declaring that she never entered such gloomy places. Besides, she could see quite enough; the one room was worthy of the other. The whole of it had come from the Saint-Antoine quarter. But the hanging lamp was her special aversion. She attacked it with merciless raillery--what a trashy thing it was, such as some little work-girl with no furniture of her own might have dreamt of! Why, lamps in the same style could be bought at all the bazaars at seven francs fifty centimes apiece. "I paid ninety francs for it," at last ejaculated Malignon in his impatience. Thereupon she seemed delighted at having angered him. On his self-possession returning, he inquired: "Won't you take off your cloak?" "Oh, yes, I will," she answered; "it is dreadfully warm here." She took off her bonnet as well, and this with her fur cloak he hastened to deposit in the next room. When he returned, he found her seated in front of the fire, still gazing round her. She had regained her gravity, and was disposed to display a more conciliatory demeanor. "It's all very ugly," she said; "still, you are not amiss here. The two rooms might have been made very pretty." "Oh! they're good enough for my purpose!" he thoughtlessly replied, with a careless shrug of the shoulders. The next moment, however, he bitterly regretted these silly words. He could not possibly have been more impertinent or clumsy. Juliette hung her head, and a sharp pang darted through her bosom. Then he sought to turn to advantage the embarrassment into which he had plunged her. "Juliette!" he said pleadingly, as he leaned towards her. But with a gesture she forced him to resume his seat. It was at the seaside, at Trouville, that Malignon, bored to death by the constant sight of the sea, had hit upon the happy idea of falling in love. One evening he had taken hold of Juliette's hand. She had not seemed offended; in fact, she had at first bantered him over it. Soon, though her head was empty and her heart free, she imagined that she loved him. She had, so far, done nearly everything that her friends did around her; a lover only was lacking, and curiosity and a craving to be like the others had impelled her to secure one. However, Malignon was vain enough to imagine that he might win her by force of wit, and allowed her time to accustom herself to playing the part of a coquette. So, on the first outburst, which took place one night when they stood side by side gazing at the sea like a pair of lovers in a comic opera, she had repelled him, in her astonishment and vexation that he should spoil the romance which served as an amusement to her. On his return to Paris Malignon had vowed that he would be more skilful in his attack. He had just reacquired influence over her, during a fit of boredom which had come on with the close of a wearying winter, when the usual dissipations, dinners, balls, and first-night performances were beginning to pall on her with their dreary monotony. And at last, her curiosity aroused, allured by the seeming mystery and piquancy of an intrigue, she had responded to his entreaties by consenting to meet him. However, so wholly unruffled were her feelings, that she was as little disturbed, seated here by the side of Malignon, as when she paid visits to artists' studios to solicit pictures for her charity bazaars. "Juliette! Juliette!" murmured the young man, striving to speak in caressing tones. "Come, be sensible," she merely replied; and taking a Chinese fan from the chimney-piece, she resumed--as much at her ease as though she had been sitting in her own drawing-room: "You know we had a rehearsal this morning. I'm afraid I have not made a very happy choice in Madame Berthier. Her 'Mathilda' is a snivelling, insufferable affair. You remember that delightful soliloquy when she addresses the purse--'Poor little thing, I kissed you a moment ago'? Well! she declaims it like a school-girl who has learnt a complimentary greeting. It's so vexatious!" "And what about Madame de Guiraud?" he asked, as he drew his chair closer and took her hand. "Oh! she is perfection. I've discovered in her a 'Madame de Lery,' with some sarcasm and animation." While speaking she surrendered her hand to the young man, and he kissed it between her sentences without her seeming to notice it. "But the worst of it all, you know," she resumed, "is your absence. In the first place, you might say something to Madame Berthier; and besides, we shall not be able to get a good _ensemble_ if you never come." He had now succeeded in passing his arm round her waist. "But as I know my part," he murmured. "Yes, that's all very well; but there's the arrangement of the scenes to look after. It is anything but obliging on your part to refuse to give us three or four mornings." She was unable to continue, for he was raining a shower of kisses on her neck. At this she could feign ignorance no longer, but pushed him away, tapping him the while with the Chinese fan which she still retained in her hand. Doubtless, she had registered a vow that she would not allow any further familiarity. Her face was now flushed by the heat reflected from the fire, and her lips pouted with the very expression of an inquisitive person whom her feelings astonish. Moreover, she was really getting frightened. "Leave me alone," she stammered, with a constrained smile. "I shall get angry." But he imagined that he had moved her, and once more took hold of her hands. To her, however, a voice seemed to be crying out, "No!" It was she herself protesting before she had even answered her own heart. "No, no!" she said again. "Let me go; you are hurting me!" And thereupon, as he refused to release her, she twisted herself violently from his grasp. She was acting in obedience to some strange emotion; she felt angry with herself and with him. In her agitation some disjointed phrases escaped her lips. Yes, indeed, he rewarded her badly for her trust. What a brute he was! She even called him a coward. Never in her life would she see him again. But he allowed her to talk on, and ran after her with a wicked and brutal laugh. And at last she could do no more than gasp in the momentary refuge which she had sought behind a chair. They were there, gazing at one another, her face transformed by shame and his by passion, when a noise broke through the stillness. At first they did not grasp its significance. A door had opened, some steps crossed the room, and a voice called to them: "Fly! fly! You will be caught!" It was Helene. Astounded, they both gazed at her. So great was their stupefaction that they lost consciousness of their embarrassing situation. Juliette indeed displayed no sign of confusion. "Fly! fly!" said Helene again. "Your husband will be here in two minutes." "My husband!" stammered the young woman; "my husband!--why--for what reason?" She was losing her wits. Her brain was in a turmoil. It seemed to her prodigious that Helene should be standing there speaking to her of her husband. But Helene made an angry gesture. "Oh! if you think I've time to explain," said she,--"he is on the way here. I give you warning. Disappear at once, both of you." Then Juliette's agitation became extraordinary. She ran about the rooms like a maniac, screaming out disconnected sentences. "My God! my God!--I thank you.--Where is my cloak?--How horrid it is, this room being so dark!--Give me my cloak.--Bring me a candle, to help me to find my cloak.--My dear, you mustn't mind if I don't stop to thank you.--I can't get my arms into the sleeves--no, I can't get them in--no, I can't!" She was paralyzed with fear, and Helene was obliged to assist her with her cloak. She put her bonnet on awry, and did not even tie the ribbons. The worst of it, however, was that they lost quite a minute in hunting for her veil, which had fallen on the floor. Her words came with a gasp; her trembling hands moved about in bewilderment, fumbling over her person to ascertain whether she might be leaving anything behind which might compromise her. "Oh, what a lesson! what a lesson! Thank goodness, it is well over!" Malignon was very pale, and made a sorry appearance. His feet beat a tattoo on the ground, as he realized that he was both scorned and ridiculous. His lips could only give utterance to the wretched question: "Then you think I ought to go away as well?" Then, as no answer was vouchsafed him, he took up his cane, and went on talking by way of affecting perfect composure. They had plenty of time, said he. It happened that there was another staircase, a small servants' staircase, now never used, but which would yet allow of their descent. Madame Deberle's cab had remained at the door; it would convey both of them away along the quays. And again he repeated: "Now calm yourself. It will be all right. See, this way." He threw open a door, and the three dingy, dilapidated, little rooms, which had not been repaired and were full of dirt, appeared to view. A puff of damp air entered the boudoir. Juliette, ere she stepped through all that squalor, gave final expression to her disgust. "How could I have come here?" she exclaimed in a loud voice. "What a hole! I shall never forgive myself." "Be quick, be quick!" urged Helene, whose anxiety was as great as her own. She pushed Juliette forward, but the young woman threw herself sobbing on her neck. She was in the throes of a nervous reaction. She was overwhelmed with shame, and would fain have defended herself, fain have given a reason for being found in that man's company. Then instinctively she gathered up her skirts, as though she were about to cross a gutter. With the tip of his boot Malignon, who had gone on first, was clearing away the plaster which littered the back staircase. The doors were shut once more. Meantime, Helene had remained standing in the middle of the sitting-room. Silence reigned there, a warm, close silence, only disturbed by the crackling of the burnt logs. There was a singing in her ears, and she heard nothing. But after an interval, which seemed to her interminable, the rattle of a cab suddenly resounded. It was Juliette's cab rolling away. Then Helene sighed, and she made a gesture of mute gratitude. The thought that she would not be tortured by everlasting remorse for having acted despicably filled her with pleasant and thankful feelings. She felt relieved, deeply moved, and yet so weak, now that this awful crisis was over, that she lacked the strength to depart in her turn. In her heart she thought that Henri was coming, and that he must meet some one in this place. There was a knock at the door, and she opened it at once. The first sensation on either side was one of bewilderment. Henri entered, his mind busy with thoughts of the letter which he had received, and his face pale and uneasy. But when he caught sight of her a cry escaped his lips. "You! My God! It was you!" The cry betokened more astonishment than pleasure. But soon there came a furious awakening of his love. "You love me, you love me!" he stammered. "Ah! it was you, and I did not understand." He stretched out his arm as he spoke; but Helene, who had greeted his entrance with a smile, now started back with wan cheeks. Truly she had waited for him; she had promised herself that they would be together for a moment, and that she would invent some fiction. Now, however, full consciousness of the situation flashed upon her; Henri believed it to be an assignation. Yet she had never for one moment desired such a thing, and her heart rebelled. "Henri, I pray you, release me," said she. He had grasped her by the wrists, and was drawing her slowly towards him, as though to kiss her. The love that had been surging within him for months, but which had grown less violent owing to the break in their intimacy, now burst forth more fiercely than ever. "Release me," she resumed. "You are frightening me. I assure you, you are mistaken." His surprise found voice once more. "Was it not you then who wrote to me?" he asked. She hesitated for a second. What could she say in answer? "Yes," she whispered at last. She could not betray Juliette after having saved her. An abyss lay before her into which she herself was slipping. Henri was now glancing round the two rooms in wonderment at finding them illumined and furnished in such gaudy style. He ventured to question her. "Are these rooms yours?" he asked. But she remained silent. "Your letter upset me so," he continued. "Helene, you are hiding something from me. For mercy's sake, relieve my anxiety!" She was not listening to him; she was reflecting that he was indeed right in considering this to be an assignation. Otherwise, what could she have been doing there? Why should she have waited for him? She could devise no plausible explanation. She was no longer certain whether she had not given him this rendezvous. A network of chance and circumstance was enveloping her yet more tightly; there was no escape from it. Each second found her less able to resist. "You were waiting for me, you were waiting for me!" he repeated passionately, as he bent his head to kiss her. And then as his lips met hers she felt it beyond her power to struggle further; but, as though in mute acquiescence, fell, half swooning and oblivious of the world, upon his neck. [Illustration: The meeting of Helene and Henri] CHAPTER XX. Jeanne, with her eyes fixed on the door, remained plunged in grief over her mother's sudden departure. She gazed around her; the room was empty and silent; but she could still hear the waning sounds of hurrying footsteps and rustling skirts, and last the slamming of the outer door. Then nothing stirred, and she was alone. All alone, all alone. Over the bed hung her mother's dressing-gown, flung there at random, the skirt bulging out and a sleeve lying across the bolster, so that the garment looked like some person who had fallen down overwhelmed with grief, and sobbing in misery. There was some linen scattered about, and a black neckerchief lay on the floor like a blot of mourning. The chairs were in disorder, the table had been pushed in front of the wardrobe, and amidst it all she was quite alone. She felt her tears choking her as she looked at the dressing-gown which no longer garmented her mother, but was stretched there with the ghastly semblance of death. She clasped her hands, and for the last time wailed, "Mamma! mamma!" The blue velvet hangings, however, deadened the sound. It was all over, and she was alone. Then the time slipped away. The clock struck three. A dismal, dingy light came in through the windows. Dark clouds were sailing over the sky, which made it still gloomier. Through the panes of glass, which were covered with moisture, Paris could only be dimly seen; the watery vapor blurred it; its far-away outskirts seemed hidden by thick smoke. Thus the city even was no longer there to keep the child company, as on bright afternoons, when, on leaning out a little, it seemed to her as though she could touch each district with her hand. What was she to do? Her little arms tightened in despair against her bosom. This desertion seemed to her mournful, passing all bounds, characterized by an injustice and wickedness that enraged her. She had never known anything so hateful; it struck her that everything was going to vanish; nothing of the old life would ever come back again. Then she caught sight of her doll seated near her on a chair, with its back against a cushion, and its legs stretched out, its eyes staring at her as though it were a human being. It was not her mechanical doll, but a large one with a pasteboard head, curly hair, and eyes of enamel, whose fixed look sometimes frightened her. What with two years' constant dressing and undressing, the paint had got rubbed off the chin and cheeks, and the limbs, of pink leather stuffed with sawdust, had become limp and wrinkled like old linen. The doll was just now in its night attire, arrayed only in a bed-gown, with its arms twisted, one in the air and the other hanging downwards. When Jeanne realized that there was still some one with her, she felt for an instant less unhappy. She took the doll in her arms and embraced it ardently, while its head swung back, for its neck was broken. Then she chattered away to it, telling it that it was Jeanne's best-behaved friend, that it had a good heart, for it never went out and left Jeanne alone. It was, said she, her treasure, her kitten, her dear little pet. Trembling with agitation, striving to prevent herself from weeping again, she covered it all over with kisses. This fit of tenderness gave her some revengeful consolation, and the doll fell over her arm like a bundle of rags. She rose and looked out, with her forehead against a window-pane. The rain had ceased falling, and the clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur. It seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a nightmare--the reflex of a world of death. To Jeanne it certainly appeared anything but pretty. She was now idly dreaming of those she had loved since her birth. Her oldest sweetheart, the one of her early days at Marseilles, had been a huge cat, which was very heavy; she would clasp it with her little arms, and carry it from one chair to another without provoking its anger in the least; but it had disappeared, and that was the first misfortune she remembered. She had next had a sparrow, but it died; she had picked it up one morning from the bottom of its cage. That made two. She never reckoned the toys which got broken just to grieve her, all kinds of wrongs which had caused her much suffering because she was so sensitive. One doll in particular, no higher than one's hand, had driven her to despair by getting its head smashed; she had cherished it to a such a degree that she had buried it by stealth in a corner of the yard; and some time afterwards, overcome by a craving to look on it once more, she had disinterred it, and made herself sick with terror whilst gazing on its blackened and repulsive features. However, it was always the others who were the first to fail in their love. They got broken; they disappeared. The separation, at all events, was invariably their fault. Why was it? She herself never changed. When she loved any one, her love lasted all her life. Her mind could not grasp the idea of neglect and desertion; such things seemed to her monstrously wicked, and never occurred to her little heart without giving it a deadly pang. She shivered as a host of vague ideas slowly awoke within her. So people parted one day; each went his own way, never to meet or love each other again. With her eyes fixed on the limitless and dreary expanse of Paris, she sat chilled by all that her childish passion could divine of life's hard blows. Meantime her breath was fast dimming the glass. With her hands she rubbed away the vapor that prevented her from looking out. Several monuments in the distance, wet with the rain, glittered like browny ice. There were lines of houses, regular and distinct, which, with their fronts standing out pale amidst the surrounding roofs, looked like outstretched linen--some tremendous washing spread to dry on fields of ruddy grass. The sky was clearing, and athwart the tail of the cloud which still cloaked the city in gloom the milky rays of the sun were beginning to stream. A brightness seemed to be hesitating over some of the districts; in certain places the sky would soon begin to smile. Jeanne gazed below, over the quay and the slopes of the Trocadero; the street traffic was about to begin afresh after that violent downpour. The cabs again passed by at a jolting crawl, while the omnibuses rattled along the still lonely streets with a louder noise than usual. Umbrellas were being shut up, and wayfarers, who had taken shelter beneath the trees, ventured from one foot pavement to another through muddy streams which were rushing into the gutters. Jeanne noticed with special interest a lady and a little girl, both of them fashionably dressed, who were standing beneath the awning of a toy-shop near the bridge. Doubtless they had been caught in the shower, and had taken refuge there. The child would fain have carried away the whole shop, and had pestered her mother to buy her a hoop. Both were now leaving, however, and the child was running along full of glee, driving the hoop before her. At this Jeanne's melancholy returned with intensified force; her doll became hideous. She longed to have a hoop and to be down yonder and run along, while her mother slowly walked behind her and cautioned her not to go too far. Then, however, everything became dim again. At each minute she had to rub the glass clear. She had been enjoined never to open the window; but she was full of rebellious thoughts; she surely might gaze out of the window, if she were not to be taken for a walk. So she opened it, and leaned out like a grown-up person--in imitation of her mother when she ensconced herself there and lapsed into silence. The air was mild, and moist in its mildness, which seemed to her delightful. A darkness slowly rising over the horizon induced her to lift her head. To her imagination it seemed as if some gigantic bird with outstretched wings were hovering on high. At first she saw nothing; the sky was clear; but at last, at the angle of the roof, a gloomy cloud made its appearance, sailing on and speedily enveloping the whole heaven. Another squall was rising before a roaring west wind. The daylight was quickly dying away, and the city grew dark, amidst a livid shimmer, which imparted to the house-fronts a rusty tinge. Almost immediately afterwards the rain fell. The streets were swept by it; the umbrellas were again opened; and the passers-by, fleeing in every direction, vanished like chaff. One old lady gripped her skirts with both hands, while the torrent beat down on her bonnet as though it were falling from a spout. And the rain travelled on; the cloud kept pace with the water ragefully falling upon Paris; the big drops enfiladed the avenues of the quays, with a gallop like that of a runaway horse, raising a white dust which rolled along the ground at a prodigious speed. They also descended the Champs-Elysees, plunged into the long narrow streets of the Saint-Germain district, and at a bound filled up all the open spaces and deserted squares. In a few seconds, behind this veil which grew thicker and thicker, the city paled and seemed to melt away. It was as though a curtain were being drawn obliquely from heaven to earth. Masses of vapor arose too; and the vast, splashing pit-a-pat was as deafening as any rattle of old iron. Jeanne, giddy with the noise, started back. A leaden wall seemed to have been built up before her. But she was fond of rain; so she returned, leaned out again, and stretched out her arms to feel the big, cold rain-drops splashing on her hands. This gave her some amusement, and she got wet to the sleeves. Her doll must, of course, like herself, have a headache, and she therefore hastened to put it astride the window-rail, with its back against the side wall. She thought, as she saw the drops pelting down upon it, that they were doing it some good. Stiffly erect, its little teeth displayed in a never-fading smile, the doll sat there, with one shoulder streaming with water, while every gust of wind lifted up its night-dress. Its poor body, which had lost some of its sawdust stuffing, seemed to be shivering. What was the reason that had prevented her mother from taking her with her? wondered Jeanne. The rain that beat down on her hands seemed a fresh inducement to be out. It must be very nice, she argued, in the street. Once more there flashed on her mind's eye the little girl driving her hoop along the pavement. Nobody could deny that she had gone out with her mamma. Both of them had even seemed to be exceedingly well pleased. This was sufficient proof that little girls were taken out when it rained. But, then, willingness on her mother's part was requisite. Why had she been unwilling? Then Jeanne again thought of her big cat which had gone away over the houses opposite with its tail in the air, and of the poor little sparrow which she had tempted with food when it was dead, and which had pretended that it did not understand. That kind of thing always happened to her; nobody's love for her was enduring enough. Oh! she would have been ready in a couple of minutes; when she chose she dressed quickly enough; it was only a question of her boots, which Rosalie buttoned, her jacket, her hat, and it was done. Her mother might easily have waited two minutes for her. When she left home to see her friends, she did not turn her things all topsy-turvy as she had done that afternoon; when she went to the Bois de Boulogne, she led her gently by the hand, and stopped with her outside every shop in the Rue de Passy. Jeanne could not get to the bottom of it; her black eyebrows frowned, and her delicate features put on a stern, jealous expression which made her resemble some wicked old maid. She felt in a vague way that her mother had gone to some place where children never go. She had not been taken out because something was to be hidden from her. This thought filled her with unutterable sadness, and her heart throbbed with pain. The rain was becoming finer, and through the curtain which veiled Paris glimpses of buildings were occasionally afforded. The dome of the Invalides, airy and quivering, was the first to reappear through the glittering vibration of the downpour. Next, some of the districts emerged into sight as the torrent slackened; the city seemed to rise from a deluge that had overwhelmed it, its roofs all streaming, and every street filled with a river of water from which vapor still ascended. But suddenly there was a burst of light; a ray of sunshine fell athwart the shower. For a moment it was like a smile breaking through tears. The rain had now ceased to fall over the Champs-Elysees district; but it was sabring the left bank, the Cite, and the far-away suburbs; in the sunshine the drops could be seen flashing down like innumerable slender shafts of steel. On the right a rainbow gleamed forth. As the gush of light streamed across the sky, touches of pink and blue appeared on the horizon, a medley of color, suggestive of a childish attempt at water-color painting. Then there was a sudden blaze--a fall of golden snow, as it were, over a city of crystal. But the light died away, a cloud rolled up, and the smile faded amidst tears; Paris dripped and dripped, with a prolonged sobbing noise, beneath the leaden-hued sky. Jeanne, with her sleeves soaked, was seized with a fit of coughing. But she was unconscious of the chill that was penetrating her; she was now absorbed in the thought that her mother had gone into Paris. She had come at last to know three buildings--the Invalides, the Pantheon, and the Tower of St.-Jacques. She now slowly went over their names, and pointed them out with her finger without attempting to think what they might be like were she nearer to them. Without doubt, however, her mother was down there; and she settled in her mind that she was in the Pantheon, because it astonished her the most, huge as it was, towering up through the air, like the city's head-piece. Then she began to question herself. Paris was still to her the place where children never go; she was never taken there. She would have liked to know it, however, that she might have quietly said to herself: "Mamma is there; she is doing such and such a thing." But it all seemed to her too immense; it was impossible to find any one there. Then her glance travelled towards the other end of the plain. Might her mother not rather be in one of that cluster of houses on the hill to the left? or nearer in, beneath those huge trees, whose bare branches seemed as dead as firewood? Oh! if she could only have lifted up the roofs! What could that gloomy edifice be? What was that street along which something of enormous bulk seemed to be running? And what could that district be at sight of which she always felt frightened, convinced as she was that people fought one another there? She could not see it distinctly, but, to tell the truth, its aspects stirred one; it was very ugly, and must not be looked at by little girls. A host of indefinable ideas and suppositions, which brought her to the verge of weeping, awoke trouble in Jeanne's ignorant, childish mind. From the unknown world of Paris, with its smoke, its endless noises, its powerful, surging life, an odor of wretchedness, filth, and crime seemed to be wafted to her through the mild, humid atmosphere, and she was forced to avert her head, as though she had been leaning over one of those pestilential pits which breathe forth suffocation from their unseen horrors. The Invalides, the Pantheon, the Tower of Saint-Jacques--these she named and counted; but she knew nothing of anything else, and she sat there, terrified and ashamed, with the all-absorbing thought that her mother was among those wicked places, at some spot which she was unable to identify in the depths yonder. Suddenly Jeanne turned round. She could have sworn that somebody had walked into the bedroom, that a light hand had even touched her shoulder. But the room was empty, still in the same disorder as when Helene had left. The dressing-gown, flung across the pillow, still lay in the same mournful, weeping attitude. Then Jeanne, with pallid cheeks, cast a glance around, and her heart nearly burst within her. She was alone! she was alone! And, O Heaven, her mother, in forsaking her, had pushed her with such force that she might have fallen to the floor. The thought came back to her with anguish; she again seemed to feel the pain of that outrage on her wrists and shoulders. Why had she been struck? She had been good, and had nothing to reproach herself with. She was usually spoken to with such gentleness that the punishment she had received awoke feelings of indignation within her. She was thrilled by a sensation of childish fear, as in the old times when she was threatened with the approach of the wolf, and looked for it and saw it not: it was lingering in some shady corner, with many other things that were going to overwhelm her. However, she was full of suspicion; her face paled and swelled with jealous fury. Of a sudden, the thought that her mother must love those whom she had gone to see far more than she loved her came upon her with such crushing force that her little hands clutched her bosom. She knew it now; yes, her mother was false to her. Over Paris a great sorrow seemed to be brooding, pending the arrival of a fresh squall. A murmur travelled through the darkened air, and heavy clouds were hovering overhead. Jeanne, still at the window, was convulsed by another fit of coughing; but in the chill she experienced she felt herself revenged; she would willingly have had her illness return. With her hands pressed against her bosom, she grew conscious of some pain growing more intense within her. It was an agony to which her body abandoned itself. She trembled with fear, and did not again venture to turn round; she felt quite cold at the idea of glancing into the room any more. To be little means to be without strength. What could this new complaint be which filled her with mingled shame and bitter pleasure? With stiffened body, she sat there as if waiting --every one of her pure and innocent limbs in an agony of revulsion. From the innermost recesses of her being all her woman's feelings were aroused, and there darted through her a pang, as though she had received a blow from a distance. Then with failing heart she cried out chokingly: "Mamma! mamma!" No one could have known whether she called to her mother for aid, or whether she accused her of having inflicted on her the pain which seemed to be killing her. At that moment the tempest burst. Through the deep and ominous stillness the wind howled over the city, which was shrouded in darkness; and afterwards there came a long-continued crashing --window-shutters beating to and fro, slates flying, chimney-tops and gutter-pipes rattling on to the pavements. For a few seconds a calm ensued; then there blew another gust, which swept along with such mighty strength that the ocean of roofs seemed convulsed, tossing about in waves, and then disappearing in a whirlpool. For a moment chaos reigned. Some enormous clouds, like huge blots of ink, swept through a host of smaller ones, which were scattered and floated like shreds of rag which the wind tore to pieces and carried off thread by thread. A second later two clouds rushed upon one another, and rent one another with crashing reports, which seemed to sprinkle the coppery expanse with wreckage; and every time the hurricane thus veered, blowing from every point of the compass, the thunder of opposing navies resounded in the atmosphere, and an awful rending and sinking followed, the hanging fragments of the clouds, jagged like huge bits of broken walls, threatening Paris with imminent destruction. The rain was not yet falling. But suddenly a cloud burst above the central quarters, and a water-spout ascended the Seine. The river's green ribbon, riddled and stirred to its depths by the splashing drops, became transformed into a stream of mud; and one by one, behind the downpour, the bridges appeared to view again, slender and delicately outlined in the mist; while, right and left, the trees edging the grey pavements of the deserted quays were shaken furiously by the wind. Away in the background, over Notre-Dame, the cloud divided and poured down such a torrent of water that the island of La Cite seemed submerged. Far above the drenched houses the cathedral towers alone rose up against a patch of clear sky, like floating waifs. On every side the water now rushed down from the heavens. Three times in succession did the right bank appear to be engulfed. The first fall inundated the distant suburbs, gradually extending its area, and beating on the turrets of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and Saint-Jacques, which glistened in the rain. Then two other downpours, following in hot haste one upon the other, streamed over Montmartre and the Champs-Elysees. At times a glimpse could be obtained of the glass roof of the Palace of Industry, steaming, as it were, under the splashing water; of Saint-Augustin, whose cupola swam in a kind of fog like a clouded moon; of the Madeleine, which spread out its flat roof, looking like some ancient court whose flagstones had been freshly scoured; while, in the rear, the huge mass of the Opera House made one think of a dismasted vessel, which with its hull caught between two rocks, was resisting the assaults of the tempest. On the left bank of the Seine, also hidden by a watery veil, you perceived the dome of the Invalides, the spires of Sainte-Clotilde, and the towers of Saint-Sulpice, apparently melting away in the moist atmosphere. Another cloud spread out, and from the colonnade of the Pantheon sheets of water streamed down, threatening to inundate what lay below. And from that moment the rain fell upon the city in all directions; one might have imagined that the heavens were precipitating themselves on the earth; streets vanished, sank into the depths, and men reappeared, drifting on the surface, amidst shocks whose violence seemed to foretell the end of the city. A prolonged roar ascended--the roar of all the water rushing along the gutters and falling into the drains. And at last, above muddy-looking Paris, which had assumed with the showers a dingy-yellow hue, the livid clouds spread themselves out in uniform fashion, without stain or rift. The rain was becoming finer, and was falling sharply and vertically; but whenever the wind again rose, the grey hatching was curved into mighty waves, and the raindrops, driven almost horizontally, could be heard lashing the walls with a hissing sound, till, with the fall of the wind, they again fell vertically, peppering the soil with a quiet obstinacy, from the heights of Passy away to the level plain of Charenton. Then the vast city, as though overwhelmed and lifeless after some awful convulsion, seemed but an expanse of stony ruins under the invisible heavens. Jeanne, who had sunk down by the window, had wailed out once more, "Mamma! mamma!" A terrible weariness deprived her limbs of their strength as she lingered there, face to face with the engulfing of Paris. Amidst her exhaustion, whilst the breeze played with her tresses, and her face remained wet with rain, she preserved some taste of the bitter pleasure which had made her shiver, while within her heart there was a consciousness of some irretrievable woe. Everything seemed to her to have come to an end; she realized that she was getting very old. The hours might pass away, but now she did not even cast a glance into the room. It was all the same to her to be forgotten and alone. Such despair possessed the child's heart that all around her seemed black. If she were scolded, as of old, when she was ill, it would surely be very wrong. She was burning with fever; something like a sick headache was weighing on her. Surely too, but a moment ago, something had snapped within her. She could not prevent it; she must inevitably submit to whatever might be her fate. Besides, weariness was prostrating her. She had joined her hands over the window-bar, on which she rested her head, and, though at times she opened her eyes to gaze at the rain, drowsiness was stealing over her. And still and ever the rain kept beating down; the livid sky seemed dissolving in water. A final blast of wind had passed by; a monotonous roar could be heard. Amidst a solemn quiescence the sovereign rain poured unceasingly upon the silent, deserted city it had conquered; and behind this sheet of streaked crystal Paris showed like some phantom place, with quivering outlines, which seemed to be melting away. To Jeanne the scene now brought nothing beyond sleepiness and horrid dreams, as though all the mystery and unknown evil were rising up in vapor to pierce her through and make her cough. Every time she opened her eyes she was seized with a fit of coughing, and would remain for a few seconds looking at the scene; which as her head fell back once more, clung to her mind, and seemed to spread over her and crush her. The rain was still falling. What hour might it be now? Jeanne could not have told. Perhaps the clock had ceased going. It seemed to her too great a fatigue to turn round. It was surely at least a week since her mother had quitted her. She had abandoned all expectation of her return; she was resigned to the prospect of never seeing her again. Then she became oblivious of everything--the wrongs which had been done her, the pain which she had just experienced, even the loneliness in which she was suffered to remain. A weight, chilly like stone, fell upon her. This only was certain: she was very unhappy--ah! as unhappy as the poor little waifs to whom she gave alms as they huddled together in gateways. Ah! Heaven! how coughing racked one, and how penetrating was the cold when there was no nobody to love one! She closed her heavy eyelids, succumbing to a feverish stupor; and the last of her thoughts was a vague memory of childhood, of a visit to a mill, full of yellow wheat, and of tiny grains slipping under millstones as huge as houses. Hours and hours passed away; each minute was a century. The rain beat down without ceasing, with ever the same tranquil flow, as though all time and eternity were allowed it to deluge the plain. Jeanne had fallen asleep. Close by, her doll still sat astride the iron window-bar; and, with its legs in the room and its head outside, its nightdress clinging to its rosy skin, its eyes glaring, and its hair streaming with water, it looked not unlike a drowned child; and so emaciated did it appear in its comical yet distressing posture of death, that it almost brought tears of pity to the eyes. Jeanne coughed in her sleep; but now she never once opened her eyes. Her head swayed to and fro on her crossed arms, and the cough spent itself in a wheeze without awakening her. Nothing more existed for her. She slept in the darkness. She did not even withdraw her hand, from whose cold, red fingers bright raindrops were trickling one by one into the vast expanse which lay beneath the window. This went on for hours and hours. Paris was slowly waning on the horizon, like some phantom city; heaven and earth mingled together in an indistinguishable jumble; and still and ever with unflagging persistency did the grey rain fall. CHAPTER XXI. Night had long gathered in when Helene returned. From her umbrella the water dripped on step after step, whilst clinging to the balusters she ascended the staircase. She stood for a few seconds outside her door to regain her breath; the deafening rush of the rain still sounded in her ears; she still seemed to feel the jostling of hurrying foot-passengers, and to see the reflections from the street-lamps dancing in the puddles. She was walking in a dream, filled with the surprise of the kisses that had been showered upon her; and as she fumbled for her key she believed that her bosom felt neither remorse nor joy. Circumstances had compassed it all; she could have done naught to prevent it. But the key was not to be found; it was doubtless inside, in the pocket of her other gown. At this discovery her vexation was intense; it seemed as though she were denied admission to her own home. It became necessary that she should ring the bell. "Oh! it's madame!" exclaimed Rosalie as she opened the door. "I was beginning to feel uneasy." She took the umbrella, intending to place it in the kitchen sink, and then rattled on: "Good gracious! what torrents! Zephyrin, who has just come, was drenched to the skin. I took the liberty, madame, of keeping him to dinner. He has leave till ten o'clock." Helene followed her mechanically. She felt a desire to look once more on everything in her home before removing her bonnet. "You have done quite right, my girl," she answered. For a moment she lingered on the kitchen threshold, gazing at the bright fire. Then she instinctively opened the door of a cupboard, and promptly shut it again. Everything was in its place, chairs and tables alike; she found them all again, and their presence gave her pleasure. Zephyrin had, in the meantime, struggled respectfully to his feet. She nodded to him, smiling. "I didn't know whether to put the roast on," began the maid. "Why, what time is it?" asked Helene. "Oh, it's close on seven o'clock, madame." "What! seven o'clock!" Astonishment riveted her to the floor; she had lost all consciousness of time, and seemed to awaken from a dream. "And where's Jeanne?" she asked. "Oh! she has been very good, madame. I even think she must have fallen asleep, for I haven't heard her for some time." "Haven't you given her a light?" Embarrassment closed Rosalie's lips; she was unwilling to relate that Zephyrin had brought her some pictures which had engrossed her attention. Mademoiselle had never made the least stir, so she could scarcely have wanted anything. Helene, however, paid no further heed to her, but ran into the room, where a dreadful chill fell upon her. "Jeanne! Jeanne!" she called. No answer broke the stillness. She stumbled against an arm-chair. From the dining-room, the door of which she had left ajar, some light streamed across a corner of the carpet. She felt a shiver come over her, and she could have declared that the rain was falling in the room, with its moist breath and continuous streaming. Then, on turning her head, she at once saw the pale square formed by the open window and the gloomy grey of the sky. "Who can have opened this window?" she cried. "Jeanne! Jeanne!" Still no answering word. A mortal terror fell on Helene's heart. She must look out of this window; but as she felt her way towards it, her hands lighted on a head of hair--it was Jeanne's. And then, as Rosalie entered with a lamp, the child appeared with blanched face, sleeping with her cheek upon her crossed arms, while the big raindrops from the roof splashed upon her. Her breathing was scarcely perceptible, so overcome she was with despair and fatigue. Among the lashes of her large, bluey eyelids there were still two heavy tears. "The unhappy child!" stammered Helene. "Oh, heavens! she's icy cold! To fall asleep there, at such a time, when she had been expressly forbidden to touch the window! Jeanne, Jeanne, speak to me; wake up, Jeanne!" Rosalie had prudently vanished. The child, on being raised in her mother's embrace, let her head drop as though she were unable to shake off the leaden slumber that had seized upon her. At last, however, she raised her eyelids; but the glare of the lamp dazzled her, and she remained benumbed and stupid. "Jeanne, it's I! What's wrong with you? See, I've just come back," said Helene. But the child seemingly failed to understand her; in her stupefaction she could only murmur: "Oh! Ah!" She gazed inquiringly at her mother, as though she failed to recognize her. And suddenly she shivered, growing conscious of the cold air of the room. Her memory was awakening, and the tears rolled from her eyelids to her cheeks. Then she commenced to struggle, in the evident desire to be left alone. "It's you, it's you! Oh, leave me; you hold me too tight! I was so comfortable." She slipped from her mother's arms with affright in her face. Her uneasy looks wandered from Helene's hands to her shoulders; one of those hands was ungloved, and she started back from the touch of the moist palm and warm fingers with a fierce resentment, as though fleeing from some stranger's caress. The old perfume of vervain had died away; Helene's fingers had surely become greatly attenuated, and her hand was unusually soft. This skin was no longer hers, and its touch exasperated Jeanne. "Come, I'm not angry with you," pleaded Helene. "But, indeed, have you behaved well? Come and kiss me." Jeanne, however, still recoiled from her. She had no remembrance of having seen her mother dressed in that gown or cloak. Besides, she looked so wet and muddy. Where had she come from dressed in that dowdy style. "Kiss me, Jeanne," repeated Helene. But her voice also seemed strange; in Jeanne's ears it sounded louder. Her old heartache came upon her once more, as when an injury had been done her; and unnerved by the presence of what was unknown and horrible to her, divining, however, that she was breathing an atmosphere of falsehood, she burst into sobs. "No, no, I entreat you! You left me all alone; and oh! I've been so miserable!" "But I'm back again, my darling. Don't weep any more; I've come home!" "Oh no, no! it's all over now! I don't wish for you any more! Oh, I waited and waited, and have been so wretched!" Helene took hold of the child again, and gently sought to draw her to her bosom; but she resisted stubbornly, plaintively exclaiming: "No, no; it will never be the same! You are not the same!" "What! What are you talking of, child?" "I don't know; you are not the same." "Do you mean to say that I don't love you any more?" "I don't know; you are no longer the same! Don't say no. You don't feel the same! It's all over, over, over. I wish to die!" With blanching face Helene again clasped her in her arms. Did her looks, then, reveal her secret? She kissed her, but a shudder ran through the child's frame, and an expression of such misery crept into her face that Helene forbore to print a second kiss upon her brow. She still kept hold of her, but neither of them uttered a word. Jeanne's sobbing fell to a whisper, a nervous revolt stiffening her limbs the while. Helene's first thought was that much notice ought not to be paid to a child's whims; but to her heart there stole a feeling of secret shame, and the weight of her daughter's body on her shoulder brought a blush to her cheeks. She hastened to put Jeanne down, and each felt relieved. "Now, be good, and wipe your eyes," said Helene. "We'll make everything all right." The child acquiesced in all gentleness, but seemed somewhat afraid and glanced covertly at her mother. All at once her frame was shaken by a fit of coughing. "Good heavens! why, you've made yourself ill now! I cannot stay away from you a moment. Did you feel cold? "Yes, mamma; in the back." "See here; put on this shawl. The dining-room stove is lighted, and you'll soon feel warm. Are you hungry?" Jeanne hesitated. It was on the tip of her tongue to speak the truth and say no; but she darted a side glance at her mother, and, recoiling, answered in a whisper: "Yes, mamma." "Ah, well, it will be all right," exclaimed Helene, desirous of tranquillizing herself. "Only, I entreat you, you naughty child, don't frighten me like this again." On Rosalie re-entering the room to announce that dinner was ready, Helene severely scolded her. The little maid's head drooped; she stammered out that it was all very true, for she ought to have looked better after mademoiselle. Then, hoping to mollify her mistress, she busied herself in helping her to change her clothes. "Good gracious! madame was in a fine state!" she remarked, as she assisted in removing each mud-stained garment, at which Jeanne glared suspiciously, still racked by torturing thoughts. "Madame ought to feel comfortable now," exclaimed Rosalie when it was all over. "It's awfully nice to get into dry clothes after a drenching." Helene, on finding herself once more in her blue dressing-gown, gave vent to a slight sigh, as though a new happiness had welled up within her. She again regained her old cheerfulness; she had rid herself of a burden in throwing off those bedraggled garments. She washed her face and hands; and while she stood there, still glistening with moisture, her dressing-gown buttoned up to her chin, she was slowly approached by Jeanne, who took one of her hands and kissed it. At table, however, not a word passed between mother and daughter. The fire flared with a merry roar, and there was a look of happiness about the little dining-room, with its bright mahogany and gleaming china. But the old stupor which drove away all thought seemed to have again fallen on Helene; she ate mechanically, though with an appearance of appetite. Jeanne sat facing her, and quietly watched her over her glass, noting each of her movements. But all at once the child again coughed, and her mother, who had become unconscious of her presence, immediately displayed lively concern. "Why, you're coughing again! Aren't you getting warm?" "Oh, yes, mamma; I'm very warm." Helene leaned towards her to feel her hand and ascertain whether she was speaking the truth. Only then did she perceive that her plate was still full. "Why, you said you were hungry. Don't you like what you have there?" "Oh, yes, mamma; I'm eating away." With an effort Jeanne swallowed a mouthful. Helene looked at her for a time, but soon again began dreaming of the fatal room which she had come from. It did not escape the child that her mother took little interest in her now. As the dinner came to an end, her poor wearied frame sank down on the chair, and she sat there like some bent, aged woman, with the dim eyes of one of those old maids for whom love is past and gone. "Won't mademoiselle have any jam?" asked Rosalie. "If not, can I remove the cloth?" Helene still sat there with far-away looks. "Mamma, I'm sleepy," exclaimed Jeanne in a changed voice. "Will you let me go to bed? I shall feel better in bed." Once more her mother seemed to awake with a start to consciousness of her surroundings. "You are suffering, my darling! where do you feel the pain? Tell me." "No, no; I told you I'm all right! I'm sleepy, and it's already time for me to go to bed." She left her chair and stood up, as though to prove that there was no illness threatening her: but her benumbed feet tottered over the floor on her way to the bedroom. She leaned against the furniture, and her hardihood was such that not a tear came from her, despite the feverish fire darting through her frame. Her mother followed to assist her to bed; but the child had displayed such haste in undressing herself that she only arrived in time to tie up her hair for the night. Without need of any helping hand Jeanne slipped between the sheets, and quickly closed her eyes. "Are you comfortable?" asked Helene, as she drew up the bedclothes and carefully tucked her in. "Yes, quite comfortable. Leave me alone, and don't disturb me. Take away the lamp." Her only yearning was to be alone in the darkness, that she might reopen her eyes and chew the cud of her sorrows, with no one near to watch her. When the light had been carried away, her eyes opened quite wide. Nearby, in the meantime, Helene was pacing up and down her room. She was seized with a wondrous longing to be up and moving about; the idea of going to bed seemed to her insufferable. She glanced at the clock --twenty minutes to nine; what was she to do? she rummaged about in a drawer, but forgot what she was seeking for. Then she wandered to her bookshelves, glancing aimlessly over the books; but the very reading of the titles wearied her. A buzzing sprang up in her ears with the room's stillness; the loneliness, the heavy atmosphere, were as an agony to her. She would fain have had some bustle going on around her, have had some one there to speak to--something, in short, to draw her from herself. She twice listened at the door of Jeanne's little room, from which, however, not even a sound of breathing came. Everything was quiet; so she turned back once more, and amused herself by taking up and replacing whatever came to her hand. Then suddenly the thought flashed across her mind that Zephyrin must still be with Rosalie. It was a relief to her; she was delighted at the idea of not being alone, and stepped in her slippers towards the kitchen. She was already in the ante-room, and was opening the glass door of the inner passage, when she detected the re-echoing clap of a swinging box on the ears, and the next moment Rosalie could be heard exclaiming: "Ha, ha! you think you'll nip me again, do you? Take your paws off!" "Oh! that's nothing, my charmer!" exclaimed Zephyrin in his husky, guttural voice. "That's to show how I love you--in this style, you know--" But at that moment the door creaked, and Helene, entering, discovered the diminutive soldier and the servant maid seated very quietly at table, with their noses bent over their plates. They had assumed an air of complete indifference; their innocence was certain. Yet their faces were red with blushes, and their eyes aflame, and they wriggled restlessly on their straw-bottomed chairs. Rosalie started up and hurried forward. "Madame wants something?" Helene had no pretext ready to her tongue. She had come to see them, to chat with them, and have their company. However, she felt a sudden shame, and dared not say that she required nothing. "Have you any hot water?" she asked, after a silence. "No, madame; and my fire is nearly out. Oh, but it doesn't matter; I'll give you some in five minutes. It boils in no time." She threw on some charcoal, and then set the kettle in place; but seeing that her mistress still lingered in the doorway, she said: "I'll bring the water to you in five minutes, madame." Helene responded with a wave of the hand. "I'm not in a hurry for it; I'll wait. Don't disturb yourself, my girl; eat away, eat away. There's a lad who'll have to go back to barracks." Rosalie thereupon sat down again. Zephyrin, who had also been standing, made a military salute, and returned to the cutting of his meat, with his elbows projecting as though to show that he knew how to conduct himself at table. Thus eating together, after madame had finished dinner, they did not even draw the table into the middle of the kitchen, but contented themselves with sitting side by side, with their noses turned towards the wall. A glorious prospect of stewpans was before them. A bunch of laurel and thyme hung near, and a spice-box exhaled a piquant perfume. Around them--the kitchen was not yet tidied--was all the litter of the things cleared away from the dining-room; however, the spot seemed a charming one to these hungry sweethearts, and especially to Zephyrin, who here feasted on such things as were never seen within the walls of his barracks. The predominant odor was one of roast meat, seasoned with a dash of vinegar--the vinegar of the salad. In the copper pans and iron pots the reflected light from the gas was dancing; and as the heat of the fire was beyond endurance, they had set the window ajar, and a cool breeze blew in from the garden, stirring the blue cotton curtain. "Must you be in by ten o'clock exactly?" asked Helene. "I must, madame, with all deference to you," answered Zephyrin. "Well, it's along way off. Do you take the ''bus'?" "Oh, yes, madame, sometimes. But you see a good swinging walk is much the best." She had taken a step into the kitchen, and leaning against the dresser, her arms dangling and her hands clasped over her dressing-gown, she began gossiping away about the wretched weather they had had that day, about the food which was rationed out in barracks, and the high price of eggs. As soon, however, as she had asked a question and their answer had been given the conversation abruptly fell. They experienced some discomfort with her standing thus behind their backs. They did not turn round, but spoke into their plates, their shoulders bent beneath her gaze, while, to conform to propriety, each mouthful they swallowed was as small as possible. On the other hand, Helene had now regained her tranquillity, and felt quite happy there. "Don't fret, madame," said Rosalie; "the kettle is singing already. I wish the fire would only burn up a little better!" She wanted to see to it, but Helene would not allow her to disturb herself. It would be all right by-and-by. An intense weariness now pervaded the young woman's limbs. Almost mechanically she crossed the kitchen and approached the window, where she observed the third chair, which was very high, and when turned over became a stepladder. However, she did not sit down on it at once, for she had caught sight of a number of pictures heaped up on a corner of the table. "Dear me!" she exclaimed, as she took them in her hand, inspired with the wish of gratifying Zephyrin. The little soldier gaped with a silent chuckle. His face beamed with smiles, and his eyes followed each picture, his head wagging whenever something especially lovely was being examined by madame. "That one there," he suddenly remarked, "I found in the Rue du Temple. She's a beautiful woman, with flowers in her basket." Helene sat down and inspected the beautiful woman who decorated the gilt and varnished lid of a box of lozenges, every stain on which had been carefully wiped off by Zephyrin. On the chair a dish-cloth was hanging, and she could not well lean back. She flung it aside, however, and once more lapsed into her dreaming. Then the two sweethearts remarked madame's good nature, and their restraint vanished--in the end, indeed, her very presence was forgotten by them. One by one the pictures had dropped from her hands on to her knees, and, with a vague smile playing on her face, she examined the sweethearts and listened to their talk. "I say, my dear," whispered the girl, "won't you have some more mutton?" He answered neither yes nor no, but swung backwards and forwards on his chair as though he had been tickled, then contentedly stretched himself, while she placed a thick slice on his plate. His red epaulets moved up and down, and his bullet-shaped head, with its huge projecting ears, swayed to and fro over his yellow collar as though it were the head of some Chinese idol. His laughter ran all over him, and he was almost bursting inside his tunic, which he did not unbutton, however, out of respect for madame. "This is far better than old Rouvet's radishes!" he exclaimed at last, with his mouth full. This was a reminiscence of their country home; and at thought of it they both burst into immoderate laughter. Rosalie even had to hold on to the table to prevent herself from falling. One day, before their first communion, it seemed, Zephyrin had filched three black radishes from old Rouvet. They were very tough radishes indeed--tough enough to break one's teeth; but Rosalie all the same had crunched her share of the spoil at the back of the schoolhouse. Hence it was that every time they chanced to be taking a meal together Zephyrin never omitted to ejaculate: "Yes; this is better than old Rouvet's radishes!" And then Rosalie's laughter would become so violent that nine times out of ten her petticoat-string would give way with an audible crack. "Hello! has it parted?" asked the little soldier, with triumph in his tone. But Rosalie responded with a good slap. "It's disgusting to make me break the string like this!" said she. "I put a fresh one on every week." However, he came nearer to her, intent on some joke or other, by way of revenging the blow; but with a furious glance she reminded him that her mistress was looking on. This seemed to trouble him but little, for he replied with a rakish wink, as much as to say that no woman, not even a lady, disliked a little fun. To be sure, when folks are sweethearting, other people always like to be looking on. "You have still five years to serve, haven't you?" asked Helene, leaning back on the high wooden-seated chair, and yielding to a feeling of tenderness. "Yes, madame; perhaps only four if they don't need me any longer." It occurred to Rosalie that her mistress was thinking of her marriage, and with assumed anger, she broke in: "Oh! madame, he can stick in the army for another ten years if he likes! I sha'n't trouble myself to ask the Government for him. He is becoming too much of a rake; yes, I believe he's going to the dogs. Oh! it's useless for you to laugh--that won't take with me. When we go before the mayor to get married, we'll see on whose side the laugh is!" At this he chuckled all the more, in order that he might show himself a lady-killer before madame, and the maid's annoyance then became real. "Oh!" said she, "we know all about that! You know, madame, he's still a booby at heart. You've no idea how stupid that uniform makes them all! That's the way he goes on with his comrades; but if I turned him out, you would hear him sobbing on the stairs. Oh, I don't care a fig for you, my lad! Why, whenever I please, won't you always be there to do as I tell you?" She bent forward to observe him closely; but, on seeing that his good-natured, freckled face was beginning to cloud over, she was suddenly moved, and prattled on, without any seeming transition: "Ah! I didn't tell you that I've received a letter from auntie. The Guignard lot want to sell their house--aye, and almost for nothing too. We might perhaps be able to take it later on." "By Jove!" exclaimed Zephyrin, brightening, "we should be quite at home there. There's room enough for two cows." With this idea they lapsed into silence. They were now having some dessert. The little soldier licked the jam on his bread with a child's greedy satisfaction, while the servant girl carefully pared an apple with a maternal air. "Madame!" all at once exclaimed Rosalie, "there's the water boiling now." Helene, however, never stirred. She felt herself enveloped by an atmosphere of happiness. She gave a continuance to their dreams, and pictured them living in the country in the Guignards' house and possessed of two cows. A smile came to her face as she saw Zephyrin sitting there to all appearance so serious, though in reality he was patting Rosalie's knee under the table, whilst she remained very stiff, affecting an innocent demeanor. Then everything became blurred. Helene lost all definite sense of her surroundings, of the place where she was, and of what had brought her there. The copper pans were flashing on the walls; feelings of tenderness riveted her to the spot; her eyes had a far-away look. She was not affected in any way by the disorderly state of the kitchen; she had no consciousness of having demeaned herself by coming there; all she felt was a deep pleasure, as when a longing has been satisfied. Meantime the heat from the fire was bedewing her pale brow with beads of perspiration, and behind her the wind, coming in through the half-open window, quivered delightfully on her neck. "Madame, your water is boiling," again said Rosalie. "There will be soon none left in the kettle." She held the kettle before her, and Helene, for the moment astonished, was forced to rise. "Oh, yes! thank you!" She no longer had an excuse to remain, and went away slowly and regretfully. When she reached her room she was at a loss what to do with the kettle. Then suddenly within her there came a burst of passionate love. The torpor which had held her in a state of semi-unconsciousness gave way to a wave of glowing feeling, the rush of which thrilled her as with fire. She quivered, and memories returned to her--memories of her passion and of Henri. While she was taking off her dressing-gown and gazing at her bare arms, a noise broke on her anxious ear. She thought she had heard Jeanne coughing. Taking up the lamp she went into the closet, but found the child with eyelids closed, seemingly fast asleep. However, the moment the mother, satisfied with her examination, had turned her back, Jeanne's eyes again opened widely to watch her as she returned to her room. There was indeed no sleep for Jeanne, nor had she any desire to sleep. A second fit of coughing racked her bosom, but she buried her head beneath the coverlet and stifled every sound. She might go away for ever now; her mother would never miss her. Her eyes were still wide open in the darkness; she knew everything as though knowledge had come with thought, and she was dying of it all, but dying without a murmur. CHAPTER XXII. Next day all sorts of practical ideas took possession of Helene's mind. She awoke impressed by the necessity of keeping watch over her happiness, and shuddering with fear lest by some imprudent step she might lose Henri. At this chilly morning hour, when the room still seemed asleep, she felt that she idolized him, loved him with a transport which pervaded her whole being. Never had she experienced such an anxiety to be diplomatic. Her first thought was that she must go to see Juliette that very morning, and thus obviate the need of any tedious explanations or inquiries which might result in ruining everything. On calling upon Madame Deberle at about nine o'clock she found her already up, with pallid cheeks and red eyes like the heroine of a tragedy. As soon as the poor woman caught sight of her, she threw herself sobbing upon her neck exclaiming that she was her good angel. She didn't love Malignon, not in the least, she swore it! Gracious heavens! what a foolish affair! It would have killed her--there was no doubt of that! She did not now feel herself to be in the least degree qualified for ruses, lies, and agonies, and the tyranny of a sentiment that never varied. Oh, how delightful did it seem to her to find herself free again! She laughed contentedly; but immediately afterwards there was another outburst of tears as she besought her friend not to despise her. Beneath her feverish unrest a fear lingered; she imagined that her husband knew everything. He had come home the night before trembling with agitation. She overwhelmed Helene with questions; and Helene, with a hardihood and facility at which she herself was amazed, poured into her ears a story, every detail of which she invented offhand. She vowed to Juliette that her husband doubted her in nothing. It was she, Helene, who had become acquainted with everything, and, wishing to save her, had devised that plan of breaking in upon their meeting. Juliette listened to her, put instant credit in the fiction, and, beaming through her tears, grew sunny with joy. She threw herself once more on Helene's neck. Her caresses brought no embarrassment to the latter; she now experienced none of the honorable scruples that had at one time affected her. When she left her lover's wife after extracting a promise from her that she would try to be calm, she laughed in her sleeve at her own cunning; she was in a transport of delight. Some days slipped away. Helene's whole existence had undergone a change; and in the thoughts of every hour she no longer lived in her own home, but with Henri. The only thing that existed for her was that next-door house in which her heart beat. Whenever she could find an excuse to do so she ran thither, and forgot everything in the content of breathing the same air as her lover. In her first rapture the sight of Juliette even flooded her with tenderness; for was not Juliette one of Henri's belongings? He had not, however, again been able to meet her alone. She appeared loth to give him a second assignation. One evening, when he was leading her into the hall, she even made him swear that he would never again visit the house in the Passage des Eaux, as such an act might compromise her. Meantime, Jeanne was shaken by a short, dry cough, that never ceased, but became severer towards evening every day. She would then be slightly feverish, and she grew weak with the perspiration that bathed her in her sleep. When her mother cross-questioned her, she answered that she wasn't ill, that she felt no pain. Doubtless her cold was coming to an end. Helene, tranquillized by the explanation, and having no adequate idea of what was going on around her, retained, however, in her bosom, amidst the rapture that made up her life, a vague feeling of sorrow, of some weight that made her heart bleed despite herself. At times, when she was plunged in one of those causeless transports which made her melt with tenderness, an anxious thought would come to her--she imagined that some misfortune was hovering behind her. She turned round, however, and then smiled. People are ever in a tremble when they are too happy. There was nothing there. Jeanne had coughed a moment before, but she had some _tisane_ to drink; there would be no ill effects. However, one afternoon old Doctor Bodin, who visited them in the character of a family friend, prolonged his stay, and stealthily, but carefully, examined Jeanne with his little blue eyes. He questioned her as though he were having some fun with her, and on this occasion uttered no warning word. Two days later, however, he made his appearance again; and this time, not troubling to examine Jeanne, he talked away merrily in the fashion of a man who has seen many years and many things, and turned the conversation on travelling. He had once served as a military surgeon; he knew every corner of Italy. It was a magnificent country, said he, which to be admired ought to be seen in spring. Why didn't Madame Grandjean take her daughter there? From this he proceeded by easy transitions to advising a trip to the land of the sun, as he styled it. Helene's eyes were bent on him fixedly. "No, no," he exclaimed, "neither of you is ill! Oh, no, certainly not! Still, a change of air would mean new strength!" Her face had blanched, a mortal chill had come over her at the thought of leaving Paris. Gracious heavens! to go away so far, so far! to lose Henri in a moment, their love to droop without a morrow! Such was the agony which the thought gave her that she bent her head towards Jeanne to hide her emotion. Did Jeanne wish to go away? The child, with a chilly gesture, had intertwined her little fingers. Oh! yes, she would so like to go! She would so like to go away into the sunny land, quite alone, she and her mother, quite alone! And over her poor attenuated face with its cheeks burning with fever, there swept the bright hope of a new life. But Helene would listen to no more; indignation and distrust led her to imagine that all of them--the Abbe, Doctor Bodin, Jeanne herself--were plotting to separate her from Henri. When the old doctor noticed the pallor of her cheeks, he imagined that he had not spoken so cautiously as he might have done, and hastened to declare that there was no hurry, albeit he silently resolved to return to the subject at another time. It happened that Madame Deberle intended to stop at home that day. As soon as the doctor had gone Helene hastened to put on her bonnet. Jeanne, however, refused to quit the house; she felt better beside the fire; she would be very good, and would not open the window. For some time past she had not teased her mother to be allowed to go with her; still she gazed after her as she went out with a longing look. Then, when she found herself alone, she shrunk into her chair and sat for hours motionless. "Mamma, is Italy far away?" she asked as Helene glided towards her to kiss her. "Oh! very far away, my pet!" Jeanne clung round her neck, and not letting her rise again at the moment, whispered: "Well, Rosalie could take care of everything here. We should have no need of her. A small travelling-trunk would do for us, you know! Oh! it would be delightful, mother dear! Nobody but us two! I should come back quite plump--like this!" She puffed out her cheeks and pictured how stout her arms would be. Helene's answer was that she would see; and then she ran off with a final injunction to Rosalie to take good care of mademoiselle. The child coiled herself up in the chimney-corner, gazing at the ruddy fire and deep in reverie. From time to time she moved her hands forward mechanically to warm them. The glinting of the flames dazzled her large eyes. So absorbed was she in her dreaming that she did not hear Monsieur Rambaud enter the room. His visits had now become very frequent; he came, he would say, in the interests of the poor paralytic woman for whom Doctor Deberle had not yet been able to secure admission into the Hospital for Incurables. Finding Jeanne alone, he took a seat on the other side of the fireplace, and chatted with her as though she were a grown-up person. It was most regrettable; the poor woman had been waiting a week; however, he would go down presently to see the doctor, who might perhaps give him an answer. Meanwhile he did not stir. "Why hasn't your mother taken you with her?" he asked. Jeanne shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of weariness. It disturbed her to go about visiting other people. Nothing gave her any pleasure now. "I am getting old," she added, "and I can't be always amusing myself. Mamma finds entertainment out of doors, and I within; so we are not together." Silence ensued. The child shivered, and held her hands out towards the fire which burnt steadily with a pinky glare; and, indeed, muffled as she was in a huge shawl, with a silk handkerchief round her neck and another encircling her head, she did look like some old dame. Shrouded in all these wraps, it struck one that she was no larger than an ailing bird, panting amidst its ruffled plumage. Monsieur Rambaud, with hands clasped over his knees, was gazing at the fire. Then, turning towards Jeanne, he inquired if her mother had gone out the evening before. She answered with a nod, yes. And did she go out the evening before that and the previous day? The answer was always yes, given with a nod of the head; her mother quitted her every day. At this the child and Monsieur Rambaud gazed at one another for a long time, their faces pale and serious, as though they shared some great sorrow. They made no reference to it--a chit like her and an old man could not talk of such a thing together; but they were well aware why they were so sad, and why it was a pleasure to them to sit like this on either side of the fireplace when they were alone in the house. It was a comfort beyond telling. They loved to be near one another that their forlornness might pain them less. A wave of tenderness poured into their hearts; they would fain have embraced and wept together. "You are cold, my dear old friend, I'm certain of it," said Jeanne; "come nearer the fire." "No, no, my darling; I'm not cold." "Oh! you're telling a fib; your hands are like ice! Come nearer, or I shall get vexed." It was now his turn to display his anxious care. "I could lay a wager they haven't left you any drink. I'll run and make some for you; would you like it? Oh! I'm a good hand at making it. You would see, if I were your nurse, you wouldn't be without anything you wanted." He did not allow himself any more explicit hint. Jeanne somewhat sharply declared she was disgusted with _tisane_; she was compelled to drink too much of it. However, now and then she would allow Monsieur Rambaud to flutter round her like a mother; he would slip a pillow under her shoulders, give her the medicine that she had almost forgotten, or carry her into the bedroom in his arms. These little acts of devotion thrilled both with tenderness. As Jeanne eloquently declared with her sombre eyes, whose flashes disturbed the old man so sorely, they were playing the parts of the father and the little girl while her mother was absent. Then, however, sadness would all at once fall upon them; their talk died away, and they glanced at one another stealthily with pitying looks. That afternoon, after a lengthy silence, the child asked the question which she had already put to her mother: "Is Italy far away?" "Oh! I should think so," replied Monsieur Rambaud. "It's away over yonder, on the other side of Marseilles, a deuce of a distance! Why do you ask me such a question?" "Oh! because--" she began gravely. But she burst into loud complaints at her ignorance. She was always ill, and she had never been sent to school. Then they both became silent again, lulled into forgetfulness by the intense heat of the fire. In the meantime Helene had found Madame Deberle and her sister Pauline in the Japanese pavilion where they so frequently whiled away the afternoon. Inside it was very warm, a heating apparatus filled it with a stifling atmosphere. The large windows were shut, and a full view could be had of the little garden, which, in its winter guise, looked like some large sepia drawing, finished with exquisite delicacy, the little black branches of the trees showing clear against the brown earth. The two sisters were carrying on a sharp controversy. "Now, be quiet, do!" exclaimed Juliette; "it is evidently our interest to support Turkey." "Oh! I've had a talk about it with a Russian," replied Pauline, who was equally excited. "We are much liked at St. Petersburg, and it is only there that we can find our proper allies." Juliette's face assumed a serious look, and, crossing her arms, she exclaimed: "Well, and what will you do with the balance of power in Europe?" The Eastern crisis was the absorbing topic in Paris at that moment;[*] it was the stock subject of conversation, and no woman who pretended to any position could speak with propriety of anything else. Thus, for two days past, Madame Deberle had with passionate fervor devoted herself to foreign politics. Her ideas were very pronounced on the various eventualities which might arise; and Pauline greatly annoyed her by her eccentricity in advocating Russia's cause in opposition to the clear interests of France. Juliette's first desire was to convince her of her folly, but she soon lost her temper. [*] The reader may be reminded that the period of the story is that of the Crimean war. "Pooh! hold your tongue; you are talking foolishly! Now, if you had only studied the matter carefully with me--" But she broke off to greet Helene, who entered at this moment. "Good-day, my dear! It is very kind of you to call. I don't suppose you have any news. This morning's paper talked of an ultimatum. There has been a very exciting debate in the English House of Commons!" "No, I don't know anything," answered Helene, who was astounded by the question. "I go out so little!" However, Juliette had not waited for her reply, but was busy explaining to Pauline why it was necessary to neutralize the Black Sea; and her talk bristled with references to English and Russian generals, whose names she mentioned in a familiar way and with faultless pronunciation. However, Henri now made his appearance with several newspapers in his hand. Helene at once realized that he had come there for her sake; for their eyes had sought one another and exchanged a long, meaning glance. And when their hands met it was in a prolonged and silent clasp that told how the personality of each was lost in the other. "Is there anything in the papers?" asked Juliette feverishly. "In the papers, my dear?" repeated the doctor; "no there's never anything." For a time the Eastern Question dropped into the background. There were frequent allusions to some one whom they were expecting, but who did not make his appearance. Pauline remarked that it would soon be three o'clock. Oh he would come, declared Madame Deberle; he had given such a definite promise; but she never hinted at any name. Helene listened without understanding; things which had no connection with Henri did not in the least interest her. She no longer brought her work when she now came down into the garden; and though her visits would last a couple of hours, she would take no part in the conversation, for her mind was ever filled with the same childish dream wherein all others miraculously vanished, and she was left alone with him. However, she managed to reply to Juliette's questions, while Henri's eyes, riveted on her own, thrilled her with a delicious languor. At last he stepped behind her with the intention of pulling up one of the blinds, and she fully divined that he had come to ask another meeting, for she noticed the tremor that seized him when he brushed against her hair. "There's a ring at the bell; that must be he!" suddenly exclaimed Pauline. Then the faces of the two sisters assumed an air of indifference. It was Malignon who made his appearance, dressed with greater care than ever, and having a somewhat serious look. He shook hands; but eschewed his customary jocularity, thus returning, in a ceremonious manner, to this house where for some time he had not shown his face. While the doctor and Pauline were expostulating with him on the rarity of his visits, Juliette bent down and whispered to Helene, who, despite her supreme indifference, was overcome with astonishment: "Ah! you are surprised? Dear me! I am not angry with him at all! he's such a good fellow at heart that nobody could long be angry with him! Just fancy! he has unearthed a husband for Pauline. It's splendid, isn't it?" "Oh! no doubt," answered Helene complaisantly. "Yes, one of his friends, immensely rich, who did not think of getting married, but whom he has sworn to bring here! We were waiting for him to-day to have some definite reply. So, as you will understand, I had to pass over a lot of things. Oh! there's no danger now; we know one another thoroughly." Her face beamed with a pretty smile, and she blushed slightly at the memories she conjured up; but she soon turned round and took possession of Malignon. Helene likewise smiled. These accommodating circumstances in life seemed to her sufficient excuse for her own delinquencies. It was absurd to think of tragic melodramas; no, everything wound up with universal happiness. However, while she had thus been indulging in the cowardly, but pleasing, thought that nothing was absolutely indefensible, Juliette and Pauline had opened the door of the pavilion, and were now dragging Malignon in their train into the garden. And, all at once, Helene heard Henri speaking to her in a low and passionate voice: "I beseech you, Helene! Oh! I beseech you--" She started to her feet, and gazed around her with sudden anxiety. They were quite alone; she could see the three others walking slowly along one of the walks. Henri was bold enough to lay his hand on her shoulder, and she trembled as she felt its pressure. "As you wish," she stammered, knowing full well what question it was that he desired to ask. Then, hurriedly, they exchanged a few words. "At the house in the Passage des Eaux," said he. "No, it is impossible--I have explained to you, and you swore to me--" "Well, wherever you like, so that I may see you! In your own house --this evening. Shall I call?" The idea was repellant to her. But she could only refuse with a sign, for fear again came upon her as she observed the two ladies and Malignon returning. Madame Deberle had taken the young man away under pretext of showing him some clumps of violets which were in full blossom notwithstanding the cold weather. Hastening her steps, she entered the pavilion before the others, her face illumined by a smile. "It's all arranged," she exclaimed. "What's all arranged?" asked Helene, who was still trembling with excitement and had forgotten everything. "Oh, that marriage! What a riddance! Pauline was getting a bit of a nuisance. However, the young man has seen her and thinks her charming! To-morrow we're all going to dine with papa. I could have embraced Malignon for his good news!" With the utmost self-possession Henri had contrived to put some distance between Helene and himself. He also expressed his sense of Malignon's favor, and seemed to share his wife's delight at the prospect of seeing their little sister settled at last. Then he turned to Helene, and informed her that she was dropping one of her gloves. She thanked him. They could hear Pauline laughing and joking in the garden. She was leaning towards Malignon, murmuring broken sentences in his ear, and bursting into loud laughter as he gave her whispered answers. No doubt he was chatting to her confidentially about her future husband. Standing near the open door of the pavilion, Helene meanwhile inhaled the cold air with delight. It was at this moment that in the bedroom up above a silence fell on Jeanne and Monsieur Rambaud, whom the intense heat of the fire filled with languor. The child woke up from the long-continued pause with a sudden suggestion which seemed to be the outcome of her dreamy fit: "Would you like to go into the kitchen? We'll see if we can get a glimpse of mamma!" "Very well; let us go," replied Monsieur Rambaud. Jeanne felt stronger that day, and reaching the kitchen without any assistance pressed her face against a windowpane. Monsieur Rambaud also gazed into the garden. The trees were bare of foliage, and through the large transparent windows of the Japanese pavilion they could make out every detail inside. Rosalie, who was busy attending to the soup, reproached mademoiselle with being inquisitive. But the child had caught sight of her mother's dress; and pointed her out, whilst flattening her face against the glass to obtain a better view. Pauline meanwhile looked up, and nodded vigorously. Then Helene also made her appearance, and signed to the child to come down. "They have seen you, mademoiselle," said the servant girl. "They want you to go down." Monsieur Rambaud opened the window, and every one called to him to carry Jeanne downstairs. Jeanne, however, vanished into her room, and vehemently refused to go, accusing her worthy friend of having purposely tapped on the window. It was a great pleasure to her to look at her mother, but she stubbornly declared she would not go near that house; and to all Monsieur Rambaud's questions and entreaties she would only return a stern "Because!" which was meant to explain everything. "It is not you who ought to force me," she said at last, with a gloomy look. But he told her that she would grieve her mother very much, and that it was not right to insult other people. He would muffle her up well, she would not catch cold; and, so saying, he wound the shawl round her body, and taking the silk handkerchief from her head, set a knitted hood in its place. Even when she was ready, however, she still protested her unwillingness; and when in the end she allowed him to carry her down, it was with the express proviso that he would take her up again the moment she might feel poorly. The porter opened the door by which the two houses communicated, and when they entered the garden they were hailed with exclamations of joy. Madame Deberle, in particular, displayed a vast amount of affection for Jeanne; she ensconced her in a chair near the stove, and desired that the windows might be closed, for the air she declared was rather sharp for the dear child. Malignon had now left. As Helene began smoothing the child's dishevelled hair, somewhat ashamed to see her in company muffled up in a shawl and a hood, Juliette burst out in protest: "Leave her alone! Aren't we all at home here? Poor Jeanne! we are glad to have her!" She rang the bell, and asked if Miss Smithson and Lucien had returned from their daily walk. No, they had not yet returned. It was just as well, she declared; Lucien was getting beyond control, and only the night before had made the five Levasseur girls sob with grief. "Would you like to play at _pigeon vole_?" asked Pauline, who seemed to have lost her head with the thought of her impending marriage. "That wouldn't tire you." But Jeanne shook her head in refusal. Beneath their drooping lids her eyes wandered over the persons who surrounded her. The doctor had just informed Monsieur Rambaud that admission to the Hospital for Incurables had been secured for his _protegee_, and in a burst of emotion the worthy man clasped his hands as though some great personal favor had been conferred on him. They were all lounging on their chairs, and the conversation became delightfully friendly. Less effort was shown in following up remarks, and there were at times intervals of silence. While Madame Deberle and her sister were busily engaged in discussion, Helene said to the two men: "Doctor Bodin has advised us to go to Italy." "Ah! that is why Jeanne was questioning me!" exclaimed Monsieur Rambaud. "Would it give you any pleasure to go away there?" Without vouchsafing any answer, the child clasped her little hands upon her bosom, while her pale face flushed with joy. Then, stealthily, and with some fear, she looked towards the doctor; it was he, she understood it, whom her mother was consulting. He started slightly, but retained all his composure. Suddenly, however, Juliette joined in the conversation, wishing, as usual, to have her finger in every pie. "What's that? Are you talking about Italy? Didn't you say you had an idea of going to Italy? Well, it's a droll coincidence! Why, this very morning, I was teasing Henri to take me to Naples! Just fancy, for ten years now I have been dreaming of seeing Naples! Every spring he promises to take me there, but he never keeps his word!" "I didn't tell you that I would not go," murmured the doctor. "What! you didn't tell me? Why, you refused flatly, with the excuse that you could not leave your patients!" Jeanne was listening eagerly. A deep wrinkle now furrowed her pale brow, and she began twisting her fingers mechanically one after the other. "Oh! I could entrust my patients for a few weeks to the care of a brother-physician," explained the doctor. "That's to say, if I thought it would give you so much pleasure--" "Doctor," interrupted Helene, "are you also of opinion that such a journey would benefit Jeanne?" "It would be the very thing; it would thoroughly restore her to health. Children are always the better for a change." "Oh! then," exclaimed Juliette, "we can take Lucien, and we can all go together. That will be pleasant, won't it?" "Yes, indeed; I'll do whatever you wish," he answered, smiling. Jeanne lowered her face, wiped two big tears of passionate anger and grief from her eyes, and fell back in her chair as though she would fain hear and see no more; while Madame Deberle, filled with ecstasy by the idea of such unexpected pleasure, began chattering noisily. Oh! how kind her husband was! She kissed him for his self-sacrifice. Then, without the loss of a moment, she busied herself with sketching the necessary preparations. They would start the very next week. Goodness gracious! she would never have time to get everything ready! Next she wanted to draw out a plan of their tour; they would need to visit this and that town certainly; they could stay a week at Rome; they must stop at a little country place that Madame de Guiraud had mentioned to her; and she wound up by engaging in a lively discussion with Pauline, who was eager that they should postpone their departure till such time as she could accompany them with her husband. "Not a bit of it!" exclaimed Juliette; "the wedding can take place when we come back." Jeanne's presence had been wholly forgotten. Her eyes were riveted on her mother and the doctor. The proposed journey, indeed, now offered inducements to Helene, as it must necessarily keep Henri near her. In fact, a keen delight filled her heart at the thought of journeying together through the land of the sun, living side by side, and profiting by the hours of freedom. Round her lips wreathed a smile of happy relief; she had so greatly feared that she might lose him; and deemed herself fortunate in the thought that she would carry her love along with her. While Juliette was discoursing of the scenes they would travel through, both Helene and Henri, indeed, indulged in the dream that they were already strolling through a fairy land of perennial spring, and each told the other with a look that their passion would reign there, aye, wheresoever they might breathe the same air. In the meantime, Monsieur Rambaud, who with unconscious sadness had slowly lapsed into silence, observed Jeanne's evident discomfort. "Aren't you well, my darling?" he asked in a whisper. "No! I'm quite ill! Carry me up again, I implore you." "But we must tell your mamma." "Oh, no, no! mamma is busy; she hasn't any time to give to us. Carry me up, oh! carry me up again." He took her in his arms, and told Helene that the child felt tired. In answer she requested him to wait for her in her rooms; she would hasten after them. The little one, though light as a feather, seemed to slip from his grasp, and he was forced to come to a standstill on the second landing. She had leaned her head against his shoulder, and each gazed into the other's face with a look of grievous pain. Not a sound broke upon the chill silence of the staircase. Then in a low whisper he asked her: "You're pleased, aren't you, to go to Italy?" But she thereupon burst into sobs, declaring in broken words that she no longer had any craving to go, and would rather die in her own room. Oh! she would not go, she would fall ill, she knew it well. She would go nowhere--nowhere. They could give her little shoes to the poor. Then amidst tears she whispered to him: "Do you remember what you asked me one night?" "What was it, my pet?" "To stay with mamma always--always--always! Well, if you wish so still, I wish so too!" The tears welled into Monsieur Rambaud's eyes. He kissed her lovingly, while she added in a still lower tone: "You are perhaps vexed by my getting so angry over it. I didn't understand, you know. But it's you whom I want! Oh! say that it will be soon. Won't you say that it will be soon? I love you more than the other one." Below in the pavilion, Helene had begun to dream once more. The proposed journey was still the topic of conversation; and she now experienced an unconquerable yearning to relieve her overflowing heart, and acquaint Henri with all the happiness which was stifling her. So, while Juliette and Pauline were wrangling over the number of dresses that ought to be taken, she leaned towards him and gave him the assignation which she had refused but an hour before. "Come to-night; I shall expect you." But as she at last ascended to her own rooms, she met Rosalie flying terror-stricken down the stairs. The moment she saw her mistress, the girl shrieked out: "Madame! madame! Oh! make haste, do! Mademoiselle is very ill! She's spitting blood!" CHAPTER XXIII. On rising from the dinner-table the doctor spoke to his wife of a confinement case, in close attendance on which he would doubtless have to pass the night. He quitted the house at nine o'clock, walked down to the riverside, and paced along the deserted quays in the dense nocturnal darkness. A slight moist wind was blowing, and the swollen Seine rolled on in inky waves. As soon as eleven o'clock chimed, he walked up the slopes of the Trocadero, and began to prowl round the house, the huge square pile of which seemed but a deepening of the gloom. Lights could still be seen streaming through the dining-room windows of Helene's lodging. Walking round, he noted that the kitchen was also brilliantly lighted up. And at this sight he stopped short in astonishment, which slowly developed into uneasiness. Shadows traversed the blinds; there seemed to be considerable bustle and stir up there. Perhaps Monsieur Rambaud had stayed to dine? But the worthy man never left later than ten o'clock. He, Henri, dared not go up; for what would he say should Rosalie open the door? At last, as it was nearing midnight, mad with impatience and throwing prudence to the winds, he rang the bell, and walked swiftly past the porter's room without giving his name. At the top of the stairs Rosalie received him. "It's you, sir! Come in. I will go and announce you. Madame must be expecting you." She gave no sign of surprise on seeing him at this hour. As he entered the dining-room without uttering a word, she resumed distractedly: "Oh! mademoiselle is very ill, sir. What a night! My legs are sinking under me!" Thereupon she left the room, and the doctor mechanically took a seat. He was oblivious of the fact that he was a medical man. Pacing along the quay he had conjured up a vision of a very different reception. And now he was there, as though he were paying a visit, waiting with his hat on his knees. A grievous coughing in the next room alone broke upon the intense silence. At last Rosalie made her appearance once more, and hurrying across the dining-room with a basin in her hand, merely remarked: "Madame says you are not to go in." He sat on, powerless to depart. Was their meeting to be postponed till another day, then? He was dazed, as though such a thing had seemed to him impossible. Then the thought came to him that poor Jeanne had very bad health; children only brought on sorrow and vexation. The door, however, opened once more, and Doctor Bodin entered, with a thousand apologies falling from his lips. For some time he chattered away: he had been sent for, but he would always be exceedingly pleased to enter into consultation with his renowned fellow-practitioner. "Oh! no doubt, no doubt," stammered Doctor Deberle, whose ears were buzzing. The elder man, his mind set at rest with regard to all questions of professional etiquette, then began to affect a puzzled manner, and expressed his doubts of the meaning of the symptoms. He spoke in a whisper, and described them in technical phraseology, frequently pausing and winking significantly. There was coughing without expectoration, very pronounced weakness, and intense fever. Perhaps it might prove a case of typhoid fever. But in the meantime he gave no decided opinion, as the anaemic nervous affection, for which the patient had been treated so long, made him fear unforeseen complications. "What do you think?" he asked, after delivering himself of each remark. Doctor Deberle answered with evasive questions. While the other was speaking, he felt ashamed at finding himself in that room. Why had he come up? "I have applied two blisters," continued the old doctor. "I'm waiting the result. But, of course, you'll see her. You will then give me your opinion." So saying he led him into the bedroom. Henri entered it with a shudder creeping through his frame. It was but faintly lighted by a lamp. There thronged into his mind the memories of other nights, when there had been the same warm perfume, the same close, calm atmosphere, the same deepening shadows shrouding the furniture and hangings. But there was no one now to come to him with outstretched hands as in those olden days. Monsieur Rambaud lay back in an arm-chair exhausted, seemingly asleep. Helene was standing in front of the bed, robed in a white dressing-gown, but did not turn her head; and her figure, in its death-like pallor, appeared to him extremely tall. Then for a moment's space he gazed on Jeanne. Her weakness was so great that she could not open her eyes without fatigue. Bathed in sweat, she lay in a stupor, her face ghastly, save that a burning flush colored each cheek. "It's galloping consumption," he exclaimed at last, speaking aloud in spite of himself, and giving no sign of astonishment, as though he had long foreseen what would happen. Helene heard him and looked at him. She seemed to be of ice, her eyes were dry, and she was terribly calm. "You think so, do you?" rejoined Doctor Bodin, giving an approving nod in the style of a man who had not cared to be the first to express this opinion. He sounded the child once more. Jeanne, her limbs quite lifeless, yielded to the examination without seemingly knowing why she was being disturbed. A few rapid sentences were exchanged between the two physicians. The old doctor murmured some words about amphoric breathing, and a sound such as a cracked jar might give out. Nevertheless, he still affected some hesitation, and spoke, suggestively, of capillary bronchitis. Doctor Deberle hastened to explain that an accidental cause had brought on the illness; doubtless it was due to a cold; however, he had already noticed several times that an anaemical tendency would produce chest diseases. Helene stood waiting behind him. "Listen to her breathing yourself," said Doctor Bodin, giving way to Henri. He leaned over the child, and seemed about to take hold of her. She had not raised her eyelids; but lay there in self-abandonment, consumed by fever. Her open nightdress displayed her childish breast, where as yet there were but slight signs of coming womanhood; and nothing could be more chaste or yet more harrowing than the sight of this dawning maturity on which the Angel of Death had already laid his hand. She had displayed no aversion when the old doctor had touched her. But the moment Henri's fingers glanced against her body she started as if she had received a shock. In a transport of shame she awoke from the coma in which she had been plunged, and, like a maiden in alarm, clasped her poor puny little arms over her bosom, exclaiming the while in quavering tones: "Mamma! mamma!" Then she opened her eyes, and on recognizing the man who was bending over her, she was seized with terror. Sobbing with shame, she drew the bed-cover over her bosom. It seemed as though she had grown older by ten years during her short agony, and on the brink of death had attained sufficient womanhood to understand that this man, above all others, must not lay hands on her. She wailed out again in piteous entreaty: "Mamma! mamma! I beseech you!" Helene, who had hitherto not opened her lips, came close to Henri. Her eyes were bent on him fixedly; her face was of marble. She touched him, and merely said in a husky voice: "Go away!" Doctor Bodin strove to appease Jeanne, who now shook with a fresh fit of coughing. He assured her that nobody would annoy her again, that every one would go away, to prevent her being disturbed. "Go away," repeated Helene, in a deep whisper in her lover's ear. "You see very well that we have killed her!" Then, unable to find a word in reply, Henri withdrew. He lingered for a moment longer in the dining-room, awaiting he knew not what, something that might possibly take place. But seeing that Doctor Bodin did not come out, he groped his way down the stairs without even Rosalie to light him. He thought of the awful speed with which galloping consumption--a disease to which he had devoted earnest study--carried off its victims; the miliary tubercles would rapidly multiply, the stifling sensation would become more and more pronounced; Jeanne would certainly not last another three weeks. The first of these passed by. In the mighty expanse of heaven before the window, the sun rose and set above Paris, without Helene being more than vaguely conscious of the pitiless, steady advance of time. She grasped the fact that her daughter was doomed; she lived plunged in a stupor, alive only to the terrible anguish that filled her heart. It was but waiting on in hopelessness, in certainty that death would prove merciless. She could not weep, but paced gently to and fro, tending the sufferer with slow, regulated movements. At times, yielding to fatigue, she would fall upon a chair, whence she gazed at her for hours. Jeanne grew weaker and weaker; painful vomiting was followed by exhaustion; the fever never quitted her. When Doctor Bodin called, he examined her for a little while and left some prescription; but his drooping shoulders, as he left the room, were eloquent of such powerlessness that the mother forbore to accompany him to ask even a question. On the morning after the illness had declared itself, Abbe Jouve had made all haste to call. He and his brother now again came every evening, exchanging a mute clasp of the hand with Helene, and never venturing to ask any news. They had offered to watch by the bedside in succession, but she sent them away when ten o'clock struck; she would have no one in the bedroom during the night. One evening the Abbe, who had seemed absorbed by some idea since the previous day, took her aside. "There is one thing I've thought of," he whispered. "Her health has put obstacles in the darling child's way; but her first communion might take place here." His meaning at first did not seem to dawn on Helene. The thought that, despite all his indulgence, he should now allow his priestly character the ascendant and evince no concern but in spiritual matters, came on her with surprise, and even wounded her somewhat. With a careless gesture she exclaimed: "No, no; I would rather she wasn't worried. If there be a heaven, she will have no difficulty in entering its gates." That evening, however, Jeanne experienced one of those deceptive improvements in health which fill the dying with illusions as to their condition. Her hearing, rendered more acute by illness, had enabled her to catch the Abbe's words. "It's you, dear old friend!" said she. "You spoke about the first communion. It will be soon, won't it?" "No doubt, my darling," he answered. Then she wanted him to come near to speak to her. Her mother had propped her up with the pillow, and she reclined there, looking very little, with a smile on her fever-burnt lips, and the shadow of death already passing over her brilliant eyes. "Oh! I'm getting on very well," she began. "I could get up if I wanted. But tell me: should I have a white gown and flowers? Will the church be as beautiful as it was in the Month of Mary?" "More beautiful, my pet." "Really? Will there be as many flowers, and will there be such sweet chants? It will be soon, soon--you promise me, won't you?" She was wrapt in joy. She gazed on the curtains of the bed, and murmured in her transport that she was very fond of the good God, and had seen Him while she was listening to the canticles. Even now she could hear organs pealing, see lights that circled round, and flowers in great vases hovering like butterflies before her eyes. Then another fit of coughing threw her back on the pillow. However, her face was still flushed with a smile; she seemed to be unconscious of her cough, but continued: "I shall get up to-morrow. I shall learn my catechism without a mistake, and we'll be all very happy." A sob came from Helene as she stood at the foot of the bed. She had been powerless to weep, but a storm of tears rushed up from her bosom as Jeanne's laughter fell on her ear. Then, almost stifling, she fled into the dining-room, that she might hide her despair. The Abbe followed her. Monsieur Rambaud had at once started up to engage the child's attention. "Oh dear! mamma cried out! Has she hurt herself?" she asked. "Your mamma?" he answered. "No, she didn't cry out; she was laughing because you are feeling so well." In the dining-room, her head bowed dejectedly on the table, Helene strove to stifle her sobs with her clasped hands. The Abbe hung over her, and prayed her to restrain her emotion. But she raised her face, streaming with tears, and bitterly accused herself. She declared to him that she herself had killed her daughter, and a full confession escaped from her lips in a torrent of broken words. She would never have succumbed to that man had Jeanne remained beside her. It had been fated that she should meet him in that chamber of mystery. God in Heaven! she ought to die with her child; she could live no longer. The priest, terrified, sought to calm her with the promise of absolution. But there was a ring at the bell, and a sound of voices came from the lobby. Helene dried her tears as Rosalie made her appearance. "Madame, it's Dr. Deberle, who--" "I don't wish him to come in." "He is asking after mademoiselle." "Tell him she is dying." The door had been left open, and Henri had heard everything. Without awaiting the return of the servant girl, he walked down the stairs. He came up every day, received the same answer, and then went away. The visits which Helene received quite unnerved her. The few ladies whose acquaintance she had made at the Deberles' house deemed it their duty to tender her their sympathy. Madame de Chermette, Madame Levasseur, Madame de Guiraud, and others also presented themselves. They made no request to enter, but catechised Rosalie in such loud voices that they could be heard through the thin partitions. Giving way to impatience, Helene would then receive them in the dining-room, where, without sitting down, she spoke with them very briefly. She went about all day in her dressing-gown, careless of her attire, with her lovely hair merely gathered up and twisted into a knot. Her eyes often closed with weariness; her face was flushed; she had a bitter taste in her mouth; her lips were clammy, and she could scarcely articulate. When Juliette called, she could not exclude her from the bedroom, but allowed her to stay for a little while beside the bed. "My dear," Madame Deberle said to her one day in friendly tones, "you give way too much. Keep up your spirits." Helene was about to reply, when Juliette, wishing to turn her thoughts from her grief, began to chat about the things which were occupying the gossips of Paris: "We are certainly going to have a war. I am in a nice state about it, as I have two cousins who will have to serve." In this style she would drop in upon them on returning from her rambles through Paris, her brain bursting with all the tittle-tattle collected in the course of the afternoon, and her long skirts whirling and rustling as she sailed through the stillness of the sick-room. It was altogether futile for her to lower her voice and assume a pitiful air; her indifference peeped through all disguise; it could be seen that she was happy, quite joyous indeed, in the possession of perfect health. Helene was very downcast in her company, her heart rent by jealous anguish. "Madame," said Jeanne one evening, "why doesn't Lucien come to play with me?" Juliette was embarrassed for a moment, and merely answered with a smile. "Is he ill too?" continued the child. "No, my darling, he isn't ill; he has gone to school." Then, as Helene accompanied her into the ante-room, she wished to apologize for her prevarication. "Oh! I would gladly bring him; I know that there's no infection. But children get frightened with the least thing, and Lucien is such a stupid. He would just burst out sobbing when he saw your poor angel--" "Yes, indeed; you are quite right," interrupted Helene, her heart ready to break with the thought of this woman's gaiety, and her happiness in possessing a child who enjoyed robust health. A second week had passed away. The disease was following its usual course, robbing Jeanne every hour of some of her vitality. Fearfully rapid though it was, however, it evinced no haste, but, in accomplishing the destruction of that delicate, lovable flesh, passed in turn through each foreseen phase, without skipping a single one of them. Thus the spitting of blood had ceased, and at intervals the cough disappeared. But such was the oppressive feeling which stifled the child that you could detect the ravages of the disease by the difficulty she experienced in breathing. Such weakness could not withstand so violent an attack; and the eyes of the Abbe and Monsieur Rambaud constantly moistened with tears as they heard her. Day and night under the shelter of the curtains the sound of oppressed breathing arose; the poor darling, whom the slightest shock seemed likely to kill, was yet unable to die, but lived on and on through the agony which bathed her in sweat. Her mother, whose strength was exhausted, and who could no longer bear to hear that rattle, went into the adjoining room and leaned her head against the wall. Jeanne was slowly becoming oblivious to her surroundings. She no longer saw people, and her face bore an unconscious and forlorn expression, as though she had already lived all alone in some unknown sphere. When they who hovered round her wished to attract her attention, they named themselves that she might recognize them; but she would gaze at them fixedly, without a smile, then turn herself round towards the wall with a weary look. A gloominess was settling over her; she was passing away amidst the same vexation and sulkiness as she had displayed in past days of jealous outbursts. Still, at times the whims characteristic of sickness would awaken her to some consciousness. One morning she asked her mother: "To-day is Sunday, isn't it?" "No, my child," answered Helene; "this is only Friday. Why do you wish to know?" Jeanne seemed to have already forgotten the question she had asked. But two days later, while Rosalie was in the room, she said to her in a whisper: "This is Sunday. Zephyrin is here; ask him to come and see me." The maid hesitated, but Helene, who had heard, nodded to her in token of consent. The child spoke again: "Bring him; come both of you; I shall be so pleased." When Rosalie entered the sick-room with Zephyrin, she raised herself on her pillow. The little soldier, with bare head and hands spread out, swayed about to hide his intense emotion. He had a great love for mademoiselle, and it grieved him unutterably to see her "shouldering arms on the left," as he expressed it in the kitchen. So, in spite of the previous injunctions of Rosalie, who had instructed him to put on a bright expression, he stood speechless, with downcast face, on seeing her so pale and wasted to a skeleton. He was still as tender-hearted as ever, despite his conquering airs. He could not even think of one of those fine phrases which nowadays he usually concocted so easily. The maid behind him gave him a pinch to make him laugh. But he could only stammer out: "I beg pardon--mademoiselle and every one here--" Jeanne was still raising herself with the help of her tiny arms. She widely opened her large, vacant eyes; she seemed to be looking for something; her head shook with a nervous trembling. Doubtless the stream of light was blinding her as the shadows of death gathered around. "Come closer, my friend," said Helene to the soldier. "It was mademoiselle who asked to see you." The sunshine entered through the window in a slanting ray of golden light, in which the dust rising from the carpet could be seen circling. March had come, and the springtide was already budding out of doors. Zephyrin took one step forward, and appeared in the sunshine; his little round, freckled face had a golden hue, as of ripe corn, while the buttons on his tunic glittered, and his red trousers looked as sanguineous as a field of poppies. At last Jeanne became aware of his presence there; but her eye again betrayed uneasiness, and she glanced restlessly from one corner to another. "What do you want, my child?" asked her mother. "We are all here." She understood, however, in a moment. "Rosalie, come nearer. Mademoiselle wishes to see you." Then Rosalie, in her turn, stepped into the sunlight. She wore a cap, whose strings, carelessly tossed over her shoulders, flapped round her head like the wings of a butterfly. A golden powder seemed to fall on her bristly black hair and her kindly face with its flat nose and thick lips. And for Jeanne there were only these two in the room--the little soldier and the servant girl, standing elbow to elbow under the ray of sunshine. She gazed at them. "Well, my darling," began Helene again, "you do not say anything to them! Here they are together." Jeanne's eyes were still fixed on them, and her head shook with the tremor of a very aged woman. They stood there like man and wife, ready to take each other's arm and return to their country-side. The spring sun threw its warmth on them, and eager to brighten mademoiselle they ended by smiling into each other's face with a look of mingled embarrassment and tenderness. The very odor of health was exhaled from their plump round figures. Had they been alone, Zephyrin without doubt would have caught hold of Rosalie, and would have received for his pains a hearty slap. Their eyes showed it. "Well, my darling, have you nothing to say to them?" Jeanne gazed at them, her breathing growing yet more oppressed. And still she said not a word, but suddenly burst into tears. Zephyrin and Rosalie had at once to quit the room. "I beg pardon--mademoiselle and every one--" stammered the little soldier, as he went away in bewilderment. This was one of Jeanne's last whims. She lapsed into a dull stupor, from which nothing could rouse her. She lay there in utter loneliness, unconscious even of her mother's presence. When Helene hung over the bed seeking her eyes, the child preserved a stolid expression, as though only the shadow of the curtain had passed before her. Her lips were dumb; she showed the gloomy resignation of the outcast who knows that she is dying. Sometimes she would long remain with her eyelids half closed, and nobody could divine what stubborn thought was thus absorbing her. Nothing now had any existence for her save her big doll, which lay beside her. They had given it to her one night to divert her during her insufferable anguish, and she refused to give it back, defending it with fierce gestures the moment they attempted to take it from her. With its pasteboard head resting on the bolster, the doll was stretched out like an invalid, covered up to the shoulders by the counterpane. There was little doubt the child was nursing it, for her burning hands would, from time to time, feel its disjointed limbs of flesh-tinted leather, whence all the sawdust had exuded. For hours her eyes would never stray from those enamel ones which were always fixed, or from those white teeth wreathed in an everlasting smile. She would suddenly grow affectionate, clasp the doll's hands against her bosom and press her cheek against its little head of hair, the caressing contact of which seemed to give her some relief. Thus she sought comfort in her affection for her big doll, always assuring herself of its presence when she awoke from a doze, seeing nothing else, chatting with it, and at times summoning to her face the shadow of a smile, as though she had heard it whispering something in her ear. The third week was dragging to an end. One morning the old doctor came and remained. Helene understood him: her child would not live through the day. Since the previous evening she had been in a stupor that deprived her of the consciousness even of her own actions. There was no longer any struggle with death; it was but a question of hours. As the dying child was consumed by an awful thirst, the doctor had merely recommended that she should be given some opiate beverage, which would render her passing less painful; and the relinquishing of all attempts at cure reduced Helene to a state of imbecility. So long as the medicines had littered the night-table she still had entertained hopes of a miraculous recovery. But now bottles and boxes had vanished, and her last trust was gone. One instinct only inspired her now--to be near Jeanne, never leave her, gaze at her unceasingly. The doctor, wishing to distract her attention from the terrible sight, strove, by assigning some little duties to her, to keep her at a distance. But she ever and ever returned, drawn to the bedside by the physical craving to see. She waited, standing erect, her arms hanging beside her, and her face swollen by despair. About one o'clock Abbe Jouve and Monsieur Rambaud arrived. The doctor went to meet them, and muttered a few words. Both grew pale, and stood stock-still in consternation, while their hands began to tremble. Helene had not turned round. The weather was lovely that day; it was one of those sunny afternoons typical of early April. Jeanne was tossing in her bed. Her lips moved painfully at times with the intolerable thirst which consumed her. She had brought her poor transparent hands from under the coverlet, and waved them gently to and fro. The hidden working of the disease was accomplished, she coughed no more, and her dying voice came like a faint breath. For a moment she turned her head, and her eyes sought the light. Doctor Bodin threw the window wide open, and then Jeanne at once became tranquil, with her cheek resting on the pillow and her looks roving over Paris, while her heavy breathing grew fainter and slower. During the three weeks of her illness she had thus many times turned towards the city that stretched away to the horizon. Her face grew grave, she was musing. At this last hour Paris was smiling under the glittering April sunshine. Warm breezes entered from without, with bursts of urchin's laughter and the chirping of sparrows. On the brink of the grave the child exerted her last strength to gaze again on the scene, and follow the flying smoke which soared from the distant suburbs. She recognized her three friends, the Invalides, the Pantheon, and the Tower of Saint-Jacques; then the unknown began, and her weary eyelids half closed at sight of the vast ocean of roofs. Perhaps she was dreaming that she was growing much lighter and lighter, and was fleeting away like a bird. Now, at last, she would soon know all; she would perch herself on the domes and steeples; seven or eight flaps of her wings would suffice, and she would be able to gaze on the forbidden mysteries that were hidden from children. But a fresh uneasiness fell upon her, and her hands groped about; she only grew calm again when she held her large doll in her little arms against her bosom. It was evidently her wish to take it with her. Her glances wandered far away amongst the chimneys glinting with the sun's ruddy light. Four o'clock struck, and the bluish shadows of evening were already gathering. The end was at hand; there was a stifling, a slow and passive agony. The dear angel no longer had strength to offer resistance. Monsieur Rambaud, overcome, threw himself on his knees, convulsed with silent sobbing, and dragged himself behind a curtain to hide his grief. The Abbe was kneeling at the bedside, with clasped hands, repeating the prayers for the dying. "Jeanne! Jeanne!" murmured Helene, chilled to the heart with a horror which sent an icy thrill through her very hair. She had repulsed the doctor and thrown herself on the ground, leaning against the bed to gaze into her daughter's face. Jeanne opened her eyes, but did not look at her mother. She drew her doll--her last love--still closer. Her bosom heaved with a big sigh, followed by two fainter ones. Then her eyes paled, and her face for a moment gave signs of a fearful anguish. But speedily there came relief; her mouth remained open, she breathed no more. "It is over," said the doctor, as he took her hand. Jeanne's big, vacant eyes were fixed on Paris. The long, thin, lamb-like face was still further elongated, there was a sternness on its features, a grey shadow falling from its contracted brows. Thus even in death she retained the livid expression of a jealous woman. The doll, with its head flung back, and its hair dishevelled, seemed to lie dead beside her. "It is over," again said the doctor, as he allowed the little cold hand to drop. Helene, with a strained expression on her face, pressed her hands to her brow as if she felt her head splitting open. No tears came to her eyes; she gazed wildly in front of her. Then a rattling noise mounted in her throat; she had just espied at the foot of the bed a pair of shoes that lay forgotten there. It was all over. Jeanne would never put them on again; the little shoes could be given to the poor. And at the sight Helene's tears gushed forth; she still knelt on the floor, her face pressed against the dead child's hand, which had slipped down. Monsieur Rambaud was sobbing. The Abbe had raised his voice, and Rosalie, standing at the door of the dining-room, was biting her handkerchief to check the noise of her grief. At this very moment Doctor Deberle rang the bell. He was unable to refrain from making inquiries. "How is she now?" he asked. "Oh, sir!" wailed Rosalie, "she is dead." He stood motionless, stupefied by the announcement of the end which he had been expecting daily. At last he muttered: "O God! the poor child! what a calamity!" He could only give utterance to those commonplace but heartrending words. The door shut once more, and he went down the stairs. CHAPTER XXIV. When Madame Deberle was apprised of Jeanne's death she wept, and gave way to one of those outbursts of emotion that kept her in a flutter for eight-and-forty hours. Hers was a noisy and immoderate grief. She came and threw herself into Helene's arms. Then a phrase dropped in her hearing inspired her with the idea of imparting some affecting surroundings to the child's funeral, and soon wholly absorbed her. She offered her services, and declared her willingness to undertake every detail. The mother, worn out with weeping, sat overwhelmed in her chair; Monsieur Rambaud, who was acting in her name, was losing his head. So he accepted the offer with profuse expressions of gratitude. Helene merely roused herself for a moment to express the wish that there should be some flowers--an abundance of flowers. Without losing a minute, Madame Deberle set about her task. She spent the whole of the next day in running from one lady friend to another, bearing the woeful tidings. It was her idea to have a following of little girls all dressed in white. She needed at least thirty, and did not return till she had secured the full number. She had gone in person to the Funeral Administration, discussed the various styles, and chosen the necessary drapery. She would have the garden railings hung with white, and the body might be laid out under the lilac trees, whose twigs were already tipped with green. It would be charming. "If only it's a fine day to-morrow!" she giddily remarked in the evening when her scurrying to and fro had come to an end. The morning proved lovely; there was a blue sky and a flood of sunshine, the air was pure and invigorating as only the air of spring can be. The funeral was to take place at ten o'clock. By nine the drapery had been hung up. Juliette ran down to give the workmen her ideas of what should be done. She did not wish the trees to be altogether covered. The white cloth, fringed with silver, formed a kind of porch at the garden gate, which was thrown back against the lilac trees. However, Juliette soon returned to her drawing-room to receive her lady guests. They were to assemble there to prevent Madame Grandjean's two rooms from being filled to overflowing. Still she was greatly annoyed at her husband having had to go that morning to Versailles--for some consultation or other, he explained, which he could not well neglect. Thus she was left alone, and felt she would never be able to get through with it all. Madame Berthier was the first arrival, bringing her two daughters with her. "What do you think!" exclaimed Madame Deberle; "Henri has deserted me! Well, Lucien, why don't you say good-day?" Lucien was already dressed for the funeral, with his hands in black gloves. He seemed astonished to see Sophie and Blanche dressed as though they were about to take part in some church procession. A silk sash encircled the muslin gown of each, and their veils, which swept down to the floor, hid their little caps of transparent tulle. While the two mothers were busy chatting, the three children gazed at one another, bearing themselves somewhat stiffly in their new attire. At last Lucien broke the silence by saying: "Jeanne is dead." His heart was full, and yet his face wore a smile--a smile born of amazement. He had been very quiet since the evening before, dwelling on the thought that Jeanne was dead. As his mother was up to her ears in business, and took no notice of him, he had plied the servants with questions. Was it a fact, he wanted to know, that it was impossible to move when one was dead?" "She is dead, she is dead!" echoed the two sisters, who looked like rosebuds under their white veils. "Are we going to see her?" Lucien pondered for a time, and then, with dreamy eyes and opened mouth, seemingly striving to divine the nature of this problem which lay beyond his ken, he answered in a low tone: "We shall never see her again." However, several other little girls now entered the room. On a sign from his mother Lucien advanced to meet them. Marguerite Tissot, her muslin dress enveloping her like a cloud, seemed a child-Virgin; her fair hair, escaping from underneath her little cap, looked, through the snowy veil, like a tippet figured with gold. A quiet smile crept into every face when the five Levasseurs made their appearance; they were all dressed alike, and trooped along in boarding-school fashion, the eldest first, the youngest last; and their skirts stood out to such an extent that they quite filled one corner of the room. But on little Mademoiselle Guiraud's entry the whispering voices rose to a higher key; the others laughed and crowded round to see her and kiss her. She was like some white turtle-dove with its downy feathers ruffled. Wrapped in rustling gauze, she looked as round as a barrel, but still no heavier than a bird. Her mother even could not find her hands. By degrees the drawing-room seemed to be filling with a cloud of snowballs. Several boys, in their black coats, were like dark spots amidst the universal white. Lucien, now that his little wife was dead, desired to choose another. However, he displayed the greatest hesitation. He would have preferred a wife like Jeanne, taller than himself; but at last he settled on Marguerite, whose hair fascinated him, and to whom he attached himself for the day. "The corpse hasn't been brought down yet," Pauline muttered at this moment in Juliette's ear. Pauline was as flurried as though the preliminaries of a ball were in hand. It was with the greatest difficulty that her sister had prevented her from donning a white dress for the ceremony. "Good gracious!" exclaimed Juliette; "what are they dreaming about? I must run up. Stay with these ladies." She hastily left the room, where the mothers in their mourning attire sat chatting in whispers, while the children dared not make the least movement lest they should rumple their dresses. When she had reached the top of the staircase and entered the chamber where the body lay, Juliette's blood was chilled by the intense cold. Jeanne still lay on the bed, with clasped hands; and, like Marguerite and the Levasseur girls, she was arrayed in a white dress, white cap, and white shoes. A wreath of white roses crowned the cap, as though she were a little queen about to be honored by the crowd of guests who were waiting below. In front of the window, on two chairs, was the oak coffin lined with satin, looking like some huge jewel casket. The furniture was all in order; a wax taper was burning; the room seemed close and gloomy, with the damp smell and stillness of a vault which has been walled up for many years. Thus Juliette, fresh from the sunshine and smiling life of the outer world, came to a sudden halt, stricken dumb, without the courage to explain that they must needs hurry. "A great many people have come," she stammered at last. And then, as no answer was forthcoming, she added, just for the sake of saying something: "Henri has been forced to attend a consultation at Versailles; you will excuse him." Helene, who sat in front of the bed, gazed at her with vacant eyes. They were wholly unable to drag her from that room. For six-and-thirty hours she had lingered there, despite the prayers of Monsieur Rambaud and the Abbe Jouve, who kept watch with her. During the last two nights she had been weighed to the earth by immeasurable agony. Besides, she had accomplished the grievous task of dressing her daughter for the last time, of putting on those white silk shoes, for she would allow no other to touch the feet of the little angel who lay dead. And now she sat motionless, as though her strength were spent, and the intensity of her grief had lulled her into forgetfulness. "Have you got some flowers?" she exclaimed after an effort, her eyes still fixed on Madame Deberle. "Yes, yes, my dear," answered the latter. "Don't trouble yourself about that." Since her daughter had breathed her last, Helene had been consumed with one idea--there must be flowers, flowers, an overwhelming profusion of flowers. Each time she saw anybody, she grew uneasy, seemingly afraid that sufficient flowers would never be obtained. "Are there any roses?" she began again after a pause. "Yes. I assure you that you will be well pleased." She shook her head, and once more fell back into her stupor. In the meantime the undertaker's men were waiting on the landing. It must be got over now without delay. Monsieur Rambaud, who was himself affected to such a degree that he staggered like a drunken man, signed to Juliette to assist him in leading the poor woman from the room. Each slipped an arm gently beneath hers, and they raised her up and led her towards the dining-room. But the moment she divined their intention, she shook them from her in a last despairing outburst. The scene was heartrending. She threw herself on her knees at the bedside and clung passionately to the sheets, while the room re-echoed with her piteous shrieks. But still Jeanne lay there with her face of stone, stiff and icy-cold, wrapped round by the silence of eternity. She seemed to be frowning; there was a sour pursing of the lips, eloquent of a revengeful nature; and it was this gloomy, pitiless look, springing from jealousy and transforming her face, which drove Helene so frantic. During the preceding thirty-six hours she had not failed to notice how the old spiteful expression had grown more and more intense upon her daughter's face, how more and more sullen she looked the nearer she approached the grave. Oh, what a comfort it would have been if Jeanne could only have smiled on her for the last time! "No, no!" she shrieked. "I pray you, leave her for a moment. You cannot take her from me. I want to embrace her. Oh, only a moment, only a moment!" With trembling arms she clasped her child to her bosom, eager to dispute possession with the men who stood in the ante-room, with their backs turned towards her and impatient frowns on their faces. But her lips were powerless to breathe any warmth on the cold countenance; she became conscious that Jeanne's obstinacy was not to be overcome, that she refused forgiveness. And then she allowed herself to be dragged away, and fell upon a chair in the dining-room, with the one mournful cry, again and again repeated: "My God! My God!" Monsieur Rambaud and Madame Deberle were overcome by emotion. There was an interval of silence, but when the latter opened the door halfway it was all over. There had been no noise--scarcely a stir. The screws, oiled beforehand, now closed the lid for ever. The chamber was left empty, and a white sheet was thrown over the coffin. The bedroom door remained open, and no further restraint was put upon Helene. On re-entering the room she cast a dazed look on the furniture and round the walls. The men had borne away the corpse. Rosalie had drawn the coverlet over the bed to efface the slight hollow made by the form of the little one whom they had lost. Then opening her arms with a distracted gesture and stretching out her hands, Helene rushed towards the staircase. She wanted to go down, but Monsieur Rambaud held her back, while Madame Deberle explained to her that it was not the thing to do. But she vowed she would behave rationally, that she would not follow the funeral procession. Surely they could allow her to look on; she would remain quiet in the garden pavilion. Both wept as they heard her pleading. However, she had to be dressed. Juliette threw a black shawl round her to conceal her morning wrap. There was no bonnet to be found; but at last they came across one from which they tore a bunch of red vervain flowers. Monsieur Rambaud, who was chief mourner, took hold of Helene's arm. "Do not leave her," whispered Madame Deberle as they reached the garden. "I have so many things to look after!" And thereupon she hastened away. Helene meanwhile walked with difficulty, her eyes ever seeking something. As soon as she had found herself out of doors she had drawn a long sigh. Ah! what a lovely morning! Then she looked towards the iron gate, and caught sight of the little coffin under the white drapery. Monsieur Rambaud allowed her to take but two or three steps forward. "Now, be brave," he said to her, while a shudder ran through his own frame. They gazed on the scene. The narrow coffin was bathed in sunshine. At the foot of it, on a lace cushion, was a silver crucifix. To the left the holy-water sprinkler lay in its font. The tall wax tapers were burning with almost invisible flames. Beneath the hangings, the branches of the trees with their purple shoots formed a kind of bower. It was a nook full of the beauty of spring, and over it streamed the golden sunshine irradiating the blossoms with which the coffin was covered. It seemed as if flowers had been raining down; there were clusters of white roses, white camellias, white lilac, white carnations, heaped in a snowy mass of petals; the coffin was hidden from sight, and from the pall some of the white blossoms were falling, the ground being strewn with periwinkles and hyacinths. The few persons passing along the Rue Vineuse paused with a smile of tender emotion before this sunny garden where the little body lay at peace amongst the flowers. There seemed to be a music stealing up from the snowy surroundings; in the glare of light the purity of the blossoms grew dazzling, and the sun flushed hangings, nosegays, and wreaths of flowers, with a very semblance of life. Over the roses a bee flew humming. "Oh, the flowers! the flowers!" murmured Helene, powerless to say another word. She pressed her handkerchief to her lips, and her eyes filled with tears. Jeanne must be warm, she thought, and with this idea a wave of emotion rose in her bosom; she felt very grateful to those who had enveloped her child in flowers. She wished to go forward, and Monsieur Rambaud made no effort to hold her back. How sweet was the scene beneath the cloud of drapery! Perfumes were wafted upwards; the air was warm and still. Helene stooped down and chose one rose only, that she might place it in her bosom. But suddenly she commenced to tremble, and Monsieur Rambaud became uneasy. "Don't stay here," he said, as he drew her away. "You promised not to make yourself unwell." He was attempting to lead her into the pavilion when the door of the drawing-room was thrown open. Pauline was the first to appear. She had undertaken the duty of arranging the funeral procession. One by one, the little girls stepped into the garden. Their coming seemed like some sudden outburst of bloom, a miraculous flowering of May. In the open air the white skirts expanded, streaked moire-like by the sunshine with shades of the utmost delicacy. An apple-tree above was raining down its blossoms; gossamer-threads were floating to and fro; the dresses were instinct with all the purity of spring. And their number still increased; they already surrounded the lawn; they yet lightly descended the steps, sailing on like downy balls suddenly expanding beneath the open sky. The garden was now a snowy mass, and as Helene gazed on the crowd of little girls, a memory awoke within her. She remembered another joyous season, with its ball and the gay twinkling of tiny feet. She once more saw Marguerite in her milk-girl costume, with her can hanging from her waist; and Sophie, dressed as a waiting-maid, and revolving on the arm of her sister Blanche, whose trappings as Folly gave out a merry tinkle of bells. She thought, too, of the five Levasseur girls, and of the Red Riding-Hoods, whose number had seemed endless, with their ever-recurring cloaks of poppy-colored satin edged with black velvet; while little Mademoiselle Guiraud, with her Alsatian butterfly bow in her hair, danced as if demented opposite a Harlequin twice as tall as herself. To-day they were all arrayed in white. Jeanne, too, was in white, her head laid amongst white flowers on the white satin pillow. The delicate-faced Japanese maiden, with hair transfixed by long pins, and purple tunic embroidered with birds, was leaving them for ever in a gown of snowy white. "How tall they have all grown!" exclaimed Helene, as she burst into tears. They were all there but her daughter; she alone was missing. Monsieur Rambaud led her to the pavilion; but she remained on the threshold, anxious to see the funeral procession start. Several of the ladies bowed to her quietly. The children looked at her, with some astonishment in their blue eyes. Meanwhile Pauline was hovering round, giving orders. She lowered her voice for the occasion, but at times forgot herself. "Now, be good children! Look, you little stupid, you are dirty already! I'll come for you in a minute; don't stir." The hearse drove up; it was time to start, but Madame Deberle appeared, exclaiming: "The bouquets have been forgotten! Quick, Pauline, the bouquets!" Some little confusion ensued. A bouquet of white roses had been prepared for each little girl; and these bouquets now had to be distributed. The children, in an ecstasy of delight, held the great clusters of flowers in front of them as though they had been wax tapers; Lucien, still at Marguerite's side, daintily inhaled the perfume of her blossoms as she held them to his face. All these little maidens, their hands filled with flowers, looked radiant with happiness in the golden light; but suddenly their faces grew grave as they perceived the men placing the coffin on the hearse. "Is she inside that thing?" asked Sophie in a whisper. Her sister Blanche nodded assent. Then, in her turn, she said: "For men it's as big as this!" She was referring to the coffin, and stretched out her arms to their widest extent. However, little Marguerite, whose nose was buried amongst her roses, was seized with a fit of laughter; it was the flowers, said she, which tickled her. Then the others in turn buried their noses in their bouquets to find out if it were so; but they were remonstrated with, and they all became grave once more. The funeral procession was now filing into the street. At the corner of the Rue Vineuse a woman without a cap, and with tattered shoes on her feet, wept and wiped her cheeks with the corner of her apron. People stood at many windows, and exclamations of pity ascended through the stillness of the street. Hung with white silver-fringed drapery the hearse rolled on without a sound; nothing fell on the ear save the measured tread of the two white horses, deadened by the solid earthen roadway. The bouquets and wreaths, borne on the funeral car, formed a very harvest of flowers; the coffin was hidden by them; every jolt tossed the heaped-up mass, and the hearse slowly sprinkled the street with lilac blossom. From each of the four corners streamed a long ribbon of white watered silk, held by four little girls--Sophie and Marguerite, one of the Levasseur family, and little Mademoiselle Guiraud, who was so small and so uncertain on her legs that her mother walked beside her. The others, in a close body, surrounded the hearse, each bearing her bouquet of roses. They walked slowly, their veils waved, and the wheels rolled on amidst all this muslin, as though borne along on a cloud, from which smiled the tender faces of cherubs. Then behind, following Monsieur Rambaud, who bowed his pale face, came several ladies and little boys, Rosalie, Zephyrin, and the servants of Madame Deberle. To these succeeded five empty mourning carriages. And as the hearse passed along the sunny street like a car symbolical of springtide, a number of white pigeons wheeled over the mourners' heads. "Good heavens! how annoying!" exclaimed Madame Deberle when she saw the procession start off. "If only Henri had postponed that consultation! I told him how it would be!" She did not know what to do with Helene, who remained prostrate on a seat in the pavilion. Henri might have stayed with her and afforded her some consolation. His absence was a horrible nuisance. Luckily, Mademoiselle Aurelie was glad to offer her services; she had no liking for such solemn scenes, and while watching over Helene would be able to attend to the luncheon which had to be prepared ere the children's return. So Juliette hastened after the funeral, which was proceeding towards the church by way of the Rue de Passy. The garden was now deserted; a few workmen only were folding up the hangings. All that remained on the gravelled path over which Jeanne had been carried were the scattered petals of a camellia. And Helene, suddenly lapsing into loneliness and stillness, was thrilled once more with the anguish of this eternal separation. Once again--only once again!--to be at her darling's side! The never-fading thought that Jeanne was leaving her in anger, with a face that spoke solely of gloomy hatred, seared her heart like a red-hot iron. She well divined that Mademoiselle Aurelie was there to watch her, and cast about for some opportunity to escape and hasten to the cemetery. "Yes, it's a dreadful loss," began the old maid, comfortably seated in an easy-chair. "I myself should have worshipped children, and little girls in particular. Ah, well! when I think of it I am pleased that I never married. It saves a lot of grief!" It was thus she thought to divert the mother. She chatted away about one of her friends who had had six children; they were now all dead. Another lady had been left a widow with a big lad who struck her; he might die, and there would be no difficulty in comforting her. Helene appeared to be listening to all this; she did not stir, but her whole frame quivered with impatience. "You are calmer now," said Mademoiselle Aurelie, after a time. "Well, in the end we always have to get the better of our feelings." The dining-room communicated with the Japanese pavilion, and, rising up, the old maid opened the door and peered into the room. The table, she saw, was covered with pastry and cakes. Meantime, in an instant Helene sped through the garden; the gate was still open, the workmen were just carrying away their ladder. On the left the Rue Vineuse turns into the Rue des Reservoirs, from which the cemetery of Passy can be entered. On the Boulevard de la Muette a huge retaining wall has been reared, and the cemetery stretches like an immense terrace commanding the heights, the Trocadero, the avenues, and the whole expanse of Paris. In twenty steps Helene had reached the yawning gateway, and saw before her the lonely expanse of white gravestones and black crosses. She entered. At the corners of the first walk two large lilac trees were budding. There were but few burials here; weeds grew thickly, and a few cypress trees threw solemn shadows across the green. Helene hurried straight on; a troop of frightened sparrows flew off, and a grave-digger raised his head towards her after flinging aside a shovelful of earth. The procession had probably not yet arrived from the church; the cemetery seemed empty to her. She turned to the right, and advanced almost to the edge of the terrace parapet; but, on looking round, she saw behind a cluster of acacias the little girls in white upon their knees before the temporary vault into which Jeanne's remains had a moment before been lowered. Abbe Jouve, with outstretched hand, was giving the farewell benediction. She heard nothing but the dull thud with which the stone slab of the vault fell back into its place. All was over. Meanwhile, however, Pauline had observed her and pointed her out to Madame Deberle, who almost gave way to anger. "What!" she exclaimed; "she has come. But it isn't at all proper; it's very bad taste!"[*] [*] In France, among the aristocracy and the upper _bourgeoisie_--to which Madame Deberle belonged--mothers seldom, if ever, attend the funerals of their children, or widows those of the husbands they have lost. They are supposed to be so prostrated by grief as to be unable to appear in public. This explanation was necessary, as otherwise the reader might not understand the force of Madame Deberle's remarks. So saying she stepped forward, showing Helene by the expression of her face that she disapproved of her presence. Some other ladies also followed with inquisitive looks. Monsieur Rambaud, however, had already rejoined the bereaved mother, and stood silent by her side. She was leaning against one of the acacias, feeling faint, and weary with the sight of all those mourners. She nodded her head in recognition of their sympathetic words, but all the while she was stifling with the thought that she had come too late; for she had heard the noise of the stone falling back into its place. Her eyes ever turned towards the vault, the step of which a cemetery keeper was sweeping. "Pauline, see to the children," said Madame Deberle. The little girls rose from their knees looking like a flock of white sparrows. A few of the tinier ones, lost among their petticoats, had seated themselves on the ground, and had to be picked up. While Jeanne was being lowered down, the older girls had leaned forward to see the bottom of the cavity. It was so dark they had shuddered and turned pale. Sophie assured her companions in a whisper that one remained there for years and years. "At nighttime too?" asked one of the little Levasseur girls. "Of course--at night too--always!" Oh, the night! Blanche was nearly dead with the idea. And they all looked at one another with dilated eyes, as if they had just heard some story about robbers. However, when they had regained their feet, and stood grouped around the vault, released from their mourning duties, their cheeks became pink again; it must all be untrue, those stories could only have been told for fun. The spot seemed pleasant, so pretty with its long grass; what capital games they might have had at hide-and-seek behind all the tombstones! Their little feet were already itching to dance away, and their white dresses fluttered like wings. Amidst the graveyard stillness the warm sunshine lazily streamed down, flushing their faces. Lucien had thrust his hand beneath Marguerite's veil, and was feeling her hair and asking if she put anything on it, to make it so yellow. The little one drew herself up, and he told her that they would marry each other some day. To this Marguerite had no objection, but she was afraid that he might pull her hair. His hands were still wandering over it; it seemed to him as soft as highly-glazed letter-paper. "Don't go so far away," called Pauline. "Well, we'll leave now," said Madame Deberle. "There's nothing more to be done, and the children must be hungry." The little girls, who had scattered like some boarding-school at play, had to be marshalled together once more. They were counted, and baby Guiraud was missing; but she was at last seen in the distance, gravely toddling along a path with her mother's parasol. The ladies then turned towards the gateway, driving the stream of white dresses before them. Madame Berthier congratulated Pauline on her marriage, which was to take place during the following month. Madame Deberle informed them that she was setting out in three days' time for Naples, with her husband and Lucien. The crowd now quickly disappeared; Zephyrin and Rosalie were the last to remain. Then in their turn they went off, linked together, arm-in-arm, delighted with their outing, although their hearts were heavy with grief. Their pace was slow, and for a moment longer they could be seen at the end of the path, with the sunshine dancing over them. "Come," murmured Monsieur Rambaud to Helene. With a gesture she entreated him to wait. She was alone, and to her it seemed as though a page had been torn from the book of her life. As soon as the last of the mourners had disappeared, she knelt before the tomb with a painful effort. Abbe Jouve, robed in his surplice, had not yet risen to his feet. Both prayed for a long time. Then, without speaking, but with a glowing glance of loving-kindness and pardon, the priest assisted her to rise. "Give her your arm," he said to Monsieur Rambaud. Towards the horizon stretched Paris, all golden in the radiance of that spring morning. In the cemetery a chaffinch was singing. CHAPTER XXV. Two years were past and gone. One morning in December the little cemetery lay slumbering in the intense cold. Since the evening before snow had been falling, a fine snow, which a north wind blew before it. From the paling sky the flakes now fell at rarer intervals, light and buoyant, like feathers. The snow was already hardening, and a thick trimming of seeming swan's-down edged the parapet of the terrace. Beyond this white line lay Paris, against the gloomy grey on the horizon. Madame Rambaud was still praying on her knees in the snow before the grave of Jeanne. Her husband had but a moment before risen silently to his feet. Helene and her old lover had been married in November at Marseilles. Monsieur Rambaud had disposed of his business near the Central Markets, and had come to Paris for three days, in order to conclude the transaction. The carriage now awaiting them in the Rue des Reservoirs was to take them back to their hotel, and thence with their travelling-trunks to the railway station. Helene had made the journey with the one thought of kneeling here. She remained motionless, with drooping head, as if dreaming, and unconscious of the cold ground that chilled her knees. Meanwhile the wind was falling. Monsieur Rambaud had stepped to the terrace, leaving her to the mute anguish which memory evoked. A haze was stealing over the outlying districts of Paris, whose immensity faded away in this pale, vague mist. Round the Trocadero the city was of a leaden hue and lifeless, while the last snowflakes slowly fluttered down in pale specks against the gloomy background. Beyond the chimneys of the Army Bakehouse, the brick towers of which had a coppery tint, these white dots descended more thickly; a gauze seemed to be floating in the air, falling to earth thread by thread. Not a breath stirred as the dream-like shower sleepily and rhythmically descended from the atmosphere. As they neared the roofs the flakes seemed to falter in their flight; in myriads they ceaselessly pillowed themselves on one another, in such intense silence that even blossoms shedding their petals make more noise; and from this moving mass, whose descent through space was inaudible, there sprang a sense of such intense peacefulness that earth and life were forgotten. A milky whiteness spread more and more over the whole heavens though they were still darkened here and there by wreaths of smoke. Little by little, bright clusters of houses became plainly visible; a bird's-eye view was obtained of the whole city, intersected by streets and squares, which with their shadowy depths described the framework of the several districts. Helene had slowly risen. On the snow remained the imprint of her knees. Wrapped in a large, dark mantle trimmed with fur, she seemed amidst the surrounding white very tall and broad-shouldered. The border of her bonnet, a twisted band of black velvet, looked like a diadem throwing a shadow on her forehead. She had regained her beautiful, placid face with grey eyes and pearly teeth. Her chin was full and rounded, as in the olden days, giving her an air of sturdy sense and determination. As she turned her head, her profile once more assumed statuesque severity and purity. Beneath the untroubled paleness of her cheeks her blood coursed calmly; everything showed that honor was again ruling her life. Two tears had rolled from under her eyelids; her present tranquillity came from her past sorrow. And she stood before the grave on which was reared a simple pillar inscribed with Jeanne's name and two dates, within which the dead child's brief existence was compassed. Around Helene stretched the cemetery, enveloped in its snowy pall, through which rose rusty monuments and iron crosses, like arms thrown up in agony. There was only one path visible in this lonely corner, and that had been made by the footmarks of Helene and Monsieur Rambaud. It was a spotless solitude where the dead lay sleeping. The walks were outlined by the shadowy, phantom-like trees. Ever and anon some snow fell noiselessly from a branch that had been too heavily burdened. But nothing else stirred. At the far end, some little while ago, a black tramping had passed by; some one was being buried beneath this snowy winding-sheet. And now another funeral train appeared on the left. Hearses and mourners went their way in silence, like shadows thrown upon a spotless linen cloth. Helene was awaking from her dream when she observed a beggar-woman crawling along near her. It was Mother Fetu, the snow deadening the sound of her huge man's boots, which were burst and bound round with bits of string. Never had Helene seen her weighed down by such intense misery, or covered with filthier rags, though she was fatter than ever, and wore a stupid look. In the foulest weather, despite hard frosts or drenching rain, the old woman now followed funerals in order to speculate on the pity of the charitable. She well knew that amongst the gravestones the fear of death makes people generous; and so she prowled from tomb to tomb, approaching the kneeling mourners at the moment they burst into tears, for she understood that they were then powerless to refuse her. She had entered with the last funeral train, and a moment previously had espied Helene. But she had not recognized her benefactress, and with gasps and sobs began to relate how she had two children at home who were dying of hunger. Helene listened to her, struck dumb by this apparition. The children were without fire to warm them; the elder was going off in a decline. But all at once Mother Fetu's words came to an end. Her brain was evidently working beneath the myriad wrinkles of her face, and her little eyes began to blink. Good gracious! it was her benefactress! Heaven, then, had hearkened to her prayers! And without seeking to explain the story about the children, she plunged into a whining tale, with a ceaseless rush of words. Several of her teeth were missing, and she could be understood with difficulty. The gracious God had sent every affliction on her head, she declared. The gentleman lodger had gone away, and she had only just been enabled to rise after lying for three months in bed; yes, the old pain still remained, it now gripped her everywhere; a neighbor had told her that a spider must have got in through her mouth while she was asleep. If she had only had a little fire, she could have warmed her stomach; that was the only thing that could relieve her now. But nothing could be had for nothing--not even a match. Perhaps she was right in thinking that madame had been travelling? That was her own concern, of course. At all events, she looked very well, and fresh, and beautiful. God would requite her for all her kindness. Then, as Helene began to draw out her purse, Mother Fetu drew breath, leaning against the railing that encircled Jeanne's grave. The funeral processions had vanished from sight. Somewhere in a grave close at hand a digger, whom they could not see, was wielding his pickaxe with regular strokes. Meanwhile the old woman had regained her breath, and her eyes were riveted on the purse. Then, anxious to extort as large a sum as possible, she displayed considerable cunning, and spoke of the other lady. Nobody could say that she was not a charitable lady; still, she did not know what to do with her money--it never did one much good. Warily did she glance at Helene as she spoke. And next she ventured to mention the doctor's name. Oh! he was good. Last summer he had again gone on a journey with his wife. Their boy was thriving; he was a fine child. But just then Helene's fingers, as she opened the purse, began to tremble, and Mother Fetu immediately changed her tone. In her stupidity and bewilderment she had only now realized that the good lady was standing beside her daughter's grave. She stammered, gasped, and tried to bring tears to her eyes. Jeanne, said she, had been so dainty a darling, with such loves of little hands; she could still see her giving her silver in charity. What long hair she had! and how her large eyes filled with tears when she gazed on the poor! Ah! there was no replacing such an angel; there were no more to be found like her, were they even to search the whole of Passy. And when the fine days came, said Mother Fetu, she would gather some daisies in the moat of the fortifications and place them on her tomb. Then, however, she lapsed into silence frightened by the gesture with which Helene cut her short. Was it possible, she thought, that she could no longer find the right thing to say? Her good lady did not weep, and only gave her a twenty-sou piece. Monsieur Rambaud, meanwhile, had walked towards them from the parapet of the terrace. Helene hastened to rejoin him. At the sight of the gentleman Mother Fetu's eyes began to sparkle. He was unknown to her; he must be a new-comer. Dragging her feet along, she followed Helene, invoking every blessing of Heaven on her head; and when she had crept close to Monsieur Rambaud, she again spoke of the doctor. Ah! his would be a magnificent funeral when he died, were the poor people whom he had attended for nothing to follow his corpse! He was rather fickle in his loves--nobody could deny that. There were ladies in Passy who knew him well. But all that didn't prevent him from worshipping his wife--such a pretty lady, who, had she wished, might have easily gone wrong, but had given up such ideas long ago. Their home was quite a turtle-doves' nest now. Had madame paid them a visit yet? They were certain to be at home; she had but a few moments previously observed that the shutters were open in the Rue Vineuse. They had formerly had such regard for madame that surely they would be delighted to receive her with open arms! The old hag leered at Monsieur Rambaud as she thus mumbled away. He listened to her with the composure of a brave man. The memories that were being called up before him brought no shadow to his unruffled face. Only it occurred to him that the pertinacity of the old beggar was annoying Helene, and so he hastened to fumble in his pocket, in his turn giving her some alms, and at the same time waving her away. The moment her eyes rested on another silver coin Mother Fetu burst into loud thanks. She would buy some wood at once; she would be able to warm her afflicted body--that was the only thing now to give her stomach any relief. Yes, the doctor's home was quite a nest of turtle-doves, and the proof was that the lady had only last winter given birth to a second child--a beautiful little daughter, rosy-cheeked and fat, who must now be nearly fourteen months old. On the day of the baptism the doctor had put a hundred sous into her hand at the door of the church. Ah! good hearts came together. Madame had brought her good luck. Pray God that madame might never have a sorrow, but every good fortune! yes, might that come to pass in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost! Helene stood upright gazing on Paris, while Mother Fetu vanished among the tombs, muttering three _Paters_ and three _Aves_. The snow had ceased falling; the last of the flakes had fluttered slowly and wearily on to the roofs; and through the dissolving mist the golden sun could be seen tinging the pearly-grey expanse of heaven with a pink glow. Over Montmartre a belt of blue fringed the horizon; but it was so faint and delicate that it seemed but a shadow such as white satin might throw. Paris was gradually detaching itself from amidst the smoke, spreading out more broadly with its snowy expanses the frigid cloak which held it in death-like quiescence. There were now no longer any fleeting specks of white making the city shudder, and quivering in pale waves over the dull-brown house-fronts. Amidst the masses of snow that girt them round the dwellings stood out black and gloomy, as though mouldy with centuries of damp. Entire streets appeared to be in ruins, as if undermined by some gunpowder explosion, with roofs ready to give way and windows already driven in. But gradually, as the belt of blue broadened in the direction of Montmartre, there came a stream of light, pure and cool as the waters of a spring; and Paris once more shone out as under a glass, which lent even to the outlying districts the distinctness of a Japanese picture. Wrapped in her fur mantle, with her hands clinging idly to the cuffs of the sleeves, Helene was musing. With the persistency of an echo one thought unceasingly pursued her--a child, a fat, rosy daughter, had been born to them. In her imagination she could picture her at the love-compelling age when Jeanne had commenced to prattle. Baby girls are such darlings when fourteen months old! She counted the months--fourteen: that made two years when she took the remaining period into consideration--exactly the time within a fortnight. Then her brain conjured up a sunny picture of Italy, a realm of dreamland, with golden fruits where lovers wandered through the perfumed nights, with arms round one another's waists. Henri and Juliette were pacing before her eyes beneath the light of the moon. They loved as husband and wife do when passion is once more awakened within them. To think of it--a tiny girl, rosy and fat, its bare body flushed by the warm sunshine, while it strives to stammer words which its mother arrests with kisses! And Helene thought of all this without any anger; her heart was mute, yet seemingly derived yet greater quietude from the sadness of her spirit. The land of the sun had vanished from her vision; her eyes wandered slowly over Paris, on whose huge frame winter had laid his freezing hand. Above the Pantheon another patch of blue was now spreading in the heavens. Meanwhile memory was recalling the past to life. At Marseilles she had spent her days in a state of coma. One morning as she went along the Rue des Petites-Maries, she had burst out sobbing in front of the home of her childhood. That was the last occasion on which she had wept. Monsieur Rambaud was her frequent visitor; she felt his presence near her to be a protection. Towards autumn she had one evening seen him enter, with red eyes and in the agony of a great sorrow; his brother, Abbe Jouve, was dead. In her turn she comforted him. What followed she could not recall with any exactitude of detail. The Abbe ever seemed to stand behind them, and influenced by thought of him she succumbed resignedly. When M. Rambaud once more hinted at his wish, she had nothing to say in refusal. It seemed to her that what he asked was but sensible. Of her own accord, as her period of mourning was drawing to an end, she calmly arranged all the details with him. His hands trembled in a transport of tenderness. It should be as she pleased; he had waited for months; a sign sufficed him. They were married in mourning garb. On the wedding night he, like her first husband, kissed her bare feet--feet fair as though fashioned out of marble. And thus life began once more. While the belt of blue was broadening on the horizon, this awakening of memory came with an astounding effect on Helene. Had she lived through a year of madness, then? To-day, as she pictured the woman who had lived for nearly three years in that room in the Rue Vineuse, she imagined that she was passing judgment on some stranger, whose conduct revolted and surprised her. How fearfully foolish had been her act! how abominably wicked! Yet she had not sought it. She had been living peacefully, hidden in her nook, absorbed in the love of her daughter. Untroubled by any curious thoughts, by any desire, she had seen the road of life lying before her. But a breath had swept by, and she had fallen. Even at this moment she was unable to explain it; she had evidently ceased to be herself; another mind and heart had controlled her actions. Was it possible? She had done those things? Then an icy chill ran through her; she saw Jeanne borne away beneath roses. But in the torpor begotten of her grief she grew very calm again, once more without a longing or curiosity, once more proceeding along the path of duty that lay so straight before her. Life had again begun for her, fraught with austere peacefulness and pride of honesty. Monsieur Rambaud now moved near her to lead her from this place of sadness. But Helene silently signed to him her wish to linger a little longer. Approaching the parapet she gazed below into the Avenue de la Muette, where a long line of old cabs in the last stage of decay stretched beside the footpath. The hoods and wheels looked blanched, the rusty horses seemed to have been rotting there since the dark ages. Some cabmen sat motionless, freezing within their frozen cloaks. Over the snow other vehicles were crawling along, one after the other, with the utmost difficulty. The animals were losing their foothold, and stretching out their necks, while their drivers with many oaths descended from their seats and held them by the bridle; and through the windows you could see the faces of the patient "fares," reclining against the cushions, and resigning themselves to the stern necessity of taking three-quarters of an hour to cover a distance which in other weather would have been accomplished in ten minutes. The rumbling of the wheels was deadened by the snow; only the voices vibrated upward, sounding shrill and distinct amidst the silence of the streets; there were loud calls, the laughing exclamations of people slipping on the icy paths, the angry whip-cracking of carters, and the snorting of terrified horses. In the distance, to the right, the lofty trees on the quay seemed to be spun of glass, like huge Venetian chandeliers, whose flower-decked arms the designer had whimsically twisted. The icy north wind had transformed the trunks into columns, over which waved downy boughs and feathery tufts, an exquisite tracery of black twigs edged with white trimmings. It was freezing, and not a breath stirred in the pure air. Then Helene told her heart that she had known nothing of Henri. For a year she had seen him almost every day; he had lingered for hours and hours near her, to speak to her and gaze into her eyes. Yet she knew nothing of him. Whence had he come? how had he crept into her intimacy? what manner of man was he that she had yielded to him--she who would rather have perished than yield to another? She knew nothing of him; it had all sprung from some sudden tottering of her reason. He had been a stranger to her on the last as on the first day. In vain did she patch together little scattered things and circumstances--his words, his acts, everything that her memory recalled concerning him. He loved his wife and his child; he smiled with delicate grace; he outwardly appeared a well-bred man. Then she saw him again with inflamed visage, and trembling with passion. But weeks passed, and he vanished from her sight. At this moment she could not have said where she had spoken to him for the last time. He had passed away, and his shadow had gone with him. Their story had no other ending. She knew him not. Over the city the sky had now become blue, and every cloud had vanished. Wearied with her memories, and rejoicing in the purity before her, Helene raised her head. The blue of the heavens was exquisitely clear, but still very pale in the light of the sun, which hung low on the horizon, and glittered like a silver lamp. In that icy temperature its rays shed no heat on the glittering snow. Below stretched the expanses of roofs--the tiles of the Army Bakehouse, and the slates of the houses on the quay--like sheets of white cloth fringed with black. On the other bank of the river, the square stretch of the Champ-de-Mars seemed a steppe, the black dots of the straggling vehicles making one think of sledges skimming along with tinkling bells; while the elms on the Quai d'Orsay, dwarfed by the distance, looked like crystal flowers bristling with sharp points. Through all the snow-white sea the Seine rolled its muddy waters edged by the ermine of its banks; since the evening before ice had been floating down, and you could clearly see the masses crushing against the piers of the Pont des Invalides, and vanishing swiftly beneath the arches. The bridges, growing more and more delicate with the distance, seemed like the steps of a ladder of white lace reaching as far as the sparkling walls of the Cite, above which the towers of Notre-Dame reared their snow-white crests. On the left the level plain was broken up by other peaks. The Church of Saint-Augustin, the Opera House, the Tower of Saint-Jacques, looked like mountains clad with eternal snow. Nearer at hand the pavilions of the Tuileries and the Louvre, joined together by newly erected buildings, resembled a ridge of hills with spotless summits. On the right, too, were the white tops of the Invalides, of Saint-Sulpice, and the Pantheon, the last in the dim distance, outlining against the sky a palace of fairyland with dressings of bluish marble. Not a sound broke the stillness. Grey-looking hollows revealed the presence of the streets; the public squares were like yawning crevasses. Whole lines of houses had vanished. The fronts of the neighboring dwellings alone showed distinctly with the thousand streaks of light reflected from their windows. Beyond, the expanse of snow intermingled and merged into a seeming lake, whose blue shadows blended with the blue of the sky. Huge and clear in the bright, frosty atmosphere, Paris glittered in the light of the silver sun. Then Helene for the last time let her glance sweep over the unpitying city which also remained unknown to her. She saw it once more, tranquil and with immortal beauty amidst the snow, the same as when she had left it, the same as it had been every day for three long years. Paris to her was full of her past life. In its presence she had loved, in its presence Jeanne had died. But this companion of her every-day existence retained on its mighty face a wondrous serenity, unruffled by any emotion, as though it were but a mute witness of the laughter and the tears which the Seine seemed to roll in its flood. She had, according to her mood, endowed it with monstrous cruelty or almighty goodness. To-day she felt that she would be ever ignorant of it, in its indifference and immensity. It spread before her; it was life. However, Monsieur Rambaud now laid a light hand on her arm to lead her away. His kindly face was troubled, and he whispered: "Do not give yourself pain." He divined her every thought, and this was all he could say. Madame Rambaud looked at him, and her sorrow became appeased. Her cheeks were flushed by the cold; her eyes sparkled. Her memories were already far away. Life was beginning again. "I'm not quite certain whether I shut the big trunk properly," she exclaimed. Monsieur Rambaud promised that he would make sure. Their train started at noon, and they had plenty of time. Some gravel was being scattered on the streets; their cab would not take an hour. But, all at once, he raised his voice: "I believe you've forgotten the fishing-rods!" said he. "Oh, yes; quite!" she answered, surprised and vexed at her forgetfulness. "We ought to have bought them yesterday!" The rods in question were very handy ones, the like of which could not be purchased at Marseilles. They there owned near the sea a small country house, where they purposed spending the summer. Monsieur Rambaud looked at his watch. On their way to the railway station they would still be able to buy the rods, and could tie them up with the umbrellas. Then he led her from the place, tramping along, and taking short cuts between the graves. The cemetery was empty; only the imprint of their feet now remained on the snow. Jeanne, dead, lay alone, facing Paris, for ever and for ever. AFTERWARD There can be no doubt in the mind of the judicial critic that in the pages of "A Love Episode" the reader finds more of the poetical, more of the delicately artistic, more of the subtle emanation of creative and analytical genius, than in any other of Zola's works, with perhaps one exception. The masterly series of which this book is a part furnishes a well-stocked gallery of pictures by which posterity will receive vivid and adequate impressions of life in France during a certain period. There was a strain of Greek blood in Zola's veins. It would almost seem that down through the ages with this blood there had come to him a touch of that old Greek fatalism, or belief in destiny or necessity. The Greek tragedies are pervaded and permeated, steeped and dyed with this idea of relentless fate. It is called heredity, in these modern days. Heredity plus environment,--in these we find the keynote of the great productions of the leader of the "naturalistic" school of fiction. It has been said that art, in itself, should have no moral. It has been further charged that the tendencies of some of Zola's works are hurtful. But, in the books of this master, the aberrations of vice are nowhere made attractive, or insidiously alluring. The shadow of expiation, remorse, punishment, retribution is ever present, like a death's-head at a feast. The day of reckoning comes, and bitterly do the culprits realize that the tortuous game of vice is not worth the candle. Casuistical theologians may attempt to explain away the notions of punishment in the life to come, of retribution beyond the grave. But the shallowest thinker will not deny the realities of remorse. To how many confessions, to how many suicides has it led? Of how many reformed lives has it been the mainspring? The great lecturer, John B. Gough, used to tell a story of a railway employee whose mind was overthrown by his disastrous error in misplacing a switch, and who spent his days in the mad-house repeating the phrase: "If I only had, if I only had." His was not an intentional or wilful dereliction. But in the hearts of how many repentant sinners does there not echo through life a similar mournful refrain. This lesson has been taught by Zola in more than one of his romances. In "A Love Episode" how poignant is this expiation! In all literature there is nothing like the portrayal of the punishment of Helene Grandjean. Helene and little Jeanne are reversions of type. The old "neurosis," seen in earlier branches of the family, reappears in these characters. Readers of the series will know where it began. Poor little Jeanne, most pathetic of creations, is a study in abnormal jealousy, a jealousy which seems to be clairvoyant, full of supernatural intuitions, turning everything to suspicion, a jealousy which blights and kills. Could the memory of those weeks of anguish fade from Helene's soul? This dying of a broken heart is not merely the figment of a poet's fancy. It has happened in real life. The coming of death, save in the case of the very aged, seems, nearly always, brutally cruel, at least to those friends who survive. Parents know what it is to sit with bated breath and despairing heart beside the bed of a sinking child. Seconds seem hours, and hours weeks. The impotency to succour, the powerlessness to save, the dumb despair, the overwhelming grief, all these are sorrowful realities. How vividly are they pictured by Zola. And, added to this keenness of grief in the case of Helene Grandjean, was the sense that her fault had contributed to the illness of her daughter. Each sigh of pain was a reproach. The pallid and ever-paling cheek was a whip of scorpions, lashing the mother's naked soul. Will ethical teachers say that there is no salutary moral lesson in this vivid picture? To many it seems better than a cart-load of dull tracts or somnolent homilies. Poor, pathetic little Jeanne, lying there in the cemetery of Passy--where later was erected the real tomb of Marie Bashkirtseff, though dead she yet spoke a lesson of contrition to her mother. And though the second marriage of Helene has been styled an anti-climax, yet it is true enough to life. It does not remove the logical and artistic inference that the memory of Jeanne's sufferings lingered with ever recurring poignancy in the mother's heart. In a few bold lines Zola sketches a living character. Take the picture of old Mere Fetu. One really feels her disagreeable presence, and is annoyed with her whining, leering, fawning, sycophancy. One almost resents her introduction into the pages of the book. There is something palpably odious about her personality. A pleasing contrast is formed by the pendant portraits of the awkward little soldier and his kitchen-sweetheart. This homely and wholesome couple one may meet any afternoon in Paris, on leave-of-absence days. Their portraits, and the delicious description of the children's party, are evidently studies from life. With such vivid verisimilitude is the latter presented that one imagines, the day after reading the book, that he has been present at the pleasant function, and has admired the fluffy darlings, in their dainty costumes, with their chubby cavaliers. It is barely fair to an author to give him the credit of knowing something about the proper relative proportions of his characters. And so, although Dr. Deberle is somewhat shadowy, he certainly serves the author's purpose, and--well, Dr. Deberle is not the hero of "An Episode of Love." Rambaud and the good Abbe Jouve are certainly strong enough. There seems to be a touch of Dickens about them. Cities sometimes seem to be great organisms. Each has an individuality, a specific identity, so marked, and peculiarities so especially characteristic of itself, that one might almost allow it a soul. Down through the centuries has fair Lutetia come, growing in the artistic graces, until now she stands the playground of princes and the capital of the world, even as mighty Rome among the ancients. And shall we object, because a few pages of "A Love Episode" are devoted to descriptions of Paris? Rather let us be thankful for them. These descriptions of the wonderful old city form a glorious pentatych. They are invaluable to two classes of readers, those who have visited Paris and those who have not. To the former they recall the days in which the spirit of the French metropolis seemed to possess their being and to take them under its wondrous spell. To the latter they supply hints of the majesty and attractiveness of Paris, and give some inkling of its power to please. And Zola loved his Paris as a sailor loves the sea. C. C. STARKWEATHER. 
45449	----	ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE PRACTICAL MYSTIC BY THE SAME AUTHOR --------------------- ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES OF THE WAR THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE AND OTHER ESSAYS THE CELTIC TEMPERAMENT MODERN MYSTICISM AND OTHER ESSAYS PARISIAN PORTRAITS THE HUMOUR OF THE UNDERMAN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS LA VIE ET LES HOMMES (_in French_) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE PRACTICAL MYSTIC BY FRANCIS GRIERSON AUTHOR OF "MODERN MYSTICISM," "ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES OF THE WAR," "THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS," ETC. NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD MCMXVIII COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co. New York, U. S. A. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS _The Practical Mysticism of Abraham Lincoln_ 9 _The Divine Will_ 12 _The Mystical Awakening_ 13 _The Agnostic and the Mystic_ 17 _The Logic of the Supernatural_ 19 _The Mystical Mood_ 21 "_Going into the Silence_" 22 _Invisible Powers_ 24 _The Fusion of Spirit and Matter_ 26 _His Miraculous Progress_ 28 _A Prophetic Witness_ 30 _Lincoln's Simplicity_ 32 _Lincoln's Clairvoyant Wit_ 34 _A Prophetic Vision of Hades_ 37 _Shakespeare and Lincoln_ 40 _A Prophecy Fulfilled_ 42 _The Ordinances of Heaven_ 44 _Lincoln's Face_ 48 _The Great Debate_ 49 _Forecastings and Premonitions_ 52 _Illumination of the Spirit_ 54 _Tycho Brahe and Lincoln_ 56 _Herndon's Analysis and Testimony_ 58 _An Original Mind_ 60 _The Great Books_ 61 _Veneration and Truth_ 63 _The Great Puzzle_ 64 _Lincoln's Energy and Will_ 65 _Nature and Prophecy_ 67 _The Seal of Nature_ 68 _Law and Authority_ 70 _Lincoln as Critic_ 73 _His Style_ 74 _Lincoln's Serenity_ 75 _The Romance of His Character_ 77 _President by the Grace of God_ 79 _Science and the Mystical_ 80 _The Old and the New_ 81 _Destiny versus Will_ 82 _James Jacquess--Practical Mystic_ 85 _Images and Dreams_ 89 _The New Era_ 92 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ABRAHAM LINCOLN THE PRACTICAL MYSTIC _The Practical Mysticism of Abraham Lincoln_ A knowledge of the influences which ruled the life of Lincoln, the greatest of practical mystics, is essential now that a new form of paganism and slavery threatens humanity. In Lincoln's time the black slaves of America had to be freed; in our time the white slaves of Europe have to be freed. We have returned to the conquest. History is being repeated, but on a far vaster scale. The whole world is groaning under the threats and deeds of tyranny that seeks to become absolute. What Abraham Lincoln stood for in the middle of the nineteenth century the English-speaking peoples must stand for at the beginning of the twentieth. Materialism produced Prussian autocracy. A spiritual power brought America safely through the ordeals of the Civil War. But the material and the spiritual cannot both rule at the same time. One must yield authority to the other. And we cannot succeed by denying the very thing which caused Lincoln to triumph over all enemies and obstacles. In 1862 the Reverend Byron Sutherland went with some friends of the President to call upon him. On November 15th, 1872, Dr. Sutherland wrote to the Reverend J. A. Reed:-- "The President began by saying, 'The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension. "Who, by searching, can find Him out?" Now, judging after the manner of men, taking counsel of our sympathies and feelings, if it had been left to us to determine it, we would have had no war. And, going farther back, to the occasion of it, we would have had no evil. There is the mystery of the universe which no man can solve, and it is at that point that human understanding backs down. There is nothing left but for the heart of man to take up faith and believe where it cannot reason. Now, I believe we are all agents and instruments of Divine Providence. On both sides we are working out the will of God. Yet how strange the spectacle! Here is one half of the nation prostrated in prayer that God will help to destroy the Union and build up a government upon the corner-stone of human bondage. And here is the other half, equally earnest in their prayers and efforts to defeat a purpose which they regard as so repugnant to their ideas of human nature and the rights of society, as well as liberty and independence. They want slavery; we want freedom. They want a servile class; we want to make equality practicable as far as possible. And they are Christians and we are Christians. They and we are praying and fighting for results exactly the opposite. What must God think of such a posture of affairs? There is but one solution--self-deception. Somewhere there is a fearful heresy in our religion, and I cannot think it lies in the love of liberty and in the aspirations of the human soul. I hold myself in my present position, and with the authority invested in me, as an instrument of Providence. I have my own views and purposes. I have my convictions of duty and my ideas of what is right to be done. But I am conscious every moment that all I am, and all I have, is subject to the control of a Higher Power. Nevertheless, I am no fatalist. I believe in the supremacy of the human conscience, and that men are responsible beings; that God has a right to hold them--and will hold them--to a strict personal account for the deeds done in the body.... God alone knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our Republic. The times are dark. The spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power and the mercy of God alone can save us.'" _The Divine Will_ September 30th, 1862, when everything looked dark and the future of America was uncertain, Lincoln wrote the following meditation on the Divine Will:-- "The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to affect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true: that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His great power on the minds of the contestants he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without war. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." _The Mystical Awakening_ A mystical epoch is upon us, and like all vital movements it has come without systematic propaganda and without organised effort. The world-upheaval did not cause this new movement; it has simply advanced it by stripping materialism of its illusive trappings and showing it naked to the civilised world. It is not the work of one man or any single group, sect, or nation. Its characteristics are Anglo-American, and its development will prove the only antidote to the new pagan Kultur, which opposes not only Christian morals but everything that places the spiritual above the material. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest practical mystic the world has known for nineteen hundred years, is the one man whose life and example ought to be clearly set before the English-speaking peoples at this supreme climax in the history of civilisation. The thoughts, incidents, manifestations, which the majority of historians glide over with a careless touch, or sidetrack because of the lack of moral courage, are the only things that count in the life of that great seer. His whole existence was controlled by influences beyond the ken of the most astute politicians of his time. His genius was superhuman. And since this world is not governed by chance, a power was at work which fore-ordained him for his unique mission. W. H. Herndon has this to say in his biography of the immortal statesman:-- "Nature had burned into him her holy fire and stamped him with the seal of her greatness." In other words, the seal of the practical mystic, which may be taken as the keynote to the spiritual theme of his marvellous experiences. For it is futile to continue to harp on Lincoln's political acumen, his knowledge of law, his understanding of the people, his judgment of individuals, his poverty, his disregard of the conventional, as causes of his greatness. The same may be said of thousands of others, yet there is no other Lincoln. To arrive at a just appreciation of the man and his achievements I felt it essential to read very carefully all the books written by those most intimate with the great President--a study which has required a period of thirty years. The writing of "The Valley of Shadows" was one of the results of that study, that book being, as far as I could make it, a depiction of the spiritual atmosphere of the Lincoln country in Lincoln's time--the atmosphere in which he lived and moved, thought and worked. Too long has the materialism of weights and bushel measures dimmed the light that shines from the example of that incomparable seer. Too long have politicians used his name to fish for gudgeons in the muddy waters of sectional politics. Too long has Lincoln been held up in speeches and electioneering manoeuvres as a politician who arrived because he was honest. As if Webster, Calhoun, Clay, Sumner, and scores of others were not equally honest without ever attaining a world-influence. What caused Lincoln's honesty? His conscience. And what created his conscience? His innate mystical knowledge of the difference between good and evil, philosophers and puppets, the solemn dignity of duty and the sham dignity of ambition. His was the clear vision in the darkest hours while others were magnifying events through long-distance spectacles, or minimising them in near-sighted details. The mystical trend now visible in England and America is not a revival but a renaissance. It has come in the natural course of events, being the only thing that responds to the spiritual aspirations and needs of the dispensation ushered in by the great war. The renaissance of practical mysticism is now apparent both in and outside the churches; but its greatest influence is exerted on that large class which, before the war, had no religious convictions of any kind. We have arrived at a climax in history. Old methods and systems are passing, but not the old fundamental truths. Conditions, not principles, have changed, and our attitude towards things has changed with conditions. Thousands can now see clearly where once they saw through a veil of agnosticism. It required a mighty force to lift the veil, and a vast amount of machinery and metaphysics had to combine to accomplish such a miracle; but the miracle is here, alive with a vital flame unknown since the days of the Prophets and the Apostles. The spiritual renaissance is not a drawing-room fad. It is not founded on a passing whim. Novelties and opinions shift with the wind, and people who are influenced by them are influenced by shadows. Mere notions can never take the place of ideas. Novelties possess no fundamental basis on which the spirit of man can build, and the difference between an idea and a notion is the difference between a university and a lunatic asylum. The spiritual renaissance is not confined to any particular profession, and this is why it is making headway among people of such divers views. The war has crushed the juice out of the orange on the tree of pleasure and nothing is left but the peel over which materialism is slipping to its doom. This stupendous movement was not sprung upon the world in a night. It has had its slow stages of development. Everything comes and goes in cycles which are graded in kind and proceed in accordance with immutable law. This spiritual movement has had its special phases of preparation. It is not true that the voices of the prophets have been inaudible. What is true is that every voice that has sounded since the dawn of historical civilisation has been heard and heeded. Emerson uttered a great mystical truth when he said: "A book written for three will gravitate to three," and, similarly, a voice intended for three will be heard and heeded by three. _The Agnostic and the Mystic_ Herndon's agnosticism left no lasting impression on the mind of Lincoln. This is remarkable, because Herndon was a man with a powerful originality and a strong will. Lincoln was more or less influenced by Herndon at the beginning of their acquaintance but such influence did not last long. Another curious thing is that Mr. Herndon, in spite of his probity, his practical ability, and his talent as a lawyer, never became known beyond his own state. He never was put forward as a leader. Perhaps he entertained no particular ambition to lead, being too much of a philosopher, but the remark is in order that what was lacking in his temperament was just a spark of that mystical illumination which gave Lincoln his faith, his conviction, and his power. No doubt Herndon was singularly fitted for the position he held with Lincoln for the space of twenty years. Had he been a leader in public affairs he could not have aided Lincoln as he did. That the great President never had a mentor is plain to all who have studied the best biographies. He did sometimes act upon suggestions from friends in matters of minor importance in his private affairs. When, one day, after he had become President, Mrs. Lincoln informed him that the gossips declared he was being ruled by Seward, his reply was: "I may not rule myself out, certainly Seward shall not. The only ruler is my conscience--following God in it--and these men will have to learn that yet." And Seward did learn it, as well as Stanton and Chase, and every member of the Cabinet, and all others who came within the radius of his mystical circuit. Indeed, the generals all learnt it, some of them to their sorrow, long before the war ended. Lincoln's authority became apparent to all whenever he delivered a speech on important occasions. Then, as Judge Whitney has said, he was "as terrible as an army with banners." Col. Henry Watterson, in his memorable address before the Lincoln Union, in Chicago, puts the question: "Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? Whose hand smote the lyre of the Scottish ploughman? God alone. And if Lincoln was not inspired of God then there is no such thing as special Providence or the interposition of Divine Power in the affairs of men." _The Logic of the Supernatural_ Judge Henry C. Whitney has asked the following questions:--"By what magic spell was this, the greatest moral transformation in all profane history, wrought? What Genius sought out this roving child of the forest, this obscure flatboatman, and placed him on the lonely heights of immortal fame? Why was this best of men made the chief propitiation for our national sins? Was his progress causative or fortuitous; was it logical or supernatural; was the Unseen Power, or he himself, the architect of his fortune? "The blunders that were committed by raw and reckless commanders in the field were sufficient to make angels weep, but they were all mosaics in the process of Fate to work out the Divine plan. If we could see the whole scheme of human redemption it would be quite clear to us that not only Abraham Lincoln, U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, but equally Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Raphael Semmes were necessary instruments of the great disposer of events--that the bullet which terminated the glorious career of the President was not more surely sped by Fate to its mark than was the bullet which ended the life of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh and which ultimately averted ruin to the Union forces on that blood-stained field, and that in the sublime procession of destiny all events, apparent accidents, calamities, crimes, and blunders were agents of the omnipotent will, now as cause, then as interlude or eddy, anon as effort, all working, apparently, and to human comprehension, fortuitously, but in reality all harmoniously to their Divine appointed end." _The Mystical Mood_ "There was to me," says Henry B. Rankin, in his "Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln," "always an unapproachable grandeur in the man when he was in this mood of inner solitude. It isolated and--I always thought--exalted him above his ordinary life. History will discern and reverently disclose the strength in Lincoln's character and the executive foresight for which this mood gave him revealings." And the Reverend Joseph Fort Newton adds to the sentiments of his friend Rankin these words: "Lincoln was a man whom to know was a kind of religion. His deep musings on the ways of God, on the souls of men, on the principles of justice and the laws of liberty bore fruit in exalted character and exact insight. Hence, a style of speech remarkable for its lucidity, direction, and forthright power, with no waste of words, tinged always by a temperament at once elusive and alluring, which Bryce compares to the weighty eloquence of Cromwell without its haziness." "_Going into the Silence_" During an important criminal trial Amzi McWilliams said: "Lincoln will pitch in heavy now for he has hid." One who knew him declared: "He seemed never to be alone. I have frequently seen him, in the midst of a Court in session, with his mind completely withdrawn from the busy scene before his eyes, as completely abstracted as if he were in absolute solitude." Judge Whitney wrote: "In religion, Lincoln was in essence a mystic, and all his adoration was in accordance with the tenets of that order," a judgment which agrees with that of Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Southern Confederacy: "With Lincoln, the Union rose to the sublimity of a religious Mysticism." The mystical mood cannot be likened to any other mood. People in a hurry never experience such a mental state. Personal ambition forbids it and the feeling of vainglory renders such a condition impossible. What renders the life of Lincoln so instructive is the fact that with him everything was so natural. He did not experiment; he did not practise special hours and seasons; he had no fixed times for this or that. He professed no subtle methods of inducing moods and took no stimulants. Nature and a mystical Providence arranged and provided. His moods were between himself and his God. No one ever dared approach him as to the why or the wherefore of his silence. And it is proper here to comment on the instinctive good sense of the American people in whose midst Lincoln passed his whole life--they instinctively knew too much to presume upon the privacy of his mystical moods. In this their attitude was wholly admirable. The American people were at that time practical, democratic seers, without whom the greatest practical mystic could not have existed. That Lincoln possessed intuition and illumination without resorting to human aid is clear and irrefutable. His words were simple and his actions were simple, like those of the Hebrew seers. He announced and he pronounced, without subtle explanations or mysterious formulas. All which proves that practical mysticism can nourish as much under a Democracy as under any other form of government. Men do not receive their gifts from those in power. They come into the world with them. Lincoln was opposed on all sides from the start. He had to contend with poverty, provincial ignorance, aristocratic prejudice, academical opposition, and he had against him his homely features, his awkward bearing, and the lack of influential patronage. He had no family connections that could be of assistance anywhere at any time. Never had there been a man of great intellect so absolutely alone in the intellectual world, so removed from social and political favours of time and circumstance. _Invisible Powers_ We are compelled to look at all sides of Lincoln's political career in order to arrive at a just appreciation of his stupendous achievements, and when that is done we have to dismiss the notion that he succeeded because of his brilliant intellectual gifts. Others possessed great intellects without attaining altitudes of commanding power and enduring fame. Why did the influence of Cæsar, Darius, Alexander, Bonaparte, and Bismarck cease as soon as they passed away? Because the influence they exerted was based on material dominion. With the collapse of the material everything collapses. The material can never go beyond or take precedence of the spiritual. Marcus Aurelius is read to-day because he placed spiritual things above all worldly possessions and privileges. The universe was created by a Supreme Mind and the direction of affairs is in the hands of this All-Seeing Power, manifesting in all forms--sometimes personal, sometimes collective. In Lincoln's case it took a pronounced individual form, isolated and unique, as in Moses. The ease with which Lincoln overcame opposition amazed those who were near him. They judged it miraculous. Miracles are manifestations for which science has no definition, no analysis. Lincoln's intelligence was not bound by the known rules and laws of science. It requires intuition and illumination for its realisation. Such intelligence cannot be handled in detail as chemists handle the elements of matter. In the mystical world all the elements, forces, and combinations act and develop together as one manifestation at one time. No mental chemistry can separate them. _The Fusion of Spirit and Matter_ "The existence of a great man," says Victor Cousin, the French philosopher, "is not the creation of arbitrary choice; he is not a thing that may, or may not, exist; he is not merely an individual; too much, or too little, of individuality are equally destructive to the character of a great man. On the one hand, individuality of itself is an element of what is pitiful and little, because particularity, the contingent and the finite, tends unceasingly to division, to dissolution, and to nothingness. On the other hand, every general tends to absolute unity. It possesses greatness but it is exposed to the risk of losing itself in abstractions. The great man is the harmonious combination of what is particular with what is general. This combination constitutes the standard value of his greatness, and it involves a two-fold condition: first, of representing the general spirit of his nation, because it is in his relation to that general spirit that his greatness consists; and, secondly, of representing the general spirit which confers upon his greatness in his own person, in a real form, that is, in a finite, positive, visible, and determinate form; so that what is general may not suppress what is particular; and that which is particular may not dissipate and dissolve what is general--that the infinite and the finite may be blended together in that proportion which truly constitutes human greatness." All which applies to Lincoln. "Conceive a great machine," wrote Guizot, the historian, "the design of which is centred in a single mind, though its various parts are entrusted to various workmen, separated from, and strangers to, each other. No one of them understands the work as a whole, nor the general result which he concerts in producing; but every one executes with intelligence and freedom, by rational and voluntary acts, the particular task assigned to him. It is thus that by the hand of man the designs of Providence are wrought out in the government of the world. It is thus that the two great facts, which are apparent in the history of civilisation, come to co-exist. On the one hand, those portions of it which may be considered as fated, or which happen without the control of human knowledge or will; on the other hand, the part played in it by the freedom and intelligence of man and what he contributes to it by means of his own knowledge and will." _His Miraculous Progress_ One of the most searching biographers of Lincoln maintains that between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight he displayed no sign of embryonic or assured greatness. If this be true, it means that none of Lincoln's early friends were intuitive enough to discover his greatness. Even the best writers who have dealt with this fascinating subject have failed to see all the facts, all the influences, all the correlated powers, in connection with what looks to many like a life of miracle. Intelligence and power are not attained by any mental hocus-pocus or metaphysics. Diamonds in the rough are still diamonds, or no one would think of having them polished. The same law works in nature as in human nature. The great man is born, but he is not born with all his faculties developed, and he, like others, must pass through stages of progressive development. There is not one law for genius and another for mere talent. A distinguished writer says:-- "Lincoln achieved greatness, but can the genesis of the mystery be analysed?" Certainly not by the ordinary process of ordinary philosophers and scientists. What all writers up to the present have failed to see is that Lincoln's powers were a combination of the normal-practical and the practical-supernatural. His supernaturalism was positive, mathematical, and absolute. The only things which Lincoln had to learn as he went were the modes of application. He had to learn system and method, as was natural, but the principle came into the world with him. Everything that is concrete appears simple. The various qualities and elements that produce what we call mental illumination are hidden from the crowd and even from those who most profess to understand. Jesse Dubois wrote to Judge Whitney that "after having been intimately associated with Lincoln for twenty-five years I now find that I never knew him." The great man had unconsciously deceived his friends because of his outward simplicity. And this outward freedom was backed by his simplicity of speech and direct logic. It was all too simple. They were fooled by the outward material because the inward mystical took that form. His friends liked the man and worked to elect him principally for that reason, and this is why they were astonished later on when the practical mystic rose clear above all systems of politics and all the accepted philosophies, and accomplished the miraculous. The impossible happened. The President had to go more than half way through the Civil War before the real Lincoln became manifest to observing critics. _A Prophetic Witness_ In his book, "Life on the Circuit with Lincoln," Judge Whitney comments:-- "As early as 1856, independent of all contemporary opinion, I conceived the idea that Mr. Lincoln was a prodigy of intellectual and moral force. Others associated with us deemed him superlatively great, but still human. I went farther; my view was definite and pronounced, that Lincoln was ordained for a greater than a merely human mission, and I avowed this belief as early as that time. "His character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man. He understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses. If a witness told the truth without evasion Lincoln was respectful and patronising to him, but he would score a perjured witness unmercifully. He took no notes but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so. I remember once we all, Court and lawyers, except Lincoln, insisted that a witness had sworn so-and-so, but it turned out that Lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar. But with all his candour, there was a method and shrewdness which Leonard Swett well understood and which he has thus forcibly expressed: 'As the trial progressed, where most lawyers object, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit this in, or that; and sometimes when his adversary could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so. When he did object to the Court, when he heard his objections answered, he would often say, "Well, I reckon I must be wrong."' "He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case, but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the whole thing is unravelled the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep. By giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case, and, the whole case hanging on the seventh, he traded everything which would give him the least aid in carrying that. Any one who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back, in a ditch." _Lincoln's Simplicity_ There are two kinds of simplicity--one is without reason or discrimination, that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty; the other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner, dress, verbiage, and meets all subterfuge, artifice, and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable. Lincoln was the most simple man in dress, in speech, in manners, in looks, that ever stood before the world in so great a rôle, but his intellect was anything but simple. He was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manoeuvres. Bacon has an essay showing the difference between cunning and wisdom, and it may be said that Lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning. His management of a law case was that of a seer. The points he made were not made for personal gratification but for love of truth and justice. Not only he did not want to risk being deceived, he took every precaution to insure against deception. Here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvellous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyse. The combination was unheard of! The lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience, they could only cite examples in their own lives, and this man Lincoln was unlike all that had been and all that was. Lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naïf that it deceived all the members of his Cabinet during the first two years of the war. They were used to smart men, clever men, academical men. They called for the routine of respectability and official dignity. To their minds the President seemed pliable and willing, and they set about instructing him in the a, b, c of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship. The President was in no way frustrated. He understood them in advance, having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment. He had found them honest but inexperienced, sincere but saucy. He knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility. At the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings. Some of them expected to act as the President's pilot, while others expected to be captain of the ship-of-state with the President as pilot. It took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the West was captain, pilot, and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed. In one sense, he wore out their obstinacy by his patience. In another, he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment, but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand with what power he acted, with what prescience he divined. What mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual, the clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs, the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness. _Lincoln's Clairvoyant Wit_ Lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion. A Southern woman begged the President to have her husband released from a Northern prison, "for," she said, "although he is a Rebel he is a very religious man." Lincoln replied: "I am glad to hear that, because any man who wants to disrupt this Union needs all the religion in sight to save him." He treated with indifference people who commandeered. A haughty woman came to Lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son. "I demand it," she said, "not as a favour but as a right. Sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington, my father fought at New Orleans, and my husband was killed at Monterey." "I guess, Madam," was Lincoln's reply, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give some one else a chance." When Hugh McCullough, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's second term, presented a delegation of New York bankers at the White House, McCullough said: "These gentlemen of New York have come on to see the Secretary of the Treasury about our new loan. As bankers, they are obliged to hold our national securities. I can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty, for, as the good Book says, 'Where the treasure is there will the heart be also.'" To which Lincoln replied: "There is another text, Mr. McCullough, I remember, that might equally apply, 'Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together.'" Lincoln condemned as tedious a certain Greek history. When a diplomat present said: "The author of that history, Mr. President, is one of the profoundest scholars of the age; no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning." "Yes," replied Lincoln, "or come up drier." When in Chicago in 1860, the mayor, John Wentworth, asked Lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to _run_ him, Lincoln replied that "events and not a man's own exertions made presidents." To Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln remarked: "Judd and Ray and those fellows think I don't see anything, but I see all around them. I see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves." They were deceived, not by Lincoln, who never cared what individuals thought, but by Nature, which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions. Nature, the medium through which the Divine mind manifests, is, so to speak, a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction. Lincoln let them talk and even act, knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing. While the ward politicians and others, who thought themselves far superior, laid their plans, schemed, and intrigued, the man of clear vision awaited unperturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places. Little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the million of incidents that go to the making of one epoch-making event. The practical mystic is little concerned with incidents. The multitude do not know in what direction they are going, moved and influenced as they are by the incidental, the accidental, the shifting illusions in which they live, but the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced. Lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident. He understood their point of view. He did not entertain feelings of revenge. Hundreds of men, like John Wentworth, are only mentioned to-day because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics. _A Prophetic Vision of Hades_ That William Blake was a mystic of the practical kind there can be no question. In art and in poetry he had that illumination which Lincoln had in statesmanship. The New York _Times_ says:-- "That a century has failed to heap the dust of oblivion over England's 'Greatest Mystic,' William Blake, is exemplified by the reproduction in a recent issue of _Country Life_ of one of Blake's engravings for Dante's _Inferno_, in which four fiends with cruel faces are torturing a soul in Hell." The face of the chief devil, who is not actually engaged in the torture, but is an eager and interested spectator, might easily be taken for a portrait of the German Emperor. As suggested by W. F. Boudillon, the familiar, upturned moustachios must have puzzled Blake in his vision. He represented them as tusks growing from the corners of the mouth--it is to be noted that this fiend alone among the four has the tusks. It is recorded of Blake, as a lad, that his father would have apprenticed him to Rylands, the Court Engraver--a man much liked and in great prosperity at the time--but Blake objected, saying: "Father, I do not like his face; he looks as if he would live to be hanged." Twelve years later Rylands committed forgery, and the prophecy came true. Blake's visions, startling though they be, are not more startling than many prophecies made by Lincoln, as, for instance, his prophecy of prohibition, woman's rights, and the end of slavery, not to mention his visions concerning himself. The practical mystic sees _through_, the scientific materialist sees only, the surface. Eternity is the everlasting now. Blake drew a faithful portrait of the Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany long before the Kaiser was born, and Tycho Brahe predicted the birth of a Swedish conqueror and what he would accomplish. In these things there is no place for chance, nor is it true that the practical mystic is limited to poetry, or to art, or to music, or to religion, politics, and philosophy. Neither is the practical mystic confined to any particular social class or any creed. Abraham Lincoln could not have directed affairs had he been a recluse. Before he became an adept in the direction of material affairs he had to be familiar with the practical ways of the world, and as a lawyer he passed through a school that left no place for vague theories or vain illusions. He frequently stripped others of their illusions, but being free of illusions himself he had none to lose. This made him invulnerable. His enemies were swayed by theories; nothing short of knowledge sufficed for this man, who reduced his adversaries to the position where they were kept constantly on the alert to know what manoeuvre to employ next. They moved in a region of guess-work where there was no law except that of their own confusion and discomfiture. _Shakespeare and Lincoln_ "Lincoln," says Judge Whitney, "was one of the most heterogeneous characters that ever played a part in the great drama of history, and it was for this reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood; that he was, on the one hand, described as a mere humourist--a sort of Artemus Ward or Mark Twain--that it was thought that, by some 'irony of Fate,' a low comedian had got into the Presidential chair, and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration, while this modern Nero fiddled upon its ruins. "One of his peculiarities was his inequality of conduct, his dignity, interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity; his high aspiration and achievement, and his descent into the most primitive vales of listlessness." In the chief drawer of his cabinet table all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions, lacking only the final signature, applications for pardons from death penalties, laws awaiting executive action, and orders which, when launched, would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations. "Hence it was that superficial persons, who expected great achievements to be ushered in with a prologue, could not understand or appreciate that this great man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship, or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force." The mystic Shakespeare and the mystic Lincoln have a connecting link in their wit and humour. Had Shakespeare left us only two dramas--_Macbeth_ and _Othello_--no one would have dreamed of a creation like Falstaff emanating from the same mind, yet it is because of the union of the tragic and the humorous that Shakespeare is universally human, worldly wise as well as spiritual and metaphysical. Shakespeare makes of the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ a sort of clown with a spade, and throughout all his dramas wit and humour, pathos and tragedy, go hand in hand. Without his humour Shakespeare would have been little more than an English Racine. With Lincoln, humour was made to serve a high, psychic purpose. By its means he created a new atmosphere and new conditions through which he could all the more freely work and act. He brought humour into play for his own good as well as that of others. He was not a theorist, or a dreamer of dreams; he was a practical mystic. _A Prophecy Fulfilled_ In a letter written from Springfield, Illinois, August 15th, 1855, to the Hon. George Robertson, of Lexington, Kentucky, Lincoln said:-- "The Autocrat of all the Russias will proclaim his subjects free sooner than will our American Masters voluntarily give up their slaves." On the day before Lincoln's first inauguration as President of the United States the "Autocrat of all the Russias," Alexander the Second, by Imperial decree emancipated his serfs, while six weeks after the inauguration the "American Masters," headed by Jefferson Davis, began the great war of secession to perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery. This is only one of Lincoln's prophecies which proved true. In stating them he did not pass into an abnormal state. He spoke as one would speak of the coming weather. He did not consult the stars, nor any person, before making a prophetic statement. Seeing clearly was as natural to him as eating or sleeping. He was not a psychic machine, uttering thoughts which seemed strange and enigmatical to himself, because his intellectual and spiritual powers were part of himself. Men of genius are not instruments in the vulgar meaning of the word. They do not act in ignorance of what they are doing and saying. Lincoln, more than any other, could give deliberate reasons for what he did and said, and it is exceedingly difficult to name another in history who was under such logical and commanding control of all the moral and intellectual faculties. When he seemed to the superficial observer to be dreaming, he was reasoning, calculating, comparing, analysing, weighing, turning things upside down and inside out, until he satisfied the dictates of his conscience and his sense of moral responsibility. He placed no reliance on halfway measures and palliatives, no faith in the workings of chance. He therefore was not, and could never have been, a passive instrument in the hands of some unknown power. When it was said of a certain musician that he composed his operas under the direct influence of Mozart, the answer was: "Then who influenced Mozart?" Great originality belongs to the mystical unity of the Supreme Intelligence. Had Lincoln imitated Henry Clay, whom he so much admired as a statesman and thinker, what would have become of Lincoln and the country he governed? He who originates is authoritative, and, as Carlyle said, "All authority is mystical in its origin." In no single thing of importance did Lincoln copy any one's methods or systems. His trend of thought was at variance with the prevailing trend, even of those who were supposed to know the most. _The Ordinances of Heaven_ "Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?"--Job. Phenomena that arrive with the days, months, seasons, centuries, are accompanied by events of corresponding significance in the human world, for everything is related to everything else. In 1858 a new party came into being, headed by the prophet from the wilderness, who was as much a phenomenon in the human world as the comet of that year was in the starry heavens--an apparition first observed by the Florentine astronomer, Donati. Some scientific authorities give Donati's comet an orbit of two thousand, others three thousand years. Its advent was as unexpected as was the advent of Lincoln. Its immense orbit, the splendour of its train, its seeming close proximity to the earth, the presentiments which it inspired in millions of the people, corresponded with the sentiments and sensations inspired by the phenomenal progress of Lincoln, the avatar of democratic freedom and justice. The following description is taken from "The Valley of Shadows":-- "After a long period of cloudy weather the sky cleared, and when darkness closed in the night came with a revelation. Never had such a night been witnessed by living man, for a great comet hung suspended in the shimmering vault like an immense silver arrow dominating the world and all the constellations. An unparalleled radiance illumined the prairie, the atmosphere vibrated with a strange, mysterious glow, and as the eye looked upward it seemed as if the earth was moving slowly towards the stars. "The sky resembled a phantasmagoria seen from the summit of some far and fabulous Eden. The Milky Way spread across the zenith like a confluence of celestial altars flecked with myriads of gleaming tapers, and countless orbs rose out of the luminous veil like fleecy spires tipped with the blaze of opal and sapphire. "The great stellar clusters appeared as beacons on the shores of infinite worlds, and night was the window from which the soul looked out on eternity." Such was the celestial apparition that ushered in the new party which was to support Abraham Lincoln and send him to the White House. In all vital phenomena there is periodicity. The barometer comes to its minimum height for the day between four and five in the evening; again, it is at its maximum height between eight and ten in the morning and between eight and ten in the evening. The two first of these periods is when the electric tension is at its minimum; at its maximum during the two latter periods. The basic unit of the lunar day is twelve hours. An ordinary or solar day is two days, and an ordinary week is two weeks. This hebdomadal or heptal cycle governs, either in its multiple or submultiple, an immense number of phenomena in animal life in which the number seven has a prominent place. A Mr. Hay, of Edinburgh, writing some sixty years ago, says: "There is harmony of numbers in all nature--in the force of gravity, in the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light, electricity and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and plants, in the perceptions of the mind. Indeed, the direction of natural and physical science is towards a generalisation which shall express the fundamental laws of all by one simple numerical ratio. The mysticism of Pythagoras was vague only to the unlettered. It was a system of philosophy founded on existing mathematics which comprised more of the philosophy of numbers than our present." Philosophical students of human nature have taken note of the danger professional and business men encounter when they extend their mental activities beyond the hour of four p.m. (by the sun). Thousands fail because of their ignorance of the fundamental laws governing all things physical. The morning hours up to ten a.m. are just as dangerous for many who are highly susceptible to the electric tension which occurs up to that hour. The feeling that prevails from four to eight in the afternoon is one of mental or physical fatigue, that in the morning one of irritability. Lincoln was not immune from natural law. On one occasion, at five p.m., he was suddenly informed of the defeat of the Northern Forces, and it was feared by those who were present that he would fall to the ground. Mr. C. C. Coffin sprang forward to assist the President, who, however, succeeded in returning to the White House unaided. Nature creates the natural, man the unnatural. Solomon declared: "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose." _Lincoln's Face_ Knowledge, conviction, and certainty gave to Lincoln's face that penetrating power which could not have been assumed on occasion even by the most versatile and gifted actor. The two following quotations from "The Valley of Shadows" describe Lincoln's personal appearance and the emotions produced by the expression of his features:-- "'The sperrit air more in the eye than it air in the tongue,' said Elihu Gest, rising from his seat; 'if Abe Lincoln looked at the wust slave-driver long enough Satan would give up every time.' "'I see right away the difference a-twixt Lincoln en Douglas warn't so much in Lincoln bein' a good ways over six foot en Douglas a good ways under, ez it war in their eyes. The Jedge looked like he war speakin' agin time, but Abe Lincoln looked plumb through the meetin' into the everlastin'--the way Moses must hev looked when he see Canaan ahead--en I kin tell ye I never did see a man look that a-way.'" _The Great Debate_ The hour had struck for the supreme test between the forces of slavery, on one hand, and the forces of freedom, on the other. A vast throng gathered at Alton from every section of the country to hear the last public discussion between the two antagonists, Lincoln and Douglas, and from the surging sea of faces thousands of anxious eyes gazed upward at the group of politicians on the balcony like wrecked mariners scanning the horizon for the smallest sign of a white sail of hope. "This final debate resembled a duel between two men-of-war, the pick of a great fleet, all but these two sunk or abandoned in other waters, facing each other in the open, Douglas, the Little Giant, hurling at his opponent from his flagship of slavery his deadliest missiles, Lincoln calmly waiting to sink his antagonist by one single broadsider. "Regarded in the light of spiritual reality, Lincoln and Douglas were predestined to meet side by side in this discussion, and it is hardly possible to give an adequate idea of the startling difference between the two temperaments: Douglas--short, plump, and petulant; Lincoln--long, gaunt, and self-possessed; the one white-haired and florid, the other black-haired and swarthy; the one educated and polished, the other unlettered and primitive. "Judge Douglas opened the debate in a sonorous voice plainly heard by all, and with a look of mingled defiance and confidence he marshalled his facts and deduced his arguments. To the vigour of his attack there was added the prestige of the Senate Chamber, and it looked as if he would carry the majority with him. When, after a brilliant oratorical effort, he brought his speech to a close, it was amidst the shouts and yells of thousands of admirers. "And now, Abraham Lincoln, the man who in 1830 undertook to split for Mrs. Nancy Miller four hundred rails for every yard of jean dyed with walnut bark that would be required to make him a pair of trousers, the flat-boatman, local stump-orator, and country lawyer, rose from his seat, stretched his long bony limbs upward, as if to get them in working order, and stood like some solitary pine on a lonely summit, very tall, very dark, very gaunt, and very rugged, his swarthy features stamped with a sad serenity, and the instant he began to speak the mouth lost its heaviness, the eyes attained a wondrous illumination, and the people stood bewildered and breathless under the natural magic of the most original personality known to the English-speaking world since Robert Burns. "Every movement of his long muscular frame denoted inflexible earnestness, and a something issued forth, elemental and mystical, that told what the man had been, what he was, and what he would do in the future. Every look of the deep-set eyes, every movement of the prominent jaw, every wave of the brawny hand produced an impression, and before he had spoken twenty minutes the conviction took possession of thousands that here was the prophetic man of the present and the political saviour of the future." Thus we see how Lincoln influenced persons, groups, crowds, whether he was sitting or standing, arguing or talking, rendering an opinion or listening to counsel. _Forecasting and Premonitions_ Nothing great comes into the world unattended. Abraham Lincoln was surrounded by men and women who were predestined to their task without being fully aware of what they were doing. One of the most memorable mystical demonstrations ever recorded in any epoch occurred in the little town of Salem, Illinois, in August, 1837, when Lincoln was only twenty-three years of age, long before he had cut any figure in the political world. Accompanied by six lawyers and two doctors, Lincoln went from Springfield to Salem in a band-wagon to attend a camp-meeting. On the way Lincoln cracked jokes about the horses, the wagon, the lawyers, and many other things. When they arrived at the camp they found Doctor Peter Akers, one of the greatest Methodist preachers of the time, was about to preach a sermon on "The Dominion of Christ." The famous preacher declared that the Dominion of Christ could not come in America until slavery was destroyed. His sermon lasted three hours and he showed that a great civil war would put an end to human bondage. "I am not a prophet," he said, "but a student of the Prophets; American slavery will come to an end in some near decade, I think in the sixties." These words caused a profound sensation. In their excitement thousands surged about the preacher, but when at last he cried out: "Who can tell but that the man who shall lead us through this strife may be standing in this presence," a solemn stillness fell over the assembly. There, not more than thirty feet away, stood the lank figure of Lincoln, with his pensive face, a prophet as yet uninspired, a leader as yet unannounced. The preacher's words had fallen like a mystical baptism on the head of this obscure pioneer, as yet unanointed by the sacrificial fire of the coming national tragedy. When they returned to Springfield Lincoln remained silent for a long time. At last one of his friends asked him what he thought of the sermon and he replied that he "little dreamed that such power could be given to mortal man, for those words were from beyond the speaker. Peter Akers has convinced me that American slavery will go down with the crash of civil war." Then he added: "Gentlemen, you may be surprised and think it strange, but when the preacher was describing the civil war I distinctly saw myself, as in second sight, bearing an important part in that strife." The next morning Mr. Lincoln came very late to his office, and Mr. Herndon, glancing at his haggard face, exclaimed: "Why, Lincoln, what's the matter?" Then Lincoln told him about the great sermon and said: "I am utterly unable to shake myself free from the conviction that I shall be involved in that terrible war." _Illumination of the Spirit_ When Lincoln, young and unknown, visited New Orleans as a flat-boatman and saw men and women being sold at auction in the public mart, he said to the friend who was with him: "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I'll hit it hard." Who was this young man, whose clothes were in tatters, who was without patrons, to suggest such a thing as a chance to strike even a feeble blow at the institution of slavery? Dr. Gregg, commenting on this memorable incident, asks: "Why did Lincoln utter these words? Was it an illumination of the Spirit forecasting the Civil War? Was it a whisper by a divine messenger that he was to be the chosen one to wipe the thing from the earth and give deliverance to millions of his fellow men?" Few, if any, of Lincoln's biographers have touched on his early life with more than a superficial notion of its significance. Judge Whitney, in spite of his great knowledge and his deep insight, divides Lincoln's life into two parts, the first being uninspired, the second supernaturally wonderful. The truth is that the first part of his life contained a clear forecast of the second. Lincoln at the age of fifty-five was the same man, unchanged, excepting by experience. Only in fairy stories are people changed from fools into philosophers. As a boy Lincoln was unlike any other boy, always unique, self-centred in the best and highest sense, the like of whom did not exist in his or any other country. All through his early life there could be seen the signs and symbols of his coming power. How such a being came into the world science fails to explain. Back of the mystery there are other mysteries, and not in a thousand years of experiment will eugenics produce another such mortal, not in ten thousand years will science create anything spiritual or mystical. Science can never get beyond the material. If it ever controls the psychic intelligence, mediocrity will be the order of the day. The higher intelligence does not need control but development. This freedom Lincoln had, but back of that apparent freedom the mystical conditions existed, fixed and foreordained. The very men and women who assisted him had to be where he found them. To have been anywhere else they would have been out of their proper element. In the human world there are no misfits, only grades of development. _Tycho Brahe and Lincoln_ When Hugh Miller, the noted geologist, faced the inexplicable he committed suicide. But Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer, the greatest practical mystic the world of science has known, experienced a sense of joy and exhilaration every time he viewed the starry heavens through his telescope. He considered astronomy something "divine." His was the joyful pride of the seer who revels in the unexplained mysteries of the universe, and from time to time obtained clairvoyant glimpses of the working of the miracle. Brahe, like Abraham Lincoln, had moments when he perceived the inevitable with unalloyed vision. After carefully studying the comet of 1577 he declared that it announced the birth of a prince in Finland who should lay waste Germany and vanish in 1632. Gustave Adolphus was born in Finland, overran Germany, and died in 1632. Brahe was the forerunner of the true scientist, Lincoln the forerunner of the true statesman. It is not a fact that science and intuition are antagonistic. The antagonism exists only in the imagination of second-rate thinkers. The great discoverers always put the spiritual and the mystical above learning. Brahe and Newton, as scientists, were unequalled in their age and have not been surpassed in this. The Kultur of modern Germany has but emphasised the danger of pseudo science in all walks of life and made it plain that no nation can prosper under such an illusion. The Prussians have forced many to revert back to a consideration of the gifts of such men as Tycho Brahe, Newton, Lincoln, and the difference between their science and that of Kultur is a difference that strikes the normal thinker with amazement. The true scientist is a seer who discloses new facts and discovers hidden laws. The true scientific mystic creates, but the votaries of Kultur destroy without creating. Yet, they will be destroyed by their own weapons. Modern materialism will go down under the weight of the material. The denial of the mystical forces of the universe is the vulnerable spot in the scientific armour of Krupp-Kultur. Let any one who wishes to be convinced by crude facts alone read the history of Frederick, the so-called Great, and then read a history of Lincoln. Then let the student ask which is the greater nation to-day--Prussia, headed by Frederick's descendant, or America, represented by Woodrow Wilson, the legitimate outcome of Washington the inspired patriot, and Lincoln the inspired emancipator? _Herndon's Analysis and Testimony_ W. H. Herndon, for more than twenty years the law partner of Mr. Lincoln, delivered an address in Springfield, Illinois, upon the life and character of the lamented President, which for subtle analysis has few equals in biographical literature. The following are excerpts: "Mr. Lincoln's perceptions were slow, cold, and exact. Everything came to him in its precise shape and colour. To some men the world of matter and of man comes ornamented with beauty, life, and action, and hence more or less false and inexact. No lurking illusion or other error, false in itself, and clad for the moment in robes of splendour, ever passed undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his mind--that point that divides vision from the realm and home of thought." "Names to him were nothing, and titles naught--assumption always standing back abashed at his cold, intellectual glare. Neither his perceptions nor intellectual vision were perverted, distorted, or diseased. He saw all things through a perfect, mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there. He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative, but calm and precise. He threw his whole mental light around the object, and, in time, substance and quality stood apart; form and colour took their appropriate places, and all was clear and exact in his mind. In his mental view he crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham.... To some minds the world is all life, a soul beneath the material; but to Mr. Lincoln no life was individual or universal that did not manifest itself to him. His mind was his standard. His perceptions were cool, persistent, pitiless in pursuit of the truth. No error went undetected and no falsehood unexposed if he once was aroused in search of truth. _An Original Mind_ "Mr. Lincoln saw philosophy in a story and a schoolmaster in a joke. No man saw nature, fact, thing, from his standpoint. His was a new and original position, which was always suggesting, hinting something to him. Nature, insinuations, hints, and suggestions were new, fresh, original, and odd to him. The world, fact, man, principle, all had their powers of suggestion to his susceptible soul. They continually put him in mind of something known or unknown. Hence his power and tenacity of what is called association of ideas. His susceptibilities to all suggestions and hints enabled him at will to call up readily the associated and classified fact and idea. "Mr. Lincoln was often at a loss for a word and hence was compelled to resort to stories, and maxims, and jokes to embody his idea, that it might be comprehended. So true was this peculiar mental vision of his, that though mankind has been gathering, arranging, and classifying facts for thousands of years, Lincoln's peculiar standpoint could give him no advantage of other men's labour. Hence he tore up to the deep foundations all arrangements of facts, and coined and arranged new plans to govern himself. His labour was great, continuous, patient, and all-enduring. _The Great Books_ "The truth about the whole matter is that Mr. Lincoln read _less_ and thought _more_ than any man in his sphere in America. When young he read the Bible, and when of age he read Shakespeare. The latter book was scarcely ever out of his mind. Mr. Lincoln is acknowledged to have been a great man, but the question is, what made him great? I repeat, that he read less and thought more than any man of his standing in America, if not in the world. He possessed originality and power of thought in an eminent degree. He was cautious, cool, patient, and enduring. These are some of the grounds of his wonderful success. Not only was nature, man, fact, and principle suggestive to Mr. Lincoln, not only had he accurate and exact perceptions, but he was causative, i. e., his mind ran back behind all facts, things, and principles to their origin, history, and first cause--to that point where forces act at once as effect and cause. He would stop and pause in the street and analyse a machine. He would whittle things to a point and then count the numberless inclined planes, and their pitch, making the point. Mastering and defining this, he would then cut that point back, and get a broad transverse section of his pine stick, and peel and define that. Clocks, omnibuses, language, paddle-wheels, and idioms never escaped his observation and analysis. Before he could form any idea of anything, before he would express his opinion on any subject, he must know its origin and history, in substance and quality, in magnitude and gravity. He must know his subject inside and outside, upside and downside. "He searched his own mind and nature thoroughly, as I have often heard him say. He must analyse a sensation, an idea, and words, and run them back to their origin, history, purpose, and destiny. He was most emphatically a merciless analyser of facts, things, and principles. When all these processes had been well and thoroughly gone through, he could form an opinion and express it, but no sooner. Hence when he did speak his utterances rang out gold-like, quick, keen, and current upon the counters of the understanding. He reasoned logically, through analogy and comparison. All opponents dreaded him in his originality of idea, condensation, definition, and force of expression, and wo be to the man who hugged to his bosom a secret error if Mr. Lincoln got on the chase of it. I say, wo to him! Time could hide the error in no nook or corner of space in which he would not detect and expose it. _Veneration and Truth_ "The predominating elements of Mr. Lincoln's peculiar character, were: firstly, his great capacity and powers of reason; secondly, his excellent understanding; thirdly, an exalted idea of the sense of right and equity; and fourthly, his intense veneration of what was true and good. His reason ruled all other faculties of his mind. "His pursuit of truth was indefatigable, terrible. He reasoned from his well-chosen principles with such clearness, force, and compactness that the tallest intellects in the land bowed to him in this respect. "He came down from his throne of logic with irresistible and crushing force. His printed speeches prove this, but his speeches before the Supreme Courts of the State and Nation would demonstrate it. "Mr. Lincoln was an odd and original man; he lived by himself and out of himself. He was a very sensitive man, unobtrusive and gentlemanly, and often hid himself in the common mass of men in order to prevent the discovery of his individuality. He had no insulting egotism and no pompous pride; no haughtiness. He was not an upstart and had no insolence. He was a meek, quiet, unobtrusive gentleman. "Not only were Mr. Lincoln's perceptions good; not only was nature suggestive to him; not only was he original and strong; not only had he great reason and understanding; not only did he love the true and good; not only was he tender and kind--but, in due proportion, he had a glorious combination of them all. "He had no avarice in his nature or other like vice. He did not care who succeeded to the presidency of this or that Christian Association or Railroad Convention; who made the most money; who was going to Philadelphia, when and for what, and what were the costs of such a trip. He could not understand why men struggled for such things as these. _The Great Puzzle_ "One day, at Washington, he made this remark to me: 'If ever this free people, if this Government itself is ever utterly demoralised, it will come from this human wriggle and struggle for office--a way to live without work.' "It puzzled him at Washington to know and to get at the root of this dread desire, this contagious disease of national robbery in the nation's death-struggle. "This man, this long, bony, wiry, sad man, floated into our country in 1831, in a frail canoe, down the north fork of the Sangamon River, friendless, penniless, powerless, and alone--begging for work in our city--ragged, struggling for the common necessities of life. This man, this peculiar man, left us in 1861, the President of the United States, backed by friends, power, fame, and all human force." _Lincoln's Energy and Will_ Energy is usually a blind force in the conduct of human affairs and the greatest with which we have to deal. History is made up of the deeds of individuals with a surplus of energy, which overflows and damages governments as floods damage lands. Will, energy, and ambition are, in most cases, synonymous terms. Without energy the will breaks down, and without ambition energy and will would prove innocuous. No one can doubt that misdirected energy was at the bottom of much that moved the Prussians and that their ambitions were wholly material, limited to geographical boundaries. Lincoln displayed physical as well as mental energy in a supernormal degree; his will was as fixed as a mountain of adamant, while his ambition was not personal, but national and universal. Only the practical mystic could direct such forces with wisdom, and as we look still closer into the mystery of his temperament the question of pride and vanity arises, and their relation to ambition and will. In the first place, what causes ambition? Pride, answers the world. But the world is wrong. Ambition is not the result of pride but of vanity. Solomon, the wisest and greatest man of his time, was a proud man and a wise ruler until he began to import apes and peacocks. Then vanity usurped the place of pride and he came to the end of his temporal tether. Vanity caused Napoleon to have himself crowned Emperor of the French, and from that day his power declined. A proper sense of pride would have led him to stop where he was and refuse all further manifestations and developments of worldly honour. Pride tends to moral dignity and intellectual reticence, and that is why Lincoln blushed in the presence of the institution of slavery. His pride gave him an acute sense of shame and his honour an acute sense of justice. Only the vain will consent to live in idleness while others slave for them. Vanity induces anything from the ridiculous to the criminal, and those controlled by it are subject to absurd statements and ridiculous actions. They cannot avoid both. Washington and Lincoln were free from the fetters of ridicule. They were imbued with a subconscious pride which stood for the whole nation. _Nature and Prophecy_ Herndon says:-- "I cannot refrain from noting the views Lincoln held in reference to the great questions of moral and social reforms under which he classed suffrage for women, temperance, and slavery. 'All such questions, he observed one day, as we were discussing temperance in the office, 'must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be organised into law and woven into the fabric of all our institutions.'" As the Divine principle permeates all nature, so Lincoln, being a pure product of nature, possessed the secret consciousness of natural power, illumined by mystical intuition and guided by the higher forces of the spirit. He realised the superiority of mind over matter, of intelligence over ignorance, of wisdom over learning, of illumination over mere knowledge. He was another Marcus Aurelius, without the influence of paganism, free from the trammels of mythology. He inquired into the mystery of his own being and delved into the darkest corners of personality and character. Some of his deepest thoughts on the mysteries of life and death were never voiced by this man who never spoke unless he deemed it imperative to speak. Lincoln, indeed, never gossipped about people and books. He was not a gossip. His jokes were for a purpose, his talk was for a purpose, and his meditations were fundamental. _The Seal of Nature_ Herndon was right when he said that Lincoln's features were stamped with the seal of nature. This is the only seal that is beyond imitation. All else can be mimicked. We have seen how ghastly one or two persons appeared when they attempted to look like Lincoln. The imitation took on the appearance of pale, dull putty. The notion that Lincoln's personality could be imitated with success was quite in keeping with that other notion that the great President was, in spite of everything, just one of the common people. But Lincoln as he appears in popular histories, and Lincoln as he was known to his associates and those who came into personal contact with him, are two different persons. Perhaps no one has summed up the matter with such concision and force as Don Piatt, who knew him well:-- "With all his awkwardness of manner and utter disregard of social conventionalities that seemed to invite familiarity, there was something about Abraham Lincoln that enforced respect. No man presumed on the apparent invitation to be other than respectful. I was told at Springfield that this accompanied him through life. Among his rough associates, when young, he was leader, looked up to and obeyed, because they felt of his muscle and its readiness in use. Among his associates at the bar it was attributed to his wit, which kept his duller associates at a distance. But the fact was that this power came from a sense of reserve force of intellectual ability that no one took account of save in its results. Through one of those manifestations of nature that produce a Shakespeare at long intervals, a giant had been born to the poor whites of Kentucky and the sense of superiority possessed Lincoln at all times. Seward, Chase, and Stanton, great as they were, felt their inferiority to their master." _Law and Authority_ We are beginning to feel the reality of that power that lies above appearance and formula, that power manifested in Job and Isaiah, which we accept as inspiration in religion, intuition in philosophy, and illumination in art, producing saints in one age and mystical scientists in another. We float through the ether on a revolving miracle called the earth, returning again and again to attain the same figure on the dial of time. The things done by human automatons count for nothing in the course of destiny. We think we are wise when we invent a new name for an old truth; and vanity aims to confine the infinite within the limits of a stopper bottle or a glass showcase, or attain inspiration by means of a ouija board. Can any one conceive what would have happened to this country had Lincoln made use of such a contrivance to direct the course of his actions? This scourge of dead agnostics seems like an ironical stroke of nature to discount their disbelief. Not only does this clumsy instrument make wits like Mark Twain "talk like poor Pol," but it makes philosophers reason like first-grade pupils at our common schools. Immortality is destined to have the last word even though it be pronounced in the most fantastic manner. Lincoln believed in law, order, and authority. He believed in the mission of the churches. He was a regular worshipper in Dr. Gurley's Presbyterian congregation at the Capital. He was a praying president, like George Washington, and, while he was not a member of any church, he was convinced that all the churches were necessary. He was not a free-thinker, as that term is commonly used. Loose reasoning and vague, uncertain doctrines he could not abide. He demanded proofs and would not accept a man's word merely from sentimental motives. No one ever induced him to "side-track" from the main line of argument and reason. His attitude in the matter of inspiration and spiritual direction may be summed up in a few words spoken at the time a delegation of Chicago ministers came to him, urging him in God's name to free the slaves without further delay. His reply was that when the Almighty wanted him to free the slaves He would deal directly with Lincoln himself instead of indirectly through Chicago. A vacillating President would have been influenced by such a request at such a time, but the President had faith in his own illuminations and awaited orders from a Supreme source. Had he been influenced by advice given by all sorts of people who called at the White House on all sorts of missions, possessing no authority themselves, what turmoil and chaos would have resulted to the army and the Nation! Practical mystic that he was, he did not seek, nor wish for, advice from people in matters which concerned his own judgment alone. It is true that on several occasions he was approached by persons who came with messages of various kinds assumed to be spiritual, but Lincoln received them with a neutral politeness, sometimes mingled with a grim humour, as when Robert Dale Owen read to him a long manuscript presumed to be highly inspirational and illuminating, and Lincoln replied, "Well, for those who like that sort of thing that is the thing they would like." _Lincoln as Critic_ Nothing escaped Lincoln's powers of philosophical and metaphysical analysis. He did not read the Bible and Shakespeare merely for pleasure, as people read novels. He could give excellent reasons for everything he did. Even in his most listless moods he never lost his firm grip on affairs, both general and individual. When he read a book it was because there was something in it which helped him to penetrate deeper into the recesses of life and character. He would study a passage or a chapter until he had assimilated its wisdom and its mystical import. Lincoln was a natural critic. When Walt Whitman's "Leaves O' Grass" was first published a copy of the book was read and discussed by several of his friends in Springfield. Lincoln at once recognised the fact that a new poetic genius had appeared and he did not permit adverse opinions to influence his judgment. He cared nothing for the romantic in itself. He cared only for those phases of literature which induce serious philosophical or spiritual thought. While his partner read Carlyle, he read Shakespeare. In the Spring of 1862 the President spent several days at Fortress Monroe awaiting military operations upon the Peninsula. As a portion of the Cabinet were with him, that was temporarily the seat of government, and he bore with him constantly the burden of public affairs. His favourite diversion was reading Shakespeare. One day--it chanced to be the day before the capture of Norfolk--as he sat reading alone, he called to his side Colonel Le Grand B. Cannon. "You have been writing long enough, Colonel," he said, "come in here; I want to read you a passage in _Hamlet_." He read the discussion on ambition between Hamlet and his courtiers, and the soliloquy in which conscience debates of a future state. _His Style_ "No criticism of Mr. Lincoln," says the _Spectator_, "can be in any sense adequate which does not deal with his astonishing power over words. It is not too much to say of him that he is among the greatest masters of prose ever produced by the English race. Self-educated, or rather not educated at all in the ordinary sense, he contrived to obtain an insight and power in the handling and mechanism of letters such as has been given to but few men in his, or, indeed, in any age. That the gift of oratory should be a natural gift is understandable enough, for the methods of the orator, like those of the poet, are primarily sensuous and may well be instinctive.... Mr. Lincoln did not get his ability to handle prose through his gift of speech. It is in his conduct of the pedestrian portions of composition that Mr. Lincoln's genius for prose style is exhibited." Lincoln avoided the superfluous in writing as in speaking, and style came after the matter of his thought, not as a conscious effort while he was uttering his thoughts. He was not consciously a literary artist. When, in his famous inaugural address, he made "pray" rhyme with "away," it sounded like a false note struck in the movement of a great symphony. That blemish remains like a flaw in a diamond which cannot be removed, but the miracle remains that this master of men and moods accomplished in his speeches and letters what no one else accomplished in his time. _Lincoln's Serenity_ "Lincoln," says the same writer in the _Spectator_, "saw things as a disillusioned man sees them, and yet, in the bad sense, he never suffered any disillusionment. For suffusing and combining his other qualities was a serenity of mind which affected the whole man. He viewed the world too much as a whole to be greatly troubled or perplexed over its accidents. To this serenity of mind was due an almost total absence of indignation in the ordinary sense." This is true, because, as Walt Whitman says, "The foundations of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystic and spiritual." "Lincoln was, before all things, a gentleman," says the _Spectator_, "and the good taste inseparable from that character made it impossible for him to be spoiled by power and position. This grace and strength of character is never better shown than in the letters to his generals, victorious or defeated. If a general had to be reprimanded he did it as only the most perfect gentleman could do it." Nevertheless, the invulnerable President did show his anger or indignation on some few occasions. And justly so. As a rule he did not consider it worth his while to permit himself to be moved by the sayings and doings of any one. The foolish are unworthy of indignation; they must be dealt with quietly but effectively; while the others must be managed with gentle firmness backed by the fundamentally drastic. Fuss and fury were unknown to this pioneer politician, philosophical statesman, and mystical leader. No man can be serene who doubts himself. Lincoln, when in doubt as to the actions of others, did not grope in the darkness, but waited. His invincible trust in Providence held him aloof from the petty circumstances and daily routine of intrigue, and his imagination soared in the empyrean while those around him flattered themselves that he was being influenced or led by their counsels and their interests. He treated people who bedevilled him with importunities and all sorts of advice as the wise parent treats a child who asks for the impossible--he knew that a little waiting would wear them out and they would end by forgetting. Often, in place of a flat refusal, he would turn away the office-seeker by a sudden, adroit stroke of his humour, thus sending the man and his friends away smiling good-humouredly at Lincoln's inimitable tact. _The Romance of His Character_ There is a "romance of character" that accompanies people of exceptional achievements, as Emerson has so justly said, and Lincoln possessed it without being in the slightest degree conscious of the fact. This is one reason why his life surpasses in interest any book of fiction ever written. He united all the realism of pioneer life with the romance of the inexplicable and the fascination of the unexpected. Those who come to Lincoln in search of the shifting romance of bohemianism will be disappointed, for the romance of change and vacillation is the kind that leads to the poorhouse or the hospital. This romance of character, belonging, as it did, to the temperament of the man, was hidden from the multitude, but all could readily see the romance of the progressive events of his life. Lincoln was at times awed, but not alarmed, by the turn of affairs which placed him at the head of the nation. He realised the tremendous responsibility without regrets or fear. He was fully conscious of his mission but quite unconscious of the romantic elements which enveloped it, for Lincoln's life included both the "romance of character" and the romance of experience. Without the first, the second would have unfitted him for the heavy responsibilities of his high office later on. He did not seek experience for the sake of experience, like so many in our day who are under the illusion that truth and wisdom arrive perforce. He forced nothing. He followed a natural course of events, dealing with each according to the light of his own judgment, asking for no advice. Neither the romance of character nor the romance of experience comes to those who seek them. Self-consciousness dissipates romantic mystery. _President by the Grace of God_ Lincoln lived long enough to become convinced that everything exists for a purpose. He saw that the Rebellion had to be, and that in the seeming confusion of sentiments and interests the Divine ruled over all persons and parties. Events had to follow as ordained by the spiritual Power that lies behind appearance. Lincoln worked in the light; Czar Nicholas of Russia lived in the dark. He could not tell why he occupied the Russian throne. Lincoln knew why he occupied the White House. The Kaiser was not able to see why will, energy, and money should not rule the world. Never were the lessons taught by Lincoln's career so much needed as now, when a ruthless autocracy is seeking to get rid of all moral responsibility, while, on the other hand, thousands are awakening to the necessity of a new order, of fostering the mystical renaissance. _Science and the Mystical_ Quintilian said:-- "No man can become a perfect orator without a knowledge of geometry. It is not without reason that the greatest men have bestowed extreme attention on this science." Locke, the philosopher, gives the reason:-- "Geometry develops the habit of pursuing long trains of ideas which will remain with the student who will be enabled to pierce through the mazes of sophism and discover a latent truth, when persons who have not this habit will never find it." Lincoln was passionately fond of geometry. His oratory was based on logic, but his logic came from the mystical absolute, a geometric science of the soul which he alone could appropriate through his perception of fundamental principles of universal law. He could perceive that an idea is a personal conception of a mathematical truth, as distinguished from mere beliefs, notions, and sentiments. Others turned politics into the art of influencing crowds through their sentimental opinions; Lincoln engaged in trying to make them think logically. While others gave vague reasons for their political views he gave reasons based on law which he explained with simple force and lucid phraseology. He never attempted to tell all he knew. The practical mystic never does. He knew how he acquired his knowledge, but his reticence was as pronounced as his gift of expression. It was this quality of reticence that kept him from taking counsel from all sorts of statesmen and explaining the inexplicable. There was not a man among them that could have understood. In this, Lincoln was a mystic, full-fledged, initiated, as by centuries of experience. His innate wisdom told him exactly how much the people could understand, how much politicians could digest, and how much statesmen could divine. Not only did he hold the allegiance of the Whigs, but he gained the allegiance of the Abolitionists. This, indeed, was intellect illumined. _The Old and the New_ How old yet new are nature's moods and manifestations! How mysteriously the souvenirs of the past are revived and quickened in new forms, faces, and phenomena! The seasons come and go with varying moods and seem new, but they are older than the formulas of civilisation; strangers bring with them new influences, but we discover in them something familiar from the vague and shadowy past. Every single thing is related to every other thing, and illuminated minds are the periods that separate the cycles, but not the laws, of human progress. The form is new; the principle remains unchangeable. Solomon was unique in his glory, but Athens had a Pericles, Rome a Cæsar, Europe a Bonaparte, and the new world a Lincoln. Real genius is elemental. It influences humanity as much as heat and cold, rain and sunshine. People who offer the greatest opposition to it are those who fall before its onward march. Indeed, it seems to be, from all historical accounts, a sort of car of Juggernaut to those who wilfully oppose it. And this is not surprising since it is the greatest power of which man has any personal knowledge, supported by all the forces of the material and the spiritual. _Destiny versus Will_ Great men float into power on mystical waves moved by the force of destiny. The greater the mind the greater the fixture of force behind it. Between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Presidents came and went as figureheads of parties or props to some ephemeral political scaffold. The majority were stopgaps. They, like the majority of politicians and many others, put their trust in Will and Desire. They could not understand that a man is not great because of his will, but because of his innate knowledge. Washington realised his destiny and understood. Lincoln realised what he was and what he would become long before his nomination for the Presidency, but he was wholly unconscious of any Will to Power. The born statesman is aware of his invincible, hidden knowledge, and he places Will in the second rank. He knows it counts for nothing in the fundamental issues. Lincoln discerned, at an early age, the difference between desire and destiny. He saw the dangerous illusions under which the Will-to-Power-politicians and others laboured and how vain were their hopes. Will and Ambition are characteristics of men who mistake the material for the permanent. Bonaparte and Bismarck exercised their Will for the possession of the material and both failed. The Hohenzollerns and their henchmen have failed in the same exercise. This exercise is indulged in by people who believe that to become intensely individualistic means the development of powerful personality. They talk of their rights as if their desires gave them the privilege of robbing their neighbours. And what some are doing publicly others are doing privately. The motives for this desire for material domination vary with the individual. With one, it is to get even with a group; with another, it is to get even with a party; with others, it is to appear in public, to be frequently named and sometimes applauded. Compromise and subterfuge are ingredients inseparable from the illusions of the Will. While Lincoln often assisted his friends, he refused to hedge or trim in order to please. Destiny behind him was invulnerable, his own sense of justice inexorable. While others were working for the good of their city, state, or section, he was thinking of the good of the whole country, with all humanity behind it. Destiny created the man and the crisis at the same time, as always happens. The one could not exist without the other. Destiny is the collective conscience acting through elective genius. For this reason Lincoln was not only the man of his time but the man whose example will exert the greatest influence on future eras. _James Jacquess Practical Mystic_ In the hubbub and confusion created by the upheaval which began in 1914 it is of vital importance for thinking people of the English-speaking countries to know what went on in the inner circles at Washington during that year of trial, 1864, when the destiny of the Union seemed to be hanging in the balance. It is time to know the truth about Lincoln's supernaturalism. Your favourite historian avoids the subject. He will not touch on a matter so dangerous to his neutral agnosticism. He avoids the details of the supernatural events of that wonderful time. He will discuss anything but that; he knows that once thinking people become acquainted with the facts they will begin to form their own conclusions. In Lincoln's day agnosticism had not taken root in the intellectual soil of this country. The negative writings of Darwin and Spencer were unknown among politicians and statesmen, and the churches still believed that "spirit" ruled matter and that Providence was directing the affairs of the nation. In Lincoln's time agnostic ministers were unknown. All believed in a positive religion. The Union was saved from disruption because Lincoln and his aids were firm believers in a higher Power and a higher destiny. Doubt, cynicism, and scepticism would have handed the country over to universal chaos. The downfall of the Union would have meant the end of the British Empire and to-day Kaiserism would be in supreme command of the remnant of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. It is the fashion to read romantic novels, but the story of the Jacquess peace mission is more fascinating than any novel because it is fact instead of fiction and because its basic element is the supernatural. James Jacquess was, himself, a practical mystic of no uncertain power but whose great gifts were overshadowed by the personality of Lincoln, his revered chief. Before the Civil War Jacquess was a mathematician, a Greek and Latin scholar, a college president, and one of the most forcible Methodist preachers of the age. His field of work was the country around Springfield, where Lincoln often heard him preach. Long before Jacquess received the mystical command to undertake his peace mission to the Rebel headquarters at Richmond, Lincoln knew and respected him as a sincere and earnest patriot. Jacquess was Colonel of an Illinois regiment during the war, and had already taken a valiant part in some of the most terrible battles. Colonel Jacquess was inspired to act as he did without, at first, consulting any one. He conceived the idea of going to Richmond, interviewing the Confederate leaders, and so gaining some definite information that would eventually lead to peace, through victory, for the Union. His mission was a secret, known only to a limited circle, including the President, General Rosecrans, General Garfield (who later became President), and James R. Gilmore, the friend of Lincoln. Mr. Gilmore, in his "Personal Recollections of Lincoln," devotes many pages to this peace mission, with all the details, from its inception by Colonel Jacquess to its final wonderful results. General Garfield, writing to Mr. Gilmore from his military headquarters on June 17th, 1863, said:-- "Colonel Jacquess has gone on his peace mission. The President approved it, though, of course, he did not make it an official matter. There are some very curious facts relating to his mission which I hope to tell you some day. It will be sufficient for me to say that enough of the mysterious is in it to give me an almost superstitious feeling of faith, and certainly a great interest, in his work. He is most solemnly in earnest and has great confidence in his mission." Colonel Jacquess succeeded in gaining a respectful hearing before the highest authorities at Richmond without being shot as a spy--more than one of his friends having predicted such a fate for him. He returned to the North determined to await patiently for another opportunity to try again. In 1864, after conferring with Mr. Gilmore and the President, it was decided that a second mission should be set on foot, this time in company with his friend Gilmore, whom a special Providence had chosen to record all the incidents and events of that unprecedented undertaking. On this occasion Colonel Jacquess learned all that he had hoped to learn, and more, from the lips of Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy; and when Jacquess and Gilmore returned Lincoln requested Mr. Gilmore to prepare a detailed account of the astounding revelation for the _Atlantic Monthly_. This vivid recital of the facts was published and it created a sensation from one end of the country to the other. It turned the tide in favour of Lincoln's election for a second term and saved the Union. This, in brief, was the work of Jacquess, the mystic, whose name to-day is only known to the more serious students of Lincoln's life and work. Had the President been less a practical mystic than he was he would have forbidden Colonel Jacquess to undertake a journey full of risks and peril, and one that ordinary business men would have called an insane adventure. _Images and Dreams_ Noah Brooks, in his Life of Lincoln, gives the following account of a vision which the President described to him:-- "It was just after my nomination in 1860 when the news was coming thick and fast all day, and there had been a great Hurrah Boys, so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest and threw myself on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass, and looking in the glass I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length, but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before. Then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away. I left, and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it, nearly but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. Later in the day I told my wife about it, and a few days later I tried the experiment again, when, sure enough, the thing came again. My wife thought that it was a sign that I was to be elected to a second term of office and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not live through the last term." Not long after his second inauguration he said to a friend in Washington:-- "I have seen this evening what I saw on the evening of my nomination. As I stood before a mirror I saw two images of myself--a bright one in front and one that was pallid, standing behind. It completely unnerved me. The bright one I know is my past, the pale one my coming life. I do not think I shall live to see the end of my second term." In his biography, Morgan relates a dream which Lincoln had. He thought he was in a vast assembly, and the people drew back to let him pass. Just then Lincoln heard some one say: "He is a common-looking fellow." Lincoln, in his dream, turned to the man and said: "Friend, the Lord prefers common-looking people; that is the reason He makes so many of them." Shortly before Lincoln's assassination some friends were talking about certain dreams recorded in the Bible when the President said: "About two days ago I retired very late. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque on which was a form wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the catafalque; others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers. 'The President,' was the answer. 'He was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream." _The New Era_ The principles enunciated by Abraham Lincoln are abiding examples, not only for the English-speaking peoples but for the whole world. Out of what seems universal confusion, tending towards chaos, there arises a new era. A material transformation had to occur before the uprising of the spiritual, and the truth is beginning to dawn in the minds of thousands that behind all material phenomena there dwells the divine idea. Before the gates of oblivion closed on civilisation we were plucked from the gulf in accordance with the Divine purpose. Amidst the strife of contending factions the thunder of upheaval reverberates from continent to continent, heralding the close of a dispensation that has known the trials and triumphs of nearly two thousand years, from which is emerging the mystical dawn of a new day. THE END THE WORKS OF FRANCIS GRIERSON ------------------------------------------- THE HUMOUR OF THE UNDERMAN _The London Evening News_:--"'The Humour of the Underman' is a classic. The work will rank among the great books of the century if only for the rarity and beauty of its literary expression." _The London Telegraph_:--"In 'The Humour of the Underman' there is a delicacy, a skilfullness, an ease of manner, and a consummate sense of style. Here is the short epigrammatic way of putting things which is Emerson's way, but the successive sentences are less staccato than in the work of the Concord Sage; there is added to it something of the delicacy, the ease, the grace of the French." THE INVINCIBLE ALLIANCE _Austin Harrison, Editor of The English Review_:--"Mr. Grierson's essays are masterpieces of lucid expression and condensed though. In 'The Invincible Alliance' he puts his index finger on the weak places--on snobbery on politics, on music, on the clergy, on the English point of view, which is twenty years behind Continental thought.... We believe him to be absolutely right." _Dr. Samuel P. Orth, Professor of Political Science at Cornell, in a page review of the book in the N. Y. Times_:--"In 'The Invincible Alliance' Mr. Grierson touches prophetic heights. His analytical gift is a sort of intellectual clairvoyance." ILLUSIONS AND REALITIES OF THE WAR _The New York Sun_:--"Mr. Grierson's volume on the war is the rarest book of the year." _The Brooklyn Eagle_:--"A work of marvellous power." _The Independent_:--"Keen observation, trenchant criticism, and a conciseness of style combine with unusual force in Mr. Grierson's latest volume on the great war." _The Boston Transcript_:--"In 1913 Mr. Grierson wrote a volume of essays called 'The Invincible Alliance' in which he outlined very clearly the dangers which lay before the two great English-speaking nations. Re-reading these essays in the light of the last four years we can see that Mr. Grierson looked even more deeply into the future and that he predicted much which has come to pass since the war began." _The Herald, Washington, D. C._:--"Since the publication of the 'The Invincible Alliance' nothing has appeared in book form to surpass the trenchant vigour and illuminating insight of 'Illusions and Realities of the War.'" LA VIE ET LES HOMMES _M. Sully Prudhomme, of the French Academy_:--"J'ai trouvé ces méditations pleines d'aperçus profonds et sagaces. J'ai été frappé de l'originalité puissante de la pensée de l'auteur." MODERN MYSTICISM _Maurice Maeterlinck_:--"This volume is full of thoughts of the very highest order. You have deliciously and profoundly surprised me. You have said so many things which I should like to have written myself." _A. B. Walkley, dramatic critic of the London Times_:--"Modern Mysticism is an original and delectable book." _The London Telegraph_:--"Mr. Grierson pierces to the heart of his theme with a keenness that is almost disconcerting. He illumines the most obscure situation by one of his sudden flashes of insight. The poise of his sentences has something of Gallic precision about it and it is not surprising that savants of contemporary French literature have praised his work with generous emphasis. Such an influence, working like leaven in the lump, cannot fail to make its presence appreciated." THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS _Arnold Bennett, in a long review_:--"'The Valley of Shadows' is a noble book.... Mr. Grierson's descriptions possess a detaching sentiment of beauty with absolute visual quality." _The New York Times_:--"Perhaps at last, before oblivion closes over the ante-bellum days in Illinois, the laureate of the Lincoln Country has arrived. If there is another book in existence which deals so graphically and so faithfully with that period we do not know of it." _The Literary Digest_:--"Grierson's description of Lincoln as he stood before Douglas at Alton, is more real, more lifelike, than any statue or picture, and will in future ages take rank with Balzac's description of Dante." _Sir Owen Seaman (Editor of Punch)_:--"There are chapters in 'The Valley of Shadows' that haunt one afterward like remembered music." THE CELTIC TEMPERAMENT _Prof. William James_:--"I find this volume full of wisdom. The pages of 'Reflections' have found their mark in me." _Maeterlinck_:--"'The Celtic Temperament' is one of the most subtle and substantial books that I know." PARISIAN PORTRAITS _The London Times_:--"The most remarkable feature of Mr. Grierson's 'Parisian Portraits' is their extraordinary clear and various detail; they are served up with truth undiluted by sentiment. His insight is sure and his choice of subject exclusive." _Leon Bazalgette, in La Phalange, Paris_:--"In his 'Parisian Portraits' Francis Grierson gives us some chapters of his romantic and marvellous existence. He conquers us by a very rare quality of evoking and suggesting a spiritual atmosphere." ------------------------------------------- JOHN LANE COMPANY, NEW YORK JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, LONDON TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 
38582	----	generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S CARDINAL TRAITS A STUDY IN ETHICS WITH AN EPILOGUE ADDRESSED TO THEOLOGIANS _BY_ C. S. BEARDSLEE BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER THE GORHAM PRESS THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED TORONTO _Copyright 1914, by C. S. Beardslee_ _All rights reserved_ _The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A._ _To my sister Alice-- A living blend Of love and loyalty, Of modesty and immortal hope._ PREFACE Abraham Lincoln was a man among men. He was earnest and keen. He was honest and kind. He was humble and inwardly refined. He was a freeman in very deed. His conscience was king. These few words contain the total sum of the following book. In unfolding what they severally mean, and what their living unison implies, the aim has been to bring to view the clear and simple beauty of a noble personality; to show how such a human life contains the final test of any proper claim in all the bounds of Ethical research; and to stir in thoughtful minds the query whether such a character as Lincoln's life displays, instinct as it is with Godliness, may not yield forms of statement ample and exact enough for all the essential formulas of pure Religion. Assuredly his aspirations were ideal. Quite as certainly his ways with men were practical. The call and need today of just his qualities are past debate. If only in our national senate chamber the ever-shifting group of senators could hear the voice of Lincoln at every roll-call and in each debate! If only in all our universities our studious youth could glean each day from Lincoln, as he speaks of politics and of logic, of ethics and of history! If only in every editorial room, where current events are registered and reviewed, Lincoln's wit and wisdom might illumine and advise! If only at every council, conference, or convention, where leaders of our churches debate religious themes, the reverence of Lincoln might preside! If only in the council chambers where directors meet to plan and govern our modern enterprises in industry and finance, Lincoln's broad humaneness might be felt! If only every artist at his exalted and elusive task could every day obtain new views of Lincoln's full nobility! If only toilers in the shop and field could feel each day the friendly brotherhood in Lincoln's rough, hard hand! Then toil, while losing naught of eagerness, would become content. Art, while losing naught of beauty, would become unfailingly ennobling. Commerce, while losing naught of enterprise, would grow benign. Religion, while retaining a becoming dignity, would not fail to be sincere. The public press would grow more savory and sane. Our schools would be nurseries of manliness. And our conscience would be embodied in our law. But Lincoln's face is vanished. Lincoln's voice is hushed. What remains is that Lincoln's sentiments be republished every day in lives that reverence and reproduce his excellence. To indicate this path, to embolden and embody this aspiration is the service this volume undertakes. Throughout this study, thought is fastened centrally upon Lincoln's last inaugural address. There Lincoln stands complete. And that completeness is vividly conscious in Lincoln's own understanding. Eleven days after its delivery, and one month before his death, he wrote to Thurlow Weed, saying that he expected that speech "to wear as well as--perhaps better than--anything I have produced." Of almost incredible brevity, containing as it left his hands, but five short paragraphs, the compass and burden of thought within that address are every way notable. It is in fact Lincoln's digest of the course and trend of our national life; while on the side of character it is replete with telling intimations of Lincoln's own moral effort, purpose, and point of view. Here are in visible action all the elements of essential manhood, all the virtues of a balanced character. Here are insight, judgment, resolution. Here is momentum. Here is something that endures. Here are ends worth any cost. Here is wariest use of means. And here are wrongs, engendering anguish, and mortal strife. And here are ultimate alternatives. And all is grasped and even merged in Lincoln as he speaks. Here is wealth of ready matter and direct allusion quite enough for any volume to lay open and assess. Such a moral inventory and evaluation this study undertakes. Its method is to subject this short address to the strictest ethical analysis, to identify the elements that are integral and cardinal in the moral being of God, and man, and government. Then, to articulate and unify these elements into a vital ethical synthesis, to demonstrate and manifest the living unison of character. Then, to designate and undertake to clarify the major problems which such an analysis and such a synthesis of such a speech and such a man open to a student's mind. In this procedure it is the aim to show how from first to last in Lincoln's life his mental clarity and his moral honesty are held in model parity; how in his daily walk law and liberty go hand in hand; how his cardinal moral qualities are to be defined; and how these elemental virtues may avail in their own authority and right to guide the eyes of men towards beauty, to guard the souls of men against despair, to find the stable base of government, to overcome all guilt by grace, to prove the perfect manliness of patience, to ground the thought of men upon reality, to pierce the gloom of woe, to find the core of piety, to perfect persuasive speech, and to win a vision of the soul. Hereby and thus it may at last stand plain that in the soul of Lincoln there is a moral universe; and that within the verities and mysteries of this universe he alone is truly wise and fully free who knows and proves the worth of faith. That so broad a study should be based upon so brief a speech, or indeed upon Lincoln's single personality, may seem to some a fatal fault. Such a thought, when facing such a method and such a theme, is surely natural. As to its validity there need be no debate. The field is free. Let any number of other speeches, or of other people be assembled and placed beside the material handled in this book, for its re-examination. In such a process, the further it is pursued, if only Lincoln and the words of this inaugural are also held in thorough and continual review, it may come the more fully clear that in a theme like ethics mere multitude is not the measure of immensity; that the structure of this book is organic, not mechanical; that the single chapter on Lincoln's Moral Unison comprehends all that the volume anywhere contains or intimates; that all the problems handled in Part IV are only sample studies, and handled only suggestively; that the volume might be expanded indefinitely or much reduced, and its significance remain in either case unchanged; that correspondingly Lincoln's last inaugural and Lincoln's public life, each and both, outline in very deed a moral universe; that to rightly understand this single character and this one address is to understand humanity, and identify the ethical finalities; that to scan the soul of Lincoln in his religious attitudes is to gaze upon God's image, and face the reality and the rationale of the true religious life; and that, in consequence, any reader who hesitates to venture such vast conclusions upon so scant material may finally be induced to submit to a substantial remeasurement his present estimates of brevity and breadth. CONTENTS PART I. INTRODUCTION Lincoln's Mental Energy Lincoln's Moral Earnestness PART II. ANALYSIS His Reverence for Law--Conscience His Jealousy for Liberty--Free-will His Kindliness--Love } His Pureness--Life } } The Cardinal Virtues His Constancy--Truth } His Humility--Worth } PART III. SYNTHESIS Lincoln's Moral Unison PART IV. STUDIES His Symmetry--The Problem of Beauty His Composure--The Problem of Pessimism His Authority--The Problem of Government His Versatility--The Problem of Mercy His Patience--The Problem of Meekness His Rise from Poverty--The Problem of Industrialism His Philosophy--The Problem of Reality His Theodicy--The Problem of Evil His Piety--The Problem of Religion His Logic--The Problem of Persuasion His Personality--The Problem of Psychology PART V. CONCLUSION Lincoln's Character Lincoln's Preference AN EPILOGUE--Addressed to Theologians LAST INAUGURAL ADDRESS LINCOLN'S CARDINAL TRAITS PART I. INTRODUCTION LINCOLN'S MENTAL ENERGY In ethics, if anywhere, a master needs to be mentally sane and strong. Truth cannot be trifled with here. Error here, whether in judgment or as to fact, is fatal. Insight to exactly discern, and balance to considerately compare must be the mental instincts of a moralist. How was this with Lincoln? What was his outfit and what his discipline mentally? Was he unfailingly shrewd? Was he sufficiently sage? Was he by instinct and by habit truly an explorer and a philosopher? Did he have in store, and did he have in hand, the needful wealth of pertinent facts? Had he the logical strength and breadth to set them all in order and to see them all as one? Such inquiries are severe--too severe to be pressed or faced by anyone in haste. But in this study of Lincoln such inquiries are not to be escaped. To fairly answer them is worth to any man the toil of many days. For just as surely as such research is resolutely pushed through all its course, the eye will come to see where wisdom dwells, and to learn what mental judgment and mental insight truly mean. And it will grow clear as day that Lincoln mentally, as well as physically, was no weakling; that in intellect, as in stature, he stands among the first. In many places this stands clear. There is no better way to trace it out than to start from his last inaugural. To fully explore one single paragraph of this address, the paragraph with which it opens, will make one's examination of Lincoln's mental competence all but complete. Its opening sentence alludes to his first inaugural. That one allusion will repay pursuit. There Lincoln assumed the presidency. In that act and under that oath he stepped to the executive headship of the Republic. By that step he faced seven states in secession. It was a civil crisis, never one more grave, or dark, or ominous. It threatened to subvert our national history and to undermine our national hope. It was crowding on towards bloody war a debate that dealt with the very basis of manhood in men. To see the meaning of that crisis and to govern its issue required an eye and a mind of Godlike vision and poise. Here is an excellent place to examine the outfit and the action of Lincoln's intellect. His first inaugural is a masterpiece of intellectual equipoise and energy. Any mind that will fasten firmly upon the substance and the sequence of its thought may feel distinctly the struggle, and the strength, and the steadiness of Lincoln's mind. His arguments and his admonitions are impressive models of sanity and power. Which is the more notable, his insight or his outlook, it is hard to tell. The marvel is that the soberness and the force of his appeal rest quite as firmly upon the prophetic as upon the historic base. So clear is his grasp of the past, so sure is his sense of the present, and so deliberate is the poise of his judicial thought that his vision into the future has been found by time to be unerringly true. Let any student put this to test. That address is an appeal. From beginning to end it pleads. Set all its parts asunder. Then bind them all together as Lincoln has done. And so find out what are its elements; whence they are gathered; what is fact; what is principle; what is prophecy; on what plan they are assembled; by what art they are displayed; to what they owe their force; if in any spot of its argument there is a break; and if the onset of the whole is irresistible. Distinct replies to these distinct inquiries will tell one all he needs to know about Lincoln's mental strength. Without wandering any further one can find that Lincoln's methods and conquests attest a student's patience, and a scholar's power; that his wisdom was ripe, entirely adequate to devise safe counsel for a Nation in civil strife. A striking feature of the address is its philosophic finish. Though solidly set in concrete facts, and fitted ideally to the day of its delivery, it is replete with counsel good for every time, so phrased as to become the very proverbs of civil politics. Total paragraphs are little more than clustered apothegms of consummate statesmanship. To get the style and cast of Lincoln's mind let any student comprehend the girth, and ponder the weight of each following sentence, all gathered from this one address:-- The intention of the lawgiver is the law. I hold that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever. Can a contract be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? That in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual is confirmed by the history of the Union itself. No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union. Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision has ever been denied. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guarantees and provisions in the Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning them. If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them. Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Unanimity is impossible. One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. Physically speaking we cannot separate. Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always. This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inherit it. The chief magistrate derives all his authority from the people. Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people. This people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Here are six and twenty sentences, culled from this one address, that are nothing less than the maxims of a political sage, as lasting as they are apt. As a glove fits a hand, so did these counsels fit that day. As the needle guides all ships that sail, so their wisdom directs all politics still. They embody sure witness of an eye that is keen to see--none more narrowly; and of a mind that is trained to think--none more thoroughly. Their author was a man who knew. He knew the past. He knew things current. He knew what their coming issues were sure to be. He knew the grounds of government. He knew the omens of anarchy. He knew the awful possibilities in fraternal hate. And he knew the need and the awful cost of patient forbearance. Here is a man well past childhood intellectually. He has the eye and the mind of a man long schooled by discipline. And he has a tongue expert in speech, well freighted with tremendous sense, but lucid too, and graceful, and void of all offense. This one address displays a man, though pathetically unfamiliar with childhood schools, of consummate intellectual balance and force. But, for its cherished end this inaugural proved pathetically incompetent. And when it became his duty to pronounce a second inaugural oath, the Nation had been four years in terrible war. That war levied a terrible tax upon the president's intellectual strength. The mental perplexities of those endless days and nights cannot be told. Much less can they be understood. It may be doubted whether any other man could have brought a mind to uphold and command those years with any approach to Lincoln's mental honesty. It was, under God, within the steadfast, tenacious grasp of Lincoln's exhaustless and invincible mental loyalty that our national destiny lay secure. To all the phases of all the problems of all those years, and to his own judgment and endeavor concerning them all, this same first paragraph of his second inaugural also alludes. This allusion, too, if any one would compass the full measure of Lincoln's mental strength, demands review, and will reward pursuit. The records are well preserved. And they bear abounding witness to Lincoln's almost superhuman sanity and insight and energy and mental equilibrium. If any one will follow through this honest and perfectly honorable hint, he will come to feel that the mind of Lincoln was the Nation's crucible in which all the Nation's problems were resolved. LINCOLN'S MORAL EARNESTNESS In the central paragraph of his last inaugural Lincoln enshrined compelling demonstration of his moral soundness. That single paragraph is nothing less than a solid section of a finished moral philosophy. It reckons right and wrong incapable of any reconciliation, God as Almighty Judge, and all his judgments just. But that opinion was no word in haste. Deliberate as he always was, when voicing any estimate as President, never was he more deliberate than when penning that moral explanation of the war. In four stern years he had been revolving surveying and pondering that sternest of all debates:--Should the war go on or should it cease? Every argument on either side, that heart or thought of man could feel or see, had been driven by every sense into the faithful heed of his honest soul. He bent his ear obediently to every plea, binding his patient mind to register fairly every weighty word, designing with absolute honesty that, when at last he spoke the executive decree, his decision should bind the Nation for the single perfect reason that it was right. And when finally and persistently he upheld the war and ordered its relentless prosecution to the end, no one may truthfully charge that opinion and command to ignorance or malice, to prejudice or haste. Moral grounds alone were the basis and motive of that conclusion and behest. The war was caused by slavery. With Southern success slavery would spread and become perpetual. If slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong. That this great wrong should be restrained and in the end removed, the war must be put through. But that was not all his thought and argument in this last inaugural. The war, for the time, parted the Nation sectionally. But the sin and guilt of slavery, in Lincoln's feeling, rested upon the Nation as a whole; and upon the Nation as a whole he adjudged the burden of its woe. Here the moral grandeur of Lincoln comes fully into view. His affirmation of that awful iniquity, inwrought in two centuries and a half of slavery, is no pharisaic indictment of the South. It is a repentant confession of his own and all the Nation's equal part in its infinite wrong. Among the guilty authors and abettors of that wrong he identifies himself. He deems the war God's righteous judgment upon the national inhumanity, and meekly bows his head, among the humblest and most afflicted of those who suffer and sorrow beneath that scourge. That kindly fellowship with all the Nation in the sorrows of the war, with its lowly confession of all the guilt, and its patient endurance of all the atoning cost, proclaims and demonstrates that Lincoln's respect for righteousness was supreme. It betokens a living sense of law, a hearty assent to duty, a careful reckoning of guilt, an uncomplaining readiness to own and rectify all wrong, a manly purpose to inaugurate a new rule of equity, a reverent acknowledgment of God, an ideal esteem for manhood everywhere, freedom from the dominion of greed, friendliness for the erring, pity for the hurt and poor. Above all it shows the faith of a moral seer in its manifest confidence that human evil, and all its awful sorrow, are under the joint divine and human control and can be absolutely and joyfully overthrown and done away. Here is a type of manhood that, under the discipline of God, grew sterling to the core, and by a signal favoring Providence provided an ample basis for a national moral ideal. Here is an ideal where conscience and righteousness stand in close affiance, where liberty springs from equity, and where pity never fails. Here is a person and a name worthy and able demonstrably to inspire and lead to national triumph a new political league. And here is an official whose spontaneous honesty has left upon all his state papers an indelible moral stamp, creating thereby out of his official documents a national literature of finished beauty and excellence and power. PART II. ANALYSIS HIS REVERENCE FOR LAW--CONSCIENCE Deeply set within the heart of Lincoln in this last inaugural was his binding sense of right. This obligation was civic. The speech can be described as a statement of what a loyal citizen under confederate law is bound to do, when his civic loyalty is put to a final test. It is an illustration of obedience facing rebellion. It is an exposition of a confederate's duty, when confederates secede. It is a civilian's announcement of the law that is singly and surely sovereign, when the sole alternative in the Nation's life is dissolution or blood. It is a revelation of the law that still prevails among and above a Republic of freemen, when all law is faced by the challenge and defiance of war. Here is a supreme exhibit of a solid co-efficient in Lincoln's character. It shows in a commanding way how moral duty held dominion in his life. He had no predilection for war. That he must face its menace, or forswear his fealty to his freeman's covenant, was a pathetic fate. And when in that alternative he upheld his oath and endured the war, it is past all denial that he was bowing under an inexorable constraint. He was plainly ordering his speech and conduct in submission to an all-commanding, all-reviewing moral regimen. His will was listening to a moral behest. His judgment was pondering a moral choice. His eye was forecasting a moral award. He was shaping sovereign issues with a sovereign responsibility. This experience and this expression of Lincoln's life unearths foundations in his character which demand precise examination. What was the nature of the law which held and swayed the soul of Lincoln with such an overmastering control? Whence came its authority? Wherein rested its validity? Is there record of its origin and authorship? Where is it recorded? By whose hand was it transcribed? Precisely what are its so imperative terms? In attempting an answer, one's first impulse is to say that in this address Lincoln was speaking as citizen and official, as subject and chief executive of an openly organized civil government, with written Constitution and laws; and that what he was saying in this inaugural address contained and involved no more and no less than those regulations expressed; that he simply adopted and echoed what they defined and described; that the sole and only authority he assumed to cite or urge was this well-known published law of the land; and that in those open records one may find in fullness and precision the full definition of the nature and validity, the authority and authorship and origin, the very terms and abiding form of all the moral mandates he here obeyed. In such a statement there is abounding truth. Lincoln explicitly shows explicit allegiance in all his political life to the dominion of our national law. He revered our Constitution. And that the Constitution should likewise be revered by all was all he gave his life to realize. Grounded as that Constitution was upon our American Bill of Rights, acknowledging as it did that all men were created equal, owning as it openly did the sovereignty of the popular will, and allowing no other lord, he found within its reverent and reverend affirmations the dignity, authority, and power all-sufficient and supremely valid for him as a fellow-citizen among his fellowmen. But in such a statement something is left unsaid. As one listens through this address to Lincoln's voice, he instantly and continuously feels that he is hearing there no mere echo of quoted words. There is in the vibrant tone a note that is original. His voice is his own. His words are of his own selection. His phrases were fashioned by himself. His paragraphs embody the shape and bear the stamp of his peculiar and painstaking invention and argument. In his utterance are the inflection and accent, the very passion of unforced and independent conviction. He speaks as one who finds within himself, in some true sense, the authority for what he says. But not merely are his words valid for himself, as he shapes his ordered speech. They are irrepressible. His convictions throb with urgency. The constraint to which he bows is enthroned and exercised within. The law he obeys is just as truly a law he ordains. But on either view it is a mandate which he humbly and grandly obeys. It is an imperative to which he yields his life. Just here emerges another phase of his amenability to law. It operates as an impulse to plead. It drives him to the rostrum, and makes of him one of the foremost masters of public address our civic life and history have produced. As Lincoln voices this address he is speaking not merely to himself, nor for himself, nor to ease and unburden his mind, nor yet to open and indicate his view. As he spoke those words his eye was fixed upon a mighty multitude of his fellowmen. As he unfolded his thought before their attentive, waiting minds, it was as though a banner were being unfurled to symbolize and signify to a Nation's multitudes the sovereign duty of all true patriots. In that transaction he became undeniably prophet and lawgiver to the Nation. The obligations that supremely bind his life he urges and attests as binding with equal and evident urgency upon the millions upon millions of the members in the same free and solemn political league. When his speech is done, he would have all who hear conjoined indefeasibly with him in loyalty to his law. Every sentence of the address bears evidence of this design. He is aiming to bring the Nation's conscience and will to embody and obey the identical mandates that govern him. But his appeal is vestured in ideal deference. He deals with law. But he does not command. Throughout his solemn exposition there is no note or hint of dictatorship of any sort. Not a breath in any accent suggests any undertaking to coerce. He simply strives, as a man with his friend, to persuade. And yet as he sets forth his speech, within the comely apparel of its courteous words gleams the regal form of duty, imperial offspring of inflexible law. Those words were no empty phrasings of indifferent platitudes, disposed and pronounced to dignify a passing pageant in the formal rounds of our civic life. They trembled with anxiety. He spoke of nothing less than the Nation's life and death, the Nation's duty, and the Nation's doom. The honor of the Republic was being sternly tried, to see if it was sound or rotten in its very heart. Lincoln was dealing with things that all men owned to be above all price. He was striving, as for life, to achieve agreement as to duties that should transcend all possible denial. He was trying to fasten upon every American conscience constraints that no American conscience could possibly escape. Here is a cognizance of law and deference before its claims that is curiously composite, if not complex, or even innerly contraposed. He acknowledges the written Constitution to bind all citizens with supreme authority; and gives his solemn oath to honor, uphold, and execute its plain behests. He as plainly betrays the presence within his individual breast of a moral sovereign to which he bows with just as loyal reverence. And before every man with whom he pleads he orders his behavior, even while he pleads, as before a throne whose moral majesty he has no right or power to nullify. And yet within the terms embodying such a deference he expounds the genesis and justifies the conduct of a long-drawn civil conflict, in which his own official decrees can be carried out only by the aid of the death and desolation entailed by war. And when, despite death-dealing guns and deferential pleas alike, vast multitudes of men, even all the captains and armies of the South, despise his arguments and defy his arms, he continues to urge his convictions and appeals, and to reinforce his words with war. Can such a complex attitude be shown and seen to rest in moral harmony? Were his conscience, and the Constitution, and his deference before other men, and his summons of the land to arms equally and alike compelling morally, all indeed morally akin? Beneath the unsparing gaze of his conscience-searching eye, under all the awful testing of his loyalty to oath, in all his patient and persistent pleadings for other men's agreement, and through all the torture and distress of war, what explanation and account can be given of any obligation adequate to bind and justify his course? Instinct himself with deference, and averse to any form of tyranny, how could he so rigidly refuse to yield? Prone toward conciliation in every fiber of his life, how did he inwardly, how could he openly vindicate his unbending determination to uphold his faith, and carry through the war? This forces a final and vital inquiry touching the nature of the law that was so regnant and compelling in Lincoln's personal life; and that he was struggling here in this address with such consuming desire, and by the unabetted efficiency of oral appeal, to implant in other breasts. From Lincoln's balanced words it stands apparent that the problems bound up in this inquiry beleaguered him on every side. His throbbing syllables, and the tactics by which his sentences are arranged, attest impressively that while he was facing problems too profound for human thought to solve, he was also facing laws that he could not escape, and dared not disobey. It was not for his kind heart to sanction and encompass such a war, and stand so solidly against the solid South, while yet behaving with so unfeigned respect for every other man, except beneath compulsion of a law supremely gentle and invincibly severe. He was plainly viewing some behest too plain to be denied, too sacred to be disobeyed, too insistent to be withheld, and yet too reverend and benign to suffer any champion to be rude--a behest around whose throne hung sanctions, true to fact, waiting to adjudge, certain to descend. In the effort now to trace in the soul of Lincoln the birth and growth and manly stature of this deep sense of law, some things stand plain. In this, his consciousness of sovereign duty and supreme allegiance, Lincoln stands entire. In this address will and thought and sentiments combine. He is not swept against his will. What he decides he eagerly desires. And with his will and wish his best intelligence co-operates. If any man essay to overthrow his argument, he has the total Lincoln to overturn. Determined, impassioned, and convinced, he confronts all men, whether they be adversaries or friends. In his contention and defense his being is completely unified. He is employing upon his master task his total strength. Distressful, dark and difficult as is his environment and time, he suffers and ponders and resolves, with forces undivided, none reserved. With such convictions, such desires, and such determination, the assurance in his onset was in itself triumphant. Upon what foundations now for such unyielding confidence and appeal did Lincoln take his stand? For Lincoln's own deliberate reply, let all men read again, and then again, and still again, this second inaugural address. Those words are appareled with a beautiful charity. But from deep within their kindliness resounds the clear, firm voice of heaven-ordered, all-prevailing law--a law that comprehends beneath its strong and high dominion the long career of American slavery, defining its sin, awarding its doom, and dealing justly with the contending imprecations and the pleading intercessions that strangely voice the deep confusion of embattling hosts. American slavery, its sin and doom--in his exposition of that dark theme, Lincoln gave his exposition of all-compelling law. All men were created equal. The right of all men to liberty is likewise a primitive endowment. Upon this one broad base, and upon no other, did Lincoln ever set up any claim to voice for himself, or for his fellowman, a civic obligation. To that creative decree can be traced all the civic appeals that Lincoln ever made. In fixing there the ground of every plea, he had indomitable assurance of faith that he was defining and declaring for every man an irreducible and ineffaceable moral law. All men were created equal. All men were divinely entitled to be free. That fiat of God Americans had tried and dared to invalidate. Its authority it was now the Almighty's purpose, by the obedient hand of Lincoln, to reinaugurate. Its simple terms, that had forever been indelible, were now to be made universally legible, and everywhere visible, by the obedient consent of all his fellowmen. In all of this the chiefest thing to note is that this same all-commanding moral law is born within. Written precepts and published constitutions are but transcriptions. They are not original. They are only copies. Not at the tip of a moving pen, but in our forefathers' reverent and independent hearts, did our noble Constitution come to birth. And in the time of Lincoln it was in Lincoln's heart that this venerable law was born again. In the heart of Washington, in the heart of Lincoln, in the heart of every man, as fashioned and over-shadowed evermore by God, all moral regimen has its stately origin. To this grave oracle, deep within Lincoln's Godlike soul, did Lincoln fashion utterance. To this same reverend oracle, deep-lodged within the Godlike soul of every listener, Lincoln made appeal. Here is all the urgency of all his argument. Here is the secret of all his confidence. Herein alone shines all his moral majesty. Something such was Lincoln's exposition to himself, and to his time, of the majesty and mandatory force of civic law. Its authority rests in God. Its validity rests as well in man. It has been written down most nobly in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Its terms spell freedom and equality for all. In the light of our common human sentiments, kindling within us from heavenly fires, its printed copies may be easily revised. And while its concrete regulations are far too manifold for any general document to possibly contain, its dictates are all as concrete and corresponsive to our human civic life as is the heaven-born and reverent human friendliness with which the life of Lincoln was continually graced. Deferring then to future pages all specific analysis and appraisal of the pregnant interior wealth of Lincoln's sense of moral obligation, two momentous affirmations touching Lincoln's reverence for law lie already right at hand. The law he reverenced held high and wide dominion. It shaped and swayed and judged at once and alike both his own and his Nation's destiny. And its terms were plain. It was no timid, dusky lamp, held in trembling hand, throwing uncertain rays, and flickering towards extinction. The law that shines in this inaugural is a glowing, radiant orb, bringing day when first it dawned, and shedding still full light of day over all the earth. HIS JEALOUSY FOR LIBERTY--FREE-WILL This second inaugural address had its birth in the breast of a man freeborn, and resolute to remain forever free. To find within this speech this living seed, to trace and sketch its bursting growth, and to gather up its fruit, is well worth any toil or cost. To begin with, this speech is undeniably Lincoln's own. That in any sense it was born of any other man's dictation, Lincoln would never admit, and no other man would ever affirm. As its words gain voice, every listener feels that Lincoln was their only author, and that even in their utterance, though in the living presence of an un-numbered multitude, this speaker was standing in a majestic solitude. That exposition of the war, of the Union, and of slavery was of and by and for himself. What he was uttering was original. The convictions he affirmed were his personal faith. The decision his words so delicately veiled was his personal resolve. The issue towards which they aimed was the outlook of his lone heart's hope. The appeal he voiced was warmed and winged by his own desire. The argument he so deftly inwrought was his invention and device. The words he singled out were his selection. The total aspect and onset and effect of the address, as it looked and worked on the day of its delivery, and as it looks and works today, were of his unforced and free election and intent. All the volume, burden and design of those pregnant, urgent, far-seeing paragraphs are the first hand product of a freeborn man, adapted and addressed to men freeborn. Here is for any student of ethics an imposing spectacle. For here is a commanding demonstration that mortal man is in very deed a responsible author of moral deeds. That this inaugural scene gives this stupendous truth an indeniable vindication, no man may lightly undertake to disapprove. But within that undeniable verity are involved all the mighty revolutions of a moral universe. This import of this speech can never be made too plain. To this end let any reader note the fact that in that stern day, and in this plain speech, Lincoln faced, and that under a pitiless compulsion, an exigent alternative. When he penned, and when he spoke its freighted words, he stood in the very brunt of war. His thoughts were tracing battle lines. His eye was fixed on bayonets. Before him stood far-ranging ranks of men in mutual defiance, men at variance upon fundamental things, men in conflict over claims irreconcilable by God or man. By no device of argument or of compromise could those contending claims become identical, or even mutually tolerant. Men's paths had parted. Armies had taken sides. Difference had deepened into intolerance; intolerance had heightened into hate; and hate had flared up into war. Secession had proclaimed that the Union must dissolve, that confederates were foes, that one Nation must be two. And men based their reasons for rending the land and for rallying ranks in arms, upon opposing views of God's decree, and of the nature of men. One side claimed that God ordained that black men should be slaves. This claim the other side denied; and avowed instead that God in his creation and endowment of the human race ordained that all men should be equal and free. So appalling and so passing plain in our political life was the alternative which this inaugural had to confront. Equally plain upon the face of this inaugural is the fact that, in the presence of that dread and stern alternative, Lincoln made a choice. He picked his flag. He chose the banner of the free. The standard of the slaveholder he spurned. Responsibly, deliberately, he selected where to stand, fully and consciously purposing that in such selection he was enlisting and employing all the voluntary powers of his life. Here was conscious choice. He did select. He did reject. He could have taken another, an oppugnant stand, as many a familiar confederate did. Two paths were surely possible. And they did undeniably diverge. That divergence he soberly surveyed, and traced down through all its devious ways to their final consequence. In act and motive, in judgment and intent, he was self-poised, self-determined, self-moved. When, in this second inaugural scene, removed from his former inaugural oath by four imperious years of sobering and awakening thought, but facing still a frowning South, he swore a second time to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution--that was a freeman's choice. And it was Lincoln's own. Between his soul and heaven, as he registered that resolve, no third authority intervened. As he stood and published and defined that reiterated pledge, his soul was sovereignly, supremely free. And within that sovereign freedom its even-balanced deliberation should not be overlooked. Those days that filed between those two inaugurals had been replete with studied meditation. The mighty problems precipitated by the war he had taken and turned and poised and sought to estimate and solve in every possible way. He pondered every ounce of their awful gravity. He paced the total course of their development. He knew our history, with all its ideals and all its errors by heart. He inspected with peculiar carefulness the drift and trend of our national career. It is doubtful if any one ever studied so incessantly the current of our affairs, or peered so anxiously and with such far-sighted calculation into the hidden and distant issues of the stupendous enterprise in which he was predestined to act so commanding a part. So when his free decision was ushered forth and projected among the contending determinations of his day, to play its part, it was the ripe conclusion of a thoughtful mind, like the well-poised verdict of a judge. And his free choice was resolute. His will was without wavering. The side he made his own was forced to face the musketry and forts, the arsenals and fleets, of a would-be nation of angry, determined men--men who would rather die than yield. The choice he made involved the shedding of human blood. This he sadly knew. In four endless years he had been compelled to defend his resolution with arms. And now as he volunteered his oath a second time, his free decision involved again the frightful corollary of war. This meant that within his voluntary oath was a conscious determination, too vigorous and resolute for any threat to daunt, for any form of terror to reverse. His choice was no feeble leaning to one side. Into its formation and into its fulfillment poured all the energy of his life. It was vastly, radically more than impulse, or propensity, or easy, unconsidered inclination. It was a freeman's choice, poised and edged and energized by a freeman's will. It had firmness like the firmness of the hills. This choice of Lincoln was ponderous. His exercise of freedom, as shown in this inaugural, was dealing, not with things indifferent, not with trifles void of moral moment, nor with empty, immaterial suppositions. When Lincoln shaped and welcomed to himself this preference, he was handling nothing less than the affronts of human arrogance, the greed of human avarice, the cruelty of human slavery, and a confederate's disloyalty. That preference was his free election to enthrone within himself, and within all other men, the stability of a firm allegiance, the grace of human friendliness, the worthy valuation of human souls, and the surpassing beauty of a true humility. It was between such values that his election took its shape. His decision dealt with things primary, enduring, and universal. It was concerned with the elemental affections and convictions of men, while all the time supremely respecting the decrees and judgments of Almighty God. Upon such a level, and amid such values, did the will of Lincoln trace out its path. It was a Godlike energy, sovereign, soberminded, original, free. But though this freedom of Lincoln, as it reigns through this inaugural, was individually his own, and wrought out into precise experience in personal singleness and independency, by no manner of means was he standing in this scene in moral isolation. He was beset about and wrought upon from many sides by mighty moral energies. For one thing, a vast Republic held him fast in the bonds of loyal citizenship. It was a Republic composed of freemen, to be sure. But those freemen were by no means a miscellany of mutually indifferent and disconnected units. They had formed a Union. That Union had a definite and inviolable integrity. That corporate integrity laid an unrenounceable obligation upon all its membership. It was the sacred respect for the sacred honor of that political bond that proved a man a patriot. To assert the freeman's right to cast aside those bonds proved a man a traitor, and gendered unto bondage. Here unfolds a veritable mesh of moral obligations--obligations of compelling potency. It was precisely in defence and demonstration of those enveloping claims that Lincoln advocated and prosecuted a defensive but relentless war. The South resented all such claims. They were resolute that national bonds should be defied, that their authority should be annulled. And this they urged explicitly in the very name of freedom. This defiant protest Lincoln's opposite preference had to face. This involved his mind in the study of a problem that is never out of date--a study that will test any student's moral honesty to the quick. Lincoln's championship of moral liberty had to grapple, in the counter championship of Southern arms, a type and sort of freedom that he forever disowned for himself, and that he could never consent to in any other man. This drove him into the study of the nature of a human soul and the nature of social bonds. This inquiry uncovered two foundation rocks, laid deep by our forefathers beneath the fabric of our republic, supports to human honor and stability which no man nor any confederation of men can undermine and overthrow without turning upside down the fundamental supports of harmony and honor among civilians that are free. These two foundation rocks are the divine design that all men should be equal and free; and the certain corollary that governments among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The equality of freemen when they stand apart, and their free consent, when they join in a political league--these are the immovable pillars of character and order among intelligent men. Upon such foundations this government has been placed. That sure basis the South assailed. In the name of freedom that assault must be repulsed. The national environment, the national integrity, the national honor, the existence of the Nation, conceived as it was in liberty, made all such liberty as the South preferred, not a freeman's right, but a sorry simulation, a moral wrong. Government of the people, by the people, was freedom to the core, the core of civic righteousness. In such a government popular and everlasting allegiance was elemental uprightness. Among freemen, the cornerstone of civics is a plighted troth to liberty. Thus Lincoln argued. And with him to argue thus was to obey. As thus conceived, obedience to his civic pledge went hand in hand with liberty. Enlistment under a government and laws framed by fellow-freemen was to him no limitation of his personal rights. Instead it involved and assured for every bondman a full emancipation, and for every freeman full title forever to every unalienable right. Such a view was indeed ideal, as Lincoln soberly knew; but for that ideal every power of his kingly manhood was ready to struggle and suffer and serve. To bind his hand to such a league was his free choice. To live in loyalty to such a bond was a living pride and joy. Such an agreement was to the end of his days unresented and unconstrained. But it cost him dearly. No indentured bonds-man ever wrought out sorer toil. None ever suffered through longer, heavier, sadder days. It wore away his life. The war was to his tender soul, as he termed it, "a dreadful scourge." But as he interpreted its trend, its certain winnings outvalued and outweighed its woe. It was freely and willingly, not by any irksome and alien coercion, that he opened his soul to all its sorrows, and poured out all his strength to direct and hasten its consummation. He saw unerringly that it had to do with government by free consent, with the tenure of a freeman's oath, with the validity of a freeman's right. And by a preference that in his freeman's breast was irrepressible, he selected with an open, far-ranging eye to take his place in that terrific conflict in the very brunt, that the Nation and all the world and coming ages might see and enjoy its happy issue in a Union built and compacted indissolubly upon the inviolable oaths and rights of men who are free. This was Lincoln's law of liberty. It secures to men their freedom; but it binds those freemen in a league. Their civic life is not a solitude. It is a covenant. But when freemen form a league, their solemn oath, as this inaugural shows, embodies awful sanctions. From such a league and covenant, seven confederate parts were affirming and defending their right to secede, and that by force of arms. This forced freedom to a final definition, and a final test. What follows when a Republic fails? What form of civic order lies beyond, when a league of freemen is violently dissolved? Where will freedom find sure footing, when the fundamental laws of freemen are defied? On this stern question Lincoln fixed his eye. And as his vision cleared and deepened, he grew to see that if freedom among men could ever survive, a freeman's mutual covenant must be inviolate. A freeman's compact must be kept, else on all the earth freedom could find no resting place. If this should ever be denied, that denial must be sternly smitten to the ground. Thus for the very cause of freedom, and as a freeman, Lincoln was driven into war. He was put where he had no other choice. He was forced to fight. But in that war the havoc and disaster were mutual. Both sides suffered terribly. The conflict dealt out torture that neither party could evade. It was mighty ponderings on these conditions that wrung from Lincoln's heart the heart of this inaugural, wherein he traces with a humble, deep-searching carefulness the cause of all the war to that prolonged infraction of the law of liberty in the lot of the American slave; and the guilt of that enormous sin to North and South alike; and the moral explanation of the sorrows of the war to the judgments of Almighty God. Herein he learned that among freemen freedom is in no sense arbitrary and absolute. Laws lie in its very being. Their presence is spontaneous indeed, as is every impulse of their promulgation and rule. But they must be obeyed. If their self-framed mandates are disobeyed, then freemen are no longer free. If freemen dare to bind and rob their fellows and aggrandize their own advantages, then the yoke they bind on other men, by a sanction no mortal can escape, will be bound upon their own necks, until their false advantages are all surrendered, and the freedom that is claimed by anyone is given equally to every other man. To the fulfillment and preservation of that law Lincoln freely bowed his life. This is the core of this address. Thus Lincoln illustrates true liberty. In the crucible of war was his vision of the worth of freedom finally refined. It was through a costly sacrifice of peace. But it was alone and all for freedom, for freedom and for nothing else, that his peace and ours was sacrificed. This exposition of Lincoln's pure ideal of independent, virile manhood has embraced, in passing, a phase of the vast environment in which he felt his manhood framed, that calls for separate remark--the relation of his human freedom to the rule of God. The war is traced in this address to a threefold origin: it was projected in the resolution of the South that slavery should be given leave to spread; it was accepted in the decision of the North that the present bounds of slavery should not be passed; the whole affair was overturned, and the war was over-ruled in the purpose of Almighty God, that North and South, as a single Nation, guilty in common for slavery as a national sin, should make full requital for all its cruelty. In this thought of Lincoln, the conflicting purposes of the North and the South, and his own determination too, were being made to bow beneath the mightier dominion of Almighty God. In the realm of human politics this is a rare and notable confession. And that it was published beneath the open sky, at noon, before a peopled Nation's open eye, as a thoughtful explanation of his inaugural oath as president of a mighty government upon the earth, must be conceded to mightily enhance its notability. It lacks but little of rising to the rank of prophecy. But equally notable with its publicity is its conscious, free submissiveness. Clear to discern, he is also prompt to own the over-mastering rule of God. His attitude in this inaugural is an attitude of explicit subordination to a higher power. But it is clear as day that this subordination is voluntary. There is no sign of reluctance or unwillingness, as though he were being forced, not even though all expectations of his own were being over-ruled in the inscrutable plans of God. This address reveals this man in a mood and tone of complete submission, ready for rebuke, surrendering all his ways to God. This posture of acquiescence, in God's revolution of his plans, and reconstruction of his hopes, is the factor to notice here, as we examine the actual operation of Lincoln's will. Above his private liberty, above his high official authority, above the great Republic in which his own decisions merge, reigns the hidden hand of God. To the power and majesty of that unseen sway he summons every dignity and every desire of his own to render unreserved obedience. In seeing and saying this, however, one must never omit to observe and add that Lincoln's eye observed with solemn joy a precious moral meaning in the divine omnipotence. Heaven's unexpected guidance and consummation of the war were only adding clarity and emphasis to the principle of liberty. It only drove the demonstration home, and that with irresistible cogency, that human bondage must be avenged. And so in fact Lincoln's solemn reverence for the divine control was a girdle confirming the strength of the fine jealousy that guarded for himself and for all mankind the sacredness and the majesty of the human will. Within the deeper deeps of his own free preference he coincided and co-operated with the will of God. His obedience to God, his allegiance to his civic covenant, and his individual, cherished preference coalesce ideally; while each, without any diversion or loss, preserves its own integrity. Thus with life-exhausting, sacrificial toil, with genuine originality, ever exemplifying in his chastened life all the burden of his thought, by a decisive choice between divergent paths, with the careful deliberateness of a full-grown man, with unconquerable determination, gravely sensible of every ponderous consequence, in unbroken and intimate companionship with all his fellow-men, with vision sharp to detect and uncover every simulation and counterfeit of his wish, through solemn fellowship with redemptive sorrows, bowing without repugnance to every sanction that free equality enjoins, and in humble reverence for the all-commanding, all-subduing will of God, Lincoln here unfolds the central and infolded implications in his all-consuming jealousy to be free. HIS KINDLINESS--LOVE A genuine and generous goodwill to other men breathes warmly through this second inaugural, as the glowing breath of life pervades the bodily frame of a living child. This manifests itself, as seen in his impassioned zeal for freedom, in a vivid consciousness of companionship. He felt his life and destiny interlaced inseparably with all Americans, nay with all the world of human kind. With this widely expanded and ever expanding Republic, he felt himself in these inaugural scenes peculiarly identified. In that great pageant he was deeply sensible of holding the central place. His inaugural oath, though his single, individual act, announced his conscious purpose to be the Nation's head. In that station his person became supremely representative. It was for him to incorporate nobly, mightily, judicially, the national dignity, authority, and design. Many phases of this profound coincidence of the life of Lincoln with the Nation's life come into sight whenever his life's career is carefully reviewed. But among all the illustrations of his self-submergence deep within the overflowing fullness of our national history, there is one that demonstrates his tender kindliness beyond all possibility of refutation. This is his profound participation with the Nation in her fate because of slavery. Around this awful issue circles all the thought of this, as of the first address. That this puissant co-efficient of our national history was somehow the cause of the existing war he said that all men felt. He registered his own opinion that all the sorrows of the war were in requital for that sin. Into those sorrows no man entered more profoundly than did Lincoln himself. They sobered all his joy. They solemnized him utterly. It is true few heard his groans. In his patience he was mainly silent. None ever heard him make complaint. All impulse to resentment was subdued. But the nation's sorrows were on his heart. Through all those days he was our confessor, self-sacrificed, sorrow-laden, faithful absolutely, but uncomplaining. Upon his head an angry, unanimous South, and many thousands in the North dealt vengeful, malicious blows, denying him all joy, crying out against him ruthlessly. All this he bore, as though he heard them not, and continued day and night to seek the Nation's peace. With marvelous freedom from malice himself, with fullness of charity for all, he taught a Nation how a Nation's sorrows should be patiently borne. And yet through all the days, in all this land, no man was more purely innocent of the Nation's sin of slavery than this same man. Here is friendship. Here is neighborly compassion written large. This is generosity, untinctured with any selfish reservation. Amid all the sorrows and fortunes of our history no sight is half as pathetic as this deep, free, silent companionship of Lincoln with his Nation's griefs in the deepest period of her affliction. And yet he almost seemed to cherish his fate. He bore it all so quietly, and with such a steady heart and eye, that in his seeming calm we are unconscious of his pain. He gives no hint of faltering and drawing back. He even strove repeatedly to lure the Nation to his side, to enter into sacrificial fellowship with the hapless South. But to nothing of this would the people hear. This commanding fact, the moral mutualness of the innocent Lincoln's sorrows with the sorrows of a guilty land, is a primary factor in this historic scene. From such a moral complication momentous questions emerge. How can such confusion of moral issues be ever justified? Why do guilty and innocent suffer and sorrow alike? In such a glaring moral inequality how could Lincoln himself ever bring his candid mind to honestly acquiesce? Why should a later generation suffer vengeance for their father's sins? Why the black man's fate? How can moral judgments diverge so hopelessly upon such basic moral themes? If God's judgment is just, why are his judgments upon such inhumanity so long delayed? How about those kindred sufferings of those earlier days that for total generations were unavenged? Questions such as these must have risen in Lincoln's mind as he drained his bitter cup. Such questions are not to be evaded or suppressed. It should rather be said that Lincoln's undeniable gentleness in enduring, as the Nation's head, and for his country's sake, a Nation's curse for a national sin forces just such questions into sharpest definition, and focuses them insistently and unavoidably before every thoughtful eye. They are shaped and fastened here solely to render aid in indicating, as they undeniably do, the supreme refinement of Lincoln's friendliness. He held by kindly fellowship with his fellowmen, even when that fellowship involved his innocent life in the moral shame and pain of their reprobation and woe. Here is an interchange of guilt and innocence, in Lincoln's undeniable experience, undeniably resolved and harmonized. Here is human kindliness, triumphant, transcending all debate. Around this exalted illustration of the strength and purity of Lincoln's benevolence cluster many statements eager to be heard. His kindness showed in many ways, but they were all but varying, accordant forms of pure neighborliness. His mastery of all malice, his unfailing charity, the kindliness of his cherished hope, his companionship with others' sorrow, his longings for peace at home and among all men, his pity for the bereft, his tenderness before our human wounds, his reluctance to go to war, his championship of the oppressed, his willingness to bear another's blame, his silence before abuse, his mighty predilections towards universal friendliness, are all concordant and coincident types and forms of his prevailing, spontaneous companionship with men. Each phase deserves elaborate description. But it is in closer keeping with the treatment here to name some general qualities of his kindliness, qualities that are common to all its forms. His friendliness was immediate. When human needs appealed for comfort and aid, it was not his way to send a deputy. He appeared himself. Here is something nothing less than marvelous. An intimate friend of all, he stood in conscious touch with all the Nation's citizenship. At first thought this may seem to be in consequence and by means of his eminence and office as the people's president. As chief executive of the people's will, and as foremost representative citizen, he stood for every man in that man's place; and his universal friendliness found open avenues to every individual citizen's consciousness. Here is truth. But this truth only partially meets this case. The operations of his benevolence were somehow independent of space and time. His tours while president were short and few. Back and forth between the White House, the war office, and the soldier's home he wore a historic path. It is almost overwhelmingly sad to realize how almost all his movements while president were within the sorrow-shadowed walls and the hidden solitudes of his official home. As said before, he seemed to exist apart from men, in a pathetic isolation. Nevertheless, it is plain to all that Lincoln's uncalculating generosity reached, like the shining of the sun, to the limits of the land. It is most surprising when one thinks. But when one thinks, it is most clear that there was in Lincoln's kindliness a Nation-wide capacity for intimacy. In the open genial presence of his good-will all men feel they have an immediate and equal share. And this holds true whether one is near enough to feel the warmth of his living breath, or whether half a continent intervenes. This fact forces into view and consciousness the pure excellence of his love. It was in its nature deeply real. He did in verity live close to every man. He wore no distant air. He practised no reserve. He felt and proved himself to be the kin of all. His pictured face and published speech were a perfect symbol, a convincing pledge to every honest man of close and equal partnership. His ways are often said to have been homely. But their very homeliness was all human and all humane. And in his presence, or in the presence of any truthful impress or echo of his life, no honest nature but feels itself instantly at ease and quite at home. This habitude in him of overcoming distance, and absence, and all other obstacles to his far-ranging love, and winning entrance everywhere into the affections of all kindly men, is a notable stamp upon the total texture of his friendliness. He stood with men in personal partnership, immediate, intimate, real. And in all his intimate and immediate fellowship with men his personal contribution was entire. In his co-partnership he had no treasure too precious to invest. He gave his all. Imposing, almost impossible as is the meaning of these words, all mankind do recognize, and that with wondering reverence, that when Lincoln rose to take the presidential oath, he held nothing back. In his service of the Union he invested his life, his honor, his hope, even all he had. It was little else he had to give. His lineage was of the lowliest. His education was of the meagerest, and wholly a by-achievement. In social graces he was quite unversed and unadorned. He was no flatterer. The fawner's dialect he never knew. He would not boast. To beg he was ashamed. He was too honest for any knavery. Pure integrity was his only asset. As he took his stand at the presidential post, he stood without a single decoration, unsupported, all alone. It was literal truth that when he took his official oath the only bond he had to furnish was his naked honor. But that possession was no counterfeit. Its value did not fluctuate. It was solid gold. In his honest rating, the plighted faith in the words of his official pledge was beyond all price. As he discerned and understood the crisis of his day, the Nation's very being was at mortal stake. And when in that momentous hour she summoned him to take the presidency, she laid sovereign requisition upon his total being. And when he obeyed the call, he invested all. No reserve of his possession was kept in hiding for his refuge and reimbursement, in case the Nation failed. He ventured all he had, even all his honor. And this complete consignment by Lincoln to the Nation's use of all his moral wealth, of all his pure and priceless personal worth, was an act of unalloyed benignity. It was for the Nation's welfare that he devoted himself. It was that the Union might be preserved, and that all men might be free, that he plighted his integrity. This investment of Lincoln's friendliness for the well-being of all the land, even of all the men therein, was not alone immediate, winning direct attachment to every man; nor merely all-absorbing on Lincoln's part, impressing into kindly service every value and every capacity of his total life; it also enshrined a deathless hope. Lincoln's patriotic devotedness was no venture of a day or of a decade. Lincoln's good-will looked far ahead. He had a passion for immortality. His total effort and aim in all his generous endeavors and hopes, as he served in his public life, can be defined as a sovereign aspiration that our government should be so guided and chastened in all its life that the Union should never be dissolved. To his kindly heart no possible event seemed more appalling than that this hope should fail. So far as his words reveal, this central, sovereign passion of his glowing heart was all but exclusively patriotic. He apparently forgot himself in his wistful anxious hope that the Nation's peace might long endure. His faith in the Union's indestructibility may be said to spring out of his undying continual love for his fellowman. Indeed just here seems to be the birthplace of all his prophetic ponderings over the final issues of our civic life. The very stature of the government which his ideal conceived and which he thankfully saw that our Republic designed, was deemed by him to be copied from nothing other than the divinely fashioned moral nature which he found alike in himself and in all his fellowmen. Deep within his friendly heart he cherished the vision of a Republic of freemen leagued together indissolubly as mutual friends. It was to realize and certify that hope that he dedicated his life. And when he pledged and sealed that offering, it was with no design that the seal should ever be broken, or the pledge be ever recalled. Here is another primary quality of Lincoln's friendliness. It was inwrought with personal durability. Grounded as was his civic hope in the freedom and conscience of Godlike men, it was impossible for him to consent that such a hope should ever encounter defeat or decay. Deep and sure within its essential nature were the urgent promptings and the soaring promise of immortality. These observations upon the immediate directness, the integral whole-heartedness, and the deathless eagerness of Lincoln's friendliness, if thoughtfully compared together, reveal that these distinctive phases of his outpouring good-will are in nature identically the same, and spring from an identical source. This essential coincidence, this mutual convergence deserves attention. It intimates wherein the very essence and being of his neighborly kindness consists. And in Lincoln's life this indication of the precise whereabouts and substance of the essential and innermost quality and being of human kindliness is certain and clear, as in hardly any other man. His benignance in his dealings with men is of well-nigh unparalleled openness and freedom from all admixture and alloy. Lincoln's kindness embodies and conveys Lincoln's self. In every favor from him he is in the gift. In the center of all the friendliness that is characteristic of Lincoln, Lincoln himself stands erect and entire, offering and commending in every case his full-sized, undivided self. This is the core and this the circumference, this is the sum and this the substance of his good-will. It is rich with all his personal wealth, solid with all his personal worth. In him an act of friendship was an inauguration of personal copartnership. In his good-will was all the energy of his life. In his benefactions he gave himself. Just so with his compassions. With the sorrows of humanity it was his way to enter into personal fellowship. This was the form and being of all his generosity. His mastery over all malice when facing a foe, his abounding charity when judging a wrong, his hearty gladness in the presence of human joy, his cordial ways in greeting friends, his fatherly affection for his boy, his love for his native land, his pity in presence of the bereft, his sadness at sight of wounds, his readiness to share evenly with all his Nation all that guilty Nation's painful discipline--all this variety and plenitude of ample, open-hearted tenderness towards other men was alike and always the complete and conscious contribution of himself. In brief, in full, and finally, Lincoln's friendliness, through all its beautiful versatility, was a free and facile, a full and total, personal self-devotion. This is the common content giving all its value to all the forms of his human kindliness. HIS PURENESS--LIFE In the exposition just foregoing, the thought has been drawn into allusions to Lincoln's premonitions or aspirations towards immortality, for the Union, if not for himself. This was in the course of an effort to find the spring-head of his kindliness. And it culminated in the suggestion that deep within Lincoln's being there was enshrined an assurance, however unconfessed or even half unconscious, of personal immortality. And that from within this shrine of living hope, common to him with every man, he drew his inspiration and his very pattern of a national Union and a national peace that would endure forever. Here is something that calls for examination, for in this we touch a radical quality of Lincoln's moral being. This eager craving after permanence was in him an appetite that could never be fed or satisfied by any things that perish. In itself and in its nutriment there is an irrepealable call for something indefeasable, something utterly superior to all fear of death, something never amenable to any form of dissolution or decay, something spiritually pure, and essentially kindred to the essential being of a deathless soul. The matter may be approached to start with by saying some things negatively. Lincoln was centrally in no sense a materialist. He was indeed firmly sensitive to the physical majesties of this continent, though in his day they were hardly half disclosed. He calculated with carefulness our material capacities for expansion in power and wealth. He foresaw our certain outward growth into a puissant Nation, the coveted and ample resort and refuge and home of hordes of men from other lands. In his own well-seasoned and resourceful physique he felt and knew the worth of physical virility. He could thoughtfully compute the glittering values, the goodly financial revenues, the days and months and total seasons of physical idleness and delights that accrue to human owners from the unrequited toil of human slaves. And in the current civil war he completely understood that no less a concern than the perpetuity of the American Union was pending upon contests largely consisting of encounters of physical prowess, of tests of muscular endurance and strength. But not in calculations such as these did his thoughtful studies of human welfare take ultimate resort, or find final rest. His conception of the ideal state, of the ideal citizen, of the ideal life, was not constructed or inspired from carnal elements. He noted with life-long sadness the sordid baseness inseparably attending the fact of owning or being a slave. He deeply saw that those battles in the Wilderness were no mere conflicts of beasts. And never could he imagine or allow that his personal weight, and force, and worth were ratable by gymnastic tests. It was not upon things like these that Lincoln's attention and hope were fixed, when his hopes and plans for our prosperity took form. To the whole world of his material environment he was marvelously indifferent. On every perusal of his life one grieves at the story of his poverty, and the sad infrequency and meagerness in his daily life of the pleasures and recreations which are for the comfort and happiness of men in material things. But in this he seems as though unconscious of any disappointment. For himself as for the Nation, and for the Nation as for himself, his satisfaction and confidence were not born and fed of things that perish in their use. Luxury in food or attire, however toothsome or attractive to other natures, stirred but the feeblest hankerings, if any at all, in him. Towards sensualism of any sort, whether gluttony, drunkenness or lust, his sound and temperate manliness did not incline. And in his estimate of personal character his eye and respect did not rest in outer attitudes, on printed, age-long codes of manner. He was no slave of stately ceremonies, or artificial etiquette. Nor in religion did he bind his tongue to creeds however hoary, nor to rituals however august. He swore not by the oaths of any sect, however ancient and renowned. Neither in this mountain nor in that did he worship God. But on the other hand, and now to speak affirmatively, Lincoln lived no penury-stricken life. The resources within his personality were well-nigh incalculable. Few men in all our national catalogue have been endowed by God with so sterling and abundant interior wealth. And of all American patriotic benefactors few indeed have left in their single individual name and right such priceless legacies to their native land. What is life? What is human life? Wherein, completely and precisely wherein, is man distinguishable from the beast? For answer, study Lincoln and see. In the full development of such a study many massive verities will unfold. But the feature in Lincoln's manhood, which this chapter is set apart to designate and clarify, is the simple purity, the elemental spirituality of all his elemental traits. His dominant sentiments, his primary convictions, his main and all-mastering decisions were never born to die. They were instinct with life, with life indeed, a life never failing, ever more abundant and free. This interior vitality, this unalloyed and undecaying purity may be described one way as a real idealism. But in ascribing idealism to Lincoln, it needs to be said at once that Lincoln's idealism, real and glorious as it must surely be confessed to be, was transparently and unvaryingly practical. In one way it may be defined as hope. A waiting hope was a standard characteristic of Lincoln's attitude. His sorrowful eye held fast to things as yet unrealizable. It is impressive to see how often and how fondly he mentioned the future, the "vast future," as he termed it, of our American career. The secret of the beauty and of the power of some of his loftiest and most spontaneous rhetoric is due to just this solemn eagerness towards the coming days. As one comes to study more intently into the outlay of his heroic strength, his struggle and toil are seen to be leashed about his consuming wish that the Nation in its undivided might could be unified about the speedy fulfillment of his prophetic aims. He never forgot the mighty lesson, nor lost the living inspiration of his own advancement from humblest station of ignorance and toiling poverty to the presidency. That transformation he loved to humbly hold before the attention of his fellow Americans, as a pattern of what might anywhere occur again. He loved to linger upon the possibilities of upward movement in the ranks of all laboring men. Large place and honorable position were given to this arousing theme in his first annual message to Congress. This general topic--the far-set, soaring possibilities of human betterment--held constant and commanding eminence in the ranging measure of his eagle-searching thought. For the Nation, and for its every inhabitant, he was a true idealist. But Lincoln's idealism, again be it said, was no wild indulgence of a vagrant and untrained imagination. It was utterly sober-minded. It took its form and found its force in the center of his sanest thoughtfulness. The terms in which its description has just been illustratively traced show it to be perfectly rational, and even matter-of-fact. Lincoln's idealism was nothing else but a heedful interpretation of the proper destiny of man. It was a reflection in terms of carefulest thought, albeit also in the guise of ardent hope, of the essential lineaments in the nature of man. And no human portrait by any artist was ever truer to fact, while yet tinged with fancy, pure and free. In all his picturing of things yet to be, but not yet in hand, his eye was fastened with an anatomist's intentness upon the actual human nature imperishably present in every man. Nothing that Lincoln's idealism ever proposed ever diverged from the bounds of the original fiat creating all men equal and free. That undeniable initial verity, itself the keystone of our national Constitution and Bill of Rights, supplied to Lincoln's hope its total and only inspiration. In those ancient and elemental realities, realities that deeply underlie and long outlast all the cults and customs and centuries which human thought is so prone to differentiate and divide, Lincoln detected solid foundations and ample warrant for age-long, undissolving expectations. In every human face there are outlines that are forever indelible. These unfailing lineaments Lincoln had the eye to see. And what is vastly more, he had the courage and the honesty to adopt them as the pattern of the platform, and to voice them as the notes of the battle-peal of his statesmanship. And this he did right wittingly, knowing assuredly that therein his vision had caught the gleam of things eternal; that therein he had made discovery that man, even the humblest of his race, could claim to be, as he phrased it to a company of blacks, "kindred to the great God who made him." This amounts to saying that Lincoln's statesmanship may be completely and precisely defined as the studied and deliberate exploitation, upon the field of politics, of those forces, central and common in all mankind, that are Godlike, immortal, spiritual. Here we reach a definition that outlines with close precision a trait of Lincoln's full-formed character that held a primary place in winning for Lincoln his immortal renown. He attached himself to things themselves immortal. His ideal hope had no admixture of clay, nor even of gold. He made no composition or compromise with anything that dies. His supreme desire was of a nature never to decay. It was pure with the deathless purity of the human soul. To this pure principle, eternal loyalty to the immortal dignity of man, he signed and sealed his soul's allegiance with bonds that even death could never relax. Such statements describe a primary co-efficient in Lincoln's ethical life. Abjuring the unnumbered allurements of the material world, allurements whose fascinations unfailingly fade, and reposing his confidence wholly in treasures that time and use only brighten and refine, Lincoln reveals in the realm of ethics the singular excellence of an ideal that can kindle in an immortal man an immortal hope. Purging every sort of baseness out of the central life, and enthroning an all-refining pureness in the sovereign desires and visions and designs, he has inaugurated in the field of civics an idealism that will honor every man, fit actual life, and endure forever. Personal pureness, this pervades the life of Lincoln as crystalline beauty pervades a block of marble. This refining trait in Lincoln, this inner hunger for his living soul's true nutriment, this thirst for the pure, perennial springs, finds signal illustration in the closing sentence of this last inaugural, where he pleads with all his fellow-citizens to so conduct all civic interests as to secure among ourselves and with all Nations a "lasting peace." That craving after permanence in civic harmony betokens an impulse towards immortality; and rests down, as the entire inaugural explains, upon that only basis of enduring civic quietude, an honest and universal recognition and respect for those indelible and universal lineaments of personal dignity which the Creator of men has traced upon every human soul--lineaments from which the obscuring dross of centuries was being purged in the Providential fires of an awful war. Just this was the meaning of the war, as Lincoln understood its work. That earth-born sordidness which marked all slaves as common chattels, was being burnt out of our national life, as our basest national sin. Thenceforth, forevermore, it was Lincoln's living hope that all mankind might peacefully agree to supremely cherish and mutually respect those human values that human unfriendliness, and centuries of contempt, however deeply they may obscure, can never obliterate. Upon such enduring foundations, and upon such foundations alone, Lincoln clearly saw, could human peace endure. And upon this same foundation rests his first inaugural as well. In all those months of special study, ensuing between his election in November of 1860 and his inauguration in March in 1861, and for an ample seven years before, Lincoln was feeling after civic perpetuity. And when he stood before the Nation to publish his first inaugural address, his supreme concern was fixed upon the threatened and impending ruin of the Republic. He there faced a menacing South, irreconcilable, and resolute for dissolution or blood. That outcrying situation brought final issues near. Must the Union perish? Could the Union endure? Civic dissolution or civic perpetuity--this was the immediate, the unrelieved, the ominous alternative. In the fiery heat of civic hate, flaming into civil war, Lincoln had to seek for civic principles that hate could not subvert, nor the fires of war consume; principles too strong to admit defeat, too pure to be dissolved. Never did a statesman bend over a graver task, nor with a more honest and patient heart, nor with a mind more divinely fashioned and furnished to comprehend and penetrate the actual case in hand. As in a chemist's alembic, he fused and tried our Constitution and all our history. Into that first inaugural he incorporated the issues of his thought. And this was its simple, sole result:--Slavery is "the only substantial dispute." With the people is "ultimate justice." With God is "ultimate truth." We are not "enemies." We are "friends." In this supreme dispute let us confer and legislate as friends, and then as friends live together in an amity that shall be perpetual. This is the uncompounded essence of his first inaugural, as of all his political philosophy. In universal freedom, by mutual persuasion, and in even friendliness, let our Union forever endure. Here again is a statesman's publication and heroic defense of a pure, immortal hope, voiced in an appeal and upheld by arguments as spiritual and pure as the inmost being and utmost destiny of the living souls of men. No study of the transcendent momentum in Lincoln's life of spiritual realities can fairly overlook his speech in Peoria, October 16, 1854. It is, as he said at the time, "substantially" a repetition of an address at Springfield, twelve days before. It "made Lincoln a power in national politics." It was the commanding beginning of his commanding career. That year, 1854, began the convulsion which made him president, involved the war, and ended in his violent death. As matters stood on New Year of 1854, slavery was, by act of Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thenceforth forbidden to spread anywhere in United States territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri. In the early half of 1854 Senator Douglas drove through Congress a bill, creating the territory of Nebraska, which declared the Compromise prohibition of 1820 "inoperative and void." Thenceforth slavery might spread anywhere. This is the "repeal" of the Missouri Compromise. That "repeal" brought Lincoln to his feet. And from the day of that Peoria speech Lincoln was, to seeing eyes, a man of destiny. For, not for that day, nor for that century, nor for this continent alone did Lincoln frame and join that speech. Let any logical mind attempt a logical synthesis of that address, marking well what affirmations are supreme. Not out of conditions that vary with the latitudes, nor out of opinions that change as knowledge improves, and not from sentiments that bloom and fade as do the passing flowers, was that address constructed. It handles things eternal. Its central propositions outwear the centuries. Its conclusions are compounded from stuff that is indestructible. And the piers upon which they rest are as steadfast as the everlasting hills. Freedom, union, perpetuity were its only positive themes. Let us "save the Union" was its central call; and "so" save it as to "make and keep it forever worth the saving"--so save it "that the succeeding generations of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed to the latest generations." The perpetual Union of freemen--this was his one pure hope. Of this freedom slavery was a "total violation." Such a Union the principle of secession made forever impossible. And in the continual presence of tyranny, and under ever impending threats of disruption, perpetuity in peace was an impossibility. Liberty, equality, loyalty--only upon these enduring verities could self-government ever be built, or ever abide. Here is stability. Here is harmony. Here are truths "self-evident." Against cruelty, disloyalty, and pride these eternal principles are in "eternal antagonism." And when the two collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must continually follow." Against human slavery, and all that human slavery entails, humanity instinctively and universally revolts. It is condemned by human righteousness and human sympathy alike. "Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature." Thus Lincoln bound together the arguments of this appeal. The irrepealability of the human sympathies in the nature of all men, the undeniable humanity of the black, self-government built upon the creative fiat of freedom and equality for all--upon these enduring propositions a Nation could be built whose resources either to eliminate all evils, pacify all convulsions, and resolve all debates, or to achieve a lasting progress, dignity and peace, would be inexhaustible. Thus, at the very start, his eye pierced through the political turmoil of his time, fixing in the central place before the Nation's gaze those "great and durable" elements which "no statesman can safely disregard." Plainly notable in all this is that powerful and habitual proclivity in Lincoln to find out and publish abroad those civic propositions and principles that are inwrought with perpetuity. He was straining and toiling towards a triumph that time could never reverse. Foundations that were sure to shift, or disintegrate, or sink away, he was resolute to overturn, and clear away. He chose and strove to toil and speak for the immortal part in man, for ages yet to come, and for the immediate justice of Almighty God. And so he fashioned forth a programme that, like the programme of the Hebrew prophets, circumvented death. HIS CONSTANCY--TRUTH This second inaugural contains a fine example of free and reasoned reliability. It is in fact, in its total stature, a stately exhibit of deliberate steadfastness. Let this short document be read, meanwhile remembering that other inaugural document, and not forgetting all the unspeakable strain and struggles of those four intervening years. The man who spoke in 1861, and the man who speaks now again in 1865, stands forth in the heart of those bewildering confusions of our political life, a living embodiment of civic constancy. In his person national firmness stands enshrined. In those ripe convictions, in those cool and poised determinations, in those ardent, prophetic desires--steadfast, consistent, and sure--are traceable the rock-like foundations of our confederate Republic. In those inaugurals stands a monument not liable soon to crumble away. But within that monument insuring its durability, rests as within and upon a steadfast throne, Lincoln's everlasting fidelity. To win clear vision of this fine trait, let one read again this second inaugural, and locate truly the center of gravity of its second paragraph. There Lincoln is tracing in broad, plain strokes the origin and on-coming of the war. In the center of his steady thought the interest centrally at stake was the Union. On the one hand he recalls his own address at his first inauguration, "devoted," as he says, "altogether to saving the Union without war." On the other hand, he recalls "insurgent agents" seeking to destroy it without war. War was deprecated and dreaded by both parties. But one would make war rather than let the Nation survive. And the other would accept war rather than let the Nation perish. "And the war came." As a register of Lincoln's capacity for free, intelligent stability, no passing glance can in any sense exhaust or apprehend the depth and sweep and energy of those last four words. When loyalty to the Union was the issue and interest at stake, Lincoln would "accept war." "And the war came." When Lincoln voiced those four words, his eye was looking back through four dreadful, bloody years--years, whether in prospect or in reminiscence, fit to make any human heart recoil. But as he surveys those scenes of hate and carnage and desolation, retracing and reckoning again the sum of their awful sorrow and cost, and rehearses again his resolution to "accept the war," it is without a shadow or a hint of wavering or remorse. In fact he is recalling that fateful day of four years before with an eye to review and vindicate that fateful resolve. At the end of those eventful and sorrow-laden years, he is as steady as at their start. Not by the breadth of a hair have his footing and purpose, his judgment and endeavor been made to swerve. Then as now, now as then, his loyalty is absolute. And in that sturdy loyalty of that lone man a seeing eye discerns nothing less than the unbending majesty of a Nation's self-respect. It is the Nation's sacred honor that he has in sacred charge. In him the integrity of the Nation at large finds a champion and a living voice. In his firm-set decision the Nation's destiny takes shape. In those short pregnant words the proud consistency of our total national career, and his superb reliability, become, instantly and for all time, freely, nobly, and completely identified. This is not to say that in the teeming history of those eventful years Lincoln's mind and will and sentiments had stood in stolid immobility. He freely concedes that the years have brought him lessons he had never foreseen. And his central attitude in this second scene is a reverent inquiry into the ways of Him whose purposes transcend all human wisdom, and require full centuries to complete. But strong and clear within his reverent and lowly acceptance of divine rebukes, stands unbent and unchanged his steadfast, invincible pledge to reveal, on his own and on his Nation's behalf, the sovereign grandeur of civic reliability. In his first message to Congress this integral trait of his personal and official life finds majestic and most definite explication. It is the passage explaining to Congress, in precise and minute recital, just how the war began. It deals with those ominous events in Charleston harbor, centering about heroic Major Anderson, a federal officer, and within Fort Sumter, a federal fort. That assault upon a national garrison by Confederate guns was no haphazard event. At just that moment, and in just that spot the national crisis became acute. Upon that spot, and upon those events Lincoln's eye was fixed with a physician's anxiety. There he knew he could feel the pulse of the resentment and resolution of the South. Day and night he held his finger upon its feverish beat. And as the fever rose, he marked with exactest attentiveness its registration of one condition of the Southern heart:--Was that heart so hot with civic hate that, when every lesser issue was set aside, and the only issue under review was the right of the Republic to stand by its officers and its flag, then those Southern leaders would fire upon those officials in a federal fort, and pull down that flag upon federal soil? If in a federal fort the major in command, and his uniformed men, while making no aggression nor voicing any threat, but acting only as peaceful exponents of the Nation's authority, and being in exigent need of food, were to be visited by a national transport bearing nought but bread, upon such a ship, upon such a mission, would seceding soldiers open fire? If they would, and if that onslaught passed without rebuke, then that Nation's federal integrity was dissolved. Such was the unmixed issue, and so sharply edged was its final and decisive definition under Lincoln's hand. And on his part there was here no accident. With foresight, and by careful design Lincoln "took pains" to make the problem plain. With impressive and ideal carefulness he guided the action of his own heart to its final resolution, and predetermined the final verdict of the world. In the last supreme alternative, when government agents stand in need of food, and citizens who repudiate all loyalty fire upon government transports freighted only with bread, what shall a government do? This was the naked question that Lincoln faced, when he decided to accept and prosecute the war. Upon this one plain question, and upon his one convinced determination he massed and compacted his first Congressional address. Right well he understood its point, its gravity, and its range. And surpassing well was he fitted to be the man to frame and demonstrate the true reply. In all the land no finer, firmer exemplar of elemental constancy could ever have been found to guide and cheer the Nation's course in this extremest test of elemental self-respect. Let those words be written and read again. It was a test of national self-respect, elemental and supreme. It was a question that concerned, as Lincoln saw and said, "the whole family of man." "Government of the people, by the same people"--can or cannot such a government "maintain its own integrity against its own domestic foes?" Can it "maintain its own integrity?" Can it master "its own domestic foes?" Can men who assume their self-control be trusted to maintain their self-respect? Here is a problem that is in verity elemental and supreme. What, in very deed and in solid fact, what is civic reliability? Where, among all the governments by men, where can steadfastness, civic steadfastness be found? Nowhere, Lincoln had the eyes to see; nowhere, but in the civic constancy of men at once governing and governed. Only thus and only there, only so and only here, in this heaven-favored land, did Lincoln see, can any government of men by men find fundamental base and final form that shall be consistent, stable, and real. This is government indeed. Here is elemental, civic verity. A community held in common self-control upon the basis of common self-respect--such a union alone has constancy. This is the sublime and radical civic truth that Lincoln forged out upon his steadfast heart, as he bent with mighty ponderings over those scenes in Charleston harbor, and reviewed and expounded their pregnant implications in his initial message to Congress in 1861. In many ways this constancy of Lincoln rewards attentive thought. For one thing, it was radiant with intelligence. Indeed in him the two became identified. As thus conceived, it shows as pure and clear consistency. His fully tried reliability was the well-poised balance of a mind long-schooled in the art of steadiest deliberation. When Lincoln held immutably fast, it was due to his invincible faith that the conviction to which he clung involved abiding truth. This quality tempered all his firmness. Just here one finds the genesis and motive of all his skilled invention of reasoned, pleading speech. Lincoln's prevailing power of urgent argument roots in the deep persistency of his convinced belief. It was because of an impassioned confidence, an assurance that was vibrant with a note of triumph, that his grasp of any ruling purpose was so unwaveringly firm. This was his mood and attitude in all the major contentions of his life. To the central tenets that those contentions involved he held with all the firmness of the rooted hills. Touching those primary principles in his character and politics his mind and faith seem to have attained an absolute confirmation. And from those settled positions he could never be moved. Constancy in him was nothing more nor less than the energetic affirmation of intellectual rectitude. His steadfastness, thus, was a mental poise. It can be defined as ripened judgment, a conclusion of thought, safeguarded on every side by a discernment not easily confused, by a penetration not easy to escape. This involved a wonderful flexibility. While steadfast unto the grade of immutability, where honor was involved, no student of his ways could call him obstinate. While firm and strong enough to hold the Nation to her predestined course upon an even keel, he held her helm with a gentle, pliant grasp. Being in every mental trait inherently honest and deliberate, he could at once be resolute and free. This blend within his being of thoughtfulness and determination, of openness and immutability, this candid, conscientious, mental poise, this Godlike apprehension of the larger equilibrium, qualified him peculiarly to interpret the major movements of his time, to trace in the deep, prevailing sentiments of the human soul the chart of our national destiny. Here is in Lincoln something wonderful. Among the millions of his fellowmen he counts but one. But in the range and grasp of his thought, in the eager passion of his heart, in the controlling power of his commanding will, he comprehends them all. Stable and heedful at once, he could challenge unanswerably every man's esteem. His symbol is the firm, benignant oak, the sheltering, abiding hills. Thus he stood to help and hold, to serve and rule among his fellowmen. Thus he wrought coherence into our great career. Thus he linked together those mighty political events with a logic which succeeding times have proved powerless to refute, but strong and glad to confirm. He had marvelous capacity to divine. With him to reason was to illuminate. Things bewilderingly obscure, within his thought and speech grew plain. He was our prime interpreter. He explained the Nation to itself. But in every such elucidation the Nation was made to co-operate. His instinctive, habitual attitude toward other men was that of a conferee. He was sensitively open to complaints and appeals. Delegations and private supplicants always found him courteous. This courtesy was never formal. To a degree altogether noteworthy the words of other men found entrance into the counselings of his mind. He was not merely accessible. He was impressible, sensitive, quick to appreciate and honor the sentiments of another man. With the earnest plea of balanced, honest argument, hailing from whatever source, he was facile to correspond. His judgments and decisions were amenable to estimates wholly novel to him. Indeed, to an almost astonishing degree his major movements were commensurate with the progress and pace of the national events that environed his life. In some of his mightiest accomplishments he seemed to do little more than register the conclusions of the national mind. All this is to say that Lincoln's constancy was poise, not obstinacy; a well-reflected equilibrium, not a stiff rigidity. All his steadiness was studied. Never can it be said of Lincoln that his verdicts were snap judgments. On the contrary, with him deliberation and delay were so habitual and so excessively indulged, while pondering some massive, political perplexity, that the patience of some of our greatest statesmen repeatedly broke down, and he was charged repeatedly with criminal, and all but wanton indifference, inertia, and neglect. But never was sorer libel. Through it all he was only too intent. Through it all his eye refused to sleep, while his steady and steadying mind pursued the vexing task, until its permanent solution stood clear. And then, with his eye steadily single to the guiding hand of God, to the Nation's immortal weal, and to his own unsurrendered integrity, he would publish and fulfill his studied and sturdy resolve. Upon the basis of these internal mental conquests did all his firmness rest. Hence his life-long evenness and freedom from fluctuation. But this challenges still further study. Given this notable blending in his mental habits of independent stalwartness and amenability to others' views, what is the inmost secret and explanation of his undeniable consistency? It lay in his human sincerity. His affinity with his neighbor was a reality. The Nation's deepest concerns were as deeply his own. Hence his ultimate convictions, though ripening in a single decade, proved to be in deep and enduring agreement with the ultimate convictions of the Nation at large, though requiring a full century to mature. The sentiments that were essentially his own were seen, when openly published upon his lips, to be the sentiments essential and common to his fellowmen. His personal aspiration was a national goal. His personal character was a national type. Truly representative, he was at the same time as truly unique. Always facing towards other men, he always stood erect. This was Lincoln's constancy. It was not the stubbornness of an arbitrary will, although his will had regal energy. It was not a frigid intellectualism, although in mental penetration he could not be surpassed. It was not a tide of swelling enthusiasm, although the supreme emotion of his heart was the passion of an ideal patriotism. His commanding constancy, potent to compose a Nation's turbulence, was but the outer stature of his typical interior integrity. It was the open assertion and attestation of his personal self-respect. Thus Lincoln's convictions and verdicts were unfailingly his own. And thus those verdicts and convictions had continental breadth. Dealing with a Nation's destiny, he came to be clothed with a Nation's majesty. In his own great heart, as in a Nation's crucible, he assembled and resolved the Nation's complexities; and in his own pure desire, as in a Nation's purified hopes, he defined and described our national goal. Of all things narrow and peculiar, of all things partisan and sectional, he purged his eye, until with malice toward none, with charity for all, with reverence towards God, he could see the total vastness of the things with which he had to deal. Here is a loyalty worthy of the name--the plighted troth of one in whom the Nation's noblest hopes stand forth already realized, assured, secure. This defines and describes the force at play in this last inaugural. In the volume of those words Lincoln's message and Lincoln's manhood were identical. Its utterance was the voice of his self-respect. Herein Lincoln the patriot and Lincoln the man are one. Here was Lincoln's standard. His search for verity was a study of himself--of himself as true kindred of God and of his fellowmen. This is the core of Lincoln's honesty. This is the key to Lincoln's constancy. This is the secret of Lincoln's authority. This was the goal of Lincoln's quest for verity. This was for Lincoln the one reality. As child of the one great God, as closest kin of every man, he is our model champion and exemplar of the one abiding truth--personal self-respect. That this should be held unperverted and preserved intact was in the thought of Lincoln the primal equity, the very substance of a man's integrity. HIS HUMILITY--WORTH The name of Lincoln is linked inseparably with the lot of the slave. That the fortune of the lowly might be improved was the supreme enterprise of his life. As conceived by him, that enterprise concerned all men. Not for black men alone, and not alone for men in literal and evident bonds, was this, his major interest, engaged. Quite as keenly, nay even more, was his heart concerned for his closer kinsmen of Saxon blood, who never felt the slave driver's lash. But even here his prevailing inclination was a kindly solicitude for people of meager comfort, culture and liberty. Towards men whose fortune was adverse, and from whom more favored ones were prone to turn their face, his heart was prone to be compassionate. His very instincts seemed inclined to make the poor his intimates. And when he stood among the lowly, he never showed a sign that he had entered the shadow of any shame. Richly dowered with nobility himself, himself superior to every fortune, incapable of subjugation by any fate, a master owned among the mightiest, the dominant function of his life was ministration. This was his ambition. And it was sovereign. His towering aspiration was that the needy be relieved, that poor men might have means, that bondmen might be free. This was a soaring, imperial wish. But it sent him where men were most down-trodden and overborne. It forced his name and reputation to become identified with the gross and low condition of the rudest, most untutored mortals of our land, the humble Afro-American slave. This lowly fellowship he never attempted to disguise nor consented to disclaim. He rather seemed to welcome whatever burden or reproach it might seem to involve. Before and against the white man who held the whip, beside and befriending the black who felt its lash, he chose to take, and persisted to keep, his stand. Many a time was this co-partnership flung in Lincoln's face with stinging words as a mongrel, shameful thing--with most vigorous persistence by Douglas in their famous debates. But it was not in Lincoln to desert and disown the poor, nor yet to apologize, nor to retort, nor even to reply. As champion and companion of the despised and embondaged victims of the white man's greed and contempt, Lincoln stands by the negro, as full of resoluteness, and as free from shame, as though defending his own home. Here is genuine humility, not an attitude assumed, but a virtue inwrought. That this rare and Christian grace was planted deep in Lincoln's heart, and pervaded the total fullness of his life, may be argued from the very texture of his last inaugural. Upon just this point that document deserves minute attention. From the vantage ground of April 4, 1865, and from the point of view of slavery, that address is a profound and most commanding interpretation of the philosophy and phenomena of our American life. The war, God's Providence, and slavery--they are its sovereign themes. God's Providence shaping into national discipline the tragedy of the war; slavery "somehow" its deepest, fateful "cause:" there are thoughts for thoughtful men, who may wish to understand the meaning of our national life. The point to notice here is to observe how in Lincoln's mind in 1865, the course, and curse, and fate of slavery connect. It is nothing less than a profound elucidation of outstanding American events. It intimates impressively how Lincoln's mind had brooded and pondered over the lot of the African slave. He had reckoned all the value of their unrequited toil. The marks of their bruises and wounds were seared upon his soul. And of all the meaning of that sore humiliation, in terms of our national destiny and of the Divine dominion, he became the supreme and sympathetic expositor. In his unfolding of that meaning was infolded the master motive of his life. Under the hand of God he was having bitter but submissive share in setting forever right the cruel, age-long wrongs of the African slave. That such sentiments should take such shape at such a time is signal demonstration that they were the central sentiments of his heart. He was highly designated to a humble task; and he knew no higher honor than to keep close friendship with the poor, until his high commission stood complete. And to this close affiliation of lowliest lives with the loftiest aims and issues of his great career, he devotes well-nigh the whole of his inaugural address as our Nation's president to expound, therein betraying no slightest sign that he sees in that alliance the slightest incongruity. In that defense and championship of the rights that were elemental to men, though the most despised, he saw his highest dignity as president. And to that lowly aim he shaped and pledged his policy, his party, his fortune, and his fame. In truth this affinity of Lincoln with his neighbor in need was the very fruitage of the fortune of his life. He was fitted and predestined for it by his birth. His station was of the lowliest. His setting-up was pathetically scant. All his discipline was cruelly stern. In ease and plenty he had no share. Of sweets and luxury he had no taste. Born of parents pitifully poor, nurtured in painful penury, poorly sheltered, scantily clad, accustomed to neglect, intimate with want, trained to disappointment, toiling in untamed scenes against hard odds with rudest tools, the kindred and daily familiar of unassuming men, denied the commonest aids to personal refinement, he was to the atmosphere and temperament of genuine, undisguised humility native born, and fully bred. From such a hopeless start, in such a hostile environment, he made his way alone. It can be said with almost literal truth that he never had any help. His only friend was his modest, resolute heart. His winnings were all by wrestling--and the struggle never relaxed. When every antagonist had been met and overthrown, and his gaunt stature stood in the Nation's arena alone and undefeated, then upon that unbent but unpretending form his Nation and his Nation's God laid a burden, such as no man in all our history had ever borne. When beneath that great final task he meekly bowed, its superhuman responsibility and weight were all-sufficient to crush forever all vain-glorious pride, if in his tried heart any pride had ever entered, and having entered had still remained. Before the majesty of his commission, and amid the inscrutable perplexities of each unparalleled day, he must always be fain, even though never forced, to walk humbly among his people, and before his God. From birth to death, by fortune and by Providence, as though by overmastering fate, he was fashioned for humility. From all these grounds he was predisposed to modesty. Over against the vastness of his task, facing daily all its formidable difficulties, and sensible evermore of his infinite insufficiency, the posture of his spirit and the tone of his daily speech unfailingly betokened a moderate estimate of his personal significance. The overspreading majesty of the work to which he set his hand, always towering vividly before his thought, kept vividly active the consciousness that he was quite incompetent to accomplish aught, except the God of Nations tendered daily help. As thus inclined and thus disposed in body and in mind, he became a man of prayer. That he should often fall upon his knees was but the consequence of his daily discovery that his burdens and his strength were widely incommensurate. Many times those supplications seemed as though unheard. The heavens gave no sign. Then malice raged against him. But then his unsurrendered faith in God, his reverence for his task, and his sobering estimate of himself would show as meekness. It was not his way to retaliate or rail. In darkness, before delay, and beneath abuse, he bore and suffered long without complaint. In this pathetic quietness his humility becomes heroic. This bent towards lowliness, tempered through and through, as it was, with his clear intelligence, saved him from vaunting and all vanity. There was habitually in his posture a grave solidity. This often seemed like carefulness and caution. But it was born of modesty. If there was ever a time when ever a man might be suffered to boast, the date of this second inaugural was the time, and the author of that inaugural was the man. The hour of that address marked the opening of Lincoln's second presidential term. It was the crowning vindication of his presidential policy. After four years of war the national poll at the last electoral vote had shown the North stronger in men than when the war began. The status of the South was desperate. But five weeks lay between him and the surrender of Lee. Lincoln was not lacking in foresight, nor in careful calculation. His skill therein was preeminent. Wary, discerning, resolute, his assurance of ultimate victory no doubt firm and clear, no breath of boasting was given vent. Instead, with almost painful reserve, he modestly said, "With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured." Lincoln was one of those rarest of men, invincible in resolution, at the same time invincible in reserve. This inner mood of modesty showed in all his outer furnishing. It was not his way to publish his distinction. For him to signalize his primacy by any decoration would be an incongruity. In any group of men where precedence was emphasized he was ill at ease. Any attempt by him to designate his official elevation by some gilded ornament or plume would have been grotesque. His eyes were not lofty nor his heart haughty. His feet were for the furrow. His hands were for the axe. His lips were for friendly salutation of all the people on the street. Any outer token, intended to mark him for separation or any superiority, would have excited nothing but sorrow in him. Fabrics however costly and rare, jewels however brilliant and pure, designed and disposed for distinction and display, awakening envy and unrest quite as much as admiration and delight, were not for him. Plain man among the lowliest, true nobleman among the noblest, he wore all his honors in uttermost innocence of all parade. Nor were the features of Lincoln ever intended to be employed as instruments of scorn. Into the hellish ministry of curling contempt those gracious lips could never be impressed. His heart was far too kindly; and that were safeguard enough. But his unalloyed humility was far too potent to ever encourage or permit in him any indulgence of disdain. Truly lowly himself, it was not in him to coldly despise any of his fellowmen. Just here his humility displayed its sterling honesty. And just here his honor and his glory blend. Here is his sure title to nobility--a title that neither time nor eternity can ever tarnish or bedim. By every right is this nobility his. By his earthly fortune, as by a hard, relentless fate, his lot was cast among the poor; and by that same appointment the lot of all earth's poor has gained perennial dignity. But he graced those ranks also as a volunteer. By his own consent, with sovereign free selection, he elected to sustain and overcome all the impediments of the station of his birth, and so to demonstrate the full capacity of the humblest human life for high endeavor and desire. Thus he was alike and at once filled with a deep compassion, and free from high contempt. Here lies the firm foundation of his proud renown. This is the true birthmark of his nobility. He was above the baseness and the meanness of scorning any brother man. And so he avoided arrogance. It was not the way of Lincoln to forever reiterate, if even to allow, his own importance. He was acutely sensitive, to the meaning and worth of an honorable renown. Especially was his cool, gray eye awake to the future issues of the pregnant deeds of his teeming times. But therein his eager concern was a patriot's anxiety--an anxiety in which he mingled his fortune and fame with the destiny of his native land. Therein the jealousy of his desire for the national welfare burned away, as in sacrificial fires and upon a sacred altar, all ambitions for himself. At any cost to others, or through any other man's neglect, it was not in the heart of Lincoln to demand and heap together honors or advantages for himself. Well might he be justified, if ever such a course were fair, in claiming for himself exceptional rewards. Chief executive of a great Republic, commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the North, assured of the major momentum of military success, in immediate reach of vast and ever increasing resources, whether for war or peace, chosen the second time to be the Nation's head, charged the second time to consummate the Nation's perpetual unity--surely he had ample guaranty for imputing to his own sole hand, in a supreme degree, mighty prowess, imposing achievements, a vast and spreading authority and power. At such a time and amid such surroundings, a generous measure of self-aggrandizement would have seemed quite warranted and well sustained. But never was a mighty commander freer from that uncomely fault. The mention of victory makes him strangely unmindful of himself. The thought of his vast authority makes him the lowliest in the land. Lincoln was not arrogant. He made no effort after aggregated honors, however deserved, much less after honors unearned. In particular he showed no inclination to appropriate another's fame. For one thing, he knew too well the awful cost of magistracy. The right to be commander-in-chief of a Nation's resources and arms, so coveted a right in aspiring men, became transmuted in the cup which Lincoln drank into a terrible, an almost impossible responsibility. Nor was it of his nature to subtract from other men for his own increase. At the price of a brother's freedom, or happiness, or life, the gaining of ease, or wealth, or joy of any sort for himself would be far too dear. In the soul of Lincoln extortion could find no soil. His mien among men was that of indulgent ministry, not of exacting mastery. With the lower level and the lesser meed he could be well content. Morbid jealousy for his own acclaim, hungry greed for another's reward, satisfaction in plaudits that were undeserved, or comfort from robbery or extortion of any sort were sentiments for which the refined and genuine modesty of Lincoln had no appetite or taste. The honors that surrounded and invested him were up-springing, spontaneous and free; in no least measure accumulated, artificial or enforced. The native purity of Lincoln's lowliness shows best in his reverence for God. He lived in a daily consciousness of Providence. As a statesman he was thoroughly a man of God, full of a patriot's adoring and acquiescent thankfulness, as he watched and studied the wonderful unfolding of God's just and kindly government of this most favored land. This mood of humble reverence was deeply wrought. It was of the texture of his character. It was not a vesture or a posture, a gesture or a phrase, assumed here and discarded there, and often counterfeit. It was essential, like his integrity, pervading and indeed controlling all his responsible life. And it was wholly undisguised. In his most formal public documents--papers in which statesmen as a rule make scant allusion to Deity--Lincoln's allusions to God are their most imposing feature. Beyond all contradiction, Lincoln enacted his public responsibilities in the fear of God. This was the beginning of his wisdom. Just this is the secret of the sanity of this last inaugural. And it is the secret of its immortal beauty. And it is the girdle of its strength. In framing its central argument, and thereby steadying the Nation's heart in the convulsions of war, he was expounding the hidden ways of God. There grew a mighty paragraph. It reads smoothly now. But when it passed through Lincoln's lips, it was the issue of a hard-pent agony. When he voiced those words he stood before an altar, and made confession, like a very priest, for both North and South. All the land had behaved with unbecoming confidence. All alike were under discipline. God was in dominion. Even in their prayers both North and South had been contending against the Lord. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither had been answered fully. The Almighty had his own purposes. The expectations of all had gone astray. The contending struggles of either side, despite their contending prayers, were being turned by the judgments of God against them both into a terrible national chastisement. So Lincoln discerned, and so he humbly, vicariously confessed. But beneath this high dominion his heart too had been bowed down, and overwhelmed, and chastened sore. Repeatedly his counsels had been overturned, and his expectations had been reversed; and that too, as he devoutly believed, by the over-ruling purposes of God. Hence, as in this inaugural scene he faced the future, though he was head of a puissant people, he behaved like a little child. In a chastened sense of the mystery and authority of the overruling designs of Almighty God, he forebore to boast. And then he said in rhythmic words of almost prophetic majesty, and in the attire of all but sacrificial humility: "Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" This is indeed in prophetic strain. But he forbears to prophesy. He longed with sacrificial eagerness for national prosperity, in lasting freedom and unison and happiness. As he renewed his official pledge to preserve, protect, and defend the world's greatest charter of equality and freedom for all mankind, his heart and hope held high and firm. But his total being was subdued. God had crossed his path. The long-drawn war was God's rebuke. The Nation had gone sadly astray. The Almighty had taken her waywardness in hand. His purposes were in control. And He was supreme. And His ways were unrevealed. Lincoln stood to his task unflinchingly, ready either for sorrow or relief, ready either for death or life, as the Most High might appoint. Here is statesmanship indeed. But it is altogether unique. A mighty Nation's executive head, discerning, devoted, and devout, holding in his steady hand the charge of a Nation's destiny, pledging in the Nation's name to lay upon the altar, if need be for the Nation's honor, the Nation's life, and there before the altar waiting humbly upon God. Many a theme of profoundest purport opens instantly into view. Just now our eye is fixed upon its illustration of humility. On the one hand, and in the first place, its exhibition of the dignity of pure manhood is sublime. In this inaugural scene, beneath the awful stress of a Nation in war, upon the basis of the pledged covenant of the free, invincible faith that a free Republic can sustain and fulfill all its solemn responsibility, and with unquenchable hope in the vast and unseen future of his land, Lincoln took his stand, and held his ground, and put on record before God and all the world his reverent and resolute oath. Here is manhood, noble, majestic, decisive, free--a manhood that embraces the worth, voices the hope, and confronts with open breast the destiny of the race. But in this same scene these mighty energies pause. Lincoln consciously faces God. For himself and for the Nation he makes humble acknowledgment that the Lord is Almighty and Most High. And to God's full sovereignty he yields spontaneous consent. With lowliest submission and confession he concedes and declares that all his rebukes and all his rule are in righteousness. Here is a place where any man may properly pause. Here the orbit of our proudest being strikes its verge. Here God and manhood meet. Here human power faints. Here human resolution halts. Here human foresight dims. Here human wisdom becomes a void. Here all our pride becomes perforce humility; and all our counselings merge in faith. Here human grandeur touches its outer rim. But here, too, human eyes awaken. Here human aspirations rise. Here human wisdom becomes newly informed. Here human forecasts brighten into hope. Here human strength revives. Here human purpose tightens. Here in reverence human wisdom begins. Here in human lowliness appears a Godlike dignity. Here our human stature shows its noblest. Lincoln is at the utmost bound of his knowledge, and his liberty; and yet he is displaying just here a discernment and a decision of the most exalted type--a discernment, however, whose insight is a vision of faith, and a decision whose resolve is an exercise of trust. In this scene statesmanship is transmuted into religion, undefiled and pure. Man in his loftiest hope and uttermost need, and God in his transcendent royalty of equity and goodwill meet face to face, and stand in open, free and friendly covenant. Here is at once a portrait of true humility, and the acme of high nobility. Here in childlike trust and childlike faith the wisdom and the freedom of man attain their goal. Here statesmanship and reverence, wisdom and trust, freedom and acquiescence, dignity and lowliness harmonize and interblend. And in the unison either one remains uncompounded and pure. Here many questions press to be resolved. This signal scene in Lincoln's career--what has it to say about the inner nature of man? What about the nature of God? What about the nature of our human insight into the essential qualities of things? What about the relation of will to thought? What about the sovereignty of character? When human character touches the limit of human life, is it facing night or day? These are ultimate inquiries. And they are immediate. For answer to these inquiries, let Lincoln and Hegel meet. And let the Nations listen to their replies; and so discern what problems clear, where dignity and lowliness convene. For here is a shining scene, where any man may see that in a lowly heart wisdom and nobility may sit together as on a throne. Modesty like Lincoln's is a courtly grace. Reverence such as his beseems a prince. Such humility, reflecting with heavenly beauty the immediate presence of God, may clothe a mighty man, and hold the center of a mighty scene, without unseemliness, and it wants not intelligence. This at least this scene makes clear. PART III. SYNTHESIS LINCOLN'S MORAL UNISON The marvelous beauty of the Athenian Parthenon is displayed in four façades. Upon these four sides runs a frieze in a continuous band, crowning all the columns, and binding all the structure into a single shrine. Comprehended within the stately course of that all-encircling frieze is classic demonstration how an impressive manifoldness of sculptural form may present a perfect and impressive unison. Something such is Lincoln's character, as it stands in this second inaugural. In this address four personal qualities stand forth, as distinct and clear to the eye and thought as are the faces of the Parthenon; while, like the Parthenon, the author of that address is indivisibly and undeniably one. Both are alike composite, and both alike are one. Both embrace diversity, but all in perfect harmony. Both have perfect unity, but without monotony. Like the temple of Athene, greeting from its single altar every horizon of the Grecian sky, Lincoln, voicing his solemn oath as the Nation's president, gives utterance to every moral element in our American life. Here is something worth minute inspection. Here, upreared upon our Western, modern American soil, is a noble work of art, as noble as any in the ancient East--finished, balanced, and enduring--the ripened moral character of a people's patriot. First to notice narrowly is that Lincoln's moral texture is fourfold. Four virtues stamp this speech. Four strands compose its web. Four hues commingle in its light. Four parts convey its harmony. This four-foldness is discernible distinctly. Plain to see through all the features of this address, as well-defined as the features of his friendly face, is his kindliness. Of all things, war was most deplorable. Of all things, peace was most to be desired. All malice was to be disowned. All charity was to be indulged. All wounds were to be bound up. All sorrows were to be consoled. There spoke the pleading voice of love. All men were bidden to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. Here the quality of moral kindliness is unmistakably and indelibly distinct. Quite as plain is his ideal and illustration of integrity. As manifest to all the world is his inflexible uprightness, as is the outer stature of his erect physique. For the equity in the bondman's protest against two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil he had an open ear and a profound respect. In the confidence that the judgments of Almighty God were altogether just he was not ashamed to make public announcement of his abiding faith. Eager that peace among ourselves and with all Nations might always last, he was also eager that it should be just. Firmly based, for his Nation and for himself, upon such foundations of self-respect, resting on God, and resolute for the right, he had no other thought but to strive with unremitting constancy, until his work was done. Here is moral loyalty, plainly visible, and as plainly inviolate. Quite as clear is his humility. The war, as Lincoln viewed it, was a humbling visitation upon the Nation of the Nation's sins, a mighty rebuke upon all human scorn and pride. In all that sin and scorn and pride--the crime and guilt of slavery--Lincoln had no slightest, conscious, personal share. But the shame and woe of that rebuke, as it fell from the hand of God upon the Nation as a whole, he bore with quiet, meek humility. And to whatever further judgment the Almighty might allot he humbly bowed his head, confessing openly that, in his own heart and thought, God's ways had been proudly misunderstood. Here is reverent humility, and here is humble reverence, undeniable and undisguised. And just as clear is his supreme esteem for values that are permanent and pure. Above all changing accidents Lincoln honored the Godlike human soul. In harmony herewith his thoughts and arguments were prone to handle centuries. And in rating worth his standard was a man's humanity. Thus he shaped the records and the prospects of our history into a philosophy. Thus he interpreted the war. It was God's vindication of the immortal value of the humblest man. Carnal pleasures and worldly gains, wrung from human lives at the cost of the degradation and debasement of the human soul, and in defiance of God's eternal and indefeasible laws, Lincoln saw to be of all things the most foolhardy and crude. So spiritual and pure was his conception of God and man, and his active understanding of the meaning of historic efforts and events. Ideals, endeavors, and enjoyments, even though normal and worthy, if they dealt with values that were decaying and gross, were cheaply rated by him; while the Nation's perpetuity, each man's spiritual quality, and God's eternal purity held eminence unfailingly in his affection and esteem. Here is spirituality, pure within, and by the inwardly pure plain to see. As in the shapely quadrilateral of the Parthenon, this fourfoldness in the character of Lincoln is cardinal. Each quality is an element, each conforming with an elemental factor in the nature of every man. This involves that in its essential substance each trait, so far considered, is incapable of analysis. And each refuses to be resolved into something else. Each one is a simple and a constant co-efficient in Lincoln's moral being. Each one exists within his life in a complete integrity, indivisible, self-contained. His humility, thus, is integral and unmixed. When Lincoln bows, as he does in this inaugural, before his God, and therein offers his life in a bending ministry to all his fellowmen, that reverence and that ministry are, as ministry and as reverence, pure lowliness. The phases of that lowliness may pass through continual transformation. And those changing forms may have changing designations. It may be submission before God's sovereignty, reverence before his majesty, awe before his mystery, obedience before his authority, trust beneath his Providence, confession under his rebukes; but common, essential, and unchanged within them all is simple, pure humility. So with the fashion of his humble ways among his fellowmen. It also wears a varying guise. It may be modest reticence, abhorrence of parade, companionship with need, submission to abuse, co-partnership with a brother's shame, preferring another's gain, honoring other's worth, seeking ways to serve. But common, essential and unchanged within all these as well, is simple, pure humility. It is a solid moral trait, substantial and irreducible. As illustrated in Lincoln's life, it is entirely dignified and beautiful, essential and inseparable. As shown in his behavior, it corresponds with a relationship, as inherent and inwrought in his very being as his very breath. As a trait of Lincoln's character, his humility has a root, as firm and durable as is the transcendence of God, and as are the opportunity and obligation of every man among his brothermen to bear, forbear, and serve. It is just the same with his fidelity. It too, is an uncompounded and imperative moral trait. It is a living, facile grace, easily capable of many kinds of affirmation. It may identify itself with truth, in reasoned or implicit faith; with promise, pledge, or oath, in loyalty; with proof by testing fires, as fidelity, steadfastness, or reliability; with unvarying, free adhesion to eternal principles, as consistency; with clear conviction of sure reality, as verity; with ethical straightforwardness, as rectitude, sincerity, or honesty; with even, balanced justice, as equity; with the innermost and final norm of truth in any personal life, as self-assertion, or self-respect. But common within them all, unaltered and unalterable amid all those varied and varying forms, is simple, unmixed constancy. In any analysis of Lincoln's moral life this moral trait will forever demand distinct and distinctive recognition and name. It is based and centered in his estimate and estimation of himself, the eye of his very honor, the core of his nobility, the very sense within his living soul of the life of his integrity. It is the inward attitude of his moral worth, as invincible, insistent, and elemental as any purest action of his self-consciousness. The same holds true of Lincoln's kindliness. In the balanced harmony of his character the note of human friendliness is a persistent and indispensable strain. Without that melody his moral consonance would be painfully and irretrievably impaired. Like every other fundamental trait, this too may be voiced with every sort of easy, fluent variation. It may spring spontaneously from deep within the heart, as benign and all-embracing benevolence. It may overflow with benefits, in active, bounteous generosity. It may bind together an ideal home in parental, filial, fraternal affection. It may kindle at the altars of one's native land, and influence the heart of the patriotic devotee. It may break through all the accidents of birth and race into universal brotherhood. It may befriend the hurt, and needy, and bereft, as sympathy. It may so prevail as to bear up beneath the cruel sin of alien hearts in the sorrow of vicarious love, to the end that guilty men may be redeemed and reconciled. In myriad ways this human kindliness may speak its gentle words of mercy, grace, and peace. But every word is keyed to kindly fellowship. Through all those variations this note is prevalent. And it is keyed to a relationship as universal and as unavoidable as are the bonds of human brotherhood. This wanting in any moral character in fact or in idea, that moral character is unbalanced and incomplete. Its mighty influence and its constant evidence in Lincoln's active life supply an elemental requisite to that life's harmony. It is his full-voiced answer to the world-wide plea for human friendliness. And just such affirmations must be made concerning Lincoln's pureness. Like each of the other three, this quality, too, holds a place and eminence distinctly and uniquely its own. No other trait can do its part or take its place. Its function and its office permit no substitute. Nor can its ministry be divided. Its claim is regal. And in any rating and apportionment among the other three this trait must be granted equal primacy. Its presence and its purport in Lincoln's total life are clear and fair and absolutely radical. Its aspect varies like the aspect of the sky. But deep within those variations gleams the pure and shining blue. It may win triumph over greed of appetite in temperance; or over fleshly passion in continence. It may fix supreme desire, not on decaying things, but on undying life; not on things that change and disappoint, but on values that abide and hold their own. It may search far beyond things visible for things unseen; and look within all symbols, discerning what they mean. It may detect within down-trodden, untutored men souls kindred to their Maker. It may transcend all idol forms, and make all worship spiritual. It may see how ends outvalue means; and how bottles should not outvalue wine. In the midst of our universal lot of accident, disease and death it may hold fast, for all the pure in heart, to the hope of a happy immortality. But enduring and undying, common and unchanged within them all is simple, spiritual purity. The soul asserts supremacy. Things that fluctuate and finally dissolve, however befitting and beautiful while they thrive, are admired and valued far beneath the immortal and unchanging worth of God and Godlike souls of men. This clear vision and high evaluation of spiritual things in the thought and life of Lincoln can never be omitted nor excluded in any final analysis of his moral life. It ranks among the elements of his character, as each or any one of its facades holds rank about the Parthenon. Thus in the composition of Lincoln's moral being there are four solid, permanent, radical integers--his kindliness, his loyalty, his pureness, and his humility. And these four elements of his character face the four cardinal points in the compass of his life--his brother man, his conscious self, his flesh-bound soul, and his sovereign Lord. So inherent in his very structure, so inwrought in his conscious character, so deeply based, so cardinal, and so enduring and irreducible is this fourfoldness in Lincoln's inward life. And now, as with the Parthenon, this finished circuit of these four constituents makes the outline of Lincoln's character not only clear and cardinal, but inclusive and complete. Combining in their significance and sweep all fleshly and material things; all things superior and supreme; all the realm and range of human brotherhood; and all the truth and worth within his own identity--every factor and relation of his conscious life has been embraced. His neighbor and himself as conscious peers, each in loyalty and love demanding and awarding equal mutual heed; his spirit and his flesh, the two and only two constituents of his personal life; his finite nature, facing, with the daily meed and due of humble reverence, his infinite Creator, the Lord of grace and truth--these exhaust the primal co-efficients of his life; these enjoin and specify his primal obligations; these inspire and consummate every moral excellence. When these four virtues are discovered and admired, when each and all are elected and achieved; when any man stands true and firm in self-respecting constancy; benign and kind in self-devoting love; spiritually refined and pure amid a world of corroding change; bending before the Most High God with the adoration and awe that are forever so beautiful and meet, his moral stature stands fully finished, balanced, and mature. So plain to see, so integral, and so comprehensive are these four qualities of Lincoln's character. And now a mighty statement is waiting to be made. These four constituents of Lincoln's virtue are not four fractions of his character, each possessing and commanding in solitude and exclusively some separate segment of his morality. Not alone is each one integral, but Lincoln is integrally in each. His kindliness is not the action of a section of his character; it enlists and occupies his being as a whole and indivisibly. In Lincoln's faithfulness Lincoln's stature stands complete. Pureness is by no means an occasional or intermittent exercise of his judgment or choice. Nor in the geography of his life is Lincoln's lowliness local or sectional. The total Lincoln is kindly, faithful, pure, and lowly equally, fully and continually. When in this address he calls the Nation to firmness in the right as God reveals the right, his manhood stands full-sized in its exercise and pledge of patriotic loyalty to duty and oath. When again with pitying heart he makes reference to the slave driver's lash, to those centuries of unpaid toil, to the terrible cruelty of the war with its sorrowful entail of widows and orphans and wounds and graves, and, disowning all malice, voices his great-souled plea for universal charity and everlasting peace, the full flood of his full strength is pouring through his speech. When he reminds his fellowmen how far the worth of man transcends all other wealth, he is professing and commending a faith to which all his hopes stand pledged. And when in humble fellowship with humble men he abjures all hollow boasts and pride, and, bending beneath God's just rebukes, voices for all the land our national guilt, from that humiliation and lowliness no portion of his being is exempt. Each cardinal virtue engrosses and engages all his soul. And now ensues with a sequence that is irresistible, an affirmation that in all this study of Lincoln's character must stand supreme. Integral as is each several one of these four virtues in Lincoln's life, and integral as is Lincoln's life in each single several trait, these two integrities can be clearly seen to deeply interblend and truly coincide. There is among the four qualities within his life no dissonance. Here emerges Lincoln's moral unison. As in the Parthenon all the elements harmonize and the edifice is one, so in Lincoln moral manifoldness unifies. There is throughout coincidence. The heart that bows towards God, in that very act of meekest acquiescence swells with pity for all who mourn and bleed, with indignant jealousy for equity, and with a supreme esteem for immortal souls. These four virtues do not exist and operate asunder. They do not come into view in this inaugural in sequence, each one in turn displacing and eclipsing the one that went and shone before. They coexist, each one continuing undiminished and unobscured, each one fully active and plain to see, their confluent tides pouring through the same identical phrase, the total strength of Lincoln surging alike in each. Through the whole address thrills Lincoln's whole conviction, all his passion, and the total vigor of his will respecting truth and falsity, hate and charity, greed and purity, pride and humility. Here is moral unison. To find the secret to this moral synthesis demands and deserves the sharpest scrutiny. That this may be understood it requires to be seen that these four virtues, so clearly distinguishable and so perfectly combined, are as clearly and perfectly akin. Lincoln's equity and charity, as voiced in this address, are not alien energies. They vitally correspond. They bear mutual resemblance. Each springs from deep within himself, from his elemental manhood, a manhood that finds in his brother's life and liberty as deep rejoicing as in his own. And herein he is also kindred with God, as God's purposes and ways are defined in this address. God, too, is deeply just and kind. Here roots Lincoln's meekness under God's rebuke, and Lincoln's firmness in his understanding of what is right. Between his heart's chief wish and God's high will the moral correspondence becomes identity. So deep is the coincidence and agreement of Lincoln's reverence and equity and charity within himself and with his God. The same inwrought agreement shines in the profound affinity of Lincoln's kindliness and faithfulness and lowliness with his pure idealism. In him they are all as fully unified as is his manliness. So deeply intimate is the vital synthesis of Lincoln's moral unison. This position is pivotal. If either of these four virtues, here defined and designated as elementally distinct and cardinal, can be ever merged into any one, or any two, or all the other three; or if any one can be dissolved, or analyzed into something else still more elemental and pure, that possibility should be made passing sure and clear at just this point. For from the affirmations, thus far laid down, as to the cardinal validity and vital harmony of these four moral traits, and of the four foundations in which these virtues rest, follow other affirmations in the chapters that now ensue, which no artificial postulate can ever uphold. But here, in passing, two standard affirmations are required. It is not to be asserted or assumed that Lincoln's personal life attained perfection, and transcended sin. In the chapter on humility, and in chapters yet to come his own deep sense of deep unworthiness stands evident. But in his clear and firm ideal and desire, aglow throughout with Godlike grief for all delinquency, appear the qualities above defined. And then these qualities, which his unique career displays, are, as moral qualities, in no respect unique or beyond the measure of any man. They beseem quite normally the plainest of us all. This truth deserves full heed and unreserved respect. Lincoln was beautifully like a little child. He was indeed a hero and performed heroic deeds. But with all his heroism, as regards his moral qualities, the humblest mortal may be his peer. Here is the hidden secret of the universal and ungrudging admiration which his heroic character commands. He is the world's model and guarantee of a world democracy. PART IV. STUDIES HIS SYMMETRY--THE PROBLEM OF BEAUTY In Lincoln's character is a beautiful illustration of moral balance. He stands before the eye unchangeably, like the Capitol dome at Washington, a signal exhibition of firmness, harmony, and repose. As he fills his place as president, he seems to face the whole horizon at once. A study of his life leaves the impression that he is resting upon a solid, ample base; that his weight is well distributed; that his energies are united evenly; that all his parts agree together; that throughout his structure he is at ease; while yet there swell and rise within his breast proud, far-seeing hopes that only a Nation's grandest magnitude could give complete embodiment. This massive poise, and breadth, and balanced evenness are the seemly vesture of his character. They well become his inner attitude. They are the open intimation of the shapeliness and majesty of the unseen soul within. And quite as worthy of study and admiration as our national dome, is this well-poised nobility of Lincoln's personality. With this intent one may well review this last inaugural, for it enshrines superior beauty. Not unfittingly did it find first utterance beneath the presence of that imposing masterpiece at our national Capitol. As in that circling colonnade, so in the measured cadences of this address, there is exalted harmony. Its phrases, rhythmic and pleasurable, rank almost as music. Read however many times, its sentences never tire. Minds the most refined are glad to point to this address as to a noble monument, assured that its perusal will awaken in any American high national pride, and in the minds of all men a pure delight. This commanding, gracious dignity is not alone a matter of even rhythms and pleasing cadences. It is to its author's moral poise and full harmony that this speech owes its symmetry. Indeed this is all its substance. Of rhetorical decoration it is absolutely bare. Its only title to its universal admiration is the patent fact that its author has traced and set therein, as with an engraver's nicest art, the princely fashion of his high-born soul. Its finished ethical symmetry is all the art that gives this speech its everlasting charm. What now is the inmost nature of the attractiveness that holds possession of this last inaugural? In this inquiry is extended a winsome invitation to any beauty-loving mind. As such a mind fixes its inspection intently upon the vital structure of this address, he sees within its shapely borders four princely virtues, standing together in a courtly league. Each virtue stands mature in unrestrained virility, no one of them overbearing the other three, nor being overborne. With easy, manly grace each virtue does its part, while all harmoniously combine, to support with Godlike sagacity and strength the problems of a Nation's destiny in days and tasks that mock the sagest counsel and baffle the proudest might of man. Like stately columns beneath a stately dome, these virtues deserve regard. Each one is integral in Lincoln's personal majesty, and in the finely finished power of this address. The exhibition of personal self-respect, the very eye of moral verity, as displayed in Lincoln's own reliability, and idealized within his steadfast plan for national consistency, is fashioned forth within the well-set features of this address with all the well-poised grandeur of the Olympian Zeus. The tones of kindliest friendliness towards detractors and defenders alike, repelling all malignity, unfailingly benign, cannot in any cadence be misunderstood. They fall like healing music, reminding listeners of home, and hearthstone, and a father's heart. The lowly attitude of penitent submissiveness towards God, with its wonderful mingling of solemn awe, adoring worship, and conscious fellowship, undeniably without hypocrisy, as without restraint, institutes in this address nothing less than the model and inspiration of a reverent, religious liturgy, fit to lead and voice a Nation's humble penitence and praise. The kindled and enkindling zeal for the transcendent worth of men above all other wealth, the burning hearth from whose free flame springs up every passion glowing through this speech, is like the fervent ardor of a prophet's heart, watching with a patient, eager wistfulness towards the dawning of a day that shall never pass away. These are signal qualities in this address, each one erect and free, its signal beauty and virility undiminished and complete. But to be noticed here is, not their individual comeliness, but the beauty of their companionship. They consort together perfectly. And in that unison is a peculiar, an individual attractiveness. Here is a symmetry that pleads for appreciation. It is the beauty of this unison throughout this speech that constitutes its eloquence. See how Lincoln's very confession of error puts him in line with God. Feel how his righteousness affiliates with tenderness. Mark how his heed for earthly things provides a body for his idealism. Within the unyielding rigor of his resolute will see how bending and genial is his attitude. Here is marvelous symphony--sin and error and war, light and truth and peace, so comprised and combined, so resolved and reconciled in this speaker and in this address, as to show a Nation how in the discord of arms heaven's own harmonies may be heard. To this fine blending of tones that are distinct, to this pure consonance of notes that are diverse, it were well for all our ears to become accustomed. This would mean a true and real refinement. To this refinement Lincoln did achieve. With this deep consonance his ear became familiar. Hence the deep-toned fulness and carrying power in the moral resonance of this address. It faces a manifold emergency with sentiments likewise manifold, but so composed together as to lead all discordant voices into lasting peace. This moral equilibrium carried within it generous breadth. This is a striking aspect of this inaugural. It comprehends and resolves together, with an ease that seems an instinct, the total orbit of our national life. Within its little compass is the easy movement of the full momentum of our past. It holds in easy grasp the full circumference of concurrent events. It evinces, though with amazing brevity, that the ponderous issues of the coming day are a familiar topic in his brooding thought. And all of this consists together within his thought with even, equal recognition. Events are made to balance. Causes and effects are so held face to face as to declare by demonstration their true comparison. Great issues and mighty forces are given their needed amplitude in his observation and review. The weight of centuries is in his ponderings. This was the style and attitude of his mental deliberations. He was predisposed to cast and arrange his thoughts in national dimensions. Union, liberty, manhood, Providence, were the themes to which his soul was drawn, as though by gravity. Thus Lincoln's influence attained solidity. The place of this inaugural, and of its author's honor, in our American life, and in the larger world of worthy civics is well-secured. The qualities embodied in this address, each one so elemental, and all so eternally allied, are more enduring, as they stand poised within those balanced paragraphs, than any qualities resident in marble or bronze. The proposition that the hostile interests of a mighty Nation be reconciled into eternal friendliness and constancy under the awful discipline of God through sacrificial baptisms of blood, contains within its balanced and majestic terms an interior cohesion and stability that nothing can ever disintegrate or move. It is without a bias anywhere. Through all its massiveness the weight is even absolutely. And its moral proportions are in perfect truth. It is a monument of finished majesty, solidity, and grace. It is a masterpiece of moral symmetry. This massive grandeur in Lincoln's moral character finds an exalted illustration in the closing half of his message to Congress in December of 1862. It forms in itself a document that may well be held before the eye as a companion piece to his last inaugural. He is making an elaborate argument for "compensated emancipation." He is laboring to make clear that the issues pending in the center of the war are no concern of mere geography, but rather a problem hanging upon the free decisions of living citizens; and that in the interest of universal liberty a full agreement by Congress and the chief executive to tax the Nation peaceably, to remunerate all loss entailed by freeing every slave, would surely win the requisite electoral support, stay the war at once, establish lasting peace, and give demonstration of a civic character and courage fit to brighten and enhearten all the world. He closes his appeal with these following words:-- "Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or in dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We--even we here--hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless." There is in that message a document that has the scope and the grandeur of the Alps. It offers an imposing illustration how politics, so prone to become and to remain ignoble, may come to have surpassing beauty; how statesmanship, vested in a worthy character, may wear transcendent dignity. This appeal, as shaped by Lincoln, is a monument fashioned by a master hand. Note its basis in equity, all the Nation in common accepting their money cost of a common complicity in wrong. Note its inscription to human goodwill, curtailing the period, and staying the bloodshed of the war. Note its enduring substance and composition, built up of human hearts, cemented in the action of freedom in the human soul, a towering protest against all gains and consequences where human liberty is denied. Note the humble reverence in the soaring appeal to the benediction of God, with which the whole address concludes. Note the conscience-stirring reference to inevitable and over-ruling law, in the ominous intimation that the light of history would luminously adjudge each several man. And note, with all the imperial urgency of the appeal, its vesture of infinite respect for the right of every congressman to make a free decision of and by and for himself alone. Here is something at once most imposing and most engaging. Here is handicraft of the highest grade. The man that conceived and drafted that political appeal was, in the realm of politics, no mean architect. He is, in these arguments, measuring the forces elemental in a great Republic, as Michael Angelo measured gravitation. He is dealing with decades, and with centuries, with freedom and with slaves, with a transient Congress and the course of history, as builders deal with granite blocks. Embracing things dispersed and widely variant, as also things mutually inclined towards fellowship, he defines and demonstrates, as a master artisan, how they may all be grasped and overcome and harmonized in a commanding unison. With a skilled designer's easy grace he drafts a sketch of our transformed career, as plain and open to the observing eye as are the massive, graceful movements of deploying clouds across the sky. Here is majesty, lofty, balanced, and secure. And all its excellence is ethical. And it pleads to be made supreme in earthly politics. In such a message is ideal courtliness. Its bearer must be a comely prince. The man and author upon whose polished tongue those sentiments found birth must be of royal lineage. Thus Lincoln has given to civics ideal comeliness and dignity. In his hand, and under his design, politics wears heavenly majesty. In his conception of a State, though devised and traced in times when cruelty and sordidness and unfairness and negligence of God were sadly prevalent through the Nation's life, there rose to view, in his pure patriotism, a civic standard in which, through holy fear of God, all men were rated at their immortal worth, and treated with the love and fairness that were the mutual due of freemen who were peers. Here is a portrait of a patriot upon which no artist can easily improve--a portrait which attests in Lincoln's soul a pure and a free idea of what true art must ever be. And it is not without profound significance for art that Lincoln's statesmanship has become one of the finest objects in our modern world for artists to idealize. The very features of his face, that were wont to be esteemed most plain, have come to show a symmetry that is beautiful. And his whole outward frame, that men so many times have called ungainly, has come to bear and body forth a dignity such as summons finest bronze and marble to their most exalted ministry. Whence came to that plain face and plainer frame such symmetry and dignity? Let artists contemplate and reply. For in Lincoln's manhood stature, where utmost rudeness has become transmuted to refinement, all men are taught that true beauty and true art are ethical. In moral harmony is found ideal symmetry. HIS COMPOSURE--THE PROBLEM OF PESSIMISM In the foregoing pages reference has been made repeatedly to Lincoln's poise. In the chapter just concluded this poise has been studied for its beauty. This attitude will repay still further scrutiny. For looked at again, and from another point of view, it reveals itself as a reservoir of energy. Seen thus, Lincoln's notable poise becomes a mighty store of potential, and indeed of active force. It may be described as a mingling of energy and repose, of resourcefulness and rest, showing and playing through all his influence among other men, and largely explaining its potency. Of just this personal habitude, through all the years of Lincoln's participation in our national affairs, there was strenuous need and requisition. His public course ran through an era in our national career of unprecedented internal turbulence. The house was divided against itself. The cause of the dissension was a diametrical opposition and an irreconcilable contention of views touching a matter so radical as the basis of our Declaration of Independence, and the purport of our fundamental national document, the Constitution. To the men on either side of this contention it seemed as though their antagonists were bent upon uprooting and removing the very hills. This obstinate and inveterate disagreement revolved about the single, simple, fateful question of the right and wrong of holding men in bonds. For a full generation before Lincoln entered the lists the conflict had been bitterly intense, refusing to be composed or assuaged. Near the beginning of the last decade of Lincoln's life he put on his armor and chose his side. In 1858, while competing with Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate, Lincoln made a declaration that, for its bearing upon his own career and its influence in national affairs, has become historic; while for its testimony to the topic of this chapter it has the very first significance. The core of that declaration was a quotation from words of Christ, when refuting the charge that he was in league with Beelzebub:--"A house divided against itself cannot stand." This quotation was cited by Lincoln to edge his affirmation that the national agitation concerning slavery, then in full course, and continually augmenting, would not cease until a crisis should be reached and passed. This was his firm assurance. A national crisis was at hand. But to this assurance, that the government could not endure permanently half slave and half free, he attested another confidence equally assured:--"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." That was said with resolute and imposing deliberation in July of 1858. In that utterance Lincoln's attitude deserves analysis, and for many reasons; but in particular for its revelation of his composure. He knew full well what tremendous issues for himself and for the Nation were involved in what he said. He knew that his appeal for the senatorship at Washington was thereby gravely imperiled. He knew that it foreboded national convulsions and throes. He knew that for himself and for the government a mighty crisis was ahead. And he knew that in that crisis the alternatives were for all humanity supreme. The issues were nothing less than human freedom and equality, or human tyranny and bonds. In the stress and strain of an age-long strife like this, many a man has swerved to moral pessimism. From the date of that speech Lincoln stood in the face of that vicissitude. Indeed for his few remaining years he was, in all that deepening commotion, an energetic and influential central force. And he never yielded to despair. In this same month he issued to Senator Douglas his doughty challenge to a series of debates. During those debates Lincoln forged his way into a preeminence that amounted almost to solitude, as champion of a people and a cause that, for weary generations, had been under all but hopeless oppression and reproach. Through all those debates Lincoln's single heart was nothing less than a national theater of a solicitude nothing less than national. Upon his lone shoulders lay the gravest burdens of his day. The ideals of a Nation lay upon his anvil; the national temper was being forged beneath his hand. Highest chivalry waged against him, bearing tempered steel, and jealous of an old and proud prestige. In the immediate outcome of those debates Lincoln met defeat. But farther on he only found himself involved more deeply still in the anguish of the crisis he had foretold. The national disagreement was verging towards the Nation's dissolution, heightening at length into secession and actual, long-drawn civil war. So tremendous was the crisis Lincoln foresaw. And this was precipitated directly by his election to the presidency. So vitally were his own fortune and fate bound up in the crisis he foretold. So pitiless and fundamental was the challenge to his hope. His total administration was spent in the tumult of arms. By no possibility in any Nation's conscious life could civil confusion be worse confounded than during the period of his presidential terms. Beginning with seven states in open secession, and brought to an end by assassination, the measure of his supreme official life was full to either brim with perils and sorrows and fears, such as any single human heart could hardly contain. But the undiminished, overwhelming volume of those fears and sorrows and cares was encompassed every day within his anxious, ample, patriot heart. When facing in August of 1864 the national election, upon which this last inaugural oath was based, he said:--"I cannot fly from my thoughts--my solicitude for this great country follows me wherever I go. I do not think it is personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from these infirmities; but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great Nation will be decided in November." So momentous and grave seemed to him the meaning and weight of the contention that drove the Nation into war. In this estimate, as said before, he stood almost in solitude. "Our best and greatest men," he said in New Haven in 1860, "have greatly underestimated the size of this question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores--plasters too small to cover the wound." To Lincoln's credit it must forever be said that he had a true prevision of the agony through which the Nation must strive, as she reached and passed the crisis which he saw in 1858 to be her predestined and impending fate. And so it came to pass that in 1861, when Fort Sumter was assailed, and the sharp imperious alternative of immediate dissolution or blood faced the Nation's eye, he was not surprised or unprepared; as likewise, when in 1865 at his second inaugural scene, after four full years of awful war, he is still found waiting in sacrificial patience to hail the culmination of his assured interpretation and hope. Here in 1865 as there in 1858, there in 1858 as here in 1865, he is cherishing the patriot-prophet's confidence that the crisis would be passed, that the Nation would not be dissolved, that the house would stand. And to Lincoln's singular honor it must always be allowed that through all the terrible hours while that crisis was being passed, it was pre-eminently due to Lincoln's mighty moral optimism that our Union was preserved. Amid all the turbulence of armies and arms, his assurance of our national perpetuity was so deeply, firmly based, as to be itself invested and informed with perpetuity. So commanding was his posture of heroic, triumphant confidence, that it mightily availed to guide and steady the Nation through the crisis into an era of internal and international peace. But not merely did Lincoln's composure prevail to secure that this Nation should not dissolve. It also wrought prevailingly to perpetuate our liberty. Throughout the crisis the issue held in stake was whether the Nation should be wholly slave or wholly free. Those were the alternatives between which Lincoln's care and fear, and the Nation's fortune and fate were hung. Throughout the crisis Lincoln's hope was that the Nation should be forever wholly free. His fear was that the Nation might be wholly slave. But above that fear, that hope steadfastly prevailed. One who studies Lincoln through those days comes to feel unerringly that deep beneath an anxiety that seemed at times almost to overwhelm his life, there lay a supreme assurance that, when the crisis should have passed, it should stand clear beyond debate, and sure beyond all doubt, that here in this favored land the chance of all the sons of men should be forever equal, fair, and free. Astutely heedful of the power of selfish, sordid greed; deeply conscious of the blind defiance of scorn and pride; painfully aware of the awful capacity of a human heart for cruelty and hate; and sharp to see how reason yields to prejudice, when chivalry becomes a counterfeit; he still found grounds to hold his anchored hope for universal liberty and brotherhood. This deep-based confidence deserves to be well understood. It is a primary phenomenon in Lincoln's life. How in the deepest welter of violence and strife could Lincoln's mood retain such level evenness? How in all that continental turbulence could he keep so unperturbed? How, through all that confusion was he never confused? In truth his days were mostly dark and sad. Sorrows did overwhelm him. How did his anchorage hold unchanged? When the very hills gave way, his foundations seemed to stay. The assurance to which his soul was attached seemed all but omnipotent. What was the secret, what the ground of such phenomenal steadiness? To answer these inquiries is but to rehearse again what has already been repeatedly made plain. This massive sturdiness of Lincoln's statesmanship, this unalterable political reliability lay inwrought in the hardy fiber of his moral character. One factor here may be termed intellectual. Lincoln's study made him steady. His untiring thoughtfulness secured to Lincoln's soul a fine deposit of pure assurance. It was with him a jealous and guarded custom to make examinations exhaustive. He was always seeking certainty. Few men ever dealt more sparingly in conjecture. Always eager towards the future, and often making statements touching things to come, he was nevertheless a model of mental caution. It was this passion to make his footing fully secure that kindled in him such zest for history. It was this same passion that glowed in his eye, as he inspected in common men their common humanity. And likewise it was this that led him into the fear of God, and made him a student of the Bible, and a man of prayer. The full capacity of his mind was taxed unceasingly, in order to secure to his ripening judgments their majestic equipoise. But with saying this not enough is said to describe the grounds of his composure. It was not merely that his mind, through thoughtful inquiry and comparison, grew far-sighted, and balanced, and clear. What gained for Lincoln his solid anchorage was his deep, strong hold upon all that was inmost and permanent in the heart and nature of men. Every inch a man himself, the one ambition of his mental research was to make every responsible thought and deed conduce to guide every brother man to the destiny which his nature decreed. This was the research that made his eye so clear. This was the study that made his hope so sure. Outcome of unsparing intellectual toil, this was the assurance that won for Lincoln his unique and most honorable diploma and degree. This was Lincoln's standing and this its warrant among all thoughtful men, alike the learned and the unlettered. This was the secret of that marvelous calmness, that was so potent to compose the fears of other men. He studied man, until he attained a magisterial power to understand and explain result and cause, issue and origin, amid historic, surrounding, and impending events. In the field where Lincoln stood and toiled he was an adept. He was a worthy master of the humanities. He took a liberal course in the liberal arts. And out of this broad course he constructed politics. He came to see unerringly, and to believe unwaveringly, and to contend unwearyingly that man, that all men should hold, in a universal equilibrium, their regard for God, their self-respect, their brother love, and a true, comparative esteem for things that perish and souls that survive. This reasoned, hopeful faith, adopted with all his heart as the comely pattern and well-set keystone of all his politics and statesmanship, is what secured to Lincoln through all those tumultuous days his far-commanding political equanimity. That all men were designed and entitled by their Creator to be free, and that in this liberty, as in the elemental right to life and self-earned happiness, all are likewise created equal, Lincoln did devoutly, profoundly, and invincibly believe. Confirmed by all his ranging observation and incessant, pondering thought, this faith was also rooted beyond repeal in his own deep reverence for God, in his own instinctive respect for himself, in irrepressible friendliness, and in his unabashed idealism. Such a man could never be a pessimist. Such a faith in such a soul could not be plucked away. Nor could its protestations be variable. That each, as alike the handiwork of God, should alike be always fair, and that all should always and alike be free, was the base of his political philosophy, and the bond of his consistency. This was the teaching of the past. This was the harbinger of the day to come. And in this long-pondered wisdom and belief lay the explanation of his underlying peacefulness through the war, and of his singular ability to prevail above the fears of other men, when in other hearts every hope gave way. He deeply saw that underneath all battlefields, and within all antagonisms, these simple principles, so surely sovereign and so certainly immortal, encompassed a breadth and strength sufficient to circumvent and overcome all hate and doubt and fear, doing to no freeman any vital harm, shielding from essential evil every toil-bowed slave. This is the source and secret of Lincoln's unexampled composure amid scenes of unexampled anxiety and unrest. And this composure, being so inwrought with hope, was unfailingly active and alert. It was never mere endurance, stolid and inert. It enshrined a powerful momentum. It was alive with purpose, conscious, vigorous, resolute. One of its fairest features was a seeing eye--an eye transfixed upon a goal. Things as yet invisible, and still unrealized, his earnest, unwearying eye prevailed to see. Hence his optimism was astir with enterprise. Anticipation, quite as truly as peacefulness, marked the constant attitude of his life. His composure could be closely defined as confidence respecting things to come. Always environed by difficulties, and all but blinded by their strife, his faith struck through their turmoil, and his hope rose free and strong into a jubilant salutation of man's undoubted destiny, and into a victorious companionship with God's clear, certain will. And so there throbbed in this habitual posture of Lincoln's heart a mighty potency. His composure was prevailing. His deep and calm security dissipated other men's dismay. Repeatedly beneath the presence of his stately quietness the Nation felt its turbulence subside. This efficiency can be felt at work in this last inaugural address; and its action well deserves to be identified. In his exposition of its theme, and in his registration of his presidential pledge, he seems by one hand to have fast hold of things immutable, while with the other hand he is helping to steady things that tremble and change. Here is kingly mastery. Things mightily disturbed are being mightily put to rest, as though from an immutable throne. The open figure of that throne may well be scanned by all the Nation and by all the world. It is built and stands foursquare. Its measure conforms in every part with the measure of a man. It is shaped and set to stand and abide where men consort, to unify their minds, and tranquillize their strifes. With sobered and sobering insight into the human soul, with resolute and expectant will before our human goal, this address inscribes and upholds, as at once an outcome and an ideal of human events, a universal amity compacted of loyal, friendly men who walk in reverence before God, and cherish treasures that can never fail. Purity, humility, charity, loyalty--these are the constituents in the structure, and the explanation of the power of Lincoln's composure. Fully illumined, firmly convinced, evenly at rest upon principles that stand foursquare upon the balanced manhood of Godlike men, his civic hopefulness stood in the midst of his practical statesmanship, like an invincible, immovable throne. HIS AUTHORITY--THE PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT The study in the preceding chapter of Lincoln's even-paced serenity, culminating in the symbol of a throne, conducts directly to an examination of his influence and mastery over other men. During those troubled days in Washington, despite all the malice, defiance, and active abuse which he daily bore, his power to persuade, conciliate, and govern other men was, in all the land, without a parallel. In fact, as well as in name, he was throughout those presidential days the Nation's chief magistrate. And since his death that dominion has increased, until it stands today above comparison. Here is an opportunity, not easily matched, to explore a theme whose importance in the field of ethics no other topic can surpass--the seat and nature of moral authority. And here in this second inaugural is a transparent illustration of the firm security in which that authority rests, and of the method by which it prevails. As in his own inner reverence for law, so in his sway of other men, his posture towards the national Constitution demands attention first. "The supreme law of the land"--thus the Constitution of the United States, in its sixth article, defines itself. In its fifth article, the same fundamental document provides that "Amendments," properly made, "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution." This primary authority for the rule of the land is further affirmed to have been ordained and established by "the people of the United States." Here are three noteworthy features of this "law of the land:"--it is supreme; it is amendable; it arises from the people. This written standard of our national life, its amendability, and its primal origin in the people's will, were matters much in Lincoln's eye. Each separate one of these three features of our national civic life had reverent respect in Lincoln's mind, in all his conception and exercise of authority over other men. It was this "supreme law" that he swore in both inaugurations to "preserve, protect, and defend." An amendment to the Constitution, that was pending at the time of his first inaugural oath, he took unusual pains in that address to mention and approve. And it was to "the people," on both occasions of his inauguration as president, and at all other times of public and responsible address, that he paid supreme respect, in his most finished and earnest eloquence and appeal. Here was a threefold ultimate standard to which Lincoln always made final appeal--the original Constitution; its amenability to due revision; and the people's free and deliberate decree. This triangular base-line was for Lincoln's politics and jurisprudence and statesmanship the supreme and finished standard of last appeal. He deferred to it submissively, habitually, and with reverence. All this can be truly said. And yet all this does not say all the truth. Respectful as Lincoln was for all that he found thus fundamentally prescribed, and heedful as he was to indulge in no executive liberty inconsonant with those express decrees, he found his fortune as chief executive forcing him to move where all explicit regulations failed to specify the path. The Constitution does not include all details. It does not vouchsafe specific counsel for specific needs. Its guidance is as to principles. "No foresight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length contain, express provisions for all possible questions." This he declared in his first inaugural. Then he mentions three such unprescribed details:--the method of returning fugitive slaves; the power of Congress to prohibit; and the duty of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories. Touching those three civic interests, civic duties and civic standards were undirected and undefined. But even while he spoke, those three unsettled problems in the Nation's life were kindling the national pulse to an uncontrollable heat. Nothing less than civil war was certainly impending, over controversies touching which the sovereign standards of the civic life did not expressly speak. Upon these momentous, undecided questions Lincoln, in his high authority as president, had to bring his judgment, his action, and his influence into settled shape. Deep in the heart of these unsettled regions he set his camp, and toiled away his life. This heroic and patriotic act may be called a detail of constitutional interpretation. But it was for Lincoln a labor of Hercules. It opened a gigantic controversy. The land was convulsed with contending explications. Views, held essential to the vital honor of separate sections of the land, were in essential hostility. As the dissension deepened, two questions rose, outstanding above the rest:--the Constitutional integrity of the several States (might States secede?); and the Constitutional rights of slavery (should slavery spread?). Both these problems were mortally acute in 1861. Both were still in hand in 1865. Under the Constitution could the Union be legitimately dissolved? Under the Constitution should slavery be permanently approved? To both these questions Southern leaders answered, Yes. To both these questions Lincoln answered, No. Of these two questions and asseverations, it is plain to see that the second is the more profound. So this second inaugural affirms: "Somehow" slavery was the cause of the secession and the war. This "all knew." Upon this pivot, all the chances and contentions of the great debate were compelled to turn. Here lay all the meaning of the war. All those awful battles were trembling, struggling arguments; thrilling, impassioned affirmations striving to finally and forever decide whether human slavery was justified to spread. Here was a supreme divergence of conviction, and a supreme debate. In all the realm of social morals, no divergence and no debate could be more radical. Into this supreme contention Lincoln was compelled to enter. To some conclusion that should be supreme he was, by his official station and responsibility, compelled to lead. To find his way through such a controversy, and to guide the land through all that strife to some sovereign reconciliation, involved this common citizen in the presidential chair in an assumption and exercise of authority nothing less than sovereign. Face to face with this impending and decisive agony, Lincoln took his stand in his first inaugural, not flinching even from war, if war must come. A mighty wrestler in the awful throes of mortal civic strife, he held his determined stand in the act of his second inaugural oath, after war had raged for four full years. The great debate is unsettled still. Still Lincoln has to bear the awful burden of responsible advice. He is still the Nation's chief magistrate. An authority pregnant to predetermine continental issues for unnumbered years to come, however dread its weight, and however frail and faint his mortal strength, he may not demit. Within the darkness and amid the din, he must think and speak, he must judge and act, he must rise and lead, while a Nation and a future both too vast for human eye to scan and estimate, stand waiting on his word and deed. It was a time for omens. But never did Lincoln's ways show fuller sanity. In such a day, and for such a responsibility this, his second inaugural address, is Lincoln's perfect vindication. Here the true civilian's true democracy stands vested with an authority both sovereign and beautiful. Here political expertness becomes consummate. Here the very throne of civil authority is unveiled. Here leadership and fellowship combine. Here a master, though none more modest in all the land, demonstrates his mastery in the mighty field of national politics. Here it may be fully seen how in a true democracy a true dominion operates. Here emerges, in the ripened, rugged, mellowed, moral character of Lincoln, and in the finished, immortal formulation of his uttermost contention and appeal, a marvelous illumination of an inquiry, that is always alike the last and the first, the first and the last in ethical research--the inquiry about ethical authority. Where did Lincoln finally rest his final appeal? He is assuming to venture a preponderant claim. He is speaking as a Nation's president. And in a conflict of radical views that for four dread years has been a conflict of relentless arms, he argues still, and without a quaver, for the thorough prosecution of the war. Divergence of judgment on moral grounds could never be brought to a sharper edge. Contention over issues in the moral realm could never be harder pressed. On what authority could Lincoln push a moral argument unto blood? Is there moral warrant for such a deed? If ever there be, then where is its base, and whence its awful sanctity? To shape reply to this is but to shape more sharply still the naked substance of the debate--the crying issue of the war. The core of that insistent strife concerned the essential nature of man. Was slavery legitimate? Might a white man enslave a black? Could a strong man enslave the weak? Dare some men forswear toil? May any men who toil be pillaged of the food their hands have earned? Are some men entitled to a luxury and ease they never earned, while to other men the luxury and ease they have fairly won may be denied? Are some men so inferior that they can have no right to life, and liberty, and happiness, however much they strive and long for such a simple, common boon? Are other men so super-excellent that life, and liberty, and happiness are theirs by right, though never earned or even struggled for at all? This was the central issue of that war; and this the central theme of this inaugural. Are common people to be forever kept beneath, and traded on, and eyed with scorn; while favored men are to be forever set on high, and filled with wealth, and fed with flattery? This was the quivering question that was brought on Lincoln's lips to its sharpest edge. Well he knew its momentousness and its antiquity. In its very formulation, as Lincoln gave it shape, there loomed the formulation of its reply, perhaps still to be bitterly defied, perhaps to be still long deferred; but inevitable at last, and sure finally to find agreement everywhere. This final answer Lincoln's vision saw. In that clear vision he discerned the certain meaning of the battles of the war. In the great debate they were the solemn, measured arguments. Amid those awful arguments this inaugural took its place, the oracle of a moral prophet, explaining how the war arose, by whose high hand the war was being led, and in what high issue the war must attain its end. As the arguments of this address advance, one grows to feel that Lincoln's thought is forging a reply, in which emerges a moral law whose authority no man may ever dare rebuke. But as that authority comes to view in Lincoln's speech, its form is shorn of every shred of arrogance. Never was mortal man more modest than in the tone and substance of this address. This modesty is indeed throughout devoid of wavering. His tones ring with confidence and decisiveness. But in that confidence, though girt for war, there are folded signs of deference and gentleness and solemn awe, as though confessing error and confronting rebuke. Even of slavery, that most palpable and abhorrent evil, as he forever avers; and of slaveholders, who wring their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, and then dare to pray for heaven's favor on their arms, he says in this address:--"let us not judge that we be not judged;" as though the germ of that dark error might then be swelling in his and all men's hearts. And as to the war itself, for which he bade the Nation stand with sword full-drawn, the central passage in this speech more than intimates, what in an earlier part he fully concedes, that he and all the people had availed but poorly to understand the Almighty's plans. In all of this Lincoln seems to say that he found himself, in common with all the land, but imperfectly in harmony with God, as to his judgment concerning the sin inwrought in holding slaves, and as to the primacy of the Union among the interests pending in the war. He seems in this address, so far from affirming his right to judge and govern arbitrarily, instead confessing that love of ease, greed for gain, the mood of scorn, and proneness to be cruel--those inhuman roots that rear up slavery--were apt to find hidden nutriment in his and all men's hearts, yielding everywhere the baleful harvest of inhumanity; confessing further that this deep-rooted tendency in human hearts to undo God's primal decree of freedom and equality was far more needful to eradicate than any proneness to secede within any confederacy of States; and confessing in consequence and finally that it was for all Americans to accept the war as God's rebuke of their common propensity to be unkind, and as God's correction of their false rating of their national concerns. This then seems to be Lincoln's posture in this address--no lofty arrogance of authority to decree and execute the right; but a humble confession of error and guilt; an acquiescent submission to God's correction and reproof. This modest hue must tincture this address through all its web. And yet the dominant note of this inaugural is clear decisiveness, an unwavering firmness in his own opinion, a classic illustration of persuasion and appeal, as though from the vantage ground of convictions perfectly assured. Where now, in full view of all that has been said, is the basis of Lincoln's argument and authority to be placed? In an argument where conviction seems to be transmuted into penitence, and where confession seems transfigured into confidence, how can the logic be resolved; and where at last can the authority repose? The full reply to this inquiry can be found only when we find where Lincoln's conviction and confession coalesce. Touching this, one thing is clear. Both bear upon the same concern. Deep within them both slavery is the common theme. Assured that slavery is wrong, he confesses that its roots run everywhere. Honest to the core, he bows beneath the scourge of war, convinced that it is heaven's penalty upon all the land. Throughout he is pleading and suffering consistently that all men may be free. This is the sum of the address. In this it all coheres. Thus he divines and understands the ways of God. And so he stands, as poised in this address, in ideal fellowship, at once with men who have held slaves, with slaves in their distress, with the Creator in his primal decree, and with the Providential meaning of the war. To all this problem, vexing so many generations, the clear and witting touch of Lincoln's sacrificial penitence is the master key. In this all contradictions, all hostilities, all sufferings, all transgressions, and all pure longings are harmonized. In assurance and repentance he has found how truth and grace, blending together in humble heed for God and for undying souls, hold complete dominion in the moral realm. These pure principles, congenial alike to God and men, he welcomes to himself, and commends to all his fellowmen in sacrificial partnership. Here is Lincoln's prevailing faith. This is the secret of his strength. Herein vests his commanding and enduring power. This is Lincoln's self--his very manhood. This is the man in this address whom the world beheld, and still beholds--the man he was, the man he aimed and strove to be, the man he recommended all the Nation to combine to reproduce, the man in whom the fear of God, the love of men, the zeal for life, and true reliability, mingle evenly, at whatever cost. This is the man, and this the mighty influence over other men, enthroned imperishably in this address. Here is the throne, the scepter, and the key to Lincoln's vast authority. It is patterned and informed from the cardinal constituents of a balanced moral character. It is inwrought within a life that heeds harmoniously, and with heroic earnestness, his own integrity, his God, his fellowman, and things immortal. Holding souls above goods, holding his fellow as himself, holding himself in true respect, and holding God above all, he stands and pleads, with a cogency that is unanswerable, for verities as self-evident to any man as any man's self-consciousness. All his claims in the heart of this address are self-apparent. They are original convictions. They prove and approve themselves. They make no call for substantiation. They confront every man within himself, the light in his eye, the life in his heart, the spring in his hope. They confront every man again within his neighbor. They confront both men again, when together they look up to God. And far within all forms that change, they confront all men forevermore in things that immortally abide. This is the truth to which Lincoln pledged his troth, and in which he besought all other men to plight their faith, in this address. The vivid, ever-living dignity in man, discoverable by every man within himself, to be greeted by every one in his brother-man, at once the image and the handiwork of God--this defined all his faith, fired all his zeal, woke all his eloquence, shaped all his argument, winged all his hope. That such a being should be a slave, that such a being should have a slave, was in his central conviction, of all wrong deeds, the least defensible. It was the primal moral falsity, cruelty, insult, and debasement. That such a sin should be atoned, at whatever cost, was the primal task of purity, reverence, tenderness, and truth. Holding such convictions, handling such concerns, for him to make the statement was to give it demonstration. Against such convictions, and in scorn of such concerns, no man could seriously contend without assailing and, in the end, undoing himself. This was the citadel and the weaponry of Lincoln's authority. And Lincoln found within these views the pledge of permanence. He saw them bulwarked and corroborated by all the lessons and revelations of history. All devices of human society, contending against these rudimentary verities, had been proved pernicious and self-defeating a thousand times. Only such behavior of man with man as harmonized with the creative design, and sprang from endowments that were common to all, could ever hope to last. Here is the sovereign lesson from all the centuries past, and a sovereign challenge for all the centuries to come. As Lincoln viewed it, he was handling a matter beyond debate, when he talked of two centuries and a half of unrequited toil. If that was not wrong, then nothing was wrong. There is the whole of Lincoln's argument, and the whole of his authority. It stood true two hundred and fifty years ago. It will hold fast two hundred and fifty years hence. To deny this is to dethrone all law, turn every freeman's highest boast to shame, and finally banish moral order from human government and from human thought. That this could never be suffered or confessed was the substance of Lincoln's argument, and the sum of his authority. This and this alone was the sovereign lesson that the sacrificial sorrows of the war were searing so legibly, that all the world could read, upon the sinful Nation's breast. And in saying this, Lincoln's voice was pleading as the voice of God. HIS VERSATILITY--THE PROBLEM OF MERCY The study of Lincoln's authority, as it wields dominion in the last inaugural, has brought to prominence his humble readiness to share repentantly with all the Nation, in the bitter sorrows of the war, the divine rebuke for sin. That sin was the wrong of holding slaves. But in all the land, if any man was innocent of that iniquity, it was Lincoln. And yet the honest Lincoln was never more sincere, more nobly true and honest with himself, than in this deep-wrought co-partnership with guilt. Surely here is call for thought. Lincoln's character was fertile. The principles that governed his development were living and prolific. In his ethics, as in his bodily tissues, he was alive. As the days and years went on, he grew. Like vines and trees, he added to his stature constantly. New twigs and tendrils were continually putting out, searching towards the sunshine and the springs, and embracing all the field. And in all this increase he was supremely pliable. While always firm and strong, he had a wonderful capacity to bend. The primary, towering impulse working in Lincoln's life was ethical. Amid the continual medley and confusion of things, he was continually reaching and searching to find and plainly designate the right and the wrong. This stands evident everywhere. Nowhere does this stand plainer than in the period, when, at his second inaugural, he faced a second presidential term. Still straining in the toil and turmoil, in the intense and blinding passion of the war, he halts upon the threshold of a second quadrennium of supreme responsibility, to see if he can surely trace God's indication of what is right. The eternally right was what he sought. He was after no mere expediency, no ephemeral shift for ephemeral needs. The judgments of the Almighty Ruler of Nations, true and righteous altogether and evermore, were what he prayed to find and know. Then, if ever, Lincoln's earnestness was moral. And for this search at just this time his eye was peculiarly sobered and grave. Portentous problems were emerging, as the finish of the war drew near. And these problems were new. What should the Nation, when it laid aside its arms, decide to do with the seceded States, and with those millions of untutored slaves? For that no precedent was at hand, no direction in the laws. The conclusion must be original. And it must be supreme. And its issues must hold wide sway for generations of imperial, expanding growth. There loomed an impending peril, and a test of statesmanship, demanding the wisdom, and integrity, and deep foresight of a moral prince--a peril and a moral test but poorly met by the men whom his untimely death thrust into Lincoln's place. For bringing to perfection his ripening judgment upon that task, and so for displaying another historic demonstration of Lincoln's moral adaptability, the few short requisite years were mysteriously to be denied. But upon other problems and in other days, there was ample revelation of Lincoln's agile moral strength. His entire career in national prominence provides outstanding demonstration of the continual full mobility and plastic freedom of his moral powers. The civil war, which he was conducting with such determination to its predestined end, as he stood the central figure in this second inaugural scene, was but the central vortex of a moral agitation in which all our national principles and precedents were challenged and defied; and in which statesmen of supremely facile, virile, moral sense were in exigent demand. Problems were propounded constantly upon which our Constitution shed no certain light, and the Constitution itself was in a way to be overturned. Throughout this period of national discord and moral instability, Lincoln was a leading, creative mind. The circuit of that career was brief indeed, scarcely more than one decade. But in those dark, swift years shine and cluster many illustrations of the rich and ready fertility of his ethical postulates in the political realm. Man of the people though he was, and acutely sensitive of his responsibility to the people for every responsible act, he was in every judgment and resolve every inch a king, openminded, original, free. Again, and again, and again, he was the man for the hour. One demonstration of this is shown in his surprising readiness. With whatever situation, he behaved as though familiar. Undisciplined in diplomacy, he proved himself almost instantly a finished diplomat. Totally untutored in all the acts and practices of war, but compelled by his office to take sovereign command of the Nation's arms, and that so suddenly that even the arms themselves could not be found, he became one of the foremost critics and counselors of perilous and intricate military campaigns. Unaccustomed to authority, but advanced at a leap to the Nation's head, beleaguered by deadly animosities among cliques and sections and States, encompassed by shameless cabinet intrigues, he developed, as in one day, into manager, adviser, administrator of political affairs, the most astute in all the land. A most impressive example of this adjustability is seen in his manifold capacity for moral patience. It reveals how he could keep his full integrity, while binding up his life and fortune inseparably with men whose moral standards swayed far from his. Lincoln's first inaugural gave luminous definition of his designs and hopes. The principles there propounded were the ripe and firm convictions of a thoughtful, honest life. They had been pronounced repeatedly before. To their defense and consummation his heart and honor were pledged irrevocably. Those propositions were the irreducible rudiments of his faith, the permanent constituents of his hope. Surrender those convictions and desires he never did, he never could. Within the ample compass and easy play of those glowing sentiments there was no room for secession, nor for war, nor for any bitterness, but only for loyalty, fellowship, peace. But as he turned from that inauguration and its declaration of his policy toward the execution of his trust, he had to face and handle secession, war, and malicious defamation. He had to see the Nation's holiest dignity desecrated, all his brotherly offices disdained, the souls of men still held as rightful objects of common trade, and the plainest decrees of God defied. This as shown in the spirit and uprising of the impatient, imperious South. And within the North, in the very armies assembled for the Union's defence, he had to find the very leaders and plotters of his campaigns absorbed and overcome by petty jealousies, too despicable and unpatriotic to be believed, and yet so real and vicious as to defeat their battles before they were fought. And back among the Union multitudes around his base, were men of might and standing, and men in multitudes, who maligned his motives, and entangled his plans, until antagonism the most malignant and resolved to all his views and undertakings seemed to environ him on every side. To such conditions it was Lincoln's bitter obligation to conform. Many men were ready with many fond prescriptions for the case; but they all were marked by weak futility. They either brought the Nation no complete relief, or else surrendered the Nation's very life. Within the strain and pull from every side Lincoln felt the obligation of his oath. The mood and method he employed (and let not the phrase be misunderstood) was moral relaxation. This did not mean that he altered aught of his pronounced belief, or varied by a single hair from his announced design. He remembered his inaugural oath. He retained his faith and hope, and held to his prime resolve unchanged. But he gave the opposition time. He suffered malignants to malign, seceders to rebel, detractors to impugn; and bore their taunts and blows and wounds patiently, still abiding by his word. His very war was simply for defense. The honor of the Union he would not yield up. His brotherly friendliness he would not forego. His rating of freemen he would not discount. The mandates of God he would not disobey. But while on every hand these might be assailed and abjured, he repressed all violence and vehemence of heart, and endured, and indulged, and was still. Herein, however, his convictions and hopes wore a modified guise. Their rigor softened; their lustre mellowed; their angles broadened; their rudeness ripened; and his aspect passed through change; the while his honor brightened and became more clear. This adjustment of such a nature to such a fate is a massive illustration of moral versatility. It is like keeping the steed to the course, while yet laying the rein upon his neck. Through experience such as this it must have been that Lincoln traversed his profoundest sorrow. Just here his critics and traducers had their firmest hold. To the world at large his tactics did seem slack, his method dilatory, his mood indifferent. Men wearied past endurance at his delay, and charged repeatedly that he had betrayed his trust. Such accusations must have been to his pure loyalty like gall. And yet he must perforce be mute. It was not he, it was the awful situation in which his noble life was manacled, that was so incorrigible. With God and man he pleaded day and night that bloodshed might be stayed, and peace possess the land. But an enemy was in the land, determined not to leave his guns until the Union was dissolved, and slavery vindicated as right. Rather than forsake the Union, and own that men were as the brutes, he would die a thousand times. And with a patience that no malice and no misfortune could wear away, he held his post and kept his word, through torments too severe for unheroic men to bear, producing thus upon his silent, sorrowful face a humble replica of the divine long-suffering of the meek and lowly Christ. And so he taught the world how in patience the righteousness that abhors all wrong may turn its face toward sin with humble meekness, through years that seem like centuries, and cause thereby that pure and Godlike truth and love shall only be more glorious. But even with this the description of this case stands incomplete. To understand it rightly further statements are required. After all his patience, the South was obdurate. Even while in this last inaugural Lincoln was pleading for universal charity, and seeking to banish malice everywhere, the leaders of the armies in the South were rallying their unrecruited ranks in a very desperation of hatred for his principles, and of scorn for his forbearance. While he was interpreting the desolations and sorrows of the war as God's all-powerful punishment of slavery, our common national sin, they resented with impassioned vehemence such an explanation, disclaimed all guilt, and denied that slavery was wrong. Here emerged in Lincoln's thought Lincoln's supreme perplexity. He was dealing with right and wrong, both only the more intensely real, because so really concrete. Liberty and loyalty, loyalty to liberty, the dignity of man, and the good pleasure of God--these were the eternal principles, and the personal interests at stake. Antagonisms were deadly virulent; and they were unrelenting. Compulsion was not availing. Patience likewise failed. Here was a desperate call for moral mastership. The man to meet the crisis, to join the cleft, to reduce to moral harmony this discord of right and wrong, the man who could resolve and morally unify this moral disagreement must have a soul and an understanding whose insight and moral comprehension were complete. Here Lincoln's moral grandeur gains its full dimension. And in this consummation it comes clear to see how in very deed right and wrong, evil and good, can be encompassed in a moral unison such that evil remains the all-abhorrent thing, and good is proved to be alone desired. This marvelous explication is found within the words and tone of this last inaugural. It stands contained in perfect poise within the mutual balancings of his princely pledge to abjure all malice, show universal charity, and still pursue the awful guidance of Almighty God in the prosecution of the war. Herein moral rigor, forbearance, and gentleness do majestically coalesce. The breath and voice of this same moral mystery are felt and heard again within this same inaugural in that bold prophetic exposition of the Providential purport of the war. In the burning furnace of those last four years, Lincoln's eyes had been purged to see how the ways of God transcend the ways and thoughts of men. Both North and South, in battle and in prayer, had failed to comprehend the thoughts of God. All the movements of all their armies were being mightily over-ruled. The purposes of the Almighty were his own. Both North and South had gone astray. Neither side was wholly right. The land was under discipline. The Nation had committed sin. That sin was destined for requital. That requital was to be complete. The ways of God were true and righteous altogether. All this the Nation must acquiescently confess. For all the wrong of slavery requital must be made, submissively, ungrudgingly, repentantly. Beneath that judgment every heart must bow. The sin must be abjured. Its wrong must be abhorred. Goodwill to all alike must be restored. And through it all the Almighty must be adored. Like a solemn litany within a great cathedral, these solemn sentiments of Lincoln resounded through the land, as, in want of any other priest, Lincoln himself led the Nation to the altar of the Lord. He truly led. And to an altar. In this inaugural, Lincoln, for all Americans, bows and veils his own brave heart in sacrificial sorrow and confession, to bear and suffer all that, as the Nation's due, and for the Nation's rescue, it is the will of holy heaven to inflict. In this profound, spontaneous assumption of full co-partnership with all the Nation in a Nation's undivided ill-desert; in this uncomplaining acquiescence, while God inflicted upon the land, as an awful scourge, all the shame and cost and sorrow that the woful wrong of slavery had entailed; in this deep discernment that deep in every heart ran and flourished all the baleful roots of greed and pride, of injustice and cruelty, out from which all man's enbondagement of brother man springs up; in this estimation of human slavery as a primary sin, while receiving without repining its ultimate doom--Lincoln unveils in his single heart, an abhorrence and an endurance of our national sin, that makes him enduringly and indivisibly the friend and brother of us all, accomplishing, in a single moral experience, the pattern of the confession, and of the resolution of our common wrong. Unto this, Lincoln's moral versatility attained. Beyond this, moral versatility could never go. The same moral dextrousness, this facile power and fluent readiness to fully comprehend and fitly meet the moral mastery of a problem, in itself all but absolutely obstinate and impossible, this wondrous deftness in compounding together guilt and grace in mutual compassion and repentance, is shown in Lincoln's patiently repeated, but always futile efforts to persuade the North and the South to come together, and so bring slavery and all dissension to an end, by giving and receiving fiscal reimbursement for the emancipation of the slaves. To this magnanimous and unexampled proposition, offered in the midst of war, and urged in words and tones of classic winsomeness, the North and South could never be brought unitedly to consent. Therein this moral hero stood like a king against the wrong, argued like a prophet for the right, and led towards mutual penitence and sacrifice like a priest. It is in human history one of the supremest illustrations of moral versatility. Never were Lincoln's character and aim more stable than in that plea. But never was mortal man more mobile. Beyond all his contemporaries he observed and regarded the signs of the times. He saw that the ancient order was certainly to change. He felt that an almighty, a just, and a benignant Providence had assumed control. He discerned that the new order was freighted with vast store of good. To make its entrance gentle, so that nothing should be rent or wrecked, was the sum of all his thought and toil. He took for pattern the coming of the dew. For his method he adopted his own well-mastered and transcendent art of brotherly persuasion. As to manner, he was vestured in humility, desiring to eject and ban the pharisee from his own and all other hearts. For prevailing motive he designated the passing hour as a time of unexampled opportunity. "So much good," he said, "has not been done by one effort in all past time, as in the Providence of God it is now your high privilege to do." And for admonition he pointed to the vastness of the future, and a possible lament over a pitiful neglect. But it was all for naught. For such a moral transmutation and free triumph the embattled Nation was unprepared. But over against that unrelenting rigor, his moral readiness to meet his brother, friend or foe, in free and mutual sacrifice, glows beautifully. Deep in the heart of his design was struggling heroically, and in balanced moral unison, the Godlike spirit of eternal justice, mercy, and conciliation. In his strong breast all pride was crucified, malice was melted down to tenderness, hypocrisy and sordidness were purged away. His moral outlook was now unobstructed, open every way. Then his soul stood fleet and free for any path within the moral universe. With every man in this broad land he stood ready to journey or sojourn, meek to suffer, resolute to prevail. Sharing with the wrongdoer and the wronged alike their shame and suffering and sin, while urging with immortal eagerness towards fairness and happiness and peace, he resolved and overcame the problem of the slaveholder and the slave, and made this land forever the universal refuge of the free. In such a transmutation, first within himself, and then throughout the land, moral as it is in every fiber, and from circumference to core, is perfect moral concord. Thus, in moral discord, moral freedom finds the way to peace, while full responsibility remains unchangeably supreme. Here is the final, perfect triumph of moral ingenuity. Thus by means of mercy, freely offered and freely received, through mutual fellowship in moral suffering, wrong may be comprehended, and fully overcome, in the unchanged dominion of the right. So moral freedom and moral consistency combine. Men's lives become vicarious. Thus moral versatility culminates, and overcomes, and wins the sovereign moral crown. HIS PATIENCE--THE PROBLEM OF MEEKNESS In the chapter just preceding, Lincoln's patience came into allusion and review. That quality deserves a somewhat closer, separate examination. When Lincoln took his last inaugural oath, he based its meaning upon a statement in his inaugural address, that all the havoc of the war was, under God, a penalty and atonement for a wrong that had been inflicted and endured for centuries. In this interpretation he subtly interwove a pleading intimation that all the land, in reverent acquiescence with the righteous rule of God, should meekly bow together to bear the awful sacrifice. And, deep within this open exposition of his prophetic thought, there gleamed the hidden pledge, inherent in his undiluted honesty, that he himself would not decline, but would rather stand the first, to bear all the sorrow consequent upon such wrong. Here is an attitude, and here a proposition which men and Nations are forever prone to scorn; but which all Nations and all men will be compelled or constrained at last to heed. Therein are published and enacted verities, than which none known to men are more profound, or vast, or vested with a higher dignity. They demand attention here. The statement made by Lincoln pivots on "offenses." Strong men, in pride and arrogance of strength, had wronged the weak. Weak men, in the lowliness and impotence of their poverty, had borne the wrong. In such conditions of painful moral strain the centuries had multiplied. Those long-drawn years of violence had heightened insolence into a defiance all but absolute. Those selfsame years of suffering had deepened ignominy into all but absolute despair. Through banishment of equity and charity, of purity and humility, while all the heavenly oracles seemed mute, fear and hope alike seemed paralyzed. The oppressor seemed to have forgotten his eternal obligation to be kind and fair. The oppressed seemed to have surrendered finally his God-like dignity. The times seemed irreversible. Here is a problem that, while ever mocking human wisdom, refuses to be mocked. It enfolds a wrong, undoubted moral wrong; else naught is right. It overwhelms. Within its awful deeps multitudes have been submerged. And it is unrelieved. It outwears the protests and appeals of total generations of unhelped, indignant hearts. This problem Lincoln undertook to understand. In his conclusion was proclaimed the vindication of the meek. Beneath that age-long wrong, beneath the silence and delay of God, and beneath the final recompense, he prevailed upon his heart, and pleaded with other hearts to stand in suffering, hopeful acquiescence. Among these sorrows, so wickedly inflicted, without relief, and without rebuke, let patience be perfected. Here let meekness grow mature. Let confidence in our equal and unconquered manhood, and let faith in God not fail to overcome all Godlessness and inhumanity. Let time be trusted absolutely to prove all wrong iniquitous. Let the worth inherent in undying souls be shown to be indeed immortal. Here is Lincoln's resolution of this profound enigma, a resolution unfolding all its mystery, and involving all his character. Here Lincoln won his crown. This is all his meaning in abjuring malice, and invoking charity. Too kindly to indulge resentment, whatever the provocation, and too sensible of his own integrity to ever court despair, he appealed to God's eternal justice and compassion, and clung to a hope that no anguish or delay could overcome. This is Lincoln's patience. This is the inmost secret of his moral strength. This is his piercing and triumphant demonstration that in this troubled world, where sin so much abounds, it is the meek who shall finally prevail. This moral patience deserves to be explored. It comprehends ingredients, quite as worthy to be kept distinct, as to be seen in unison. For one thing it identified him with slaves. Therein he bore a grave reproach. Its weight only he himself could rightly compute. Beneath the rude and among the hurt he took deliberate stand. Among the lowly, before the scorner, he held his place. He braved the master's taunts. He penetrated to its heart the cause that kept the black man mute. He measured out, but without indifference, as without complaint, the divine delay. He courted in his thought on slavery a perfect consciousness of its sin. He examined with nicest carefulness the sufferers' impulse towards revenge. He knew the awful misery in human shame. He shared with honest men their proudest aspirations. And all of this, he shared with blacks, not by compulsion, but as a volunteer. Herein, and in the second place, he held fast the fundamental claims that every slave retained an ineffaceable affinity with God; that this divine inheritance, however deep the negro's poverty, could never be annulled or forfeited; that friendliness with fellowmen, however hard or sad their lot, was no reproach; that in human sorrows it well becometh human hearts, as it becometh God, to remember to be pitiful; that all invasion or neglect of those inherent human rights and dignities was bound to be avenged; that in God's good time all patient souls would be crowned with song; and that thus his open championship of the cause of slaves was in perfect keeping with his own unaltered and unalterable self-respect. A third ingredient in Lincoln's patience was its conspicuous and inseparable impeachment of oppression. Lincoln's patience under moral wrong made him no neutral morally. Without fear and without reserve, he held before oppressors, however hard or strong, the enormity of their wrong. Before the cruel their cruelty was displayed. Before the arrogant their arrogance was reflected back. Before the base and foul their sordidness was brought to light. Before disloyal men the perfidy of covenant disloyalty was nakedly unveiled. All the wrongs inwrought and undergone in slavery were recited with insistent accuracy and unreserve. Of all those centuries of unpaid toil each month and year were reckoned up. Of all those sins against pure womanhood and helpless infancy each tell-tale face was told numerically. The moral wrong in slavery was set before its advocates and beneficiaries unsparingly. Patience, whether God's or man's, and whether for one day or for a thousand years, can never be interpreted or understood to diminish sin's iniquity. Its prolonged persistence only aggravates its guilt. In the fourth place, there was in Lincoln's patience a waiting deference before God's silence and delay. His total confidence was in God. That God was negligent, or indifferent, he would not concede. His whole abhorrence of oppression was based on God's decree. Here rested also all his hope of recompense. Vengeance belongs to God. He will rebuke the mighty, and redeem the meek. In both, his righteousness will be complete. And when his judgments fall, all men must own adoringly his perfect equity. Finally, in Lincoln's patience there is explicit recognition and confession of his own complicity with all the land, in the wrong to slaves, and of his own and all the land's delinquency before the Lord, in failure to discern and approbate the divine designs. It had been left with God's far greater patience and far higher moral jealousy to overcome and overwhelm and overrule the devious plans and ways of erring men. In lowly acquiescence it was for him and the land to acquaint themselves with God's designs, confess their wanderings, accept his will alike in redemption and rebuke, and unite henceforth to represent and praise on earth his perfect equity and grace. Here are the elements in Lincoln's patience, and here their sum. Forming with the lowly and oppressed a free and intimate partnership; avowing jealously for all mankind a coequal dignity among themselves and an imperishable affinity with God; declaring unflinchingly to all who tyrannize the full enormity of their primal sin; restraining malice and all avenging deeds; confessing his own misjudgments and misdeeds among his fellowmen and before the Lord; he endures submissively the divine delays, and shares repentantly with all who sin the judgments of a perfect righteousness. Genuinely pitiful for suffering men, sharply jealous for human worth, direct as light to designate the shame in pride, docile as a child before the righteous and eternal rule of God, he illustrates and demonstrates how a perfect patience makes requisition in a noble man of all his noblest manliness. But worthy as are all its qualities, its exercise entails stern discipline in suffering. It costs a man his life. That this was Lincoln's understanding, as he traversed the responsibility of that last inauguration day, is witnessed unmistakably by his letter to Thurlow Weed respecting his inaugural address. These are his words, well worthy to be reproduced a second time:-- "I believe it (the address) is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it." "Most directly on myself." There Lincoln bares his heart to God and man, in order that upon himself might fall the first, the deepest, and the most direct humiliation. At one with slaves, despised by pride, astray from God prepared for sacrifice--but attesting still that slaves were men, that robbery was wrong, that God was just--so he stands. But, be it said again and yet again, in such a posture looms nobility. In meekness such as this is nothing craven. It beseems true royalty. Bowing before his God to receive rebuke, bowing to make confession before his fellowmen, he stands as on a hilltop, announcing and declaring to all the world how arrogance proves men base, how lowliness may be beautiful, how reverend are God's mysteries, how just and pitiful his ways. Here is a kingliness that no crown can rightly symbolize. Here is a victory that is not won with swords. In the very attitude is final triumph. It bravely claims, and truly overcomes the world. In such a patience there is present instantly, and in full possession, the vigor of undying hope, and the title of a firstborn son to the heritage of the earth. This capacity in Lincoln's patience for the close allegiance of self-devotion and self-respect, of sympathy and jealousy, is shown dramatically in his tournament with Douglas in 1858. Throughout those speeches, replies, and rejoinders Lincoln held fast his full fraternity with the slaves, while repressing with his fullest vigor every onslaught against his personal integrity. The date of those debates marked over four full years, since Douglas had championed through Congress into finished legislation a bill that abrogated all federal limitation of slavery, and opened an unrestricted possibility of its further spread forever, wherever any local interest might so desire. That bill obtained the presidential signature in May of 1854. During the succeeding years Douglas had been shaping public sentiment by his almost royal influence in public speech towards a stereotyped acceptance of the principles and implications of that law. Under his aggressive leadership his party had been well solidified upon three political postulates, which he declared essential not alone to party fealty, but to any permanent national peace. These three postulates were the following:-- Slavery is in no sense wrong. Slavery is to be treated as a local interest only. These principles have been sanctioned perfectly by history. From these fundamental postulates flowed numerous corollaries:-- Black men are an inferior race. This inferiority has been stamped upon this race indelibly by God. The Declaration of Independence did not and does not include the blacks in its affirmations about equality. This country contains vast sections precisely fitted to be occupied by slavery. Local interests being essentially diverse, as for example between Alabama and Maine, decisions as to local affairs will also be diverse. This entails divergent treatment of black men, just as of herds and crops. To the rights of stronger races to enslave the blacks, the fathers who framed our government, our national history since, and the age-long fate of Africa unitedly bear witness. Counter to these three major postulates of Douglas, Lincoln set the following three:-- The enslavement of men is wrong. The treatment of slavery is a federal concern. Our history has contained, and still contains a compromise. Our fathers deemed slavery a wrong. But finding it present when they framed our government, and finding its removal impossible at the time, they arranged for its territorial limitation, for its gradual diminishment, and for its ultimate termination. From these three fundamental postulates in Lincoln's arguments flowed also various corollaries:-- The sinfulness of slavery roots in the elemental manhood of the slave. This manhood warrants his elemental claim to the employment and enjoyment of his life in liberty. In our form of government, things local and things federal being held within their respective realms respectively supreme, things locally divergent lead to federal compromise. Certain sections of the country in particular, and the Nation in general being committed, either from policy or from choice, to foster slavery; men who hate the thing as wrong must in patient meekness endure its presence, until in God's own time its presence and its sin and guilt shall be removed. As will be seen at once, for the purposes of a popular debate, the postulates of Douglas were easier to defend. Of the two sets of premises, his seemed the more simple, more explicit, more direct, more telling with a crowd; while those of Lincoln, by reason of that moral and historical compromise, seemed more confused, more evasive, and not so apt to take the multitude. In the nature of the debate Lincoln had to shape his propositions and replies to face two ways:--towards the practical emergencies of our history and form of government, on the one hand; and on the other hand, towards an ideal nowhere yet attained, and seemingly unattainable. Whereas Douglas, quite unconcerned about any ideal motives in the past, as of any vision of an ideal day to come, but dealing solely with the political situation that day occurrent, could make every affirmation and every thrust against his adversary seem straight, and clear, and impossible to refute. This very practical and substantial disadvantage Lincoln had to bear. Questions that Douglas would answer decisively, and instantly, and with absolute distinctness, Lincoln would be compelled to labor with, in careful deference both to our Constitutional protection of slavery, and to its moral wrong. This situation in those debates deserves a close attention. The difference in the two positions was most profound. That this deep difference was laid fully bare was the supreme resultant of the debate. It was indeed a difference in principles. But stated yet more narrowly, it was a difference in nothing less than estimates of men, and attitudes towards wrong. It was not a difference in abstract theorems. It was vastly more. It was a difference in the personal qualities of the two protagonists. To test this affirmation let any one imagine Douglas producing from his heart the sentiments, and arranging in his thought the arguments of Lincoln's last inaugural. Douglas sadly erred in his opinion of his time. In Lincoln, in those debates, our government, our history, our ideal as a great Republic stood incorporate. Like our noble history, he patiently endured and bore what he instinctively and inveterately abhorred. This pathetic situation, this invincible anomaly in our national career, is pathetically re-enacted in the fate of Lincoln in these debates. This at bottom, and this at last is what those flashing falchions and ringing shields declare. This explains the genesis and the actual course of those painful personalities. And it is to study this that these debates have been introduced. In the personal thrusts of those debates two qualities in Lincoln become pre-eminent. He would not forsake his humble championship of slaves. He would accept no thrust against his personal integrity. Let those debates be read, and re-perused until those cardinal elements in Lincoln's attitude come clear. And let it be observed that in no single personality was Lincoln's thrust initial. Douglas opened the debate. In his opening speech he made direct assertions and indirect intimations too gross to be termed subtle, and too staring to be called disguised; imputing and suggesting that Lincoln was in character a coward and a cheat, in his politics a revolutionary, and in his social proclivities contemptible. These same charges were made with unrelenting persistency and reiteration by Douglas throughout the series of the debates. To every imputation Lincoln made definite and reiterated reply, denouncing them roundly as unwarranted and inexcusable impeachment of his honor, his veracity, and his candor. And then, with measured and exact equivalence, he dealt out to Douglas's face a list of counter personalities of sharply parallel and actual transactions in Douglas's life, meriting precisely his own reproach. And he pressed the battle home so hard that Douglas, in an impassioned height of protest, demanded if Lincoln meant to carry his tactics up to "personal difficulty." All this is painful confessedly to review. One wishes earnestly, just as with the later civil war, it might never have occurred. But it should be remembered that every retort of Lincoln was, as in the war itself, in personal defense. Lincoln was not the assailant. But once his honor was assailed, it was not the nature of that honor to stand so mute that his own character seemed rightly smirched, while justice rested with his adversary. And so, in self-defense, as in his speech at Quincy, he carefully details, he vigorously returned each thrust. And this, be it constantly recalled, not in any selfishness, not for wounded pride, not for unction to a hurt, not in any vengeful heat; but just as in the following war, in absolute unselfishness, void of malice, in the ministry of charity, that the honor of all men might be saved, and that the Union with its boon of universal freedom and equality might not perish from the earth. Such was Lincoln's patience, in those earlier debates, and in this last inaugural, the same. While bearing voluntarily in his single life all the opprobrium borne by slaves; through all that fellowship and sympathy, and on its sole behalf, he guarded his own honor with an infinite jealousy. But it was honor saved for suffering. His life was sacrificial. He learned to know full well, but willingly, what meekness costs. Not alone from a political antagonist and an embattled South, but from a multitude of active dissentients besides throughout the North, from Congress, and from the close circle of his cabinet he had to bear with blind misunderstandings, and malignant misrepresentations of the deeds and qualities and motives of his perplexed and overburdened life. But whatever his shortcomings or mistakes, whatever his follies or sins, two affirmations about his life will hold forever true. He bore his load. And he kept his path. Through all that stern campaign for liberty and union he turned neither to the right nor to the left. Sorrows and contentions surrounded him continually. But he descried a better time. To speed that day he welcomed sacrifice. He lived and died for nothing else. To show the priceless worth of freemen in a mighty multitude, in a civic league of lasting unison and peace was his supreme commission and consuming wish. To bring that vision near he aspired and submitted to be its pattern and its devotee. HIS RISE FROM POVERTY--THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRIALISM In his first public speech, seeking election to the State Legislature of Illinois in 1832, Lincoln said: "I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life." He adds: "If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined." In the same speech he said: "I have no other (ambition) so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." Here are three phrases that epitomize Lincoln's ideals and Lincoln's career:--"the most humble walks of life;" "too familiar with disappointments;" and "rendering myself worthy of their esteem." There at the age of twenty-three we are apprised of Lincoln's poverty, of his ambition, and of his adversity. In the same address he says: "I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me." At that time he had been but two years in the State. In pondering this brief and frank appeal one wonders at the blending of the youthful and the mature, the daring and the wary, the ardent and the chastened, the eager and the sedate, the wistful and the resigned. What had been the inner and the outer history and fortune of him, who at the age of twenty-three could talk of being "familiar with disappointments"--so familiar with experiences of reverse that he could bear the public refusal of his one greatest ambition, that public's "true esteem," without being "much chagrined." Plainly in Lincoln's early life there was a great heart, cherishing a high hope, but environed with poverty, familiar with reversals, unchampioned, unknown. Already he was being refined by manifold discipline. Already in that refining fire he had fixed his eye and set his face to win his neighbor's true esteem. Therein one comprehends his whole career. Out of oblivion and solitude and direst poverty he passed by sheer self-mastery to the highest national authority and renown. Of all the distance and of all the way between those "humblest walks" and that commanding eminence, and of all the pregnant meaning to him and to all Americans, and indeed to every son of Adam, of that achievement, Lincoln had a marvelous discerning sense. He knew full well its vast significance and he never let its vivid recollection lapse. It was always in his living consciousness. One impressive proof and token that the meaning of his advancement had permanent place in his remembrance, and that he deemed his fortune an ideal and a type of our American government and life has been preserved in the tone and substance of his address in Independence Hall, when on his way to his first great inauguration. Standing there at the age of forty-one, the Nation's president-elect, and "filled with deep emotion," he said: "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." And to give that statement explanation he said, "I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together." And for answer to that inquiry he points to "that sentiment in the Declaration which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." "Liberty," "hope," "promise," "weights lifted," "an equal chance," "to all," "for all," "of all," "all," "in due time"--these are the terms that answered the question over which he "often pondered" and "often inquired." This was the "great principle," the "idea" which held the Confederacy together. This was the "basis" on which, if he could save the country, he would be "one of the happiest men in the world, if he could help to save it." This was the principle concerning which he exclaimed: "If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say that I would rather be assassinated upon this spot than surrender it"--words whose purport is seen to be nothing less than tragic, when we recall the peril of death, which he was consciously facing in that very hour from a deep laid conspiracy against his life. Thus spoke Lincoln within ten days of his inauguration, in a speech which he says was "wholly unprepared." But the day before, in a speech at Trenton, he characterized that same "idea" as that "something more than common" which away back in childhood, the earliest days of his being able to read, he recollected thinking, "boy though I was," was the "treasure" for which "those men struggled." That "something" he then defines as "even more than national independence;" and as holding out "a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come." This lifting of weights from the shoulders of men, this equal chance for all; this was the liberty for which the fathers fought, this was the hope which their Declaration enshrined, this it was whose preservation Lincoln longed to secure above any other happiness, this it was for which he was all but ready to die. There Lincoln spoke his heart. There he voiced his highest hopes. There he traced his patriotism to its roots. And there too he touched the quick nerve of his own disappointments, of his own often futile endeavors and desires. And there as well his living sympathy with other men, encumbered with disadvantage and defeat, found mighty utterance. Lifting weights from the shoulders of all men--that in "due time" this should be achieved he judged and felt to be the single sovereign meaning of our national destiny. Of just this national destiny Lincoln's personal life was a strangely full epitome. His shoulders knew full well the pressure of those "weights." His soul knew all the awful volume of sorrow as of joy, that poured about the denial or the enjoyment of an "equal chance." From the humblest walks to the foremost seat he had been permitted to thread his way. That liberty he chiefly sought in struggling youth. That liberty he chiefly prized as president. And this, not alone for himself, not alone for all Americans, but for "all the world." Thus spoke Lincoln, "all unprepared" in February of 1861. But these spontaneous words were no passing breath of transient sentiments. In July of that same year he sent to Congress his first Message. That paper was Lincoln's studied and formal argument, a president's deliberate State Paper, addressing to Congress his responsible demonstration that the war was a necessity. In that argument and demonstration his fundamental postulate was a definition of our government. In that definition he affirms its "leading object" to be "to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life." And so he calls the war a "people's contest." And he speaks of its deeper purport as something that "the plain people understand." And he speaks of the loyalty of all the common soldiers--not one of whom was known to have deserted his flag--as "the patriotic instinct of the plain people." Those words of Lincoln in Trenton and Philadelphia, defining the "leading object" in the minds of the founders of our government in the hours of its birth-travail, define his own idea and ideal as he approached the hour of his presidential oath. That a national government, thus beneficently designed for the equal weal of all, should be preserved inviolate and preserved from dissolution was his supreme desire and his supreme resolve. Its majesty and its integrity must be held most sacred and most jealously preserved. This was the apple of his eye. By the light of this ideal and in the pursuit of this alluring, wistful hope he studied and judged all the movements of his time. And in this, his initial message, he registers his official verdict upon those surrounding evolutions and events. A vast and ever-expanding Confederacy of intelligent and resolute men, leagued together in a Union of Confederate States, and pledged to secure to all men within its bounds a clear path, an unfettered start, and a fair chance in every laudable pursuit, was judged by him a civic undertaking too preciously freighted with promise and hope for the welfare of the world to be ever disrupted and destroyed by the disloyalty and the withdrawal of any one or any cluster of its constituent parts. It was a Union as sacred and holy as all the worth and all the hopes of men. To separate from such a league was a capital disloyalty. To disintegrate such a unison was the ultimate inhumanity. To stand fast forever by such a federation was a crowning fidelity. To preserve, protect and defend such a Union, at whatever cost of life or wealth, and therein to adventure however sacred honor was a primary and a final obligation. By its perpetual preservation unimpaired was secured to all mankind the vision and the priceless promise of liberty and hope. By secession, defiance, and violent assault, that precious human treasure was being endangered and defiled. Hence his anxious all-consuming eagerness as he approached his ominous task. Hence his firm acceptance of awful, inevitable war. Such were the marshalings of Lincoln's thoughts and sentiments as he approached and undertook his mighty work--fit prelude in Independence Hall, and befitting explanation and defense in the Halls of Congress of the mighty rallying of those regiments of men for the awful combats of a people's war. This was Lincoln's argument. That the rights of life and liberty and happiness were designed and decreed by the Maker of all to be equal for all was for him, as an American, and for him as a fellow and a friend of all, under God, an axiom. And to that firm truth the war was but a corollary. Because the Union was a league of freemen, kindred to God, and peers among themselves, bound together in mutual goodwill and for mutual weal, it must at all hazards and through all perils and sorrows be made perpetual. Not that slavery should be immediately removed, though its existence in such a league was an elemental unworthiness and affront; but that the Union should be forever secured was his immediate aspiration and resolve. This once achieved and forever assured, and slavery with every other kindred inequality would in "due time" be done away. This is the key and the core of his ringing and irresistible retort to Greeley. This was the inspiration of that immortal appeal at Gettysburg, the very pledge and secret of its excellence and immortality--the plea that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth. And it was definitively this axiomatic verity that provided to his deeply thoughtful mind that deeply philosophic interpretation of the divine intention in the war, which he so carefully enshrined within his last inaugural. The sin of slavery had transgressed a primary law of God. Human shoulders had been heavily laden with artificial weights. Brother men had been denied by fellow-men an equal start. The paths of laudable pursuit were not kept equally clear to all. Multitudes of men, by the inhuman tyranny of the strong upon the weak, and that from birth to death, had been accorded no fair chance. Men had toiled for centuries, and that beneath the lash, without requital. Hence the awful doom and woe of war--God's visitation upon ourselves of our own offense, the wasting of our unholy wealth and the leveling of our inhuman pride. And all of this was being guided through to its predestined and most holy end with the divine design that through the awful baptism of blood our national life should begin anew in humble reverence for him whose just and fiery jealousy demands that all his little ones shall share with all the mightiest in equal rights. Thus Lincoln viewed the war as God's avenging vindication of the just and gracious principles that all men everywhere are entitled to share together equally in liberty and hope. But Lincoln felt all of this to be, not alone the law of God, but quite as truly the common and compelling affirmation of the human heart. This way and style of phrasing it found eloquent annunciation in that earliest and unanswerable address respecting slavery at Peoria in October of 1854, where were deeply laid and may still be seen the foundations of all his power and fame. In that address he said, "My faith in the proposition, that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own, lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me." And upon that foundation he laid this cornerstone of social and civic order: "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man's consent." To so invade the liberty of another man is "despotism." Such invasion is "founded in the selfishness of man's nature." "Opposition to it is founded in his sense of justice." "These principles are in eternal antagonism." When they collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow." These sentiments of liberty are above repeal. Though you repeal all past history, "you cannot repeal human nature." Out of the "abundance of man's heart" "his mouth will continue to speak." And to demonstrate that this sentiment of liberty, this consciousness that human worth is sovereign, is a verity of human nature which even holders of slaves corroborate, he points to the over 400,000 free negroes then in the land. Their presence is proof that deep in all human hearts is a "sense of human justice and sympathy" continually attesting "that the poor negro has some natural right to himself, and that those who deny it and make merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt and death." This irrepealable law of the human heart was a mighty rock of confidence in Lincoln's social and political faith. All men were made to be free, and entitled equally to a happy life; and of this divine endowment all men everywhere were well aware. Human nature is by its nature the birthplace and the home of liberty and hope. Especially serviceable for the purposes of this study upon Industrialism is the section in Lincoln's Message to Congress of December, 1861, dealing with what he calls our "popular institutions." With his eagle eye he discerns in the Southern insurrection an "approach of returning despotism." The assault upon the Union was proving itself, under his gaze, an attack upon "the first principles of popular government--the rights of the people." And against that assault he raised "a warning voice." In this warning he treats specifically the relation of labor and capital. In this discussion his motive is single and clear. He detects a danger that so-called labor may be assumed to be so inseparably bound up and indentured with capital as to be subject to capital in a sort of bondage; and that, once labor, whether slave or hired, is brought under that assumed subjection, that condition is "fixed for life." Both of these assumptions he assails. Labor is not a "subject state;" nor is capital in any sense its master. There is "no such thing as a free man's being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer." So he affirms. And then he argues that "labor is prior to and independent of capital." "Capital is only the fruit of labor." "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Hired labor, and capital that hires and labors not--these do both exist; and both have rights. But "a large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others, nor have others working for them." This is measurably true even in the Southern States. While in the Northern States a large majority are "neither hirers nor hired." And even where free labor is employed for hire, that condition is not "fixed for life." "Many independent men everywhere in these Northern States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers." The "penniless," if "prudent," "labors for wages awhile;" "saves a surplus;" "then labors on his own account;" and "at length hires another new beginner to help him." "This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all." Here is a form of "political power;" here is a "popular principle" that underlies present national prosperity and strength, and infolds a pledge of its certain future abounding expansion. Thus Lincoln argued in his Annual Message of 1861. In his Annual Message of 1862, he pursued in a similar strain, a vital and kindred aspect of the same industrial theme. He was arguing with Congress in favor of compensated emancipation. In the course of that argument, speaking of the relation of freed negroes to white labor and white laborers, he said: "If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In time like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." And then, after appealing with utmost patience and consideration and with ideal persuasiveness to every better sentiment and to every proper interest, he drew towards the close of his plea with these arresting, prophetic, almost forboding words, words richly worth citation for a second time:--"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." "We cannot escape history." "The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." "We know how to save the Union." "We--even we here--hold the power and bear the responsibility." "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve." "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth." "The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless." Thus Lincoln voiced, and in terms that human-kind will not lightly suffer to be forgotten, his seasoned and convinced belief about the principles that should hold dominion in the industrial realm. They reveal that in his chastened and chastening faith Civics and Economics are merged forever in Ethics, and that therein they are forever at one. Individuals, however lowly or however strong; parties or combinations of men or wealth, however massive or however firm; governments or nations, however puissant, ambitious or proud, are alike endowed and alike enjoined with sovereign duties and with sovereign rights. The negro, however poor, may not be robbed or exploited or bound by any master, however grand. The soil of a neighboring government, however alluring its promise of expansion or wealth, may never be invaded or annexed by force of any Nation's arms, however exalted and humane that Nation's professions and aims. If any man, or any Nation of men be but meagerly endowed, that humble heritage is inviolably theirs forever to enjoy. The person of Dred Scott and the soil of Mexico are holy ground--heaven-appointed sanctuaries that no oppressor or invader may ever venture to profane. If to any nation, or to any man "God gave but little, that little let him enjoy." Slavery and tyranny are iniquitous economy. "Take from him that is needy" is the rule of the slaveholder and the tyrant. "Give to him that is needy" is the rule of Christian charity. As between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the timid and the bold, "this good earth is plenty broad enough for both." Here is indeed an eternal struggle. But underneath is "an eternal principle." And among the many Nations of the earth this American people are bringing to this principle in the face of all the world a world-commanding demonstration of its benign validity. By the sweat of his face shall man eat bread. And the fruit of his toil shall man enjoy. So would Lincoln guard, in the industrial world, against all exaggeration and all infringement of human liberties and rights, and this quite as much for the sake of the strong as in defense of the weak. Tyranny, in despoiling the weak, despoils the tyrant too. Liberty does harm to none, but brings rich boon to all. Thus Lincoln cherished freedom. But deep within this treasured liberty Lincoln saw the shining jewel of human hope. And hope with him was ever neighborly. And this generous sentiment, expanding forever in his heart, he cherished, not merely as common civilian, but as president. It was while at Cincinnati, on his way to his inauguration, that he said, "I hold that while man exists it is his duty not only to improve his own condition, but also to assist in ameliorating mankind." "It is not my nature, when I see people borne down by the weight of their shackles ... to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke." But true as was Lincoln's view of our national mission, and clear and just and generous as was his own desire, he saw in the Nation's path before his face a mighty obstacle. He knew the fascination of "property." And he knew that this fascination held its malevolent sway, even though that "property" was vested in human life. Here was the brunt of all his battle. The slaves of his day had a "cash value" at a "moderate estimate" of $2,000,000,000. He saw that this property value had "a vast influence on the minds of its owners." And he knew that this was so "very naturally" that the same amount of property "would have an equal influence ... if owned in the North;" that "human nature is the same;" that "public opinion is founded to great extent on a property basis;" that "what lessens the value of property is opposed;" that "what enhances its value is favored." With this prevailing tendency, native and universal in all men alike, he had to deal. Indeed he had no other problem. All his presidential difficulties reduced to this:--the universal greed of men for gain; and deep within this inborn greed, man's inborn selfishness. And all his all-absorbing toil and thought as statesman and as president were to exalt in human estimation the values in men above all other gain. This desire lay deep in his heart at the beginning of his struggle in 1854. At the end of his conflict in those closing days of his life in 1865 this longing came forth as pure and shining gold thrice refined. From the time of his second election his thoughts moved with an almost unwonted constancy upon these upper heights. With immeasurable satisfaction he brooded and pondered over the emerging issues of the stupendous strife. With an almost mother's love he considered and counted over and reckoned up those outcomes of the sacrifice that should worthily endure. With a vision purged of every form of vanity and every form of selfishness, not as a miser, but in very deed with a mother's pride and inner joy, he recited over the precious inventory of the chastened Nation's wealth. Touching evidence of this is in his habitual tone of speech when addressing soldiers returning from the field to their homes. Over and over again he would remind the men of the vital principle at stake, alike in war and in peace. "That you may all have equal privileges in the race of life;" that there may be "an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence--this is 'our birthright,' our 'inestimable pearl.' Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality." "To the humblest and the poorest among us are held out the highest privileges and positions." It is hard to say, when he was voicing his satisfaction and his gratitude to these returning regiments, to which his words were most directly addressed, to the soldier in the uniform, or to the citizen. All those veteran soldiers were to his discerning eyes the precious sterling units of the Nation's lasting wealth. In their service as defenders of the Union they had saved the most precious human heritage that human history ever knew or human hope conceived. And of that heritage and hope they were themselves the exponent. Their service under arms and their civilian life in coming days of peace were one. And with a deep and fond solicitude he would charge them to shield and guard, to champion and defend with ballot as with sword their dear-bought liberty and right. These peaceable precious fruits of the deadly terrible war he well foresaw and greeted eagerly. The verdict of the ballots in his re-election in 1864 proclaimed afar a word the world had never heard before. It "demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war." That verdict declared authoritatively that government by the people was "sound and strong." And it also showed by actual count that after four terrible years of war the government had more supporting men than when the war began. This abounding victory filled and satisfied his heart. And in the presence of that unexampled proof that equal liberty for all was safe within the guardianship of common men, he exclaimed with a prophet's vision of the living unison of civic and economic weal:--"Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold." Such were Lincoln's principles as he defined a Nation's true prosperity and wealth. A Nation's strength, a Nation's honor, a Nation's truest treasure is in her men. Men of freedom and men of hope, men intolerant of tyranny, men resolved to be worthy of themselves and conscious of kinship with their Maker, men jealous equally of their own and their brother's liberty, men who welcome all the bonds involved in a friendly league of equal duties and equal rights, men in whom the amelioration of all is a ruling desire, these are the chief and best achievement in the proudest Nation's wealth. To undervalue men, preferring any other good, is to cherish in a Nation's heart the source of its undoing. More to be prized than finest gold is every citizen. However weak and humble any man may be, his honor is sacredly above offense. To leave the burden of the feeble unrelieved, or to clog the progress of the slow is in any Nation's history a primal sin, and is sure to be abundantly revenged. For such a sin no store of wealth has power to atone. A sin like that a sinner himself must bear. This is the central thought of the last inaugural. These were the human sentiments lying underneath all Lincoln's economic faith. To these firm verities he held devotedly, whether counseling the Nation as its president, projecting negro colonies as the negro's friend, or offering to an idling, impecunious brother a dollar gratis for every dollar earned. Men are equal; men are free. Men are royal; men are kin. Men are hopeful; men aspire. Men are feeble; men have need. Men may prosper; men may rise. Melioration is for all. Men have duties; men have rights. Rights are mutual; duties bind. Every man resents offense. Only despots can offend. Human tyranny is doomed. Vengeance waits on every wrong. God is sovereign, kind and just. These are Lincoln's sentiments. These he nobly illustrates. These are laws which he defends. These are truths he vindicates. These few fundamental principles, applied anywhere in the industrial field, would soon and certainly put in force wholesome, everlasting, all-embracing laws. If, like Lincoln himself, men start in penury with never a favor and never a friend, then, like him, they must hire themselves to other men for the going wage. But every such a contract must be forever subject to a fair and orderly recall. The humblest earner of a daily wage must be forever free, free to continue or to withdraw. To his freedom and improvement, to his enheartenment and hope all industrial regulations must conduce. This is basic. This alone is generous and fair. And only here can any government win permanence and peace. Here are Lincoln's primal postulates in social economics. Moral imperatives are over every man. Moral freedom is in every breast. Within the nethermost foundations of any mortal's share in any social fellowship must rest his own self-wrought integrity and self-respect. To make that social fellowship in any form perpetually secure each man must seek with all his heart and with continual willing sacrifice the lasting welfare of every party and of every part. That this be safely guaranteed each man must learn to estimate his brother-man, not by epaulets and coins, but by immortal standards, such as only living persons can achieve. To make this social league invincible within, each member in the fellowship must show a true humility, abjuring all temptation or desire to be a despot or a grandee. And through it all this social compact must be cherished and revered as ordained by a God of pure and sovereign truth and love. Thus by friendly ministry, in unpretending honesty, in brother-kindliness, as sharing in a common immortality, under the favor and in the fear of God, may fellowmen in multitudes be fellow citizens in a civic order that may hope for perpetual prosperity. This is the resounding message that Lincoln's life transmuted into speech through his pathetic and inspiring rise from poverty. HIS PHILOSOPHY--THE PROBLEM OF REALITY The study of Lincoln's moral versatility, examined in a former chapter, ranging as it does through all the measure of the moral realm, verges all along its border on the domain of philosophy. Lincoln has scant familiarity, it is true, with the rubrics and the problems, the theories and the methods of the schools. His boyhood was in the wilderness; locusts and wild honey were his food. Such education as he achieved was in pathetic isolation. It was a naked earth, unfurnished with any aids or guides, from which his homely hard-earned wisdom was laboriously wrung. But his Maker dowered him with a mind attempered to defiance of every difficulty. And, however stern the face of his life's fortune might become, his sterner will and diligence found in her solitudes her choicest treasures. To minds that nimbly traverse many books, thinking to have gained the substance of great truths, when they have only gained vain forms, this may seem to be impossible. But Lincoln's mind had traversed severest discipline. He found rare substance of intellectual wealth. And he knew its solid worth. Of this, as has been shown, his first inaugural yields shining proof. Almost every sentence is as the oracle of a sage. But his second inaugural, too, is a gem of wisdom, clear and pure, fit ornament for any man to wear in any place where wisest men convene. Let keenest eyes examine narrowly the aspiration with which this second inaugural concludes. There shines a wish as bright as any human hope that ever shone in human breast--a wish that all the earth might gain to just and lasting peace. That yearning plea was voiced upon the very breath that spoke of the battles and wounds, the dead and the bereft, of a mighty Nation in fratricidal war. The peace he sought for within all the land, and through all the earth, was to be the national consummation of a conflict in which multitudes of men and millions of treasure had been offered up under God in the name of charity and right. Such was the wording and the setting of this wish. Comprehend its girth. It encircled all the earth. This cannot be said to be nothing but the ill-considered aspiration of an inexperienced underling. It is the prayer of one who for four terrific years had held the chief position in conducting the executive affairs of one of the major empires of the world. During all that time, among the bewildering and imperious problems of an era of unexampled civil convulsion, hardly any complications had been more obstinate or more disturbing than those bound up in the relation of the United States to the other major Nations of the world. Within those international complications were infolded problems and principles as profoundly fundamental as any within any Nation's single life, or within all the reach of international law. In such a situation and out of such a career Lincoln culminates the declaration of his policy for a second presidential term with an invocation of just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all Nations. Again let it be said, and be it not forgotten, that it is from the lips of Lincoln that this appeal ascends. He is not a novice. He is a seasoned veteran. Coming from that heart, and spoken in that hour, those words cannot be lightly flung aside. They are the longing of a man who, through almost unparalleled discipline, has attained an almost peerless sobriety, sincerity, and clear-sightedness. Too honest to utter hollow words, too deliberate to accept an ill-judged phrase, too discerning to recommend a futile and unlikely proposition, and sobered far beyond any power or inclination to play the hypocrite, we must concede that Lincoln meant and measured what he said. In simple fairness, and in all sobriety, we must allow that Lincoln understood that the principles which guided him as national chief magistrate, and the goal towards which he was driving everything in his conduct of the war, contained all needed light and power for winning all the world to perpetual harmony. This is nothing less than to allow in Lincoln's deeds and words the sweep and insight of a philosopher. And it is but simple justice, though of vast significance, to append just here that it was in the office and person of John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, when later he was our Secretary of State, that there dawned and brightened the new era in international diplomacy, now in our day so widely inaugurated, and so well advanced. It can be truly added that in this vast arena, where mighty Nations are the actors, and in very fact all the world is the stage, those cardinal moral traits of Lincoln, and his transparent and commanding personality, so steadfast and vivid and gentle and meek, have no need to borrow from other and ancient theories and illustrations of world-wide statesmanship either light or power. That each individual retain unsmirched and undiminished his pristine self-respect as the cornerstone of all reliability, his neighborly kindness as the prime condition of all true comity, his child-like deference towards God as the basis of all genuine dignity, and his rating of human souls above all perishable goods as the absolute and essential foundation of any perpetuity, forms a programme as elemental and imperial among mightiest Nations, as among humblest neighborhoods of men. Lincoln's obedient recognition of the Almighty's purposes in over-ruling national affairs, his king-like resolution to hold loyally by his innate sense of equity, his eagerness for the elevation of all the oppressed, his instinctive aspiration in his civic life for foundations that cannot fail, and his uncomplaining fellowship with the penal sorrows of his erring fellow citizens,--all apprehended and defended and adhered to with such a lucid mind and steadfast will and prophetic hope upon the open platform of our American Republic--propose both in active practice and in reasoned theory a pattern of statesmanship, capable of comprehending the political conditions, and directing the diplomacy of all the governments of the world. Here are the primal conditions and constituents of international amity. Agreements constructed and defended thereupon among the Nations could not fail to be fair. They would surely endure. And as the centuries passed, the faith of Lincoln in a Ruler of Nations, just, benign, eternal, supreme, would aboundingly increase. But once again it must be said that these are not the themes, nor this the flight of an untrained imagination. The peace among all Nations towards which Lincoln's hope appealed, was being patterned upon a just and lasting achievement among ourselves. And among ourselves the government was being tried in the burning, fiery furnace of a civil war. It was being proved in flames what factors in a national civic order were permanent, and fair, and approved of God. It was out of deep affliction and unsparing discipline, rebuking all our sins, humbling all our vanity, purging all our hopes, and cementing among ourselves a just and lasting brotherhood, that Lincoln found the heart to hope for perpetual fraternity through all the world. Within his wish deep-wrought, hard-earned, clear-eyed wisdom was crystallized. It was an imperial proposition, momentous, comprehensive, profound. It embodied nothing less than a political philosophy. But these assertions demand a closer scrutiny. Does Lincoln's thought, in scope and mode, deserve in any sense to be entitled a philosophy? In soberness, is any such pretension justified? Are Lincoln's principles so radical, so comprehensive, so well-ordered, as to deserve a title so supreme? All turns on truly understanding Lincoln's apprehension of reality. Lincoln's world was a society of persons. God, himself, his fellowman engrossed his thought and interest. Among all persons, as seen and known by him, there was a full affinity. All men were equal, and all were kindred to the great God. This was the starting point, this the circuit, and this the goal of all his conscious thought and toil. This was his world. To penetrate its nature was to handle elements. To grasp those elements was to be inclusive. And to comprehend their native correlation was to master fundamental wisdom. Here Lincoln shows his mental strength. Among all these elements he traced a fundamental similarity. A common pattern embraced them all. The highest and the lowest were essentially alike. All were dowered with kindred capacities for nobility. He never suffered himself or any of his fellowmen to forget his own elevation from lowliest ignorance and poverty to the presidency. However humble, all could rise. However ignorant, all could learn. However unbefriended, all deserved regard. Life and liberty and happiness were a common boon, an even, universal right. For fellowship with God, even when buffeted beneath divine rebukes, all might hope. The ultimate, open possibility of such divine companionship is shown in this last inaugural, where Lincoln's keen discernment avails to comprehend, that even sinning men may, through penitent acceptance of heaven's rebukes, win heaven's favor and walk with God. Thus Lincoln learned and knew that among all men, and between all men and God there was a fundamental ground of imperishable affiance. Here lies the foundation of his philosophy. And this affiance was in its being moral. With him the real was ethical. Pure equity was the primal verity. By character were all things judged. Politics and ethics were identical. In the thought of Lincoln the qualities constituting our American Union, the qualities that defined and contained its very being, the qualities that made it a civic entity, securing to it its coherence and perpetuity, the qualities guaranteeing that it should not dissolve and disappear in the fate and wreck of all decaying things, the qualities that made it worth the faithful care of God and the loving loyalty of men, were identical with the qualities constituting himself a free, responsible soul. The same humble reverence, the same mutual goodwill, the same regard for durability, the same jealousy for integrity as informed his personal conscience and inspired his personal will, should form the law and determine the deeds of the Nation as well, if the Nation was ever to have in its civic being a dignity worthy to survive. Here is a standard conformable at once with the measure of things in heaven, the measure of a Nation, and the measure of every man. Such is the scope of this inaugural. In penning that grave paragraph touching "unrequited toil," Lincoln had his eye alike upon the individual slave, upon the Nation as a whole, upon long centuries, and upon the ways of God. It may be said with equal truth that he was pondering the sin and hurt of a single act of fraud, the vital structure of organic civic life, the continual tenure of right and guilt through lives and times that seem diverse, and the unison of moral estimates that hold with God and men alike forever. This may not be denied. The sin inflicted in a single wrong, like that of slavery, may implicate a Nation in a guilt that, under the impartial and upright rule of God, the centuries cannot obliterate. Inhuman scorn, short-sighted greed, disloyalty and cruelty, however disguised, or however upheld, entail a doom too certain and too sovereign for the centuries to unduly defer, or for any nation to ever annul. Here are principles undeniably. And as undeniably these principles are supreme. A just God is over all. To his high purposes all things, even the most perverse, must eventually conform. To his right rule even unrighteous men must bend. Into intelligent harmony with his will all upright men may come, finding in lowly acknowledgment of his great majesty their true dignity, in loyalty to his pure righteousness their own complete integrity, in imitation of his universal benignity their perfect mutual friendliness, and in a vision of his eternal purity their assurance of personal and civic perpetuity. Thus in the midst of all being, and in the conscious presence of Him in whom all being finds its source, our personal, human being finds its transcendent dignity and crown. Living thus, and living thus together, men find life indeed. Thus all, endowed alike with the common sanctity of life, enjoying equally the common right to liberty, share equally a common boon of happiness. Thus each man alone and thus the civic order as a whole may survive and flourish under God in just and lasting peace. This, in Lincoln's thought, was final, comprehensive truth. Taken in all its foursquare amplitude and unison, there was nothing human it did not avail to fitly arrange and fully circumscribe. Whether for man alone or for men in leagues, whether for States supreme or for States confederate, it provided every needful guide and bond. As for the international arena, so for every lesser realm of social life, the principles enshrined in this inaugural are civic wisdom crystallized. They proffer to our human social life nothing less than a philosophy. This is the wisdom literally inscribed upon the tablet of this last inaugural. To unveil its face before an ever heedful and ever more attentive world is being found a sovereign function of succeeding time. Men are ever learning, but have ever yet to learn what Lincoln was. Despite his fame, his proper glory has been veiled. His features have been shadowed, almost smirched. His reputation has been overlaid with rumours and reports of excessive pleasure in ribald, rollicking hours in wayside inns. But in his very laughter there were deep hints of measured soberness. Seasoned wisdom flavored all his wit. His very folly was profound. But when his mood of frolic passed, when, and almost without any inner change, his outer mien grew serious, and sadness brooded on his face, then his speech was fed from nether springs. Then his lips were freighted from afar, and his speech was rich with precious lore. In his inmost instinct Lincoln was a philosopher. Out of life's complexities he was always searching for its clue. His speeches deal at bottom with nothing but details. But out of the mesh of those details he was always weaving principles. It is this that gives his words their weight. He is by his own right a true philosopher. It was true wisdom with which he dealt. With true wisdom he was in love. In his own character he has garnered all his gains. By self-refinement he has become a Nation's pattern. In himself are treasured all the honors, dignities, and rewards that appertain to a worthy devotee of wisdom. Assuredly, and beyond all fair dispute, the author of this last inaugural, when fairly measured and esteemed for what he was, and what he did, and what he overcame in civic realms by sheer original research, far more than any Dr. Faust, deserves his doctorate and degree. In sober verity the author of this inaugural is a true Doctor of Philosophy. HIS THEODICY--THE PROBLEM OF EVIL The last preceding chapter closed with an allusion to Dr. Faust. That reference may now be profitably resumed. Goethe's Faust is introduced as in deep uneasiness before the unsolved mysteries of life. He is described as having mastered all that all the Faculties can give, but all to no sure end, and as being then beguiled into other paths and scenes, there to prosecute afresh his quest for present satisfaction. In this new quest he accepts the guidance of a scorner into realms of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft; into scenes of ribaldry, debauchery, and basest sordidness; into lust, murder, and treacherous unfaithfulness; into a devilish trade for present carnal happiness, at cost of freedom, reason, and any heed for future destiny. One notable feature in all this quest is its submergence in the sea of things that surge up around the passing life, only to pass away themselves and disappear. His riddles and his quests, his ideals and delights are largely physical. His guide does not conduct him into the steadfast presence and observation of things permanent and spiritual. He is prone to make him roam in realms of magic, where forms and deeds are too thin and vague to be even shadows, and too false to be even artificial, but where yet each scene excites the imagination to perishing desires for joys of sense. Carnal potions, charms, and lust; physical tumults and delights so largely occupy the central place in all the scenes, that the riddles Faust would fain resolve are, to a large degree, the mysteries of the universe of sense. Now let any man compare the major problems in the mind of Goethe's Faust with the problems that Lincoln felt to be supreme. One discovers instantly a vast divergence. Themes and questions, that to the very end of Goethe's life perplexed and vexed his thought, were in Lincoln's writings not so much as named. But far beyond all this. The vast, unwieldly world of solid sense, so baffling, but so sure, now so terrible, and now so kind, now serving, and now crushing boastful, trembling man, now begetting, and now absorbing endless, countless generations and multitudes, seems not to constitute a vexing or perplexing theme in Lincoln's most insistent thought. This can never be explained as due to a painless, care-free, earthly lot; nor to a pampering environment; nor to physical stolidity; nor to incapacity for aesthetic joys. The lines that seamed his face, the muscles that leashed his frame, the structure of his hands, the meaning message upon his lips, his shadowed, sobered, brooding eyes attest a different tale. Lincoln was sufficiently aware of the plain and common sorrows incident to our earthly environment. He knew what havoc cold and heat, hunger and pain, toil and want, plague and death could visit upon our human life. But none of these things seemed to trouble him. So engrossed was he with questions he called "durable," that all physical discomforts and distresses, with their connected pleasures and desires and hopes and fears, were but passing, minor incidents. This undoubted fact in Lincoln's mental habitude is a signal and significant factor, to be held in careful estimation in a final judgment of Lincoln's character. Ethics, pure ethics, themes that dealt with realms where man is truly responsible and truly free, were his supreme concern from first to last. And so it comes to pass that the problem, which for him is truly fundamental and ultimate, passes wholly by at once all that burden of so-called evil, in the fear and hurt and mystery of things inflexible, and clings fast hold of things alone that are responsible and free. Touching the theme of this chapter, and touching also this last inaugural, the following letter, written March 15, 1865, to Thurlow Weed, already cited and considered once, deserves a bit of heed again:-- Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech and on the recent inaugural address. I expect the latter to wear as well as--perhaps better than--anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it. Truly yours, A. LINCOLN. This letter shows what Lincoln judged to be the secret of this inaugural's permanent hold on human approbation. It was its humble testimony to the fact that, amidst and above the errors and sins, the struggles and failures of men and Nations, there is a world-governing God. Here opens a theme that is truly sovereign and ultimate. The last inaugural reveals that Lincoln was closely pondering two incongruous themes: the bitter career of slavery; and the just rule of God. Touching the first--the fact of human slavery--whatever other men might think, in Lincoln's view it was always abhorrent, a primary immorality. He was naturally "anti-slavery." Even in this address, guarded against all malice, and suffused with charity, he could not forbear from saying:--"It may seem strange that any men should dare to seek a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from other men's faces." Man's right to live was in his thought primal. That right carried with it the right to enjoy the bread that his own hands had earned. Such a privilege was the central element in human happiness. Such felicity was elemental. Such freedom and such joy were the simplest common boon in our common, earthly lot. The institution of slavery blasted that joy, denied that liberty, robbed that right to life. This annihilated hope. It ranked men with brutes. Such a ravaging of human desires and human rights Lincoln judged, from the side of the slave-holder, a paramount crime; and from the side of the slave, an insufferable curse. The terrible enormity of both crime and curse was measured in Lincoln's estimation by the enormity of the war. Viewed any way, that war was the indication and register of the wrong done, and the wrong borne, by men in the centuries of slavery. Arrogance and insolence, ruthlessness and cruelty, dishonesty and faithlessness, luxury and lust, trailed all along its path. That, in a Republic dedicated to liberty, men would go to war and fight to the death with their fellow-citizens in defense and perpetuation of tyranny and bonds, gave evidence to the strange and obdurate perverseness involved and nurtured in the mood and attitude of men that were bent on holding fellow men as slaves. The existence of such an institution in any land Lincoln deemed a national calamity; in a free Republic he felt it to be a heaven-braving anomaly and affront. It was a flagrant evil, bound to bring down woe. But in the deep entanglements of history this baleful institution had to be condoned, even in this land made sacred to the free. Inbred within the Nation in the Nation's very birth, that it be sheltered within the Nation's life became a national responsibility. From this firm bond Lincoln himself could not escape. In the Constitution that Lincoln swore to uphold, when first he took the presidency, slavery was sheltered, if not entrenched. As chief magistrate of the whole Republic, however obnoxious slavery might be, he had the obnoxious thing to protect. This he freely admitted, and explicitly declared in his first inaugural. Here was the beginning of his final, moral debate. How should he morally justify himself in defending what he morally abhorred? That this dual attitude should be assumed he seemed fully to concede. This shows most clearly, and in its sharpest moral contradiction, when, in his first inaugural, he volunteered to permit an amendment to the Constitution, enacting, as the supreme law of the land, that slavery should remain thereafter undisturbed forever. How he brought his mind to take that stand has never been made clear. He said in that connection that such an amendment was in effect already Constitutional law. But previous to that date he had always pledged and urged forbearance with slavery, on the understanding that such forbearance was only for a time; that, as foreseen and designed by the men who framed the Constitution, slave holding was always to be so handled, as to be always on the way to disappear. It is not easy to see how a man, to whom the practice of holding slaves was so morally repellent, could participate in making it perpetual. One could wish that just this problem had been frankly handled under Lincoln's pen. It must have been plainly before his thought. And the words of few men would be more worthy of careful record and review than deliberate words from Lincoln upon this world-perplexing query:--how adjust one's thoughts and acts to a moral evil, that inveterately endures, and is never atoned? But in fact that amendment was never carried through. One of the fruits of slavery was its rash unwisdom at just this juncture. Still, though the amendment lapsed, slavery held on. And slaveholders tightened their resolution to retain their rights in slaves, or rend the Union. This precipitated war. This may seem to have doubled Lincoln's problem, slavery and national dissolution. Standing at the apex of national responsibility, he had to bear the hottest brunt of the physical anguish, the mental perplexity, and the moral sorrows of a war waged by a slave-holding South in militant secession. But in reality, in his thought, the two were one. All turned on slavery. This was the burning blemish in the Constitution. This was the intent of the war. This was the burden on his heart. Here was a load too grievous for any man to bear. It bore preponderantly on him. And yet, as regards any personal and conscious desire or deed, he was through and in it all conscious within himself of innocence. His trial and sorrow were without cause. How now, in his soberest thought, was all this moral confusion explained? Hating slavery with all his heart, innocent all his life of any inclination to rob another man of liberty, but pledged and sworn to shelter slavery under the arm of his supreme and free authority, how could he prove himself consistent morally? Here emerge the profoundest thoughts of Lincoln on the ways of God. And herein appears his contribution to a theodicy--a vindication of God's moral honor, where his moral government seems slack. How can thoughtful men conceive and hold that God is just, when such injustice and disaster are allowed at all, much less for centuries; in any corner of the earth, much less where heaven's favor seems to dwell? Upon this subduing theme this last inaugural gives us Lincoln's most explicit words. Of God's personal being, and of his personal care, this address shows Lincoln to be perfectly assured. This was his standing attitude and confidence. Throughout his years in the presidency this trust had seemed unwavering. Indeed, by repeated, almost unconscious attestations, it was his stablest trust. Some of his utterances are tender and touching testimonials to his belief that God rules in his own personal career. But mainly his confessions of belief in the Providence of God are connected with national concerns. He did joyfully, almost jubilantly believe that this Republic was under God's special watch and care. His own hope for our national future well-being and honor rested mainly, we must judge, upon the tokens he thought he could trace in our thrilling and inspiring history of the divine controlling care. At bottom it was this faith that underlay all his patriotism. That the fundamental affirmations of our Constitution were rescripts and digests from the will and word of God was the lively ground and unfailing confirmation of his pure devotion to his Nation's honor and weal. More than aught in all the world beside, it was this religious faith that steadied and girded his will through all those strenuous days. It is just here that this study of a theodicy sets in. Above all his former thoughts about himself, about his land, about the clash of right and wrong; above all thoughts of other men, and other times; even above his own and his opponents' former prayers and faith, he lifts new thoughts in new reverence and new docility towards God. Still naught but slavery in his theme--its undeniable iniquity; its strange, prolonged permission; his own, and all other men's responsibility; its unavoidable entail in penalty; and the divine, enduring terms of new liberty and peace. Here are themes and fixed realities that seem eternally to disagree. Can they ever all be morally harmonized? Could even God enlighten that dark past? Could his own historic acts be morally unified? Nothing he had ever done with slavery, not even its utter elimination in his act of freedom, had ever been done, he explicitly affirmed, on moral grounds. Yet slavery, and by his own hand, was indeed undone. But even so the spirit of the South was still invincible, and war was holding on. What indeed could be the thoughts and plans of God? To begin with, he confesses both North and South and all the land gone wrong. This is the first component in his theodicy. Neither North nor South, not even in the act of prayer, had walked with God, nor found the truth, nor gained its wish. All thoughts of men, in the righteous rule of God, were being overturned. This confession verges near to worship, acclaiming, as it does, the Almighty's designs; and venturing as it does, to trace and reproduce the Almighty's thoughts. Here is seen how genuine is the moral earnestness in Lincoln's earnest thoughtfulness. As though by a very instinct, his form of words betrays his reverence. He refrains from dogmatism. He refrains even from affirmation. He knows he is venturing upon a daring flight. He is assuming to conjoin together into a moral unison that bitter sample of the age-long cruelty of man against his brother, and the transcendent sovereignty, the eternal justice, and the age-long silence of God. His formula is a modest supposition. But within its modesty is an eye that searches far. He takes resort in one of the most trenchant declarations of Christ, that momentous saying in his colloquy about the majesty and modesty of a little child:--"Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." In this colloquy Jesus seems to be moved by a tender impulse of affectionate jealousy for the model beauty and grace of children. But that tenderness is roused into one of the most terrific outbursts that ever passed his lips. Little children are Christlike, Godlike, models of the citizenship in the heavenly Kingdom. God is their jealous guardian and defender. But Godlike, and of heavenly dignity though they be, they are shy and frail. And men, as they grow gross and impudent, abuse and offend their defenselessness. So things have to be. But woe to such offenders. They were better tied to that mammoth stone that the mule turns in the mill, and submerged in the abyss of the deep of the great sea. Here are four noteworthy elements:--a blended heavenly modesty and majesty and innocence; an insufferable insolence; a trebly-terrible penalty; and a strange and ominous necessity. Over these four factors Lincoln's mind must have pondered long. Else how explain their place in this inaugural? They form the foundation of its central paragraph, and constitute its paramount argument; forming alike a sobering admonition, and a humble ground of hope to all the Nation, while at the same time holding aloft before the Nation's thought the outline and substance of a stately vindication of the ways of God. Evidently here is shapely fashioning in lucid speech of Lincoln's ripest, surest thought. As one faces all its range, it seems like the open sky, clear but fathomless. But its wisdom is doubly sealed, and it bears a double claim to our respect. It shows the way of Lincoln's mind, and the way of the mind of Christ. Not quickly will any other thinker, however disciplined, traverse all its course. But travel where he will in the mighty orbit of this inquiry, the modern thinker, whatever his attainment, may find in this inaugural shining indications that Lincoln's thought has gone before. In this modest, far-searching supposition, transferred to American history from the lips of Christ, Lincoln firmly grasps two solid facts, elemental and universal in human life:--the beautiful modesty of the meek; and the ugly arrogance in the strong. Strength and weakness needs must be. These invite to rudeness and retreat. Then the powerful overbear. The gentle are overborne. Offenses multiply. The arrogant prevail. So must it be. But when the meek go down beneath the wicked rudeness of the strong, then the Most High God, within whose firm dominion both strong and weak share equally in all the privileges and rights of liberty and law, sets over the offended one his shield, and against the proud offender his sword, until pity and equity are enthroned upon the earth again. Thus must it be. The meek must suffer. Offenders must arise. But meekness is a heavenly, Godlike quality. And as with God, so with his gentle little ones, patient gentleness will be duly vindicated; rude arrogance will meet exact and fit rebuke; and it will stand clear that strength and weakness may dwell together in equity and liberty and peace. This was the age-long moral process which Lincoln's eye discerned, and the final issue which his expectation hailed. Then and therein his eye discerned that all voices would be constrained to proclaim that in all the moral world pity and equity were prevalent; that the least had Godlike majesty; that humility gave to all the great their courtliness; and that there was within all men a fadeless worth, far outranking all other wealth. But it is essential to note, not alone that Lincoln offers this in the modest form of supposition; but that, as it leaves his lips, it assumes the formula of a confession. Even the meek receive rebuke. The gentlest have wandered also away from God. The problem has surpassed us all. All have somewhat to learn from God. That arrogance may meet its due, meekness must be yet more meek. It must needs be that offenses come. Greater than all our wrong, and all our patience, is the patient truth of God. This must be fully learned. It is under wrong that wrong is made right. It is by meekness under arrogance that arrogance is put to shame. It is by gentleness under rudeness that rudeness is subdued. Offenses must needs be. Only in sacrificial submission to its woe is the problem of evil ever resolved. Only thus is the iniquity of the sin measured back upon the evil doer in a symmetrical and equivalent rebuke. But this is never to exculpate the offender or condone the offense. Blood with the sword, drop for drop, must be meted out to the slaveholder, as he meted out to the slave blood with the lash. All the wealth that the bonds-man's lord has snatched from the toiling slave must be yielded up. Over human scorn and greed and injustice and cruelty hang unfailingly judgments that are true and righteous altogether. Neither may they who are offended rail, nor they who offend exult, over the divine delay. Nor when God's judgments fall may they who are rebuked complain, nor they who are redeemed turn exultation into arrogance. God's ways, and his alone are even, and altogether true. In thoughts like these Lincoln's final explanation of the ways of God took form. In patient, repentant, adoring acquiescence his heart found rest. His sorrows were profound, the sorrows of a patriot, kinsman to all the sorrowful in the land. But he learned, however deep the stroke, to forbear complaint. He received the sorrows of the war into his own breast as heaven's righteous woe upon a haughty land, and as heaven's discipline, teaching offenders the woe of their offense. So his ways became coincident with the greater ways of God. But in this moral explication of the war, and of all that the war involves, two vastly different types of character persist. Lincoln's solution of the enigma was in diametrical contrast with the views of the leading spirits of the South. Not like him did they rate slavery, nor conceive the war, nor understand the ways of God. How, now, could Lincoln's view assimilate this obduracy in the South? This question was clearly within the scope of Lincoln's thought, and its answer is embraced in what has already been explained. Given an even penalty for any sin, drop for drop with the avenging sword for blood with the lash, and it is morally indifferent whether men rail, or whether they acquiesce. The wrong is made right. The meek are redeemed. God's delay is vindicated. Rudeness is reversed. The law is fully revealed. Man's liberty is honored equally. Cruelty and unfairness are rebuked. The gains of greed are scattered. Humblest men are crowned with eternal dignity. To such, whether from the North or from the South, as with melting sorrow and repentance welcomed to their bosoms this bitter vindication of those primal rights, the sorrows of the war opened into perennial peace. To such as repelled that proffered vindication, there was in the sorrows of the war no alleviation. But for both, nevertheless, and for both identically, the sorrows of the war completed the moral vindication of a pure and Christlike equity and friendliness. Thus all the ways of God, with the repentant and the rebellious alike, are just and righteous altogether. This it is the highest wisdom of men to acquiescently confess. To this even those who rebelliously complain and rail must finally utterly submit. And now one final matter remains--the idea and definition of happiness. When men discuss the problem of evil in the universe, and in its awful presence try to substantiate their confidence in the just and friendly care of a transcendent Deity, one subtle touchstone governs all they say:--What is their conception of human weal, and of human woe? What in actual fact is deepest misery; and what is true felicity? What do they assume man's highest good to be? Just here is wide and multiform diversity. For illustration, let thought recur to the contrast with which the topic of this chapter was introduced. The idea of happiness that Goethe plants in Dr. Faust, and the idea of happiness that ruled in Lincoln, are as separate as the poles. And again, to keep within the setting of this inaugural, the happiness towards which Lincoln strove, and in which his thought found satisfaction, contrasted mightily with the happiness that informed the aspirations of the leaders of the South. In their ideal, disdain of all inferiors, delight in easy luxury, unequal acknowledgment of rights, and a cruel stifling of the very rudiments of love, were mixed and working mightily. Desiring and enjoying that Elysium, their estimate of evil, their definition of the highest good, and their programme for a final consummation under God could have no fellowship with any final plan of thought approved by Lincoln. What was Lincoln's highest happiness? This merits pondering anywhere; but compellingly, where one tries to trace his views upon this problem of theodicy; and yet still more when one conceives in this inquiry how in Lincoln's life his ethics, his civics, and his religion became coincident. As this mighty problem resolves itself in Lincoln's mind, it comprehends, along with his own welfare and worth and true contentment, the equal dignity and happiness of every other man, and a harmonious consonance with the being and decree of God. He sees that scorn of any other man involves in time the scorner's shame. He sees that robbery, however veiled, entails a debt whose perfect reimbursement the slowest centuries will in their time exact. He sees that any form of malice or unfriendliness, housed and fed in any heart, will forfeit all the joy of gratitude, and fill that heart at last with vindictive hate and bitterest loneliness. He sees that fleshly joys, however lush and full, are marked and destined for a swift and sure decay and weariness and vanity. And so, to realize the perfect welfare, he commends to himself, and urges persuasively on all other men, the sovereign good of an even justice, upheld within himself, and so measured out to other men by the perfect standard of God's self-respecting loyalty; of universal charity, eager everywhere to minister universal benefit and peace; of supreme enthusiasm for enduring life; and of a genuine humility, that shares all hope with all the lowly, and trusts and honors God. In this fourfold, composite unison of conscious, deathless life Lincoln sees the fairest goal, the choicest boon, the highest good of man. In the presence of such a standard, and before the outlook of such a hope Lincoln fashions his theodicy. Here then is the sum of Lincoln's thought upon this bewildering theme:-- The evil that makes this earthly lot so dark and hard is man's wrong to man; the awful sorrows of the meek; the offenses wrought upon the helpless by the arrogant. Before this mystery all other mysteries, however deep and terrible, such as hurricanes and famine, plagues and death, may not be named. This most sovereign evil is most clearly understood by those who are oppressed. Their eyes pierce all its deeps. The rude are, by their rudeness, blind. The names of all who suffer and are still are registered on high for full solace and redemption. The register of the rudeness of the strong is also full, and destined for full requital. This redemption and requital shall be wrought by God. In this redemption the ruthless may relent and share with all the meek the full measure of all their sorrows, and so become partakers of all their joy. If ruthlessness persist, full requitals shall still descend, and in the presence of God's even righteousness every mouth shall be stopped. And so shall all evil be fully rectified. HIS PIETY--THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION Of all the words of Lincoln, evincing what he thought of God, none outweigh the witness of this last inaugural. His reply to Thurlow Weed regarding this address, referred to in another place, concerned precisely just this point--the movements and the postulates of his religious faith. As his ripened mind prepared and pondered and reviewed this speech, there accrued within his consciousness a solemn confidence that it was destined to become his most enduring monument; and that as coming generations became aware of its outstanding eminence, their eyes and hearts would fasten on those words about the age-long, just, and overturning purposes of God. There was a confession, so Lincoln felt assured, embracing and conjoining North and South and East and West in an equal lowliness and shame; and declaring and extolling God's divine supremacy over all the erring waywardness and awful sufferings of men. In this outpouring of his burdened heart before his God, and in the presence of his fellowmen, there is evidence respecting Lincoln's piety that courts reflection. In the first place it indicates where Lincoln's sense of moral rectitude found out its final bearings. Those purposes of God, as Lincoln watched their operation, were working out the moral issues in the awful wrong of age-long, unrequited toil in perfect equity. Strong men had been wronging weaklings and inferiors. Helpless men had been suffering untold sorrows. Indignant men had been crying out in hot and hasty protest for full and speedy vengeance. Thoughtful men had been tortured over weary, futile wonderings as to how the baffling problem could be solved. Convulsions and confusion, which no arm or thought of man could start or stay, were shaking and bewildering all the land. But through and over all, as Lincoln came reverently to believe, a sovereign God held righteous government; and out of all the baffling turmoil he was, by simple righteousness, bringing perfect unison and peace. The dark mystery of unrequited wrong was being illuminated by the righteous majesty of complete requital. But in its full perfection, it was a righteousness such as no mind of man devised. It was the righteousness of God. Here Lincoln's moral sense was purified. He was being taught of God. And this he clearly, humbly recognized. And he took full pains in this address to give God all the praise. And so his reverence towards Deity, and his affirmation touching righteousness became identical. His sense of equity stood clothed in piety. In the second place, deep within the heart of these divine instructions were such unveilings of God's high majesty, in his steadfast reign above the passing centuries, as awoke on Lincoln's lips such lowly adoration as attuned these words of Godly statesmanship unto a psalm of praise. Here Lincoln's lowliness attains consummate beauty. It is indeed an utterance of profound abasement. It sinks beneath a strong rebuke. It acknowledges sad wanderings. It accepts correction, and meekly takes God's guiding hand. It also sees God's excellence, his high thoughts and ways, his irresistible dominion, his moral spotlessness. And before that revelation he humbly walks among his fellow-citizens, the lowliest of them all, confessing that the reproach involved in what he said fell heaviest upon himself; and therein, as a priest, leading the Nation in an act of worshipping submissiveness before the Lord. Herein his comely, moral modesty becomes an act and attitude of simple reverence towards God. And thus his humility, just like his sense of righteousness, becomes apparelled all about with Godly piety. In the third place, this new discernment of the ways of God unfolds profound discoveries of the divine evaluation of the diverse, contending interests in our commingled life. It makes clear which values fade, and which shine on eternally. The problem upon which Lincoln had transfixed his eye was that two and one-half centuries of hard and sad embondagement. By that gross sin men's deathless souls were bought and sold for transient gain. Past all denial, therein was moral wrong; else moral wrong had no existence. Its presence, every time he faced it, tortured Lincoln, and made him miserable. And it affronted heaven, overturning God's creative fiat of equality in all mankind. It set and ranked brief creature comforts and desires above the worth of heaven's image in a brother man. Every day it challenged heaven's curse. But heaven's judgment was delayed. Long centuries seemed to show that heaven was indifferent whether human souls or carnal pleasures held superior rank. But now, within the awful tumult of the war there boomed an undertone, conveying unto all who had quick ears to hear, how God adjudged that wrong. Upon dark battle clouds shone heavenly light, making newly plain God's estimate of slaveholder and of slave; of joys and gains that perish with their use, or await recall; and of souls that never die. Those awful tidings told how ill-gotten, carnal wealth is mortgaged under woe, and to the uttermost farthing must be released; how offending men affront the Lord; and how all offenses must be avenged. They made full clear how he who grasps at earthly gain by wrecking human dignity commits a primal sin--a sin that time, though it run into centuries, cannot obscure, or mitigate, or exempt from strict review. They reveal infallibly that God's pure eye is on God's image in every son of man; that supreme, far-seeing ends are lodged in all the good but unenduring gifts wherewith God's wise and kindly bounties crown man's toil; that a perfect moral government holds dominion everywhere and forevermore; and that beneath this rule, in God's own time, it shall come supremely clear that feasts and luxury and fine attire, that wealth and lust and pampered flesh have lesser worth and pass away, while souls of men may thrive, and gain, and win new worth eternally. As Lincoln's eye reviewed these centuries of reveling wealth, and impoverished hearts; and beheld, in the issues of the resultant war, that wealth laid waste, and those pure hearts fed and filled with hope and liberty; his wisdom to compare all earth-born, mortal things with things unperishing and heavenly passed through new birth, new growth to new completeness in depth and clarity and confidence. And all this gain to Lincoln, while wholly ethical, dealing as it did with the wrong and right in human slavery and liberty, owed all its increase to truer understanding of the Lord. Here again his ethics was purified by faith. His faith was deeply ethical. As with his lowliness, and his rectitude, so with his moral valuation of the human soul. It was vestured all about with Godly piety. In the fourth place, within the awful wreckage of the war, with which this last inaugural is so absorbed, there were mighty attestations that God was pitiful. That war could be defined as God's vengeance on man's cruelty. Precisely this was what Lincoln grew to see. To all who toiled in slavery the war had brought deliverance. Thereby the stinging lash was snatched from human hands; the human heel was thrust from human necks; the shameless havoc of the homes of lowly men was stayed; countless sufferings were assuaged; and true blessedness was restored to souls hard-wonted to unrelenting grief. And this achievement was alone the Lord's. Of all down-trodden men high heaven became the champion. In all its awful judgments he who ruled that conflict remembered mercy. High above all the bloody carnage of those swords there swayed the scepter of the All-pitiful. In the very doom upon the strong God wrought redemption for the poor. And so, as that dreadful wreckage brought to nothing all the pride in the extorted gain of centuries, it published most impressively that he who reigned above all centuries was All-compassionate. To this great thought of God, Lincoln keyed this last inaugural. The majesty of God's sovereign law of purity and righteousness was robed in kindliness. Into this high truth ascended Lincoln's patriot hope. Let men henceforth forswear all cruelty, and follow God in showing all who suffer their costliest sympathy. This was a mighty longing in his great heart, as he prepared this speech. Before God's vindication of the meek, let the merciless grow merciful. Yea, let all the land, for all the land had taken part in human cruelty, confess its wrong, accept God's scourge without complaint, thus opening every heart to God's free, healing grace, and binding all the land in leagues of friendliness. Let men, like God, be pitiful. Like God, let men be merciful. In mutual sympathy let all make clear how men of every sort may yet resemble God, the All-compassionate. This was the trend and strength of Lincoln's gentleness, as it stood and wrought in full maturity beneath God's discipline, within this last inaugural. It was nothing but an echo and reflection of the gentleness of God. And so, in his benignity, as in his rectitude and lowliness and purity, he stood in this address attired in Godly piety. So Lincoln's ethics can be described, in his ripened harvest-tide of life. So it stands in this inaugural. It is alike a living code for daily life, and a religious faith. It is born and taught of God. It is Godliness without disguise, upon the open field of civic statesmanship. It is a prophet's voice, in a civilian's speech. It is the seasoned wisdom of a man familiar equally with the field of politics, and the place of prayer. It shows how God may walk with men, how civic interests deal with things divine. It proves that a civilian in a foremost seat may without apology profess himself a man of God, and gain thereby in solid dignity. It shows how heaven and earth may harmonize. But this manly recognition in Lincoln's mind of the inner unison of ethics and religion was in no respect ephemeral, no careless utterance of a single speech, no flitting sentiment of a day. It was the fruitage of an ample season's growth. It was royally deliberate, the issue of prolonged reflection, the goal of mental equipoise and rest to which his searching, balanced thought had long conduced. It was in keeping with an habitual inclination in his life. This proclivity of his inwrought moral honesty to find its norm and origin, its warrant and secure foundation in his and his Nation's God must have taken shape controllingly within those silent days that intervened between his first election in 1860, and the date of his inaugural oath in 1861. Else, in those brief addresses on his way to Washington, that marvelous efflorescence upon his honest lips of an ideal heavenward expectancy is unaccountable. In those dispersed and fugitive responses, from Springfield to Independence Hall and Harrisburg, there breathed such patriotic sentiments of aspiration and anxiety as owed their ardor, their excellence, and their very loyalty to his eager trust and hope, that all his deeds as president should execute the will of God. Throughout his presidential term this wish to make his full official eminence a facile instrument of God, attains in his clear purpose and intelligence a solid massiveness, all too unfamiliar in the craft of politics. The witness to this, in a letter to A. G. Hodges of April, 1864, is most explicit and unimpeachable. This letter is a transcript of a verbal conversation, is written by request, and is designed distinctly to make the testimony of his mortal lips everywhere accessible and permanent. Its major portion aims to give his former spoken words a simple repetition. Then he says:--"I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation." And upon this he appends a paragraph, as of something he could not restrain, the while he was conscious perfectly that what he was about to write was certain to be published and preserved among all men. In this letter, so doubly, so explicitly deliberate, he is defending his decree for unshackling the slave, by the plea, that only so could the Union be preserved. In the appended paragraph, he disclaims all compliment to his own sagacity, and accredits all direction and deliverance of the Nation's life, in that dark mortal crisis, to the hidden, reverend government of a kind and righteous God. If any man desires to probe and understand the thoughtfulness of Lincoln's piety, let him place this doubly-pondered document and the last inaugural side by side, remembering discerningly the date of each, detecting how each conveys Lincoln's well-digested judgment of unparalleled events, and not forgetting that Lincoln foresaw how both those documents would be reviewed in generations to come. Here are signs assuredly that Lincoln's lowliness and reverence, his prayerfulness and trust, his steadfastness and gratitude towards God had been balanced and illumined beneath the livelong cogitations of an even, piercing eye. Pursuing and comparing every way the tangled, complex facts of history; the endless strifes of men; the broken lights in minds most sage; and the awful evidence, as the centuries evolve, that greed and scorn and hate and falsity lead to woe; his patient mind grows poised and clear in faith that a good and righteous God is sovereign eternally. The truth he grasped transcended centuries. His grasping faith transcends change. But Lincoln's piety was not alone deep-rooted and deliberate, the ripened growth of mixed and manifold experience. It was heroic. It was the mainspring and the inspiration of a splendid bravery. This is finely shown in the early autumn of 1864. On September 4 of that year he wrote a letter to Mrs. Gurney, a Quakeress. This letter bears a most curious and intimate resemblance to the central substance of the last inaugural. It witnesses to his earnest research after the hidden ways of God. Within this search he sees some settled certainties. He sees that he and all men are prone to fail, when they strive to perceive what God intends. Into such an error touching the period of the war all had fallen. God's rule had overborne men's hopes. God's wisdom and men's error therein would yet be acknowledged by all. Men, though prone to err, if they but earnestly work and humbly trust in deference to God, will therein still conduce to God's great ends. So with the war. It was a commotion transcending any power of men to make or stay. But in God's design it contained some noble boon. And then he closes, as he began, with a tender intimation of his reverent trust in prayer. The whole is comprehended within this single central sentence, a sentence which involves and comprehends as well the total measure of the last inaugural:--"The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance." Here is a confession notable in itself. It would be notable in any man, and at any time. But when one marks its date, its notability is enhanced impressively. For Lincoln was traversing just there some of the darkest hours of his overshadowed life. It was the period following his second nomination for the presidency in May of 1864, and before the crisis of election in November of the same year. Central in that season of wearisome and ominous uncertainty fell the failure of the battle in the Wilderness under Grant; the miscarriage of his plans for Richmond; and the awful carnage by Petersburg. Here fell also the date of Early's raid, with its terrible disclosure of the helplessness in Washington. Thereupon ensued, in unexampled earnestness, a recrudescence of the great and widespread weariness with the war; and of an open clamor for some immediate conference and compromise for peace. Foremost leaders and defenders of the Union cause throughout the North sank down despairingly, convinced that at the coming national vote Lincoln was certain to meet defeat. At the same time the army sorely needed new recruits; but another draft seemed desperate. Then Lincoln's closest counselors approached his ears with heavy words of hopelessness about the outlook in the Northern States confessedly most pivotal. In the midst of those experiences, on August 23, 1864, Lincoln penned and folded away with singular care from all other eyes, these following words:-- "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the president-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward." Those words were written eleven days before he penned the sentiments cited above from the letter to the Quakeress. Between those two dates the Democratic Convention of Chicago had convened and nominated General McClellan. Amid such scenes, in the presence of such events, and among such prognostications, Lincoln chiseled out those phrases about the perfect, hidden, but all-prevailing purposes of God. Here is Godly piety in the sternest stress of politics. Here faith is militant, and unsubdued. Its face is like a burnished shield. Its patience no campaign outwears. In its constancy suggestions of surrender can find no place. It was forged upon a well-worn anvil, under mighty strokes, and at a fervent heat. Fires only proved its purity. It was fighting battles quite as sore as any fought with steel. It was the deathless, truceless courage of a moral hero. It was pure and perfect fortitude. Its struggle, its testing, and its victory had not been wrought on earthly battle-fields. Its strife had been with God. More than with the South, Lincoln's controversy had been with the Most High. He wrestled with the heavenly angel through the night, like the ancient patriarch. Like the ancient saint, he bore the marks of grievous conflict. And like him of old, he gained his boon. He achieved to see that God and perfect righteousness were in eternal covenant. Such was Lincoln's piety. His view of God gave God an absolute pre-eminence. In Lincoln's day, as in the day when Satan tempted Christ, vast areas of human life seemed to give all faith in God's control the lie; and men in multitudes abjured such futile confidence. But Lincoln kept his faith in God, and truth, and love, and immortality. And in that faith he judged his trust, and hope, and prayer to be preserved on high inviolate. There above, he firmly held, were lodged eternally the perfect pattern and assurance of full rectitude and charity. And in that understanding he held on earth unyieldingly to the perfect image of that heavenly norm, in a pure and acquiescent loyalty and love. Thus discerningly, submissively, triumphantly did Lincoln's heart aspire to unify an honest earthly walk with a living faith in God. One word remains. As Lincoln makes confession of his faith in this inaugural, extolling God supremely, and therein announcing to his fellowmen the groundwork of his morality, it comes to view that the qualities held fast in Lincoln's heart, and the attributes of God have marvelous affinity. The equity he adores in God he cherishes within himself, and recommends to all. God's estimate of the incomparable value of a human soul, when set beside the variable treasures men exchange, Lincoln's judgment reverently approves, and as reverently adopts, establishing thereby a standard quality in his conscious life. God's tender pity for the poor, hidden deep in his divine rebuke of slavery, and hidden deeper still within his mercy for all who help to bear its awful sacrifice, melts and molds the heart of Lincoln to the same compassion. And to the very outlines of God's majesty, as his sovereign purposes are all unrolled and all fulfilled throughout the earth, Lincoln's soul conforms ideally, in its humble vision and expression of devout, discerning praise. Here is something passing wonderful. Between a fragile, mortal man and the eternal God, when each is limned in terms of ethics, appears a deep and high agreement. There is enthroned in each a common righteousness. In each, the laws of mercy are the same. In each are constituted principles inwrought with immortality. And within the eternal interplay of reverence and majesty between mankind and God, there is a fellowship in dignity that proves the holy Maker and his moral creature to be immediately akin. And so the mind and will of Lincoln, in this their moral plenitude, may interpret and recommend, may apprehend and execute the eternal purposes of God. This high commission Lincoln humbly, firmly undertook. And in his commanding life there is a mighty hint, not easy to silence or erase, that Godliness and ethics, which have been set so often far apart, were eternally designed for unison. HIS LOGIC--THE PROBLEM OF PERSUASION In the study of Lincoln's ethics it is not enough to describe it as an ideal scheme of thought, however notable its range and poise and insight may be seen to be. As Lincoln's character stands forth in national eminence among our national heroes, he figures as a man of deeds, a man of powerful influence over the actions of other men, a man of masterly exploits. However truly it may be affirmed that multitudes of adjutants reinforced his undertakings at every turn and on every side, it still holds also true, and that a truth almost without a parallel, that his sheer personal force was the single, undeniable, over-mastering energy that shaped this Nation's evolution through an outstanding epoch in its career. It was primarily out of those prolific and exhaustless energies, stored and mobilized within himself, that he rose, as though by nature, to be national chief executive. It was straight along the line of his far-seeing vision and advice that Congress and the Nation were guided to accept and undertake that terrible enterprise of war. In that great struggle he came to be in firm reality, far more than any other man, the competent, effective commander-in-chief. He was chief councilor in a cabinet whose supreme function dealt singly with matters wholly executive. It was by the almost marvelous unison of wisdom and decision resident in him that Congress and the Nation were day by day induced to hold with an almost preternatural inflexibility to the single, sovereign issue of the strife. When, after four years of unexampled bitterness, multitudes were wearying of all patience in further hostilities, it was his personal momentum and weight, more than any other influence, that held the prevailing majority of the national electorate to predetermine by their free ballots that, at whatever cost of further war, the principles of liberty, equality, and national integrity should be placed above all possible challenge or assault forever. And in the period before the war and before his elevation to the presidency this same executive efficiency, this singular capacity to mold the views and stir the motives of other men, was likewise in continual demonstration. Discerning how supreme a factor in our American affairs was the power of public sentiment, and observing how that power was being utilized to undermine the national tranquillity, he challenged and overthrew single handed the leading master of the day in the field of political management and debate. Trusting in the same confidence, and pursuing the same device, he appealed to the civic consciences of men in the open field of free debate, by the single instrument of reasoned speech, until, by his persuading arguments, he consolidated into effective harmony and led to national victory a party of independent voters, with watchword, platform, and experience all untried. In all the process by which that new-formed party gained access to national pre-eminence it was Lincoln's governing influence that went ahead and gave the movement steadiness. And through it all he vitally inspired a Nation, now undivided and indivisible, with a prevailing, corporate desire, that all succeeding days and all beholding Nations are now deeming, for any stable civic life, the true enduring ideal. And all of this was compassed and set afoot within scarcely more than one decade. In October of 1854 at Peoria, he consciously took up his strenuous enterprise. In April of 1865, he laid it down and ceased to strive. Single handed he undertook the task. Through all its progress the weight of that one hand was undeniably preponderant. And when that hand relaxed, the task that its release left trembling was one that stirred a mighty Nation's full solicitude. Here is something marvelous. These affirmations, as thus far made, seem certainly overdrawn, and totally incredible. An agency and an efficiency of national dimensions, introducing and completing an epoch in our national history; but an agent and an outfit almost defying inventory, his personality seeming in every phase so simple and without prestige, and all his ways and means seeming so unpromising and plain; the while through all his course he was confronting a resistance and a hostility whose impulse was rooted in centuries of firm and proud dominion, and whose onset made a Nation tremble. How can such stupendous affirmations be clothed with credibility? Was it indeed the hand of Lincoln that turned the Nation from its mistaken path? Was it Lincoln's will that reinaugurated our predestined course? Was it Lincoln's overcoming confidence that established in the land again a good assurance that its integrity was indestructible? If questions such as these were addressed to Lincoln himself for his reply, we may be sure his answer, like all his ways, would contain a beautiful mingling of modesty and confidence. Heeding well the mortal crisis, and hearing the Nation's call for help, he would not refuse, when bidden and appointed, to take his stand alone at the very apex of the strain, knowing well that the burdens to be borne would be greater than tasked the strength of even Washington; and affirming as he advanced warily to his post, that in his appointment many abler men had been passed by. But then he would re-affirm and urge again all the arguments of his great addresses and messages and debates, beginning with that initial trumpet peal in Peoria in 1854, and not concluding until, after all had been rehearsed and reavouched, he recited again with prophetic earnestness this last inaugural. And throughout all his devout re-affirmation of all the spoken and written appeals to which his patriotic mind gave studied form and utterance in that intense decade, a discerning ear could distinguish in every paragraph profound and penetrating attestations, such as these:--This is a mighty Nation. Its future is far more vast. Its present perplexities are intricate. It has been misled. It needs most sane direction. I am stationed at her head. Difficulties environ me. My burdens outweigh Washington's. But this land was conceived in liberty. It was dedicated to be free. Here all are peers. God's hand has been on our history. Our destiny enfolds the highest human weal. God is with us still. Human hearts are with us. Here is overcoming power. Despite my frailty and poor descent, I will never leave my place. I see how other men prevail with multitudes by personal appeal. This shall be my confidence. Though I have no name, though there is perhaps no reason why I should ever have a name, I can plead. I can plead with men. It is a Godlike art. Grave as is my problem, this is its grand solution. I will study to persuade. I will take refuge in the mighty power of argument. I will confer, and conciliate, and convince. I will employ my reason to the full. I will address, and assail, and enlist the reason of other men. I will put all my trust in speech, in ordered, reasoned speech. I will arrange all my convictions and hopes and plans in arguments. I will approach men's wills with momentous propositions. I will open a path to human hearts through open ears by my living voice. I will make righteousness vibrate vocally. To men's very faces will I rebuke their wrong. Argument, pure argument shall be my only weapon, my only agency, my only way. By naked argument, honest and unadorned, I will undertake to turn this Nation back to rectitude. I will rest all my confidence in truth, truth unalloyed, abjuring every counterfeit and all hypocrisy. It is truth's primal and mightiest function to persuade. Through persuasion alone can freemen be induced by freemen to yield a free obedience. The heavenly art of persuading speech shall be for me the first and the last resort. By this most comely instrument shall my most eager and ambitious wish gain access to all this peopled land, and win vindication through all coming time. Something such as this, as one must judge from Lincoln's practice, was Lincoln's science and evaluation of the art of logical appeal. By every token Lincoln was a master of assemblies. Upon a public platform he was in his native element. There he won his place and name. Whatever any one may say about Lincoln's reputation or Lincoln's power, that power and that reputation were mined and minted in the very act and exercise of reasoning appeal. As iron sharpeneth iron, so he, in the immediate presence of audiences of freeborn men, assembled from his very neighborhood, shaped and edged and tempered his total influence. It was when upon the hustings, and while engaged in pleading speech, that he commanded the Nation's eye and gained the Nation's ear. And once advanced to national pre-eminence, it was still by logical persuasion that the Nation's deference was retained. What now was the inner nature of Lincoln's arguments? What was the fiber, what the texture in the composition of his thought that made its arguments so convincing? What was the structure, and what the carrying power in his appeals that made their logic so prevailing, so compelling, so enduring? To find an answer to this inquiry let men review yet once again this last inaugural. Here is a product of Lincoln's mind whose single motive is persuasion, whose momentum does not diminish, and which seems destined to be adjudged by history a master's masterpiece. What does this short speech contain that gave it in 1865, and gives it yet, an influence almost magical? There can be but one possible reply. The factor in that address that makes its influence so imperial is the moral majesty of the argument in its major paragraph. That paragraph enshrines an argument. Though fashioned in the mode and aspect of a reverent supposition, the steady pace and import of its ordered thought is such as every ordered mind admits to be compelling. But in substance and in structure that argument is purely ethical. All turns upon that cited, undoubted fact of age-long, unrequited toil. Upon that stern actuality hinges all the arrangement of the thought. Its phrases move with rhythmic fluency; but they bind together inseparably a Nation's duty, sin, and doom; not omitting to enfold, with a marvel of moral insight, an almost hidden intimation of a healing cure. Here are weighty thoughts, thoughts that press and urge, thoughts that carry and communicate the gravity of centuries. They contain an interpretation. They clarify and illuminate. And they all co-ordinate. They combine and operate together to enforce agreement. They demonstrate that tyranny breeds a baleful progeny of guilt and woe; that robbery binds the robber under debt to the full measure of his rapine; that such guilt can never be forgotten; that such a woe is pitiless; that the centuries, though slow and mute, are attentive and impartial witnesses; and that God's even judgments are over all, and are altogether just. This is all the content and all the purport of this paragraph, and of all this speech: an exposition of American slavery and of its resultant civil war, in moral terms, before the moral bar of every hearer's conscience, and beneath the thought of God's eternal righteousness; all turning upon the self-evident verity that unpaid toil is wrong. In this prolific affirmation is the fertile germ of all that Lincoln ever thought or undertook in that supreme decade. Here are enfolded all his axioms and postulates and propositions. By interlocking its multiform, infolded, self-evident certitudes he framed all his arguments. Its overflowing, resistless demonstrations in active human affairs formed all his corollaries. Toil unrequited is a moral wrong. It cries to heaven, and shall be avenged. In this avenging, if we but see our day, there is an open door to join with heaven, and transmute its vengeance into recompense and reconciliation. This was Lincoln's logic. It was purely ethical. This was the master-key to his transcendent statesmanship. Here was the secret of his political efficiency. Thus, and in no other way, he swayed the Nation. Himself a Godlike man, and discerning in every other man the same Godlikeness; trusting his own soul's honesty, and appealing to honest manhood in all other men; he took his stand beside all the oppressed, and against all extortion; and voiced and urged and trusted the sovereign moral plea for perfect charity, and perfect equity for all. But Lincoln's logic was interlaced with history. All through his debates and addresses are woven the facts and sequences of our national career. And to these connected events he clung in all his arguments, as a man clings to the honor of his home. There was in those events an argument. To tamper with that history, discrediting its sure occurrences, or distorting their right connection, was in his conception a downright immorality. But mere historical exactitude was not the motive of Lincoln's appeal to past events. The momentum of our past was for Lincoln's use entirely moral. Here upon this continent, as he conceived our great experiment, was being tried, in the presence and on behalf of all mankind, a government in which the governed were the governors. Here men are inquiring and being taught what true manhood can create, uphold, and consummate upon a continental scale, in mutual equality. Here men are schooled for independence. Here men may dare to fashion their own law. Here men are nurtured towards full fraternity. Here men are forced to heed the civic necessity of being fair. Here a boundless impending future has to be kept steadily in view. Here the God of Nations is teaching a Nation that he should be revered. Here, in brief and in sum, men are being disciplined to know and cherish the rudiments of civic character. Thus Lincoln interpreted the meaning of our national history. In his rating, its total purport was ethical. Any logical exposition of our national career, if its statements are historically exact, will carry moral consequences. If the logical sequence of any statement of our historical course is morally perverse, then that statement of our history is historically untrue. Thus Lincoln's jealous zest for truthful history, for truthful argument, and for true morality became coincident. But Lincoln's logic was his own. His zeal for history was a freeman's zest. His arguments were not the cold reflection of a borrowed light. They were the fervid affirmations of his own convictions, compacted into reasoned unison, out of the indivisible constituents of his very manhood's honor. When in his appeal his soul most glowed, when the ordered sequence and pressure of his thought waxed irresistible, he was simply opening to his auditors the balanced burden of his honest heart. Then genuine manhood became articulate. Then pure honor found a voice. Then eloquence became naught but plain sincerity. Then arguments became transparent, and affirmations convinced like axioms. Then demonstrations moved. Assertions did persuade. Then the very being of the orator took possession of the auditor in an intelligent fraternity. True, indeed, a solid South, and multitudes besides, derided his postulates, contemned his arguments, and scorned derisively his tenderest appeals. But better than they themselves he understood their hearts; and holding fast forever his deeper faith and confidence, he maintained his reasoning and his plea, knowing surely that in some future day their chastened hearts would vindicate his words. But in all of this exposition of Lincoln's logical force and skill there has been no mention of a syllogism. Did Lincoln then neglect that famous formula of argumentative address? To this natural inquiry it must be replied that Lincoln understood right well the fine utility of this strict norm of formal thought. Indeed, he had taken special pains to perfect his skill in just that form of argument. To the logical click in a well-formed syllogism his inner ear was well attuned. Repeatedly he summoned in its aid. An excellent illustration may be seen in his rejoinder to Douglas at Galesburg in September of 1858. But Lincoln's confidence was not in syllogistic forms, however trim. His trust was in his moral axioms. Unaided, naked truth; truth whose total urgency is self-contained, whose perfect verity is self-displayed, and whose proudest triumphs are self-achieved; pure truth, shaped forth in speech of absolute simplicity; truth that works directly in the human mind, like sunshine in the eye, was Lincoln's handiest and most common instrument in an argument. Thus he sought to so use reason as to awaken conscience and arouse the will. And thus his arguments prevailed. This was Lincoln's logic. It was the orderly exposition of his honest manhood, pleading with the honest intelligence of every other man for his free assent. Himself a freeman whom God made free, and greeting in every other man an equal dignity; with loyalty to himself and with charity for all; with Godly deference and unfailing hope; he urged and argued from his own true manhood, and from no other grounds, with a logic that no true freeman can ever refute: that in this heaven favored land, and for the welfare of all the world, these ethical foundations of all true civic welfare be kept unmoved forever. In such a moral character, and in such a moral argument is this expanding Nation's only pride and sure defense. At any modern Round Table of civic knights Lincoln is true King Arthur, and his persuading speech the true Excalibur. HIS PERSONALITY--THE PROBLEM OF PSYCHOLOGY When Plato took his pen to write his dialogues; when Michael Angelo took his chisel to fashion his Moses; when Raphael took his brush to paint his Madonna; they were designing to make their several ideals of personality pre-eminently beautiful and distinct. And each artist in his way won a signal, a supreme success. Moses, Socrates, the Madonna, are shining revelations of human personality. Success herein is the height of highest art. But what is personality? It seems an eternal secret, despite all human search and art. Yet its secret is everywhere felt instinctively to be of all quests the most supreme. By every avenue men are trying to reach and reveal its hiding place. Our goal is nothing less than the human soul. And upon this inquest the eyes and instruments of our inspection are being sharpened with a determination and zeal hitherto unparalleled. Suppose this quest be turned to Lincoln. Surely here is a human person. He stands enough apart in his preeminence to be pre-eminently distinguishable and distinct; while yet his face beams near enough to be as familiar and accessible as our most accessible and familiar friend. For surely, despite all his proneness towards a musing solitude, Lincoln, of all Americans, displays through all his published statements, and in all his public life, an instructive and unstudied openness and unreserve. Just here his marvelous power and influence lie. He practiced no concealment. He held communion with all his fellowmen. Herein consists his honesty. Now may not an honest scholarship, honestly conceiving that of all investigations our pursuit for the ways and dwelling place of personality is easily supreme, as honestly believe that in the open, waiting heart of Lincoln that supreme inquiry may find its supreme reward? Surely here is promise of a labor that will pay. In Lincoln's personality is a vein, a mine whose worth and sure utility no mineral wealth can parallel. What in very truth, what in solid fact, what in absolute reality is Lincoln's personality? For undeniably in facing and regarding him, we confront and apprehend a human life, compact and self-controlled, the native home and throne of all the conscious and self-directed energies that are ever resident within and representative of any man. If human personality ever took evident and conscious shape and form, then Lincoln is an open and easily approachable illustration of its embodiment. Upon no object may a student of psychology more easily or more wisely fix his eye than upon the soul of Lincoln, when it thrills in resolute, intense endeavor, as in this last inaugural. For one thing, that Lincoln should be the specimen of psychology commanding any student's choice is suggested by Lincoln's notability. Here is an exhibit in no way ordinary. He has secured the attention of us all. And the attention of us all is athrill with mighty interest. However it has come about, in some way, as a human personality, he illustrates a type, he presents a sample so powerful and positive as to stand before all eyes almost alone, while also so attractive as to be by everyone beloved. This fact may fairly beget assurance from the start that in any heedful search for the very substance of human personality, an interior and intimate fellowship with Lincoln may show us closely and clearly where it dwells, and what it is. For from the start it stands plain that Lincoln's hold upon our hearts is in its controlling co-efficients purely personal. That hold clings fast and spreads afar, indifferent to space, or time, or even death. His influence over us, so gladly welcomed and so clearly felt, is no wise physical or temporal. It cannot be handled or weighed. It is personal. Herein is high encouragement. And that in this sense of our response to his enduring sway should be enfolded on our part, a kindred, pure, enduring delight attests convincingly that within Lincoln's personality and our own there is something mutual. Within the thing we search and us who seek there is profound affinity. In this our encouragement may heighten, and that with solid soberness, unto hope. And then the scene of this his last inaugural is all aglow with promise. For here if anywhere Lincoln's personality may be seen engaged in the ripeness of his finished discipline, and the fullness of his manhood's strength. The scene itself swells full of meaning; and Lincoln's part and contribution fix and fill the center of its significance. Surely if anything within that scene is plain to see and localize, it is Lincoln's own identity. The living Lincoln is surely there, wholly unreserved and unconcealed. There Lincoln's personality is in fullest play, an evident and mighty revelation, plainly felt and seen. But it is only in the action that the actor comes to view; only in his words does the thinker stand revealed. Here and thus, and nowhere else or otherwise, is Lincoln's personality unveiled. And yet herein, within the compass of this speech, Lincoln unlades a burden of such grave concern, and unrolls a problem of such profound complexity as could nowhere come to birth and utterance but in a mighty human heart. In the vastness of that problem and anxiety can be gauged the vastness of the measure of that heart. Here open into immediate view at once an object and a method of research, fitted at once to challenge and appall the bravest student's heart. But once its summons is distinguished, it is irresistible. One thing that meets the student, as he seeks the speaker in this speech, is its witness to his titanic and pathetic toil. The words he utters are the message of a laborer far forespent, voiced with mingled weariness and hope, well towards the sunset of a weary day. The sun had been fiercely hot. The field had been full of thorns. And through the arid hours he had tasted little food, or rest, or joy. No husbandman ever chose his seed or tilled his ground at greater cost of patient care. None ever had to bend his frame to ruder weather, or battle against more malicious and persistent pests. And all the agony of that toil had been wrought through within the anguish of his mind. In exactest and exacting thought he had engrossed and consumed the full measure of his full strength. On all he had to bear and do he pondered mightily. No mortal ever pondered more intently on all that mortals ever have to meet. In this inaugural scene the soul of Lincoln is straining at its full strength. No portion of his personal life is idling. If a student's hand is truly deft, he can feel, as he fingers the throbbing life of this address, the pulse beats of a full heart. And within the grasp and compass of that heart are revolving vast and strenuous themes. The soul of Lincoln is dealing with a Nation's destiny. His speech is borne upon his single voice; but with that single voice he pleads for millions; and its vibrations carry through a continent, as a national oracle. Expounder and defender of the Nation's vital honor, beleaguered all about with war, distressed by all oppression, eager with a sacrificial passion that all men everywhere may have liberty and an equal share in equity, searching for a just and stable basis for the world's tranquillity, as he stands and strives throughout that speech the structure of his soul grows luminous. As he studied Providence and scanned the grounds of government; as he peered far into the deeps of freedom, the majesty of duty, and the sanctions of inviolable law; as he pondered the nature of eternal right, and the deadly mischief of moral wrong; as he watched the ways of hate and pride and falsity and sensual delights, he was not alone compacting the substance and order of this immortal address; but in the shapely body of his argument he has embodied and uncovered his honest, guileless heart. In the very scars and seams upon his sorrow-shadowed face, as he overcomes his task and fills out his duty in this address, discerning eyes can see through the furnace of how deep refinement his humble and majestic soul has been forever beautified. Transforming themes possessed his mind. By the ministry and inner influence of these themes he grew to be transformed; and in the process and issue of that change the outline and texture of his inner being becomes traceable. And of this inner revelation the most notable mark is its simplicity. As in this speech his inner life is introduced, its texture is not perplexing and intricate. It is perfectly apprehensible. The total speech can be quickly scanned. Its sentiments barely get your full attention before they are at an end. Its entire compass can be comprehended in a single glance. Its whole sum can be reviewed in a single breath. And still its themes and propositions are imperial. Within its fine simplicity its stateliness stands uneclipsed. Hence its marvelous power to command. Upon all who look and listen, its action and appeal are like the dawning of a day. Its major propositions are assented to unconsciously. It works like light. It is genial, winsome, clear. And it is irresistible. It moves. It rules. It is an argument, the ordered appeal of a candid, earnest mind to the reasoned thought of honest men. Gentle and modest throughout, it contains and conveys compelling energy. It has the sturdiness of a hardy oak. And yet its first appearing was like a new unfolding of our flag. It is a kingly word, alike in lasting beauty and enduring strength. In this there is surely some sure reflection of that hidden man within, Lincoln's real, undying self. And this still further may be said. Amid these sovereign interests and affirmations their agent is thus employed of his own free choice. He is no automaton. The Lincoln whom we seek, the Lincoln whom this address is helping us to see can never be defined by physical terms. Through the realm of physics things move as they are moved. Lincoln in this address moves and guides and governs himself. And he is here self-judged. This inaugural teems with moral verdicts, verdicts that define eternal issues irrevocably. No higher function than this can be imagined in any sphere of being, or in any form. These verdicts Lincoln fastens upon himself. And before the same complete authority he summons the whole Nation to bow. Deep within those verdicts there throbs omnipotently a sense of moral duty, moral right, man's highest good and goal. This ideal of what should be stands evident in this inaugural in Lincoln's own humble conformity with God, in his own unimpeachable integrity, in his unreserved benevolence, and in his pure esteem for souls. In each one of these constituents of human duty Lincoln sees unchallengeable authority. For the honor of each one he deems himself responsible. Their mingled rays create the light in which he writes this speech, by which this speech is read, and under whose clear radiance he records his oath. Surely here are more than hints for any one, who seeks to see just where this speech originates, and most precisely how its author may be defined. Within this last preceding paragraph one feels again the presence and the movement of all that all the chapters of this volume have contained. Herein we seem to face a sort of final synthesis of all our study. If this be true, or only true approximately, then its face and contents should be scrutinized until they are cleared of every shadow or alloy. For this research is surely approaching its goal, and some of its boundaries may surely be defined. One line that shows indelibly is his intelligence; an intelligence comprehending total centuries, and assembling within its scope extreme diversities; an intelligence that has a piercing eye, acute to distinguish and divide; an intelligence that has power to estimate, compare, and summarize; an intelligence intolerant of error, and eager after truth; an intelligence that can frame an argument designed to clarify, convince, and win all other minds; an intelligence that assumes to deal with God, receiving and reflecting within its own interior and proper vision a revelation of the divine intent. Here is an energy, at once receptive and original, fitted marvelously for a reflection that can embrace and authorize eternal truth. This intelligence is within control. It is not a vagrant or unguided force. It is under conduct, all its action to observe, inspect, and estimate being ordered reasonably. And all this influence operating to understand and counsel, all this wisdom, while gathering light and substance from everywhere, is informed within, and wonderfully self-contained. As Lincoln reasons in this inaugural, as he resolves and purifies his argument, its power to convince is most intimate and deep within himself. As he guides and shapes his thoughts for the thought of other men, the convictions within the speaker, and their power to persuade, so inwrought in the speech, become identical. In his own consent choice and judgment are combined. Here is freedom indeed, a freedom to discern as truly as to choose, to distinguish as truly as to decide, to estimate as truly as to select, the freedom of the intelligence, an intelligence that is truly free. This freedom fashions character. It is a moral architect. It is original, able to create. The author of this speech is self-produced. The personality that comes to view among those words is self-determined and self-made. Its plan was sketched by his own hand. His position and his posture, his sentiments and his sympathies, his bent and inclination, his moral postulates and axioms, his moral stamp and trend and tone, his stability and moral sturdiness are all his own invention, originally, essentially, inseparably his own. Lincoln's character is Lincoln's handicraft. Its title vests in him. It never was, nor could it ever become the property of another man. This all men recognize. But this universal recognition is pregnant with significance to any seeker amid the phenomena of Lincoln's life for the substance of his personality. Somewhere within those statements just now made, somewhere within Lincoln's conscious authorship and invention of his moral worth is precious intimation of the whereabouts and constitution of his personality. This blend in Lincoln of freedom and intelligence, of liberty and sanity is notable for its evenness. Lincoln's liberty is not chimerical or riotous. It is regulated, orderly, real. Within himself and over his full destiny, an unimpeachable sovereign though he is, he is not prone towards wilfulness, but towards composure and sobriety. He moves as one fast-held beneath the law that for all his movements he will be accountable. He always wears the mien of one who carries high responsibilities. Far from being arbitrary, he behaves as facing within himself a court of arbitration, truly self-invested, and just as truly sovereign. Of all his words and deeds and attitudes he is himself self-constituted, reverend judge. Whether seeking to resolve a doubt, or waiting to receive a verdict, his appeal is finally to himself. This is his mood and posture in this inaugural. He is giving an opinion. This scene is a literal crisis in a review in which a Nation's history and delinquency have met incisive, balanced examination, to the end that his own view of duty as president might come clear to his own judicial eye, and all gain the approbation of all mankind. In his loftiest originality, where his conscious power and right to elect the path he takes is most self-evident, the way he takes is also owned to be an unimpeachable obligation. Here is another signal hint for the seeker after the living and abiding source of Lincoln's words and deeds. Somewhere within this sense of duty, so sane and free and serious, lives the very Lincoln whom we seek. This judicial evenness within the free and reasoned movements of Lincoln's action and argument is due to a balanced store of moral ballast. His stalwart mind and sturdy will and steadfast consciousness that duty binds his life stand leagued together in a partnership employing infinite wealth. With these resources he daily ventures vast investments. This speech is such a venture, laden with most goodly merchandise. Indeed he ventures here, as everywhere, his all. His fear of God, his self-respect, his neighbor love, his thirst for things that last--these are the priceless treasure he examines with a searching insight, estimates with judicial carefulness, enjoys with soul-filling admiration, and then responsibly invests. On these and these alone he chooses and resolves to seek returns. These are the only seas where sail his ships. Here is all his merchandise. Here is the only exchange where Lincoln ever resorts. Here and here alone can one make computation of his wealth. If he has wisdom, it is here. Here is all his liberty. Here is a full register of his life's accounts, and of his full accountability. Here are all his goodly pearls. These are the jewels that delight his heart. And if only students have the eye to see, within this joy deep secrets are revealed. Just here this study has to pause. For while it seems to be facing straight for that in Lincoln which is innermost--his essential and immortal self, transcending all the mere phenomena of life--and standing where nothing intervenes between our eager search and his steadfast soul, the outlook, as it is scanned by different eyes, reflects in different minds world-wide diversity. Lincoln sees this difference, and deals with it in this speech. He knows his chosen estimates of God and man and government, of prayer and equity and happiness, of right and wrong and penalty, awake resentful protest. Just here his manhood shows its breed. Without resentment, but without surrender, he takes and keeps his oath, expecting that God, humanity, and time will vindicate his insight and his choice. This valiant expectation stands today fulfilled, a commanding testimony that Lincoln's personality, though so simply childlike in its every trait, has majestic permanence and comprehension. Its inmost attributes, as purified in him, reflect and clarify to other souls, however opposite and hostile they may seem, their own essential and enduring rank. This gives pointed intimation that in Lincoln's conscious life, deep underneath his daily words and deeds, there is a conscious unity, the very seat of freedom and law, a shrine of reverence, an altar of love, a throne of truth, a fountain-head of purity--a unity that no antagonist can overcome, that neither time nor death can decompose. But an objection still persists. Some man will say that the search for Lincoln's personality, as thus far carried on, has only dealt with ethics, whereas research in personality is at bottom a problem of pure psychology; and that in pure psychology the position holds impregnable that naught beneath men's words and deeds can ever be discerned; that naught indeed is real for this investigation but sensible phenomena; that a human soul is something it is impossible to place. This matter plainly claims respect. As an objection it is inveterate; and whenever urged, it gains wide heed. In treating with it some things rise up for hearing. To begin with, the intimation cited in the former paragraph will honor pondering. Though that paragraph is intent on ethics in its every word, no paragraph in all the volume more strictly so, still its statements clear more ground than a single hasty glance is liable accurately to survey. It is concerned with ethics truly--again be that conceded. But in no concern of morals whatsoever did Lincoln vacate intelligence. Never was pure intelligence more intellectually engaged than when Lincoln's mind was scanning moral problems. In such engagements Lincoln's total being was occupied. And if amid the clustering multitudes of moral judgments and decisions that attend his moral inquiries and activities, there is witness to the presence of a freeborn judge whose identity remains continuously and consciously single and the same, that fact sheds searching light upon the problem with which this paragraph deals. Let one listen again to this address--listen with a due intentness as it speaks of Union and destruction and defense; of bondage and lash and unpaid toil; of offenders, offenses and woe; of malice and charity and right; of God and Bible and prayer; of widows and orphans and wounds; of war and sorrow and peace; of Nations and centuries and Providence. Here are trilogies and tragedies and millenniums, in ethics and religion and philosophy--but borne from perishing lips to perishing ears upon the perishing vehicle of a passing breath. This human breath is frail, these human words are faint, this scene bursts forth and vanishes. But those trilogies! They are more than flitting words, and shifting scenes, and dying breath. The actor outlasts the scene; the speaker outlives his word; the mortal breath is not the measure of the man. He by whom these massive trilogies were marshaled and deployed before a national audience, upon a Nation's stage, to form a national spectacle, and expound a Nation's history, does not perish with his breath, nor vanish with this scene. Before, within and afterwards he lives, pre-arranging, fulfilling and surviving this mighty drama of his life, mightily resembling God. A speech and scene like this bear witness to an author and actor outdating and outranking both scene and speech. An author looms within this speech, self-moved, creative, free. An actor moves within this scene, self-made, poetic, unconstrained. Speech and scene, voice and form are not the man. These are but his fading vesture. Deep within those solemn trilogies, as within a kingly robe, conveying to his vestment all its dignity, though all unseen among its shapely folds, stands Lincoln's living, Godlike self. It was to this the people paid their deference. Through those clear syllables that came to utterance upon those mortal lips it was Lincoln's immortal soul that became articulate. In those ringing accents Lincoln's self became identified. If ever a human personality crossed a human stage, not as actor echoing the words and attitudes of other men, but as an author and creator, fulfilling within himself, in God's fear, on other men's behalf, and with an eye to deathless destinies, his own responsible trust, that man was Lincoln in this second inaugural address. There he asserted and declared himself. Here then, in the tone and impress of this address is the sovereign place to find the tone and impress of Lincoln's soul. If that living soul ever gave a conscious hint of its living lineaments and hidden dwelling place, here is that hint's finest published utterance. Here, then, is the total measure of our task. Upon this transparent speech, and not upon vacant air, is the student of psychology to direct his eye. Here is the final challenge. Deep within the deeps of this supreme address, clear within the rhythms of these resounding trilogies, what does one see and hear? To the question thus defined an answer something such as this must be returned: Here in this inaugural address is designation and signature of a man astute to comprehend a Nation's history, reverent towards responsibility, a champion and exponent of liberty, commending with radiant earnestness that all his fellow men so walk with God, so cherish equity, and so walk in charity as to secure in all the earth an amity that time can never disrupt. Something such is the personality which this address attests. While this speech exists, this testimony will endure. Its word stands firm. And its signature is plain. He who wrote the speech has left upon its manuscript his clear and sacred seal. He who gave its body shape was a freeman none could bend, heedful of the arbiter none might disobey, humble towards God, loyal to himself, a friend to every man, an aspirant for life. Surely these are intimations of personality. Here is Lincoln, a vivid plenitude in living unison of timeless quietness and harmony, ordaining freely his own law of even heed for self and brother man, for God and spirit life. Here is the full manhood of a living soul, Godlike and earthly-born. None of its features are solidified in flesh, to be again and soon resolved. All its face is spiritual; all its action free, self-ordered, and self-judged; all preserving jealously its own kingly honor; all beaming graciously on other men; all bearing homage up to God; all vivid with immortality; abhorring mightily all pride and hate, all falsehood and decay; all sharing sacrificially with other men the cost and shame entailed in righting human wrong. This is Lincoln's personality. In Godlike, friendly, undying self-respect; in heavenly, upright, immortal kindliness; in humane, divine, self-honoring heed for spirit-life--in each and any one of these four identical affirmations is Lincoln's personality exhaustively engrossed, each and any one declaring that he contains within himself a free and deathless soul, akin alike to God and man, and bound therein by the self-wrought law of love and truth. These terms define a life at once of human and of heavenly range, at once inhabiting and transcending realms of change, at once self-ruled and environed with responsibility. Here is elemental personality, in inwrought and indivisible unity, with measureless capacity for versatility, easily blending fulness of vigor with complete repose, vestured and transfused with native symmetry and grace. In some such living, breathing words, themselves transfigured and illumined by the quickening verities they strive to body forth, may the pure, immortal soul of Lincoln, and of every child of man, be defined, unburdened, and declared. Something thus must written words describe the soul that surged beneath this speech, and freely gave this speech its being. Surely such an undertaking must not be despised. That aspiring, creative spirit, so earnest and so resolute, far more than any speech its vision or its passion may body forth, demands to be portrayed. Grand as are these paragraphs, their author has a far surpassing majesty. Fitted as are these accents to reach and stir the auditors of a continent, the soul from which these accents rise has an access to all those auditors far more intimate. If readers of this essay spurn the effort which it undertakes, let them not be scorners merely. From among their number, let some one arise, artist enough in insight and handicraft to make some truer delineation of that living Lincoln, the abiding origin and author of this and his every other noble speech and deed. Such an artist is sure to find, if ever the conscious soul of Lincoln shines through his hand, that when the inner face of Lincoln is portrayed, that portrait will carry speaking evidence of a joyful and abiding consciousness of liberty and law, of self and brother man, of things eternal, and of God; that in his countenance, so sorrow-shadowed and yet so serene, will shine a close resemblance to every other man; that through his quiet eye will gleam that image of God in which he and all his fellow men have been made; and that deep within it all will beam a radiant assurance that by the way of sacrifice the awful mystery of sin has been resolved. Hitherward must men who seek the soul of Lincoln turn their eye. Humble, gentle, and loyal, eager after the life that is its own reward, at once dutiful and free, lavishing out his life to take the sting from sin--this is the soul of Lincoln. In this image every man will see himself reflected, either in affinity, or by rebuke, herein revealing how all men resemble God. Something such is man. Something such is our common manhood. Something such is our inherent testimony as to our origin and source. And something such is the task of him who would frame a valid definition of personality. No undertaking is more profound, none more supreme. And once it is accomplished, forms of statement will have been found availing to embody all man can ever know of self or God. PART V. CONCLUSION LINCOLN'S CHARACTER In all the chapters that have gone before, the essential constructive factors have been very few. This is evident from their continual reiteration--a reiteration that is too conspicuous to be overlooked. In this is intimation that the last inclusive affirmation of this study will be remarkable for its brevity and also for its open clarity. The simple elements of such a closing synthesis may be here set down. As encouraging this attempt, it may be first remarked that Lincoln's life attests and demonstrates the primacy of character. This is the foundation of his fame; and hereby his fame is felt to be secure. To this all men agree. This world-wide consent may be said to be unhesitant, spontaneous, unforced, arising as though by common instinct, or by a moral intuition, all men everywhere viewing him alike, even as all eyes everywhere act alike in receiving and reflecting light. Here is something of a significance nothing less than imperial for a student of ethics. For it seems to say that by universal suffrage an international tribute is rendered to a common pattern of human life; that there is a world ideal in the moral realm; that this ideal is visibly near; and that this realized ideal is so altogether friendly, admirable and excellent as to win from every land an overflowing flood of thankfulness and joy. So genuine, so genial, and so grand is Lincoln's moral life. In the face of such a life, and of such a tribute, a student of ethics may be emboldened to assume that his science has indeed foundations; that those sure grounds are after all not far to seek; and that when those cornerstones are once uncovered, they will be within the easy comprehension of common men. Here, then, in Lincoln's open and exalted life is at once a challenge and a test for all who would like to attempt a careful survey of the moral realm. One sterling, standing coefficient of Lincoln's character was its thoughtfulness. Piercing, pondering thought was with him a habitude. His mind had insight, and he used its eye unsparingly. This was no mere mental cunning, though he was surely passing shrewd and keen. In Lincoln insight was so inseparably allied with an active sense of responsibility that it may be best defined as searching honesty. Into the massive, solid, stubborn problems of his perplexing day he drilled and pierced by plodding, patient, penetrating thought. Kepler never fixed his mind more steadily upon any study of geometric curves than Lincoln his upon the intricate questions of government. And not in vain. It may be truly said that Lincoln's moral judgments and resolves were without exception the long-sought winnings of exactest and most exacting mental toil. One fruit of this sharp scrutiny was a quite unusual foresight. In this keen certitude touching things to come he was almost without a peer. But its design and its utility for him were ethical. The coming issues towards which he explored were moral. The future he foresaw was thick with evolving sanctions involved in moral deeds. For such events, whether near or far, he had a seeing eye. And with a steady view to those oncoming certainties he shaped his resolutions, and plotted out his life. That those high purposes involved his soul in untold sorrow he well and unerringly foresaw. It was not by mental blunders that he became enmeshed in the anguish and anxiety that made his life so shadowed and solitary. And it was not by shrewder wits that other men escaped his all but constant fellowship with reproach and grief. Lincoln saw beforehand whither his studied view of duty and his clear-eyed obedience led. Where other men stood blind he achieved to see that his selected, sorrow-burdened path was the only way to the happiness that could wear and satisfy. His insight was betrothed right loyally to the faithful league of moral verities. Thus Lincoln's character was stamped and sealed with prudence. Here gleams his wisdom. His thought was balanced, looking many ways and comprehending many parts. Hence his sane judiciousness. But this well-pondered carefulness was no mere mental sapience. The world of Lincoln's painstaking thought was a world of character; a world of liberty; a world of binding obligation; a world of right and wrong; a world of God-like opportunities; a world of awful sanctions; a world where dignity and shame are infinite; a world of manhood and of brother men; a world where human souls outrank all other things, like God. These were the themes that Lincoln's mind inspected and adjudged. It is by virtue of his life-long search to find in such mighty interests as these their rational consistency, that mental values of the highest grade pervade and signalize his character. No mortal course in all our history was ever reasoned out more carefully than the course that Lincoln chose and held with moral heroism to his death. To overlook or underrate this thoughtfulness in any reasoned estimate or exposition of Lincoln's character would be infinitely unfair. As with light and vision, his thoughtfulness is the medium in which his character stands manifest. Quite as elemental in Lincoln's character as his thoughtfulness is his courtly deference to duty. Lincoln's conscience controlled and held him in his course, as gravitation holds and guides this globe. This all men discern; and discerning, they admire. Deep in the center of this unanimous admiration is a respect for Lincoln that amounts almost to reverence. Lincoln's estimate of law was most profound. When, after humble and all-engrossing search, he found and traced those sovereign obligations to which he bowed his life, his estimate and attitude were as though he stood face to face with God. But in that deference was a courtliness that was beautifully Lincoln's own. He too admired, where he obeyed. His thoughtfulness was a stately, sovereign court that sanctioned and made supreme every law that he revered. This transcendent, all-commanding sense of duty, springing from within, and also descending from above, seated centrally within his character, is centrally and inseparably inwrought within his fame. While his name abides this princely heed for duty will persist to challenge and to test each studied statement of his character. Another factor of Lincoln's character, likewise radical, impossible to omit, is his free and self-formed choice. That Lincoln's choice was truly free, self-moved, and truly unconstrained comes clear impressively when one for long inspects and understands his thoughtfulness. Lincoln's mental action in its riper stages was a pure deliberation. In that careful pondering we can feel and see his ripening moral preference grow clear and free from trammels of every sort, and gain towards decisions that know no other influence but reason wholly purified. So inseparable in him were choice and seasoned wisdom. From this it follows that Lincoln's ripe decisions can be understood only when one comprehends his mental equilibrium. And here it comes to view that Lincoln's moral resolutions led him far asunder from the multitudes. It is here that Lincoln's isolation takes departure. This parting of the ways needs noting narrowly. From his selection of his path for life the world at large draws back. Yet even so he still retains the world's applause. Here opens the true secret of his distinction, as of his excellence and power. This secret lies deeply hidden, and yet openly revealed in the comely balanced law his thoughtful wisdom led his noble will loyally to admire, adopt, and struggle unto death to keep. What now in true precision was this comely, balanced programme of a moral life that Lincoln's wisdom led his will to adopt? Here is the apex of this study. That it is not beyond man's reach, the world's applause and Lincoln's lowly plainness and full accessibility may well encourage any man to hope. That this inquiry should stand unanswered, or be answered heedlessly, or with any vagueness, is unworthy of our day or of our land. But in the answer should be verbally embodied adequate and intelligible explanation of Lincoln's moral majesty, of his unexampled intimateness with every sort of men, and of an undivided world's applause. These tests are heeded by the answer which this study ventures to suggest, when it says that Lincoln's thoughtful ponderings on the ways of God, on the souls and lives of men, on the microcosm in every man, and on the principles of all society, revealed to him the obligation, in deference to himself, to his neighbor, and to his God, and with full heed to immortality, to choose and follow to its full perfection the law of even truth and love. To be fair, and kind, and pure, as a lowly, kingly child of God--this was the wisdom, the obligation, the aspiration of Lincoln's life. This was the moral sum and substance of his thoughtful, free, obedient life. Here in brief and in full is Lincoln's character. In such a character is Godlike potency, and fluency, and dignity. Within its easy interplay is true simplicity, and unison. Within its harmony shines the eye of beauty. Amid all turbulence it holds serene. Its movements convey a majesty that awakens deference. It is free, like God, to devise, adjust, and originate, ever having inner power creatively to overcome or reconcile outright antagonism. Its thoughtfulness has a master's power to divide, combine, and comprehend. It can gaze unblenched and unamazed into the awful face of evil. It can plant and wield a leverage that can overturn every evil argument. In its finished ministry it can present a portrait of the human soul true to its very life. In such a character, though compassed in a single life, and marked with signal modesty, there dwells a fulness adequate to delineate and comprehend all the mighty magnitudes within the moral universe. Such is the character that Lincoln's life leads all the world to admire. Its beauty lies enshrined within the blended light of wisdom, freedom and obedience along the way where loyalty, charity, humility and hope of immortality shine ever brighter unto perfect day. Here is wisdom. And here is worth. And here these two are one. LINCOLN'S PREFERENCE In the chapter just concluded, the field of ethics is termed a "universe." In the chapter upon Theodicy, it was noted that in Lincoln's most thoughtful ponderings, the great world of reality that passes under the name of physics, or the physical world, seemed to lie outside the field of his concern. Here is a matter demanding something more than a bare allusion. The ponderable universe of material things has impressive majesty. It is too solid and real and present in our life to be ignored. Among the stars and beneath the hills and within the seas are solid and substantial verities. We are environed by their influences on every side. It is deep within their strong embrace that our predetermined fate is being continuously unrolled. What can be the scope and what must be the value of any view of ethics or any plan of life in which this solid, ever-present, all-embracing material world is so indifferently esteemed? It is with just this query in mind that this research into the mind of Lincoln was first conceived. And the query which has been throughout in immediate review, but unpropounded openly as yet, now demands to be defined and scrutinized. Did the mind of Lincoln, engrossed as it was upon interests supremely ethical, and ignoring, as it seemed to do, all those vast and deep complexities of the purely physical world, find for our unquiet human thought the true and perfect equilibrium? Or was the thought of Lincoln unbalanced and incomplete, misguided and inadequate essentially? In brief, how must ethics and physics, these two and only two supreme realities, when each is most fairly understood, be conceived to correlate and harmonize? As between these two realities, each so imperial and so irreducible, which holds primacy? Here is for any thoughtful mind well nigh the last interrogation. To attain a competent reply the essential qualities of each and either realm must be uncovered and compared. In physics here, and in ethics there, what attributes pervade, abide, and are essential? And, these true qualities being seen in each, as between the two, which proves itself superior; in which does the soul of man find rest? In the universe of physics, in all the world of things men see and touch and weigh one pervading and abiding quality is change. We speak indeed of the eternal hills; and before their age-long steadfastness that phrase seems accurate. But it is only soaring rhetoric, surely sinking from its flight, when sober science sets about to cipher from the distinct confessions of their very rocks the date of their birth, the story of their growth, and the sure predictions of their complete decay. In all the stability of the solid hills there is nothing permanent. So with the ageless stars. So with the ever-flowing sea. And so with the very elements of which hills and stars and sea are mixed. All the story of all their genesis and journeying and vanishing is a never-ending tale of change. Nothing physical abides the same. Beneath the daring rays of present-day research all things are being proved impermanent, all found verging over the infinite abyss. Transmutations are in progress everywhere. In the soul of Lincoln there was craving for a sort of satisfaction which nothing mutable could ever meet. Amid this pageantry of change, among these ceaseless transformations, with all their passing beauty, and all their final disappointment, there was in him a hungering after something that should hold eternally. And within this very eagerness was genuine kinship with the changeless foothold in things eternal which it aspired to find. His very longing was innerly undying. His thirst for immortality was in itself averse and opposite to death essentially. Deep within his desire, deep within himself were living verities, within themselves immutable. His admiration before God's majesty, his free covenant with perfect loyalty, his friendly kindliness towards all others like himself, and his God-like sacrificial grief for all wrongdoing, held within their pure vitality visions and passions and aspirations that no mortal darts could touch. And when with clear discernment he freely chose to fill his soul with hopes and deeds that eternally evade decay, he selected, as between things that change and things that abide, that reality to whose eternal primacy every passing day yields perfect demonstration. Nowhere in physics, in ethics alone could be found the perfect solace of conscious perpetuity. Another quality of all things physical, a quality likewise all-pervading and persistent, is their want of spontaneity. Within the nature of this mighty physical bulk, that is forever altering its garb and form, and within all its flowing change there is no liberty. Through all the ever-varying orbit of the moon; in all the marvelous wedlock of the elements within the rocks and soils and plants; in all convulsions and explosions of air and sea and fluent gas; in lightning, fire, and plague; in all the age-long monotony of instinct, habit, and proclivity, there is no conscious choice, no character-worth, no ennobling and terrifying responsibility. Through all this change of mortal things all things are fixed. Naught is nobly free. In the soul of Lincoln there was a passion to be free. In this desire there was a clear intelligence, and a purpose like to God's. He coveted a dignity that was self-achieved. He deemed that worth, and that alone, supreme that was his own creation. Only in deeds that he himself determined could he discern true excellence. Herein he stood apart from brutes, ranked above the hills, and pierced beyond the stars. And when, with such an insight, and such a soaring wish, and in such high dignity, he freely chose to hold supreme the life and thought and joy that are truly free, rating all things fixed and physical as forever far beneath, he allotted certain primacy to that which he discreetly judged undoubtedly pre-eminent. In closest consonance with what has last been said, comes now to be affirmed, a central quality of all things purely physical--persistent and pervading everywhere--their absolute inertia morally. They move as they are moved, and never otherwise. The law by which their being is controlled is not their own. At the last and evermore physics, though the measureless arena of unmeasured active energy, is powerless. It cannot even obey. But most demonstrably it can never command, not even itself. It is vastly, deeply, and forever only passive; although within its ponderous frame are playing with baffling constancy forces that weary all too easily our most stalwart thought. In such a realm as this, forever unawakened and evermore unjudged, Lincoln's awakened and judicial soul could never find contentment. Within that manly heart was enthroned a conscience, alert alike to receive and to originate, as also to approve and fulfill all noble and ennobling obligations. He knew the meaning and the sense of duty, the weight of duty claimed, and the worth of duty done. In his true heart was a living spring of moral law. And in cherishing with exalted satisfaction this imperial quality of all true moral life, therein deciding that physics held nothing worthy of any comparison, he gave kingly utterance to a judgment and decision and desire that could estimate infallibly the ultimate competitors within his conscious life for primacy. For ever in ethics, as never in physics, right judgment finds its source. Yet another quality of physics, likewise all-pervasive and permanent, is the mocking, paralyzing mystery in which all its certainties are veiled. The mighty acquisitions to our certain knowledge in the realm of nature are superbly manifold and as superbly sure. The swelling catalogue of things well certified in the material world seems to advance the modern scientific mind almost to genuine apotheosis. But of all these stately certitudes there is not one but walks in darkness no human eye nor thought can penetrate. Before heroic and unexampled diligence and daring the scientific frontiers are receding everywhere; but only to make still more amazing and unbearable their inscrutability. On every horizon of the physical realm yawn infinitudes, whether of space or time, of geometry or arithmetic, of electron or of cell, so defiant, so bewildering, and so overwhelming in their complete defeat and mockery of our bravest and best intelligence that our proudest powers are palsied utterly. Whichever ways we turn, whatever gains we win, we face at last, in the very eye of our research, and in the very heart of our desire, a changeless silence that mocks all hope, and leaves us standing in an utter void. In the realm of simple physics the human intellect, despite the fact that in the physical realm the mind of man has triumphed gloriously, is faced forever with the taunting consciousness that its primal task is still undone. In an undertaking such as this, and in such a hapless outcome, the mind and life of Lincoln could never be engrossed. He was ever facing mystery indeed in the perplexities that throng the moral realm. In fact, in the darkness and confusion that enshroud and mystify the world of duty and award were all his sorrows born. But in those mysteries moral honesty is not mocked. Where iniquities prevail, the soul that bows towards God sees light. Where sin abounds, the heart that yields the sacrifice of penitence finds peace. In the face of hate and strife and bloodshed, to banish malice and to cherish charity is to enter and to introduce complete tranquillity. Where lives grow coarse and souls are base and purity is all denied, the soul that seeks refinement grows refined and consciously approaches God. When God is mocked and scorners multiply and hearts grow hard in pride, the heart that meekly, humbly holds its confidence in the transcendent, all-controlling Deity opens in that lowly faith deep springs of never-failing hope. In these mysteries, however baffling and persistent, these efforts towards relief find sure and great reward. In such a field and in such endeavors it was Lincoln's sovereign preference to measure out all the forces of his conscious life. Attent towards God, benign towards men, upright within, and prizing life, he found, not defiance and despair, but perennial quickening and encouragement, whatever problems darkened round his life. For him such soul-filling verities, and such a corresponding faith held far-transcending primacy. And so in conscious, sovereign and everlasting preference for the truth that shows all its light in character, and for the faith that such clear truth forever illuminates, Lincoln testified his confidence that in the face of physics ethics holds supreme pre-eminence. Of all this searching estimate and supreme comparison of these two divergent realms one's mind may gravely doubt whether Lincoln's mind had perfect consciousness. Concerning this no one may speak, except with hesitance. But any one whose mind has entered into intimate partnership with all the wealth of Lincoln's words is well aware that it was a habit of his mind to pursue its themes to their farthest bourne. In penetration and in pondering not many minds were ever more evenly taxed. His mental persistence and deliberation were almost preternatural. Discovering this, a student of his mental ways will grow to feel that, in a likelihood almost equivalent to full certainty, Lincoln was wittingly aware of all the meaning in his proclivity to rate ethical interests uppermost. At any rate, in his life and writings, so the matter stands. And standing thus in the deeply conscious soul of Lincoln, the matter has a high significance. It seems to testify with a prophet's steady voice that in all the total realm of being, the realm of freedom, of consciousness, and of character is the first and sovereign verity; that the real is fundamentally ethical; that he who seeks for perfect satisfaction must bring to his inquiry the glad allegiance of a moral freeman and a moral judge; that in every undertaking becoming him as man each cardinal moral excellence must grow and shine increasingly; that every mental acquisition must conduce to a lowliness that adores, to a gentleness that loves, to a purity that pledges immortality, to a self-respect that is the mirror and original of all reality; that only thus, in all this universe, and to all eternity, can the soul of man gain triumphs that can satisfy. Only so will truth grow fully radiant, and mystery become benign. Only so can finite man find peace before his Maker, and face serenely all that wisest unbelief finds terrible. This is truth. Here is freedom. Such is faith. Thus, in a freeman's faith truth stands complete. Such is Lincoln's preference. Like another Abraham, and with a kindred insight and determination, he won all his triumphs and renown by faith--a free and conscious faith in God, and soul, and character. Here are designations, at once so plastic and so precise, at once so simple and so profound, as to signify and demonstrate how souls of men may conquer death; how one may be a perfect devotee to another person's weal, and still preserve his own integrity; how perfect sanctity may assume a full companionship with sin, whether by redemption or rebuke, and still remain unflecked; and how in man's humility may be enshrined a dignity wherein supernal majesty may be unveiled. In some such vivid, moral terms, mobile to grasp and manifest the boundless range and priceless worth within the sovereign moral law; as also to declare unerringly the fateful and unbounded issues of a moral choice, may students hope to trace with true intelligence the real foundations of Lincoln's all but unexampled power and fame. AN EPILOGUE ADDRESSED TO THEOLOGIANS In designing and constructing the chapters that precede, three motives have been actively at work. There has been a desire to set within the realm of Civics a clear and balanced exposition of Lincoln's moral grandeur. There has been a desire to introduce within the realm of Ethics a fertile method of discussion and research. There has been a desire to intimate how in the realm of pure Religion the finished outline of a transparent character may provide a pattern for a true description of the problems of Theology. Of these three motives the one last named has been preponderant. Lincoln's public life was keyed alike to moral honor and to faith in God. In his most quickening aspirations and in his most sacrificial sorrows his sense of personal obligation and his belief in an over-ruling Providence held fast together in a most notable unison. Guileless, luminous, and single-hearted in his rectitude and in his reverence, he affords a signal illustration of the way in which faith and conscience may vitally co-operate and even coalesce. He presents in consequence a signal opportunity for exploring the inner kinship of ethics and religion. His personality challenges us to inquire and see how honesty and godliness consort; how in a complete and balanced character the categories that define the basis of one's moral excellence may prove themselves to be the very categories that inform and underlie the religious life. Here opens an engaging investigation. May the ultimate principles of a true ethical theory and the ultimate rationale of a true theology be found in living deed to coincide? To bring this question into open view is the ulterior aim of this book, and more particularly of this appended Epilogue. In the open petals of the plainest flower soil and sunlight, earth and heaven meet in almost mystic union. Be this our parable. In the ample compass of a normal character, such as Lincoln shows, there is in very deed a mystic union--a vital partnership of man with fellowman, and of men with God. Be this deep fellowship described; for here commingle indivisibly the essential elements in any pure and full display in human life of morals and religion. In Lincoln's public life there was undeniably a close companionship with God. Earth-born and earth-environed though he was, he had supreme affinity with heavenly realms. His face was seamed with suffering; he wore a humble mien; his habitual posture was a pattern of unstudied modesty. But through those sorrow-shadowed features shone a radiant exalted hope, as he walked and toiled in reverend covenant with the sovereign God of Nations. Besieged by day and night with difficulties and distresses such as rarely burden mortal men, in his nightly vigils and in his daily labors he clung to Deity, true civilian and true man of God at once. The terms of this high covenant were specific and distinct. They were the very terms that defined the conscious qualities of his upright, God-revering character. Be those qualities described. In the first place, here in Lincoln's open character it becomes heavenly clear how profoundly intimate and at one are majesty and true humility. When the guise of each is fully genuine, they minutely correspond. In Lincoln's lowliness lay the very image of the majesty of God. To that high majesty his lowliness conformed. As in a mountain lake may be enshrined a perfect pattern of the heavenly firmament, so was Lincoln's reverence a conscious, free reflection of the excellence of God. His obedience was an intelligent recognition and re-enthronement of the sovereign law of God. His lowly posture, when in supplicating or interceding prayer, was induced by the bending pity of a compassionate God. That trusting appeal was the very echo of God's benign concern; and within the wrestlings of those intense entreaties the divine designs gained place in human history. Lincoln in his lowliness was Godlike. His humility was supremely dignified, supremely beautiful. In its open face, as in the face of a flower opening towards the sun, was resident a heavenly glory. In the second place, this vital unison of man with God stands superbly evident in the stately wedlock of Lincoln's honesty with God's righteousness. In Lincoln's soul there lived a faith in God's integrity which no dark storm of human faithlessness, and no delay of heaven's righteous judgments could eclipse or wear away. This belief was in him an active energy. It grew to be a partnership with God's uprightness--a covenant in which his own soul's eagerest ambitions and resolves became upright. In his inmost soul it was his inmost aspiration to be an agent for enthroning here on earth the equity of God. And so, in fact, as a mighty nation's chief executive, he did become the executive of the will of God. In his transparent honesty there was a reflection of the sincerity of God. In his firm constancy there was upheld before this people's eye an index finger pointing to the steadfast constancy of God. In his pure jealousy for the utter sanctity of his plighted word there burned a fire that was kindled in the eye of God. In all his even, glowing zeal for righteousness he has been adjudged by all his fellowmen pre-eminently a man of God. And as signal devotee to honesty he demonstrates most signally that God and man may set their lives in unison. In the third place there was in Lincoln's patient gentleness a profound resemblance to the all-enduring gentleness of God. His mastery of malice and his universal charity in the face of multitudes of bitter and malignant men attest eternally an intimate companionship with divine forbearing grace. His sacrificial intervention on behalf of all God's little ones whom human heartlessness had oppressed is world-arresting evidence and demonstration that in his kindly heart was throned the Heavenly Father's sympathy. Unto costly fellowship with this divine forbearance and compassion Lincoln opened unreservedly all the compass of his life. For afflicted and afflicting men he felt a sorrow, mixed with pity and rebuke, both born of the affection fathers feel, both proved sincere by years of sacrificial anguish unto death. And this he did with a discerning and deliberate mind. It was thus he understood the heart and ways of God; and thus by clear design he undertook in his own life to recommend the ways of God to men. In verity he was partaker and dispenser of the manifold grace of God. In him the mighty love of God found living medium. Like a gentle flower drinking gratefully the warmth and beauty flowing towards it from the sun, his soul absorbed the gentle ways of God and itself grew kind and beautiful. Here again it may be seen how intimate may be the life of man in God, the life of God in man. In the fourth place there was in Lincoln's soul an all-prevailing confidence touching future destiny. This living confidence was the outcome of his close partnership with God. His faith believed that God's designs held fast eternally, and that conviction clouds and night and death were impotent to overshadow or obscure. The rather, as his faith and hope confided in that unfailing verity, that faith and hope became themselves unfailing. His sure belief became participant in God's dependability. Here is the deepest secret of his abiding steadiness. Hence his calm indifference to death. And this illumines all his great appeals to his fellowmen with the light of a prophetic vision. For his fellow-citizens, as for himself, his sovereign aspiration was after permanence. This abiding life, whether in the Nation or in himself, he had the mind to comprehend, must be the very life of God within the soul. In civic Godliness alone could there be civic permanence. In the Nation's life the life of God must be incorporate. Then and then alone would any Nation long endure. For this bright civic hope, for this alone he lived. And this ever-springing hopefulness and confidence is the shining efflorescence of his Godliness. He clung to things eternal in a conscious league with God. Here is something wonderful--something replete alike with mystery and with certitude--a vital unison of God and man in undeniable verity--a unison in righteousness and kindliness, in lowly and majestic dignity, in immortal spirit purity--a unison in which all that is most sacredly elemental in God and man most intimately coalesce, while yet remaining most unmistakably distinct--a unison in which is freely and consciously engaged all that personality, however self-discerning and free, can ever contribute or contain--a unison as historically real as it is immeasurably profound--a unison in which space and time provide the theater, while yet a unison in which time and space dissolve. Here is surely ample range for ample exposition of many a major problem in theology, and all within the open and familiar bounds of a normal moral life. In close alliance and affinity with Lincoln's vital partnership with God, and of almost equal pregnancy for the problems of religious thought, is the marvelous intimacy of his inner and essential fellowship with men. This feature of his public life is becoming more commanding and impressive every year. To a degree altogether notable it is becoming widely understood how he and all his fellowmen were wonderfully allied. It is becoming seen by all of us that the qualities essential to his commanding excellence are qualities deeply typical of us all. His attitudes of deference and modesty, his promptings towards things permanent and durable, his equities, his kindnesses are universal. They are enthroned within us all. Everywhere, in everyone they ultimately predominate. Wonderful as it may seem, this holds as true of enemies as it does of friends. Hosts of people, while Lincoln lived, held him their deadliest foe. Through all those bitter years, while they defamed, he meekly, mightily held his own, subduing malice, disdaining subtlety, despising scorn and arrogance, abhorring sordid greed; pleading humbly, but as a prince instead, for righteousness and charity and man's immortal destiny. And now all men detect that however deep and overmastering those aversions and animosities may have been, there was in his enemies and himself a moral kinship and agreement far more powerful and profound. His humble, hopeful plea that every man be fair and pitiful is winning everywhere today glad witness to its eternal and imperial validity. And the wonder of this deep partnership with men but deepens, when we consider that the form of this all-appealing, all-prevailing partnership was sacrificial. This leads straight into the innermost interior of the problem of vicarious suffering--one mortal, suffering in another's place and for another's sake. Never in all that era of civic anguish in the civil war did any human mortal suffer keener or more continual sorrow than did he who of all the Nation's multitudes stood most untainted and innocent of the iniquity which that stern civic judgment was to purge away. Guiltless utterly of any part in slavery for his own profit or by his own consent, he partook with all the guilty ones of all the sorrows of its expurgation. And yet more wonderful is the sequent fact that in precisely this voluntary and conscious unison of innocence and suffering in his outstanding life stood and moved the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud that led this Nation through those sorrows by night and day. Here again is something wonderful--something again replete with mystery and with certitude. And here again do mystery and certitude stand truly unified and harmonized. Truly they are unified. But in that unison their identity stands clarified. There where Lincoln's manhood shows most humane and universal, a Nation's common symbol, outlining nothing less than a puissant Nation's boundless majesty, there stands defined, as with engraver's finished art, his separate, ever sacred, individual nobility. Even there where his moral being merges most completely into deepest sympathy with the afflictions that descend on sin, there his own integrity and personal jealousy for righteousness are most outstanding and distinct. But be it said again, in Lincoln do that broad humaneness and that erect nobility, that sympathy and that jealousy subsist in unison. In strict verity he is our Nation's surrogate. Surely here again is ample range for ample exposition of many a major problem of theology, and all still held within the open and familiar bounds of a normal moral life. So Lincoln stood in unison with God and fellowman. Ideally complete in his own identity, he was ideally allied with other lives through all the personal realm. And be it well and truly seen that the elements of this affiance with his God, and the elements of his firm league with brothermen were identically the same. In each and either realm the binding bonds were fealty to charity, to equity, to humility, to purity. These four qualities explain and guarantee completely his allegiance. These and these alone were the constituent elements of all his brotherhood and of all his reverence. And it is within the nature of these four vital qualities, at once so Godlike and so human, and within their ever-living interplay that one must look to find whatever Lincoln's character can contribute to the problems of theology. What averments tremble here! Our mighty human race does truly live in unison. Within that peopled unison the life of one may have far-ranging partnership. That partnership is closely definable in terms of character. In Lincoln's life as private soul, and as vicar of us all alike, his constancy and kindliness, his purity and lowliness embrace and body forth his total being, with all he bore and wrought. Herein unfolded all his beauty and all his worth, whether as a single citizen or as a Nation's representative. And our humble human life does also truly share the life in God. Within that heavenly unison the lowliest soul may have exalted fellowship. And so in Lincoln's loyalty and tenderness, his lowliness and thirst for immortality, as man of God, unfolds the heavenly beauty of God's eternal purity and majesty, God's benignity and faithfulness. So do lives of free and conscious beings most truly flourish and so do they most truly blend. Our fellowship with Lincoln, and Lincoln's fellowship with us; God's fellowship with Lincoln and Lincoln's fellowship with God; this mystic unrestricted partnership of noble souls; unfolding and unrolling sovereign harmonies, even when they antagonize; in vengeance or compassion fulfilling all their mission and dominion through the earth--these are indeed our sovereign realities. In scanning these we may indeed discern deep ways of God and men. Mighty highways open here--highways that enter every major province of theology. Be these avenues observed. Whence came the blight of slavery? How in human soil could such inhumanity germinate? What is the virus of its contagion? What makes its guilt so terrible? Must inhumanity be avenged? May avengers still be merciful? May hardened men become regenerate? May guilt and innocence be reconciled? Why such anguish on the innocent? Why should little ones be crushed? Why such hosts of patient ones meekly bearing wrong and shame? Why do offenses need to come? How does patience work on sin? How does sorrow work on guilt? What is human brotherhood? May fellowmen be surrogates? May men's honor interchange? Wherein stands human character? What makes a man responsible? How sovereign is man's liberty? How supreme is man's intelligence? Are moral beings subject to decay? May finite man come near to God? Does God come near to finite man? May plans of men and God's designs combine? May God be seen in human life? May human hearts partake of God? Are love and truth and liberty, the crown of human dignity, enthroned in God ideally? Is Christ indeed the Lord of men? Is he our life? Are his teachings true? Is his love divine? Can he indeed redeem? Upon such queryings as these, all running deeply into mystery, each one fast rooted in reality, and each one voicing in each human soul an urgent quest, those sterling elements of Lincoln's character, his lowliness, his living hope, his pity, and his faithfulness shed grateful light. Be these four qualities unveiled before the face of sin, that sin may be defined. When in the presence of some noble majesty or of some courtly modesty a free and conscious soul is arrogant or insolent; when a being born for endless life in freedom, light and purity, exchanges God and immortality for idol forms and baseness and decay; when recipients of God's unnumbered benefits, and participants in the joys and sorrows of a teeming world of brothermen remain ungrateful and unpitiful; when beings destined to be sons of light prefer hypocrisy and unbelief; then, irreverent, corrupt, ungracious, and untrue, sin shows all its horridness and iniquity. And when in the presence of pure grace and truth all such perverseness stands revealed; then the beauty of a quiet modesty, as it respects all worthy majesty, will make supremely plain the ugliness of every form of insolence; then the life that opens towards perpetual dawn will most mightily and forevermore reproach the life that feasts upon corroding food, fattening and hardening towards decay; then outpouring, patient love will visit on ingratitude and hate their most unbearable rebuke; and then the radiant light of simple truth and pure sincerity will set all falsity and unbelief in uttermost disgrace. In such an awful penalty, supreme and unavoidable, will sin incur its doom. But in the very penalty it stands proclaimed how sinful souls may be transformed, and hostile hearts be reconciled. When pride, subdued by majesty, rejoices in humility; when grossness, shamed by purity, welcomes purging fires; when malice, melted by forbearance, partakes the sacrifice and becomes itself compassionate; when falsity, unveiled by verity, submits to its rebuke and welcomes truth with deep docility and faith; then within the sinner's penitence is every penalty absolved, and between embittered souls comes perfect reconciliation. Be these four qualities addressed to that supreme transaction named atonement. When, in perfect loyalty and in perfect lowliness, with a perfect charity and with an utter trust in immortality, one like a Son of Man consents to bear the dark affront of insolence and perfidy from base and deadly men, enduring meekly what his soul abhors, then to all the sons of men is published equally, and with supreme assurance, that sins of men must be indeed avenged, and that sinful men may be indeed redeemed. In that transaction malice faces patience, and patience faces malice for a final strife. There candor bears the lying taunt of acting in disguise. Humility endures the shameful charge of shameless arrogance. Compassion bows as though a thief to all the brutal rudeness of a mob. The soul of immortal purity is bartered for by traders greedy after silver coins, and driving through their trade with lamps and clubs. But in the measure and in the manner of that transcendent patience malice is preparing for itself the manner and the measure of its own just doom. And in the measure and the manner of that same transcendent patience contrition may discern the manner and the measure of its release. In that mighty mingling of aversion and endurance sin must behold alike its omnipotent redemption and its omnipotent rebuke. Thus love, in perfect sympathy, and truth, in perfect equity set forth in heavenly purity the sovereign majesty of an atonement for the world. Be these four radiant qualities applied to him we call alike the son of Mary and the Son of God. In him, the Son of God, shines such a plenitude of grace and truth as becomes the glory of the very God, revealed in such immortal purity as proves him heir and very Lord of all eternity, and wearing such a dignity as belongs at once to heaven's majesty and our most genuine humility; while deep within his open life as son of Mary there shines such a full and genial truth and grace as proves his true humanity, so free from mortal taint through all our transient scenes as proves his spirit's immortality, and manifesting everywhere to all the sons of man their own ideal lowliness. These are all his beauty. In him they fully blend. They blend in him indeed. But they do not dissolve. And so may we with souls akin to him whom Mary bore behold in him the proper image of our complete humanity; and still with eyes and vision all unchanged, behold within those same fair traits the very image and the unbounded fulness of the glory of the infinite God. Be these same radiant qualities our proper medium for beholding Deity. Conceive of One in whose being the only light and glory reside in the pure majesty of a perfect grace and truth. Conceive how these free living qualities permit a unison in fellowship, a fellowship in unison. Conceive how such a unison permits to each participant complete equality and a full infinity. Conceive thus how perfect constancy and perfect kindliness, revealed in perfect purity, and clad in perfect majesty may manifest eternally in mystic unison the blessedness of a perfect personality. Conceive how such a partnership in unison, and unison in partnership will be evermore containing and enjoying within itself an evermore unsullied Spirit life, engendering and completing all the finite forms of being of the created universe; an evermore unfolding Love that is the one original of every fatherhood in heaven and earth; and an evermore Responding Love that is the primal inspiration of the admiring and adoring thankfulness of every child of God; while evermore displaying in a loyal self-respect the eternal archetype and origin of every verity and every equity enthroned in any earnest upright mind. And so conceive in terms as vivid as our own intelligence and liberty how true transcendent Deity may wield no other energy and know no other blessedness than unfolds forever in a free and conscious unison and partnership in pure transcendent love and truth. Transcendent thoughts and ventures these. But abounding other thoughts and ventures no less transcendent wait and urge for utterance. They all assume no less, and nothing more, than that in the living vision of a living personality hides and shines the harmony that may unite the mysteries and the certainties of this universe. Let Truth, as personal self-respect; and Love, as self-devoting life; and Purity, that fears no death; and Dignity, that crowns all worth--let these be clearly seen, each one apart; and clearly seen again when fully unified--and human thought holds categories in hand whereby the problems of our mental and ethical and religious life may be resolved. Of all of this what goes before is but a brief and bare suggestive hint. Its development and vindication call for the completed exposition of such a balanced round of thought as may be found in a prophet like Isaiah, an apostle like Paul, or an evangelist like John. LINCOLN'S SECOND INAUGURAL Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the Nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it--all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the Nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the Nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all Nations. Transcriber's Notes: Inconsistent/archaic spelling and punctuation retained from original. 
46677	----	images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 46677-h.htm or 46677-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46677/46677-h/46677-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46677/46677-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/introductiontops032004mbp AN INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY by WILHELM WUNDT Professor of Philosophy in the University Of Leipsic Translated from the Second German Edition by Rudolf Pintner, M. A. (Edin.), Ph. D., (Leipsic) Publication of the "Pädagogische Literatur Gesellschaft Neue Bahnen" London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. Ruskin House, 40 Museum St. W. C. I. Published 1912--Reprint 1920 AUTHOR'S PREFACE It is not the intention of this introduction to psychology to discuss the scientific or philosophical conceptions of psychology, or even to make a survey of the investigations and their results. What this little book attempts is rather to introduce the reader to the principal thoughts underlying present-day experimental psychology, leaving out many facts and methods which would be necessary for a thorough study of the subject. To omit all mention of experimental methods and their results is at the present day impossible. Yet we only need to consider a comparatively small number of results of the first importance in order to comprehend the basal principles of the new psychology. To characterise the methods of this psychology it would be impossible to omit all reference to experiments, but we can and will omit reference to the more or less complicated instruments on which the carrying out of such experiments depends. I must refer the reader who wishes a fuller account of the new psychology to my _Outlines of Psychology_, which also contains the necessary bibliography of the subject. W. WUNDT. Leipsic, June 1911. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE The present volume is a popular introduction to the Wundtian psychology. It is a shorter and simpler sketch than the same author's _Outlines of Psychology_, and it should prove invaluable to the English-speaking student who wishes to gain some conception of the subject before entering upon a deeper study of the same. Its popularity in Germany has been phenomenal. In translating the work the translator has, as far as possible, used the same English terms as those employed in the translations of Wundt by Judd and Titchener. He is greatly indebted to Mr. Robert Wilson, M.A., B. Sc., for his advice and help in reading over the manuscript before going to press. RUDOLF PINTNER. Edinburgh, May 1912. CONTENTS CHAPTER I CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION Psychology as a description of processes of consciousness--The metronome--The rhythmical disposition of consciousness--The scope of consciousness--The threshold of consciousness--The fixation-point and field of consciousness--The focus of attention--The scope of attention--Apprehension and apperception CHAPTER II THE ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Psychical elements and compounds--Sensation and idea--Memory images and perceptions--Quality and intensity of sensations--Feelings--Difference between sensation and feeling--The three pairs of feelings--The affective process--Emotions and moods--Volitional processes--Motives--Instinctive, voluntary, and discriminative actions--The qualities of feelings--Feeling and apperception CHAPTER III ASSOCIATION Associations and apperceptions--The fusion of tones into clangs--Spatial and temporal perception --Assimilation and dissimilation--Direct and reproduced forms of the same--Complications--The recognition and cognition of objects--Successive association--The so-called "feeling of familiarity"--Secondary ideas --The affective processes in recognition--The so-called states of consciousness in forgetting, remembering, &c. --Memory associations CHAPTER IV APPERCEPTION General characteristics of apperceptive combinations as compared to associations--The aggregate idea and its analysis--Concrete and abstract thought--Speech and thought--Understanding and imagination--Examples of primitive forms of speech in the language of primitive races--Development of apperceptive combinations out of associative ones--Inadequacy of the method of introspection in dealing with the psychological problems of thought--Psychology of language and race CHAPTER V THE LAWS OF PSYCHICAL LIFE The relation between psychical and natural laws--The psycho-physical individual--The question as to the universal validity of the laws--The principle of creative resultants--The principle of heterogony of ends--The principle of conditioning relations--The principle of intensifying contrasts--The psychological and physical standpoints--Relation between physical and psychical values--Physical and psychical elements--The nature of the soul--Mythological views--The "substance" hypothesis--The principle of the actuality of mind AN INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY CHAPTER I CONSCIOUSNESS AND ATTENTION If psychologists are asked, what the business of psychology is, they generally make some such answer as follows, if they belong to the empirical school: that this science has to investigate the facts of consciousness, its combinations and relations, so that it may ultimately discover the laws which govern these relations and combinations. Now although this definition seems quite perfect, it is really to some extent a vicious circle. For if we ask further, what is this consciousness which psychology investigates? the answer will be, "It consists of the sum total of facts of which we are conscious." In spite of this, our definition is the simplest, and therefore for the present it will be well for us to keep to it. All objects of experience have this peculiarity, namely, that we cannot really define them but only point to them, and if they are of a complex nature analyse them into their separate qualities. Such an analysis we call a description. We will therefore best be able to answer more accurately the question as to the nature of psychology by describing as exactly as possible all the separate qualities of that consciousness, the content of which psychological investigation has to deal with. For this purpose let us make use of a little instrument to help us--an instrument well known to all who have studied music, i.e. the metronome. It is really nothing more than a clockwork with an upright standing pendulum, on which a sliding weight is attached, so that beats may follow each other at equal intervals in greater or less rapidity. If the weight is fixed at the upper end of the pendulum, the beats follow each other at an interval of two seconds; if at the lower end, the interval is shortened to about a third of a second. Between these limits every different length of beat can be produced. We can, however, increase these limits considerably by taking off the sliding weight altogether. Now the lower limit falls to a quarter of a second. Similarly we can obtain any longer time we choose with a sufficient degree of accuracy, if we have some one to help us. Instead of letting the pendulum swing of its own accord, the assistant moves it backwards and forwards with his hand, measuring off the longer interval fixed upon, by means of a watch, that marks the seconds. This instrument is not only very useful for teaching singing and music, but it is also a psychological apparatus of the simplest kind. In psychology, as we shall see, we can use it for so many purposes that we are almost justified in saying that with its help we can demonstrate the most important part of the psychology of consciousness. In order to be able to do this the instrument must satisfy one requirement, which every instrument does not possess. The strength of the beats must be sufficiently uniform, so that even to the most attentive listener differences in the intensity of the successive beats may not be noticed. To test an instrument in this respect, we proceed thus. We subjectively emphasise the one beat and then the other, as the two following rows of notes show:-- [Illustration] This diagram represents the separate beats by notes, and the accent shows those beats that are subjectively emphasised. Row A shows an ascending beat, and row B a descending one. Now if it happens that we can at will hear into the beats of the metronome an ascending or a descending beat (A or B), i.e. we can hear one and the same beat now emphasised and now unemphasised, then we may regard the instrument as suitable for all the psychological experiments to be described in the following pages. Although the experiment described was only meant to serve as a test for the metronome, yet we can derive from it a remarkable psychological result. For we notice in this experiment that it is really extraordinarily difficult to hear the beats in absolutely the same intensity, or, to put it in other words, to hear unrhythmically. Again and again we recur to the ascending or descending beat. We can express this phenomenon in this sentence: Our consciousness is rhythmically disposed. The reason of this scarcely lies in a specific quality, peculiar to consciousness alone, but it clearly stands in the closest relationship to our whole psycho-physical organisation. Consciousness is rhythmically disposed, because the whole organism is rhythmically disposed. The movements of the heart, of breathing, of walking, take place rhythmically. In a normal state we certainly are not aware of the pulsations of the heart, but we do feel the movements of breathing, and they act upon us as very weak stimuli. Above all, the movements of walking form a very clear and recognisable background to our consciousness. Now our means of locomotion are in a certain sense natural pendulums, the movements of which generally follow with a certain regularity, as with the pendulum of the metronome. Therefore whenever we receive impressions in consciousness at similar stated intervals, we arrange them in a rhythmical form similar to that of our own outward movements. The special form of rhythm, ascending or descending, is within certain limits left to our own free choice, just as with the movements of locomotion, which may take the form of walking, of running, of jumping, and lastly of all different kinds of dances. Our consciousness is not a thing separated from our whole physical and mental being, but a collection of the contents that are most important for the mental side of this being. We can obtain a further result from the experiment with the metronome described above, if we change the length of the ascending or descending row of beats. In our diagram each row, A and B, contains sixteen separate beats, or, taking one rise and fall together, eight double beats. If we listen attentively to a row of beats of this length when the metronome is going at a medium rapidity of, say, 1 to 1 1/2 seconds, and then after a short pause repeat a row of exactly the same length, we recognise immediately the identity of the two. In the same way a difference will be immediately noticed, if the second row is only by one beat longer or shorter than the first. It is immaterial whether we beat in ascending or descending rhythm. Now it is obvious that such an immediate recognition of the identity of two successive rows is only possible if each of them is in consciousness as a whole. It is not at all necessary for both of them to be in consciousness at the same time. We can see at once that consciousness must grasp them as wholes, if we consider for one moment an analogous case, e.g. the recognition of a complex visual image. If we look, for example, at a regular hexagon for a short time, and then cast another glance at the same figure, we recognise at once that both images are identical. Such a recognition is impossible if we divide the figure up into several parts and show these parts separately. Just as the two visual images appeared in consciousness as wholes, so must each of our rows of beats appear as a whole, if the second is to call up a similar impression to the first. The difference consists in this, that the hexagon was perceived in all its parts at once, whereas the beats followed each other in succession. Just because they follow in this way, such a row of beats possesses this advantage, that we can thereby determine precisely how far we can extend such a row so that it is still possible to grasp it in consciousness as a whole. It has been proved by such experiments that sixteen successive beats, alternately rising and falling, or so-called 2/8 time, is the maximum for such a row, in order that all the separate elements may still find room in our consciousness. We may therefore consider such a row as a measure for the scope of consciousness under these given conditions. At the same time it appears that this measure is, between certain limits, independent of the rapidity of succession of the beats. A grasping together of the row as a whole becomes, however, impossible, when the beats follow each other so slowly that no rhythm may be heard, or when the rapidity is so great that the 2/8 time is lost, and the mind tries to group the beats together in a more complicated rhythm. The former limit lies at about 2 1/2 seconds, and the latter at 1 second. When we take the longest row of beats that can be grasped together as one whole in consciousness under the given conditions and call this the scope of consciousness, it is of course obvious that we do not mean by this expression the total content of consciousness that is present at one given moment. We mean only to denote the maximum scope of one single complex whole. Let us picture consciousness for a moment as a plane surface of a limited extension. Then our scope of consciousness is one diameter of this surface, and not the whole extent. There may at the same time be many other elements of consciousness scattered about beside the ones we are just measuring. They can, however, in general be left out of account, since in a case such as ours consciousness will be directed to the content that is being measured, and the elements outside of this will be unclear, fluctuating, and isolated. The scope of consciousness, in accordance with our definition, is a relatively constant value, if we keep to a special time, e.g. the 2/8 time. It does not change with a different rapidity of beat within the above-mentioned limits. A change in the time, however, exercises great influence. Such a change is to some extent dependent upon our will. We can hear into our uniform row of beats not only a simple 2/8 time, but a more complicated rhythm, e.g. the following 4/4 time:-- [Illustration: letter diagram; cardboard with point in the middle.] Such a row arises if we let different intensities of accent enter, say the strongest at the beginning of the row, a medium one in the middle, and a weak one in the middle of each of the two halves of the whole row, as in the diagram above. The strongest emphasis is denoted by three accents, the medium one by two, and the weak ones by one. This transition to more complicated rhythms is to a great degree dependent upon the rapidity of the beat, as well as upon our will. With long intervals it is very difficult to go beyond the simple 2/8 time. With short ones a certain exertion is necessary to withstand the impulse of transition to more complicated rhythms. When listening unconcernedly to the beats of the metronome when the interval between the beats is 1/2 second or less, the above-described 4/4 time generally appears. This groups together eight beats into one unity, whereas the 2/8 time only embraces two beats. Now if we measure the scope of consciousness for such a complicated row of beats, we find that five bars of 4/4 time can be grouped together and grasped as a whole; and if this row is repeated after a short interval, it can be recognised as identical with the preceding row. Here, then, we have forty beats as the scope of consciousness for this complicated rhythm, whereas with the most simple rhythmical arrangement we had only sixteen beats. This scope of forty seems to be the greatest we can attain by any means. We can, it is true, voluntarily call forth more complicated rhythmic arrangements, e.g. 6/4 time. But such an increase in the number of beats in the rhythmic arrangement demands a certain exertion, and the length of the row that can be grouped together as one whole does not increase, but decreases. In these experiments a further remarkable quality of consciousness appears, which is closely connected to the rhythmical disposition of consciousness. The three degrees of emphasis, which the diagram of 4/4 time shows, form a maximum of differentiation which cannot be surpassed. Counting the unaccented beat as well, we arrive at a scale of intensity of four grades as the highest limit in the gradation of the intensity of impressions. This value clearly determines the rhythmical arrangement of the whole row, and with it the comprehension of this in consciousness, just as on the contrary the rhythm of the beats determines the number of gradations in intensity, which are necessary in the arrangement of the row of beats as supports for the comprehension by consciousness. Both factors therefore stand in close relationship to each other. The rhythmical disposition of consciousness demands certain limits for the number of grades of emphasis, and these on their part demand that specific rhythmical disposition which is peculiar to the human consciousness. The more extensive the rows of beats become, which we join together in the experiments described, the more clearly does another important phenomenon of consciousness appear. If we pay attention to the relation between a beat, perceived in a certain given moment, and one that has immediately preceded it, and if we further compare this latter with a beat further back in the row that is being grouped together as a whole, differences of a certain kind between all these impressions appear. They are quite different from the variations in intensity and emphasis. To describe them we do best to make use of expressions, which were first of all formed in all languages to describe the perception of visual impressions, where the same differences also appear and are relatively independent of differences in the intensity of light. These expressions are "clearness" and "distinctness." Their meanings almost coincide, but still they differ inasmuch as they denote different sides of the faculty of perception. "Clearness" refers more to the special constitution of the impression itself; "distinctness" to the relation of the impression to other impressions from which it seems to stand out. Let us transfer these conceptions in a generalised sense to the content of consciousness. One row of beats clearly shows in each of its separate elements the most varying degrees of clearness and distinctness. They all in a regular manner bear upon the beat that is affecting consciousness at the moment. This beat is the one that is most clear and most distinct. The ones immediately preceding are most like this one, whereas those that lie further back lose more and more in clearness. If the beat furthest away lies so far back that the impression has absolutely disappeared, then we speak in a picturesque way of a sinking beneath the threshold of consciousness. For the opposite process we have at once the picture of a rising above the threshold. In a similar sense for that gradual approach to the threshold of consciousness, which we notice in our experiments in the beats that lie further back, we use the expression "a darkening," and for the reverse process "a brightening" of the content of consciousness. With the use of these expressions we can formulate in the following manner the condition necessary for the comprehension of a whole consisting of many parts, e.g. a row of beats: a comprehension as a whole is possible as long as no part sinks beneath the threshold of consciousness. For the most obvious differences in the clearness and distinctness of the content of consciousness, we generally use two other expressions, which, like our former ones of darkening and brightening, illustrate the meaning. We say that that element of consciousness, which is mostly clearly apprehended, lies in the fixation-point of consciousness, and that all the rest belongs to the field of consciousness. In our metronome experiments, therefore, the beat, that is at the moment affecting consciousness, lies in this subjective fixation-point, whereas the preceding beats, the further back they stretch, the more do they belong merely to this subjective field. This latter we may picture to ourselves as a region surrounding the fixation-point, which becomes gradually darker towards the periphery and at last is bounded by the threshold of consciousness. In this last figure of speech we have already suggested that the so-called fixation-point of consciousness denotes in general only the ideal middle point of a central region, within which several impressions can be clearly and distinctly apprehended. So in one row of beats the beat heard at a certain moment would lie within the fixation-point; yet the immediately preceding beats are still clear and distinct enough, in order to be included within the same narrow region, which contrasts with the more extensive field by reason of its greater clearness. The psychological process agrees also in this respect with the expressions we have borrowed from the sense of sight, where we have a single point of the field of vision as fixation-point, around which a great number of impressions may be clearly perceived. Only because of this are we able to apprehend a larger image in a single moment, e.g. to read a word. For this central part of the field of our consciousness, which immediately surrounds the subjective fixation-point, the practical necessity of language has already coined a word, which has been accepted by psychology. We call that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of a narrow region of the content of consciousness, attention. When impressions, or any other content, at a certain moment are remarkable for their special clearness in comparison to the other elements in consciousness, we say that they lie within the focus of attention. Keeping to our former figure, we imagine this as the central region that surrounds the subjective fixation-point, and it is cut off by a more or less clearly defined boundary-line from the larger and darker field that surrounds it. And this immediately gives rise to a new experimental problem, which forms an important supplement to the above-described measurement of the whole scope of consciousness. The problem consists in answering the question that immediately arises, How big is this narrower scope of attention? Rhythmical rows of beats, because of the arrangement of the successive impressions in them, were excellently suited to determine the total scope of consciousness. But because of this very same quality they can give us little help in solving our second problem. For it is obvious that just that connection between the focus of attention and the wider field of consciousness, that the rhythm of a row of beats causes--this connection makes a clear boundary between these two regions impossible. We notice clearly enough that along with the beat that is directly affecting consciousness a few of the preceding ones also fall within the focus of attention, but how many remains uncertain. The sense of sight obviously offers us more favourable conditions. We must, however, first of all note the fact that the physiological conditions of vision in themselves limit the apprehension of an extended object, not taking into account the psychological boundary of clear perception. The keenest differentiation of impressions is limited to the so-called region of clearest vision, which surrounds the fixation-point. The reader can test this for himself by fixating the middle letter "_o_" in the following diagram of letters from a distance of about 20-25 cm, while keeping one eye closed. We can in this position, by directing our attention alone to the outlying parts of the field of vision, still recognise letters, which lie at the sides of our figure, as, for example, the _h_ at the top or the _i_ at the right-hand side. To carry out this experiment a little practice in fixation is required, since in natural vision we are always inclined to direct our line of vision to that point, to which our attention is turned. If, however, we practise letting our attention wander over the different parts of the field of vision while keeping the same fixation-point, it will soon be clear to us that the fixation-point of attention and the fixation-point of the field of vision are by no means identical. They can by practice be separated, and the attention can be directed to a point in indirect vision, i.e. a point lying to this or to that side of the line of vision. From this we see that clear perception in the psychological sense and clear vision in the physiological sense do not necessarily coincide. For example, if we fixate the middle letter _o_, and at the same time direct our attention to the "_n_" at the right-hand side, we also perceive clearly the letters that surround _n_, i.e. _f g s i_, whereas the letters around _o_, i.e. _h t i n_, seem to retreat into the darker field of consciousness. This diagram of letters has been printed so large, that when we look at it from a distance of 20-25 cm. it almost corresponds in scope to the region of clearest vision, taking as a measure for this the recognisability of letters of the size of those printed in this book. We see, therefore, at once from the above-described observations, that the scope of the focus of attention and the region of clearest vision in the physiological sense differ widely from each other. The latter, under the conditions of observation we have chosen, comprises a far wider field than the former. In our figure there are 95 letters: If it were possible simultaneously clearly to perceive in the psychological sense all the objects clearly seen physiologically, then we should be able by fixating the point _o_ to perceive all these letters. This is, however, by no means the case. At one given moment we can differentiate only a few, which surround the fixation-point of attention, whether this coincides with the objective fixation-point of the field of vision, as in ordinary vision, or whether it lies in any way outside of this point owing to a severance of the two fixation-points. Although these observations as to the simultaneous recognition of haphazardly arranged simple objects, e.g. letters, point decisively to a fairly narrow limitation of the scope of attention, still we cannot give an exact numerical answer by this method as to the size of this scope, as we could by means of our metronome experiments in regard to the scope of consciousness. Still, without any great change and without any complicated apparatus, we can make these visual experiments suffice to answer our question. Our immediate results will, of course, only be valid under the special conditions we set up. For this purpose a great number of such diagrams, with letters arranged in the same manner, must be constructed. The position of the letters in each diagram must be different. Then a fairly large square of white cardboard, with a black point in the middle, is made (as in the figure on p. 19). With this we cover the diagram chosen for the experiment. The observer, who previously must not have seen the diagrams, is told to fixate with one eye the point in the middle, and to keep the other eye closed. The cover is then taken away rapidly for one moment, and then as rapidly replaced. The rapidity of this procedure must be such that no movement of the eye, or wandering of the attention over the field of vision, can take place, as long as the diagram remains uncovered.[1] Each time we repeat the experiment a new diagram must be chosen, otherwise the individual momentary impression will supplement the preceding ones. If we wish to obtain unambiguous results we must choose conditions which exclude such influences of previous perceptions. Our question will therefore be limited to this: What is the number of simple and new impressions in consciousness that the focus of attention can grasp in one given moment? In reference to this way of stating the question, an objection to our method of experimenting might be raised. It might be objected that a letter is not a simple element of consciousness, and that we ought rather to use simpler objects, e.g. dots. But since these lack all means of differentiation, the carrying out of the experiment would be rendered much more difficult, if not impossible. On the other hand, we must not forget that our familiarity with letters is of the greatest importance. Because of this a letter of ordinary print can be perceived as quickly as a single dot--a fact any one can easily prove for himself by means of observation. Such symbols, because of their characteristic differences, have this advantage, that after a momentary impression they can be easily retained in consciousness, and thus an account of what has been clearly perceived can be given after the experiment. If we carry out the experiments in the manner described, it appears that an unpractised observer can perceive, at most, only 3-4 letters. After a few more experiments this number increases to 6. Of course, as before mentioned, a new diagram must be used in every new experiment. This value 6 cannot be increased by further practice, and it remains the same for different observers. We are therefore entitled to regard it as a constant for attention for the human consciousness. [Footnote 1: To carry out such experiments more exactly and more uniformly it is best to make use of the simple apparatus called the tachistoscope. A falling screen exposes the object to sight for a very short time, which can be accurately measured. Still, if this apparatus cannot be procured, the procedure described above suffices. Special practice should be devoted to covering and uncovering the diagram, so that this may be done as rapidly as possible.] This determination of the scope of attention is, however, dependent upon one condition, which is exactly the opposite of that introduced in measuring the scope of consciousness. This latter was only possible by using rows of impressions that were bound together into one complex whole. To measure the scope of attention, on the other hand, we must isolate the separate impressions from each other, so that they form an unarranged multiplicity of elements. This is a difference in conditions which certainly does not only depend upon the fact that in the first case the sense of hearing and in the second case the sense of sight was used. We rather conjecture at the very outset that here the chief influence lay in the psychological conditions, in the first case in the combination of the elements into a whole, and in the second in the isolation of the elements. At once the following question naturally arises: What will happen if we, so to speak, change the rôles of these two senses, if we let impressions, connected together as wholes, work upon the sense of sight, and isolated impressions upon the sense of hearing? In the first case we have simply to combine letters together, so that they form words or sentences. A letter is nothing more than an element that has been artificially taken out of such a natural combination. Now if we carry out with these parts of speech experiments in the same manner as we have described above, we obtain, in fact, an absolutely different result. If we show the observer a word such as this-- Miscellaneousness, he can read it at once, without being prepared for it and without previous practice. With isolated elements he could at most grasp six, but here, under exactly the same conditions, the scope is extended to seventeen or more elements without the slightest difficulty. It is clear that this is essentially the same phenomenon that we encountered in our experiments on rhythm with the sense of hearing. The conditions of combination are, however, in so far different, as the stimuli for the sense of sight were simultaneous, whereas for the sense of hearing the whole was made up of simple impressions that followed each other. And with this another difference is connected. A word can only be recognised at a momentary glance, if it has been known to us before as a whole, or with compound words, if their chief parts have been familiar to us. Therefore a word of an absolutely unknown language appears as a complex of unarranged letters, and with such a complex our scope is again limited to six isolated elements. With a rhythmical row of beats, on the other hand, it is of no consequence what the form of rhythm is that binds them together, since we can think into such a row whatever rhythmical arrangement we choose, as long as it conforms to the general rhythmical disposition of consciousness, i.e. as long as it does not exceed the maximum of three different accents, as we have previously shown. At the same time this requirement shows us that the differences in apprehending a successive and a simultaneous whole, which appear in our experiments with sight and hearing, are in reality only apparent differences. A musical time that is adequate to our sense of rhythm behaves in exactly the same way as a word or sentence that is adequate to our sense of language. Therefore we may presuppose that in the reading, as in the rhythm experiments, it is not the whole of a complex consisting of many elements that is instantaneously grasped by the attention. Only a limited part of such a word falls within the scope of attention, and from this part the psychical power of combination goes over to those other elements that lie in the wider field of consciousness. In fact there is a well-known phenomenon that gives a striking proof for this combination of the parts of a word or sentence grasped by attention with unclearly perceived elements. It consists in the fact that misprints are so often unnoticed, especially in rapid reading. This would be impossible if we were forced to perceive with our attention equally clearly all the separate elements of a long word or of a sentence in order to be able to read. In fact, in each separate moment there are only a few elements within the focus of attention. From these the threads of psychical combination stretch to the elements unclearly perceived--yes, sometimes even to the impressions only physiologically seen that lie in the regions of indirect vision. Just as in hearing a rhythm, the sound impressions affecting consciousness at the moment are bound to the preceding ones that have retreated into the darker regions of consciousness, and, on the other hand, they are preparing the way for further expected impressions. The chief difference of the two cases lies not so much in the formal relations of the scope of attention and of consciousness, as in the constitution of the elements and their combinations. Let us now, equipped with the results of our visual experiments, turn our attention again to our metronome experiments. The analogy between the two immediately gives rise to this question: Can we not in our rhythm experiments arrange the conditions so that we may obtain a similar isolation of simple impressions, as was necessary in measuring the scope of attention for the sense of sight? Now in fact such an isolation of single beats arises at once, as soon as we restrain a "hearing into" the beats of any kind of accentuation whatever. Even the simplest rhythm, the 2/8 time, must be avoided. This is not so easy as it appears to be at the first glance, because of the rhythmical disposition of our consciousness and of our whole psycho-physical organisation. Again and again we are inclined to hear into a row of beats following each other at similar intervals, at least the 2/8 time. And yet it is possible to conform to this condition, if the metronome beats do not show any noticeable objective differences. The interval between the beats must be chosen long enough to check any tendency to rhythmical grouping, and yet not too long, so that it may still remain possible to grasp so many beats as one whole. In general an interval of from 1 1/2-2 1/2 seconds will conform to this requirement. With such an interval, after a fair amount of practice, it is possible to change at will from a rhythmical to an unrhythmical or absolutely monotonous perception of the beats. If this is done, and if in exactly the same manner as in the rhythm experiments a number of metronome beats is given, and then after a pause the same or a slightly differing number is given, the observer can clearly perceive the identity or difference of the two rows. If in the first test a row of six beats is given (row A), and in the second a row of nine, it appears in repeating two rows of the same length, that a precise recognition of identity is present with row A, whereas with row B this is impossible. Even with seven or eight beats recognition is very uncertain. We arrive therefore at the same result as in our optical experiments. Six simple impressions form the limit for the scope of attention. [Illustration row A - row B] Since this value is the same for optical and acoustical, for successive and simultaneous impressions, it surely denotes some psychical constant independent of any special sense. And in fact in using different kinds of impressions we always arrive at the same result. The number six with very minor variations denotes the maximum of simple impressions that can be grasped by attention. If we choose syllables of any form, that are not combined into words, and if we read out a row of such to an observer, and require him to repeat them, we find that a correct repetition is possible with a row such as the following:-- ap ku no li sa ro Whereas it is not possible with a row like this:-- ra po su am na il ok pu We notice that even with seven such senseless syllables the repetition is generally unsuccessful. We may by practice become successful with seven syllables. This is obviously exactly the same result as we obtained above with our rows of metronome beats. There still remains another phenomenon that coincides with this result. It is the more worthy of note since it belongs to a third sense, namely the sense of touch, and since it was discovered from practical considerations quite independent of psychology. There had been many futile attempts to discover the most useful method of printing for the blind, before Braille, a French teacher of the blind, about the middle of last century solved this important practical problem. He himself had become blind, and was therefore in a better position than others to make sure of the requirements that were necessary, by means of experiments upon himself. He came to this result, that, first of all, groups of distinct points were the only suitable means of establishing letter-signs that could be easily distinguished, and that, secondly, not more than six definite points were to be used for one letter. These points must not spread over an extent greater than that which can be covered by the sense of touch, if the symbols are to be distinguished by the fingers of the blind with ease and certainty. He decided for an arrangement of points as seen in Fig. I., out of which the alphabet for the blind was arranged:-- [Illustration: Fig. I - II - III.] This limitation to six points in certain positions certainly did not come about by chance. This can clearly be seen from the fact that a greater number, e.g. an arrangement of nine points as in Fig. III., would have greater practical advantages. By means of them it would have been possible for example to represent the most important punctuation marks or numbers with separate signs, a thing which is not possible in Braille's type for the blind. But such complications in the positions of the points are at once made useless by the fact that it is impossible clearly to grasp the difference of such a large number of points. Any one can convince himself of this by immediate observation, if he arranges more than six similar signs and tries to distinguish by touch alone. Thus we arrive again at the same limit that our metronome and optical experiments led us to. The importance of these results as to the scope of consciousness and of attention does not lie merely in the fact that we are able to state the relation of both in values that can be expressed in figures. Above all, our results give us an important insight into the relations between those elements that stand in the focus of attention and those that belong to the wider field of consciousness. In order, then, to denote clearly the most important results that have come to light in these experiments, let us use two short expressions for the two processes of the entrance into consciousness, and of the elevation into the focus of attention--two expressions that were first of all introduced by Leibnitz in a similar sense. We shall call the entrance into the large region of consciousness--apprehension, and the elevation into the focus of attention--apperception. We shall take no account of the philosophical meanings, in which Leibnitz uses these expressions in his theory of monads. We shall use these expressions purely in their empirical and psychological sense. Accordingly we understand by apprehension simply the entrance of some content into consciousness--an entrance that can be in fact proved, and by apperception the grasping of this by the attention. The apprehended content is that of which we are more or less darkly aware; it is always, however, above the threshold of consciousness. The apperceived content is that of which we are clearly aware, or, keeping to the figure of speech of a threshold, that which lies above the narrower threshold of attention. We can further define the relation between these two regions of consciousness. If the apperception is directed to one isolated element, the rest, the merely psychically apprehended elements, disappear as if they were non-existent. On the other hand, if the apperceived content is bound to certain merely apprehended elements of consciousness, it is combined into one total apprehension, which is only limited by the threshold of consciousness itself. In close relationship with this stands the fact that the scope of apperception is a relatively limited and constant one, and that the scope of apprehension is not only larger, but also much more variable. And, as we have clearly seen from our comparison of simple and complex rhythmical rows, it varies according to the scope of the psychical complexes that are united together into one whole. Thereby the difference between the merely apprehended and the apperceived parts of such a whole by no means disappears. For it is only a limited part of this latter that lies within the focus of attention, as has been strikingly shown in reading experiments, where we can vary single and merely apprehended parts of a word, without thereby disturbing the comprehension of the total complex. To use a picture which is itself an example of this phenomenon, we may say that that wider darkly apprehended content stands in the same relation here as the chords of the piano accompaniment to the voice of the singer. Slight variations in the former are mostly unobserved, so long as the guiding voice is correct in pitch and rhythm. On the other hand, the impression of the whole would be feeble if the accompaniment was wanting. In this relationship between the apprehended and apperceived content of consciousness another factor appears, which brings to light the great importance of the processes of apperception. We started out from the fact that it was extremely difficult to apprehend with absolute uniformity a row of identical beats, since we are always inclined to accentuate certain beats. This phenomenon is clearly connected with a fundamental characteristic of apperception, which intervenes in all processes of consciousness. We know, from ordinary life, that we are not able to direct our attention perfectly steadily and uniformly to one and the same object. When we attempt to do this, we notice that a continual change takes place in the apperception of the object in question. At times the attention turns towards the object most intensively, and at times its energy flags. Where the conditions remain uniform, this change gradually becomes regular and periodic. The rise of such a process is of course materially assisted, if the outside impressions themselves, to which our attention is directed, possess a regular periodicity. This is the case in a high degree with a row of beats. And so it happens that those oscillations of apperception are directly adjusted to the periodicity of the impressions. Therefore we emphasise an impression that coincides with a rise in the apperception wave, so that the beats which are in fact uniform become rhythmically arranged. The manner of this arrangement depends to a certain degree upon our own choice, and also upon the extent in which we are trying to combine the single impressions into a whole. If the beats follow each other very quickly, our endeavour to combine leads us easily into complicated rhythmical arrangements, as we have in fact noticed above. With other and especially with simultaneous impressions similar relations between the apperceived and the merely apprehended content of consciousness arise, but in varying form according to the sense in question. For example, if we expose a very short word in our reading experiments, the whole is easily apprehended at one glance. If, however, we expose a long word, e.g. "miscellaneousness," we notice at once, even by direct observation, that the apprehension time is a little longer and that it really is made up of two or three very rapid and successive acts of apperception, and these acts may last longer than the actual time the impression is affecting consciousness. This succession is seen more clearly, if instead of a word we expose a sentence of about the same length as the following:-- "Honesty is the best policy." Here the breaking up of apperception into successive acts is materially assisted by the divisions of the words. With such a sentence we observe as a rule three successive acts of apperception, and it is the last that combines the whole into one unified thought. In such a case this is only possible as long as the preceding parts of the sentence from the last apperception remain in the field of consciousness. If the sentence is so long that this cannot happen, then the same thing occurs as we have observed with rhythmical rows of beats, that have passed the limits of possible rhythmical arrangement. We can only combine a part of such a successively exposed whole into one conclusive act of apperception. It is obvious therefore that the two phenomena, the apprehension of connected beats and of connected words and sentences, are essentially the same. The only difference consists in the fact that in the first case the apperceived impression is connected with the preceding one, that has retreated into the apprehension field, by means of the rhythmical arrangement, whereas the connection in the second case is brought about by means of the sense that binds the word or the parts of the word together. The process consists by no means of a mere successive apperception of the parts. These have already disappeared out of the apperception and have become merely apprehended elements, when they are combined into one whole along with the last apperceived impression. This act of combination is itself a uniform and instantaneous act of apperception. From this we see that, in all cases of a combination of a larger complex of elements, apperception is the function that unites these elements, and that in general it always combines directly apperceived parts of the whole with the merely apprehended parts that stand in connection. And so the great importance of the relations between these two functions of apperception and of apprehension lies precisely in the great change of these relations and in their adjustment to the needs of our psychical life, which finds expression in this change of relation to each other. At times the apperception concentrates upon a very narrow region, in order completely to free itself from the enormous manifoldness of incoming impressions. At other times, with the help of its capacity for grouping together successive elements which arises from the oscillating nature of its function, it winds its threads through a wide web of psychical contents, that stretches over the whole field of consciousness. Through it all apperception remains the unifying function which binds that manifold content into one ordered whole. Contrasted with it and subordinate to it, and in a certain sense acting as centrifugal forces, are the processes of apprehension, which with apperception together form the whole of our psychical life. CHAPTER II THE ELEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS In our last chapter we have discussed the general and formal characteristics of consciousness. These have appeared to us in the scope of consciousness, in the different grades of clearness and distinctness of its content, and lastly, connected with this, in the relations of apprehension and apperception. The next question that immediately presents itself is: Of what kind is the specific content that appears to us in these forms? The answer to this question includes the task of explaining the ultimate parts of this content, that cannot be further disintegrated. Such ultimate parts are generally called elements. Now it is one of the first tasks of each science, that deals with the investigation of empirical facts, to discover the elements of the phenomena. Its second task is to find out the laws according to which these elements enter into combinations. The whole task of psychology can therefore be summed up in these two problems: (1) What are the elements of consciousness? (2) What combinations do these elements undergo and what laws govern these combinations? In contradistinction to the elements of consciousness let us call any combination of such elements a psychical compound. The relation of the two to each other can be at once made clear by the examples that lie at hand. Let us return to our metronome. If we let one single beat work upon consciousness and then immediately arrest the pendulum, we have a psychical element. Such a beat cannot in general be further disintegrated if we, as can easily be done in such a case, abstract from the fact that we hear it from some special direction in space, &c. If, on the other hand, we let two beats work, they constitute at once a psychical compound. This becomes always more complex, the more such beats we combine into a row, and the more we increase this complication by different degrees of accentuation, as in the examples of 2/8 and 4/4 time described above. Such an element of consciousness as the single beat is called a sensation, a combination of elements into rhythms of more or less complicated constitution is called an idea. Even at the present time many psychologists use the word "idea" only for a complex that does not arise from direct outward impressions, i.e. only for so-called "memory images." For ideas formed by outward sense impressions they generally use the word "perception." Now this distinction is psychologically of absolutely no importance, since there are really no valid differences between memory ideas and so-called sense-perceptions. The memory ideas of our dreams are in general quite as lively as sense impressions in the waking state, and it is for this reason that they are often held to be really experienced phenomena. The word "idea" denotes well the essential characteristic of all these complexes. The idea (Greek idea) is the form or appearance of something in the outer world. In the same sense, as belonging to the outer world, we speak of the sensations and their complexes arising in our own body as organic sensations, because we locate them in out own body, e.g. the sensations of fatigue of our muscles, the pressure and pain sensations of the inner organs, &c. The relatively uniform elements of touch and organic sensations are distributed among the sensations of pressure, warmth, cold, and pain. In contra-distinction to these, the special senses of hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting present an abundance of sensations, each of which, according to its peculiar constitution, is called a quality of sensation. Each such quality is besides variable in its intensity. We can, for example, produce a certain beat in very variable intensities, while the quality remains the same. In all these cases we meet with the same relations between sensations and ideas, as we saw in the metronome beats described above. Green or red, white or black, &c., are called visual sensations; a green surface or a black body is called a visual idea. The relation is exactly the same as between the single beat and the row of beats. Only in this case the combination of several sensations to an idea of a surface or of a body forces itself upon us much more directly, and it requires a very careful abstraction from this combination into an ideational complex, in order to retain the conception of a sensation. But we can vary our ideas of surfaces and bodies at will, while the colour remains the same. So at last we are forced to look upon this element, that remains the same in spite of all changes in the combinations, as a simple sensation. In the same way we consider a simple tone as a sensation of hearing, and a clang or chord, composed of several tones, as an auditory idea, and so on. If the tones follow each other in a melodious and rhythmical combination, then ideas of increasing complexity arise, and in the same manner several relatively simple visual ideas may be bound together into more extensive simultaneous or successive unities. The senses of sight and of hearing in especial form in this way a great variety of sensations and ideas, and they do this in two ways--firstly, through the qualities of their simple sensations, and secondly, through the complications of ideas, into which these sensations may be combined. The simple scale of tones, from the deepest to the highest tone that can be heard, consists of an infinite gradation of tonal qualities, out of which our musical scale chooses only certain tones, which lie at relatively large distances from each other. Musical clangs are combinations of a number of such simple tonal sensations, and the so-called compound clangs increase this complicated constitution of the clangs by emphasising to a greater degree certain partial tones. The simple light-sensations form a more concise manifoldness, but one that stretches into different directions. Red, for example, on the one hand goes over by constant gradations into orange and then into yellow, and on the other hand we have just as many constant gradations from each of these colour-shades through the lighter colour-tones into white, or through the darker ones into black, and so on. The ideas of this sense are absolutely inexhaustible. If we think of the manifold forms of surfaces and bodies, and of the differences in distance and direction, in which we perceive objects, it is obvious that it is absolutely impossible to find any limit here. Thus the richness in sensations and ideas, which each of the senses conveys, stands in close relation to the spatial distance of the objects which they introduce into consciousness. The narrowest region is that of the touch and organic sense, where the impressions all refer to our own body. Then come the sensations of the two so-called chemical senses of taste and of smell. Even in man they have the important function of organs of help or protection in the choice of food, as is the case in the whole animal kingdom. The sensations and ideas of hearing stretch much further. By means of them the outer world enters into relation with our consciousness in language, song, and music. And last of all, the sense of sight, the sense of distance in the real meaning of the word, gives form and content to the whole picture of the outer world, that we carry in our consciousness. However different the qualities of sensations and the forms of ideas may be, yet these elements and complexes all agree in one particular--they all refer to the objective world, to things and processes outside of us, to their qualities, their combinations, and their relations. Our own body, to which touch and organic sensations relate, forms in contradistinction to our consciousness a part of this outer world. It is the nearest to us, but still a mere part of the outer world. The question immediately arises: Do these objective elements and complexes form the only content of consciousness? Or in other words, are the only psychical elements such as we project outwards? Or are there in our consciousness, besides this picture of the outer world, other elements, which we do not apprehend as objects or their qualities that stand in contradistinction to ourselves? To answer this question let us use the metronome to help us. If we choose time intervals of a medium length, say 1/2 to 1 1/2 seconds, and if we make such a row of beats rhythmical by the voluntary emphasis of certain beats in the manner described above, then each single beat represents a sensation and the whole row of beats represents an idea. At the same time, during the impression on consciousness of such a rhythmical whole we notice phenomena that are not contained in our definition of sensation or idea. Above all, we have at the end of the row of beats the impression of an agreeable whole. If we wish to define this concept of "agreeable" more accurately, we may describe it as a subjective feeling of pleasure, which is caused by outward impressions, which we therefore call agreeable. This concept consists therefore of two parts--an objective idea, in our case the row of beats, and a subjective feeling of pleasure. This latter is obviously not in itself included in the impression of the row of beats or in that which we call the idea. It is clearly an added subjective element. It also shows itself to be such from the fact that we do not project it into the outer world. It is apprehended directly as a reaction of our consciousness, or rather, to express it at once more fittingly, of our apperception. This shows itself also in the relative independence of this feeling of pleasure from the objective constitution of the impression. Since in such a simple compound as a rhythmical row of beats the agreeableness is generally very moderate, we clearly observe that with many individuals the feeling of pleasure contained in it often sinks below the threshold of consciousness, so that they only perceive the objective constitution of the beats. With others this subjective reaction becomes very prominent. The feeling of pleasure will, as is well known, become more intense, when harmonious tones combine with the rhythmical beat into one melodious whole. The agreeable feeling that then arises from the melody can scarcely be wanting in any individual consciousness. Just here we note that the degree of this feeling of pleasure for one and the same melody can vary extraordinarily for different individuals. And these subjective differences increase more and more as the melodious compound becomes more complicated. A complicated tone-structure may produce the greatest ecstasy in a musician, whereas it may leave an unmusical person absolutely cold. The latter, on the other hand, may perhaps find a very simple melody agreeable, and this same melody may appear trivial to the musician and therefore disagreeable. In all these cases we see that the feeling of pleasure, which is bound to certain sensations and ideas, is purely subjective. It is an element that is not only dependent upon the impression itself, but also and always and most of all dependent upon the subject receiving the impression. And negatively the subjective character of this feeling is shown in the fact that it is never projected into the outer world, although it may be so closely bound up with the idea that refers to the outer world. But feelings of pleasure are not the only ones that we observe in our rhythm experiments. If we call to mind the exact state of consciousness between two beats of a rhythmical row, we notice that the apprehension of the identity of two intervals arises by means of a subjective process. This process takes place in the same manner within each of the two compared intervals, and thereby gives rise to the impression that they coincide. In ordinary life we generally speak of the phenomena, that are observed in such cases, as a change from "expectation" to "realisation." If we follow these phenomena a little more closely, we notice that in our case the process of expectation is a continuous and regularly varying one. At the moment immediately following one beat, expectation strains itself to catch the next one, and this straining increases until this beat really occurs. At the same moment the strain is suddenly relieved by the realisation of the expected, when the new beat comes. Then the same process is repeated during the next interval. If the arrangement of the beat is more complicated because of different degrees of emphasis, then these subjective processes become in proportion more complicated, since several such processes of expectation and realisation overlap one another. What do these processes, which we so often meet, although not always in such regular change as in a rhythmical row of beats, consist of? It is obvious at a glance that expectation and realisation are both elements that are not bound to the objective impression itself. These processes can vary subjectively just as much as the agreeable feeling that arises from a rhythmical row of beats or from a melody. It is now pretty generally agreed that these peculiar elements of consciousness arise within us and not without us. There is, however, still one possibility that remains. It might be that sensations are the bearers of these subjective phenomena of expectation, perhaps sensations that are perceived while listening to a row of beats, arising partly in the interior of the ear because of the straining of the membrane of the tympanum, and partly in the mimic muscles that surround the ear. These sensations correspond to the similar sensations in the eye in expectation of visual impressions. Yet this hypothesis, on closer examination, proves untenable for various reasons. First of all these sensations continue, during the whole period of expectation, in a relatively constant intensity, as far as can be observed. There is no trace of that regular increase and that sudden transition to the opposite process of realisation, such as we observed in our rhythm experiments. Secondly, we can produce exactly similar sensations in our ear, or round about our ear, or in the region surrounding the eye, if we voluntarily contract the muscles in question, without our being in a state of expectation, or if we send a slight electric current through such muscles. In both cases the characteristic element of expectation is wanting. Lastly, it is obviously impossible to account for these phenomena by means of uniform muscle-sensations if we wish to explain that superposition of states of expectation of different degrees and extents, which we observed in more complicated rhythmical rows of beats, or which happens in complicated psychical states arising through intellectual processes. How could the sensations of the membrane of the tympanum, or of the fixation muscles of the eye, account for that intense feeling of expectation which an exciting novel or a good play may cause? Add to this the fact that these states are quite as subjective and dependent on the individual disposition of consciousness as a feeling of pleasure that is awakened by an agreeable rhythm, and it is at once obvious that these states, which we shall call for shortness the contrasts of strain and relaxation, have the very same right to be called feelings. For feelings, wherever they arise, accompany, as subjective reactions of consciousness, sensations and ideas, but are never identical with them. We obtain therefore, with the above-mentioned medium rapidity of the metronome, feelings of pleasure and feelings of strain and relaxation in close connection with each other, as regular concomitants of rhythmical impressions. This, however, is essentially changed if the rapidity of the beats is altered. If we chose intervals of from to 3 seconds, strain and relaxation follow similarly as before. They appear even more distinctly, since the strain increases, to a greater intensity because of the longer intervals. But just as distinctly does the feeling of pleasure decrease with this increase in the length of the interval, and we soon reach the limit where the strain of expectation becomes painful. Here, then, the former feeling of pleasure is transformed into a feeling of displeasure, which is again closely connected with the feelings of strain and relaxation. Now let us proceed in the opposite direction by making the metronome beats follow each other after intervals of 1/2 to 1/4 of a second, and we notice that the feelings of strain and relaxation disappear. In their place appears an excitement that increases with the rapidity of the impressions, and along with this we have generally a more or less lively feeling of displeasure. We see, therefore, a new feeling added to those already found. We may call it most appropriately excitation. It is sufficiently well known to us in ordinary life in its more complicated forms, where it obviously forms an essential component of many emotions, e.g. anger, lively joy, &c. We can also find the contrast to this feeling of excitation with the help of the same instrument, by suddenly decreasing the rapidity of the beats to their medium rapidity again. This change is regularly accompanied by a very distinct feeling of quiescence (a quieting or subduing feeling). Accordingly our metronome experiments have brought to light three pairs of feelings--pleasure and pain, strain and relaxation, excitation and quiescence. At the same time it has been shown that only very seldom do these forms of feeling appear isolated. Several of them are generally combined together into one feeling-compound. We may call this latter the aggregate feeling, and the former the partial feelings. It is evident that between these two a similar relation exists as between ideas and pure sensations. Besides this, the contrasts of each pair of feelings--e.g. pleasure and displeasure--include the possibility of all these contrasts balancing each other, so that a state almost free from feeling may result. Just as, on the other hand, several partial feelings very often join together to form one aggregate feeling, so in more complicated states of emotion contrasting feelings may be intertwined. They do not therefore in all cases compensate one another. They sometimes join together to make contrasting combinations. Simple cases of such contrasting combinations or disjointed moods can be brought about in a simple form by means of the metronome. We arrange the time of the beats so that the feeling of strain just begins to become painful, while at the same time the feeling of relaxation, and partly also the strain directed on this, still causes pleasure. Let us now leave rhythmical acoustical impressions and consider any other sense. We find everywhere the same pairs of feelings that we produced by means of the metronome. It is very striking how the feeling-character always follows in the same directions, if we give successive impressions that give rise to contrasting feelings. Red is exciting, while blue in contrast to it is quieting. In the same way a deep and a high tone contrast. At the same time, the feeling-contrast is here a mixed one, as the expressions "serious" and "solemn" for deep tones, and "bright" and "lively" for the high ones, show. It would seem as if with the deepest tones pleasure and displeasure combine together to that total impression of seriousness, and to this a quieting feeling is added when the deep tone stands in contrast to preceding high tones. The feelings joined to the impressions of the senses of touch and smell and taste are in general more uniform and simpler. Here we have as contrasts the strong displeasure of a sensation of pain, and the feeling of pleasure of a weak sensation of tickling. Similarly with the pleasant impression of a sweet and the unpleasant impression of an intensely bitter or sour taste, and so on. It is obvious, however, that already among the smells we find many that possess a composite feeling-quality, e.g. pleasant and at the same time exciting, as menthol-ether, or unpleasant and exciting, as ammonia and asafoetida. The organic or common sensations are also often of a mixed feeling-character. Yet pleasure and displeasure predominate here most of all. An important characteristic of feelings consists lastly in the fact that they combine themselves into an affective process, which as a rule is joined to an ideational process. A temporal process of this kind with an affective and ideational content, that changes but is nevertheless joined together, we call an emotion, or with less intensity and a more lasting nature of the feelings, a disposition. Joy, delight, merriness, hope are emotions in which the predominant feeling is pleasure; anger, grief, sorrow, and fear are emotions in which displeasure predominates. Now in both these series of emotions the exciting and quieting feelings and the feelings of strain and relaxation in many cases often play an important part. The quieting feeling combined with displeasure we call depression. Joy and anger are exciting emotions, grief and fear are depressing, hope, sorrow, and fear are straining. When, however, an expected result takes place, or when the emotion of fear disappears, a strong feeling of relaxation generally occurs. Many emotions are also characterised by a fluctuating affective process, sometimes changing in intensity and sometimes in quality. Anger, hope, and sorrow in especial show great fluctuations in intensity. With hope, fear, and sorrow we very often find fluctuations in quality. Hope and sorrow often change between themselves, and in most cases increase in intensity because of this contrast. Especially with the emotions we can perceive this affective process objectively in the movements of the mimic muscles of the face, and when the emotions are very strong in the other muscles of the body. These so-called mimic and pantomimic "expression movements" are always combined with characteristic changes of the movements of the heart and lungs. They are in so far the most sensitive characteristics of these subjective processes, since they can be observed even with the weakest emotions and even with the simplest feelings, that have not yet been bound together into an affective process. The expansion and contraction of the small blood-vessels, especially of the face, that often happens in a state of emotion, must also be mentioned here. In anger and shame we notice blushing, and in fear and fright pallor. A further class of important compound processes stands in close connection with the emotions, i.e. the volitional processes. In many cases, even at the present day, the will is held to be a specific psychical element, or it is considered in its essence to be identical with the idea of an intended act. A closer investigation of the volitional process as to its subjective and objective characteristics shows, however, that it is most closely connected with the emotions, and that it really is to be considered an affective process. There is no act of volition in which feelings of greater or less intensity, which combine into an affective process, are not present. The characteristic in which a volitional process differs from an emotion consists essentially in the end of the process that immediately precedes and accompanies the act of volition. If this end is not reached, it remains simply an emotion. We speak of the emotion of anger if a man merely shows his angry excitement in his expression movements. On the other hand we speak of an act of emotion if he fells to the ground the person who has excited his anger. In many cases the emotions and their feeling-content, which form the constituent parts of the volitional process, are weaker, but they are never absolutely wanting. A voluntary action without feeling, one that follows from purely intellectual motives, as many philosophers presuppose, does not exist at all. On the other hand the volitional processes are marked out from the ordinary emotions by characteristics which give volition its peculiar character. Firstly there are certain ideas in the process which possess a more or less strong feeling-tone, and which are in direct connection with the end stage of the act of volition, and prepare for it. We call such ideas the motives of volition. Secondly, the end stage consists of characteristic feelings, which always occur in essentially the same manner in all volitional processes. These we generally call feelings of activity. They are very probably compounded of feelings of excitation, of strain, and of relaxation, as a closer subjective analysis and the concomitant objective expression-symptoms, especially the movements of breathing, show. Excitation and strain precede the conclusive act, relaxation and excitation accompany the act, and continue for a short time afterwards. It is obvious that the number and the reciprocal action of the motives are of decisive moment for the constitution of the volitional process. If only one single motive is present, which prepares the emotion and its discharge into action, we call the volitional process an impulsive act; The acts of animals are clearly in most cases such simple volitional acts. So also in the psychical life of man they play a very important part--the leading part in the more composite volitional processes, and they very often arise out of these latter when these have been often repeated. The actions that arise out of several conflicting motives of strong feeling-tone we call voluntary acts, or if we are clearly aware of a previous conflict of opposite motives, selective or discriminative acts. According to this complication of motives, the end stage, which is especially characteristic of the volitional processes, takes different forms. With impulsive acts the whole process takes place quickly; the concluding feelings of excitation, strain, and relaxation are generally crowded together in a very short time. With voluntary and especially with selective acts, the whole process is much slower, and the feelings often fluctuate up and down. The same is often the case with those complex volitional acts, which do not show themselves outwardly in certain bodily movements, but which give rise to changes in the process of consciousness itself. Such inner volitional acts are noticed above all in the voluntary concentration of attention, in the direction of thought guided by special motives, and so on. Now if we investigate more closely these feelings of strain, excitation, and relaxation, which make up these inner volitional acts, we notice at once the great conformity of these with the processes which accompany the apperception of an impression or of an idea arising in consciousness through recollection. It is obvious that these elements, grouped together under the name of "feelings of activity," make up along with varying sensations the essential part of impulsive and voluntary acts in the one case, and of the processes of attention and apperception in the other. These processes also coincide in so far as different forms of apperception correspond to impulsive and voluntary action. If we apprehend an impression which is given to us without our assistance, the attention seems in a sense to be compelled to turn to this impression, following this single motive. We can express this by saying we apprehend it passively. The feeling of activity always follows such an impression. If on the other hand we turn to an expected impression, then these feelings of strain and excitation clearly precede the impression. We are aware that our apperception is active. These have often been called processes of involuntary and voluntary attention. But these expressions are unsuitable, since in reality volitional processes are present in both cases. They are, like impulsive and voluntary acts, merely processes of different grades. It is at once evident that, by reason of this inner conformity, apperception itself may be looked upon as a volitional process. It occurs as an essential factor in all inner and outer volitional acts, and as an ever-present one in the feelings of activity so characteristic of the will. Herein lies the chief motive for the fact that we look upon the will as our most private possession, the one that is most identical with our inner nature itself. Our ideas seem in comparison with it to be something external, upon which our will reacts according to its feelings. And so at bottom our will coincides with our "ego." Now this ego is neither an idea, nor a specific feeling, but it consists of those elementary volitional processes of apperception which accompany the processes of consciousness. They are always changing but they are always present, and in this way form the lasting substratum of our self-consciousness. The inner line of fortifications of this ego are the feelings, which represent nothing more than the reactions of apperception to outer experience. The next line consists of this experience itself--the ideas, of which the ones that are nearest to us, i.e. those of our own body, are most closely connected with the volitional processes that are at work in the apprehension of them. And so it happens at a naive stage of consciousness that they are combined together with the ego itself into one unity. We have now learned to recognise the emotions, dispositions, and volitional processes as psychical contents, all of which differ from each other in their characteristic processes. None of them, however, contain anywhere specific elements. They can all of them be analysed into the same forms of feelings. Although the volitional process in especial is very peculiar, yet this peculiarity nowhere depends upon specific ideational or affective elements, but solely upon the mode of combination of these elements into emotions with their end stages again composed merely of general affective forms. Still there remains another question to be answered, which has not yet been settled by the reduction of all feelings to the above-mentioned six principal forms, viz. pleasure, displeasure, strain, relaxation, excitation, and quiescence. Is each of these forms perfectly uniform? Does it always return in the same quality? Or does it stand in a similar relation as the colour "blue" stands to the different shades of that colour, so that the principal form may not only appear in different grades of intensity, but also in various qualities? To answer these questions let us turn again to our metronome. It has again the advantage of illustrating our problem by means of a very simple example. Let us take two rows of beats in 4/4 time with the accents arranged differently as in A and B, obtained by the method of subjective rhythm as described above. [Illustration] Both contain the same number of rises and falls, but in a different arrangement. A shows a pronounced example of a descending row of beats, B a similar example of a row that first ascends and then descends. With a suitable rapidity of the metronome we can easily hear at will into the uniform beats of the pendulum each of these rhythms. If, however, we have once made our choice between the two forms, then we group the beats that follow the row A in exactly the same manner as the row A, and the same thing happens with the row B. Such a spontaneous repetition is only possible owing to the fact that at the last beat of each row we group the whole together. This we do with the succeeding beats as well, just as we have seen to be generally the case in measuring the scope of consciousness. Now if we observe our feelings we obtain an important addition to our previous observations. They showed us that a very important part of such a process was composed of the alternating feelings of strain and relaxation, and perhaps also of excitation and quiescence, and lastly of agreeableness. This last feeling was especially strong at the end of a row of beats, caused by the arrangement of the single element into one rhythmically ordered whole. It is obvious now that the centre of gravity of the affective process lies every time at the end of a row, where the superimposed rhythmical feelings run together into one unity. For it is unmistakably this feeling that allows us directly to apprehend the succeeding rows as identical with the preceding ones in a succession of similar rows. What we apperceive is not the preceding row itself. The greater number of its elements lie already in the darker field of consciousness. We apperceive rather this aggregate feeling, which is joined to the last directly apperceived element, and which is the resultant of the preceding affective processes. Now let us compare this terminal feeling, that lends a given rhythm its essential and peculiar affective character, as it appears in the two examples represented by A and B. It is evident that however much on the one hand a row may depend upon the constitution and the arrangement of the preceding components, it yet on the other hand always possesses its own specific quality. It is true that we can always classify this under one or more of the six chief qualities, and yet we do not thereby account for its own peculiar quality, which differentiates it from the others of the same class. It also cannot be considered a mere summation of the simple feelings that axe joined to the separate parts of the process. The feelings of strain and relaxation that are distributed over the rows A and B are the same. They differ at most in the degree of intensity. We cannot therefore understand why the feelings that remain behind at the end of each row should be so different. But it is so. We can convince ourselves of this more directly than in the experiments with voluntary rhythmical emphasis, if we produce the rows A and B after one another by means of knocking and without a metronome. Here the emphasised beats are not only subjectively, but also objectively accentuated. If, by this method, another observer compares the rows A and B given successively, he obtains at the end of each row such differing impressions that he cannot decide with certainty whether the rows are of equal or of different lengths. We saw above, that with the repetition of similar rows of beats, five rows of 4/4 time could be apprehended at once. Now, however, as soon as the rhythm is changed, it is impossible to compare one single row with another of differing rhythm. The aggregate feeling concentrated at the end of each row of beats possesses each time a qualitative colouring dependent upon the constitution of the rhythm. This colouring coincides in its general form with the feeling of agreeableness that arises at the end and with the feeling of relaxation following the strain of expectation. These observations supplement essentially our former results as to the apprehension of longer rows of beats. We found that the knowledge that two rows were the same, always came at the end of a row, and that this verification followed the rows directly in one uniform act of apperception. Now we can explain this phenomenon perfectly by the uniform nature and the instantaneous rise of that resulting aggregate feeling. Because of this the last beat in a rhythmical row comes to represent the whole row. 'The quality of the rhythmical feeling that corresponds to the time in question concentrates itself in a perfectly adequate manner in the apperception. Thus the qualitative shades of feeling that are bound to the idea come to represent the idea itself. This substitution is of the greatest importance, above all from the fact, as we have clearly seen in the rhythmical experiments, that the ideas and their components lying in the darker fields of consciousness influence in their apperceptive affective power the process of consciousness. What has been here explained with the simple example of a row of beats, can now be applied to ideational content of every kind. If we form a melody by combining the rhythm with a certain ordered change of tones, and if it is repeated, exactly the same process takes place as with the repetition of an unmelodious row of beats. The qualitative resultant of this whole, which here again is concentrated on the apperception of the last impression and which makes an immediate repetition possible, has, however, become very much richer. Here in the terminal feeling, preparing itself during the course of the melodious collection of tones, the whole concentrates itself again to a perfectly uniform affective product complete in itself. It is the very same with any other ideational compound. Even although the affective value is very weak, it always receives a qualitative colouring from the composition of the idea. This colouring appears, where other more lively affective reactions are wanting, as a modification of the delicate feelings of strain and excitation which accompany all processes of consciousness, and especially of apperception. The great importance which feelings have for all the processes of consciousness is often overlooked. This applies to the processes of memory, cognition and recognition, and also to the so-called activities of imagination and understanding. We shall return to this when we discuss these various forms of psychical combinations. At this point let us emphasise once again the result that our observations have led us to as to the real nature of feeling. We have called the feelings states that were connected with the subject, subjective reactions of consciousness. We see now that this description is not exactly incorrect, but that it is inadequate. What gives its psychical value to a feeling arising from any objective content of consciousness is not its connection with consciousness, but the fact that it is closely bound up with the apperceptive processes. Feeling is always bound to an apperceptive act. This came plainly to light in the rhythmical experiments where the feeling arose from preceding impressions. Feeling may therefore be looked upon as the specific way in which the apperception reacts upon the content of consciousness that stands in connection with the immediately apperceived impression. Lastly, two other questions present themselves. How is it that feeling possesses the characteristic of appearing in certain contrasts, viz. pleasure and displeasure, &c.? And how is it that just three such pairs of contrasts exist, which we shall call for the sake of shortness the three dimensions of feeling? Since we are here dealing with ultimate facts of psychological experience, which cannot be further analysed, the answers to our questions cannot in the proper sense give an explanation of these facts. That is, in reality, as impossible as to explain why a blue colour is blue and a red one red. Considering, however, the connection of the feelings with the total processes of consciousness, we can try to explain these contrasts in this connection The view of feeling as a way of reaction of the apperception upon a given content gives us some help in understanding these affective contrasts. We found that the act of apperception represented a simple volitional act. Now each volition contains latently either an attracting or an opposing element. Our volition is attracted by the desired object, and it turns away from the one that opposes us. Herein lies expressed, as we can see, that fundamental relation of affective contrasts which now spreads into different directions in the basal forms of feeling. Among these the pair of contrasts of pleasure and displeasure may be looked upon as a modification of the attracting and opposing elements, which are directly connected with the qualitative constitution of the impression or the idea. What we desire is joined with pleasure, what opposes us with displeasure. On the other hand, the pair of contrasts of excitation and quiescence will very likely stand in direct relation to the intensity with which apperception enters into action, even although qualitatively the content that calls it into action be pleasurable, or the reverse, or indifferent. Now in so far as this action, called forth by a certain content, consists of an increase or decrease of the normal function of apperception, so the intensive side of the reaction divides up into these two opposites--excitation and quiescence. Lastly, because of the relation between the successive processes of consciousness, each act of apperception stands at the same time in connection with the preceding and the succeeding processes. Now, according as apperception is directed to an immediately passed or to an immediately coming row, a feeling of relaxation or of strain arises. We may therefore look upon each single feeling in principle as a compound that can be divided up into all these dimensions and into their two principal directions. In each feeling these components are emphasised more or less strongly or are quite wanting, while all the time the total qualitative constitution of the content of consciousness gives to the whole its specific colouring, which distinguishes it from every other content. CHAPTER III ASSOCIATION The elements of our consciousness, as the foregoing discussion has taught us, stand in general combinations with each other. Even where objective impressions lack steady combinations, we are accustomed to construct such by means of subjective sensations and feelings. The single beats of a row on the metronome are as such isolated, but we combine them into a rhythmical whole by means of our feelings of strain and relaxation, and by means of weak accompanying muscle-sensations. We have seen that in this way the different ideational compounds, the complex feelings, the emotions, and the volitional processes are all resultants of the psychical processes of combination. Now, how are these combinations constituted, and what laws are they subject to? Psychologists generally have called them "Associations," since the English philosophy of the eighteenth century turned its attention to the importance of this process of combination. The opinion has often been expressed that this one concept is sufficient to include under it all psychical processes of combination. We shall soon see, however, that thereby a very important and characteristic difference is left out of account. We shall choose this difference, since it certainly influences all processes of consciousness, as our chief principle in a division of these combinations. This distinctive characteristic consists in the fact that one set of psychical combinations acts of its own accord, i.e. without the accompaniment of those feelings of activity which we learnt were constituent parts of the processes of apperception and volition; whereas another set is closely connected with these activities. At the same time, further distinctive characteristics in the combination processes run parallel to this one. Let us therefore call only those generally passive combination processes associations, and the active ones apperceptive combinations, or for shortness apperceptions. If we limit in this way the concept "association" in contra-distinction to the ordinary use of the term, still we must enlarge it considerably on the other side, if we wish to do justice to all the combinations of this sort that really exist. The old theory of association was founded exclusively on the observation of the memory-processes. With such a process we are accustomed to take note, first of all, merely of the ideational compounds of consciousness, and secondly, the ideas in such a schematic memory-process are arranged regularly in a temporal succession; for example, an outward impression acts first of all upon consciousness, and then we remember something previous that was similar to this impression, or stood in relation to it. Now these memory-processes, as a closer inspection will show, make up a remarkably small part of our associations. They are in fact of much less importance than many other forms. As soon as we compare this form with other forms, we recognise at once that it is merely a secondary form. If we wish to arrange associations according to their simplicity and the closeness of their combinations, we can start with the following simple experiment. If we make the string of a piano sound by plucking it in the middle, then, as the science of physics teaches us, not only does the whole string vibrate, but each half vibrates as well in a smaller degree, and in general each third part, each fourth, &c., in ever decreasing amplitudes. These segments, which decrease in length according to the numerical series 1, 2, 3, &c., correspond to tones of increasing pitch--the half string corresponds to the octave, the third part to the fifth of the octave, the fourth to the double octave, and so on. If these high tones are then produced alone, one after another, by making the corresponding part of the string vibrate each time, and if we then return to the tone of the whole string, we can then, if we listen attentively, hear clearly, along with the stronger sounding fundamental tone, these overtones, or at least those nearest to the fundamental. We therefore say that the clang of a string, or of any other musical source, does not only consist of the one tone according to which we determine its pitch, but also of a series of overtones, which give it its timbre or clang-colour. This expression itself points to the fact that in hearing a clang there takes place psychologically an association, which is of a specially intimate kind. The above-described experiment of comparing a clang with some of its overtones teaches us that these latter really exist in sensation, and that we can perceive them with very intense attention. Nevertheless under ordinary circumstances we do not perceive them as independent tones, but they appear to us massed together only as a specific modification of the fundamental tone, and we call this its clang-colour or timbre. An association of this kind, in which the sensation-components are so fused into the resulting product that they can no longer be clearly perceived as isolated component parts, is called a fusion. Such a fusion can be either a very close one or a very loose one. A single clang is for example a close fusion, a chord is a loose one. The separate fundamental tones of a chord are bound fairly closely into one whole, but we can hear at least some of them quite plainly. Similar fusions occur in the various senses, and they become very complicated owing to the fact that sensation-elements of several senses are joined together at the same time. The disappearance of the components into one resulting product brings it about that we cannot directly perceive the separate elements that make up this product by means of direct sensation, as is in part possible in the case of clang-fusions. We are forced to make use of an indirect method. We proceed from the principle, that each sensation, a change in which is of essential influence on the resulting idea, belongs to the components of this idea. A pronounced case of this kind is seen very clearly in spatial ideas of the senses of touch and sight. If any part of the skin is touched with a little rod, we can, as is well known, with a fair degree of certainty apprehend the place touched, without looking at it. Now in the pathological cases of partial paralysis, it is shown that there are two kinds of sensations that are of essential influence on this localisation. Firstly, it is considerably disturbed by a partial suspension of the outer cutaneous sensitivity. In this case the patient often localises the impression on a place far removed from the place touched. Secondly, complete or partial paralysis of the muscles in the region of the place touched, e.g. the muscles of the arm and hand in the case of a touch sensation on the hand, causes just as much confusion in localisation. In this case as well the patient may localise the impression on an absolutely wrong part of the body. Therefore we must presuppose that neither cutaneous nor muscle sensations alone are the original cause of the idea of the place touched, but that both together by fusion give rise to this idea. After this has once happened, the quality of the touch sensation which is peculiar to each part of the skin and which varies with the place of the impression, can in itself bring about a localisation. That in general both components, i.e. cutaneous and movement sensations, must fuse together in order to produce an idea of a certain place or locality, is clearly shown in blind people, and especially in those born blind. In their case the sense of sight, which determines the whole perception of space for those who can see, is wanting, and we observe in them a continuous and very lively co-operation of cutaneous sensations and movements of touch. Exactly corresponding to these relations in the sense of touch are the phenomena that we observe in the formation of visual spatial ideas. Here as well we notice two sensation-components regularly working together. The one consists of the sensations of the retina. Analogous to the touch sensations of the skin, they vary in quality not only according to the constitution of the outer impressions, but also according to the part of the retina which is affected by the impression. The other component consists of the extremely delicate sensations which accompany the positions and movements of the eye. They vary in their intensity according to the length of the distance through which the movement travels, just like the sensations of movement of the other muscles of the body. We notice, therefore, that changes in the position of the retinal elements, which may occur in inflammations of the inside of the eye, or abnormalities in the mechanism of the eye-movements may disturb considerably our spatial perception. They cause sometimes apparent dislocations in the objects seen, and at other times illusions as to their size and distance. These influences can be demonstrated on the normal eye by means of experiments. By making the movement of the eye more difficult, we cause the length of a distance to be over-valued. If we compare two straight lines of exactly the same length, one of which is interrupted by a number of transverse lines, so that a continuous movement of the eye is hindered, then this divided line appears longer than the undivided one. We can also by systematic experiments change the normal relation between eye-movements and retinal sensations. It will then be observed that our vision slowly begins to adapt itself to this new relation between the eye-movements and the position of the retinal elements. This can be done by wearing spectacles with prismatic glasses for a considerable length of time. At first all objects appear distorted. A straight line appears curved, a circle looks like an oval, and so on. If the spectacles are worn for several days, these distortions disappear. It may happen that distortions again appear when the glasses are discarded. This phenomenon can scarcely be accounted for except in the following manner. The retinal sensations by means of local differences in quality, which we may call qualitative local signs, correspond to definite sensations of movement graduated as to intensity, which we may call intensive local signs. Their relation to the centre of the retina probably determines this correspondence. Now our experiment with the prismatic glasses shows that this relation is neither an absolutely permanent nor an innate one, but that it is acquired by practice. It is acquired by the function itself, and therefore, when the functional relations are changed, gives way to a different relation or correspondence. This combination possesses distinctly the character of an association, and in so far as in it the sensation-components only appear as modified elements of the resulting spatial idea, it also possesses the characteristics of a fusion. In contradistinction, however, to the intensive fusions of clangs and chords, this possesses the special characteristic, that it consists of elements out of different senses. For the qualitative local signs belong to the sense of sight or to the sense of touch if we are dealing with spatial cutaneous perceptions which are exactly analogous to visual perceptions; whereas the intensive local signs belong to sensations of movement or muscle sensations. Both together form a complex system of local signs. Just as sensations fuse together into more or less complex ideas, so also do feelings fuse together into complex compounds, in which single elements appear to bear the rest, which act in a modifying manner upon the form, something analogous to the overtones of a clang. These affective fusions are again bound up most closely with the ideational fusions that correspond to them. The impression of a musical chord is composed of both. Only in a psychological analysis can we separate the ideational from the affective associations, which are the essential causes of the æthetic character of the chord. One of the most important and simplest affective fusions of this kind is that of the so-called "common or organic feeling." It consists of an indefinite number of organic feelings, to which more or less lively feelings are joined, which in this case pre-eminently belong to the class of pleasant-unpleasant feelings. In this case, just as in the case of a chord, certain elements are predominant, while the others are merely modifying concomitants. Our general state of health, e.g. freshness and activeness or general displeasure and exhaustion, is essentially a product of this affective complex, in which under normal conditions the sensuous feelings joined to the strain and movement sensations of the muscles play the most important part. A most important form of fusion consists of the impressions of our sense of hearing and of our organs of locomotion. These impressions are the intermediaries of our ideas of time. If we divide up into their elements the processes of consciousness caused by metronome beats of a medium rapidity, we find two classes--those that belong to the class of sensations and those that belong to feelings. As sensations we have first of all the single metronome beats divided from each other by empty intervals. These are not the only sensations. As we have shown above, there is also a weak sensation of strain which probably arises from the tensor muscle of the tympanum, and which lasts continuously from one beat to the other. To this is joined a further sensation in the mimic muscles surrounding the ear. The whole process, therefore, looked at from the point of view of sensation, appears as a continuous sensation-process, which is interrupted at regular intervals by stronger impulses arising from the objective impressions of the beats. To all this, however, as we saw before, there is added the regularly alternating feelings of strain and relaxation, which determine the rhythmical ideas. All these elements of sensation and feeling form in reality an indivisible whole. If a temporal idea is to arise, none of these components may be wanting, if the sensations are wanting, the feelings have, so to speak, no foundation. They can only arise if sensation impressions are present, upon which the feelings of expectation and realisation can be founded. On the other land the sensations remain unconnected, they lack a combination into a successive row, if the feelings of strain and relaxation are not present, for they directly help in the apprehension of the equality or inequality of the successive periods of time. If the beats are allowed to follow each other so slowly that the last one disappears out of the scope of consciousness when the new one enters, then the idea of time becomes absolutely uncertain. The same thing happens if, on the other hand, the time is so rapid that feelings of strain and relaxation cannot arise. In both cases it is obvious that any uncertain idea of time is only possible by reason of other extraneous factors. Just as all our objective measures of time, from the course of the sun to the vibrations of a tuning-fork used to measure time, depend upon regular periodic movements, so also is our subjective time-consciousness absolutely dependent upon rhythmical ideas. These arise first of all from our movements of locomotion, and then in a much richer and finer form are transmitted to us by our sense of hearing. In all these cases, however, the resulting idea of time can be divided up into a substratum of sensation and into an affective process of strain and relaxation, of expectation and realisation. In the idea of time they fuse perfectly together, so that the influence of these factors can only be shown by the essential changes, which the resulting idea undergoes, if one of these sensation or affective factors is altered in some marked degree. Just as elements of consciousness are joined together by fusion into compounds, so these compounds themselves undergo manifold changes, out of which new combinations arise. Of great importance among these associations of the second class are those which we shall call assimilations and dissimilations. As ideational combinations they can be easily demonstrated, whereas the corresponding affective associations are joined to them rather as secondary components or form a special class of complex feelings, which are connected with the processes of recollection, recognition, memory, &c, and which we shall treat of in detail later on. Let us first of all glance at some of the most important phenomena in connection with assimilation and dissimilation. To begin with the simplest case, we let one object of sight work in an assimilating manner upon another. We can achieve this most readily if we first of all make the difference between the two objects very small, and if secondly we bring them into a familiar relationship to each other, and so promote the idea of their identity. For example, we draw from one and the same centre sectors of a circle, and make one less than the others only by a few degrees. In spite of this we are inclined to apprehend all the sectors as equal. The larger ones work assimilatively upon the smaller one. To cause the opposite process of dissimilation, we draw one large sector among several smaller sectors. This appears, in contrast to the surrounding smaller sectors, very much enlarged, and we can convince ourselves of this by drawing on another piece of paper a sector of the same size as the one changed by dissimilation. This independent sector will then appear smaller than the one of its own size that is lying among the smaller sectors. This dissimilative change is generally called a contrast. We must not, however, confuse this dissimilative contrast with the contrast of feelings, where it is not a case of the formation of apparent differences in size, but of qualitative contrasts, such as pleasure and displeasure, or the increase of these. More important than the assimilations and dissimilations between directly given impressions are those that arise out of the reciprocal action of a direct impression and of ideational elements, which belong to previous impressions, and therefore arise by means of an act of memory. Reproductive assimilations of this kind we have already met with in our reading experiments (see p. 26). We saw there that a well-known word can in general be read almost instantaneously, although its scope greatly exceeds that of the focus of attention. It is clear that this great facilitation in apprehension is only possible owing to the familiarity of the object, because by its action it gives rise to the reproduction of former corresponding impressions, and thereby causes the completion of the image only partially perceived. We can convince ourselves of this in a striking manner by means of reading experiments, in which certain letters of a fairly long word have been voluntarily altered. Such changes are then in general only partially or not at all perceived in these quick reading experiments. It may easily happen that we take the following combination of letters "Miscaldoniousness" for the word "Miscellaneousness," although four out of the seventeen letters of the word have been changed, If by chance our attention is very strongly concentrated upon one of the wrong letters, we can perceive the mistake, but for the other wrong letters the right ones are as a rule substituted. It is obvious that this phenomenon is exactly the same as the one we continually meet with when we overlook misprints in a book, only that in our experiments a false reading is greatly favoured by the shortness of the exposition-time. In all these cases we generally take it for granted that it is nothing more nor less than an inaccurate apprehension, as the expression "overlook" suggests. Yet our rapid reading experiments convince us that this expression is really incorrect. In reality it is not a mere not-seeing of the wrong letters, but a seeing of the right ones in the place of the wrong ones. If we call into our mind directly after the experiment the image we have seen, we can see very often in those very places, where a wrong letter stands, the right letter in the full distinctness of an immediate impression. This is, of course, only possible if the wrong letter is displaced by the reproduction of the right one. Such a process is obviously made up of two parts--firstly, the displacement of the wrong letter, and secondly, the reproduction of the right one. Naturally both acts take place quite simultaneously, and therefore we may look upon the displacement as an effect of the reproduction. In this combination of the two acts an assimilation process and a dissimilation process are joined together. By means of an assimilation caused by the other letters the right letter is reproduced, and this together with all the rest of the word has a dissimilating effect upon the wrong letter. At the same time a further conclusion follows from these phenomena, which is of importance for the understanding of all the processes of association. It is impossible to imagine that a combination of letters, such as we have given above, could work as a whole, and then, because it was wrong, be replaced by the right word. It is on the contrary obvious that processes of assimilation and displacement have only occurred at certain places. It is also difficult to take for granted that the observer has ever seen the word printed in exactly the same size and type as employed in the reading experiments. It cannot, therefore, be a single definite word-image that he calls to memory, but there must be an indefinite number of similar word-images, which affect assimilatively the given impression, and cast it into the word-form which we ultimately apprehend. From this it follows that these associations do not by any means consist of a combination of complex ideas, but of a combination of ideational elements, which may possibly belong to very different ideas. With this we see that assimilation is at the same time closely connected with the associations by fusion considered above. In both cases the association is an elementary process. The difference between the two forms consists only in the fact that the elements in a fusion are constituent parts of a complex impression, whereas in an assimilation they already belong to complex ideas, from which they then break away in order to enter into new ideational compounds. Thus fusion and assimilation work together in all sense-perceptions. The moment we see an object, hear a musical chord, &c., not only do the parts of the impression itself fuse together, but the impression also immediately gives rise to reproductive elements, which fill up any gaps in it, and arrange it among the ideas familiar to us. These processes continually overlap each other, and extend over all the regions of sense. What we imagine we perceive directly, really belongs in a great extent to our memory of innumerable previous impressions, and we are not aware of a separation between what is directly given us and what is supplied by assimilation. Only when the reproductive elements attain to such a striking ascendancy, that they come into an irreconcilable contradiction with our usual perceptions, are we accustomed to speak of a deception of the senses or of an illusion. But this is only a limiting case, and it goes over by unnoticeable intermediate gradations into normal associations, which we might just as well call "normal illusions." Many words of a lecture are imperfectly heard; the contours of a drawing or painting are only imperfectly represented in our eye. In spite of this we notice none of the gaps. That does not happen because we perceive the things inaccurately, as this phenomenon is often incorrectly interpreted, but because we have at our disposal the rich stores of memory, which fill out and perfect the perceived image. This complementary association is met with in a striking manner, when a real assimilation is hindered by the associated elements belonging to different senses. In this case the difference in sense-quality erects, as it were, a partition-wall, which prevents the unobservable union of the elements. But at the same time even then close combinations can be formed, which at the operation of a sense-impression immediately reproduce the associated sensations of another sense. For example, we often observe in silent reading weak clang-images of the words, to which are joined slight movements of the articulation-organs, or at least indications of such movements. At the sight of a musical instrument we often perceive in ourselves a weak auditory sensation of its clang; the sight of a gun will often give rise to a weak sound sensation, or if we hear the gun fired, to a reproduced visual image, and so forth. Such associations of disparate senses are called complications. They form an important supplement to the associations, since together with these they essentially determine the ideational process in consciousness. Such a co-operation of assimilations and complications is seen in the most striking manner in those processes of association which in ordinary life are called "recognitions," or, if the scope of the region of association over which the recognition stretches is indefinitely larger, are called "cognitions." We recognise, for example, an acquaintance, whom we have not seen for a long time. We know a table as a table, although we may never have seen the particular table in question before. We can do this by means of the indefinite number of associations with other tables, which the image of the table in question gives rise to. From what we have said above, it is at once obvious that all such recognitions or cognitions are nothing more than assimilations. The usual expression (to know or to be cognisant of) must not tempt us to look upon the process as a logical process, as an act of "knowledge." An act of knowledge may possibly follow a process of pure associative assimilation, if we afterwards try to account for the motives of the same. But the processes themselves, as they continually occur and make up an important part of our sense-experience, are pure associations. To place in them any acts of judgment or of reflection, as is customary in the scholastic psychology of ancient and modern times, can only serve to disguise the real psychological character of these processes. Among the associations called recognitions, only those are of special interest in which the consummation of the assimilation process is in any way hindered, either because the perceived object has but seldom been met with, or because it has undergone changes since a previous perception of it. For example it may, as is well known, take a long time before we recognise a friend, who meets us unexpectedly after many years' absence. If we observe the process in such a case a little more closely, it appears regularly that the impression of the individual which we first of all receive, appears to change because of certain lineaments, that are apperceived by means of our feelings, rather than brought into connection with the personality in question. Thus there arises a feeling of being acquainted with him, and then there occurs a second act, the real recognition, which follows in some cases very rapidly. This is the consummation of the assimilation proper. Here we see assimilation has turned into successive association, and we generally call it a process of memory. In fact this obviously arises out of an ordinary simultaneous assimilation, if the latter is hindered by some disturbing factor, so that the first impression and the assimilation of this impression form two successive acts. Such a dividing up into a succession generally occurs very distinctly, especially when the factors hindering the assimilation are so strong that it requires the addition of a further helping factor in order to overcome the hindrance. How often does it happen that some one greets us and we do not recognise him! If, however, he comes forward and mentions his name, suddenly the whole personality as a well-known one rises up in front of us. The reproductive assimilations are only set into motion by the addition of a helping idea. At the same time this example shows us how, in the dividing up of an assimilation process into a memory process, a complication may occasionally intervene. The name and the visual image are joined together as a complication, although in regard to the impression of human personalities in general they form fairly strong associations. In these processes of hindrance and assistance of associations, which are to be observed in recognitions, feelings play a not unimportant part. We have indicated this already. In the above example, before we recognised the friend we had not seen for a long time, the act of recognition was prepared for by an indefinite kind of feeling, which with a certain suddenness, experiencing at the same time a noticeable increase in intensity, changed into the real act of recognition. How are we to explain this feeling? Whence does it come, and how can we explain its transition into the assimilation? The term a "feeling of familiarity" or a "quality of familiarity" with a thing has been used and has been regarded as a name for a specific element common to all acts of recognition. This was supposed to be affixed to every known object as a kind of outward sign. But the supposition of such an abstract symbol contradicts absolutely our observation. For, however indefinite this feeling may be in the period that prepares for the assimilation, it nevertheless possesses in each separate case its own peculiar quality, which is quite dependent upon the constitution of the recognised object. For example, the feeling differs, if we recognise an old friend, and if we recognise a district through which we have once wandered long ago. And it is by no means the same when we meet our friend Mr. X., and when we meet Mr. Y. whom we did not wish to see again. Just as much as the objects themselves differ, so do the so-called "qualities of familiarity" diverge from each other. From this we must conclude that these qualities are integral parts of the objects, naturally not of their objective nature, but of their effect upon us, or, more precisely expressed, of our apperception. Now we have learnt that the essence of feeling was just this influence of the ideational content of consciousness upon the apperception. It follows therefore incontestably, that this quality of familiarity is nothing more than the feeling character, which the recognised idea possesses for us. Now this feeling of being acquainted with a thing, as the above-mentioned observations teach us, may be very strong, while the assimilation of the new idea by the old is taking place not quite unhindered. We must therefore conclude that, in the period of preparation for the recognition, the assimilating previous idea is already beginning to make its appearance in the darker region of consciousness, and that it causes its corresponding affective reaction, but that it cannot itself force its way through to apperception. This interpretation of the process obviously receives fundamental support from our previous observations of the rhythmical feelings. With them it was also a case of recognition. If we repeat two similar rows of beats one after the other, we recognise the second as similar to the first. Now this can only happen, as we have convinced ourselves, if the total feeling concentrates itself upon the last beat of each row, which in its specific feeling-quality corresponds to the previous rhythmical whole. Exactly the same thing that happened in these rhythmical experiments, repeats itself now in these retarded recognitions of ordinary experience, except that in a way the distribution of the feelings is reversed. In the recognition of a rhythm the feeling corresponding to it arises out of the influence of the elements, that have receded out of the focus of attention into the darker field of consciousness, upon the apperception; in the steady rise of an impression to a state of recognition, the feeling is caused by the influence of the elements that are already in the darker field of consciousness but have not yet entered into the focus of attention. In these complex processes of the recognition of objects, a further condition is added, which in the repetition of rows of beats did not make itself felt, at least not in the same degree, because of the simplicity of the phenomenon, It consists in the fact that each idea possesses a background of other ideas that are joined to it in a spatial or temporal connection, and that in the process of recognition these ideas may hinder or assist the assimilation process. They may retard the recognition or make it absolutely impossible, or they may form essential aids to it. Such secondary ideas can be observed very distinctly in cases where they join the chief idea after some time has elapsed. So in the above example, where the mentioning of the man's name caused a sudden recognition of the person himself; or, to take the reverse of this example, where the assimilation that is being formed is retarded owing to the fact that the name is other than the one suited to the motives of assimilation. Such secondary ideas are of course always present, even although we do not notice them. Even although they are in the darkest region of consciousness, they form, along with the feeling-tone of the chief idea, important components of the feelings accompanying the processes of cognition and recognition, especially in regard to their influence upon the apperception. In this way these latter are in reality always resultants of a sum of influences, and thus each separate experience, because of the unlimited variation of the secondary ideas accompanying assimilations and recognitions, possesses its specific feeling-tone, which distinguishes it from other previous or succeeding experiences. Many phenomena that belong here escape ordinary observation, because their continuous repetition makes us insensitive to them. In those cases where an impression was accompanied by a very strong feeling-tone, and where its return is accompanied by a totally different affective state, we notice distinctly how the original feeling-tone becomes modified owing to the changed background. Thus every psychical process possesses its specific tone, even if it appears as a mere repetition of a previous process. The changing secondary ideas, by means of their own affective influences, give it its special temporal and local signs. By means of these each single process can be distinguished from any other, however similar this may be. The opposite phenomenon may also occur. Who does not know the strange feeling which occasionally comes over us at some process, the feeling that we have already in the past experienced this thing, although we know with certainty that this is in reality impossible? These phenomena also belong to the department of feelings, and we must connect them with the influences which arise from the indistinct secondary ideas, and which may at times almost exactly correspond, even when the chief ideas themselves are absolutely different. If such feelings become particularly strong, they very likely exert a reactive influence upon the assimilation process, and thus cause the new experience to appear as the repetition of a previous one. It may be that the so-called "second sight," which some people imagine they possess, depends upon very strong individual affective reactions of this kind and their assimilative influences. The ever-changing constellations of secondary ideas give each single experience its specific feeling-tone, by means of which it is distinguished from previous and following experiences. So it may happen that similar constellations of the darkly perceived content return in processes that otherwise are different, i.e. in the components that stand in the focus of consciousness. There is also another experience that may be mentioned here--one that has certainly escaped no keen observer of his own psychical life. If one calls to mind any previous experience, or in general any previous period of life--e.g. any definite period of one's childhood, of one's student life, or the beginning of one's professional career, &c.--each such striking experience or each such period of life is connected with a peculiar feeling, which also in this case enters into a distinct reciprocal action with the recalled ideas, inasmuch as it raises them to a greater degree of clearness and is itself increased by them. Any single recalled idea could scarcely account for the unusual intensity and the specific quality which these feeling-tones often reach. We must also remember that a clearly apperceived content in such cases seldom arises, and that in the second set (the periods of life) we have not as a rule one single idea. We can understand such cases by considering the fact that, if fewer definite ideas clearly arise, a great number of indistinct secondary ideas are active, and, since they are peculiar to each experience and to each period of life, call up again the corresponding total feeling, where a more definite reproduction of single ideas is absolutely wanting. Let us return after this digression to the processes of recognition. The activity of the secondary ideas, that came to light in the experiences described above, helps us to understand some special characteristics that we met with in ordinary recognition, and still more so in the hindrances that this may experience. Especially in acts of recognition that are in some way or other retarded, we can in general observe a strong affective reaction arising, which, wherever we can bring it into connection with special motives, points to the effect of secondary ideas. They are as a rule only indistinct in consciousness, but sometimes they are afterwards recognised and prove themselves to be the motive, not only of the specific accompanying feeling, but also of the recognition itself. With these are closely connected other phenomena, which arise under circumstances where a real act of recognition never takes place, or under circumstances where the process, which is at first taking place absolutely within the region of the affective influences of the indistinct content of consciousness, more or less suddenly changes at most into an act of memory. A few examples will make such cases clear. Who has not had the experience of being for hours at a time oppressed with the feeling that he has forgotten something, or missed something, or done something wrong, without being able to explain what it is that oppresses him in this manner? Or who has not had experiences such as the following? I leave my house, and the moment I walk along the street I feel there is something I have forgotten; then by chance I pass a pillar-box, and it suddenly strikes me that I have forgotten to take with me an important letter. To such examples also belongs the torture we sometimes endure in trying to recall a name well-known to us. In such cases it often happens that we voluntarily try to obtain similar aids to our memory, as sometimes play a part in the retarded recognition of an individual known to us. Attempts have been made to explain all such cases by speaking of "states of consciousness"--an expression that tells us nothing and gives us no information as to the nature of these phenomena themselves. Now these feelings of forgetting, of thinking over a thing, of missing a thing, &c., are by no means always the same. They depend in each single case upon the special constitution of the idea in question. We can, therefore, in a manner analogous to our recognition experiments, interpret them as affective reactions to indistinct ideational content, in which the affective quality is dependent upon the specific constitution of the ideas, whereas the general affective character in the above-mentioned cases mostly belongs to the directions of strain and excitation. The phenomena of recognition in their origin could be represented as simultaneous assimilations with occasional intervening complications. In their inhibition-forms, which we have just discussed, they lead us directly over to memory-associations. The old theory of association derived from these its schematism of association forms. In reality they are the association phenomena that are most of all noticed, because with them the ideas that are bound together seem to be distinguishable from each other because of their succession in time. Our previous discussion has, however, shown us that they are neither the only combinations of this class, nor even the most important ones. In fact they may be defined in accordance with their psychological origin as assimilations and complications, in which the combination of the constituent components is hindered by opposing motives, so that these components appear as independent ideas. This is seen clearly in such cases in which a continuous transition from the direct assimilative recognition, that takes place in a single act, to a memory-association is possible. Let us take, for example, the case of looking at a portrait of a well-known person, and let us imagine the portrait executed in the most differing grades of likeness to the original. In the very rare cases, in which the painter achieves the greatest degree of likeness, it can happen that the picture gives rise to a very strong impression of identity with the original. There then arises a direct assimilation, which follows without any hindrance or retardation. If the picture is fairly good, so that the person may be recognised without any difficulty, but nevertheless possesses some strange lineaments, the process is one of retarded assimilation. The false parts of the portrait are after a longer inspection pushed aside by reproductive assimilation, and it may also happen after some time, that we see into this less excellent picture also the known personality. But if in the third and last case the portrait is much too unlike, there arises a peculiar competition between assimilation and dissimilation, in which it sometimes happens that we try to call up the memory-image of the person independently of the portrait we are looking at. It is usual to call this process "association by similarity," and to take for granted that the seen and the reproduced picture have been successively in consciousness. This is, as can easily be seen, a one-sided way of looking at the process; it is an attempt to make up a scheme out of an occasionally secondary phenomenon, whereas the essential part of the process, the competition between the assimilative and dissimilative influences, is quite overlooked. There is yet another occasion, in which the assimilation of an impression may be analysed into a succession of ideas. This happens if the impression has been a component of a compound idea in previous experiences. The separate parts of this compound idea have been arranged in a succession, and this row itself may either be a temporal or a spatial one, and, in order to go through it, a succession of acts of apprehension are necessary. Both cases, temporal and spatial, are in essence identical, since they coincide as to the factor of succession. For example, if the words "I am the Lord" are seen or heard, then any one who is familiar with the Ten Commandments will feel inclined to continue, "thy God," &c., and this continuation may appear to him in visual word-images, or in weak sound-images, or the words may arise in the memory in complications made up out of impressions of both senses. It is usual to call this process "association by contiguity." Here also it is taken for granted that the directly impressed and the reproduced members of the row have joined together in pure succession. But this is also an imaginary scheme that does not correspond to reality. If we pay special attention to the course of the process, we clearly observe that the unseen or unheard part of the row does not by any means only enter consciousness, when the directly perceived part has already disappeared out of our apperception. We have rather in this case a phenomenon quite similar to the one we observed in the course of a row of beats or, in the reverse order, in the retarded recognition of an object. In the moment in which in the above example the word "Lord" was apperceived, already the whole succeeding content of the Decalogue was in the dark region of consciousness, so that from this the feeling-character, not only of the next words, but of the whole Ten Commandments, immediately conditioned the apperception. In reality, therefore, we have also in this case to do with a reproductive assimilation, in which the parts are apperceived successively because of the temporal arrangement of these parts, which are in reciprocal assimilation with each other. Just in the same way do the separate beats of a rhythmical row form a succession and still are at the same time a united whole in consciousness. This process becomes in a way modified, if an impression calls up memory-elements of different kinds, by which it can be assimilated according to the individual disposition of consciousness. If, for example, I hear the word "father" without any special connection with other ideas, I may according to circumstances bring the word "mother" or "house" or "land," &c., into assimilative combination with it. In such cases it may happen that a competition between these different reproductions may arise, similar to the one we observed in the examination of a bad portrait, and this is generally shown in feelings of displeasure and excitation, as also in a retardation of the whole process. But such phenomena seldom occur under the normal conditions of psychical life, although they form the rule in the so-called association experiments. Our observations have therefore made it clear that the division, which to some extent still exists in present-day psychology, of all memory-associations into "combinations by similarity" and "by contiguity," rests upon a schematisation of these processes, in which their essential content, and in particular their close connection with simultaneous assimilations, remains unnoticed. The deeper reason for this method of observation, that operates more with fictions and formulæ than with real phenomena, may be looked for in the false materialisation of ideas. This has been consolidated rather than abolished by the conventional association psychology. A more thorough analysis of associations should have tended to abolish such a materialisation. The memory-associations were looked upon as the typical and only forms of association, instead of being considered as mere limiting cases, which are only developed under certain conditions out of processes of fusion, assimilation, and complication. The succession of two independent ideas, only joined together by outward similarity or by habitual contiguity, was made the basis for a scheme for all psychical processes. And thus the view was formed that each idea was an unchangeable thing, very similar to the object from which it arose. If we take an unprejudiced view of the processes of consciousness, free from all the so-called association rules and theories, we see at once that an idea is no more an even relatively constant thing than is a feeling or emotion or volitional process. There exist only changing and transient ideational processes; there are no permanent ideas that return again and disappear again. In the ideational processes there is a continual interaction among the elements out of which they are formed. A remembered idea is therefore as little identical with the previous memory-act of the same idea as with the original impression with which it is connected. Just as ideas are not permanent objects, so they are not processes that take place independent of feelings and emotions, for the more indistinct ideational content of consciousness by means of its feeling-tone influences apperception. From these again arise other combinations, which join together into one whole a number of contents of consciousness which belong together. Even with memory associations it is therefore never the complex ideas themselves which associate together, but each association divides up into a number of more elementary combinations. In these there are always processes of hindrance and retardation at work, so that the associated idea, in contradistinction to the original idea, of which it seems the renewal, can always show further changes, which depend upon the special conditions of their origin. Here those assimilations and dissimilations, which continually intervene as reproductive factors in our immediate sense-perceptions, make up the fundamental forms of the process, which determine all acts of memory. And these themselves can always be reduced to assimilation processes, which have been divided up into a succession, partly because of hindrances, and partly because of the temporal arrangement of the ideational processes themselves. CHAPTER IV APPERCEPTION There are cases of severe insanity in which the patients utter with great rapidity a number of words, joined together without sense and sometimes intermingled with absolutely meaningless sounds. This symptom is considered a component of the so-called "flight of ideas." A sane person can also produce this, if he, without any train of thought, simply repeats any words that may occur to him. For example, the following is such a series of words: "school house garden build stones ground hard soft long see harvest rain move pain." Compare with this a context like the following out of the seventh book of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_: "Spring had come in all its glory. A spring thunder-storm, that had been threatening the whole day long, passed angrily over the hills. The rain-clouds swept over the land, the sun came out again in his majesty, and the glorious rainbow appeared against the grey background." Wherein do these two word-combinations differ from each other? We are perhaps inclined to answer that the first series is lacking in any connection between the separate elements. It seems almost like a series of words taken at haphazard out of a dictionary and placed aimlessly one after the other. And yet one soon notices that the separate words are not quite so unconnected, as at the first glance they seem to be. As a rule it is obviously some memory-association that combines the succeeding word with the preceding one, as "house" with "school," and "garden" with "house," and so on. Sometimes the association may join a word with one preceding it at a greater distance back, or it may join two different words to the same one, e.g. "stones" with "build" and "house," "ground" with "garden." Sometimes also it may not be the ideational content itself, but the mere rhyme, that brings about the combination, as with "rain" and "pain." In other cases we may not be able to find a definite association at all. And yet, considering the many-sided and darkly perceived ideas often caused by mere affective influences, which we have considered above, we cannot help taking for granted latent associations in such cases as well, and especially since these cases happen very seldom. A "free, unconnected chain of ideas," as is sometimes presupposed, we shall place at once in the same category with "chance" in the region of physical phenomena. Just as in the latter case, it simply means for us that the cause cannot be found in the case in question. From this point of view the first series of words is in some way or other psychologically conditioned in each of its elements by association, and still the series does not form a whole. It resembles in a way a heap of stones, out of which a house or several houses could possibly be built, but to make them into a whole the building plan, the unifying thought, is wanting. Now if we look at the second series of words, we see at once that in this case also the different parts are joined together by association. The general ideas of spring, thunderstorm, hills, rain, sun, and rainbow are all links in an association-chain. But these elements are so arranged as to make a unified image. The impression of this image places us at once in the situation and mood that the author wishes to awaken in the reader. In this picture none of the chief component parts are superfluous; each is in close connection with the whole, which as a total idea binds all these associated elements together. Now if we wished to distinguish the second from the first of the above ideational series by the objective characteristic of the sensible arrangement of its separate components, it would not be possible in consequence of the subjective nature of the process. Let us suppose that a child learns by heart the sentences from _Wilhelm Meister_ without in the least paying attention to the meaning of the words, as it occasionally may happen, then the reproduction of these sentences has for the child no sense. The difference between this and the first series as to its psychological character is only apparent and not real. The separate words in both cases are joined to each other by mere association. In the consciousness of the child they do not form a unified whole. Wherein lies the difference between this mere apparent unity of sentences learned senselessly by heart and the real unity in the mind of the author, who wrote them, or of the intelligent reader, who reproduces the picture in his mind? Let us try to answer this question in detail The author who first formed the picture, and the reader who reproduces it, do not behave psychologically in exactly the same manner. The whole, even although in indistinct outlines, must be present in the consciousness of the author, before he writes down his sentences. He behaves, to take an example from our metronome experiments, in the same way as we do in listening to a certain rhythm, which we are hearing into the uniform beats of the metronome, or again, as we do when we beat with our finger a certain predetermined rhythm. The whole was in his consciousness, but the separate parts entered successively into the fixation-point of apperception and then ultimately ended at the end of the paragraph with the total feeling joined to the whole, which even at the beginning prepared for and influenced the coming paragraph. The state of the reader, who reproduces the author's thoughts, is a little different. From the beginning his attention is directed towards one total idea made up of many components, but this total idea is only produced from the impression of the words read. With the author the whole is there at the beginning and at the end of the production of the thought, which is itself developed in the successive apperceptions of the separate parts. With the reader there is at first only an expectation directed towards a whole. This expectation is shown in feelings of strain which are mostly regulated into definite qualitative directions, and these feelings are sufficient to guide the conception of the developing parts of the image into clear consciousness in the way in which the author himself raised his total idea, which was at first indistinct. Thus in both cases the activity of apperception is the essential factor, which makes a difference in the formation of such a combination from that of a mere association row. The thought-context changes into a mere association, if the separate parts of the same are joined together by memory alone and if they are reproduced without the inner unity of thought. Now such a reproduction becomes a passively experienced process, which lacks the consciousness of activity peculiar to the self-production of a thought and also, with the above-mentioned modifications, to its reproduction in the mind of the hearer or reader. In both these cases it is that feeling of activity, that we have mentioned above as the characteristic of active apperception, made up of alternating feelings of excitation, strain, and relaxation--it is this feeling of activity which gives the process the character whereby it differs essentially from mere association. While all apperceptions agree in the objective characteristics of the combination of a complex into a unity and in the subjective one of voluntary activity, yet in a further comparison of our thought processes we meet with a very evident difference in the content of the combined ideas. Think, for example, of a sentence such as the following one from Kant: "Whether the treatment of knowledge, that belongs to a critique of reason, is proceeding along the sure way of science or not, can easily be judged by the result." If we compare this sentence out of the Critique of Pure Reason with the above description, out of _Wilhelm Meister_, may we not be inclined to say that each belongs to quite a different world of thought? In our first example everything is graphic, each word represents a sensuous idea, the whole is a picture in words. In Kant not one single word is the expression of a concrete object, they are all abstract concepts, which only obtain some living content by means of further processes of thought, which they stimulate. And yet the abstract thought-compound corresponds with the concrete description in so far as it can be reduced ultimately to concrete concepts. It has to make use of words, which as impressions of the senses of hearing and seeing are themselves sensuous ideas. Certainly such concepts as "knowledge," "reason," "science," and even "treatment," "way," "result," which make up the sentence out of Kant, are not in the least of a concrete character in the way they are used. But if we go back to the original meanings of all these words, we find every time that it is a sensuous one, i.e. relates to the senses. "Treatment" at an earlier stage of language means something that we can treat in a material sense, "knowledge" refers to sensuous knowledge --something that we know by means of our senses, "reason" is nothing but the understanding of words or similar sensible impressions. As regards "way" it clearly bears the stamp of a concrete concept, it can be used as synonymous with "road." And yet in all these cases, the words in the thought, which they here help to express, are far removed from their origins. Thus the most abstract thought can ultimately be reduced in all its components to concrete concepts. And these words, the means of expression, which we cannot dispense with, at the same time bear witness to the fact that abstract thinking has developed itself step by step from concrete. The history of knowledge teaches us that this happened in the following manner. The original sensuous ideas entered into the most manifest relations with each other, and then just as at the primitive stage of thought the concrete ideas themselves were joined together as separate elements of one thought, so at a higher stage these relations between ideas were then treated as elements. So the word "knowledge" represents an almost unlimited number of processes of objective knowing, and thereby it becomes an abstract concept, which can no longer be directly considered concrete. In this way there is brought about, by an unceasing concatenation of apperceptions, a continuous concentration of the thought process, which at the same time represents a great saving and concentration in the work of thinking. A concept, such as "knowledge," is like a bank-note that represents an inexhaustible value of current coin. Very appropriate in this connection is what Mephistopheles says to the student in Faust, "One throw of the shuttle stirs up a thousand combinations." And even although with the help of this development in meaning of word-ideas the process of thinking may have very greatly diverged from its original sensuous basis, it nevertheless remains in the actual process always sensuous and concrete. For, to continue with Mephistopheles, "just where concepts are lacking, a word comes in at the right moment." Only in our sense the "word" has quite a serious meaning. The word is the real ideational equivalent for the concept, that cannot be formed into an idea. It changes abstract thoughts into concrete ideational processes that can be heard and seen. By the side of these concentrations caused by continuous apperceptions, the primitive concrete thinking, along with all the intermediate steps between the concrete object and the abstract concept, always preserves its own value peculiar to each of these steps. And among this row of values it is the most primitive one, the one that is directed solely to the apprehension of reality, that receives a favoured place in our life and thought--in our life, since we belong to the immediate reality and intervene in it in our activity; in our thought, since we always must think the abstract thought-complexes made real in their separate applications, if we do not wish to lose ourselves altogether. The special value of primitive apprehension, unweakened by any kind of abstraction, finds expression in the fact that the two divisions of human mental activity, which as complements to each other make up the chief value of human life, i.e. science and art, make real the two forms of thinking. Hence the creations of art are no less thought-compounds than those of science. They follow in the general laws of their construction exactly the same laws of apperception, which we observed in the productions of thought contained in speech. The thought is as a whole in our consciousness, and at first only works upon the apperception by means of the resulting total feeling, and then develops into its separate component parts by successive acts of apperception. In exactly the same way the artist, the poet, or the composer is accustomed to grasp the whole of the work of art in its outlines, sometimes very indistinct, before he begins to carry out any of the parts, and while carrying them out a total idea is formed, which in its turn has a reciprocal influence upon the original idea. In both cases, especially through the influence of intervening associations, the thought-process or the composition of the work of art may undergo deviations or additions in its separate parts. The regularity of the process as a whole remains undisturbed by this. A work of art is just as little a mere product of association as is a thought arranged in sentences. Various phenomena of everyday experience find their explanation in these psychological observations. First of all must be mentioned the seldom-noted fact, that we are able in our speech to bring to an end a fairly complicated thought without difficulty, although at the beginning of the sentences we are not at all clear as to the separate words and ideas or their combinations. Some people, when they are obliged to speak in public, fail simply because their confidence in this self-regulation of the train of thoughts is lacking at such moments. And this again is due to the fact that they think they must first of all find the suitable transition from one word to the next. In free conversation they can carry to an end without a break the most complicated sentences, while in public their speech is hesitating and embarrassed, and they are every moment in danger of breaking down. In such a case absolute confidence in the possibility of expressing freely and involuntarily the thought in one's mind is the surest help to overcome these difficulties. Of course a sensible training will also help. Let us call to mind the processes by means of which the beginning and end of an expression of thought are held together into one sentence or into several sentences joined together by the same thought. We note at once that the general content in its whole feeling-quality is already present as soon as the first word is spoken, while the ideas and the corresponding words are not clearly in consciousness beyond that first beginning. If the process continues without associative distractions and additions, by which, occasionally, parts that lie far from the original thought are added to it, then we notice at the same time that that beginning feeling corresponds perfectly with the terminal feeling that accompanies the termination of the spoken thought. This terminal feeling is generally at first much stronger than the initial feeling, but then it gradually goes over into the feeling-quality that is preparing the next thought. Now it is obvious at once that all these phenomena correspond in essentials with those we observed in our metronome experiments. In these experiments the conditions were much more simple and exact, so that they strengthen the more uncertain observations in ordinary reading and thinking. More complicated than in ordinary speaking and thinking are the phenomena where the sequence of thought-processes stretches over vast creations of the mind. Very likely the whole of the idea hovers in the mind of the artist, who has received an inspiration for a work of art, or of the philosopher, who's filled with the conception of a complicated system of thought, before either of them carries it out. This anticipation can only be considered an indefinite total feeling, which points the direction for the continuation of the thoughts, and which becomes clearer itself during this continuation. At the same time, in such complicated cases the distracting influences increase in power continually, and accordingly continually alter the quality of the feeling-tone that hovers over the whole. So it sometimes happens that the resulting product becomes in its execution quite different from what it was in its first conception, and it sometimes may happen that such changes occur several times in the course of the process. In all such cases this is generally caused by new associations, which arise from single elements of the total thought, and which, if they do not fit into the regular course, often assimilate with the total thought in a similar manner, or crowd it out altogether. In combinations of creations of thought these secondary influences ultimately increase so much that the regular steady course becomes an exception, and the preponderance of these transforming forces becomes the rule. Although in most cases these phenomena defy objective control, yet there are examples enough in which they can be clearly seen, at least their broad outlines. So Goethe's _Faust_ shows clearly traces of a repeated change in the idea of the whole, and the supposition is forced upon us that the author in his later conceptions had forgotten his first ones. In _Wilhelm Meister_ it almost seems as if he purposely had given as much free scope as possible to the play of associations caused by the plot. These may be extreme cases, and yet there is hardly in the province of science or art any creation of thought which in its execution remains free from any such intervening influences, which have their source partly in new impressions and partly in the thought-compounds caused by the execution or the elaboration of the same in the mind. The two psychical processes, that here interact, have been brought by psychologists under the concepts of "understanding" and "imagination." Where a regular arrangement of the thought-compounds, bound up with a tendency to form them abstractly, is uppermost, it is the custom to assign this to the understanding. Where consciousness is more inclined to the free play of associations and of newly excited thought-forms, and at the same time to a more concrete form of thinking, it is customary to speak of the activity of the imagination. But really we are here not dealing with faculties of thought that can in any way be separated, not even with functions of a different kind, but at bottom always and only with a participation of the apperceptions and associations that enter into all processes of thought, though distributed in a relatively different manner. It is therefore an absolutely wrong conception, if, according to the tradition of the old psychology, imagination is called the specific property of art, and understanding that of science. Science without imagination is worth just as little as art without understanding. These general conceptions of understanding and imagination correspond in a certain sense only to different points of view, under which we look at the mental functions, in themselves indivisible, and by means of which we separate them according to the relative, participation of their factors. So in the same way associations and combinations of apperception are not processes which belong to differing regions of our psychical life. On the contrary, not only are they always in a state of interaction, but apperceptions show that they arise out of associations, wherever we are able to trace them back to the conditions of their development. Nowhere can we see so clearly this rise of apperceptive combinations out of association as in spoken thought, the region of mental activity which is more than any other open to us in its objective forms. Let us explain this by means of an example, which is closely connected with the above examples of concrete and abstract forms of thought. We have taken the sentences out of _Wilhelm Meister_, which describe the coming of spring, as a sample of sensuous objective expression in the sense of forms of thought-construction familiar to us. And yet they are absolutely controlled by the laws of our abstract thinking, which join together widely separated elements of thought to one total idea in the interests of a unified combination, and compel us to use, in the form of particles and inflections, abstract elements of conception in order to arrange the parts of the scene described. This is different at a more primitive stage of thinking and expression in speech. Let us take, for example, the following simple statement in our own language: "He gave the children the slate-pencil." This sentence is for us directly concrete. If, however, we were to translate it just as it stands into the language of the inhabitants of the African colony Togo, they would probably not understand it. For such an individual even "slate-pencil" would be too abstract a conception. Further, he would not be able to imagine how any one could give something without having first of all taken it from somewhere else. The elements inserted between "slate-pencil" and the action of giving, which to us serve to combine the whole into one single idea, would mean to him rather a mixture of disparate elements. Lastly, he cannot form the concept "children" without thinking that they are children of some people or other. Accordingly our sentence would run somewhat as follows in the speech of the Togo negro: "He take stone to write something this gives of somebody child they." We must note here that even this literal translation still bears traces of the abstract culture of our language. The difference between substantives and verbs, which we have been forced to use, does not exist in the Togo language. If we look at such a sentence a little more closely, it is at once evident that the ideas are arranged exactly in the same order in which the objective process takes place. Each word denotes only one idea and is not placed in any grammatical category, since there are none such in this language. Therefore the expression of thought is still in essentials at the stage of pure association of ideas. Such a sentence only differentiates itself from a perfectly unsystematic association, that strays from one member to the other--as in the above-mentioned series, "school house garden &c."--by the fact that it follows directly the action described element for element, and therefore reproduces this in the memory exactly as it took place in perception. Here we meet clearly the two motives which raise pure associations to apperceptive combinations by means of the impulses that lie in the association itself. One of these motives is an objective one. It lies in the regular concatenation of the outward phenomena which present themselves to our view, and which force the association to combine the ideas in the same regularity. A series, such as "school house garden &c.," is only possible when the thought process frees itself from perception and gives itself up to the incidental inner motives, which remain when the continuous succession of phenomena that regulates our thinking is wanting. Therefore association that is joined to these phenomena is in itself the more primitive, and in this way it is the regularity of the course of nature, which transfers its regularity to the normal association of our ideas. Added to this objective motive there is a second, a subjective one. We would not be able to hold together in association a series of impressions given to us in a certain order and to reproduce them again, were it not for our attention that follows from member to member the separate parts of the series, and ultimately binds them together into a whole. Thus ordered thinking arises out of the ordered course of nature in which man finds himself, and this thinking is from the beginning nothing more than the subjective reproduction of the regularity according to law of natural phenomena. On the other hand, this reproduction is only possible by means of the will that controls the concatenation of ideas. Thus human thought, like the human being himself, is at the same time the product of nature and a creation of his own mental life, which in the human will finds that unity which binds together the unbounded manifoldness of mental contents into one whole. In this way the development of apperceptive thought-combinations out of associations corroborates further the result obtained above in considering volitional processes, namely that to every outward voluntary action there correspond inner acts of volition which are occupied in influencing the course of thought. In the close combination between thought and speech this connection between inner and outer volition comes most clearly to light. We cannot act outwardly without at the same time executing inner acts of will. Therefore ordered expression of thought in speech corresponds as outward volitional activity to the control of the will over the associations that originally stray here and there without order. Even although thought in a primitive speech, as in the above example, may be ever so near to mere association of ideas, yet the control by the will is also to be seen in it, from the fact that the association series is one that inwardly is connected together. And with this we have the basis upon which the more complicated forms of apperception can rise, because of the continuous concentrations and combinations in thinking, and these latter at the same time find their adequate expression in the forms of speech. This connection between inner and outer volition, as we see it living in the connection between thought and speech, is ultimately of as great practical as theoretical importance. Only by considering this connection do we arrive at a sufficient understanding for the higher productions of human mental life. It also points forcibly to the fact that the most important part of education for the formation of character--i.e. the training of the will--should not only, and not even in the first instance, be directed to the outward act. Rather must education pay most attention to that inner volition which is occupied with ordered thinking. To make this strong, to make this able to resist the distracting play of associations, is its most important and also one of its most difficult tasks. Many attempts have been made to investigate the processes of thought in other ways than in the way described above. At first it was thought that the surest way would be to take as a foundation for the psychological analysis of the thought-processes the laws of logical thinking, as they had been laid down from the time of Aristotle by the science of logic. Scholastic philosophy showed great subtlety in this direction in changing psychical processes into logical judgments and conclusions, and there are still followers of this direction at the present day. Starting with the thought-processes in the narrow meaning of the word, this logical explanation of everything psychical was allowed to spread over to associations, the processes of sense-perception, the pure sensations, feelings, emotions, &c., so that in this old scholastic psychology the human consciousness was in danger of becoming a scholastic philosopher, who regulated each of his actions according to the laws of logic. Now such laws are a late product of scientific thinking, which presupposes a long history of thinking determined by a number of specific factors. These norms, even for the fully-developed consciousness, only apply to a small part of the thought-processes. Any attempt to explain, out of these norms, thought in the psychological sense of the word can only lead to an entanglement of the real facts in a net of logical reflections. We can in fact say of such attempts, that measured by results they have been absolutely fruitless. They have disregarded the psychical processes themselves, and have gained nothing at all for the interpretation of the laws of logic simply because they saw in them the primitive facts of consciousness itself. Many psychologists thought that this method could be improved by making use of direct introspection. They thought by turning their attention to their own consciousness to be able to explain what happened when we were thinking. Or they sought to attain the same end by asking another person a question, by means of which certain processes of thought would be excited, and then by questioning the person about the introspection he had made. It is obvious to the reader, who has followed our discussion so far, that nothing can be discovered in such experiments, where the most complicated psychical processes are investigated directly and without any further preparation. We need first of all a careful analysis of the more elementary psychical processes, of the facts of attention and of the wider scope of consciousness as well as of the relations between them and of the manifold affective processes that intervene in all these cases. Without having gained by these means the necessary information as to the general conditions and, so to say, as to the scene over which our thought-processes move, it is impossible in any way to understand these themselves in their psychical combinations. Many psychologists have connected this difficulty, not with the wrongness of their own method but with the essence of the thought-process. This was explained as an unconscious and (since all sense-perception belongs to consciousness) as a supersensual phenomenon, in the interpretation of which each one must be left to his own speculation. This opened the door at once to the explanation of psychical phenomena according to logical reflections, that were at will read into such phenomena. This alleged method of exact introspection ended ultimately at the point from whence it started, i.e. the scholastic philosophy. In contradistinction to all this let us remember the rule, valid for psychology as well as for any other science, that we cannot understand the complex phenomena, before we have become familiar with the simple ones, which presuppose the former. Now the general phenomena of the course of simple processes in consciousness, as we have seen them in their most concrete form and under the simplest conditions in our observations of the combination and comparison of rows of beats, give us the most general preliminary conditions, which must be held as a criterion for much more complicated thought-processes. It is evident, however, that these formal conditions of all processes of consciousness cannot be sufficient to account for the special characteristics and phenomena of the development of thought. To do this we must turn our attention to this development itself, as it is shown in the documents of the spoken expression of thought at different stages of consciousness. It is unfortunate that in these and in other cases the development of the child, that is for us the easiest to observe, can give, as is obvious, only a few and in part only doubtful results. The speech and thought of the child, under the present conditions of culture, not only presuppose a number of inherited dispositions, whose influences can scarcely be accurately traced, but it is also absolutely impossible to withdraw the child from the influences to which, from the very beginning, its environment gives rise. Therefore the mental development of our children is under all circumstances not only an accelerated but also in many respects an essentially changed one, in comparison to a purely spontaneous development. On the other hand there are, at least in a relative manner, such stages of a spontaneous development of thinking, in many cases relatively independent of outward influences of culture, in the mental life of more primitive peoples. The different stages, which this mental life shows, find their most adequate expression in the outward phenomena of this mental life itself, and above all in those of speech, which is a means of expression and an instrument of thought at the same time. We can by means of the different stages of the development of speech follow that gradual transition of associative into apperceptive processes of consciousness from step to step. The example given above of a relatively primitive form of spoken thought shows the relation in which it stands to our languages of culture. A closer investigation of this subject would lead us beyond the scope of individual psychology into that of racial psychology, where the most important part deals with the psychological development of thought and speech. CHAPTER V THE LAWS OF PSYCHICAL LIFE Many psychologists and philosophers have denied the existence of special laws for our psychical life, if we understand this to mean specific laws, differing from the universal physical ones. Some say that everything that is called a psychical law is nothing but a psychological reflex of physical combinations, which is made up of sensations joined to certain central cerebral processes. Others maintain that there are no laws at all in the mental sphere. They say that the essential difference between natural and mental sciences consists in the fact that only the former can be reduced to definite laws, whereas the latter are absolutely wanting in any arrangement of phenomena according to law. The first of these opinions, that of materialistic psychology, can be passed over rapidly. It is contradicted by all the phenomena of consciousness that we have up till now discussed. It is contradicted by the fact of consciousness itself, which cannot possibly be derived from any physical qualities of material molecules or atoms. The indisputable affirmation, that there exist no processes of consciousness that are not in some manner or other connected with physical processes, is changed by this materialistic hypothesis into the dogma that the processes of consciousness themselves are in their real essence physical processes. Now this is an assertion that directly contradicts our immediate experience, which teaches us that a human being, or any other similar living creature, is a psycho-physical and not only a physical unity. The second of the above opinions ascribes to the natural sciences alone laws in the sense of universally valid rules for phenomena, and therefore limits psychology in principle to the description of facts, which appear in their combinations to be arranged purely by chance or at will. This opinion rests obviously on a mistaken use of the conception of law. We are only allowed to consider those regularities in phenomena as according to law, which always repeat themselves in exactly the same manner. But there are in reality no such laws, not even in the natural sciences. For this principle is valid here: laws determine the course of phenomena only in so far as they are not annulled by other laws. Now because of the complex nature of all phenomena in general each process stands under the influence of many laws, and so it happens that just the most universal natural laws can never in experience be demonstrated in their full power. There is no law of dynamics which has a more universal validity than the so-called "law of inertia" or Newton's first law of motion. It can be formulated as follows: "A body in motion, and not acted on by any external force, will continue to move indefinitely in a straight line and with uniform velocity." It is obvious that this law can never and nowhere be realised in experience, since a case of independence from other external forces, which alter the motion, never and nowhere exists. And yet the law of inertia is for us an infallible law of nature, since all real processes of motion may be looked upon as lawful modifications of that ideal case (never existing in concrete experience) of a motion not acted upon by any external influences. Let us now in the light of these considerations, universally acknowledged in natural science, consider the question of the existence or non-existence of psychical laws. It is of course self-evident that we may consider as laws only such regularities that lie within the process of consciousness, and not such as lie outside of consciousness, e.g. such as belong to physiological processes of the brain. Accordingly we may call combinations of sensations or of simple feelings into complex ideas, emotions, &c., psychical laws, if they in any way take place regularly. On the other hand, the fact that, if a bright point appears on a dark field of vision, the lines of vision of the two eyes are at once directed towards this point--this fact is a physiological and not a psychical law. Naturally such physical laws, as the one in our example, may have a determining influence upon the operation of certain psychical laws. But this does not hinder us from making a sharp distinction between the two kinds of law. We keep as a principle for a psychical law, that the components as well as the resultants of the effects of such laws are parts of immediate consciousness, i.e. sensations, feelings and their combinations. Now if we cast a glance, while keeping firmly to this criterion, over the manifold processes of consciousness, which have been touched upon in this book, we see at once that all these processes bear the character of a stem regularity. Not in the sense that these laws are fixed rules without exceptions (such laws as we have seen above do not exist, because of the never-failing interference from other influences), but in the only sense permissible, i.e. that each complex phenomenon can be reduced to a lawful co-operation of elements. If this requirement were not fulfilled, there would be no cohesion in our psychical life. It would break up into a chaos of unconnected elements, and consciousness itself, which is just the opposite of such a chaotic disarrangement, would be impossible. Therefore each separate idea is a combination of sensations according to law. A given clang of a definite timbre is put together unchangeably in the same way out of elementary tone-sensations. That certain objective sources of sound, e.g. strings, air spaces, possess physical qualities, by means of which such regular combinations of tone-quality arise, is undoubtedly a very important factor for the psychical law of the blending of tones. But these physical facts have in themselves nothing whatever to do with this law. If our consciousness was not disposed to such regular combinations, those objective factors would remain powerless. And it is exactly the same with the combination of light-sensations into spatial ideas, with the union of the images of an object in the right and left eye into one total image, with the rise of peculiar total feelings out of their partial feelings, as we have observed in the organic feeling and in the elementary æsthetic feelings, and last of all with the composition of the emotions and volitional processes out of their elements. Starting from these single more or less complex processes of consciousness, this character of regularity applies above all to the temporal succession of the processes. The generalisations of the old association psychology were absolutely inadequate, and its chief mistake lay, not so much in postulating laws too hastily, as in the fact that it did not attempt to penetrate deeply enough into the laws underlying the association processes by means of an analysis of the same. A last and conclusive testimony for this lawful character of psychical phenomena is given by the apperceptive combinations, whose specific products (of course quite dependent upon the laws of association), are the combinations of the thought-processes, as we have seen above. There can be no more striking proof of the absurdity of the above-mentioned theory of the lawlessness of psychical phenomena as the consequence to which it would lead us. For it would lead to the conclusion that the conception of law itself was contrary to law. This conception is in fact nothing more than one of the results of those psychical thought-combinations, the lawful nature of which is questioned. It would lead us too far here to go into the profusion of psychical laws. The general character of them has been suggested in our chapters on association and apperception. In the natural sciences there are more general fundamental laws that rise above the separate particular laws, and these we may call the principles of investigation, in so far as they are general requirements to which investigation has to conform. In the same way we can set up fundamental laws in psychology which are not included in the separate regularities of phenomena, because they can only be gained from a general view of the whole of such phenomena. In physics, for example, the above-mentioned example of the law of inertia is a universally valid law. The same claim is raised in a wider scope by "the law of the indestructibility of matter," and by the near-related "principle of the conservation of energy." Are there, we naturally ask at once, psychological principles of similar universal validity? Before we attempt to answer this question we must note one restriction, to which even in the natural sciences the requirement of universal validity for the leading principles is subject, and which, we may be sure, will be even more prominent in mental science, because of the extraordinarily complex nature of the phenomena. This restriction consists in the fact that the validity of each fundamental principle is subject to certain hypotheses, so that, where these are no longer fulfilled, the principles themselves become doubtful or untenable. Thus the law of the conservation of energy is only valid as long as the measured units of energy belong to a closed or finite material system. It loses its validity if the system is of infinite extent, or if, though finite, it can be acted upon by any external forces. A restriction analogous to this last one will have to be employed in regard to the psychical laws obtained by generalisation from the individual psychological regularities. Of course we must take into account the conditions arising out of the peculiarity of mental phenomena. These psychical laws, by virtue of the subjection of psychical phenomena to the interconnection of consciousness, can only be valid within the limits within which such an interconnection of psychical processes takes place. We shall, for example, try to obtain a fundamental principle which controls the formation of complex psychical processes out of their elements. But it would have no sense to set up such a law for absolutely disparate processes that do not stand in any relation in the single consciousness. It may be that, because of this, the limits of validity for psychological principles are much narrower than those for general natural laws. This is connected with the fact that psychology has to do with inner and not with outer relations. And also we must not forget that this limitation can be compensated for by the character of the psychical laws themselves. And, in fact, the discussion of the first and most general of these laws will show us that this hypothesis proves correct. The first fundamental principle deals with the relation of the parts contained in a complex psychical process to the unified resultants into which they form. This relation can, as regards its qualitative content, be a most extraordinarily varying one, so that, in regard to the quality of the elements and their combinations, the separate psychical processes cannot be compared. Thus we cannot compare simple light sensations and qualities of tones, or a spatial visual image with a compound clang, or bring into comparison, according to their qualitative character, the relations of both of these pairs with those of the elements of an æsthetic feeling to that feeling itself, or with those of the separate feelings of an emotion to the total content of the same, or with those of the affective and ideational components of motives to the volitional process in which they take part. Nevertheless all these cases are regulated in regard to the formal relation between the components of a process and their resultants by one single principle, which we may call, for the sake of shortness, "the principle of creative resultants." It attempts to state the fact that in all psychical combinations the product is not a mere sum of the separate elements that compose such combinations, but that it represents a new creation. But at the same time, the general disposition of this product is formed by the elements, so that further components are not necessary for its creation, and indeed cannot be considered possible from the standpoint of a psychological interpretation. Thus in the light sensations of the retina, combined and fused with the sensations of strain in the eye in its movements and adjustments, are contained the essentials for the production of a given spatial image. At the same time this spatial image itself is something new, which as regards the resulting qualities is not contained in those elements. In the same way an act of volition that takes place under the influence of a number of motives, partly combating and partly aiding each other, is the necessary creation of this motivation, so that any specific process lying outside of these elements is nowhere to be observed. At the same time such an act of volition is no mere sum of motive-elements, but something new, that connects these elements into one united resultant. We see this creative and yet absolutely lawful nature of psychical phenomena best of all in apperceptive combinations, and for a long time it has been silently recognised in their case. Every one knows that the result of a chain of reasoning, made up of a row of single acts of thought, may be a product of those single thought-acts, which throws much light on some subject and which was before unknown to us, and yet which conclusively comes from those premises, if we analyse retrogressively its development. Upon this creative character of apperceptive combinations, above all, rests the regularity of psychical development, which is shown in the single consciousness during the individual life, and in the total mental development revealed to us by culture and history. The assertion that is occasionally made, based on dogmatic prejudices--namely, that the law of the constancy of matter, that is valid for the forces of nature, must necessarily keep mental life always at the same level in its total value--this assertion is contradicted by the facts of individual and universal development. That does not naturally exclude the possibility of individual interruptions of the course of development, and, because of these, of retrogressive movements arising, in consequence of the above-mentioned conditions, which govern all mental combinations. This combination of creative growth and strict regularity, which marks our mental life, is shown above all in the fact that, especially with the more complicated processes and the more extensive forms of progress of psychical phenomena, the future resultants can never be determined in advance; but that on the other hand it is possible, starting with the given resultants, to achieve, under favourable conditions, an exact deduction into the components. The psychologist, like the psychological historian, is a prophet with his eyes turned towards the past. He ought not only to be able to tell what has happened, but also what necessarily must have happened, according to the position of events. This point of view has in essentials for a long time been held in practice in the historical sciences. It must be of some value that psychology can show the same law of resultants even in the simplest sense-perceptions and affective-processes, where, in consequence of the simplicity of the conditions, very often the retrogressive deduction turns at the same time into a prophecy of events. The law of resultants undergoes an important change in those cases, in which in the course of a psychical process secondary influences arise, which lie outside the region of the immediately produced resultants, and in which these secondary influences become independent conditions of new influences, which combine with those immediate resultants into a complex phenomenon. In such cases it may even happen that the secondary influences obtain the mastery and so degrade the original resultants to mere secondary influences or ultimately obliterate them altogether. Such a phenomenon may in longer processes be repeated several times and in this manner produce a chain of processes, the members of which diverge more and more from the starting-point of the row of phenomena. It is most of all processes made up of all other psychical compounds, i.e. volitional processes, in which this modification of the law of resultants may be demonstrated by means of numerous phenomena mostly belonging to racial psychology or the history of civilisation. An action arising from a given motive produces not only the ends latent in the motive, but also other, not directly purposed, influences. When these latter enter into consciousness and stir up feelings and impulses, they themselves become new motives, which either make the original act of volition more complicated, or they change it or substitute some other act for it. We may call this modification of the law of resultants, in accordance with the principal form in which it appears, "the principle of the heterogony of ends." It is of eminent importance for the development of the individual as well as of the general consciousness, and especially because the influences of original motives, that have decayed, are almost always preserved in some few traces alongside of the new ones that have taken their place. Such remnants of former purposes continue to exist in forms we do not understand in a great number of our habits, customs, and above all in religious ceremonies handed down to us from the past. Not only do these phenomena themselves remain obscure, but also the development of the present aims remains obscure, as long as we cannot account for them by the principle of heterogony that intervenes in all these cases. As a supplement to the law of resultants, and yet at the same time in a certain sense as an expression for the same psychical regularity, we have "the law of conditioning relations." Just as the law of resultants joins into one unified expression the forms of psychical synthesis, so we may say that the law of relations is the analytic principle, which arranges under one general rule the relations of the components of one such synthetic whole. This rule consists in the fact that the psychical elements of a product stand in internal relations to each other, out of which the product itself necessarily arises, while at the same time the character of a new creation (a character that belongs to all psychical resultants) is caused by these relations. By inner relations we mean such as depend upon the qualitative constitution of the separate contents, and in so far stand, as a specifically different and at the same time complementary condition, in contradistinction to those external relations, which are determined by their formal arrangement. In this sense this distinction between external and internal relations corresponds to the difference in the ways of viewing the phenomena by the natural sciences and psychology respectively. The processes of nature are absolutely determined by the connection of temporal and spatial relations, in which the elements of the phenomena stand to each other. The mental processes on the other hand cannot, because of their subjection to natural phenomena, dispense with these external relations, but their inmost nature rests on the internal qualitative relations of the elements bound into one whole. The law of relations stands in general reciprocal relationship to the law of resultants. Both of these laws apply to all compound unities of psychical phenomena, from the simplest ideational and complex affective processes up to the most complicated individual and general developments in psychical life. Thus the combination of a sum of tone elements into a single whole, by means of a specific ideational and affective value resulting from the combination itself, depends absolutely upon the qualitative and quantitative relations in which the tones stand to each other. This clearly arises from the natural dependence of resultants and relations upon each other, since each change of the latter modifies the constitution of the resultants in a corresponding manner. In the same way a spatial visual image is dependent on the relations of the qualitative and quantitative elements of the sensations of the retina and the strain sensations of the eye, and so on. A complex æsthetic feeling is a resultant of the simpler æsthetic feelings bound to the different parts of the perception, in so far as these latter again determine the product by means of their qualitative relations. And lastly all the processes of mental development are founded on the relations of their separate factors, by means of which they are combined into resultants. The interdependence of the laws of resultants and of relations shows us the importance of each of these principles. We cannot explain the psychical value of new creative compounds without considering the internal relations of their components, just as we cannot comprehend the peculiarity of these relations without continually taking into account their resulting influences. Again in this case the most striking proof for the close connection between these two principles is given by the apperceptive combinations, especially in the forms of logical processes of thought, as they are expressed in the combination of sentences in speech. The thought-content of a sentence stands first of all, as we saw above, as a whole in our consciousness, but not yet as an ideational compound raised to clear apperception. In this stage it is a resultant from previous separate association and apperception processes. Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations, which are joined into a unified resultant by this logical arrangement. Thus the relation of subject and predicate includes all those further relations of noun and adjective, verb and object or adverb, as its minor terms, which are joined together partly by their own relations and partly by the relations of those most general members of the sentence, i.e. subject and predicate. This explains the psychological fact, that after this process of joining the thought together has passed, the total idea is once again, as at the beginning but this time more clearly, in consciousness. In a similar manner such single thought-compounds are combined into more extensive chains of thought, of which the relatively simplest forms are found in the process of drawing a conclusion. The law of resultants finds a supplement and a specific application in the principle of the heterogony of ends in certain very important cases. In the same way we find, as supplementary to the law of relations, "the principle of intensifying contrasts." It includes those relations of psychical elements and compounds which are connected with certain limiting values of the qualitative and quantitative components of a whole. In the region of ideational combinations we have noted such influences of contrast in associative assimilations and dissimilations. We saw there that at a certain limiting value of the difference between two sensations or ideas, e.g. two spatial or temporal distances, two sound or light sensations, the assimilation present at a small difference may turn suddenly into a dissimilation. The impressions no longer assimilate, but become intensified through contrast. In another especially important form we meet the same principle in the feelings, where it stands in connection with the duality of the feelings that is valid for all affective processes and their combinations. In consequence of this each feeling, as we have seen, possesses its contrast-feeling, e.g. pleasure and displeasure, excitation and quiescence, strain and relaxation. Here the principle of relations shows itself in the form of the law of contrast, above all in the fact that the change between contrasting feelings itself intensifies the contrasts. Thus a feeling of pleasure is more intense, and its specific quality is more clearly felt, if it has been preceded by a feeling of displeasure. A similar relation exists between excitation and quiescence, strain and relaxation. The law of contrasts is by no means limited to the relation between separate contents of consciousness existing side by side or following each other, but we see its most important influences in those places where it extends over more extensive groups of mental experience. Thoughtful historians have long since noted the fact, that in historical development not only do periods of rise and fall follow each other, but also periods of a special direction of mental life. And these periods, both in the impression they make upon us and in the objective relations in which they stand to each other, are so intensified that the following phase is every time increased by means of the contrast with the preceding one. Let us take an example from the near past. The German literature of the classicist period received its peculiar stamp of contemplative calm and beauty of form to a great degree from the contrast with the "storm and stress" period that was marked with such strong emotions. In the same way romanticism, which was inclined to the cult of the imagination and of a poetical past, was influenced by contrast with the preceding classical period, that laid most stress upon the understanding, and that regarded the present as the ripest fruit of human development. And lastly this change of contrasts shows itself most clearly and with the shortest oscillations in economic life, where it is in part assisted by the oscillations in the conditions of civilisation. We see this, for example, very well in the fluctuations of our national credit and of stocks and shares. And these sharp contrasts can be ultimately explained by the inner life of man that fluctuates between hope and hesitation, and in this fluctuation intensifies the emotions. Let us now consider the connection of the four principles we have discussed. The second and fourth may be looked upon as special applications of the two fundamental principles of creative resultants and conditioning relations. We see also that they are not only joined very closely together, but that they stand, as absolutely disparate incomparable laws, in contradistinction to those general principles to which all natural phenomena are subjected. A contradiction has very often been thought to exist in the relation between the universal mental and natural laws. And since the natural laws are considered to be the more general and more necessary, these psychical principles have been looked upon as inadmissible generalisations, if they have not been absolutely ignored, which has more often been the case. Now we have seen in our whole discussion, that in reality we cannot move a step in the interpretation of psychical processes from the simplest sense-perceptions and affective combinations to the most complicated mental processes, as shown in society and history, without meeting with these principles always and everywhere. We must of course keep strictly to the maxim of analysing the psychical processes in their own connections and as processes joined together in themselves, as far as they so appear to us. Now the neglect of this maxim has led to the above-mentioned contradiction and to the disregard of these laws. In fact the reverse maxim has been formed, namely, that psychical processes should not be held as decisive for the principles that condition them, but rather that the laws of nature, founded upon external natural phenomena, should also rule our mental life. In this sense the law of the conservation of energy has been considered a fundamental law of all mental development. For this purpose, and also in order to preserve a kind of independence for our mental life, the conception of "psychical energy" has been formed. This, in all the changes it undergoes, is supposed to be subject to the law of the conservation of energy just like mechanical, thermal, electro-magnetic, or any other energy. Since we do not possess a definite unit of measurement for this psychical energy, and since it always occurs between two other physical energies, it was taken for granted that it could be indirectly measured. It could be placed in the middle of a series of transformations that took place according to constant equivalents as a value to be measured indirectly by the physical energy equivalent to it. For example, it could be placed between a given quantity of chemical energy, supplied from outside to the organism, and an equivalent quantity of warmth and mechanical work-energy, which the organism produces. If this were the case we could not reconcile with it a principle such as the one of creative resultants. Such a principle could not be included among the universal psychical laws; it would have to lie outside the general regularity of our psychical life. We can of course reverse this relation. Then we come to the result, that psychical regularity lies outside the law of energy, and in that case it would have no sense to place this psychical energy between two other physical energies and then attempt a measurement. Such a measurement is a pure fiction. We might just as well take any other fictitious process, say a miracle, and place it in the series of transformations. These applications of physical laws to psychical phenomena are not based upon empirical facts, but they arise from a metaphysical principle, namely, the demand for a monistic view of life. Now this idea certainly has a justification, inasmuch as it rests upon a logical demand which it seeks to satisfy. If the so-called monism does not do this, it changes into a real dualism, as would clearly happen in the above-suggested rationalistic explanation of a miracle. In fact monism is only scientifically justified in its view of the relation between psychical and physical, as long as it emphasises the fact that the human being can just as little be considered a purely physical as a purely psychical being, and that man must be considered a psycho-physical individual, as we in reality experience him. This monism alone corresponds to the facts, A dualistic separation of soul and body, even if it sails under a monistic flag in the form of an atom-soul, or of an anonymous psychical energy, is a hypothesis which cannot be proved and which is useless for the interpretation of mental life. From the standpoint of the scientific and only justifiable monism, the mental processes are considered inseparable components of human and animal life. They must be judged according to the qualities that are immanent in them, and not according to laws which apply to other phenomena, and in the formulation of which no regard was paid to those psychical qualities. There cannot, however, be the least contradiction in the idea that physical and psychical phenomena follow different laws, as long as these laws are not irreconcilable with the actual unity of the psycho-physical individual. In reality we cannot talk of irreconcilability in this case, because firstly, the two series of phenomena are of a disparate nature, and because secondly everywhere, where these two series of phenomena meet together in the unity of the individual, they are really, as far as we know, subject to a principle of regular arrangement. Thus, for example, the law of creative resultants is not the least contradiction to the law of the conservation of energy, because the measures by which we determine psychical values cannot be compared with those with which we measure physical values. We judge the psychical according to its qualitative value, and the physical according to its quantitative value. The idea of value is in its origin really psychical, and this points to the fact that in reality physical values have in themselves no real measure, and that they only obtain one, if we make them the object of a comparative judgment, i.e. in a sense translate them into the psychological. Disparate values cannot in any way be compared, so long as a transformation of the one into the other is impossible. We can compare warmth and mechanical work, because the one can be transformed into the other according to a strict law of equivalence. But we cannot compare a tone with a sensation of light, or a visual idea with a chord, because a transformation of the one of these practical contents into the other is unthinkable. Now physical values are subject to the principle of the conservation of energy because of the unlimited capacity for transformation of physical energies according to equivalent relations. But it has on the other hand no sense to try to apply this same principle to the qualitative psychical values, which do not in any way admit of such a transformation. This of course stands in close relation with the fact that the subject-matter of psychology is the whole manifoldness of qualitative contents directly presented to our experience, each of which would immediately lose its own peculiar quality, if we tried to transform it into any other. Thus the physical phenomena investigated by the natural sciences and the laws of these phenomena do not in the least contradict the qualitative content of life dealt with by psychology. They rather supplement each other, inasmuch as we must combine them together into one whole, if we wish to understand the life of the psycho-physical being given to us in its unity. Yet this impossibility of comparison of these qualities could not exist along with the unity of their substratum, if the physical and psychical values were not joined together in this substratum. This connection consists herein, that on the one side the physical elements, whether atoms or parts of one continuous matter, must necessarily be thought by us in forms of spatial and temporal ideas arising in accordance with psychical laws, and on the other side the psychical elements, the simple sensations and feelings, are inalienably bound up with definite physical processes. These latter need by no means be of a simple constitution, as has at times been presupposed by reason of metaphysical prejudices. The opposite is rather the case, as experience, which alone in this question can decide, incontestably teaches. For it shows that each simple sensation is joined to a very complicated combination of peripheral and central nerve-processes, and so also with the most elementary feeling, as is shown by the manifold "expression" phenomena which accompany the simplest feeling. The actual correlation then is between simple, i.e. not further analysable, psychical content and complex physical processes. If, however, in contradiction to this, we introduce the metaphysical postulate of a correspondence between the psychically simple and the physically simple, we are inclined to go further and to presuppose a continuous correspondence between the two series of phenomena right up to the highest and most complicated content of consciousness. This regular relation between psychical elements and physical processes then becomes changed into a metaphysical parallelism, in which in content as well as in form the psychical becomes a copy of the physical, and the physical a copy of the psychical phenomenon. This hypothesis finds expression in the words of Spinoza, "The order and combination of ideas is the same as the order and combination of things." Such an idea was thinkable as long as the physical side of the qualities of living beings was so little known, and as long as there was no explanation of those psychological principles, which control the combination of processes of consciousness from simple sense-perceptions to complex thought-processes. At that Lime philosophy could take the liberty of building up reality out of abstract ideas, such as substance and causality. At the present day metaphysics, if it wishes to make any claim to respect, must build upon the real facts and not upon those ideas used from purely logical, dialectical motives. Even from this point of view there remains a "principle of psychological parallelism" in the sense that there is no psychical process, from the simplest sensation and affective elements to the most complex thought-processes, which does not run parallel with a physical process. Now sensation and affective elements cannot be compared in that way, since a simple process in the one case does not correspond to even a relatively simple one in the other, and this of course is valid for all other contents of consciousness formed from these elements. We meet everywhere physical and psychical as incomparable qualities of the united psycho-physical individual, and each of these must be judged according to the laws of combinations of elements, which are expressed in the combination itself. Since these qualities themselves are disparate, it can therefore never happen that the two principles come into antagonism with each other, whereas on the other hand, if we try to transfer the conditions that are only valid for the one side of the phenomena of life to the other side, we will very soon either come into antagonism with facts, or be forced to abandon an interpretation of a part of life placed in this manner under a strange point of view. Thus from the present-day psychological standpoint, which must be authoritative for a philosophical consideration, we can only speak of a "parallelism" between psychical and physical in as far as all elements of psychical life are joined to physical processes. The combinations of these elements, however, can never be judged according to the laws that are valid for the combination of the physical processes of life. If we try to do this, we eliminate what is most characteristic and important in our mental life. This reduction of the so-called principle of parallelism is occasionally called inconsequent and unsatisfying. This objection rests upon the interference of _a priori_ metaphysical theories of the past, whose principles have long been thrown aside by science, and also upon ignorance of the real problem which psychology has to solve. This problem can surely never consist in applying, in connection with psychical processes, principles which do not belong to the psychical side of life. It must much rather consist in the attempt to gain principles out of the contents of our psychical life, just as in the reverse case physiological investigation of the change of matter and energy in the organism does not in the least, and rightly so, trouble itself with the psychical qualities of the organism. For the real unity of life will not be understood by subjecting real phenomena to laws with which they have absolutely no inner relationship. No, we must try to explain all sides of life and then the relations of these to each other. From the standpoints which have here been developed as to the relation of psychical to natural laws and as to their combination into one unity, we may now decide a question which is of mythological origin, and which was transferred by mythology to philosophy and ultimately to psychology. This question is the one as to the nature of the soul. For the primitive thinker the soul was a demoniacal being, which had its seat in the whole body, but especially in certain favoured organs, such as the heart, the kidneys, the liver, or the blood. Besides this oldest idea of a body-soul, there soon arose a second idea of a soul only externally bound to the parts of the body, and this soul left the body at death in the last breath, and also for a short time during sleep, as noticed in the images of dreams. This was called the breath-soul or the shadow-soul. For a long time, in spite of the self-contradiction, these two conceptions were joined together, although we see in the development of mythological thought that the breath-soul or psyche slowly supersedes the idea of a body-soul. The development of the idea of a soul in philosophy is in essentials a repetition of this mythological development. The ancient philosophy, in whose footsteps mediæval philosophy follows, still holds fast to the idea of a body-soul. The soul is the driving force of all, even physical processes of life, e.g. nutrition and propagation. By the side of this, however, the higher mental activities are bound to a specific being that is separable from the body. This opinion, which gave a concrete, clear form to the mythological ideas, found its most perfect scientific expression in the psychology of Aristotle. The psyche that was separable from the body had thus won a victory over the body-soul both in mythology and in the classical work of Aristotle. This, of course, led ultimately to the absolute dominion of this independent soul, and its qualities were more and more considered to be absolutely opposite to the qualities of the body, that was ruled by purely material laws. This development culminated in the system of Descartes, the last great philosopher of the Renaissance. The body is from now on considered to be an expended substance, subject to mechanical laws only; the soul stands, in contradistinction to this, as an unextended, purely thinking substance. The two substances are, however, during life externally joined together. In one single point of the brain the body was supposed to meet in reciprocal action with the soul, which was thought of as something analogous to a material atom. Descartes fixed upon the pineal gland, but there were countless other hypotheses as to the position of this point. This is not the place to follow the further changes that these ideas underwent in the history of modern philosophy and psychology. All the later changes of the dualistic hypothesis are not of the first importance. The fundamental principle is, that the soul is a permanent substance, and the psychical processes are looked upon as changing phenomena of this substance, which are, however, different from it. This hypothesis may take the form that Spinoza gave it in presupposing the two substances changed into two attributes which run parallel with each other. There is also the materialistic hypothesis that reduces the soul-substance to a quality of the bodily substance, which alone is recognised as real. It becomes clear to us that such further developments of the "substance" hypothesis become more and more contradictory to the laws of psychical life, the more they attempt to explain the self-contradicting conception of two absolutely different substances which must be bound together into one unity. The Cartesian soul can no longer exist in face of our present-day physiological knowledge of the physical substratum of our mental life. And metaphysical monism in these two forms, which try to combine soul-and body-substance into one unity, would shut out the possibility of any knowledge of our psychical life. Therefore, in contradistinction to this metaphysical concept of a mind-substance, we set up the concept of the actuality of mind. Mental processes are not transient appearances to which the soul stands in contradistinction as a permanent, unknowable being unrelated to them, so that any attempt to combine the two must necessarily lead to a tissue of influences and counter-influences, which were at will given the conventional names: "ideas, feeling, striving, &c." A striking example of the futility of such an attempt to make substance the basis of an explanation of mental life is seen in the last and most thorough-going of these theories, i.e. in Herbart's so-called Mechanism of Ideas. Certainly all psychical phenomena is a continual coming and going, a producing and being produced. But no supersensuous substance, standing in contradistinction to these phenomena, can help us to understand the latter in their separate parts, or even in the connection of these parts into a whole. Sense-perception is a product of elements of pure sensation, an emotion is the course of directly experienced feelings, a thought-process is a combination of its elements established by itself. Nowhere do these facts of real mental life need another substratum for their interpretation beyond the one that is given in the facts themselves. And the unity of this life does not gain in the least, if we add to its own real union another substance, which is neither perceived nor really experienced, but which stands as an abstract conception in contradistinction to that mental life established by itself. We only need to cast a glance at the sciences most closely connected with psychology, i.e. the so-called mental sciences, in order to become aware of the emptiness and futility of this psychological conception of "substance." The name "mental science" has only the right to exist, so long as these departments of learning are based upon the facts of psychology--the mental science in the most general sense of the term. Now when would a historian, philologist, or jurist make use of any other means to understand some phenomenon or of any other arguments to prove some statement than those which spring from immediate facts of mental life? Why then should the standpoint of psychology be in absolute contradiction to the stand-points of its most nearly related sciences? Psychology must not only strive to become a useful basis for the other mental sciences, but it must also turn again and again to the historical sciences, in order to obtain an understanding for the more highly developed mental processes. Racial psychology is the clearest proof of this latter. It is one of the newest of the mental sciences and depends absolutely on these relations between psychology and the historical sciences. It is the first transition from psychology to the other mental sciences. The metaphysical psychology of the present day, that has developed out of Descartes' theory of two substances absolutely different and yet externally joined together, this psychology seems unquestionably to be further away from the reality of the mental life than the theories of the ancient metaphysicians were. The old idea saw in the soul the principle of all life, or, according to Aristotle, the energy working towards an end, out of which the whole of the phenomena of life, physical and psychical, sprang. It sought at least to account for that unity of life, which popular dualism must regard as a wonder, if it does not suppose the psychical to be a confused image of the physical, or reversely suppose this latter to be a mere subjective idea without its own reality. And yet this old vitalistic idea of a soul is for us no longer possible. For it tries to explain the unity of life only by postulating an all-embracing idea of purpose or use in place of a causal explanation of phenomena such as is now demanded. This vague notion of purpose does not explain the peculiarity of mental processes, nor does it fulfil the requirements of a natural explanation in regard to the physical side of the phenomena of life. Nutrition, propagation, movement, on the one hand, and perception, imagination, understanding, on the other, cannot be combined into one unity, even although the facts which these concepts denote are purposeful from the standpoint of the connection of the phenomena of life. They do not resist such a combination because they are bound up with essentially different substrata, but because they depend upon absolutely different stand-points of the phenomena of life given to us as a unity. Nutrition, propagation, movement, are organic processes which belong to objective nature, and for which, because of their own characteristics, the ideas we form of them serve as signs which point to an existence independent of our consciousness. In investigating them, just as in the investigation of natural phenomena outside our own body, we must abstract from the subjective processes of consciousness, to which they are bound, if we wish to understand them in their objective natural connection. On the other hand our ideas, inasmuch as they are subjective, our feelings and our emotions are immediate experiences, which psychology tries to understand exactly in the way in which they arise, continue, and enter into relations with each other in consciousness. Therefore it is one and the same psycho-physical individual forming a unity, which physiology and psychology have as subject-matter. Each of these, however, views this subject-matter from a different stand-point. Physiology regards it as an object of external nature, belonging to the system of physical-chemical processes, of which organic life consists. Psychology regards it as the system of our experiences in consciousness. Now for every piece of knowledge two factors are necessary--the subject who knows and the object thought about, independent of this subject. The investigation of the subject in his characteristics, as revealed to us in human consciousness, forms therefore not only a necessary supplement to the investigations of natural science, but it also attains to a more universal importance, since all mental values and their development arise from immediately experienced processes of consciousness, and therefore can alone be understood by means of these processes. And this is exactly what we mean by the principle of the actuality of mind. 
2529	----	THE ANALYSIS OF MIND By Bertrand Russell 1921 MUIRHEAD LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY An admirable statement of the aims of the Library of Philosophy was provided by the first editor, the late Professor J. H. Muirhead, in his description of the original programme printed in Erdmann's History of Philosophy under the date 1890. This was slightly modified in subsequent volumes to take the form of the following statement: "The Muirhead Library of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought--Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects--Psychology, Ethics, Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Theology. While much had been done in England in tracing the course of evolution in nature, history, economics, morals and religion, little had been done in tracing the development of thought on these subjects. Yet 'the evolution of opinion is part of the whole evolution'. "By the co-operation of different writers in carrying out this plan it was hoped that a thoroughness and completeness of treatment, otherwise unattainable, might be secured. It was believed also that from writers mainly British and American fuller consideration of English Philosophy than it had hitherto received might be looked for. In the earlier series of books containing, among others, Bosanquet's "History of Aesthetic," Pfleiderer's "Rational Theology since Kant," Albee's "History of English Utilitarianism," Bonar's "Philosophy and Political Economy," Brett's "History of Psychology," Ritchie's "Natural Rights," these objects were to a large extent effected. "In the meantime original work of a high order was being produced both in England and America by such writers as Bradley, Stout, Bertrand Russell, Baldwin, Urban, Montague, and others, and a new interest in foreign works, German, French and Italian, which had either become classical or were attracting public attention, had developed. The scope of the Library thus became extended into something more international, and it is entering on the fifth decade of its existence in the hope that it may contribute to that mutual understanding between countries which is so pressing a need of the present time." The need which Professor Muirhead stressed is no less pressing to-day, and few will deny that philosophy has much to do with enabling us to meet it, although no one, least of all Muirhead himself, would regard that as the sole, or even the main, object of philosophy. As Professor Muirhead continues to lend the distinction of his name to the Library of Philosophy it seemed not inappropriate to allow him to recall us to these aims in his own words. The emphasis on the history of thought also seemed to me very timely; and the number of important works promised for the Library in the very near future augur well for the continued fulfilment, in this and other ways, of the expectations of the original editor. H. D. Lewis PREFACE This book has grown out of an attempt to harmonize two different tendencies, one in psychology, the other in physics, with both of which I find myself in sympathy, although at first sight they might seem inconsistent. On the one hand, many psychologists, especially those of the behaviourist school, tend to adopt what is essentially a materialistic position, as a matter of method if not of metaphysics. They make psychology increasingly dependent on physiology and external observation, and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making "matter" less and less material. Their world consists of "events," from which "matter" is derived by a logical construction. Whoever reads, for example, Professor Eddington's "Space, Time and Gravitation" (Cambridge University Press, 1920), will see that an old-fashioned materialism can receive no support from modern physics. I think that what has permanent value in the outlook of the behaviourists is the feeling that physics is the most fundamental science at present in existence. But this position cannot be called materialistic, if, as seems to be the case, physics does not assume the existence of matter. The view that seems to me to reconcile the materialistic tendency of psychology with the anti-materialistic tendency of physics is the view of William James and the American new realists, according to which the "stuff" of the world is neither mental nor material, but a "neutral stuff," out of which both are constructed. I have endeavoured in this work to develop this view in some detail as regards the phenomena with which psychology is concerned. My thanks are due to Professor John B. Watson and to Dr. T. P. Nunn for reading my MSS. at an early stage and helping me with many valuable suggestions; also to Mr. A. Wohlgemuth for much very useful information as regards important literature. I have also to acknowledge the help of the editor of this Library of Philosophy, Professor Muirhead, for several suggestions by which I have profited. The work has been given in the form of lectures both in London and Peking, and one lecture, that on Desire, has been published in the Athenaeum. There are a few allusions to China in this book, all of which were written before I had been in China, and are not intended to be taken by the reader as geographically accurate. I have used "China" merely as a synonym for "a distant country," when I wanted illustrations of unfamiliar things. Peking, January 1921. CONTENTS I. Recent Criticisms of "Consciousness" II. Instinct and Habit III. Desire and Feeling IV. Influence of Past History on Present Occurrences in Living Organisms V. Psychological and Physical Causal Laws VI. Introspection VII. The Definition of Perception VIII.Sensations and Images IX. Memory X. Words and Meaning XI. General Ideas and Thought XII. Belief XIII.Truth and Falsehood XIV. Emotions and Will XV. Characteristics of Mental Phenomena THE ANALYSIS OF MIND LECTURE I. RECENT CRITICISMS OF "CONSCIOUSNESS" There are certain occurrences which we are in the habit of calling "mental." Among these we may take as typical BELIEVING and DESIRING. The exact definition of the word "mental" will, I hope, emerge as the lectures proceed; for the present, I shall mean by it whatever occurrences would commonly be called mental. I wish in these lectures to analyse as fully as I can what it is that really takes place when we, e.g. believe or desire. In this first lecture I shall be concerned to refute a theory which is widely held, and which I formerly held myself: the theory that the essence of everything mental is a certain quite peculiar something called "consciousness," conceived either as a relation to objects, or as a pervading quality of psychical phenomena. The reasons which I shall give against this theory will be mainly derived from previous authors. There are two sorts of reasons, which will divide my lecture into two parts: (1) Direct reasons, derived from analysis and its difficulties; (2) Indirect reasons, derived from observation of animals (comparative psychology) and of the insane and hysterical (psycho-analysis). Few things are more firmly established in popular philosophy than the distinction between mind and matter. Those who are not professional metaphysicians are willing to confess that they do not know what mind actually is, or how matter is constituted; but they remain convinced that there is an impassable gulf between the two, and that both belong to what actually exists in the world. Philosophers, on the other hand, have maintained often that matter is a mere fiction imagined by mind, and sometimes that mind is a mere property of a certain kind of matter. Those who maintain that mind is the reality and matter an evil dream are called "idealists"--a word which has a different meaning in philosophy from that which it bears in ordinary life. Those who argue that matter is the reality and mind a mere property of protoplasm are called "materialists." They have been rare among philosophers, but common, at certain periods, among men of science. Idealists, materialists, and ordinary mortals have been in agreement on one point: that they knew sufficiently what they meant by the words "mind" and "matter" to be able to conduct their debate intelligently. Yet it was just in this point, as to which they were at one, that they seem to me to have been all alike in error. The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. As regards matter, I have set forth my reasons for this view on former occasions,* and I shall not now repeat them. But the question of mind is more difficult, and it is this question that I propose to discuss in these lectures. A great deal of what I shall have to say is not original; indeed, much recent work, in various fields, has tended to show the necessity of such theories as those which I shall be advocating. Accordingly in this first lecture I shall try to give a brief description of the systems of ideas within which our investigation is to be carried on. * "Our Knowledge of the External World" (Allen & Unwin), Chapters III and IV. Also "Mysticism and Logic," Essays VII and VIII. If there is one thing that may be said, in the popular estimation, to characterize mind, that one thing is "consciousness." We say that we are "conscious" of what we see and hear, of what we remember, and of our own thoughts and feelings. Most of us believe that tables and chairs are not "conscious." We think that when we sit in a chair, we are aware of sitting in it, but it is not aware of being sat in. It cannot for a moment be doubted that we are right in believing that there is SOME difference between us and the chair in this respect: so much may be taken as fact, and as a datum for our inquiry. But as soon as we try to say what exactly the difference is, we become involved in perplexities. Is "consciousness" ultimate and simple, something to be merely accepted and contemplated? Or is it something complex, perhaps consisting in our way of behaving in the presence of objects, or, alternatively, in the existence in us of things called "ideas," having a certain relation to objects, though different from them, and only symbolically representative of them? Such questions are not easy to answer; but until they are answered we cannot profess to know what we mean by saying that we are possessed of "consciousness." Before considering modern theories, let us look first at consciousness from the standpoint of conventional psychology, since this embodies views which naturally occur when we begin to reflect upon the subject. For this purpose, let us as a preliminary consider different ways of being conscious. First, there is the way of PERCEPTION. We "perceive" tables and chairs, horses and dogs, our friends, traffic passing in the street--in short, anything which we recognize through the senses. I leave on one side for the present the question whether pure sensation is to be regarded as a form of consciousness: what I am speaking of now is perception, where, according to conventional psychology, we go beyond the sensation to the "thing" which it represents. When you hear a donkey bray, you not only hear a noise, but realize that it comes from a donkey. When you see a table, you not only see a coloured surface, but realize that it is hard. The addition of these elements that go beyond crude sensation is said to constitute perception. We shall have more to say about this at a later stage. For the moment, I am merely concerned to note that perception of objects is one of the most obvious examples of what is called "consciousness." We are "conscious" of anything that we perceive. We may take next the way of MEMORY. If I set to work to recall what I did this morning, that is a form of consciousness different from perception, since it is concerned with the past. There are various problems as to how we can be conscious now of what no longer exists. These will be dealt with incidentally when we come to the analysis of memory. From memory it is an easy step to what are called "ideas"--not in the Platonic sense, but in that of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, in which they are opposed to "impressions." You may be conscious of a friend either by seeing him or by "thinking" of him; and by "thought" you can be conscious of objects which cannot be seen, such as the human race, or physiology. "Thought" in the narrower sense is that form of consciousness which consists in "ideas" as opposed to impressions or mere memories. We may end our preliminary catalogue with BELIEF, by which I mean that way of being conscious which may be either true or false. We say that a man is "conscious of looking a fool," by which we mean that he believes he looks a fool, and is not mistaken in this belief. This is a different form of consciousness from any of the earlier ones. It is the form which gives "knowledge" in the strict sense, and also error. It is, at least apparently, more complex than our previous forms of consciousness; though we shall find that they are not so separable from it as they might appear to be. Besides ways of being conscious there are other things that would ordinarily be called "mental," such as desire and pleasure and pain. These raise problems of their own, which we shall reach in Lecture III. But the hardest problems are those that arise concerning ways of being "conscious." These ways, taken together, are called the "cognitive" elements in mind, and it is these that will occupy us most during the following lectures. There is one element which SEEMS obviously in common among the different ways of being conscious, and that is, that they are all directed to OBJECTS. We are conscious "of" something. The consciousness, it seems, is one thing, and that of which we are conscious is another thing. Unless we are to acquiesce in the view that we can never be conscious of anything outside our own minds, we must say that the object of consciousness need not be mental, though the consciousness must be. (I am speaking within the circle of conventional doctrines, not expressing my own beliefs.) This direction towards an object is commonly regarded as typical of every form of cognition, and sometimes of mental life altogether. We may distinguish two different tendencies in traditional psychology. There are those who take mental phenomena naively, just as they would physical phenomena. This school of psychologists tends not to emphasize the object. On the other hand, there are those whose primary interest is in the apparent fact that we have KNOWLEDGE, that there is a world surrounding us of which we are aware. These men are interested in the mind because of its relation to the world, because knowledge, if it is a fact, is a very mysterious one. Their interest in psychology is naturally centred in the relation of consciousness to its object, a problem which, properly, belongs rather to theory of knowledge. We may take as one of the best and most typical representatives of this school the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose "Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint,"* though published in 1874, is still influential and was the starting-point of a great deal of interesting work. He says (p. 115): * "Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte," vol. i, 1874. (The second volume was never published.) "Every psychical phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (also the mental) inexistence of an object, and what we, although with not quite unambiguous expressions, would call relation to a content, direction towards an object (which is not here to be understood as a reality), or immanent objectivity. Each contains something in itself as an object, though not each in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is acknowledged or rejected, in love something is loved, in hatred hated, in desire desired, and so on. "This intentional inexistence is exclusively peculiar to psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything similar. And so we can define psychical phenomena by saying that they are phenomena which intentionally contain an object in themselves." The view here expressed, that relation to an object is an ultimate irreducible characteristic of mental phenomena, is one which I shall be concerned to combat. Like Brentano, I am interested in psychology, not so much for its own sake, as for the light that it may throw on the problem of knowledge. Until very lately I believed, as he did, that mental phenomena have essential reference to objects, except possibly in the case of pleasure and pain. Now I no longer believe this, even in the case of knowledge. I shall try to make my reasons for this rejection clear as we proceed. It must be evident at first glance that the analysis of knowledge is rendered more difficult by the rejection; but the apparent simplicity of Brentano's view of knowledge will be found, if I am not mistaken, incapable of maintaining itself either against an analytic scrutiny or against a host of facts in psycho-analysis and animal psychology. I do not wish to minimize the problems. I will merely observe, in mitigation of our prospective labours, that thinking, however it is to be analysed, is in itself a delightful occupation, and that there is no enemy to thinking so deadly as a false simplicity. Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored. The view expressed by Brentano has been held very generally, and developed by many writers. Among these we may take as an example his Austrian successor Meinong.* According to him there are three elements involved in the thought of an object. These three he calls the act, the content and the object. The act is the same in any two cases of the same kind of consciousness; for instance, if I think of Smith or think of Brown, the act of thinking, in itself, is exactly similar on both occasions. But the content of my thought, the particular event that is happening in my mind, is different when I think of Smith and when I think of Brown. The content, Meinong argues, must not be confounded with the object, since the content must exist in my mind at the moment when I have the thought, whereas the object need not do so. The object may be something past or future; it may be physical, not mental; it may be something abstract, like equality for example; it may be something imaginary, like a golden mountain; or it may even be something self-contradictory, like a round square. But in all these cases, so he contends, the content exists when the thought exists, and is what distinguishes it, as an occurrence, from other thoughts. * See, e.g. his article: "Ueber Gegenstande hoherer Ordnung und deren Verhaltniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung," "Zeitschrift fur Psychologie and Physiologie der Sinnesorgane," vol. xxi, pp. 182-272 (1899), especially pp. 185-8. To make this theory concrete, let us suppose that you are thinking of St. Paul's. Then, according to Meinong, we have to distinguish three elements which are necessarily combined in constituting the one thought. First, there is the act of thinking, which would be just the same whatever you were thinking about. Then there is what makes the character of the thought as contrasted with other thoughts; this is the content. And finally there is St. Paul's, which is the object of your thought. There must be a difference between the content of a thought and what it is about, since the thought is here and now, whereas what it is about may not be; hence it is clear that the thought is not identical with St. Paul's. This seems to show that we must distinguish between content and object. But if Meinong is right, there can be no thought without an object: the connection of the two is essential. The object might exist without the thought, but not the thought without the object: the three elements of act, content and object are all required to constitute the one single occurrence called "thinking of St. Paul's." The above analysis of a thought, though I believe it to be mistaken, is very useful as affording a schema in terms of which other theories can be stated. In the remainder of the present lecture I shall state in outline the view which I advocate, and show how various other views out of which mine has grown result from modifications of the threefold analysis into act, content and object. The first criticism I have to make is that the ACT seems unnecessary and fictitious. The occurrence of the content of a thought constitutes the occurrence of the thought. Empirically, I cannot discover anything corresponding to the supposed act; and theoretically I cannot see that it is indispensable. We say: "_I_ think so-and-so," and this word "I" suggests that thinking is the act of a person. Meinong's "act" is the ghost of the subject, or what once was the full-blooded soul. It is supposed that thoughts cannot just come and go, but need a person to think them. Now, of course it is true that thoughts can be collected into bundles, so that one bundle is my thoughts, another is your thoughts, and a third is the thoughts of Mr. Jones. But I think the person is not an ingredient in the single thought: he is rather constituted by relations of the thoughts to each other and to the body. This is a large question, which need not, in its entirety, concern us at present. All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the grammatical forms "I think," "you think," and "Mr. Jones thinks," are misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single thought. It would be better to say "it thinks in me," like "it rains here"; or better still, "there is a thought in me." This is simply on the ground that what Meinong calls the act in thinking is not empirically discoverable, or logically deducible from what we can observe. The next point of criticism concerns the relation of content and object. The reference of thoughts to objects is not, I believe, the simple direct essential thing that Brentano and Meinong represent it as being. It seems to me to be derivative, and to consist largely in BELIEFS: beliefs that what constitutes the thought is connected with various other elements which together make up the object. You have, say, an image of St. Paul's, or merely the word "St. Paul's" in your head. You believe, however vaguely and dimly, that this is connected with what you would see if you went to St. Paul's, or what you would feel if you touched its walls; it is further connected with what other people see and feel, with services and the Dean and Chapter and Sir Christopher Wren. These things are not mere thoughts of yours, but your thought stands in a relation to them of which you are more or less aware. The awareness of this relation is a further thought, and constitutes your feeling that the original thought had an "object." But in pure imagination you can get very similar thoughts without these accompanying beliefs; and in this case your thoughts do not have objects or seem to have them. Thus in such instances you have content without object. On the other hand, in seeing or hearing it would be less misleading to say that you have object without content, since what you see or hear is actually part of the physical world, though not matter in the sense of physics. Thus the whole question of the relation of mental occurrences to objects grows very complicated, and cannot be settled by regarding reference to objects as of the essence of thoughts. All the above remarks are merely preliminary, and will be expanded later. Speaking in popular and unphilosophical terms, we may say that the content of a thought is supposed to be something in your head when you think the thought, while the object is usually something in the outer world. It is held that knowledge of the outer world is constituted by the relation to the object, while the fact that knowledge is different from what it knows is due to the fact that knowledge comes by way of contents. We can begin to state the difference between realism and idealism in terms of this opposition of contents and objects. Speaking quite roughly and approximately, we may say that idealism tends to suppress the object, while realism tends to suppress the content. Idealism, accordingly, says that nothing can be known except thoughts, and all the reality that we know is mental; while realism maintains that we know objects directly, in sensation certainly, and perhaps also in memory and thought. Idealism does not say that nothing can be known beyond the present thought, but it maintains that the context of vague belief, which we spoke of in connection with the thought of St. Paul's, only takes you to other thoughts, never to anything radically different from thoughts. The difficulty of this view is in regard to sensation, where it seems as if we came into direct contact with the outer world. But the Berkeleian way of meeting this difficulty is so familiar that I need not enlarge upon it now. I shall return to it in a later lecture, and will only observe, for the present, that there seem to me no valid grounds for regarding what we see and hear as not part of the physical world. Realists, on the other hand, as a rule, suppress the content, and maintain that a thought consists either of act and object alone, or of object alone. I have been in the past a realist, and I remain a realist as regards sensation, but not as regards memory or thought. I will try to explain what seem to me to be the reasons for and against various kinds of realism. Modern idealism professes to be by no means confined to the present thought or the present thinker in regard to its knowledge; indeed, it contends that the world is so organic, so dove-tailed, that from any one portion the whole can be inferred, as the complete skeleton of an extinct animal can be inferred from one bone. But the logic by which this supposed organic nature of the world is nominally demonstrated appears to realists, as it does to me, to be faulty. They argue that, if we cannot know the physical world directly, we cannot really know any thing outside our own minds: the rest of the world may be merely our dream. This is a dreary view, and they there fore seek ways of escaping from it. Accordingly they maintain that in knowledge we are in direct contact with objects, which may be, and usually are, outside our own minds. No doubt they are prompted to this view, in the first place, by bias, namely, by the desire to think that they can know of the existence of a world outside themselves. But we have to consider, not what led them to desire the view, but whether their arguments for it are valid. There are two different kinds of realism, according as we make a thought consist of act and object, or of object alone. Their difficulties are different, but neither seems tenable all through. Take, for the sake of definiteness, the remembering of a past event. The remembering occurs now, and is therefore necessarily not identical with the past event. So long as we retain the act, this need cause no difficulty. The act of remembering occurs now, and has on this view a certain essential relation to the past event which it remembers. There is no LOGICAL objection to this theory, but there is the objection, which we spoke of earlier, that the act seems mythical, and is not to be found by observation. If, on the other hand, we try to constitute memory without the act, we are driven to a content, since we must have something that happens NOW, as opposed to the event which happened in the past. Thus, when we reject the act, which I think we must, we are driven to a theory of memory which is more akin to idealism. These arguments, however, do not apply to sensation. It is especially sensation, I think, which is considered by those realists who retain only the object.* Their views, which are chiefly held in America, are in large measure derived from William James, and before going further it will be well to consider the revolutionary doctrine which he advocated. I believe this doctrine contains important new truth, and what I shall have to say will be in a considerable measure inspired by it. * This is explicitly the case with Mach's "Analysis of Sensations," a book of fundamental importance in the present connection. (Translation of fifth German edition, Open Court Co., 1914. First German edition, 1886.) William James's view was first set forth in an essay called "Does 'consciousness' exist?"* In this essay he explains how what used to be the soul has gradually been refined down to the "transcendental ego," which, he says, "attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experience IS KNOWN. It loses personal form and activity--these passing over to the content--and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein uberhaupt, of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said. I believe (he continues) that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy"(p. 2). * "Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods," vol. i, 1904. Reprinted in "Essays in Radical Empiricism" (Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), pp. 1-38, to which references in what follows refer. He explains that this is no sudden change in his opinions. "For twenty years past," he says, "I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded"(p. 3). His next concern is to explain away the air of paradox, for James was never wilfully paradoxical. "Undeniably," he says, "'thoughts' do exist." "I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is KNOWING"(pp. 3-4). James's view is that the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind, but that it is arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations, and that some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical. "My thesis is," he says, "that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known"(p. 4). After mentioning the duality of subject and object, which is supposed to constitute consciousness, he proceeds in italics: "EXPERIENCE, I BELIEVE, HAS NO SUCH INNER DUPLICITY; AND THE SEPARATION OF IT INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTENT COMES, NOT BY WAY OF SUBTRACTION, BUT BY WAY OF ADDITION"(p. 9). He illustrates his meaning by the analogy of paint as it appears in a paint-shop and as it appears in a picture: in the one case it is just "saleable matter," while in the other it "performs a spiritual function. Just so, I maintain (he continues), does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing"(pp. 9-10). He does not believe in the supposed immediate certainty of thought. "Let the case be what it may in others," he says, "I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them"(pp. 36-37). The same view of "consciousness" is set forth in the succeeding essay, "A World of Pure Experience" (ib., pp. 39-91). The use of the phrase "pure experience" in both essays points to a lingering influence of idealism. "Experience," like "consciousness," must be a product, not part of the primary stuff of the world. It must be possible, if James is right in his main contentions, that roughly the same stuff, differently arranged, would not give rise to anything that could be called "experience." This word has been dropped by the American realists, among whom we may mention specially Professor R. B. Perry of Harvard and Mr. Edwin B. Holt. The interests of this school are in general philosophy and the philosophy of the sciences, rather than in psychology; they have derived a strong impulsion from James, but have more interest than he had in logic and mathematics and the abstract part of philosophy. They speak of "neutral" entities as the stuff out of which both mind and matter are constructed. Thus Holt says: "If the terms and propositions of logic must be substantialized, they are all strictly of one substance, for which perhaps the least dangerous name is neutral-stuff. The relation of neutral-stuff to matter and mind we shall have presently to consider at considerable length." * * "The Concept of Consciousness" (Geo. Allen & Co., 1914), p. 52. My own belief--for which the reasons will appear in subsequent lectures--is that James is right in rejecting consciousness as an entity, and that the American realists are partly right, though not wholly, in considering that both mind and matter are composed of a neutral-stuff which, in isolation, is neither mental nor material. I should admit this view as regards sensations: what is heard or seen belongs equally to psychology and to physics. But I should say that images belong only to the mental world, while those occurrences (if any) which do not form part of any "experience" belong only to the physical world. There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology. The law of gravitation, for example, is a physical law, while the law of association is a psychological law. Sensations are subject to both kinds of laws, and are therefore truly "neutral" in Holt's sense. But entities subject only to physical laws, or only to psychological laws, are not neutral, and may be called respectively purely material and purely mental. Even those, however, which are purely mental will not have that intrinsic reference to objects which Brentano assigns to them and which constitutes the essence of "consciousness" as ordinarily understood. But it is now time to pass on to other modern tendencies, also hostile to "consciousness." There is a psychological school called "Behaviourists," of whom the protagonist is Professor John B. Watson,* formerly of the Johns Hopkins University. To them also, on the whole, belongs Professor John Dewey, who, with James and Dr. Schiller, was one of the three founders of pragmatism. The view of the "behaviourists" is that nothing can be known except by external observation. They deny altogether that there is a separate source of knowledge called "introspection," by which we can know things about ourselves which we could never observe in others. They do not by any means deny that all sorts of things MAY go on in our minds: they only say that such things, if they occur, are not susceptible of scientific observation, and do not therefore concern psychology as a science. Psychology as a science, they say, is only concerned with BEHAVIOUR, i.e. with what we DO; this alone, they contend, can be accurately observed. Whether we think meanwhile, they tell us, cannot be known; in their observation of the behaviour of human beings, they have not so far found any evidence of thought. True, we talk a great deal, and imagine that in so doing we are showing that we can think; but behaviourists say that the talk they have to listen to can be explained without supposing that people think. Where you might expect a chapter on "thought processes" you come instead upon a chapter on "The Language Habit." It is humiliating to find how terribly adequate this hypothesis turns out to be. * See especially his "Behavior: an Introduction to Comparative Psychology," New York, 1914. Behaviourism has not, however, sprung from observing the folly of men. It is the wisdom of animals that has suggested the view. It has always been a common topic of popular discussion whether animals "think." On this topic people are prepared to take sides without having the vaguest idea what they mean by "thinking." Those who desired to investigate such questions were led to observe the behaviour of animals, in the hope that their behaviour would throw some light on their mental faculties. At first sight, it might seem that this is so. People say that a dog "knows" its name because it comes when it is called, and that it "remembers" its master, because it looks sad in his absence, but wags its tail and barks when he returns. That the dog behaves in this way is matter of observation, but that it "knows" or "remembers" anything is an inference, and in fact a very doubtful one. The more such inferences are examined, the more precarious they are seen to be. Hence the study of animal behaviour has been gradually led to abandon all attempt at mental interpretation. And it can hardly be doubted that, in many cases of complicated behaviour very well adapted to its ends, there can be no prevision of those ends. The first time a bird builds a nest, we can hardly suppose it knows that there will be eggs to be laid in it, or that it will sit on the eggs, or that they will hatch into young birds. It does what it does at each stage because instinct gives it an impulse to do just that, not because it foresees and desires the result of its actions.* * An interesting discussion of the question whether instinctive actions, when first performed, involve any prevision, however vague, will be found in Lloyd Morgan's "Instinct and Experience" (Methuen, 1912), chap. ii. Careful observers of animals, being anxious to avoid precarious inferences, have gradually discovered more and more how to give an account of the actions of animals without assuming what we call "consciousness." It has seemed to the behaviourists that similar methods can be applied to human behaviour, without assuming anything not open to external observation. Let us give a crude illustration, too crude for the authors in question, but capable of affording a rough insight into their meaning. Suppose two children in a school, both of whom are asked "What is six times nine?" One says fifty-four, the other says fifty-six. The one, we say, "knows" what six times nine is, the other does not. But all that we can observe is a certain language-habit. The one child has acquired the habit of saying "six times nine is fifty-four"; the other has not. There is no more need of "thought" in this than there is when a horse turns into his accustomed stable; there are merely more numerous and complicated habits. There is obviously an observable fact called "knowing" such-and-such a thing; examinations are experiments for discovering such facts. But all that is observed or discovered is a certain set of habits in the use of words. The thoughts (if any) in the mind of the examinee are of no interest to the examiner; nor has the examiner any reason to suppose even the most successful examinee capable of even the smallest amount of thought. Thus what is called "knowing," in the sense in which we can ascertain what other people "know," is a phenomenon exemplified in their physical behaviour, including spoken and written words. There is no reason--so Watson argues--to suppose that their knowledge IS anything beyond the habits shown in this behaviour: the inference that other people have something nonphysical called "mind" or "thought" is therefore unwarranted. So far, there is nothing particularly repugnant to our prejudices in the conclusions of the behaviourists. We are all willing to admit that other people are thoughtless. But when it comes to ourselves, we feel convinced that we can actually perceive our own thinking. "Cogito, ergo sum" would be regarded by most people as having a true premiss. This, however, the behaviourist denies. He maintains that our knowledge of ourselves is no different in kind from our knowledge of other people. We may see MORE, because our own body is easier to observe than that of other people; but we do not see anything radically unlike what we see of others. Introspection, as a separate source of knowledge, is entirely denied by psychologists of this school. I shall discuss this question at length in a later lecture; for the present I will only observe that it is by no means simple, and that, though I believe the behaviourists somewhat overstate their case, yet there is an important element of truth in their contention, since the things which we can discover by introspection do not seem to differ in any very fundamental way from the things which we discover by external observation. So far, we have been principally concerned with knowing. But it might well be maintained that desiring is what is really most characteristic of mind. Human beings are constantly engaged in achieving some end they feel pleasure in success and pain in failure. In a purely material world, it may be said, there would be no opposition of pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, what is desired and what is feared. A man's acts are governed by purposes. He decides, let us suppose, to go to a certain place, whereupon he proceeds to the station, takes his ticket and enters the train. If the usual route is blocked by an accident, he goes by some other route. All that he does is determined--or so it seems--by the end he has in view, by what lies in front of him, rather than by what lies behind. With dead matter, this is not the case. A stone at the top of a hill may start rolling, but it shows no pertinacity in trying to get to the bottom. Any ledge or obstacle will stop it, and it will exhibit no signs of discontent if this happens. It is not attracted by the pleasantness of the valley, as a sheep or cow might be, but propelled by the steepness of the hill at the place where it is. In all this we have characteristic differences between the behaviour of animals and the behaviour of matter as studied by physics. Desire, like knowledge, is, of course, in one sense an observable phenomenon. An elephant will eat a bun, but not a mutton chop; a duck will go into the water, but a hen will not. But when we think of our own desires, most people believe that we can know them by an immediate self-knowledge which does not depend upon observation of our actions. Yet if this were the case, it would be odd that people are so often mistaken as to what they desire. It is matter of common observation that "so-and-so does not know his own motives," or that "A is envious of B and malicious about him, but quite unconscious of being so." Such people are called self-deceivers, and are supposed to have had to go through some more or less elaborate process of concealing from themselves what would otherwise have been obvious. I believe that this is an entire mistake. I believe that the discovery of our own motives can only be made by the same process by which we discover other people's, namely, the process of observing our actions and inferring the desire which could prompt them. A desire is "conscious" when we have told ourselves that we have it. A hungry man may say to himself: "Oh, I do want my lunch." Then his desire is "conscious." But it only differs from an "unconscious" desire by the presence of appropriate words, which is by no means a fundamental difference. The belief that a motive is normally conscious makes it easier to be mistaken as to our own motives than as to other people's. When some desire that we should be ashamed of is attributed to us, we notice that we have never had it consciously, in the sense of saying to ourselves, "I wish that would happen." We therefore look for some other interpretation of our actions, and regard our friends as very unjust when they refuse to be convinced by our repudiation of what we hold to be a calumny. Moral considerations greatly increase the difficulty of clear thinking in this matter. It is commonly argued that people are not to blame for unconscious motives, but only for conscious ones. In order, therefore, to be wholly virtuous it is only necessary to repeat virtuous formulas. We say: "I desire to be kind to my friends, honourable in business, philanthropic towards the poor, public-spirited in politics." So long as we refuse to allow ourselves, even in the watches of the night, to avow any contrary desires, we may be bullies at home, shady in the City, skinflints in paying wages and profiteers in dealing with the public; yet, if only conscious motives are to count in moral valuation, we shall remain model characters. This is an agreeable doctrine, and it is not surprising that men are un willing to abandon it. But moral considerations are the worst enemies of the scientific spirit and we must dismiss them from our minds if we wish to arrive at truth. I believe--as I shall try to prove in a later lecture--that desire, like force in mechanics, is of the nature of a convenient fiction for describing shortly certain laws of behaviour. A hungry animal is restless until it finds food; then it becomes quiescent. The thing which will bring a restless condition to an end is said to be what is desired. But only experience can show what will have this sedative effect, and it is easy to make mistakes. We feel dissatisfaction, and think that such and-such a thing would remove it; but in thinking this, we are theorizing, not observing a patent fact. Our theorizing is often mistaken, and when it is mistaken there is a difference between what we think we desire and what in fact will bring satisfaction. This is such a common phenomenon that any theory of desire which fails to account for it must be wrong. What have been called "unconscious" desires have been brought very much to the fore in recent years by psycho-analysis. Psycho-analysis, as every one knows, is primarily a method of understanding hysteria and certain forms of insanity*; but it has been found that there is much in the lives of ordinary men and women which bears a humiliating resemblance to the delusions of the insane. The connection of dreams, irrational beliefs and foolish actions with unconscious wishes has been brought to light, though with some exaggeration, by Freud and Jung and their followers. As regards the nature of these unconscious wishes, it seems to me--though as a layman I speak with diffidence--that many psycho-analysts are unduly narrow; no doubt the wishes they emphasize exist, but others, e.g. for honour and power, are equally operative and equally liable to concealment. This, however, does not affect the value of their general theories from the point of view of theoretic psychology, and it is from this point of view that their results are important for the analysis of mind. * There is a wide field of "unconscious" phenomena which does not depend upon psycho-analytic theories. Such occurrences as automatic writing lead Dr. Morton Prince to say: "As I view this question of the subconscious, far too much weight is given to the point of awareness or not awareness of our conscious processes. As a matter of fact, we find entirely identical phenomena, that is, identical in every respect but one-that of awareness in which sometimes we are aware of these conscious phenomena and sometimes not"(p. 87 of "Subconscious Phenomena," by various authors, Rebman). Dr. Morton Price conceives that there may be "consciousness" without "awareness." But this is a difficult view, and one which makes some definition of "consciousness" imperative. For nay part, I cannot see how to separate consciousness from awareness. What, I think, is clearly established, is that a man's actions and beliefs may be wholly dominated by a desire of which he is quite unconscious, and which he indignantly repudiates when it is suggested to him. Such a desire is generally, in morbid cases, of a sort which the patient would consider wicked; if he had to admit that he had the desire, he would loathe himself. Yet it is so strong that it must force an outlet for itself; hence it becomes necessary to entertain whole systems of false beliefs in order to hide the nature of what is desired. The resulting delusions in very many cases disappear if the hysteric or lunatic can be made to face the facts about himself. The consequence of this is that the treatment of many forms of insanity has grown more psychological and less physiological than it used to be. Instead of looking for a physical defect in the brain, those who treat delusions look for the repressed desire which has found this contorted mode of expression. For those who do not wish to plunge into the somewhat repulsive and often rather wild theories of psychoanalytic pioneers, it will be worth while to read a little book by Dr. Bernard Hart on "The Psychology of Insanity."* On this question of the mental as opposed to the physiological study of the causes of insanity, Dr. Hart says: * Cambridge, 1912; 2nd edition, 1914. The following references are to the second edition. "The psychological conception [of insanity] is based on the view that mental processes can be directly studied without any reference to the accompanying changes which are presumed to take place in the brain, and that insanity may therefore be properly attacked from the standpoint of psychology"(p. 9). This illustrates a point which I am anxious to make clear from the outset. Any attempt to classify modern views, such as I propose to advocate, from the old standpoint of materialism and idealism, is only misleading. In certain respects, the views which I shall be setting forth approximate to materialism; in certain others, they approximate to its opposite. On this question of the study of delusions, the practical effect of the modern theories, as Dr. Hart points out, is emancipation from the materialist method. On the other hand, as he also points out (pp. 38-9), imbecility and dementia still have to be considered physiologically, as caused by defects in the brain. There is no inconsistency in this If, as we maintain, mind and matter are neither of them the actual stuff of reality, but different convenient groupings of an underlying material, then, clearly, the question whether, in regard to a given phenomenon, we are to seek a physical or a mental cause, is merely one to be decided by trial. Metaphysicians have argued endlessly as to the interaction of mind and matter. The followers of Descartes held that mind and matter are so different as to make any action of the one on the other impossible. When I will to move my arm, they said, it is not my will that operates on my arm, but God, who, by His omnipotence, moves my arm whenever I want it moved. The modern doctrine of psychophysical parallelism is not appreciably different from this theory of the Cartesian school. Psycho-physical parallelism is the theory that mental and physical events each have causes in their own sphere, but run on side by side owing to the fact that every state of the brain coexists with a definite state of the mind, and vice versa. This view of the reciprocal causal independence of mind and matter has no basis except in metaphysical theory.* For us, there is no necessity to make any such assumption, which is very difficult to harmonize with obvious facts. I receive a letter inviting me to dinner: the letter is a physical fact, but my apprehension of its meaning is mental. Here we have an effect of matter on mind. In consequence of my apprehension of the meaning of the letter, I go to the right place at the right time; here we have an effect of mind on matter. I shall try to persuade you, in the course of these lectures, that matter is not so material and mind not so mental as is generally supposed. When we are speaking of matter, it will seem as if we were inclining to idealism; when we are speaking of mind, it will seem as if we were inclining to materialism. Neither is the truth. Our world is to be constructed out of what the American realists call "neutral" entities, which have neither the hardness and indestructibility of matter, nor the reference to objects which is supposed to characterize mind. * It would seem, however, that Dr. Hart accepts this theory as 8 methodological precept. See his contribution to "Subconscious Phenomena" (quoted above), especially pp. 121-2. There is, it is true, one objection which might be felt, not indeed to the action of matter on mind, but to the action of mind on matter. The laws of physics, it may be urged, are apparently adequate to explain everything that happens to matter, even when it is matter in a man's brain. This, however, is only a hypothesis, not an established theory. There is no cogent empirical reason for supposing that the laws determining the motions of living bodies are exactly the same as those that apply to dead matter. Sometimes, of course, they are clearly the same. When a man falls from a precipice or slips on a piece of orange peel, his body behaves as if it were devoid of life. These are the occasions that make Bergson laugh. But when a man's bodily movements are what we call "voluntary," they are, at any rate prima facie, very different in their laws from the movements of what is devoid of life. I do not wish to say dogmatically that the difference is irreducible; I think it highly probable that it is not. I say only that the study of the behaviour of living bodies, in the present state of our knowledge, is distinct from physics. The study of gases was originally quite distinct from that of rigid bodies, and would never have advanced to its present state if it had not been independently pursued. Nowadays both the gas and the rigid body are manufactured out of a more primitive and universal kind of matter. In like manner, as a question of methodology, the laws of living bodies are to be studied, in the first place, without any undue haste to subordinate them to the laws of physics. Boyle's law and the rest had to be discovered before the kinetic theory of gases became possible. But in psychology we are hardly yet at the stage of Boyle's law. Meanwhile we need not be held up by the bogey of the universal rigid exactness of physics. This is, as yet, a mere hypothesis, to be tested empirically without any preconceptions. It may be true, or it may not. So far, that is all we can say. Returning from this digression to our main topic, namely, the criticism of "consciousness," we observe that Freud and his followers, though they have demonstrated beyond dispute the immense importance of "unconscious" desires in determining our actions and beliefs, have not attempted the task of telling us what an "unconscious" desire actually is, and have thus invested their doctrine with an air of mystery and mythology which forms a large part of its popular attractiveness. They speak always as though it were more normal for a desire to be conscious, and as though a positive cause had to be assigned for its being unconscious. Thus "the unconscious" becomes a sort of underground prisoner, living in a dungeon, breaking in at long intervals upon our daylight respectability with dark groans and maledictions and strange atavistic lusts. The ordinary reader, almost inevitably, thinks of this underground person as another consciousness, prevented by what Freud calls the "censor" from making his voice heard in company, except on rare and dreadful occasions when he shouts so loud that every one hears him and there is a scandal. Most of us like the idea that we could be desperately wicked if only we let ourselves go. For this reason, the Freudian "unconscious" has been a consolation to many quiet and well-behaved persons. I do not think the truth is quite so picturesque as this. I believe an "unconscious" desire is merely a causal law of our behaviour,* namely, that we remain restlessly active until a certain state of affairs is realized, when we achieve temporary equilibrium If we know beforehand what this state of affairs is, our desire is conscious; if not, unconscious. The unconscious desire is not something actually existing, but merely a tendency to a certain behaviour; it has exactly the same status as a force in dynamics. The unconscious desire is in no way mysterious; it is the natural primitive form of desire, from which the other has developed through our habit of observing and theorizing (often wrongly). It is not necessary to suppose, as Freud seems to do, that every unconscious wish was once conscious, and was then, in his terminology, "repressed" because we disapproved of it. On the contrary, we shall suppose that, although Freudian "repression" undoubtedly occurs and is important, it is not the usual reason for unconsciousness of our wishes. The usual reason is merely that wishes are all, to begin with, unconscious, and only become known when they are actively noticed. Usually, from laziness, people do not notice, but accept the theory of human nature which they find current, and attribute to themselves whatever wishes this theory would lead them to expect. We used to be full of virtuous wishes, but since Freud our wishes have become, in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah, "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Both these views, in most of those who have held them, are the product of theory rather than observation, for observation requires effort, whereas repeating phrases does not. * Cf. Hart, "The Psychology of Insanity," p. 19. The interpretation of unconscious wishes which I have been advocating has been set forth briefly by Professor John B. Watson in an article called "The Psychology of Wish Fulfilment," which appeared in "The Scientific Monthly" in November, 1916. Two quotations will serve to show his point of view: "The Freudians (he says) have made more or less of a 'metaphysical entity' out of the censor. They suppose that when wishes are repressed they are repressed into the 'unconscious,' and that this mysterious censor stands at the trapdoor lying between the conscious and the unconscious. Many of us do not believe in a world of the unconscious (a few of us even have grave doubts about the usefulness of the term consciousness), hence we try to explain censorship along ordinary biological lines. We believe that one group of habits can 'down' another group of habits--or instincts. In this case our ordinary system of habits--those which we call expressive of our 'real selves'--inhibit or quench (keep inactive or partially inactive) those habits and instinctive tendencies which belong largely in the past"(p. 483). Again, after speaking of the frustration of some impulses which is involved in acquiring the habits of a civilized adult, he continues: "It is among these frustrated impulses that I would find the biological basis of the unfulfilled wish. Such 'wishes' need never have been 'conscious,' and NEED NEVER HAVE BEEN SUPPRESSED INTO FREUD'S REALM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. It may be inferred from this that there is no particular reason for applying the term 'wish' to such tendencies"(p. 485). One of the merits of the general analysis of mind which we shall be concerned with in the following lectures is that it removes the atmosphere of mystery from the phenomena brought to light by the psycho-analysts. Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance. Man has developed out of the animals, and there is no serious gap between him and the amoeba. Something closely analogous to knowledge and desire, as regards its effects on behaviour, exists among animals, even where what we call "consciousness" is hard to believe in; something equally analogous exists in ourselves in cases where no trace of "consciousness" can be found. It is therefore natural to suppose that, what ever may be the correct definition of "consciousness," "consciousness" is not the essence of life or mind. In the following lectures, accordingly, this term will disappear until we have dealt with words, when it will re-emerge as mainly a trivial and unimportant outcome of linguistic habits. LECTURE II. INSTINCT AND HABIT In attempting to understand the elements out of which mental phenomena are compounded, it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap. It is, of course, POSSIBLE that there may be, at certain stages in evolution, elements which are entirely new from the standpoint of analysis, though in their nascent form they have little influence on behaviour and no very marked correlatives in structure. But the hypothesis of continuity in mental development is clearly preferable if no psychological facts make it impossible. We shall find, if I am not mistaken, that there are no facts which refute the hypothesis of mental continuity, and that, on the other hand, this hypothesis affords a useful test of suggested theories as to the nature of mind. The hypothesis of mental continuity throughout organic evolution may be used in two different ways. On the one hand, it may be held that we have more knowledge of our own minds than those of animals, and that we should use this knowledge to infer the existence of something similar to our own mental processes in animals and even in plants. On the other hand, it may be held that animals and plants present simpler phenomena, more easily analysed than those of human minds; on this ground it may be urged that explanations which are adequate in the case of animals ought not to be lightly rejected in the case of man. The practical effects of these two views are diametrically opposite: the first leads us to level up animal intelligence with what we believe ourselves to know about our own intelligence, while the second leads us to attempt a levelling down of our own intelligence to something not too remote from what we can observe in animals. It is therefore important to consider the relative justification of the two ways of applying the principle of continuity. It is clear that the question turns upon another, namely, which can we know best, the psychology of animals or that of human beings? If we can know most about animals, we shall use this knowledge as a basis for inference about human beings; if we can know most about human beings, we shall adopt the opposite procedure. And the question whether we can know most about the psychology of human beings or about that of animals turns upon yet another, namely: Is introspection or external observation the surer method in psychology? This is a question which I propose to discuss at length in Lecture VI; I shall therefore content myself now with a statement of the conclusions to be arrived at. We know a great many things concerning ourselves which we cannot know nearly so directly concerning animals or even other people. We know when we have a toothache, what we are thinking of, what dreams we have when we are asleep, and a host of other occurrences which we only know about others when they tell us of them, or otherwise make them inferable by their behaviour. Thus, so far as knowledge of detached facts is concerned, the advantage is on the side of self-knowledge as against external observation. But when we come to the analysis and scientific understanding of the facts, the advantages on the side of self-knowledge become far less clear. We know, for example, that we have desires and beliefs, but we do not know what constitutes a desire or a belief. The phenomena are so familiar that it is difficult to realize how little we really know about them. We see in animals, and to a lesser extent in plants, behaviour more or less similar to that which, in us, is prompted by desires and beliefs, and we find that, as we descend in the scale of evolution, behaviour becomes simpler, more easily reducible to rule, more scientifically analysable and predictable. And just because we are not misled by familiarity we find it easier to be cautious in interpreting behaviour when we are dealing with phenomena remote from those of our own minds: Moreover, introspection, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated, is extraordinarily fallible even in cases where we feel a high degree of certainty. The net result seems to be that, though self-knowledge has a definite and important contribution to make to psychology, it is exceedingly misleading unless it is constantly checked and controlled by the test of external observation, and by the theories which such observation suggests when applied to animal behaviour. On the whole, therefore, there is probably more to be learnt about human psychology from animals than about animal psychology from human beings; but this conclusion is one of degree, and must not be pressed beyond a point. It is only bodily phenomena that can be directly observed in animals, or even, strictly speaking, in other human beings. We can observe such things as their movements, their physiological processes, and the sounds they emit. Such things as desires and beliefs, which seem obvious to introspection, are not visible directly to external observation. Accordingly, if we begin our study of psychology by external observation, we must not begin by assuming such things as desires and beliefs, but only such things as external observation can reveal, which will be characteristics of the movements and physiological processes of animals. Some animals, for example, always run away from light and hide themselves in dark places. If you pick up a mossy stone which is lightly embedded in the earth, you will see a number of small animals scuttling away from the unwonted daylight and seeking again the darkness of which you have deprived them. Such animals are sensitive to light, in the sense that their movements are affected by it; but it would be rash to infer that they have sensations in any way analogous to our sensations of sight. Such inferences, which go beyond the observable facts, are to be avoided with the utmost care. It is customary to divide human movements into three classes, voluntary, reflex and mechanical. We may illustrate the distinction by a quotation from William James ("Psychology," i, 12): "If I hear the conductor calling 'all aboard' as I enter the depot, my heart first stops, then palpitates, and my legs respond to the air-waves falling on my tympanum by quickening their movements. If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes a movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall, the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden a shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly and a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out. "These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ, however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and the lachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbance of the heart. Such involuntary responses we know as 'reflex' acts. The motion of the arms to break the shock of falling may also be called reflex, since it occurs too quickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinctive or whether it result from the pedestrian education of childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions of this kind, with which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called 'semi-reflex.' The act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to be attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a 'voluntary act.' Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary performances shade into each other gradually, being connected by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also be modified by conscious intelligence. "An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompanying consciousness, might be wholly at a loss to discriminate between the automatic acts and those which volition escorted. But if the criterion of mind's existence be the choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed end, all the acts alike seem to be inspired by intelligence, for APPROPRIATENESS characterizes them all alike." There is one movement, among those that James mentions at first, which is not subsequently classified, namely, the stumbling. This is the kind of movement which may be called "mechanical"; it is evidently of a different kind from either reflex or voluntary movements, and more akin to the movements of dead matter. We may define a movement of an animal's body as "mechanical" when it proceeds as if only dead matter were involved. For example, if you fall over a cliff, you move under the influence of gravitation, and your centre of gravity describes just as correct a parabola as if you were already dead. Mechanical movements have not the characteristic of appropriateness, unless by accident, as when a drunken man falls into a waterbutt and is sobered. But reflex and voluntary movements are not ALWAYS appropriate, unless in some very recondite sense. A moth flying into a lamp is not acting sensibly; no more is a man who is in such a hurry to get his ticket that he cannot remember the name of his destination. Appropriateness is a complicated and merely approximate idea, and for the present we shall do well to dismiss it from our thoughts. As James states, there is no difference, from the point of view of the outside observer, between voluntary and reflex movements. The physiologist can discover that both depend upon the nervous system, and he may find that the movements which we call voluntary depend upon higher centres in the brain than those that are reflex. But he cannot discover anything as to the presence or absence of "will" or "consciousness," for these things can only be seen from within, if at all. For the present, we wish to place ourselves resolutely in the position of outside observers; we will therefore ignore the distinction between voluntary and reflex movements. We will call the two together "vital" movements. We may then distinguish "vital" from mechanical movements by the fact that vital movements depend for their causation upon the special properties of the nervous system, while mechanical movements depend only upon the properties which animal bodies share with matter in general. There is need for some care if the distinction between mechanical and vital movements is to be made precise. It is quite likely that, if we knew more about animal bodies, we could deduce all their movements from the laws of chemistry and physics. It is already fairly easy to see how chemistry reduces to physics, i.e. how the differences between different chemical elements can be accounted for by differences of physical structure, the constituents of the structure being electrons which are exactly alike in all kinds of matter. We only know in part how to reduce physiology to chemistry, but we know enough to make it likely that the reduction is possible. If we suppose it effected, what would become of the difference between vital and mechanical movements? Some analogies will make the difference clear. A shock to a mass of dynamite produces quite different effects from an equal shock to a mass of steel: in the one case there is a vast explosion, while in the other case there is hardly any noticeable disturbance. Similarly, you may sometimes find on a mountain-side a large rock poised so delicately that a touch will set it crashing down into the valley, while the rocks all round are so firm that only a considerable force can dislodge them What is analogous in these two cases is the existence of a great store of energy in unstable equilibrium ready to burst into violent motion by the addition of a very slight disturbance. Similarly, it requires only a very slight expenditure of energy to send a post-card with the words "All is discovered; fly!" but the effect in generating kinetic energy is said to be amazing. A human body, like a mass of dynamite, contains a store of energy in unstable equilibrium, ready to be directed in this direction or that by a disturbance which is physically very small, such as a spoken word. In all such cases the reduction of behaviour to physical laws can only be effected by entering into great minuteness; so long as we confine ourselves to the observation of comparatively large masses, the way in which the equilibrium will be upset cannot be determined. Physicists distinguish between macroscopic and microscopic equations: the former determine the visible movements of bodies of ordinary size, the latter the minute occurrences in the smallest parts. It is only the microscopic equations that are supposed to be the same for all sorts of matter. The macroscopic equations result from a process of averaging out, and may be different in different cases. So, in our instance, the laws of macroscopic phenomena are different for mechanical and vital movements, though the laws of microscopic phenomena may be the same. We may say, speaking somewhat roughly, that a stimulus applied to the nervous system, like a spark to dynamite, is able to take advantage of the stored energy in unstable equilibrium, and thus to produce movements out of proportion to the proximate cause. Movements produced in this way are vital movements, while mechanical movements are those in which the stored energy of a living body is not involved. Similarly dynamite may be exploded, thereby displaying its characteristic properties, or may (with due precautions) be carted about like any other mineral. The explosion is analogous to vital movements, the carting about to mechanical movements. Mechanical movements are of no interest to the psychologist, and it has only been necessary to define them in order to be able to exclude them. When a psychologist studies behaviour, it is only vital movements that concern him. We shall, therefore, proceed to ignore mechanical movements, and study only the properties of the remainder. The next point is to distinguish between movements that are instinctive and movements that are acquired by experience. This distinction also is to some extent one of degree. Professor Lloyd Morgan gives the following definition of "instinctive behaviour": "That which is, on its first occurrence, independent of prior experience; which tends to the well-being of the individual and the preservation of the race; which is similarly performed by all members of the same more or less restricted group of animals; and which may be subject to subsequent modification under the guidance of experience." * * "Instinct and Experience" (Methuen, 1912) p. 5. This definition is framed for the purposes of biology, and is in some respects unsuited to the needs of psychology. Though perhaps unavoidable, allusion to "the same more or less restricted group of animals" makes it impossible to judge what is instinctive in the behaviour of an isolated individual. Moreover, "the well-being of the individual and the preservation of the race" is only a usual characteristic, not a universal one, of the sort of movements that, from our point of view, are to be called instinctive; instances of harmful instincts will be given shortly. The essential point of the definition, from our point of view, is that an instinctive movement is in dependent of prior experience. We may say that an "instinctive" movement is a vital movement performed by an animal the first time that it finds itself in a novel situation; or, more correctly, one which it would perform if the situation were novel.* The instincts of an animal are different at different periods of its growth, and this fact may cause changes of behaviour which are not due to learning. The maturing and seasonal fluctuation of the sex-instinct affords a good illustration. When the sex-instinct first matures, the behaviour of an animal in the presence of a mate is different from its previous behaviour in similar circumstances, but is not learnt, since it is just the same if the animal has never previously been in the presence of a mate. * Though this can only be decided by comparison with other members of the species, and thus exposes us to the need of comparison which we thought an objection to Professor Lloyd Morgan's definition. On the other hand, a movement is "learnt," or embodies a "habit," if it is due to previous experience of similar situations, and is not what it would be if the animal had had no such experience. There are various complications which blur the sharpness of this distinction in practice. To begin with, many instincts mature gradually, and while they are immature an animal may act in a fumbling manner which is very difficult to distinguish from learning. James ("Psychology," ii, 407) maintains that children walk by instinct, and that the awkwardness of their first attempts is only due to the fact that the instinct has not yet ripened. He hopes that "some scientific widower, left alone with his offspring at the critical moment, may ere long test this suggestion on the living subject." However this may be, he quotes evidence to show that "birds do not LEARN to fly," but fly by instinct when they reach the appropriate age (ib., p. 406). In the second place, instinct often gives only a rough outline of the sort of thing to do, in which case learning is necessary in order to acquire certainty and precision in action. In the third place, even in the clearest cases of acquired habit, such as speaking, some instinct is required to set in motion the process of learning. In the case of speaking, the chief instinct involved is commonly supposed to be that of imitation, but this may be questioned. (See Thorndike's "Animal Intelligence," p. 253 ff.) In spite of these qualifications, the broad distinction between instinct and habit is undeniable. To take extreme cases, every animal at birth can take food by instinct, before it has had opportunity to learn; on the other hand, no one can ride a bicycle by instinct, though, after learning, the necessary movements become just as automatic as if they were instinctive. The process of learning, which consists in the acquisition of habits, has been much studied in various animals.* For example: you put a hungry animal, say a cat, in a cage which has a door that can be opened by lifting a latch; outside the cage you put food. The cat at first dashes all round the cage, making frantic efforts to force a way out. At last, by accident, the latch is lifted and the cat pounces on the food. Next day you repeat the experiment, and you find that the cat gets out much more quickly than the first time, although it still makes some random movements. The third day it gets out still more quickly, and before long it goes straight to the latch and lifts it at once. Or you make a model of the Hampton Court maze, and put a rat in the middle, assaulted by the smell of food on the outside. The rat starts running down the passages, and is constantly stopped by blind alleys, but at last, by persistent attempts, it gets out. You repeat this experiment day after day; you measure the time taken by the rat in reaching the food; you find that the time rapidly diminishes, and that after a while the rat ceases to make any wrong turnings. It is by essentially similar processes that we learn speaking, writing, mathematics, or the government of an empire. * The scientific study of this subject may almost be said to begin with Thorndike's "Animal Intelligence" (Macmillan, 1911). Professor Watson ("Behavior," pp. 262-3) has an ingenious theory as to the way in which habit arises out of random movements. I think there is a reason why his theory cannot be regarded as alone sufficient, but it seems not unlikely that it is partly correct. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that there are just ten random movements which may be made by the animal--say, ten paths down which it may go--and that only one of these leads to food, or whatever else represents success in the case in question. Then the successful movement always occurs during the animal's attempts, whereas each of the others, on the average, occurs in only half the attempts. Thus the tendency to repeat a previous performance (which is easily explicable without the intervention of "consciousness") leads to a greater emphasis on the successful movement than on any other, and in time causes it alone to be performed. The objection to this view, if taken as the sole explanation, is that on improvement ought to set in till after the SECOND trial, whereas experiment shows that already at the second attempt the animal does better than the first time. Something further is, therefore, required to account for the genesis of habit from random movements; but I see no reason to suppose that what is further required involves "consciousness." Mr. Thorndike (op. cit., p. 244) formulates two "provisional laws of acquired behaviour or learning," as follows: "The Law of Effect is that: Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond. "The Law of Exercise is that: Any response to a situation will, other things being equal, be more strongly connected with the situation in proportion to the number of times it has been connected with that situation and to the average vigour and duration of the connections." With the explanation to be presently given of the meaning of "satisfaction" and "discomfort," there seems every reason to accept these two laws. What is true of animals, as regards instinct and habit, is equally true of men. But the higher we rise in the evolutionary scale, broadly speaking, the greater becomes the power of learning, and the fewer are the occasions when pure instinct is exhibited unmodified in adult life. This applies with great force to man, so much so that some have thought instinct less important in the life of man than in that of animals. This, however, would be a mistake. Learning is only possible when instinct supplies the driving-force. The animals in cages, which gradually learn to get out, perform random movements at first, which are purely instinctive. But for these random movements, they would never acquire the experience which afterwards enables them to produce the right movement. (This is partly questioned by Hobhouse*--wrongly, I think.) Similarly, children learning to talk make all sorts of sounds, until one day the right sound comes by accident. It is clear that the original making of random sounds, without which speech would never be learnt, is instinctive. I think we may say the same of all the habits and aptitudes that we acquire in all of them there has been present throughout some instinctive activity, prompting at first rather inefficient movements, but supplying the driving force while more and more effective methods are being acquired. A cat which is hungry smells fish, and goes to the larder. This is a thoroughly efficient method when there is fish in the larder, and it is often successfully practised by children. But in later life it is found that merely going to the larder does not cause fish to be there; after a series of random movements it is found that this result is to be caused by going to the City in the morning and coming back in the evening. No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found it. Of course, in actual fact, human learning is rendered easier, though psychologically more complex, through language; but at bottom language does not alter the essential character of learning, or of the part played by instinct in promoting learning. Language, however, is a subject upon which I do not wish to speak until a later lecture. * "Mind in Evolution" (Macmillan, 1915), pp. 236-237. The popular conception of instinct errs by imagining it to be infallible and preternaturally wise, as well as incapable of modification. This is a complete delusion. Instinct, as a rule, is very rough and ready, able to achieve its result under ordinary circumstances, but easily misled by anything unusual. Chicks follow their mother by instinct, but when they are quite young they will follow with equal readiness any moving object remotely resembling their mother, or even a human being (James, "Psychology," ii, 396). Bergson, quoting Fabre, has made play with the supposed extraordinary accuracy of the solitary wasp Ammophila, which lays its eggs in a caterpillar. On this subject I will quote from Drever's "Instinct in Man," p. 92: "According to Fabre's observations, which Bergson accepts, the Ammophila stings its prey EXACTLY and UNERRINGLY in EACH of the nervous centres. The result is that the caterpillar is paralyzed, but not immediately killed, the advantage of this being that the larva cannot be injured by any movement of the caterpillar, upon which the egg is deposited, and is provided with fresh meat when the time comes. "Now Dr. and Mrs. Peckham have shown that the sting of the wasp is NOT UNERRING, as Fabre alleges, that the number of stings is NOT CONSTANT, that sometimes the caterpillar is NOT PARALYZED, and sometimes it is KILLED OUTRIGHT, and that THE DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES DO NOT APPARENTLY MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE TO THE LARVA, which is not injured by slight movements of the caterpillar, nor by consuming food decomposed rather than fresh caterpillar." This illustrates how love of the marvellous may mislead even so careful an observer as Fabre and so eminent a philosopher as Bergson. In the same chapter of Dr. Drever's book there are some interesting examples of the mistakes made by instinct. I will quote one as a sample: "The larva of the Lomechusa beetle eats the young of the ants, in whose nest it is reared. Nevertheless, the ants tend the Lomechusa larvae with the same care they bestow on their own young. Not only so, but they apparently discover that the methods of feeding, which suit their own larvae, would prove fatal to the guests, and accordingly they change their whole system of nursing" (loc. cit., p. 106). Semon ("Die Mneme," pp. 207-9) gives a good illustration of an instinct growing wiser through experience. He relates how hunters attract stags by imitating the sounds of other members of their species, male or female, but find that the older a stag becomes the more difficult it is to deceive him, and the more accurate the imitation has to be. The literature of instinct is vast, and illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. The main points as regards instinct, which need to be emphasized as against the popular conceptions of it, are: (1) That instinct requires no prevision of the biological end which it serves; (2) That instinct is only adapted to achieve this end in the usual circumstances of the animal in question, and has no more precision than is necessary for success AS A RULE; (3) That processes initiated by instinct often come to be performed better after experience; (4) That instinct supplies the impulses to experimental movements which are required for the process of learning; (5) That instincts in their nascent stages are easily modifiable, and capable of being attached to various sorts of objects. All the above characteristics of instinct can be established by purely external observation, except the fact that instinct does not require prevision. This, though not strictly capable of being PROVED by observation, is irresistibly suggested by the most obvious phenomena. Who can believe, for example, that a new-born baby is aware of the necessity of food for preserving life? Or that insects, in laying eggs, are concerned for the preservation of their species? The essence of instinct, one might say, is that it provides a mechanism for acting without foresight in a manner which is usually advantageous biologically. It is partly for this reason that it is so important to understand the fundamental position of instinct in prompting both animal and human behaviour. LECTURE III. DESIRE AND FEELING Desire is a subject upon which, if I am not mistaken, true views can only be arrived at by an almost complete reversal of the ordinary unreflecting opinion. It is natural to regard desire as in its essence an attitude towards something which is imagined, not actual; this something is called the END or OBJECT of the desire, and is said to be the PURPOSE of any action resulting from the desire. We think of the content of the desire as being just like the content of a belief, while the attitude taken up towards the content is different. According to this theory, when we say: "I hope it will rain," or "I expect it will rain," we express, in the first case, a desire, and in the second, a belief, with an identical content, namely, the image of rain. It would be easy to say that, just as belief is one kind of feeling in relation to this content, so desire is another kind. According to this view, what comes first in desire is something imagined, with a specific feeling related to it, namely, that specific feeling which we call "desiring" it. The discomfort associated with unsatisfied desire, and the actions which aim at satisfying desire, are, in this view, both of them effects of the desire. I think it is fair to say that this is a view against which common sense would not rebel; nevertheless, I believe it to be radically mistaken. It cannot be refuted logically, but various facts can be adduced which make it gradually less simple and plausible, until at last it turns out to be easier to abandon it wholly and look at the matter in a totally different way. The first set of facts to be adduced against the common sense view of desire are those studied by psycho-analysis. In all human beings, but most markedly in those suffering from hysteria and certain forms of insanity, we find what are called "unconscious" desires, which are commonly regarded as showing self-deception. Most psycho-analysts pay little attention to the analysis of desire, being interested in discovering by observation what it is that people desire, rather than in discovering what actually constitutes desire. I think the strangeness of what they report would be greatly diminished if it were expressed in the language of a behaviourist theory of desire, rather than in the language of every-day beliefs. The general description of the sort of phenomena that bear on our present question is as follows: A person states that his desires are so-and-so, and that it is these desires that inspire his actions; but the outside observer perceives that his actions are such as to realize quite different ends from those which he avows, and that these different ends are such as he might be expected to desire. Generally they are less virtuous than his professed desires, and are therefore less agreeable to profess than these are. It is accordingly supposed that they really exist as desires for ends, but in a subconscious part of the mind, which the patient refuses to admit into consciousness for fear of having to think ill of himself. There are no doubt many cases to which such a supposition is applicable without obvious artificiality. But the deeper the Freudians delve into the underground regions of instinct, the further they travel from anything resembling conscious desire, and the less possible it becomes to believe that only positive self-deception conceals from us that we really wish for things which are abhorrent to our explicit life. In the cases in question we have a conflict between the outside observer and the patient's consciousness. The whole tendency of psycho-analysis is to trust the outside observer rather than the testimony of introspection. I believe this tendency to be entirely right, but to demand a re-statement of what constitutes desire, exhibiting it as a causal law of our actions, not as something actually existing in our minds. But let us first get a clearer statement of the essential characteristic of the phenomena. A person, we find, states that he desires a certain end A, and that he is acting with a view to achieving it. We observe, however, that his actions are such as are likely to achieve a quite different end B, and that B is the sort of end that often seems to be aimed at by animals and savages, though civilized people are supposed to have discarded it. We sometimes find also a whole set of false beliefs, of such a kind as to persuade the patient that his actions are really a means to A, when in fact they are a means to B. For example, we have an impulse to inflict pain upon those whom we hate; we therefore believe that they are wicked, and that punishment will reform them. This belief enables us to act upon the impulse to inflict pain, while believing that we are acting upon the desire to lead sinners to repentance. It is for this reason that the criminal law has been in all ages more severe than it would have been if the impulse to ameliorate the criminal had been what really inspired it. It seems simple to explain such a state of affairs as due to "self-deception," but this explanation is often mythical. Most people, in thinking about punishment, have had no more need to hide their vindictive impulses from themselves than they have had to hide the exponential theorem. Our impulses are not patent to a casual observation, but are only to be discovered by a scientific study of our actions, in the course of which we must regard ourselves as objectively as we should the motions of the planets or the chemical reactions of a new element. The study of animals reinforces this conclusion, and is in many ways the best preparation for the analysis of desire. In animals we are not troubled by the disturbing influence of ethical considerations. In dealing with human beings, we are perpetually distracted by being told that such-and-such a view is gloomy or cynical or pessimistic: ages of human conceit have built up such a vast myth as to our wisdom and virtue that any intrusion of the mere scientific desire to know the facts is instantly resented by those who cling to comfortable illusions. But no one cares whether animals are virtuous or not, and no one is under the delusion that they are rational. Moreover, we do not expect them to be so "conscious," and are prepared to admit that their instincts prompt useful actions without any prevision of the ends which they achieve. For all these reasons, there is much in the analysis of mind which is more easily discovered by the study of animals than by the observation of human beings. We all think that, by watching the behaviour of animals, we can discover more or less what they desire. If this is the case--and I fully agree that it is--desire must be capable of being exhibited in actions, for it is only the actions of animals that we can observe. They MAY have minds in which all sorts of things take place, but we can know nothing about their minds except by means of inferences from their actions; and the more such inferences are examined, the more dubious they appear. It would seem, therefore, that actions alone must be the test of the desires of animals. From this it is an easy step to the conclusion that an animal's desire is nothing but a characteristic of a certain series of actions, namely, those which would be commonly regarded as inspired by the desire in question. And when it has been shown that this view affords a satisfactory account of animal desires, it is not difficult to see that the same explanation is applicable to the desires of human beings. We judge easily from the behaviour of an animal of a familiar kind whether it is hungry or thirsty, or pleased or displeased, or inquisitive or terrified. The verification of our judgment, so far as verification is possible, must be derived from the immediately succeeding actions of the animal. Most people would say that they infer first something about the animal's state of mind--whether it is hungry or thirsty and so on--and thence derive their expectations as to its subsequent conduct. But this detour through the animal's supposed mind is wholly unnecessary. We can say simply: The animal's behaviour during the last minute has had those characteristics which distinguish what is called "hunger," and it is likely that its actions during the next minute will be similar in this respect, unless it finds food, or is interrupted by a stronger impulse, such as fear. An animal which is hungry is restless, it goes to the places where food is often to be found, it sniffs with its nose or peers with its eyes or otherwise increases the sensitiveness of its sense-organs; as soon as it is near enough to food for its sense-organs to be affected, it goes to it with all speed and proceeds to eat; after which, if the quantity of food has been sufficient, its whole demeanour changes it may very likely lie down and go to sleep. These things and others like them are observable phenomena distinguishing a hungry animal from one which is not hungry. The characteristic mark by which we recognize a series of actions which display hunger is not the animal's mental state, which we cannot observe, but something in its bodily behaviour; it is this observable trait in the bodily behaviour that I am proposing to call "hunger," not some possibly mythical and certainly unknowable ingredient of the animal's mind. Generalizing what occurs in the case of hunger, we may say that what we call a desire in an animal is always displayed in a cycle of actions having certain fairly well marked characteristics. There is first a state of activity, consisting, with qualifications to be mentioned presently, of movements likely to have a certain result; these movements, unless interrupted, continue until the result is achieved, after which there is usually a period of comparative quiescence. A cycle of actions of this sort has marks by which it is broadly distinguished from the motions of dead matter. The most notable of these marks are--(1) the appropriateness of the actions for the realization of a certain result; (2) the continuance of action until that result has been achieved. Neither of these can be pressed beyond a point. Either may be (a) to some extent present in dead matter, and (b) to a considerable extent absent in animals, while vegetable are intermediate, and display only a much fainter form of the behaviour which leads us to attribute desire to animals. (a) One might say rivers "desire" the sea water, roughly speaking, remains in restless motion until it reaches either the sea or a place from which it cannot issue without going uphill, and therefore we might say that this is what it wishes while it is flowing. We do not say so, because we can account for the behaviour of water by the laws of physics; and if we knew more about animals, we might equally cease to attribute desires to them, since we might find physical and chemical reactions sufficient to account for their behaviour. (b) Many of the movements of animals do not exhibit the characteristics of the cycles which seem to embody desire. There are first of all the movements which are "mechanical," such as slipping and falling, where ordinary physical forces operate upon the animal's body almost as if it were dead matter. An animal which falls over a cliff may make a number of desperate struggles while it is in the air, but its centre of gravity will move exactly as it would if the animal were dead. In this case, if the animal is killed at the end of the fall, we have, at first sight, just the characteristics of a cycle of actions embodying desire, namely, restless movement until the ground is reached, and then quiescence. Nevertheless, we feel no temptation to say that the animal desired what occurred, partly because of the obviously mechanical nature of the whole occurrence, partly because, when an animal survives a fall, it tends not to repeat the experience. There may be other reasons also, but of them I do not wish to speak yet. Besides mechanical movements, there are interrupted movements, as when a bird, on its way to eat your best peas, is frightened away by the boy whom you are employing for that purpose. If interruptions are frequent and completion of cycles rare, the characteristics by which cycles are observed may become so blurred as to be almost unrecognizable. The result of these various considerations is that the differences between animals and dead matter, when we confine ourselves to external unscientific observation of integral behaviour, are a matter of degree and not very precise. It is for this reason that it has always been possible for fanciful people to maintain that even stocks and stones have some vague kind of soul. The evidence that animals have souls is so very shaky that, if it is assumed to be conclusive, one might just as well go a step further and extend the argument by analogy to all matter. Nevertheless, in spite of vagueness and doubtful cases, the existence of cycles in the behaviour of animals is a broad characteristic by which they are prima facie distinguished from ordinary matter; and I think it is this characteristic which leads us to attribute desires to animals, since it makes their behaviour resemble what we do when (as we say) we are acting from desire. I shall adopt the following definitions for describing the behaviour of animals: A "behaviour-cycle" is a series of voluntary or reflex movements of an animal, tending to cause a certain result, and continuing until that result is caused, unless they are interrupted by death, accident, or some new behaviour-cycle. (Here "accident" may be defined as the intervention of purely physical laws causing mechanical movements.) The "purpose" of a behaviour-cycle is the result which brings it to an end, normally by a condition of temporary quiescence-provided there is no interruption. An animal is said to "desire" the purpose of a behaviour cycle while the behaviour-cycle is in progress. I believe these definitions to be adequate also to human purposes and desires, but for the present I am only occupied with animals and with what can be learnt by external observation. I am very anxious that no ideas should be attached to the words "purpose" and "desire" beyond those involved in the above definitions. We have not so far considered what is the nature of the initial stimulus to a behaviour-cycle. Yet it is here that the usual view of desire seems on the strongest ground. The hungry animal goes on making movements until it gets food; it seems natural, therefore, to suppose that the idea of food is present throughout the process, and that the thought of the end to be achieved sets the whole process in motion. Such a view, however, is obviously untenable in many cases, especially where instinct is concerned. Take, for example, reproduction and the rearing of the young. Birds mate, build a nest, lay eggs in it, sit on the eggs, feed the young birds, and care for them until they are fully grown. It is totally impossible to suppose that this series of actions, which constitutes one behaviour-cycle, is inspired by any prevision of the end, at any rate the first time it is performed.* We must suppose that the stimulus to the performance of each act is an impulsion from behind, not an attraction from the future. The bird does what it does, at each stage, because it has an impulse to that particular action, not because it perceives that the whole cycle of actions will contribute to the preservation of the species. The same considerations apply to other instincts. A hungry animal feels restless, and is led by instinctive impulses to perform the movements which give it nourishment; but the act of seeking food is not sufficient evidence from which to conclude that the animal has the thought of food in its "mind." * For evidence as to birds' nests, cf. Semon, "Die Mneme," pp. 209, 210. Coming now to human beings, and to what we know about our own actions, it seems clear that what, with us, sets a behaviour-cycle in motion is some sensation of the sort which we call disagreeable. Take the case of hunger: we have first an uncomfortable feeling inside, producing a disinclination to sit still, a sensitiveness to savoury smells, and an attraction towards any food that there may be in our neighbourhood. At any moment during this process we may become aware that we are hungry, in the sense of saying to ourselves, "I am hungry"; but we may have been acting with reference to food for some time before this moment. While we are talking or reading, we may eat in complete unconsciousness; but we perform the actions of eating just as we should if we were conscious, and they cease when our hunger is appeased. What we call "consciousness" seems to be a mere spectator of the process; even when it issues orders, they are usually, like those of a wise parent, just such as would have been obeyed even if they had not been given. This view may seem at first exaggerated, but the more our so-called volitions and their causes are examined, the more it is forced upon us. The part played by words in all this is complicated, and a potent source of confusions; I shall return to it later. For the present, I am still concerned with primitive desire, as it exists in man, but in the form in which man shows his affinity to his animal ancestors. Conscious desire is made up partly of what is essential to desire, partly of beliefs as to what we want. It is important to be clear as to the part which does not consist of beliefs. The primitive non-cognitive element in desire seems to be a push, not a pull, an impulsion away from the actual, rather than an attraction towards the ideal. Certain sensations and other mental occurrences have a property which we call discomfort; these cause such bodily movements as are likely to lead to their cessation. When the discomfort ceases, or even when it appreciably diminishes, we have sensations possessing a property which we call PLEASURE. Pleasurable sensations either stimulate no action at all, or at most stimulate such action as is likely to prolong them. I shall return shortly to the consideration of what discomfort and pleasure are in themselves; for the present, it is their connection with action and desire that concerns us. Abandoning momentarily the standpoint of behaviourism, we may presume that hungry animals experience sensations involving discomfort, and stimulating such movements as seem likely to bring them to the food which is outside the cages. When they have reached the food and eaten it, their discomfort ceases and their sensations become pleasurable. It SEEMS, mistakenly, as if the animals had had this situation in mind throughout, when in fact they have been continually pushed by discomfort. And when an animal is reflective, like some men, it comes to think that it had the final situation in mind throughout; sometimes it comes to know what situation will bring satisfaction, so that in fact the discomfort does bring the thought of what will allay it. Nevertheless the sensation involving discomfort remains the prime mover. This brings us to the question of the nature of discomfort and pleasure. Since Kant it has been customary to recognize three great divisions of mental phenomena, which are typified by knowledge, desire and feeling, where "feeling" is used to mean pleasure and discomfort. Of course, "knowledge" is too definite a word: the states of mind concerned are grouped together as "cognitive," and are to embrace not only beliefs, but perceptions, doubts, and the understanding of concepts. "Desire," also, is narrower than what is intended: for example, WILL is to be included in this category, and in fact every thing that involves any kind of striving, or "conation" as it is technically called. I do not myself believe that there is any value in this threefold division of the contents of mind. I believe that sensations (including images) supply all the "stuff" of the mind, and that everything else can be analysed into groups of sensations related in various ways, or characteristics of sensations or of groups of sensations. As regards belief, I shall give grounds for this view in later lectures. As regards desires, I have given some grounds in this lecture. For the present, it is pleasure and discomfort that concern us. There are broadly three theories that might be held in regard to them. We may regard them as separate existing items in those who experience them, or we may regard them as intrinsic qualities of sensations and other mental occurrences, or we may regard them as mere names for the causal characteristics of the occurrences which are uncomfortable or pleasant. The first of these theories, namely, that which regards discomfort and pleasure as actual contents in those who experience them, has, I think, nothing conclusive to be said in its favour.* It is suggested chiefly by an ambiguity in the word "pain," which has misled many people, including Berkeley, whom it supplied with one of his arguments for subjective idealism. We may use "pain" as the opposite of "pleasure," and "painful" as the opposite of "pleasant," or we may use "pain" to mean a certain sort of sensation, on a level with the sensations of heat and cold and touch. The latter use of the word has prevailed in psychological literature, and it is now no longer used as the opposite of "pleasure." Dr. H. Head, in a recent publication, has stated this distinction as follows:** * Various arguments in its favour are advanced by A. Wohlgemuth, "On the feelings and their neural correlate, with an examination of the nature of pain," "British Journal of Psychology," viii, 4. (1917). But as these arguments are largely a reductio ad absurdum of other theories, among which that which I am advocating is not included, I cannot regard them as establishing their contention. ** "Sensation and the Cerebral Cortex," "Brain," vol. xli, part ii (September, 1918), p. 90. Cf. also Wohlgemuth, loc. cit. pp. 437, 450. "It is necessary at the outset to distinguish clearly between 'discomfort' and 'pain.' Pain is a distinct sensory quality equivalent to heat and cold, and its intensity can be roughly graded according to the force expended in stimulation. Discomfort, on the other hand, is that feeling-tone which is directly opposed to pleasure. It may accompany sensations not in themselves essentially painful; as for instance that produced by tickling the sole of the foot. The reaction produced by repeated pricking contains both these elements; for it evokes that sensory quality known as pain, accompanied by a disagreeable feeling-tone, which we have called discomfort. On the other hand, excessive pressure, except when applied directly over some nerve-trunk, tends to excite more discomfort than pain." The confusion between discomfort and pain has made people regard discomfort as a more substantial thing than it is, and this in turn has reacted upon the view taken of pleasure, since discomfort and pleasure are evidently on a level in this respect. As soon as discomfort is clearly distinguished from the sensation of pain, it becomes more natural to regard discomfort and pleasure as properties of mental occurrences than to regard them as separate mental occurrences on their own account. I shall therefore dismiss the view that they are separate mental occurrences, and regard them as properties of such experiences as would be called respectively uncomfortable and pleasant. It remains to be examined whether they are actual qualities of such occurrences, or are merely differences as to causal properties. I do not myself see any way of deciding this question; either view seems equally capable of accounting for the facts. If this is true, it is safer to avoid the assumption that there are such intrinsic qualities of mental occurrences as are in question, and to assume only the causal differences which are undeniable. Without condemning the intrinsic theory, we can define discomfort and pleasure as consisting in causal properties, and say only what will hold on either of the two theories. Following this course, we shall say: "Discomfort" is a property of a sensation or other mental occurrence, consisting in the fact that the occurrence in question stimulates voluntary or reflex movements tending to produce some more or less definite change involving the cessation of the occurrence. "Pleasure" is a property of a sensation or other mental occurrence, consisting in the fact that the occurrence in question either does not stimulate any voluntary or reflex movement, or, if it does, stimulates only such as tend to prolong the occurrence in question.* * Cf. Thorndike, op. cit., p. 243. "Conscious" desire, which we have now to consider, consists of desire in the sense hitherto discussed, together with a true belief as to its "purpose," i.e. as to the state of affairs that will bring quiescence with cessation of the discomfort. If our theory of desire is correct, a belief as to its purpose may very well be erroneous, since only experience can show what causes a discomfort to cease. When the experience needed is common and simple, as in the case of hunger, a mistake is not very probable. But in other cases--e.g. erotic desire in those who have had little or no experience of its satisfaction--mistakes are to be expected, and do in fact very often occur. The practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes easier, by preventing experience of the actions to which a desire would otherwise lead, and by often causing the inhibited impulses themselves to be unnoticed or quickly forgotten. The perfectly natural mistakes which thus arise constitute a large proportion of what is, mistakenly in part, called self-deception, and attributed by Freud to the "censor." But there is a further point which needs emphasizing, namely, that a belief that something is desired has often a tendency to cause the very desire that is believed in. It is this fact that makes the effect of "consciousness" on desire so complicated. When we believe that we desire a certain state of affairs, that often tends to cause a real desire for it. This is due partly to the influence of words upon our emotions, in rhetoric for example, and partly to the general fact that discomfort normally belongs to the belief that we desire such-and-such a thing that we do not possess. Thus what was originally a false opinion as to the object of a desire acquires a certain truth: the false opinion generates a secondary subsidiary desire, which nevertheless becomes real. Let us take an illustration. Suppose you have been jilted in a way which wounds your vanity. Your natural impulsive desire will be of the sort expressed in Donne's poem: When by thy scorn, O Murderess, I am dead, in which he explains how he will haunt the poor lady as a ghost, and prevent her from enjoying a moment's peace. But two things stand in the way of your expressing yourself so naturally: on the one hand, your vanity, which will not acknowledge how hard you are hit; on the other hand, your conviction that you are a civilized and humane person, who could not possibly indulge so crude a desire as revenge. You will therefore experience a restlessness which will at first seem quite aimless, but will finally resolve itself in a conscious desire to change your profession, or go round the world, or conceal your identity and live in Putney, like Arnold Bennett's hero. Although the prime cause of this desire is a false judgment as to your previous unconscious desire, yet the new conscious desire has its own derivative genuineness, and may influence your actions to the extent of sending you round the world. The initial mistake, however, will have effects of two kinds. First, in uncontrolled moments, under the influence of sleepiness or drink or delirium, you will say things calculated to injure the faithless deceiver. Secondly, you will find travel disappointing, and the East less fascinating than you had hoped--unless, some day, you hear that the wicked one has in turn been jilted. If this happens, you will believe that you feel sincere sympathy, but you will suddenly be much more delighted than before with the beauties of tropical islands or the wonders of Chinese art. A secondary desire, derived from a false judgment as to a primary desire, has its own power of influencing action, and is therefore a real desire according to our definition. But it has not the same power as a primary desire of bringing thorough satisfaction when it is realized; so long as the primary desire remains unsatisfied, restlessness continues in spite of the secondary desire's success. Hence arises a belief in the vanity of human wishes: the vain wishes are those that are secondary, but mistaken beliefs prevent us from realizing that they are secondary. What may, with some propriety, be called self-deception arises through the operation of desires for beliefs. We desire many things which it is not in our power to achieve: that we should be universally popular and admired, that our work should be the wonder of the age, and that the universe should be so ordered as to bring ultimate happiness to all, though not to our enemies until they have repented and been purified by suffering. Such desires are too large to be achieved through our own efforts. But it is found that a considerable portion of the satisfaction which these things would bring us if they were realized is to be achieved by the much easier operation of believing that they are or will be realized. This desire for beliefs, as opposed to desire for the actual facts, is a particular case of secondary desire, and, like all secondary desire its satisfaction does not lead to a complete cessation of the initial discomfort. Nevertheless, desire for beliefs, as opposed to desire for facts, is exceedingly potent both individually and socially. According to the form of belief desired, it is called vanity, optimism, or religion. Those who have sufficient power usually imprison or put to death any one who tries to shake their faith in their own excellence or in that of the universe; it is for this reason that seditious libel and blasphemy have always been, and still are, criminal offences. It is very largely through desires for beliefs that the primitive nature of desire has become so hidden, and that the part played by consciousness has been so confusing and so exaggerated. We may now summarize our analysis of desire and feeling. A mental occurrence of any kind--sensation, image, belief, or emotion--may be a cause of a series of actions, continuing, unless interrupted, until some more or less definite state of affairs is realized. Such a series of actions we call a "behaviour-cycle." The degree of definiteness may vary greatly: hunger requires only food in general, whereas the sight of a particular piece of food raises a desire which requires the eating of that piece of food. The property of causing such a cycle of occurrences is called "discomfort"; the property of the mental occurrences in which the cycle ends is called "pleasure." The actions constituting the cycle must not be purely mechanical, i.e. they must be bodily movements in whose causation the special properties of nervous tissue are involved. The cycle ends in a condition of quiescence, or of such action as tends only to preserve the status quo. The state of affairs in which this condition of quiescence is achieved is called the "purpose" of the cycle, and the initial mental occurrence involving discomfort is called a "desire" for the state of affairs that brings quiescence. A desire is called "conscious" when it is accompanied by a true belief as to the state of affairs that will bring quiescence; otherwise it is called "unconscious." All primitive desire is unconscious, and in human beings beliefs as to the purposes of desires are often mistaken. These mistaken beliefs generate secondary desires, which cause various interesting complications in the psychology of human desire, without fundamentally altering the character which it shares with animal desire. LECTURE IV. INFLUENCE OF PAST HISTORY ON PRESENT OCCURRENCES IN LIVING ORGANISMS In this lecture we shall be concerned with a very general characteristic which broadly, though not absolutely, distinguishes the behaviour of living organisms from that of dead matter. The characteristic in question is this: The response of an organism to a given stimulus is very often dependent upon the past history of the organism, and not merely upon the stimulus and the HITHERTO DISCOVERABLE present state of the organism. This characteristic is embodied in the saying "a burnt child fears the fire." The burn may have left no visible traces, yet it modifies the reaction of the child in the presence of fire. It is customary to assume that, in such cases, the past operates by modifying the structure of the brain, not directly. I have no wish to suggest that this hypothesis is false; I wish only to point out that it is a hypothesis. At the end of the present lecture I shall examine the grounds in its favour. If we confine ourselves to facts which have been actually observed, we must say that past occurrences, in addition to the present stimulus and the present ascertainable condition of the organism, enter into the causation of the response. The characteristic is not wholly confined to living organisms. For example, magnetized steel looks just like steel which has not been magnetized, but its behaviour is in some ways different. In the case of dead matter, however, such phenomena are less frequent and important than in the case of living organisms, and it is far less difficult to invent satisfactory hypotheses as to the microscopic changes of structure which mediate between the past occurrence and the present changed response. In the case of living organisms, practically everything that is distinctive both of their physical and of their mental behaviour is bound up with this persistent influence of the past. Further, speaking broadly, the change in response is usually of a kind that is biologically advantageous to the organism. Following a suggestion derived from Semon ("Die Mneme," Leipzig, 1904; 2nd edition, 1908, English translation, Allen & Unwin, 1921; "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," Leipzig, 1909), we will give the name of "mnemic phenomena" to those responses of an organism which, so far as hitherto observed facts are concerned, can only be brought under causal laws by including past occurrences in the history of the organism as part of the causes of the present response. I do not mean merely--what would always be the case--that past occurrences are part of a CHAIN of causes leading to the present event. I mean that, in attempting to state the PROXIMATE cause of the present event, some past event or events must be included, unless we take refuge in hypothetical modifications of brain structure. For example: you smell peat-smoke, and you recall some occasion when you smelt it before. The cause of your recollection, so far as hitherto observable phenomena are concerned, consists both of the peat smoke (present stimulus) and of the former occasion (past experience). The same stimulus will not produce the same recollection in another man who did not share your former experience, although the former experience left no OBSERVABLE traces in the structure of the brain. According to the maxim "same cause, same effect," we cannot therefore regard the peat-smoke alone as the cause of your recollection, since it does not have the same effect in other cases. The cause of your recollection must be both the peat-smoke and the past occurrence. Accordingly your recollection is an instance of what we are calling "mnemic phenomena." Before going further, it will be well to give illustrations of different classes of mnemic phenomena. (a) ACQUIRED HABITS.--In Lecture II we saw how animals can learn by experience how to get out of cages or mazes, or perform other actions which are useful to them but not provided for by their instincts alone. A cat which is put into a cage of which it has had experience behaves differently from the way in which it behaved at first. We can easily invent hypotheses, which are quite likely to be true, as to connections in the brain caused by past experience, and themselves causing the different response. But the observable fact is that the stimulus of being in the cage produces differing results with repetition, and that the ascertainable cause of the cat's behaviour is not merely the cage and its own ascertainable organization, but also its past history in regard to the cage. From our present point of view, the matter is independent of the question whether the cat's behaviour is due to some mental fact called "knowledge," or displays a merely bodily habit. Our habitual knowledge is not always in our minds, but is called up by the appropriate stimuli. If we are asked "What is the capital of France?" we answer "Paris," because of past experience; the past experience is as essential as the present question in the causation of our response. Thus all our habitual knowledge consists of acquired habits, and comes under the head of mnemic phenomena. (b) IMAGES.--I shall have much to say about images in a later lecture; for the present I am merely concerned with them in so far as they are "copies" of past sensations. When you hear New York spoken of, some image probably comes into your mind, either of the place itself (if you have been there), or of some picture of it (if you have not). The image is due to your past experience, as well as to the present stimulus of the words "New York." Similarly, the images you have in dreams are all dependent upon your past experience, as well as upon the present stimulus to dreaming. It is generally believed that all images, in their simpler parts, are copies of sensations; if so, their mnemic character is evident. This is important, not only on its own account, but also because, as we shall see later, images play an essential part in what is called "thinking." (c) ASSOCIATION.--The broad fact of association, on the mental side, is that when we experience something which we have experienced before, it tends to call up the context of the former experience. The smell of peat-smoke recalling a former scene is an instance which we discussed a moment ago. This is obviously a mnemic phenomenon. There is also a more purely physical association, which is indistinguishable from physical habit. This is the kind studied by Mr. Thorndike in animals, where a certain stimulus is associated with a certain act. This is the sort which is taught to soldiers in drilling, for example. In such a case there need not be anything mental, but merely a habit of the body. There is no essential distinction between association and habit, and the observations which we made concerning habit as a mnemic phenomenon are equally applicable to association. (d) NON-SENSATIONAL ELEMENTS IN PERCEPTION.--When we perceive any object of a familiar kind, much of what appears subjectively to be immediately given is really derived from past experience. When we see an object, say a penny, we seem to be aware of its "real" shape we have the impression of something circular, not of something elliptical. In learning to draw, it is necessary to acquire the art of representing things according to the sensation, not according to the perception. And the visual appearance is filled out with feeling of what the object would be like to touch, and so on. This filling out and supplying of the "real" shape and so on consists of the most usual correlates of the sensational core in our perception. It may happen that, in the particular case, the real correlates are unusual; for example, if what we are seeing is a carpet made to look like tiles. If so, the non-sensational part of our perception will be illusory, i.e. it will supply qualities which the object in question does not in fact have. But as a rule objects do have the qualities added by perception, which is to be expected, since experience of what is usual is the cause of the addition. If our experience had been different, we should not fill out sensation in the same way, except in so far as the filling out is instinctive, not acquired. It would seem that, in man, all that makes up space perception, including the correlation of sight and touch and so on, is almost entirely acquired. In that case there is a large mnemic element in all the common perceptions by means of which we handle common objects. And, to take another kind of instance, imagine what our astonishment would be if we were to hear a cat bark or a dog mew. This emotion would be dependent upon past experience, and would therefore be a mnemic phenomenon according to the definition. (e) MEMORY AS KNOWLEDGE.--The kind of memory of which I am now speaking is definite knowledge of some past event in one's own experience. From time to time we remember things that have happened to us, because something in the present reminds us of them. Exactly the same present fact would not call up the same memory if our past experience had been different. Thus our remembering is caused by-- (1) The present stimulus, (2) The past occurrence. It is therefore a mnemic phenomenon according to our definition. A definition of "mnemic phenomena" which did not include memory would, of course, be a bad one. The point of the definition is not that it includes memory, but that it includes it as one of a class of phenomena which embrace all that is characteristic in the subject matter of psychology. (f) EXPERIENCE.--The word "experience" is often used very vaguely. James, as we saw, uses it to cover the whole primal stuff of the world, but this usage seems objection able, since, in a purely physical world, things would happen without there being any experience. It is only mnemic phenomena that embody experience. We may say that an animal "experiences" an occurrence when this occurrence modifies the animal's subsequent behaviour, i.e. when it is the mnemic portion of the cause of future occurrences in the animal's life. The burnt child that fears the fire has "experienced" the fire, whereas a stick that has been thrown on and taken off again has not "experienced" anything, since it offers no more resistance than before to being thrown on. The essence of "experience" is the modification of behaviour produced by what is experienced. We might, in fact, define one chain of experience, or one biography, as a series of occurrences linked by mnemic causation. I think it is this characteristic, more than any other, that distinguishes sciences dealing with living organisms from physics. The best writer on mnemic phenomena known to me is Richard Semon, the fundamental part of whose theory I shall endeavour to summarize before going further: When an organism, either animal or plant, is subjected to a stimulus, producing in it some state of excitement, the removal of the stimulus allows it to return to a condition of equilibrium. But the new state of equilibrium is different from the old, as may be seen by the changed capacity for reaction. The state of equilibrium before the stimulus may be called the "primary indifference-state"; that after the cessation of the stimulus, the "secondary indifference-state." We define the "engraphic effect" of a stimulus as the effect in making a difference between the primary and secondary indifference-states, and this difference itself we define as the "engram" due to the stimulus. "Mnemic phenomena" are defined as those due to engrams; in animals, they are specially associated with the nervous system, but not exclusively, even in man. When two stimuli occur together, one of them, occurring afterwards, may call out the reaction for the other also. We call this an "ekphoric influence," and stimuli having this character are called "ekphoric stimuli." In such a case we call the engrams of the two stimuli "associated." All simultaneously generated engrams are associated; there is also association of successively aroused engrams, though this is reducible to simultaneous association. In fact, it is not an isolated stimulus that leaves an engram, but the totality of the stimuli at any moment; consequently any portion of this totality tends, if it recurs, to arouse the whole reaction which was aroused before. Semon holds that engrams can be inherited, and that an animal's innate habits may be due to the experience of its ancestors; on this subject he refers to Samuel Butler. Semon formulates two "mnemic principles." The first, or "Law of Engraphy," is as follows: "All simultaneous excitements in an organism form a connected simultaneous excitement-complex, which as such works engraphically, i.e. leaves behind a connected engram-complex, which in so far forms a whole" ("Die mnemischen Empfindungen," p. 146). The second mnemic principle, or "Law of Ekphory," is as follows: "The partial return of the energetic situation which formerly worked engraphically operates ekphorically on a simultaneous engram-complex" (ib., p. 173). These two laws together represent in part a hypothesis (the engram), and in part an observable fact. The observable fact is that, when a certain complex of stimuli has originally caused a certain complex of reactions, the recurrence of part of the stimuli tends to cause the recurrence of the whole of the reactions. Semon's applications of his fundamental ideas in various directions are interesting and ingenious. Some of them will concern us later, but for the present it is the fundamental character of mnemic phenomena that is in question. Concerning the nature of an engram, Semon confesses that at present it is impossible to say more than that it must consist in some material alteration in the body of the organism ("Die mnemischen Empfindungen," p. 376). It is, in fact, hypothetical, invoked for theoretical uses, and not an outcome of direct observation. No doubt physiology, especially the disturbances of memory through lesions in the brain, affords grounds for this hypothesis; nevertheless it does remain a hypothesis, the validity of which will be discussed at the end of this lecture. I am inclined to think that, in the present state of physiology, the introduction of the engram does not serve to simplify the account of mnemic phenomena. We can, I think, formulate the known laws of such phenomena in terms, wholly, of observable facts, by recognizing provisionally what we may call "mnemic causation." By this I mean that kind of causation of which I spoke at the beginning of this lecture, that kind, namely, in which the proximate cause consists not merely of a present event, but of this together with a past event. I do not wish to urge that this form of causation is ultimate, but that, in the present state of our knowledge, it affords a simplification, and enables us to state laws of behaviour in less hypothetical terms than we should otherwise have to employ. The clearest instance of what I mean is recollection of a past event. What we observe is that certain present stimuli lead us to recollect certain occurrences, but that at times when we are not recollecting them, there is nothing discoverable in our minds that could be called memory of them. Memories, as mental facts, arise from time to time, but do not, so far as we can see, exist in any shape while they are "latent." In fact, when we say that they are "latent," we mean merely that they will exist under certain circumstances. If, then, there is to be some standing difference between the person who can remember a certain fact and the person who cannot, that standing difference must be, not in anything mental, but in the brain. It is quite probable that there is such a difference in the brain, but its nature is unknown and it remains hypothetical. Everything that has, so far, been made matter of observation as regards this question can be put together in the statement: When a certain complex of sensations has occurred to a man, the recurrence of part of the complex tends to arouse the recollection of the whole. In like manner, we can collect all mnemic phenomena in living organisms under a single law, which contains what is hitherto verifiable in Semon's two laws. This single law is: IF A COMPLEX STIMULUS A HAS CAUSED A COMPLEX REACTION B IN AN ORGANISM, THE OCCURRENCE OF A PART OF A ON A FUTURE OCCASION TENDS TO CAUSE THE WHOLE REACTION B. This law would need to be supplemented by some account of the influence of frequency, and so on; but it seems to contain the essential characteristic of mnemic phenomena, without admixture of anything hypothetical. Whenever the effect resulting from a stimulus to an organism differs according to the past history of the organism, without our being able actually to detect any relevant difference in its present structure, we will speak of "mnemic causation," provided we can discover laws embodying the influence of the past. In ordinary physical causation, as it appears to common sense, we have approximate uniformities of sequence, such as "lightning is followed by thunder," "drunkenness is followed by headache," and so on. None of these sequences are theoretically invariable, since something may intervene to disturb them. In order to obtain invariable physical laws, we have to proceed to differential equations, showing the direction of change at each moment, not the integral change after a finite interval, however short. But for the purposes of daily life many sequences are to all in tents and purposes invariable. With the behaviour of human beings, however, this is by no means the case. If you say to an Englishman, "You have a smut on your nose," he will proceed to remove it, but there will be no such effect if you say the same thing to a Frenchman who knows no English. The effect of words upon the hearer is a mnemic phenomena, since it depends upon the past experience which gave him understanding of the words. If there are to be purely psychological causal laws, taking no account of the brain and the rest of the body, they will have to be of the form, not "X now causes Y now," but-- "A, B, C,... in the past, together with X now, cause Y now." For it cannot be successfully maintained that our understanding of a word, for example, is an actual existent content of the mind at times when we are not thinking of the word. It is merely what may be called a "disposition," i.e. it is capable of being aroused whenever we hear the word or happen to think of it. A "disposition" is not something actual, but merely the mnemic portion of a mnemic causal law. In such a law as "A, B, C,... in the past, together with X now, cause Y now," we will call A, B, C,... the mnemic cause, X the occasion or stimulus, and Y the reaction. All cases in which experience influences behaviour are instances of mnemic causation. Believers in psycho-physical parallelism hold that psychology can theoretically be freed entirely from all dependence on physiology or physics. That is to say, they believe that every psychical event has a psychical cause and a physical concomitant. If there is to be parallelism, it is easy to prove by mathematical logic that the causation in physical and psychical matters must be of the same sort, and it is impossible that mnemic causation should exist in psychology but not in physics. But if psychology is to be independent of physiology, and if physiology can be reduced to physics, it would seem that mnemic causation is essential in psychology. Otherwise we shall be compelled to believe that all our knowledge, all our store of images and memories, all our mental habits, are at all times existing in some latent mental form, and are not merely aroused by the stimuli which lead to their display. This is a very difficult hypothesis. It seems to me that if, as a matter of method rather than metaphysics, we desire to obtain as much independence for psychology as is practically feasible, we shall do better to accept mnemic causation in psychology protem, and therefore reject parallelism, since there is no good ground for admitting mnemic causation in physics. It is perhaps worth while to observe that mnemic causation is what led Bergson to deny that there is causation at all in the psychical sphere. He points out, very truly, that the same stimulus, repeated, does not have the same consequences, and he argues that this is contrary to the maxim, "same cause, same effect." It is only necessary, however, to take account of past occurrences and include them with the cause, in order to re-establish the maxim, and the possibility of psychological causal laws. The metaphysical conception of a cause lingers in our manner of viewing causal laws: we want to be able to FEEL a connection between cause and effect, and to be able to imagine the cause as "operating." This makes us unwilling to regard causal laws as MERELY observed uniformities of sequence; yet that is all that science has to offer. To ask why such-and-such a kind of sequence occurs is either to ask a meaningless question, or to demand some more general kind of sequence which includes the one in question. The widest empirical laws of sequence known at any time can only be "explained" in the sense of being subsumed by later discoveries under wider laws; but these wider laws, until they in turn are subsumed, will remain brute facts, resting solely upon observation, not upon some supposed inherent rationality. There is therefore no a priori objection to a causal law in which part of the cause has ceased to exist. To argue against such a law on the ground that what is past cannot operate now, is to introduce the old metaphysical notion of cause, for which science can find no place. The only reason that could be validly alleged against mnemic causation would be that, in fact, all the phenomena can be explained without it. They are explained without it by Semon's "engram," or by any theory which regards the results of experience as embodied in modifications of the brain and nerves. But they are not explained, unless with extreme artificiality, by any theory which regards the latent effects of experience as psychical rather than physical. Those who desire to make psychology as far as possible independent of physiology would do well, it seems to me, if they adopted mnemic causation. For my part, however, I have no such desire, and I shall therefore endeavour to state the grounds which occur to me in favour of some such view as that of the "engram." One of the first points to be urged is that mnemic phenomena are just as much to be found in physiology as in psychology. They are even to be found in plants, as Sir Francis Darwin pointed out (cf. Semon, "Die Mneme," 2nd edition, p. 28 n.). Habit is a characteristic of the body at least as much as of the mind. We should, therefore, be compelled to allow the intrusion of mnemic causation, if admitted at all, into non-psychological regions, which ought, one feels, to be subject only to causation of the ordinary physical sort. The fact is that a great deal of what, at first sight, distinguishes psychology from physics is found, on examination, to be common to psychology and physiology; this whole question of the influence of experience is a case in point. Now it is possible, of course, to take the view advocated by Professor J. S. Haldane, who contends that physiology is not theoretically reducible to physics and chemistry.* But the weight of opinion among physiologists appears to be against him on this point; and we ought certainly to require very strong evidence before admitting any such breach of continuity as between living and dead matter. The argument from the existence of mnemic phenomena in physiology must therefore be allowed a certain weight against the hypothesis that mnemic causation is ultimate. * See his "The New Physiology and Other Addresses," Griffin, 1919, also the symposium, "Are Physical, Biological and Psychological Categories Irreducible?" in "Life and Finite Individuality," edited for the Aristotelian Society, with an Introduction. By H. Wildon Carr, Williams & Norgate, 1918. The argument from the connection of brain-lesions with loss of memory is not so strong as it looks, though it has also, some weight. What we know is that memory, and mnemic phenomena generally, can be disturbed or destroyed by changes in the brain. This certainly proves that the brain plays an essential part in the causation of memory, but does not prove that a certain state of the brain is, by itself, a sufficient condition for the existence of memory. Yet it is this last that has to be proved. The theory of the engram, or any similar theory, has to maintain that, given a body and brain in a suitable state, a man will have a certain memory, without the need of any further conditions. What is known, however, is only that he will not have memories if his body and brain are not in a suitable state. That is to say, the appropriate state of body and brain is proved to be necessary for memory, but not to be sufficient. So far, therefore, as our definite knowledge goes, memory may require for its causation a past occurrence as well as a certain present state of the brain. In order to prove conclusively that mnemic phenomena arise whenever certain physiological conditions are fulfilled, we ought to be able actually to see differences between the brain of a man who speaks English and that of a man who speaks French, between the brain of a man who has seen New York and can recall it, and that of a man who has never seen that city. It may be that the time will come when this will be possible, but at present we are very far removed from it. At present, there is, so far as I am aware, no good evidence that every difference between the knowledge possessed by A and that possessed by B is paralleled by some difference in their brains. We may believe that this is the case, but if we do, our belief is based upon analogies and general scientific maxims, not upon any foundation of detailed observation. I am myself inclined, as a working hypothesis, to adopt the belief in question, and to hold that past experience only affects present behaviour through modifications of physiological structure. But the evidence seems not quite conclusive, so that I do not think we ought to forget the other hypothesis, or to reject entirely the possibility that mnemic causation may be the ultimate explanation of mnemic phenomena. I say this, not because I think it LIKELY that mnemic causation is ultimate, but merely because I think it POSSIBLE, and because it often turns out important to the progress of science to remember hypotheses which have previously seemed improbable. LECTURE V. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL CAUSAL LAWS The traditional conception of cause and effect is one which modern science shows to be fundamentally erroneous, and requiring to be replaced by a quite different notion, that of LAWS OF CHANGE. In the traditional conception, a particular event A caused a particular event B, and by this it was implied that, given any event B, some earlier event A could be discovered which had a relation to it, such that-- (1) Whenever A occurred, it was followed by B; (2) In this sequence, there was something "necessary," not a mere de facto occurrence of A first and then B. The second point is illustrated by the old discussion as to whether it can be said that day causes night, on the ground that day is always followed by night. The orthodox answer was that day could not be called the cause of night, because it would not be followed by night if the earth's rotation were to cease, or rather to grow so slow that one complete rotation would take a year. A cause, it was held, must be such that under no conceivable circumstances could it fail to be followed by its effect. As a matter of fact, such sequences as were sought by believers in the traditional form of causation have not so far been found in nature. Everything in nature is apparently in a state of continuous change,* so that what we call one "event" turns out to be really a process. If this event is to cause another event, the two will have to be contiguous in time; for if there is any interval between them, something may happen during that interval to prevent the expected effect. Cause and effect, therefore, will have to be temporally contiguous processes. It is difficult to believe, at any rate where physical laws are concerned, that the earlier part of the process which is the cause can make any difference to the effect, so long as the later part of the process which is the cause remains unchanged. Suppose, for example, that a man dies of arsenic poisoning, we say that his taking arsenic was the cause of death. But clearly the process by which he acquired the arsenic is irrelevant: everything that happened before he swallowed it may be ignored, since it cannot alter the effect except in so far as it alters his condition at the moment of taking the dose. But we may go further: swallowing arsenic is not really the proximate cause of death, since a man might be shot through the head immediately after taking the dose, and then it would not be of arsenic that he would die. The arsenic produces certain physiological changes, which take a finite time before they end in death. The earlier parts of these changes can be ruled out in the same way as we can rule out the process by which the arsenic was acquired. Proceeding in this way, we can shorten the process which we are calling the cause more and more. Similarly we shall have to shorten the effect. It may happen that immediately after the man's death his body is blown to pieces by a bomb. We cannot say what will happen after the man's death, through merely knowing that he has died as the result of arsenic poisoning. Thus, if we are to take the cause as one event and the effect as another, both must be shortened indefinitely. The result is that we merely have, as the embodiment of our causal law, a certain direction of change at each moment. Hence we are brought to differential equations as embodying causal laws. A physical law does not say "A will be followed by B," but tells us what acceleration a particle will have under given circumstances, i.e. it tells us how the particle's motion is changing at each moment, not where the particle will be at some future moment. * The theory of quanta suggests that the continuity is only apparent. If so, we shall be able theoretically to reach events which are not processes. But in what is directly observable there is still apparent continuity, which justifies the above remarks for the prevent. Laws embodied in differential equations may possibly be exact, but cannot be known to be so. All that we can know empirically is approximate and liable to exceptions; the exact laws that are assumed in physics are known to be somewhere near the truth, but are not known to be true just as they stand. The laws that we actually know empirically have the form of the traditional causal laws, except that they are not to be regarded as universal or necessary. "Taking arsenic is followed by death" is a good empirical generalization; it may have exceptions, but they will be rare. As against the professedly exact laws of physics, such empirical generalizations have the advantage that they deal with observable phenomena. We cannot observe infinitesimals, whether in time or space; we do not even know whether time and space are infinitely divisible. Therefore rough empirical generalizations have a definite place in science, in spite of not being exact of universal. They are the data for more exact laws, and the grounds for believing that they are USUALLY true are stronger than the grounds for believing that the more exact laws are ALWAYS true. Science starts, therefore, from generalizations of the form, "A is usually followed by B." This is the nearest approach that can be made to a causal law of the traditional sort. It may happen in any particular instance that A is ALWAYS followed by B, but we cannot know this, since we cannot foresee all the perfectly possible circumstances that might make the sequence fail, or know that none of them will actually occur. If, however, we know of a very large number of cases in which A is followed by B, and few or none in which the sequence fails, we shall in PRACTICE be justified in saying "A causes B," provided we do not attach to the notion of cause any of the metaphysical superstitions that have gathered about the word. There is another point, besides lack of universality and necessity, which it is important to realize as regards causes in the above sense, and that is the lack of uniqueness. It is generally assumed that, given any event, there is some one phenomenon which is THE cause of the event in question. This seems to be a mere mistake. Cause, in the only sense in which it can be practically applied, means "nearly invariable antecedent." We cannot in practice obtain an antecedent which is QUITE invariable, for this would require us to take account of the whole universe, since something not taken account of may prevent the expected effect. We cannot distinguish, among nearly invariable antecedents, one as THE cause, and the others as merely its concomitants: the attempt to do this depends upon a notion of cause which is derived from will, and will (as we shall see later) is not at all the sort of thing that it is generally supposed to be, nor is there any reason to think that in the physical world there is anything even remotely analogous to what will is supposed to be. If we could find one antecedent, and only one, that was QUITE invariable, we could call that one THE cause without introducing any notion derived from mistaken ideas about will. But in fact we cannot find any antecedent that we know to be quite invariable, and we can find many that are nearly so. For example, men leave a factory for dinner when the hooter sounds at twelve o'clock. You may say the hooter is THE cause of their leaving. But innumerable other hooters in other factories, which also always sound at twelve o'clock, have just as good a right to be called the cause. Thus every event has many nearly invariable antecedents, and therefore many antecedents which may be called its cause. The laws of traditional physics, in the form in which they deal with movements of matter or electricity, have an apparent simplicity which somewhat conceals the empirical character of what they assert. A piece of matter, as it is known empirically, is not a single existing thing, but a system of existing things. When several people simultaneously see the same table, they all see something different; therefore "the" table, which they are supposed all to see, must be either a hypothesis or a construction. "The" table is to be neutral as between different observers: it does not favour the aspect seen by one man at the expense of that seen by another. It was natural, though to my mind mistaken, to regard the "real" table as the common cause of all the appearances which the table presents (as we say) to different observers. But why should we suppose that there is some one common cause of all these appearances? As we have just seen, the notion of "cause" is not so reliable as to allow us to infer the existence of something that, by its very nature, can never be observed. Instead of looking for an impartial source, we can secure neutrality by the equal representation of all parties. Instead of supposing that there is some unknown cause, the "real" table, behind the different sensations of those who are said to be looking at the table, we may take the whole set of these sensations (together possibly with certain other particulars) as actually BEING the table. That is to say, the table which is neutral as between different observers (actual and possible) is the set of all those particulars which would naturally be called "aspects" of the table from different points of view. (This is a first approximation, modified later.) It may be said: If there is no single existent which is the source of all these "aspects," how are they collected together? The answer is simple: Just as they would be if there were such a single existent. The supposed "real" table underlying its appearances is, in any case, not itself perceived, but inferred, and the question whether such-and-such a particular is an "aspect" of this table is only to be settled by the connection of the particular in question with the one or more particulars by which the table is defined. That is to say, even if we assume a "real" table, the particulars which are its aspects have to be collected together by their relations to each other, not to it, since it is merely inferred from them. We have only, therefore, to notice how they are collected together, and we can then keep the collection without assuming any "real" table as distinct from the collection. When different people see what they call the same table, they see things which are not exactly the same, owing to difference of point of view, but which are sufficiently alike to be described in the same words, so long as no great accuracy or minuteness is sought. These closely similar particulars are collected together by their similarity primarily and, more correctly, by the fact that they are related to each other approximately according to the laws of perspective and of reflection and diffraction of light. I suggest, as a first approximation, that these particulars, together with such correlated others as are unperceived, jointly ARE the table; and that a similar definition applies to all physical objects.* *See "Our Knowledge of the External World" (Allen & Unwin), chaps. iii and iv. In order to eliminate the reference to our perceptions, which introduces an irrelevant psychological suggestion, I will take a different illustration, namely, stellar photography. A photographic plate exposed on a clear night reproduces the appearance of the portion of the sky concerned, with more or fewer stars according to the power of the telescope that is being used. Each separate star which is photographed produces its separate effect on the plate, just as it would upon ourselves if we were looking at the sky. If we assume, as science normally does, the continuity of physical processes, we are forced to conclude that, at the place where the plate is, and at all places between it and a star which it photographs, SOMETHING is happening which is specially connected with that star. In the days when the aether was less in doubt, we should have said that what was happening was a certain kind of transverse vibration in the aether. But it is not necessary or desirable to be so explicit: all that we need say is that SOMETHING happens which is specially connected with the star in question. It must be something specially connected with that star, since that star produces its own special effect upon the plate. Whatever it is must be the end of a process which starts from the star and radiates outwards, partly on general grounds of continuity, partly to account for the fact that light is transmitted with a certain definite velocity. We thus arrive at the conclusion that, if a certain star is visible at a certain place, or could be photographed by a sufficiently sensitive plate at that place, something is happening there which is specially connected with that star. Therefore in every place at all times a vast multitude of things must be happening, namely, at least one for every physical object which can be seen or photographed from that place. We can classify such happenings on either of two principles: (1) We can collect together all the happenings in one place, as is done by photography so far as light is concerned; (2) We can collect together all the happenings, in different places, which are connected in the way that common sense regards as being due to their emanating from one object. Thus, to return to the stars, we can collect together either-- (1) All the appearances of different stars in a given place, or, (2) All the appearances of a given star in different places. But when I speak of "appearances," I do so only for brevity: I do not mean anything that must "appear" to somebody, but only that happening, whatever it may be, which is connected, at the place in question, with a given physical object--according to the old orthodox theory, it would be a transverse vibration in the aether. Like the different appearances of the table to a number of simultaneous observers, the different particulars that belong to one physical object are to be collected together by continuity and inherent laws of correlation, not by their supposed causal connection with an unknown assumed existent called a piece of matter, which would be a mere unnecessary metaphysical thing in itself. A piece of matter, according to the definition that I propose, is, as a first approximation,* the collection of all those correlated particulars which would normally be regarded as its appearances or effects in different places. Some further elaborations are desirable, but we can ignore them for the present. I shall return to them at the end of this lecture. *The exact definition of a piece of matter as a construction will be given later. According to the view that I am suggesting, a physical object or piece of matter is the collection of all those correlated particulars which would be regarded by common sense as its effects or appearances in different places. On the other hand, all the happenings in a given place represent what common sense would regard as the appearances of a number of different objects as viewed from that place. All the happenings in one place may be regarded as the view of the world from that place. I shall call the view of the world from a given place a "perspective." A photograph represents a perspective. On the other hand, if photographs of the stars were taken in all points throughout space, and in all such photographs a certain star, say Sirius, were picked out whenever it appeared, all the different appearances of Sirius, taken together, would represent Sirius. For the understanding of the difference between psychology and physics it is vital to understand these two ways of classifying particulars, namely: (1) According to the place where they occur; (2) According to the system of correlated particulars in different places to which they belong, such system being defined as a physical object. Given a system of particulars which is a physical object, I shall define that one of the system which is in a given place (if any) as the "appearance of that object in that place." When the appearance of an object in a given place changes, it is found that one or other of two things occurs. The two possibilities may be illustrated by an example. You are in a room with a man, whom you see: you may cease to see him either by shutting your eyes or by his going out of the room. In the first case, his appearance to other people remains unchanged; in the second, his appearance changes from all places. In the first case, you say that it is not he who has changed, but your eyes; in the second, you say that he has changed. Generalizing, we distinguish-- (1) Cases in which only certain appearances of the object change, while others, and especially appearances from places very near to the object, do not change; (2) Cases where all, or almost all, the appearances of the object undergo a connected change. In the first case, the change is attributed to the medium between the object and the place; in the second, it is attributed to the object itself.* * The application of this distinction to motion raises complications due to relativity, but we may ignore these for our present purposes. It is the frequency of the latter kind of change, and the comparatively simple nature of the laws governing the simultaneous alterations of appearances in such cases, that have made it possible to treat a physical object as one thing, and to overlook the fact that it is a system of particulars. When a number of people at a theatre watch an actor, the changes in their several perspectives are so similar and so closely correlated that all are popularly regarded as identical with each other and with the changes of the actor himself. So long as all the changes in the appearances of a body are thus correlated there is no pressing prima facie need to break up the system of appearances, or to realize that the body in question is not really one thing but a set of correlated particulars. It is especially and primarily such changes that physics deals with, i.e. it deals primarily with processes in which the unity of a physical object need not be broken up because all its appearances change simultaneously according to the same law--or, if not all, at any rate all from places sufficiently near to the object, with in creasing accuracy as we approach the object. The changes in appearances of an object which are due to changes in the intervening medium will not affect, or will affect only very slightly, the appearances from places close to the object. If the appearances from sufficiently neighbouring places are either wholly un changed, or changed to a diminishing extent which has zero for its limit, it is usually found that the changes can be accounted for by changes in objects which are between the object in question and the places from which its appearance has changed appreciably. Thus physics is able to reduce the laws of most changes with which it deals to changes in physical objects, and to state most of its fundamental laws in terms of matter. It is only in those cases in which the unity of the system of appearances constituting a piece of matter has to be broken up, that the statement of what is happening cannot be made exclusively in terms of matter. The whole of psychology, we shall find, is included among such cases; hence their importance for our purposes. We can now begin to understand one of the fundamental differences between physics and psychology. Physics treats as a unit the whole system of appearances of a piece of matter, whereas psychology is interested in certain of these appearances themselves. Confining ourselves for the moment to the psychology of perceptions, we observe that perceptions are certain of the appearances of physical objects. From the point of view that we have been hitherto adopting, we might define them as the appearances of objects at places from which sense-organs and the suitable parts of the nervous system form part of the intervening medium. Just as a photographic plate receives a different impression of a cluster of stars when a telescope is part of the intervening medium, so a brain receives a different impression when an eye and an optic nerve are part of the intervening medium. An impression due to this sort of intervening medium is called a perception, and is interesting to psychology on its own account, not merely as one of the set of correlated particulars which is the physical object of which (as we say) we are having a perception. We spoke earlier of two ways of classifying particulars. One way collects together the appearances commonly regarded as a given object from different places; this is, broadly speaking, the way of physics, leading to the construction of physical objects as sets of such appearances. The other way collects together the appearances of different objects from a given place, the result being what we call a perspective. In the particular case where the place concerned is a human brain, the perspective belonging to the place consists of all the perceptions of a certain man at a given time. Thus classification by perspectives is relevant to psychology, and is essential in defining what we mean by one mind. I do not wish to suggest that the way in which I have been defining perceptions is the only possible way, or even the best way. It is the way that arose naturally out of our present topic. But when we approach psychology from a more introspective standpoint, we have to distinguish sensations and perceptions, if possible, from other mental occurrences, if any. We have also to consider the psychological effects of sensations, as opposed to their physical causes and correlates. These problems are quite distinct from those with which we have been concerned in the present lecture, and I shall not deal with them until a later stage. It is clear that psychology is concerned essentially with actual particulars, not merely with systems of particulars. In this it differs from physics, which, broadly speaking, is concerned with the cases in which all the particulars which make up one physical object can be treated as a single causal unit, or rather the particulars which are sufficiently near to the object of which they are appearances can be so treated. The laws which physics seeks can, broadly speaking, be stated by treating such systems of particulars as causal units. The laws which psychology seeks cannot be so stated, since the particulars themselves are what interests the psychologist. This is one of the fundamental differences between physics and psychology; and to make it clear has been the main purpose of this lecture. I will conclude with an attempt to give a more precise definition of a piece of matter. The appearances of a piece of matter from different places change partly according to intrinsic laws (the laws of perspective, in the case of visual shape), partly according to the nature of the intervening medium--fog, blue spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, sense-organs, etc. As we approach nearer to the object, the effect of the intervening medium grows less. In a generalized sense, all the intrinsic laws of change of appearance may be called "laws of perspective." Given any appearance of an object, we can construct hypothetically a certain system of appearances to which the appearance in question would belong if the laws of perspective alone were concerned. If we construct this hypothetical system for each appearance of the object in turn, the system corresponding to a given appearance x will be independent of any distortion due to the medium beyond x, and will only embody such distortion as is due to the medium between x and the object. Thus, as the appearance by which our hypothetical system is defined is moved nearer and nearer to the object, the hypothetical system of appearances defined by its means embodies less and less of the effect of the medium. The different sets of appearances resulting from moving x nearer and nearer to the object will approach to a limiting set, and this limiting set will be that system of appearances which the object would present if the laws of perspective alone were operative and the medium exercised no distorting effect. This limiting set of appearances may be defined, for purposes of physics, as the piece of matter concerned. LECTURE VI. INTROSPECTION One of the main purposes of these lectures is to give grounds for the belief that the distinction between mind and matter is not so fundamental as is commonly supposed. In the preceding lecture I dealt in outline with the physical side of this problem. I attempted to show that what we call a material object is not itself a substance, but is a system of particulars analogous in their nature to sensations, and in fact often including actual sensations among their number. In this way the stuff of which physical objects are composed is brought into relation with the stuff of which part, at least, of our mental life is composed. There is, however, a converse task which is equally necessary for our thesis, and that is, to show that the stuff of our mental life is devoid of many qualities which it is commonly supposed to have, and is not possessed of any attributes which make it incapable of forming part of the world of matter. In the present lecture I shall begin the arguments for this view. Corresponding to the supposed duality of matter and mind, there are, in orthodox psychology, two ways of knowing what exists. One of these, the way of sensation and external perception, is supposed to furnish data for our knowledge of matter, the other, called "introspection," is supposed to furnish data for knowledge of our mental processes. To common sense, this distinction seems clear and easy. When you see a friend coming along the street, you acquire knowledge of an external, physical fact; when you realize that you are glad to meet him, you acquire knowledge of a mental fact. Your dreams and memories and thoughts, of which you are often conscious, are mental facts, and the process by which you become aware of them SEEMS to be different from sensation. Kant calls it the "inner sense"; sometimes it is spoken of as "consciousness of self"; but its commonest name in modern English psychology is "introspection." It is this supposed method of acquiring knowledge of our mental processes that I wish to analyse and examine in this lecture. I will state at the outset the view which I shall aim at establishing. I believe that the stuff of our mental life, as opposed to its relations and structure, consists wholly of sensations and images. Sensations are connected with matter in the way that I tried to explain in Lecture V, i.e. each is a member of a system which is a certain physical object. Images, though they USUALLY have certain characteristics, especially lack of vividness, that distinguish them from sensations, are not INVARIABLY so distinguished, and cannot therefore be defined by these characteristics. Images, as opposed to sensations, can only be defined by their different causation: they are caused by association with a sensation, not by a stimulus external to the nervous system--or perhaps one should say external to the brain, where the higher animals are concerned. The occurrence of a sensation or image does not in itself constitute knowledge but any sensation or image may come to be known if the conditions are suitable. When a sensation--like the hearing of a clap of thunder--is normally correlated with closely similar sensations in our neighbours, we regard it as giving knowledge of the external world, since we regard the whole set of similar sensations as due to a common external cause. But images and bodily sensations are not so correlated. Bodily sensations can be brought into a correlation by physiology, and thus take their place ultimately among sources of knowledge of the physical world. But images cannot be made to fit in with the simultaneous sensations and images of others. Apart from their hypothetical causes in the brain, they have a causal connection with physical objects, through the fact that they are copies of past sensations; but the physical objects with which they are thus connected are in the past, not in the present. These images remain private in a sense in which sensations are not. A sensation SEEMS to give us knowledge of a present physical object, while an image does not, except when it amounts to a hallucination, and in this case the seeming is deceptive. Thus the whole context of the two occurrences is different. But in themselves they do not differ profoundly, and there is no reason to invoke two different ways of knowing for the one and for the other. Consequently introspection as a separate kind of knowledge disappears. The criticism of introspection has been in the main the work of American psychologists. I will begin by summarizing an article which seems to me to afford a good specimen of their arguments, namely, "The Case against Introspection," by Knight Dunlap ("Psychological Review," vol xix, No. 5, pp. 404-413, September, 1912). After a few historical quotations, he comes to two modern defenders of introspection, Stout and James. He quotes from Stout such statements as the following: "Psychical states as such become objects only when we attend to them in an introspective way. Otherwise they are not themselves objects, but only constituents of the process by which objects are recognized" ("Manual," 2nd edition, p. 134. The word "recognized" in Dunlap's quotation should be "cognized.") "The object itself can never be identified with the present modification of the individual's consciousness by which it is cognized" (ib. p. 60). This is to be true even when we are thinking about modifications of our own consciousness; such modifications are to be always at least partially distinct from the conscious experience in which we think of them. At this point I wish to interrupt the account of Knight Dunlap's article in order to make some observations on my own account with reference to the above quotations from Stout. In the first place, the conception of "psychical states" seems to me one which demands analysis of a somewhat destructive character. This analysis I shall give in later lectures as regards cognition; I have already given it as regards desire. In the second place, the conception of "objects" depends upon a certain view as to cognition which I believe to be wholly mistaken, namely, the view which I discussed in my first lecture in connection with Brentano. In this view a single cognitive occurrence contains both content and object, the content being essentially mental, while the object is physical except in introspection and abstract thought. I have already criticized this view, and will not dwell upon it now, beyond saying that "the process by which objects are cognized" appears to be a very slippery phrase. When we "see a table," as common sense would say, the table as a physical object is not the "object" (in the psychological sense) of our perception. Our perception is made up of sensations, images and beliefs, but the supposed "object" is something inferential, externally related, not logically bound up with what is occurring in us. This question of the nature of the object also affects the view we take of self-consciousness. Obviously, a "conscious experience" is different from a physical object; therefore it is natural to assume that a thought or perception whose object is a conscious experience must be different from a thought or perception whose object is a physical object. But if the relation to the object is inferential and external, as I maintain, the difference between two thoughts may bear very little relation to the difference between their objects. And to speak of "the present modification of the individual's consciousness by which an object is cognized" is to suggest that the cognition of objects is a far more direct process, far more intimately bound up with the objects, than I believe it to be. All these points will be amplified when we come to the analysis of knowledge, but it is necessary briefly to state them now in order to suggest the atmosphere in which our analysis of "introspection" is to be carried on. Another point in which Stout's remarks seem to me to suggest what I regard as mistakes is his use of "consciousness." There is a view which is prevalent among psychologists, to the effect that one can speak of "a conscious experience" in a curious dual sense, meaning, on the one hand, an experience which is conscious of something, and, on the other hand, an experience which has some intrinsic nature characteristic of what is called "consciousness." That is to say, a "conscious experience" is characterized on the one hand by relation to its object and on the other hand by being composed of a certain peculiar stuff, the stuff of "consciousness." And in many authors there is yet a third confusion: a "conscious experience," in this third sense, is an experience of which we are conscious. All these, it seems to me, need to be clearly separated. To say that one occurrence is "conscious" of another is, to my mind, to assert an external and rather remote relation between them. I might illustrate it by the relation of uncle and nephew a man becomes an uncle through no effort of his own, merely through an occurrence elsewhere. Similarly, when you are said to be "conscious" of a table, the question whether this is really the case cannot be decided by examining only your state of mind: it is necessary also to ascertain whether your sensation is having those correlates which past experience causes you to assume, or whether the table happens, in this case, to be a mirage. And, as I explained in my first lecture, I do not believe that there is any "stuff" of consciousness, so that there is no intrinsic character by which a "conscious" experience could be distinguished from any other. After these preliminaries, we can return to Knight Dunlap's article. His criticism of Stout turns on the difficulty of giving any empirical meaning to such notions as the "mind" or the "subject"; he quotes from Stout the sentence: "The most important drawback is that the mind, in watching its own workings, must necessarily have its attention divided between two objects," and he concludes: "Without question, Stout is bringing in here illicitly the concept of a single observer, and his introspection does not provide for the observation of this observer; for the process observed and the observer are distinct" (p. 407). The objections to any theory which brings in the single observer were considered in Lecture I, and were acknowledged to be cogent. In so far, therefore, as Stout's theory of introspection rests upon this assumption, we are compelled to reject it. But it is perfectly possible to believe in introspection without supposing that there is a single observer. William James's theory of introspection, which Dunlap next examines, does not assume a single observer. It changed after the publication of his "Psychology," in consequence of his abandoning the dualism of thought and things. Dunlap summarizes his theory as follows: "The essential points in James's scheme of consciousness are SUBJECT, OBJECT, and a KNOWING of the object by the subject. The difference between James's scheme and other schemes involving the same terms is that James considers subject and object to be the same thing, but at different times In order to satisfy this requirement James supposes a realm of existence which he at first called 'states of consciousness' or 'thoughts,' and later, 'pure experience,' the latter term including both the 'thoughts' and the 'knowing.' This scheme, with all its magnificent artificiality, James held on to until the end, simply dropping the term consciousness and the dualism between the thought and an external reality"(p. 409). He adds: "All that James's system really amounts to is the acknowledgment that a succession of things are known, and that they are known by something. This is all any one can claim, except for the fact that the things are known together, and that the knower for the different items is one and the same" (ib.). In this statement, to my mind, Dunlap concedes far more than James did in his later theory. I see no reason to suppose that "the knower for different items is one and the same," and I am convinced that this proposition could not possibly be ascertained except by introspection of the sort that Dunlap rejects. The first of these points must wait until we come to the analysis of belief: the second must be considered now. Dunlap's view is that there is a dualism of subject and object, but that the subject can never become object, and therefore there is no awareness of an awareness. He says in discussing the view that introspection reveals the occurrence of knowledge: "There can be no denial of the existence of the thing (knowing) which is alleged to be known or observed in this sort of 'introspection.' The allegation that the knowing is observed is that which may be denied. Knowing there certainly is; known, the knowing certainly is not"(p. 410). And again: "I am never aware of an awareness" (ib.). And on the next page: "It may sound paradoxical to say that one cannot observe the process (or relation) of observation, and yet may be certain that there is such a process: but there is really no inconsistency in the saying. How do I know that there is awareness? By being aware of something. There is no meaning in the term 'awareness' which is not expressed in the statement 'I am aware of a colour (or what-not).'" But the paradox cannot be so lightly disposed of. The statement "I am aware of a colour" is assumed by Knight Dunlap to be known to be true, but he does not explain how it comes to be known. The argument against him is not conclusive, since he may be able to show some valid way of inferring our awareness. But he does not suggest any such way. There is nothing odd in the hypothesis of beings which are aware of objects, but not of their own awareness; it is, indeed, highly probable that young children and the higher animals are such beings. But such beings cannot make the statement "I am aware of a colour," which WE can make. We have, therefore, some knowledge which they lack. It is necessary to Knight Dunlap's position to maintain that this additional knowledge is purely inferential, but he makes no attempt to show how the inference is possible. It may, of course, be possible, but I cannot see how. To my mind the fact (which he admits) that we know there is awareness, is ALL BUT decisive against his theory, and in favour of the view that we can be aware of an awareness. Dunlap asserts (to return to James) that the real ground for James's original belief in introspection was his belief in two sorts of objects, namely, thoughts and things. He suggests that it was a mere inconsistency on James's part to adhere to introspection after abandoning the dualism of thoughts and things. I do not wholly agree with this view, but it is difficult to disentangle the difference as to introspection from the difference as to the nature of knowing. Dunlap suggests (p. 411) that what is called introspection really consists of awareness of "images," visceral sensations, and so on. This view, in essence, seems to me sound. But then I hold that knowing itself consists of such constituents suitably related, and that in being aware of them we are sometimes being aware of instances of knowing. For this reason, much as I agree with his view as to what are the objects of which there is awareness, I cannot wholly agree with his conclusion as to the impossibility of introspection. The behaviourists have challenged introspection even more vigorously than Knight Dunlap, and have gone so far as to deny the existence of images. But I think that they have confused various things which are very commonly confused, and that it is necessary to make several distinctions before we can arrive at what is true and what false in the criticism of introspection. I wish to distinguish three distinct questions, any one of which may be meant when we ask whether introspection is a source of knowledge. The three questions are as follows: (1) Can we observe anything about ourselves which we cannot observe about other people, or is everything we can observe PUBLIC, in the sense that another could also observe it if suitably placed? (2) Does everything that we can observe obey the laws of physics and form part of the physical world, or can we observe certain things that lie outside physics? (3) Can we observe anything which differs in its intrinsic nature from the constituents of the physical world, or is everything that we can observe composed of elements intrinsically similar to the constituents of what is called matter? Any one of these three questions may be used to define introspection. I should favour introspection in the sense of the first question, i.e. I think that some of the things we observe cannot, even theoretically, be observed by any one else. The second question, tentatively and for the present, I should answer in favour of introspection; I think that images, in the actual condition of science, cannot be brought under the causal laws of physics, though perhaps ultimately they may be. The third question I should answer adversely to introspection I think that observation shows us nothing that is not composed of sensations and images, and that images differ from sensations in their causal laws, not intrinsically. I shall deal with the three questions successively. (1) PUBLICITY OR PRIVACY OF WHAT IS OBSERVED. Confining ourselves, for the moment, to sensations, we find that there are different degrees of publicity attaching to different sorts of sensations. If you feel a toothache when the other people in the room do not, you are in no way surprised; but if you hear a clap of thunder when they do not, you begin to be alarmed as to your mental condition. Sight and hearing are the most public of the senses; smell only a trifle less so; touch, again, a trifle less, since two people can only touch the same spot successively, not simultaneously. Taste has a sort of semi-publicity, since people seem to experience similar taste-sensations when they eat similar foods; but the publicity is incomplete, since two people cannot eat actually the same piece of food. But when we pass on to bodily sensations--headache, toothache, hunger, thirst, the feeling of fatigue, and so on--we get quite away from publicity, into a region where other people can tell us what they feel, but we cannot directly observe their feeling. As a natural result of this state of affairs, it has come to be thought that the public senses give us knowledge of the outer world, while the private senses only give us knowledge as to our own bodies. As regards privacy, all images, of whatever sort, belong with the sensations which only give knowledge of our own bodies, i.e. each is only observable by one observer. This is the reason why images of sight and hearing are more obviously different from sensations of sight and hearing than images of bodily sensations are from bodily sensations; and that is why the argument in favour of images is more conclusive in such cases as sight and hearing than in such cases as inner speech. The whole distinction of privacy and publicity, however, so long as we confine ourselves to sensations, is one of degree, not of kind. No two people, there is good empirical reason to think, ever have exactly similar sensations related to the same physical object at the same moment; on the other hand, even the most private sensation has correlations which would theoretically enable another observer to infer it. That no sensation is ever completely public, results from differences of point of view. Two people looking at the same table do not get the same sensation, because of perspective and the way the light falls. They get only correlated sensations. Two people listening to the same sound do not hear exactly the same thing, because one is nearer to the source of the sound than the other, one has better hearing than the other, and so on. Thus publicity in sensations consists, not in having PRECISELY similar sensations, but in having more or less similar sensations correlated according to ascertainable laws. The sensations which strike us as public are those where the correlated sensations are very similar and the correlations are very easy to discover. But even the most private sensations have correlations with things that others can observe. The dentist does not observe your ache, but he can see the cavity which causes it, and could guess that you are suffering even if you did not tell him. This fact, however, cannot be used, as Watson would apparently wish, to extrude from science observations which are private to one observer, since it is by means of many such observations that correlations are established, e.g. between toothaches and cavities. Privacy, therefore does not by itself make a datum unamenable to scientific treatment. On this point, the argument against introspection must be rejected. (2) DOES EVERYTHING OBSERVABLE OBEY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS? We come now to the second ground of objection to introspection, namely, that its data do not obey the laws of physics. This, though less emphasized, is, I think, an objection which is really more strongly felt than the objection of privacy. And we obtain a definition of introspection more in harmony with usage if we define it as observation of data not subject to physical laws than if we define it by means of privacy. No one would regard a man as introspective because he was conscious of having a stomach ache. Opponents of introspection do not mean to deny the obvious fact that we can observe bodily sensations which others cannot observe. For example, Knight Dunlap contends that images are really muscular contractions,* and evidently regards our awareness of muscular contractions as not coming under the head of introspection. I think it will be found that the essential characteristic of introspective data, in the sense which now concerns us, has to do with LOCALIZATION: either they are not localized at all, or they are localized, like visual images, in a place already physically occupied by something which would be inconsistent with them if they were regarded as part of the physical world. If you have a visual image of your friend sitting in a chair which in fact is empty, you cannot locate the image in your body, because it is visual, nor (as a physical phenomenon) in the chair, because the chair, as a physical object, is empty. Thus it seems to follow that the physical world does not include all that we are aware of, and that images, which are introspective data, have to be regarded, for the present, as not obeying the laws of physics; this is, I think, one of the chief reasons why an attempt is made to reject them. I shall try to show in Lecture VIII that the purely empirical reasons for accepting images are overwhelming. But we cannot be nearly so certain that they will not ultimately be brought under the laws of physics. Even if this should happen, however, they would still be distinguishable from sensations by their proximate causal laws, as gases remain distinguishable from solids. * "Psychological Review," 1916, "Thought-Content and Feeling," p. 59. See also ib., 1912, "The Nature of Perceived Relations," where he says: "'Introspection,' divested of its mythological suggestion of the observing of consciousness, is really the observation of bodily sensations (sensibles) and feelings (feelables)"(p. 427 n.). (3) CAN WE OBSERVE ANYTHING INTRINSICALLY DIFFERENT FROM SENSATIONS? We come now to our third question concerning introspection. It is commonly thought that by looking within we can observe all sorts of things that are radically different from the constituents of the physical world, e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains and emotions. The difference between mind and matter is increased partly by emphasizing these supposed introspective data, partly by the supposition that matter is composed of atoms or electrons or whatever units physics may at the moment prefer. As against this latter supposition, I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations, and other things similar to sensations as regards extent and duration. As against the view that introspection reveals a mental world radically different from sensations, I propose to argue that thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains and emotions are all built up out of sensations and images alone, and that there is reason to think that images do not differ from sensations in their intrinsic character. We thus effect a mutual rapprochement of mind and matter, and reduce the ultimate data of introspection (in our second sense) to images alone. On this third view of the meaning of introspection, therefore, our decision is wholly against it. There remain two points to be considered concerning introspection. The first is as to how far it is trustworthy; the second is as to whether, even granting that it reveals no radically different STUFF from that revealed by what might be called external perception, it may not reveal different RELATIONS, and thus acquire almost as much importance as is traditionally assigned to it. To begin with the trustworthiness of introspection. It is common among certain schools to regard the knowledge of our own mental processes as incomparably more certain than our knowledge of the "external" world; this view is to be found in the British philosophy which descends from Hume, and is present, somewhat veiled, in Kant and his followers. There seems no reason whatever to accept this view. Our spontaneous, unsophisticated beliefs, whether as to ourselves or as to the outer world, are always extremely rash and very liable to error. The acquisition of caution is equally necessary and equally difficult in both directions. Not only are we often un aware of entertaining a belief or desire which exists in us; we are often actually mistaken. The fallibility of introspection as regards what we desire is made evident by psycho-analysis; its fallibility as to what we know is easily demonstrated. An autobiography, when confronted by a careful editor with documentary evidence, is usually found to be full of obviously inadvertent errors. Any of us confronted by a forgotten letter written some years ago will be astonished to find how much more foolish our opinions were than we had remembered them as being. And as to the analysis of our mental operations--believing, desiring, willing, or what not--introspection unaided gives very little help: it is necessary to construct hypotheses and test them by their consequences, just as we do in physical science. Introspection, therefore, though it is one among our sources of knowledge, is not, in isolation, in any degree more trustworthy than "external" perception. I come now to our second question: Does introspection give us materials for the knowledge of relations other than those arrived at by reflecting upon external perception? It might be contended that the essence of what is "mental" consists of relations, such as knowing for example, and that our knowledge concerning these essentially mental relations is entirely derived from introspection. If "knowing" were an unanalysable relation, this view would be incontrovertible, since clearly no such relation forms part of the subject matter of physics. But it would seem that "knowing" is really various relations, all of them complex. Therefore, until they have been analysed, our present question must remain unanswered I shall return to it at the end of the present course of lectures. LECTURE VII. THE DEFINITION OF PERCEPTION In Lecture V we found reason to think that the ultimate constituents* of the world do not have the characteristics of either mind or matter as ordinarily understood: they are not solid persistent objects moving through space, nor are they fragments of "consciousness." But we found two ways of grouping particulars, one into "things" or "pieces of matter," the other into series of "perspectives," each series being what may be called a "biography." Before we can define either sensations or images, it is necessary to consider this twofold classification in somewhat greater detail, and to derive from it a definition of perception. It should be said that, in so far as the classification assumes the whole world of physics (including its unperceived portions), it contains hypothetical elements. But we will not linger on the grounds for admitting these, which belong to the philosophy of physics rather than of psychology. * When I speak of "ultimate constituents," I do not mean necessarily such as are theoretically incapable of analysis, but only such as, at present, we can see no means of analysing. I speak of such constituents as "particulars," or as "RELATIVE particulars" when I wish to emphasize the fact that they may be themselves complex. The physical classification of particulars collects together all those that are aspects of one "thing." Given any one particular, it is found often (we do not say always) that there are a number of other particulars differing from this one in gradually increasing degrees. Those (or some of those) that differ from it only very slightly will be found to differ approximately according to certain laws which may be called, in a generalized sense, the laws of "perspective"; they include the ordinary laws of perspective as a special case. This approximation grows more and more nearly exact as the difference grows less; in technical language, the laws of perspective account for the differences to the first order of small quantities, and other laws are only required to account for second-order differences. That is to say, as the difference diminishes, the part of the difference which is not according to the laws of perspective diminishes much more rapidly, and bears to the total difference a ratio which tends towards zero as both are made smaller and smaller. By this means we can theoretically collect together a number of particulars which may be defined as the "aspects" or "appearances" of one thing at one time. If the laws of perspective were sufficiently known, the connection between different aspects would be expressed in differential equations. This gives us, so far, only those particulars which constitute one thing at one time. This set of particulars may be called a "momentary thing." To define that series of "momentary things" that constitute the successive states of one thing is a problem involving the laws of dynamics. These give the laws governing the changes of aspects from one time to a slightly later time, with the same sort of differential approximation to exactness as we obtained for spatially neighbouring aspects through the laws of perspective. Thus a momentary thing is a set of particulars, while a thing (which may be identified with the whole history of the thing) is a series of such sets of particulars. The particulars in one set are collected together by the laws of perspective; the successive sets are collected together by the laws of dynamics. This is the view of the world which is appropriate to traditional physics. The definition of a "momentary thing" involves problems concerning time, since the particulars constituting a momentary thing will not be all simultaneous, but will travel outward from the thing with the velocity of light (in case the thing is in vacuo). There are complications connected with relativity, but for our present purpose they are not vital, and I shall ignore them. Instead of first collecting together all the particulars constituting a momentary thing, and then forming the series of successive sets, we might have first collected together a series of successive aspects related by the laws of dynamics, and then have formed the set of such series related by the laws of perspective. To illustrate by the case of an actor on the stage: our first plan was to collect together all the aspects which he presents to different spectators at one time, and then to form the series of such sets. Our second plan is first to collect together all the aspects which he presents successively to a given spectator, and then to do the same thing for the other spectators, thus forming a set of series instead of a series of sets. The first plan tells us what he does; the second the impressions he produces. This second way of classifying particulars is one which obviously has more relevance to psychology than the other. It is partly by this second method of classification that we obtain definitions of one "experience" or "biography" or "person." This method of classification is also essential to the definition of sensations and images, as I shall endeavour to prove later on. But we must first amplify the definition of perspectives and biographies. In our illustration of the actor, we spoke, for the moment, as though each spectator's mind were wholly occupied by the one actor. If this were the case, it might be possible to define the biography of one spectator as a series of successive aspects of the actor related according to the laws of dynamics. But in fact this is not the case. We are at all times during our waking life receiving a variety of impressions, which are aspects of a variety of things. We have to consider what binds together two simultaneous sensations in one person, or, more generally, any two occurrences which forte part of one experience. We might say, adhering to the standpoint of physics, that two aspects of different things belong to the same perspective when they are in the same place. But this would not really help us, since a "place" has not yet been defined. Can we define what is meant by saying that two aspects are "in the same place," without introducing anything beyond the laws of perspective and dynamics? I do not feel sure whether it is possible to frame such a definition or not; accordingly I shall not assume that it is possible, but shall seek other characteristics by which a perspective or biography may be defined. When (for example) we see one man and hear another speaking at the same time, what we see and what we hear have a relation which we can perceive, which makes the two together form, in some sense, one experience. It is when this relation exists that two occurrences become associated. Semon's "engram" is formed by all that we experience at one time. He speaks of two parts of this total as having the relation of "Nebeneinander" (M. 118; M.E. 33 ff.), which is reminiscent of Herbart's "Zusammen." I think the relation may be called simply "simultaneity." It might be said that at any moment all sorts of things that are not part of my experience are happening in the world, and that therefore the relation we are seeking to define cannot be merely simultaneity. This, however, would be an error--the sort of error that the theory of relativity avoids. There is not one universal time, except by an elaborate construction; there are only local times, each of which may be taken to be the time within one biography. Accordingly, if I am (say) hearing a sound, the only occurrences that are, in any simple sense, simultaneous with my sensation are events in my private world, i.e. in my biography. We may therefore define the "perspective" to which the sensation in question belongs as the set of particulars that are simultaneous with this sensation. And similarly we may define the "biography" to which the sensation belongs as the set of particulars that are earlier or later than, or simultaneous with, the given sensation. Moreover, the very same definitions can be applied to particulars which are not sensations. They are actually required for the theory of relativity, if we are to give a philosophical explanation of what is meant by "local time" in that theory The relations of simultaneity and succession are known to us in our own experience; they may be analysable, but that does not affect their suitability for defining perspectives and biographies. Such time-relations as can be constructed between events in different biographies are of a different kind: they are not experienced, and are merely logical, being designed to afford convenient ways of stating the correlations between different biographies. It is not only by time-relations that the parts of one biography are collected together in the case of living beings. In this case there are the mnemic phenomena which constitute the unity of one "experience," and transform mere occurrences into "experiences." I have already dwelt upon the importance of mnemic phenomena for psychology, and shall not enlarge upon them now, beyond observing that they are what transforms a biography (in our technical sense) into a life. It is they that give the continuity of a "person" or a "mind." But there is no reason to suppose that mnemic phenomena are associated with biographies except in the case of animals and plants. Our two-fold classification of particulars gives rise to the dualism of body and biography in regard to everything in the universe, and not only in regard to living things. This arises as follows. Every particular of the sort considered by physics is a member of two groups (1) The group of particulars constituting the other aspects of the same physical object; (2) The group of particulars that have direct time-relations to the given particular. Each of these is associated with a place. When I look at a star, my sensation is (1) A member of the group of particulars which is the star, and which is associated with the place where the star is; (2) A member of the group of particulars which is my biography, and which is associated with the place where I am.* *I have explained elsewhere the manner in which space is constructed on this theory, and in which the position of a perspective is brought into relation with the position of a physical object ("Our Knowledge of the External World," Lecture III, pp. 90, 91). The result is that every particular of the kind relevant to physics is associated with TWO places; e.g. my sensation of the star is associated with the place where I am and with the place where the star is. This dualism has nothing to do with any "mind" that I may be supposed to possess; it exists in exactly the same sense if I am replaced by a photographic plate. We may call the two places the active and passive places respectively.* Thus in the case of a perception or photograph of a star, the active place is the place where the star is, while the passive place is the place where the percipient or photographic plate is. * I use these as mere names; I do not want to introduce any notion of "activity." We can thus, without departing from physics, collect together all the particulars actively at a given place, or all the particulars passively at a given place. In our own case, the one group is our body (or our brain), while the other is our mind, in so far as it consists of perceptions. In the case of the photographic plate, the first group is the plate as dealt with by physics, the second the aspect of the heavens which it photographs. (For the sake of schematic simplicity, I am ignoring various complications connected with time, which require some tedious but perfectly feasible elaborations.) Thus what may be called subjectivity in the point of view is not a distinctive peculiarity of mind: it is present just as much in the photographic plate. And the photographic plate has its biography as well as its "matter." But this biography is an affair of physics, and has none of the peculiar characteristics by which "mental" phenomena are distinguished, with the sole exception of subjectivity. Adhering, for the moment, to the standpoint of physics, we may define a "perception" of an object as the appearance of the object from a place where there is a brain (or, in lower animals, some suitable nervous structure), with sense-organs and nerves forming part of the intervening medium. Such appearances of objects are distinguished from appearances in other places by certain peculiarities, namely: (1) They give rise to mnemic phenomena; (2) They are themselves affected by mnemic phenomena. That is to say, they may be remembered and associated or influence our habits, or give rise to images, etc., and they are themselves different from what they would have been if our past experience had been different--for example, the effect of a spoken sentence upon the hearer depends upon whether the hearer knows the language or not, which is a question of past experience. It is these two characteristics, both connected with mnemic phenomena, that distinguish perceptions from the appearances of objects in places where there is no living being. Theoretically, though often not practically, we can, in our perception of an object, separate the part which is due to past experience from the part which proceeds without mnemic influences out of the character of the object. We may define as "sensation" that part which proceeds in this way, while the remainder, which is a mnemic phenomenon, will have to be added to the sensation to make up what is called the "perception." According to this definition, the sensation is a theoretical core in the actual experience; the actual experience is the perception. It is obvious that there are grave difficulties in carrying out these definitions, but we will not linger over them. We have to pass, as soon as we can, from the physical standpoint, which we have been hitherto adopting, to the standpoint of psychology, in which we make more use of introspection in the first of the three senses discussed in the preceding lecture. But before making the transition, there are two points which must be made clear. First: Everything outside my own personal biography is outside my experience; therefore if anything can be known by me outside my biography, it can only be known in one of two ways: (1) By inference from things within my biography, or (2) By some a priori principle independent of experience. I do not myself believe that anything approaching certainty is to be attained by either of these methods, and therefore whatever lies outside my personal biography must be regarded, theoretically, as hypothesis. The theoretical argument for adopting the hypothesis is that it simplifies the statement of the laws according to which events happen in our experience. But there is no very good ground for supposing that a simple law is more likely to be true than a complicated law, though there is good ground for assuming a simple law in scientific practice, as a working hypothesis, if it explains the facts as well as another which is less simple. Belief in the existence of things outside my own biography exists antecedently to evidence, and can only be destroyed, if at all, by a long course of philosophic doubt. For purposes of science, it is justified practically by the simplification which it introduces into the laws of physics. But from the standpoint of theoretical logic it must be regarded as a prejudice, not as a well-grounded theory. With this proviso, I propose to continue yielding to the prejudice. The second point concerns the relating of our point of view to that which regards sensations as caused by stimuli external to the nervous system (or at least to the brain), and distinguishes images as "centrally excited," i.e. due to causes in the brain which cannot be traced back to anything affecting the sense-organs. It is clear that, if our analysis of physical objects has been valid, this way of defining sensations needs reinterpretation. It is also clear that we must be able to find such a new interpretation if our theory is to be admissible. To make the matter clear, we will take the simplest possible illustration. Consider a certain star, and suppose for the moment that its size is negligible. That is to say, we will regard it as, for practical purposes, a luminous point. Let us further suppose that it exists only for a very brief time, say a second. Then, according to physics, what happens is that a spherical wave of light travels outward from the star through space, just as, when you drop a stone into a stagnant pond, ripples travel outward from the place where the stone hit the water. The wave of light travels with a certain very nearly constant velocity, roughly 300,000 kilometres per second. This velocity may be ascertained by sending a flash of light to a mirror, and observing how long it takes before the reflected flash reaches you, just as the velocity of sound may be ascertained by means of an echo. What it is that happens when a wave of light reaches a given place we cannot tell, except in the sole case when the place in question is a brain connected with an eye which is turned in the right direction. In this one very special case we know what happens: we have the sensation called "seeing the star." In all other cases, though we know (more or less hypothetically) some of the correlations and abstract properties of the appearance of the star, we do not know the appearance itself. Now you may, for the sake of illustration, compare the different appearances of the star to the conjugation of a Greek verb, except that the number of its parts is really infinite, and not only apparently so to the despairing schoolboy. In vacuo, the parts are regular, and can be derived from the (imaginary) root according to the laws of grammar, i.e. of perspective. The star being situated in empty space, it may be defined, for purposes of physics, as consisting of all those appearances which it presents in vacuo, together with those which, according to the laws of perspective, it would present elsewhere if its appearances elsewhere were regular. This is merely the adaptation of the definition of matter which I gave in an earlier lecture. The appearance of a star at a certain place, if it is regular, does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence of the star. Every regular appearance is an actual member of the system which is the star, and its causation is entirely internal to that system. We may express this by saying that a regular appearance is due to the star alone, and is actually part of the star, in the sense in which a man is part of the human race. But presently the light of the star reaches our atmosphere. It begins to be refracted, and dimmed by mist, and its velocity is slightly diminished. At last it reaches a human eye, where a complicated process takes place, ending in a sensation which gives us our grounds for believing in all that has gone before. Now, the irregular appearances of the star are not, strictly speaking, members of the system which is the star, according to our definition of matter. The irregular appearances, however, are not merely irregular: they proceed according to laws which can be stated in terms of the matter through which the light has passed on its way. The sources of an irregular appearance are therefore twofold: (1) The object which is appearing irregularly; 2) The intervening medium. It should be observed that, while the conception of a regular appearance is perfectly precise, the conception of an irregular appearance is one capable of any degree of vagueness. When the distorting influence of the medium is sufficiently great, the resulting particular can no longer be regarded as an appearance of an object, but must be treated on its own account. This happens especially when the particular in question cannot be traced back to one object, but is a blend of two or more. This case is normal in perception: we see as one what the microscope or telescope reveals to be many different objects. The notion of perception is therefore not a precise one: we perceive things more or less, but always with a very considerable amount of vagueness and confusion. In considering irregular appearances, there are certain very natural mistakes which must be avoided. In order that a particular may count as an irregular appearance of a certain object, it is not necessary that it should bear any resemblance to the regular appearances as regard its intrinsic qualities. All that is necessary is that it should be derivable from the regular appearances by the laws which express the distorting influence of the medium. When it is so derivable, the particular in question may be regarded as caused by the regular appearances, and therefore by the object itself, together with the modifications resulting from the medium. In other cases, the particular in question may, in the same sense, be regarded as caused by several objects together with the medium; in this case, it may be called a confused appearance of several objects. If it happens to be in a brain, it may be called a confused perception of these objects. All actual perception is confused to a greater or less extent. We can now interpret in terms of our theory the distinction between those mental occurrences which are said to have an external stimulus, and those which are said to be "centrally excited," i.e. to have no stimulus external to the brain. When a mental occurrence can be regarded as an appearance of an object external to the brain, however irregular, or even as a confused appearance of several such objects, then we may regard it as having for its stimulus the object or objects in question, or their appearances at the sense-organ concerned. When, on the other hand, a mental occurrence has not sufficient connection with objects external to the brain to be regarded as an appearance of such objects, then its physical causation (if any) will have to be sought in the brain. In the former case it can be called a perception; in the latter it cannot be so called. But the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Until this is realized, no satisfactory theory of perception, sensation, or imagination is possible. LECTURE VIII. SENSATIONS AND IMAGES The dualism of mind and matter, if we have been right so far, cannot be allowed as metaphysically valid. Nevertheless, we seem to find a certain dualism, perhaps not ultimate, within the world as we observe it. The dualism is not primarily as to the stuff of the world, but as to causal laws. On this subject we may again quote William James. He points out that when, as we say, we merely "imagine" things, there are no such effects as would ensue if the things were what we call "real." He takes the case of imagining a fire. "I make for myself an experience of blazing fire; I place it near my body; but it does not warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it and the stick either burns or remains green, as I please. I call up water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mental fire.... With 'real' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue; and thus the real experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the things from our thoughts of them, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience--chaos, under the name of the physical world."* * "Essays in Radical Empiricism," pp. 32-3. In this passage James speaks, by mere inadvertence, as though the phenomena which he is describing as "mental" had NO effects. This is, of course, not the case: they have their effects, just as much as physical phenomena do, but their effects follow different laws. For example, dreams, as Freud has shown, are just as much subject to laws as are the motions of the planets. But the laws are different: in a dream you may be transported from one place to another in a moment, or one person may turn into another under your eyes. Such differences compel you to distinguish the world of dreams from the physical world. If the two sorts of causal laws could be sharply distinguished, we could call an occurrence "physical" when it obeys causal laws appropriate to the physical world, and "mental" when it obeys causal laws appropriate to the mental world. Since the mental world and the physical world interact, there would be a boundary between the two: there would be events which would have physical causes and mental effects, while there would be others which would have mental causes and physical effects. Those that have physical causes and mental effects we should define as "sensations." Those that have mental causes and physical effects might perhaps be identified with what we call voluntary movements; but they do not concern us at present. These definitions would have all the precision that could be desired if the distinction between physical and psychological causation were clear and sharp. As a matter of fact, however, this distinction is, as yet, by no means sharp. It is possible that, with fuller knowledge, it will be found to be no more ultimate than the distinction between the laws of gases and the laws of rigid bodies. It also suffers from the fact that an event may be an effect of several causes according to several causal laws we cannot, in general, point to anything unique as THE cause of such-and-such an event. And finally it is by no means certain that the peculiar causal laws which govern mental events are not really physiological. The law of habit, which is one of the most distinctive, may be fully explicable in terms of the peculiarities of nervous tissue, and these peculiarities, in turn, may be explicable by the laws of physics. It seems, therefore, that we are driven to a different kind of definition. It is for this reason that it was necessary to develop the definition of perception. With this definition, we can define a sensation as the non-mnemic elements in a perception. When, following our definition, we try to decide what elements in our experience are of the nature of sensations, we find more difficulty than might have been expected. Prima facie, everything is sensation that comes to us through the senses: the sights we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we smell, and so on; also such things as headache or the feeling of muscular strain. But in actual fact so much interpretation, so much of habitual correlation, is mixed with all such experiences, that the core of pure sensation is only to be extracted by careful investigation. To take a simple illustration: if you go to the theatre in your own country, you seem to hear equally well in the stalls or the dress circle; in either case you think you miss nothing. But if you go in a foreign country where you have a fair knowledge of the language, you will seem to have grown partially deaf, and you will find it necessary to be much nearer the stage than you would need to be in your own country. The reason is that, in hearing our own language spoken, we quickly and unconsciously fill out what we really hear with inferences to what the man must be saying, and we never realize that we have not heard the words we have merely inferred. In a foreign language, these inferences are more difficult, and we are more dependent upon actual sensation. If we found ourselves in a foreign world, where tables looked like cushions and cushions like tables, we should similarly discover how much of what we think we see is really inference. Every fairly familiar sensation is to us a sign of the things that usually go with it, and many of these things will seem to form part of the sensation. I remember in the early days of motor-cars being with a friend when a tyre burst with a loud report. He thought it was a pistol, and supported his opinion by maintaining that he had seen the flash. But of course there had been no flash. Nowadays no one sees a flash when a tyre bursts. In order, therefore, to arrive at what really is sensation in an occurrence which, at first sight, seems to contain nothing else, we have to pare away all that is due to habit or expectation or interpretation. This is a matter for the psychologist, and by no means an easy matter. For our purposes, it is not important to determine what exactly is the sensational core in any case; it is only important to notice that there certainly is a sensational core, since habit, expectation and interpretation are diversely aroused on diverse occasions, and the diversity is clearly due to differences in what is presented to the senses. When you open your newspaper in the morning, the actual sensations of seeing the print form a very minute part of what goes on in you, but they are the starting-point of all the rest, and it is through them that the newspaper is a means of information or mis-information. Thus, although it may be difficult to determine what exactly is sensation in any given experience, it is clear that there is sensation, unless, like Leibniz, we deny all action of the outer world upon us. Sensations are obviously the source of our knowledge of the world, including our own body. It might seem natural to regard a sensation as itself a cognition, and until lately I did so regard it. When, say, I see a person I know coming towards me in the street, it SEEMS as though the mere seeing were knowledge. It is of course undeniable that knowledge comes THROUGH the seeing, but I think it is a mistake to regard the mere seeing itself as knowledge. If we are so to regard it, we must distinguish the seeing from what is seen: we must say that, when we see a patch of colour of a certain shape, the patch of colour is one thing and our seeing of it is another. This view, however, demands the admission of the subject, or act, in the sense discussed in our first lecture. If there is a subject, it can have a relation to the patch of colour, namely, the sort of relation which we might call awareness. In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will consist of awareness of the colour, while the colour itself will remain wholly physical, and may be called the sense-datum, to distinguish it from the sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do. The functions that they appear to perform can always be performed by classes or series or other logical constructions, consisting of less dubious entities. If we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world. But when we do this, the possibility of distinguishing the sensation from the sense-datum vanishes; at least I see no way of preserving the distinction. Accordingly the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical world, and part of what physics is concerned with. A patch of colour is certainly not knowledge, and therefore we cannot say that pure sensation is cognitive. Through its psychological effects, it is the cause of cognitions, partly by being itself a sign of things that are correlated with it, as e.g. sensations of sight and touch are correlated, and partly by giving rise to images and memories after the sensation is faded. But in itself the pure sensation is not cognitive. In the first lecture we considered the view of Brentano, that "we may define psychical phenomena by saying that they are phenomena which intentionally contain an object." We saw reasons to reject this view in general; we are now concerned to show that it must be rejected in the particular case of sensations. The kind of argument which formerly made me accept Brentano's view in this case was exceedingly simple. When I see a patch of colour, it seemed to me that the colour is not psychical, but physical, while my seeing is not physical, but psychical. Hence I concluded that the colour is something other than my seeing of the colour. This argument, to me historically, was directed against idealism: the emphatic part of it was the assertion that the colour is physical, not psychical. I shall not trouble you now with the grounds for holding as against Berkeley that the patch of colour is physical; I have set them forth before, and I see no reason to modify them. But it does not follow that the patch of colour is not also psychical, unless we assume that the physical and the psychical cannot overlap, which I no longer consider a valid assumption. If we admit--as I think we should--that the patch of colour may be both physical and psychical, the reason for distinguishing the sense-datum from the sensation disappears, and we may say that the patch of colour and our sensation in seeing it are identical. This is the view of William James, Professor Dewey, and the American realists. Perceptions, says Professor Dewey, are not per se cases of knowledge, but simply natural events with no more knowledge status than (say) a shower. "Let them [the realists] try the experiment of conceiving perceptions as pure natural events, not cases of awareness or apprehension, and they will be surprised to see how little they miss."* I think he is right in this, except in supposing that the realists will be surprised. Many of them already hold the view he is advocating, and others are very sympathetic to it. At any rate, it is the view which I shall adopt in these lectures. * Dewey, "Essays in Experimental Logic," pp. 253, 262. The stuff of the world, so far as we have experience of it, consists, on the view that I am advocating, of innumerable transient particulars such as occur in seeing, hearing, etc., together with images more or less resembling these, of which I shall speak shortly. If physics is true, there are, besides the particulars that we experience, others, probably equally (or almost equally) transient, which make up that part of the material world that does not come into the sort of contact with a living body that is required to turn it into a sensation. But this topic belongs to the philosophy of physics, and need not concern us in our present inquiry. Sensations are what is common to the mental and physical worlds; they may be defined as the intersection of mind and matter. This is by no means a new view; it is advocated, not only by the American authors I have mentioned, but by Mach in his Analysis of Sensations, which was published in 1886. The essence of sensation, according to the view I am advocating, is its independence of past experience. It is a core in our actual experiences, never existing in isolation except possibly in very young infants. It is not itself knowledge, but it supplies the data for our knowledge of the physical world, including our own bodies. There are some who believe that our mental life is built up out of sensations alone. This may be true; but in any case I think the only ingredients required in addition to sensations are images. What images are, and how they are to be defined, we have now to inquire. The distinction between images and sensations might seem at first sight by no means difficult. When we shut our eyes and call up pictures of familiar scenes, we usually have no difficulty, so long as we remain awake, in discriminating between what we are imagining and what is really seen. If we imagine some piece of music that we know, we can go through it in our mind from beginning to end without any discoverable tendency to suppose that we are really hearing it. But although such cases are so clear that no confusion seems possible, there are many others that are far more difficult, and the definition of images is by no means an easy problem. To begin with: we do not always know whether what we are experiencing is a sensation or an image. The things we see in dreams when our eyes are shut must count as images, yet while we are dreaming they seem like sensations. Hallucinations often begin as persistent images, and only gradually acquire that influence over belief that makes the patient regard them as sensations. When we are listening for a faint sound--the striking of a distant clock, or a horse's hoofs on the road--we think we hear it many times before we really do, because expectation brings us the image, and we mistake it for sensation. The distinction between images and sensations is, therefore, by no means always obvious to inspection.* * On the distinction between images and sensation, cf. Semon, "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," pp. 19-20. We may consider three different ways in which it has been sought to distinguish images from sensations, namely: (1) By the less degree of vividness in images; (2) By our absence of belief in their "physical reality"; (3) By the fact that their causes and effects are different from those of sensations. I believe the third of these to be the only universally applicable criterion. The other two are applicable in very many cases, but cannot be used for purposes of definition because they are liable to exceptions. Nevertheless, they both deserve to be carefully considered. (1) Hume, who gives the names "impressions" and "ideas" to what may, for present purposes, be identified with our "sensations" and "images," speaks of impressions as "those perceptions which enter with most force and violence" while he defines ideas as "the faint images of these (i.e. of impressions) in thinking and reasoning." His immediately following observations, however, show the inadequacy of his criteria of "force" and "faintness." He says: "I believe it will not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction. Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference betwixt feeling and thinking. The common degrees of these are easily distinguished, though it is not impossible but in particular instances they may very nearly approach to each other. Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions; as, on the other hand, it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas. But notwithstanding this near resemblance in a few instances, they are in general so very different, that no one can make a scruple to rank them under distinct heads, and assign to each a peculiar name to mark the difference" ("Treatise of Human Nature," Part I, Section I). I think Hume is right in holding that they should be ranked under distinct heads, with a peculiar name for each. But by his own confession in the above passage, his criterion for distinguishing them is not always adequate. A definition is not sound if it only applies in cases where the difference is glaring: the essential purpose of a definition is to provide a mark which is applicable even in marginal cases--except, of course, when we are dealing with a conception, like, e.g. baldness, which is one of degree and has no sharp boundaries. But so far we have seen no reason to think that the difference between sensations and images is only one of degree. Professor Stout, in his "Manual of Psychology," after discussing various ways of distinguishing sensations and images, arrives at a view which is a modification of Hume's. He says (I quote from the second edition): "Our conclusion is that at bottom the distinction between image and percept, as respectively faint and vivid states, is based on a difference of quality. The percept has an aggressiveness which does not belong to the image. It strikes the mind with varying degrees of force or liveliness according to the varying intensity of the stimulus. This degree of force or liveliness is part of what we ordinarily mean by the intensity of a sensation. But this constituent of the intensity of sensations is absent in mental imagery"(p. 419). This view allows for the fact that sensations may reach any degree of faintness--e.g. in the case of a just visible star or a just audible sound--without becoming images, and that therefore mere faintness cannot be the characteristic mark of images. After explaining the sudden shock of a flash of lightning or a steam-whistle, Stout says that "no mere image ever does strike the mind in this manner"(p. 417). But I believe that this criterion fails in very much the same instances as those in which Hume's criterion fails in its original form. Macbeth speaks of-- that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs Against the use of nature. The whistle of a steam-engine could hardly have a stronger effect than this. A very intense emotion will often bring with it--especially where some future action or some undecided issue is involved--powerful compelling images which may determine the whole course of life, sweeping aside all contrary solicitations to the will by their capacity for exclusively possessing the mind. And in all cases where images, originally recognized as such, gradually pass into hallucinations, there must be just that "force or liveliness" which is supposed to be always absent from images. The cases of dreams and fever-delirium are as hard to adjust to Professor Stout's modified criterion as to Hume's. I conclude therefore that the test of liveliness, however applicable in ordinary instances, cannot be used to define the differences between sensations and images. (2) We might attempt to distinguish images from sensations by our absence of belief in the "physical reality" of images. When we are aware that what we are experiencing is an image, we do not give it the kind of belief that we should give to a sensation: we do not think that it has the same power of producing knowledge of the "external world." Images are "imaginary"; in SOME sense they are "unreal." But this difference is hard to analyse or state correctly. What we call the "unreality" of images requires interpretation it cannot mean what would be expressed by saying "there's no such thing." Images are just as truly part of the actual world as sensations are. All that we really mean by calling an image "unreal" is that it does not have the concomitants which it would have if it were a sensation. When we call up a visual image of a chair, we do not attempt to sit in it, because we know that, like Macbeth's dagger, it is not "sensible to feeling as to sight"--i.e. it does not have the correlations with tactile sensations which it would have if it were a visual sensation and not merely a visual image. But this means that the so-called "unreality" of images consists merely in their not obeying the laws of physics, and thus brings us back to the causal distinction between images and sensations. This view is confirmed by the fact that we only feel images to be "unreal" when we already know them to be images. Images cannot be defined by the FEELING of unreality, because when we falsely believe an image to be a sensation, as in the case of dreams, it FEELS just as real as if it were a sensation. Our feeling of unreality results from our having already realized that we are dealing with an image, and cannot therefore be the definition of what we mean by an image. As soon as an image begins to deceive us as to its status, it also deceives us as to its correlations, which are what we mean by its "reality." (3) This brings us to the third mode of distinguishing images from sensations, namely, by their causes and effects. I believe this to be the only valid ground of distinction. James, in the passage about the mental fire which won't burn real sticks, distinguishes images by their effects, but I think the more reliable distinction is by their causes. Professor Stout (loc. cit., p. 127) says: "One characteristic mark of what we agree in calling sensation is its mode of production. It is caused by what we call a STIMULUS. A stimulus is always some condition external to the nervous system itself and operating upon it." I think that this is the correct view, and that the distinction between images and sensations can only be made by taking account of their causation. Sensations come through sense-organs, while images do not. We cannot have visual sensations in the dark, or with our eyes shut, but we can very well have visual images under these circumstances. Accordingly images have been defined as "centrally excited sensations," i.e. sensations which have their physiological cause in the brain only, not also in the sense-organs and the nerves that run from the sense-organs to the brain. I think the phrase "centrally excited sensations" assumes more than is necessary, since it takes it for granted that an image must have a proximate physiological cause. This is probably true, but it is an hypothesis, and for our purposes an unnecessary one. It would seem to fit better with what we can immediately observe if we were to say that an image is occasioned, through association, by a sensation or another image, in other words that it has a mnemic cause--which does not prevent it from also having a physical cause. And I think it will be found that the causation of an image always proceeds according to mnemic laws, i.e. that it is governed by habit and past experience. If you listen to a man playing the pianola without looking at him, you will have images of his hands on the keys as if he were playing the piano; if you suddenly look at him while you are absorbed in the music, you will experience a shock of surprise when you notice that his hands are not touching the notes. Your image of his hands is due to the many times that you have heard similar sounds and at the same time seen the player's hands on the piano. When habit and past experience play this part, we are in the region of mnemic as opposed to ordinary physical causation. And I think that, if we could regard as ultimately valid the difference between physical and mnemic causation, we could distinguish images from sensations as having mnemic causes, though they may also have physical causes. Sensations, on the other hand, will only have physical causes. However this may be, the practically effective distinction between sensations and images is that in the causation of sensations, but not of images, the stimulation of nerves carrying an effect into the brain, usually from the surface of the body, plays an essential part. And this accounts for the fact that images and sensations cannot always be distinguished by their intrinsic nature. Images also differ from sensations as regards their effects. Sensations, as a rule, have both physical and mental effects. As you watch the train you meant to catch leaving the station, there are both the successive positions of the train (physical effects) and the successive waves of fury and disappointment (mental effects). Images, on the contrary, though they MAY produce bodily movements, do so according to mnemic laws, not according to the laws of physics. All their effects, of whatever nature, follow mnemic laws. But this difference is less suitable for definition than the difference as to causes. Professor Watson, as a logical carrying-out of his behaviourist theory, denies altogether that there are any observable phenomena such as images are supposed to be. He replaces them all by faint sensations, and especially by pronunciation of words sotto voce. When we "think" of a table (say), as opposed to seeing it, what happens, according to him, is usually that we are making small movements of the throat and tongue such as would lead to our uttering the word "table" if they were more pronounced. I shall consider his view again in connection with words; for the present I am only concerned to combat his denial of images. This denial is set forth both in his book on "Behavior" and in an article called "Image and Affection in Behavior" in the "Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods," vol. x (July, 1913). It seems to me that in this matter he has been betrayed into denying plain facts in the interests of a theory, namely, the supposed impossibility of introspection. I dealt with the theory in Lecture VI; for the present I wish to reinforce the view that the facts are undeniable. Images are of various sorts, according to the nature of the sensations which they copy. Images of bodily movements, such as we have when we imagine moving an arm or, on a smaller scale, pronouncing a word, might possibly be explained away on Professor Watson's lines, as really consisting in small incipient movements such as, if magnified and prolonged, would be the movements we are said to be imagining. Whether this is the case or not might even be decided experimentally. If there were a delicate instrument for recording small movements in the mouth and throat, we might place such an instrument in a person's mouth and then tell him to recite a poem to himself, as far as possible only in imagination. I should not be at all surprised if it were found that actual small movements take place while he is "mentally" saying over the verses. The point is important, because what is called "thought" consists mainly (though I think not wholly) of inner speech. If Professor Watson is right as regards inner speech, this whole region is transferred from imagination to sensation. But since the question is capable of experimental decision, it would be gratuitous rashness to offer an opinion while that decision is lacking. But visual and auditory images are much more difficult to deal with in this way, because they lack the connection with physical events in the outer world which belongs to visual and auditory sensations. Suppose, for example, that I am sitting in my room, in which there is an empty arm-chair. I shut my eyes, and call up a visual image of a friend sitting in the arm-chair. If I thrust my image into the world of physics, it contradicts all the usual physical laws. My friend reached the chair without coming in at the door in the usual way; subsequent inquiry will show that he was somewhere else at the moment. If regarded as a sensation, my image has all the marks of the supernatural. My image, therefore, is regarded as an event in me, not as having that position in the orderly happenings of the public world that belongs to sensations. By saying that it is an event in me, we leave it possible that it may be PHYSIOLOGICALLY caused: its privacy may be only due to its connection with my body. But in any case it is not a public event, like an actual person walking in at the door and sitting down in my chair. And it cannot, like inner speech, be regarded as a SMALL sensation, since it occupies just as large an area in my visual field as the actual sensation would do. Professor Watson says: "I should throw out imagery altogether and attempt to show that all natural thought goes on in terms of sensori-motor processes in the larynx." This view seems to me flatly to contradict experience. If you try to persuade any uneducated person that she cannot call up a visual picture of a friend sitting in a chair, but can only use words describing what such an occurrence would be like, she will conclude that you are mad. (This statement is based upon experiment.) Galton, as every one knows, investigated visual imagery, and found that education tends to kill it: the Fellows of the Royal Society turned out to have much less of it than their wives. I see no reason to doubt his conclusion that the habit of abstract pursuits makes learned men much inferior to the average in power of visualizing, and much more exclusively occupied with words in their "thinking." And Professor Watson is a very learned man. I shall henceforth assume that the existence of images is admitted, and that they are to be distinguished from sensations by their causes, as well as, in a lesser degree, by their effects. In their intrinsic nature, though they often differ from sensations by being more dim or vague or faint, yet they do not always or universally differ from sensations in any way that can be used for defining them. Their privacy need form no bar to the scientific study of them, any more than the privacy of bodily sensations does. Bodily sensations are admitted by even the most severe critics of introspection, although, like images, they can only be observed by one observer. It must be admitted, however, that the laws of the appearance and disappearance of images are little known and difficult to discover, because we are not assisted, as in the case of sensations, by our knowledge of the physical world. There remains one very important point concerning images, which will occupy us much hereafter, and that is, their resemblance to previous sensations. They are said to be "copies" of sensations, always as regards the simple qualities that enter into them, though not always as regards the manner in which these are put together. It is generally believed that we cannot imagine a shade of colour that we have never seen, or a sound that we have never heard. On this subject Hume is the classic. He says, in the definitions already quoted: "Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name IMPRESSIONS; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By IDEAS I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning." He next explains the difference between simple and complex ideas, and explains that a complex idea may occur without any similar complex impression. But as regards simple ideas, he states that "every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simple impression a correspondent idea." He goes on to enunciate the general principle "that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent" ("Treatise of Human Nature," Part I, Section I). It is this fact, that images resemble antecedent sensations, which enables us to call them images "of" this or that. For the understanding of memory, and of knowledge generally, the recognizable resemblance of images and sensations is of fundamental importance. There are difficulties in establishing Hume's principles, and doubts as to whether it is exactly true. Indeed, he himself signalized an exception immediately after stating his maxim. Nevertheless, it is impossible to doubt that in the main simple images are copies of similar simple sensations which have occurred earlier, and that the same is true of complex images in all cases of memory as opposed to mere imagination. Our power of acting with reference to what is sensibly absent is largely due to this characteristic of images, although, as education advances, images tend to be more and more replaced by words. We shall have much to say in the next two lectures on the subject of images as copies of sensations. What has been said now is merely by way of reminder that this is their most notable characteristic. I am by no means confident that the distinction between images and sensations is ultimately valid, and I should be glad to be convinced that images can be reduced to sensations of a peculiar kind. I think it is clear, however, that, at any rate in the case of auditory and visual images, they do differ from ordinary auditory and visual sensations, and therefore form a recognizable class of occurrences, even if it should prove that they can be regarded as a sub-class of sensations. This is all that is necessary to validate the use of images to be made in the sequel. LECTURE IX. MEMORY Memory, which we are to consider to-day, introduces us to knowledge in one of its forms. The analysis of knowledge will occupy us until the end of the thirteenth lecture, and is the most difficult part of our whole enterprise. I do not myself believe that the analysis of knowledge can be effected entirely by means of purely external observation, such as behaviourists employ. I shall discuss this question in later lectures. In the present lecture I shall attempt the analysis of memory-knowledge, both as an introduction to the problem of knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is presupposed in almost all other knowledge. Sensation, we decided, is not a form of knowledge. It might, however, have been expected that we should begin our discussion of knowledge with PERCEPTION, i.e. with that integral experience of things in the environment, out of which sensation is extracted by psychological analysis. What is called perception differs from sensation by the fact that the sensational ingredients bring up habitual associates--images and expectations of their usual correlates--all of which are subjectively indistinguishable from the sensation. The FACT of past experience is essential in producing this filling-out of sensation, but not the RECOLLECTION of past experience. The non-sensational elements in perception can be wholly explained as the result of habit, produced by frequent correlations. Perception, according to our definition in Lecture VII, is no more a form of knowledge than sensation is, except in so far as it involves expectations. The purely psychological problems which it raises are not very difficult, though they have sometimes been rendered artificially obscure by unwillingness to admit the fallibility of the non-sensational elements of perception. On the other hand, memory raises many difficult and very important problems, which it is necessary to consider at the first possible moment. One reason for treating memory at this early stage is that it seems to be involved in the fact that images are recognized as "copies" of past sensible experience. In the preceding lecture I alluded to Hume's principle "that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent." Whether or not this principle is liable to exceptions, everyone would agree that is has a broad measure of truth, though the word "exactly" might seem an overstatement, and it might seem more correct to say that ideas APPROXIMATELY represent impressions. Such modifications of Hume's principle, however, do not affect the problem which I wish to present for your consideration, namely: Why do we believe that images are, sometimes or always, approximately or exactly, copies of sensations? What sort of evidence is there? And what sort of evidence is logically possible? The difficulty of this question arises through the fact that the sensation which an image is supposed to copy is in the past when the image exists, and can therefore only be known by memory, while, on the other hand, memory of past sensations seems only possible by means of present images. How, then, are we to find any way of comparing the present image and the past sensation? The problem is just as acute if we say that images differ from their prototypes as if we say that they resemble them; it is the very possibility of comparison that is hard to understand.* We think we can know that they are alike or different, but we cannot bring them together in one experience and compare them. To deal with this problem, we must have a theory of memory. In this way the whole status of images as "copies" is bound up with the analysis of memory. * How, for example, can we obtain such knowledge as the following: "If we look at, say, a red nose and perceive it, and after a little while ekphore, its memory-image, we note immediately how unlike, in its likeness, this memory-image is to the original perception" (A. Wohlgemuth, "On the Feelings and their Neural Correlate with an Examination of the Nature of Pain," "Journal of Psychology," vol. viii, part iv, June, 1917). In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even if no past had existed. I am not suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all sceptical hypotheses, it is logically tenable, but uninteresting. All that I am doing is to use its logical tenability as a help in the analysis of what occurs when we remember. In the second place, images without beliefs are insufficient to constitute memory; and habits are still more insufficient. The behaviourist, who attempts to make psychology a record of behaviour, has to trust his memory in making the record. "Habit" is a concept involving the occurrence of similar events at different times; if the behaviourist feels confident that there is such a phenomenon as habit, that can only be because he trusts his memory, when it assures him that there have been other times. And the same applies to images. If we are to know as it is supposed we do--that images are "copies," accurate or inaccurate, of past events, something more than the mere occurrence of images must go to constitute this knowledge. For their mere occurrence, by itself, would not suggest any connection with anything that had happened before. Can we constitute memory out of images together with suitable beliefs? We may take it that memory-images, when they occur in true memory, are (a) known to be copies, (b) sometimes known to be imperfect copies (cf. footnote on previous page). How is it possible to know that a memory-image is an imperfect copy, without having a more accurate copy by which to replace it? This would SEEM to suggest that we have a way of knowing the past which is independent of images, by means of which we can criticize image-memories. But I do not think such an inference is warranted. What results, formally, from our knowledge of the past through images of which we recognize the inaccuracy, is that such images must have two characteristics by which we can arrange them in two series, of which one corresponds to the more or less remote period in the past to which they refer, and the other to our greater or less confidence in their accuracy. We will take the second of these points first. Our confidence or lack of confidence in the accuracy of a memory-image must, in fundamental cases, be based upon a characteristic of the image itself, since we cannot evoke the past bodily and compare it with the present image. It might be suggested that vagueness is the required characteristic, but I do not think this is the case. We sometimes have images that are by no means peculiarly vague, which yet we do not trust--for example, under the influence of fatigue we may see a friend's face vividly and clearly, but horribly distorted. In such a case we distrust our image in spite of its being unusually clear. I think the characteristic by which we distinguish the images we trust is the feeling of FAMILIARITY that accompanies them. Some images, like some sensations, feel very familiar, while others feel strange. Familiarity is a feeling capable of degrees. In an image of a well-known face, for example, some parts may feel more familiar than others; when this happens, we have more belief in the accuracy of the familiar parts than in that of the unfamiliar parts. I think it is by this means that we become critical of images, not by some imageless memory with which we compare them. I shall return to the consideration of familiarity shortly. I come now to the other characteristic which memory-images must have in order to account for our knowledge of the past. They must have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring to more or less remote portions of the past. That is to say if we suppose that A is the event remembered, B the remembering, and t the interval of time between A and B, there must be some characteristic of B which is capable of degrees, and which, in accurately dated memories, varies as t varies. It may increase as t increases, or diminish as t increases. The question which of these occurs is not of any importance for the theoretic serviceability of the characteristic in question. In actual fact, there are doubtless various factors that concur in giving us the feeling of greater or less remoteness in some remembered event. There may be a specific feeling which could be called the feeling of "pastness," especially where immediate memory is concerned. But apart from this, there are other marks. One of these is context. A recent memory has, usually, more context than a more distant one. When a remembered event has a remembered context, this may occur in two ways, either (a) by successive images in the same order as their prototypes, or (b) by remembering a whole process simultaneously, in the same way in which a present process may be apprehended, through akoluthic sensations which, by fading, acquire the mark of just-pastness in an increasing degree as they fade, and are thus placed in a series while all sensibly present. It will be context in this second sense, more specially, that will give us a sense of the nearness or remoteness of a remembered event. There is, of course, a difference between knowing the temporal relation of a remembered event to the present, and knowing the time-order of two remembered events. Very often our knowledge of the temporal relation of a remembered event to the present is inferred from its temporal relations to other remembered events. It would seem that only rather recent events can be placed at all accurately by means of feelings giving their temporal relation to the present, but it is clear that such feelings must play an essential part in the process of dating remembered events. We may say, then, that images are regarded by us as more or less accurate copies of past occurrences because they come to us with two sorts of feelings: (1) Those that may be called feelings of familiarity; (2) those that may be collected together as feelings giving a sense of pastness. The first lead us to trust our memories, the second to assign places to them in the time-order. We have now to analyse the memory-belief, as opposed to the characteristics of images which lead us to base memory-beliefs upon them. If we had retained the "subject" or "act" in knowledge, the whole problem of memory would have been comparatively simple. We could then have said that remembering is a direct relation between the present act or subject and the past occurrence remembered: the act of remembering is present, though its object is past. But the rejection of the subject renders some more complicated theory necessary. Remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way resembling, or related to, what is remembered. And it is difficult to find any ground, except a pragmatic one, for supposing that memory is not sheer delusion, if, as seems to be the case, there is not, apart from memory, any way of ascertaining that there really was a past occurrence having the required relation to our present remembering. What, if we followed Meinong's terminology, we should call the "object" in memory, i.e. the past event which we are said to be remembering, is unpleasantly remote from the "content," i.e. the present mental occurrence in remembering. There is an awkward gulf between the two, which raises difficulties for the theory of knowledge. But we must not falsify observation to avoid theoretical difficulties. For the present, therefore, let us forget these problems, and try to discover what actually occurs in memory. Some points may be taken as fixed, and such as any theory of memory must arrive at. In this case, as in most others, what may be taken as certain in advance is rather vague. The study of any topic is like the continued observation of an object which is approaching us along a road: what is certain to begin with is the quite vague knowledge that there is SOME object on the road. If you attempt to be less vague, and to assert that the object is an elephant, or a man, or a mad dog, you run a risk of error; but the purpose of continued observation is to enable you to arrive at such more precise knowledge. In like manner, in the study of memory, the certainties with which you begin are very vague, and the more precise propositions at which you try to arrive are less certain than the hazy data from which you set out. Nevertheless, in spite of the risk of error, precision is the goal at which we must aim. The first of our vague but indubitable data is that there is knowledge of the past. We do not yet know with any precision what we mean by "knowledge," and we must admit that in any given instance our memory may be at fault. Nevertheless, whatever a sceptic might urge in theory, we cannot practically doubt that we got up this morning, that we did various things yesterday, that a great war has been taking place, and so on. How far our knowledge of the past is due to memory, and how far to other sources, is of course a matter to be investigated, but there can be no doubt that memory forms an indispensable part of our knowledge of the past. The second datum is that we certainly have more capacity for knowing the past than for knowing the future. We know some things about the future, for example what eclipses there will be; but this knowledge is a matter of elaborate calculation and inference, whereas some of our knowledge of the past comes to us without effort, in the same sort of immediate way in which we acquire knowledge of occurrences in our present environment. We might provisionally, though perhaps not quite correctly, define "memory" as that way of knowing about the past which has no analogue in our knowledge of the future; such a definition would at least serve to mark the problem with which we are concerned, though some expectations may deserve to rank with memory as regards immediacy. A third point, perhaps not quite so certain as our previous two, is that the truth of memory cannot be wholly practical, as pragmatists wish all truth to be. It seems clear that some of the things I remember are trivial and without any visible importance for the future, but that my memory is true (or false) in virtue of a past event, not in virtue of any future consequences of my belief. The definition of truth as the correspondence between beliefs and facts seems peculiarly evident in the case of memory, as against not only the pragmatist definition but also the idealist definition by means of coherence. These considerations, however, are taking us away from psychology, to which we must now return. It is important not to confuse the two forms of memory which Bergson distinguishes in the second chapter of his "Matter and Memory," namely the sort that consists of habit, and the sort that consists of independent recollection. He gives the instance of learning a lesson by heart: when I know it by heart I am said to "remember" it, but this merely means that I have acquired certain habits; on the other hand, my recollection of (say) the second time I read the lesson while I was learning it is the recollection of a unique event, which occurred only once. The recollection of a unique event cannot, so Bergson contends, be wholly constituted by habit, and is in fact something radically different from the memory which is habit. The recollection alone is true memory. This distinction is vital to the understanding of memory. But it is not so easy to carry out in practice as it is to draw in theory. Habit is a very intrusive feature of our mental life, and is often present where at first sight it seems not to be. There is, for example, a habit of remembering a unique event. When we have once described the event, the words we have used easily become habitual. We may even have used words to describe it to ourselves while it was happening; in that case, the habit of these words may fulfil the function of Bergson's true memory, while in reality it is nothing but habit-memory. A gramophone, by the help of suitable records, might relate to us the incidents of its past; and people are not so different from gramophones as they like to believe. In spite, however, of a difficulty in distinguishing the two forms of memory in practice, there can be no doubt that both forms exist. I can set to work now to remember things I never remembered before, such as what I had to eat for breakfast this morning, and it can hardly be wholly habit that enables me to do this. It is this sort of occurrence that constitutes the essence of memory Until we have analysed what happens in such a case as this, we have not succeeded in understanding memory. The sort of memory with which we are here concerned is the sort which is a form of knowledge. Whether knowledge itself is reducible to habit is a question to which I shall return in a later lecture; for the present I am only anxious to point out that, whatever the true analysis of knowledge may be, knowledge of past occurrences is not proved by behaviour which is due to past experience. The fact that a man can recite a poem does not show that he remembers any previous occasion on which he has recited or read it. Similarly, the performances of animals in getting out of cages or mazes to which they are accustomed do not prove that they remember having been in the same situation before. Arguments in favour of (for example) memory in plants are only arguments in favour of habit-memory, not of knowledge-memory. Samuel Butler's arguments in favour of the view that an animal remembers something of the lives of its ancestors* are, when examined, only arguments in favour of habit-memory. Semon's two books, mentioned in an earlier lecture, do not touch knowledge-memory at all closely. They give laws according to which images of past occurrences come into our minds, but do not discuss our belief that these images refer to past occurrences, which is what constitutes knowledge-memory. It is this that is of interest to theory of knowledge. I shall speak of it as "true" memory, to distinguish it from mere habit acquired through past experience. Before considering true memory, it will be well to consider two things which are on the way towards memory, namely the feeling of familiarity and recognition. * See his "Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory." We often feel that something in our sensible environment is familiar, without having any definite recollection of previous occasions on which we have seen it. We have this feeling normally in places where we have often been before--at home, or in well-known streets. Most people and animals find it essential to their happiness to spend a good deal of their time in familiar surroundings, which are especially comforting when any danger threatens. The feeling of familiarity has all sorts of degrees, down to the stage where we dimly feel that we have seen a person before. It is by no means always reliable; almost everybody has at some time experienced the well-known illusion that all that is happening now happened before at some time. There are occasions when familiarity does not attach itself to any definite object, when there is merely a vague feeling that SOMETHING is familiar. This is illustrated by Turgenev's "Smoke," where the hero is long puzzled by a haunting sense that something in his present is recalling something in his past, and at last traces it to the smell of heliotrope. Whenever the sense of familiarity occurs without a definite object, it leads us to search the environment until we are satisfied that we have found the appropriate object, which leads us to the judgment: "THIS is familiar." I think we may regard familiarity as a definite feeling, capable of existing without an object, but normally standing in a specific relation to some feature of the environment, the relation being that which we express in words by saying that the feature in question is familiar. The judgment that what is familiar has been experienced before is a product of reflection, and is no part of the feeling of familiarity, such as a horse may be supposed to have when he returns to his stable. Thus no knowledge as to the past is to be derived from the feeling of familiarity alone. A further stage is RECOGNITION. This may be taken in two senses, the first when a thing not merely feels familiar, but we know it is such-and-such. We recognize our friend Jones, we know cats and dogs when we see them, and so on. Here we have a definite influence of past experience, but not necessarily any actual knowledge of the past. When we see a cat, we know it is a cat because of previous cats we have seen, but we do not, as a rule, recollect at the moment any particular occasion when we have seen a cat. Recognition in this sense does not necessarily involve more than a habit of association: the kind of object we are seeing at the moment is associated with the word "cat," or with an auditory image of purring, or whatever other characteristic we may happen to recognize in the cat of the moment. We are, of course, in fact able to judge, when we recognize an object, that we have seen it before, but this judgment is something over and above recognition in this first sense, and may very probably be impossible to animals that nevertheless have the experience of recognition in this first sense of the word. There is, however, another sense of the word, in which we mean by recognition, not knowing the name of a thing or some other property of it, but knowing that we have seen it before In this sense recognition does involve knowledge about the Fast. This knowledge is memory in one sense, though in another it is not. It does not involve a definite memory of a definite past event, but only the knowledge that something happening now is similar to something that happened before. It differs from the sense of familiarity by being cognitive; it is a belief or judgment, which the sense of familiarity is not. I do not wish to undertake the analysis of belief at present, since it will be the subject of the twelfth lecture; for the present I merely wish to emphasize the fact that recognition, in our second sense, consists in a belief, which we may express approximately in the words: "This has existed before." There are, however, several points in which such an account of recognition is inadequate. To begin with, it might seem at first sight more correct to define recognition as "I have seen this before" than as "this has existed before." We recognize a thing (it may be urged) as having been in our experience before, whatever that may mean; we do not recognize it as merely having been in the world before. I am not sure that there is anything substantial in this point. The definition of "my experience" is difficult; broadly speaking, it is everything that is connected with what I am experiencing now by certain links, of which the various forms of memory are among the most important. Thus, if I recognize a thing, the occasion of its previous existence in virtue of which I recognize it forms part of "my experience" by DEFINITION: recognition will be one of the marks by which my experience is singled out from the rest of the world. Of course, the words "this has existed before" are a very inadequate translation of what actually happens when we form a judgment of recognition, but that is unavoidable: words are framed to express a level of thought which is by no means primitive, and are quite incapable of expressing such an elementary occurrence as recognition. I shall return to what is virtually the same question in connection with true memory, which raises exactly similar problems. A second point is that, when we recognize something, it was not in fact the very same thing, but only something similar, that we experienced on a former occasion. Suppose the object in question is a friend's face. A person's face is always changing, and is not exactly the same on any two occasions. Common sense treats it as one face with varying expressions; but the varying expressions actually exist, each at its proper time, while the one face is merely a logical construction. We regard two objects as the same, for common-sense purposes, when the reaction they call for is practically the same. Two visual appearances, to both of which it is appropriate to say: "Hullo, Jones!" are treated as appearances of one identical object, namely Jones. The name "Jones" is applicable to both, and it is only reflection that shows us that many diverse particulars are collected together to form the meaning of the name "Jones." What we see on any one occasion is not the whole series of particulars that make up Jones, but only one of them (or a few in quick succession). On another occasion we see another member of the series, but it is sufficiently similar to count as the same from the standpoint of common sense. Accordingly, when we judge "I have seen THIS before," we judge falsely if "this" is taken as applying to the actual constituent of the world that we are seeing at the moment. The word "this" must be interpreted vaguely so as to include anything sufficiently like what we are seeing at the moment. Here, again, we shall find a similar point as regards true memory; and in connection with true memory we will consider the point again. It is sometimes suggested, by those who favour behaviourist views, that recognition consists in behaving in the same way when a stimulus is repeated as we behaved on the first occasion when it occurred. This seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. The essence of recognition is in the DIFFERENCE between a repeated stimulus and a new one. On the first occasion there is no recognition; on the second occasion there is. In fact, recognition is another instance of the peculiarity of causal laws in psychology, namely, that the causal unit is not a single event, but two or more events Habit is the great instance of this, but recognition is another. A stimulus occurring once has a certain effect; occurring twice, it has the further effect of recognition. Thus the phenomenon of recognition has as its cause the two occasions when the stimulus has occurred; either alone is insufficient. This complexity of causes in psychology might be connected with Bergson's arguments against repetition in the mental world. It does not prove that there are no causal laws in psychology, as Bergson suggests; but it does prove that the causal laws of psychology are Prima facie very different from those of physics. On the possibility of explaining away the difference as due to the peculiarities of nervous tissue I have spoken before, but this possibility must not be forgotten if we are tempted to draw unwarranted metaphysical deductions. True memory, which we must now endeavour to understand, consists of knowledge of past events, but not of all such knowledge. Some knowledge of past events, for example what we learn through reading history, is on a par with the knowledge we can acquire concerning the future: it is obtained by inference, not (so to speak) spontaneously. There is a similar distinction in our knowledge of the present: some of it is obtained through the senses, some in more indirect ways. I know that there are at this moment a number of people in the streets of New York, but I do not know this in the immediate way in which I know of the people whom I see by looking out of my window. It is not easy to state precisely wherein the difference between these two sorts of knowledge consists, but it is easy to feel the difference. For the moment, I shall not stop to analyse it, but shall content myself with saying that, in this respect, memory resembles the knowledge derived from the senses. It is immediate, not inferred, not abstract; it differs from perception mainly by being referred to the past. In regard to memory, as throughout the analysis of knowledge, there are two very distinct problems, namely (1) as to the nature of the present occurrence in knowing; (2) as to the relation of this occurrence to what is known. When we remember, the knowing is now, while what is known is in the past. Our two questions are, in the case of memory: (1) What is the present occurrence when we remember? (2) What is the relation of this present occurrence to the past event which is remembered? Of these two questions, only the first concerns the psychologist; the second belongs to theory of knowledge. At the same time, if we accept the vague datum with which we began, to the effect that, in some sense, there is knowledge of the past, we shall have to find, if we can, such an account of the present occurrence in remembering as will make it not impossible for remembering to give us knowledge of the past. For the present, however, we shall do well to forget the problems concerning theory of knowledge, and concentrate upon the purely psychological problem of memory. Between memory-image and sensation there is an intermediate experience concerning the immediate past. For example, a sound that we have just heard is present to us in a way which differs both from the sensation while we are hearing the sound and from the memory-image of something heard days or weeks ago. James states that it is this way of apprehending the immediate past that is "the ORIGINAL of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term"("Psychology," i, p. 604). Everyone knows the experience of noticing (say) that the clock HAS BEEN striking, when we did not notice it while it was striking. And when we hear a remark spoken, we are conscious of the earlier words while the later ones are being uttered, and this retention feels different from recollection of something definitely past. A sensation fades gradually, passing by continuous gradations to the status of an image. This retention of the immediate past in a condition intermediate between sensation and image may be called "immediate memory." Everything belonging to it is included with sensation in what is called the "specious present." The specious present includes elements at all stages on the journey from sensation to image. It is this fact that enables us to apprehend such things as movements, or the order of the words in a spoken sentence. Succession can occur within the specious present, of which we can distinguish some parts as earlier and others as later. It is to be supposed that the earliest parts are those that have faded most from their original force, while the latest parts are those that retain their full sensational character. At the beginning of a stimulus we have a sensation; then a gradual transition; and at the end an image. Sensations while they are fading are called "akoluthic" sensations.* When the process of fading is completed (which happens very quickly), we arrive at the image, which is capable of being revived on subsequent occasions with very little change. True memory, as opposed to "immediate memory," applies only to events sufficiently distant to have come to an end of the period of fading. Such events, if they are represented by anything present, can only be represented by images, not by those intermediate stages, between sensations and images, which occur during the period of fading. * See Semon, "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," chap. vi. Immediate memory is important both because it provides experience of succession, and because it bridges the gulf between sensations and the images which are their copies. But it is now time to resume the consideration of true memory. Suppose you ask me what I ate for breakfast this morning. Suppose, further, that I have not thought about my breakfast in the meantime, and that I did not, while I was eating it, put into words what it consisted of. In this case my recollection will be true memory, not habit-memory. The process of remembering will consist of calling up images of my breakfast, which will come to me with a feeling of belief such as distinguishes memory-images from mere imagination-images. Or sometimes words may come without the intermediary of images; but in this case equally the feeling of belief is essential. Let us omit from our consideration, for the present, the memories in which words replace images. These are always, I think, really habit-memories, the memories that use images being the typical true memories. Memory-images and imagination-images do not differ in their intrinsic qualities, so far as we can discover. They differ by the fact that the images that constitute memories, unlike those that constitute imagination, are accompanied by a feeling of belief which may be expressed in the words "this happened." The mere occurrence of images, without this feeling of belief, constitutes imagination; it is the element of belief that is the distinctive thing in memory.* * For belief of a specific kind, cf. Dorothy Wrinch "On the Nature of Memory," "Mind," January, 1920. There are, if I am not mistaken, at least three different kinds of belief-feeling, which we may call respectively memory, expectation and bare assent. In what I call bare assent, there is no time-element in the feeling of belief, though there may be in the content of what is believed. If I believe that Caesar landed in Britain in B.C. 55, the time-determination lies, not in the feeling of belief, but in what is believed. I do not remember the occurrence, but have the same feeling towards it as towards the announcement of an eclipse next year. But when I have seen a flash of lightning and am waiting for the thunder, I have a belief-feeling analogous to memory, except that it refers to the future: I have an image of thunder, combined with a feeling which may be expressed in the words: "this will happen." So, in memory, the pastness lies, not in the content of what is believed, but in the nature of the belief-feeling. I might have just the same images and expect their realization; I might entertain them without any belief, as in reading a novel; or I might entertain them together with a time-determination, and give bare assent, as in reading history. I shall return to this subject in a later lecture, when we come to the analysis of belief. For the present, I wish to make it clear that a certain special kind of belief is the distinctive characteristic of memory. The problem as to whether memory can be explained as habit or association requires to be considered afresh in connection with the causes of our remembering something. Let us take again the case of my being asked what I had for breakfast this morning. In this case the question leads to my setting to work to recollect. It is a little strange that the question should instruct me as to what it is that I am to recall. This has to do with understanding words, which will be the topic of the next lecture; but something must be said about it now. Our understanding of the words "breakfast this morning" is a habit, in spite of the fact that on each fresh day they point to a different occasion. "This morning" does not, whenever it is used, mean the same thing, as "John" or "St. Paul's" does; it means a different period of time on each different day. It follows that the habit which constitutes our understanding of the words "this morning" is not the habit of associating the words with a fixed object, but the habit of associating them with something having a fixed time-relation to our present. This morning has, to-day, the same time-relation to my present that yesterday morning had yesterday. In order to understand the phrase "this morning" it is necessary that we should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words "this morning." This appreciation of time-intervals is, however, obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it. It will be better, therefore, if we wish to analyse the causation of memory by something not presupposing memory, to take some other instance than that of a question about "this morning." Let us take the case of coming into a familiar room where something has been changed--say a new picture hung on the wall. We may at first have only a sense that SOMETHING is unfamiliar, but presently we shall remember, and say "that picture was not on the wall before." In order to make the case definite, we will suppose that we were only in the room on one former occasion. In this case it seems fairly clear what happens. The other objects in the room are associated, through the former occasion, with a blank space of wall where now there is a picture. They call up an image of a blank wall, which clashes with perception of the picture. The image is associated with the belief-feeling which we found to be distinctive of memory, since it can neither be abolished nor harmonized with perception. If the room had remained unchanged, we might have had only the feeling of familiarity without the definite remembering; it is the change that drives us from the present to memory of the past. We may generalize this instance so as to cover the causes of many memories. Some present feature of the environment is associated, through past experiences, with something now absent; this absent something comes before us as an image, and is contrasted with present sensation. In cases of this sort, habit (or association) explains why the present feature of the environment brings up the memory-image, but it does not explain the memory-belief. Perhaps a more complete analysis could explain the memory-belief also on lines of association and habit, but the causes of beliefs are obscure, and we cannot investigate them yet. For the present we must content ourselves with the fact that the memory-image can be explained by habit. As regards the memory-belief, we must, at least provisionally, accept Bergson's view that it cannot be brought under the head of habit, at any rate when it first occurs, i.e. when we remember something we never remembered before. We must now consider somewhat more closely the content of a memory-belief. The memory-belief confers upon the memory-image something which we may call "meaning;" it makes us feel that the image points to an object which existed in the past. In order to deal with this topic we must consider the verbal expression of the memory-belief. We might be tempted to put the memory-belief into the words: "Something like this image occurred." But such words would be very far from an accurate translation of the simplest kind of memory-belief. "Something like this image" is a very complicated conception. In the simplest kind of memory we are not aware of the difference between an image and the sensation which it copies, which may be called its "prototype." When the image is before us, we judge rather "this occurred." The image is not distinguished from the object which existed in the past: the word "this" covers both, and enables us to have a memory-belief which does not introduce the complicated notion "something like this." It might be objected that, if we judge "this occurred" when in fact "this" is a present image, we judge falsely, and the memory-belief, so interpreted, becomes deceptive. This, however, would be a mistake, produced by attempting to give to words a precision which they do not possess when used by unsophisticated people. It is true that the image is not absolutely identical with its prototype, and if the word "this" meant the image to the exclusion of everything else, the judgment "this occurred" would be false. But identity is a precise conception, and no word, in ordinary speech, stands for anything precise. Ordinary speech does not distinguish between identity and close similarity. A word always applies, not only to one particular, but to a group of associated particulars, which are not recognized as multiple in common thought or speech. Thus primitive memory, when it judges that "this occurred," is vague, but not false. Vague identity, which is really close similarity, has been a source of many of the confusions by which philosophy has lived. Of a vague subject, such as a "this," which is both an image and its prototype, contradictory predicates are true simultaneously: this existed and does not exist, since it is a thing remembered, but also this exists and did not exist, since it is a present image. Hence Bergson's interpenetration of the present by the past, Hegelian continuity and identity-in-diversity, and a host of other notions which are thought to be profound because they are obscure and confused. The contradictions resulting from confounding image and prototype in memory force us to precision. But when we become precise, our remembering becomes different from that of ordinary life, and if we forget this we shall go wrong in the analysis of ordinary memory. Vagueness and accuracy are important notions, which it is very necessary to understand. Both are a matter of degree. All thinking is vague to some extent, and complete accuracy is a theoretical ideal not practically attainable. To understand what is meant by accuracy, it will be well to consider first instruments of measurement, such as a balance or a thermometer. These are said to be accurate when they give different results for very slightly different stimuli.* A clinical thermometer is accurate when it enables us to detect very slight differences in the temperature of the blood. We may say generally that an instrument is accurate in proportion as it reacts differently to very slightly different stimuli. When a small difference of stimulus produces a great difference of reaction, the instrument is accurate; in the contrary case it is not. * This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The subject of accuracy and vagueness will be considered again in Lecture XIII. Exactly the same thing applies in defining accuracy of thought or perception. A musician will respond differently to very minute differences in playing which would be quite imperceptible to the ordinary mortal. A negro can see the difference between one negro and another one is his friend, another his enemy. But to us such different responses are impossible: we can merely apply the word "negro" indiscriminately. Accuracy of response in regard to any particular kind of stimulus is improved by practice. Understanding a language is a case in point. Few Frenchmen can hear any difference between the sounds "hall" and "hole," which produce quite different impressions upon us. The two statements "the hall is full of water" and "the hole is full of water" call for different responses, and a hearing which cannot distinguish between them is inaccurate or vague in this respect. Precision and vagueness in thought, as in perception, depend upon the degree of difference between responses to more or less similar stimuli. In the case of thought, the response does not follow immediately upon the sensational stimulus, but that makes no difference as regards our present question. Thus to revert to memory: A memory is "vague" when it is appropriate to many different occurrences: for instance, "I met a man" is vague, since any man would verify it. A memory is "precise" when the occurrences that would verify it are narrowly circumscribed: for instance, "I met Jones" is precise as compared to "I met a man." A memory is "accurate" when it is both precise and true, i.e. in the above instance, if it was Jones I met. It is precise even if it is false, provided some very definite occurrence would have been required to make it true. It follows from what has been said that a vague thought has more likelihood of being true than a precise one. To try and hit an object with a vague thought is like trying to hit the bull's eye with a lump of putty: when the putty reaches the target, it flattens out all over it, and probably covers the bull's eye along with the rest. To try and hit an object with a precise thought is like trying to hit the bull's eye with a bullet. The advantage of the precise thought is that it distinguishes between the bull's eye and the rest of the target. For example, if the whole target is represented by the fungus family and the bull's eye by mushrooms, a vague thought which can only hit the target as a whole is not much use from a culinary point of view. And when I merely remember that I met a man, my memory may be very inadequate to my practical requirements, since it may make a great difference whether I met Brown or Jones. The memory "I met Jones" is relatively precise. It is accurate if I met Jones, inaccurate if I met Brown, but precise in either case as against the mere recollection that I met a man. The distinction between accuracy and precision is however, not fundamental. We may omit precision from out thoughts and confine ourselves to the distinction between accuracy and vagueness. We may then set up the following definitions: An instrument is "reliable" with respect to a given set of stimuli when to stimuli which are not relevantly different it gives always responses which are not relevantly different. An instrument is a "measure" of a set of stimuli which are serially ordered when its responses, in all cases where they are relevantly different, are arranged in a series in the same order. The "degree of accuracy" of an instrument which is a reliable measurer is the ratio of the difference of response to the difference of stimulus in cases where the difference of stimulus is small.* That is to say, if a small difference of stimulus produces a great difference of response, the instrument is very accurate; in the contrary case, very inaccurate. * Strictly speaking, the limit of this, i.e. the derivative of the response with respect to the stimulus. A mental response is called "vague" in proportion to its lack of accuracy, or rather precision. These definitions will be found useful, not only in the case of memory, but in almost all questions concerned with knowledge. It should be observed that vague beliefs, so far from being necessarily false, have a better chance of truth than precise ones, though their truth is less valuable than that of precise beliefs, since they do not distinguish between occurrences which may differ in important ways. The whole of the above discussion of vagueness and accuracy was occasioned by the attempt to interpret the word "this" when we judge in verbal memory that "this occurred." The word "this," in such a judgment, is a vague word, equally applicable to the present memory-image and to the past occurrence which is its prototype. A vague word is not to be identified with a general word, though in practice the distinction may often be blurred. A word is general when it is understood to be applicable to a number of different objects in virtue of some common property. A word is vague when it is in fact applicable to a number of different objects because, in virtue of some common property, they have not appeared, to the person using the word, to be distinct. I emphatically do not mean that he has judged them to be identical, but merely that he has made the same response to them all and has not judged them to be different. We may compare a vague word to a jelly and a general word to a heap of shot. Vague words precede judgments of identity and difference; both general and particular words are subsequent to such judgments. The word "this" in the primitive memory-belief is a vague word, not a general word; it covers both the image and its prototype because the two are not distinguished.* * On the vague and the general cf. Ribot: "Evolution of General Ideas," Open Court Co., 1899, p. 32: "The sole permissible formula is this: Intelligence progresses from the indefinite to the definite. If 'indefinite' is taken as synonymous with general, it may be said that the particular does not appear at the outset, but neither does the general in any exact sense: the vague would be more appropriate. In other words, no sooner has the intellect progressed beyond the moment of perception and of its immediate reproduction in memory, than the generic image makes its appearance, i.e. a state intermediate between the particular and the general, participating in the nature of the one and of the other--a confused simplification." But we have not yet finished our analysis of the memory-belief. The tense in the belief that "this occurred" is provided by the nature of the belief-feeling involved in memory; the word "this," as we have seen, has a vagueness which we have tried to describe. But we must still ask what we mean by "occurred." The image is, in one sense, occurring now; and therefore we must find some other sense in which the past event occurred but the image does not occur. There are two distinct questions to be asked: (1) What causes us to say that a thing occurs? (2) What are we feeling when we say this? As to the first question, in the crude use of the word, which is what concerns us, memory-images would not be said to occur; they would not be noticed in themselves, but merely used as signs of the past event. Images are "merely imaginary"; they have not, in crude thought, the sort of reality that belongs to outside bodies. Roughly speaking, "real" things would be those that can cause sensations, those that have correlations of the sort that constitute physical objects. A thing is said to be "real" or to "occur" when it fits into a context of such correlations. The prototype of our memory-image did fit into a physical context, while our memory-image does not. This causes us to feel that the prototype was "real," while the image is "imaginary." But the answer to our second question, namely as to what we are feeling when we say a thing "occurs" or is "real," must be somewhat different. We do not, unless we are unusually reflective, think about the presence or absence of correlations: we merely have different feelings which, intellectualized, may be represented as expectations of the presence or absence of correlations. A thing which "feels real" inspires us with hopes or fears, expectations or curiosities, which are wholly absent when a thing "feels imaginary." The feeling of reality is a feeling akin to respect: it belongs PRIMARILY to whatever can do things to us without our voluntary co-operation. This feeling of reality, related to the memory-image, and referred to the past by the specific kind of belief-feeling that is characteristic of memory, seems to be what constitutes the act of remembering in its pure form. We may now summarize our analysis of pure memory. Memory demands (a) an image, (b) a belief in past existence. The belief may be expressed in the words "this existed." The belief, like every other, may be analysed into (1) the believing, (2) what is believed. The believing is a specific feeling or sensation or complex of sensations, different from expectation or bare assent in a way that makes the belief refer to the past; the reference to the past lies in the belief-feeling, not in the content believed. There is a relation between the belief-feeling and the content, making the belief-feeling refer to the content, and expressed by saying that the content is what is believed. The content believed may or may not be expressed in words. Let us take first the case when it is not. In that case, if we are merely remembering that something of which we now have an image occurred, the content consists of (a) the image, (b) the feeling, analogous to respect, which we translate by saying that something is "real" as opposed to "imaginary," (c) a relation between the image and the feeling of reality, of the sort expressed when we say that the feeling refers to the image. This content does not contain in itself any time-determination. The time-determination lies in the nature of the belief feeling, which is that called "remembering" or (better) "recollecting." It is only subsequent reflection upon this reference to the past that makes us realize the distinction between the image and the event recollected. When we have made this distinction, we can say that the image "means" the past event. The content expressed in words is best represented by the words "the existence of this," since these words do not involve tense, which belongs to the belief-feeling, not to the content. Here "this" is a vague term, covering the memory-image and anything very like it, including its prototype. "Existence" expresses the feeling of a "reality" aroused primarily by whatever can have effects upon us without our voluntary co-operation. The word "of" in the phrase "the existence of this" represents the relation which subsists between the feeling of reality and the "this." This analysis of memory is probably extremely faulty, but I do not know how to improve it. NOTE.-When I speak of a FEELING of belief, I use the word "feeling" in a popular sense, to cover a sensation or an image or a complex of sensations or images or both; I use this word because I do not wish to commit myself to any special analysis of the belief-feeling. LECTURE X. WORDS AND MEANING The problem with which we shall be concerned in this lecture is the problem of determining what is the relation called "meaning." The word "Napoleon," we say, "means" a certain person. In saying this, we are asserting a relation between the word "Napoleon" and the person so designated. It is this relation that we must now investigate. Let us first consider what sort of object a word is when considered simply as a physical thing, apart from its meaning. To begin with, there are many instances of a word, namely all the different occasions when it is employed. Thus a word is not something unique and particular, but a set of occurrences. If we confine ourselves to spoken words, a word has two aspects, according as we regard it from the point of view of the speaker or from that of the hearer. From the point of view of the speaker, a single instance of the use of a word consists of a certain set of movements in the throat and mouth, combined with breath. From the point of view of the hearer, a single instance of the use of a word consists of a certain series of sounds, each being approximately represented by a single letter in writing, though in practice a letter may represent several sounds, or several letters may represent one sound. The connection between the spoken word and the word as it reaches the hearer is causal. Let us confine ourselves to the spoken word, which is the more important for the analysis of what is called "thought." Then we may say that a single instance of the spoken word consists of a series of movements, and the word consists of a whole set of such series, each member of the set being very similar to each other member. That is to say, any two instances of the word "Napoleon" are very similar, and each instance consists of a series of movements in the mouth. A single word, accordingly, is by no means simple it is a class of similar series of movements (confining ourselves still to the spoken word). The degree of similarity required cannot be precisely defined: a man may pronounce the word "Napoleon" so badly that it can hardly be determined whether he has really pronounced it or not. The instances of a word shade off into other movements by imperceptible degrees. And exactly analogous observations apply to words heard or written or read. But in what has been said so far we have not even broached the question of the DEFINITION of a word, since "meaning" is clearly what distinguishes a word from other sets of similar movements, and "meaning" remains to be defined. It is natural to think of the meaning of a word as something conventional. This, however, is only true with great limitations. A new word can be added to an existing language by a mere convention, as is done, for instance, with new scientific terms. But the basis of a language is not conventional, either from the point of view of the individual or from that of the community. A child learning to speak is learning habits and associations which are just as much determined by the environment as the habit of expecting dogs to bark and cocks to crow. The community that speaks a language has learnt it, and modified it by processes almost all of which are not deliberate, but the results of causes operating according to more or less ascertainable laws. If we trace any Indo-European language back far enough, we arrive hypothetically (at any rate according to some authorities) at the stage when language consisted only of the roots out of which subsequent words have grown. How these roots acquired their meanings is not known, but a conventional origin is clearly just as mythical as the social contract by which Hobbes and Rousseau supposed civil government to have been established. We can hardly suppose a parliament of hitherto speechless elders meeting together and agreeing to call a cow a cow and a wolf a wolf. The association of words with their meanings must have grown up by some natural process, though at present the nature of the process is unknown. Spoken and written words are, of course, not the only way of conveying meaning. A large part of one of Wundt's two vast volumes on language in his "Volkerpsychologie" is concerned with gesture-language. Ants appear to be able to communicate a certain amount of information by means of their antennae. Probably writing itself, which we now regard as merely a way of representing speech, was originally an independent language, as it has remained to this day in China. Writing seems to have consisted originally of pictures, which gradually became conventionalized, coming in time to represent syllables, and finally letters on the telephone principle of "T for Tommy." But it would seem that writing nowhere began as an attempt to represent speech it began as a direct pictorial representation of what was to be expressed. The essence of language lies, not in the use of this or that special means of communication, but in the employment of fixed associations (however these may have originated) in order that something now sensible--a spoken word, a picture, a gesture, or what not--may call up the "idea" of something else. Whenever this is done, what is now sensible may be called a "sign" or "symbol," and that of which it is intended to call up the "idea" may be called its "meaning." This is a rough outline of what constitutes "meaning." But we must fill in the outline in various ways. And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the social use of language. Language profoundly affects our thoughts, and it is this aspect of language that is of most importance to us in our present inquiry. We are almost more concerned with the internal speech that is never uttered than we are with the things said out loud to other people. When we ask what constitutes meaning, we are not asking what is the meaning of this or that particular word. The word "Napoleon" means a certain individual; but we are asking, not who is the individual meant, but what is the relation of the word to the individual which makes the one mean the other. But just as it is useful to realize the nature of a word as part of the physical world, so it is useful to realize the sort of thing that a word may mean. When we are clear both as to what a word is in its physical aspect, and as to what sort of thing it can mean, we are in a better position to discover the relation of the two which is meaning. The things that words mean differ more than words do. There are different sorts of words, distinguished by the grammarians; and there are logical distinctions, which are connected to some extent, though not so closely as was formerly supposed, with the grammatical distinctions of parts of speech. It is easy, however, to be misled by grammar, particularly if all the languages we know belong to one family. In some languages, according to some authorities, the distinction of parts of speech does not exist; in many languages it is widely different from that to which we are accustomed in the Indo-European languages. These facts have to be borne in mind if we are to avoid giving metaphysical importance to mere accidents of our own speech. In considering what words mean, it is natural to start with proper names, and we will again take "Napoleon" as our instance. We commonly imagine, when we use a proper name, that we mean one definite entity, the particular individual who was called "Napoleon." But what we know as a person is not simple. There MAY be a single simple ego which was Napoleon, and remained strictly identical from his birth to his death. There is no way of proving that this cannot be the case, but there is also not the slightest reason to suppose that it is the case. Napoleon as he was empirically known consisted of a series of gradually changing appearances: first a squalling baby, then a boy, then a slim and beautiful youth, then a fat and slothful person very magnificently dressed This series of appearances, and various occurrences having certain kinds of causal connections with them, constitute Napoleon as empirically known, and therefore are Napoleon in so far as he forms part of the experienced world. Napoleon is a complicated series of occurrences, bound together by causal laws, not, like instances of a word, by similarities. For although a person changes gradually, and presents similar appearances on two nearly contemporaneous occasions, it is not these similarities that constitute the person, as appears from the "Comedy of Errors" for example. Thus in the case of a proper name, while the word is a set of similar series of movements, what it means is a series of occurrences bound together by causal laws of that special kind that makes the occurrences taken together constitute what we call one person, or one animal or thing, in case the name applies to an animal or thing instead of to a person. Neither the word nor what it names is one of the ultimate indivisible constituents of the world. In language there is no direct way of designating one of the ultimate brief existents that go to make up the collections we call things or persons. If we want to speak of such existents--which hardly happens except in philosophy--we have to do it by means of some elaborate phrase, such as "the visual sensation which occupied the centre of my field of vision at noon on January 1, 1919." Such ultimate simples I call "particulars." Particulars MIGHT have proper names, and no doubt would have if language had been invented by scientifically trained observers for purposes of philosophy and logic. But as language was invented for practical ends, particulars have remained one and all without a name. We are not, in practice, much concerned with the actual particulars that come into our experience in sensation; we are concerned rather with whole systems to which the particulars belong and of which they are signs. What we see makes us say "Hullo, there's Jones," and the fact that what we see is a sign of Jones (which is the case because it is one of the particulars that make up Jones) is more interesting to us than the actual particular itself. Hence we give the name "Jones" to the whole set of particulars, but do not trouble to give separate names to the separate particulars that make up the set. Passing on from proper names, we come next to general names, such as "man," "cat," "triangle." A word such as "man" means a whole class of such collections of particulars as have proper names. The several members of the class are assembled together in virtue of some similarity or common property. All men resemble each other in certain important respects; hence we want a word which shall be equally applicable to all of them. We only give proper names to the individuals of a species when they differ inter se in practically important respects. In other cases we do not do this. A poker, for instance, is just a poker; we do not call one "John" and another "Peter." There is a large class of words, such as "eating," "walking," "speaking," which mean a set of similar occurrences. Two instances of walking have the same name because they resemble each other, whereas two instances of Jones have the same name because they are causally connected. In practice, however, it is difficult to make any precise distinction between a word such as "walking" and a general name such as "man." One instance of walking cannot be concentrated into an instant: it is a process in time, in which there is a causal connection between the earlier and later parts, as between the earlier and later parts of Jones. Thus an instance of walking differs from an instance of man solely by the fact that it has a shorter life. There is a notion that an instance of walking, as compared with Jones, is unsubstantial, but this seems to be a mistake. We think that Jones walks, and that there could not be any walking unless there were somebody like Jones to perform the walking. But it is equally true that there could be no Jones unless there were something like walking for him to do. The notion that actions are performed by an agent is liable to the same kind of criticism as the notion that thinking needs a subject or ego, which we rejected in Lecture I. To say that it is Jones who is walking is merely to say that the walking in question is part of the whole series of occurrences which is Jones. There is no LOGICAL impossibility in walking occurring as an isolated phenomenon, not forming part of any such series as we call a "person." We may therefore class with "eating," "walking," "speaking" words such as "rain," "sunrise," "lightning," which do not denote what would commonly be called actions. These words illustrate, incidentally, how little we can trust to the grammatical distinction of parts of speech, since the substantive "rain" and the verb "to rain" denote precisely the same class of meteorological occurrences. The distinction between the class of objects denoted by such a word and the class of objects denoted by a general name such as "man," "vegetable," or "planet," is that the sort of object which is an instance of (say) "lightning" is much simpler than (say) an individual man. (I am speaking of lightning as a sensible phenomenon, not as it is described in physics.) The distinction is one of degree, not of kind. But there is, from the point of view of ordinary thought, a great difference between a process which, like a flash of lightning, can be wholly comprised within one specious present and a process which, like the life of a man, has to be pieced together by observation and memory and the apprehension of causal connections. We may say broadly, therefore, that a word of the kind we have been discussing denotes a set of similar occurrences, each (as a rule) much more brief and less complex than a person or thing. Words themselves, as we have seen, are sets of similar occurrences of this kind. Thus there is more logical affinity between a word and what it means in the case of words of our present sort than in any other case. There is no very great difference between such words as we have just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as "white" or "round." The chief difference is that words of this latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal, called "whiteness," or whether white things are to be defined as those having a certain kind of similarity to a standard thing, say freshly fallen snow, is a question which need not concern us, and which I believe to be strictly insoluble. For our purposes, we may take the word "white" as denoting a certain set of similar particulars or collections of particulars, the similarity being in respect of a static quality, not of a process. From the logical point of view, a very important class of words are those that express relations, such as "in," "above," "before," "greater," and so on. The meaning of one of these words differs very fundamentally from the meaning of one of any of our previous classes, being more abstract and logically simpler than any of them. If our business were logic, we should have to spend much time on these words. But as it is psychology that concerns us, we will merely note their special character and pass on, since the logical classification of words is not our main business. We will consider next the question what is implied by saying that a person "understands" a word, in the sense in which one understands a word in one's own language, but not in a language of which one is ignorant. We may say that a person understands a word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use it, (b) the hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these two active and passive understanding respectively. Dogs often have passive understanding of some words, but not active understanding, since they cannot use words. It is not necessary, in order that a man should "understand" a word, that he should "know what it means," in the sense of being able to say "this word means so-and-so." Understanding words does not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or in being able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate. Such understanding as this may belong to lexicographers and students, but not to ordinary mortals in ordinary life. Understanding language is more like understanding cricket*: it is a matter of habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled out of it by observation and analysis. Moreover, the meaning of a word is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or less degree of vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target: it may have a bull's eye, but the outlying parts of the target are still more or less within the meaning, in a gradually diminishing degree as we travel further from the bull's eye. As language grows more precise, there is less and less of the target outside the bull's eye, and the bull's eye itself grows smaller and smaller; but the bull's eye never shrinks to a point, and there is always a doubtful region, however small, surrounding it.** * This point of view, extended to the analysis of "thought" is urged with great force by J. B. Watson, both in his "Behavior," and in "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist" (Lippincott. 1919), chap. ix. ** On the understanding of words, a very admirable little book is Ribot's "Evolution of General Ideas," Open Court Co., 1899. Ribot says (p. 131): "We learn to understand a concept as we learn to walk, dance, fence or play a musical instrument: it is a habit, i.e. an organized memory. General terms cover an organized, latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual order." A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness." The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly. The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when we hear it used. There is no more reason why a person who uses a word correctly should be able to tell what it means than there is why a planet which is moving correctly should know Kepler's laws. To illustrate what is meant by "understanding" words and sentences, let us take instances of various situations. Suppose you are walking in London with an absent-minded friend, and while crossing a street you say, "Look out, there's a motor coming." He will glance round and jump aside without the need of any "mental" intermediary. There need be no "ideas," but only a stiffening of the muscles, followed quickly by action. He "understands" the words, because he does the right thing. Such "understanding" may be taken to belong to the nerves and brain, being habits which they have acquired while the language was being learnt. Thus understanding in this sense may be reduced to mere physiological causal laws. If you say the same thing to a Frenchman with a slight knowledge of English he will go through some inner speech which may be represented by "Que dit-il? Ah, oui, une automobile!" After this, the rest follows as with the Englishman. Watson would contend that the inner speech must be incipiently pronounced; we should argue that it MIGHT be merely imaged. But this point is not important in the present connection. If you say the same thing to a child who does not yet know the word "motor," but does know the other words you are using, you produce a feeling of anxiety and doubt you will have to point and say, "There, that's a motor." After that the child will roughly understand the word "motor," though he may include trains and steam-rollers If this is the first time the child has heard the word "motor," he may for a long time continue to recall this scene when he hears the word. So far we have found four ways of understanding words: (1) On suitable occasions you use the word properly. (2) When you hear it you act appropriately. (3) You associate the word with another word (say in a different language) which has the appropriate effect on behaviour. (4) When the word is being first learnt, you may associate it with an object, which is what it "means," or a representative of various objects that it "means." In the fourth case, the word acquires, through association, some of the same causal efficacy as the object. The word "motor" can make you leap aside, just as the motor can, but it cannot break your bones. The effects which a word can share with its object are those which proceed according to laws other than the general laws of physics, i.e. those which, according to our terminology, involve vital movements as opposed to merely mechanical movements. The effects of a word that we understand are always mnemic phenomena in the sense explained in Lecture IV, in so far as they are identical with, or similar to, the effects which the object itself might have. So far, all the uses of words that we have considered can be accounted for on the lines of behaviourism. But so far we have only considered what may be called the "demonstrative" use of language, to point out some feature in the present environment. This is only one of the ways in which language may be used. There are also its narrative and imaginative uses, as in history and novels. Let us take as an instance the telling of some remembered event. We spoke a moment ago of a child who hears the word "motor" for the first time when crossing a street along which a motor-car is approaching. On a later occasion, we will suppose, the child remembers the incident and relates it to someone else. In this case, both the active and passive understanding of words is different from what it is when words are used demonstratively. The child is not seeing a motor, but only remembering one; the hearer does not look round in expectation of seeing a motor coming, but "understands" that a motor came at some earlier time. The whole of this occurrence is much more difficult to account for on behaviourist lines. It is clear that, in so far as the child is genuinely remembering, he has a picture of the past occurrence, and his words are chosen so as to describe the picture; and in so far as the hearer is genuinely apprehending what is said, the hearer is acquiring a picture more or less like that of the child. It is true that this process may be telescoped through the operation of the word-habit. The child may not genuinely remember the incident, but only have the habit of the appropriate words, as in the case of a poem which we know by heart, though we cannot remember learning it. And the hearer also may only pay attention to the words, and not call up any corresponding picture. But it is, nevertheless, the possibility of a memory-image in the child and an imagination-image in the hearer that makes the essence of the narrative "meaning" of the words. In so far as this is absent, the words are mere counters, capable of meaning, but not at the moment possessing it. Yet this might perhaps be regarded as something of an overstatement. The words alone, without the use of images, may cause appropriate emotions and appropriate behaviour. The words have been used in an environment which produced certain emotions; by a telescoped process, the words alone are now capable of producing similar emotions. On these lines it might be sought to show that images are unnecessary. I do not believe, however, that we could account on these lines for the entirely different response produced by a narrative and by a description of present facts. Images, as contrasted with sensations, are the response expected during a narrative; it is understood that present action is not called for. Thus it seems that we must maintain our distinction words used demonstratively describe and are intended to lead to sensations, while the same words used in narrative describe and are only intended to lead to images. We have thus, in addition to our four previous ways in which words can mean, two new ways, namely the way of memory and the way of imagination. That is to say: (5) Words may be used to describe or recall a memory-image: to describe it when it already exists, or to recall it when the words exist as a habit and are known to be descriptive of some past experience. (6) Words may be used to describe or create an imagination-image: to describe it, for example, in the case of a poet or novelist, or to create it in the ordinary case for giving information-though, in the latter case, it is intended that the imagination-image, when created, shall be accompanied by belief that something of the sort occurred. These two ways of using words, including their occurrence in inner speech, may be spoken of together as the use of words in "thinking." If we are right, the use of words in thinking depends, at least in its origin, upon images, and cannot be fully dealt with on behaviourist lines. And this is really the most essential function of words, namely that, originally through their connection with images, they bring us into touch with what is remote in time or space. When they operate without the medium of images, this seems to be a telescoped process. Thus the problem of the meaning of words is brought into connection with the problem of the meaning of images. To understand the function that words perform in what is called "thinking," we must understand both the causes and the effects of their occurrence. The causes of the occurrence of words require somewhat different treatment according as the object designated by the word is sensibly present or absent. When the object is present, it may itself be taken as the cause of the word, through association. But when it is absent there is more difficulty in obtaining a behaviourist theory of the occurrence of the word. The language-habit consists not merely in the use of words demonstratively, but also in their use to express narrative or desire. Professor Watson, in his account of the acquisition of the language-habit, pays very little attention to the use of words in narrative and desire. He says ("Behavior," pp. 329-330): "The stimulus (object) to which the child often responds, a box, e.g. by movements such as opening and closing and putting objects into it, may serve to illustrate our argument. The nurse, observing that the child reacts with his hands, feet, etc., to the box, begins to say 'box' when the child is handed the box, 'open box' when the child opens it, 'close box' when he closes it, and 'put doll in box' when that act is executed. This is repeated over and over again. In the process of time it comes about that without any other stimulus than that of the box which originally called out the bodily habits, he begins to say 'box' when he sees it, 'open box' when he opens it, etc. The visible box now becomes a stimulus capable of releasing either the bodily habits or the word-habit, i.e. development has brought about two things: (1) a series of functional connections among arcs which run from visual receptor to muscles of throat, and (2) a series of already earlier connected arcs which run from the same receptor to the bodily muscles.... The object meets the child's vision. He runs to it and tries to reach it and says 'box.'... Finally the word is uttered without the movement of going towards the box being executed.... Habits are formed of going to the box when the arms are full of toys. The child has been taught to deposit them there. When his arms are laden with toys and no box is there, the word-habit arises and he calls 'box'; it is handed to him, and he opens it and deposits the toys therein. This roughly marks what we would call the genesis of a true language-habit."(pp. 329-330).* * Just the same account of language is given in Professor Watson's more recent book (reference above). We need not linger over what is said in the above passage as to the use of the word "box" in the presence of the box. But as to its use in the absence of the box, there is only one brief sentence, namely: "When his arms are laden with toys and no box is there, the word-habit arises and he calls 'box.'" This is inadequate as it stands, since the habit has been to use the word when the box is present, and we have to explain its extension to cases in which the box is absent. Having admitted images, we may say that the word "box," in the absence of the box, is caused by an image of the box. This may or may not be true--in fact, it is true in some cases but not in others. Even, however, if it were true in all cases, it would only slightly shift our problem: we should now have to ask what causes an image of the box to arise. We might be inclined to say that desire for the box is the cause. But when this view is investigated, it is found that it compels us to suppose that the box can be desired without the child's having either an image of the box or the word "box." This will require a theory of desire which may be, and I think is, in the main true, but which removes desire from among things that actually occur, and makes it merely a convenient fiction, like force in mechanics.* With such a view, desire is no longer a true cause, but merely a short way of describing certain processes. * See Lecture III, above. In order to explain the occurrence of either the word or the image in the absence of the box, we have to assume that there is something, either in the environment or in our own sensations, which has frequently occurred at about the same time as the word "box." One of the laws which distinguish psychology (or nerve-physiology?) from physics is the law that, when two things have frequently existed in close temporal contiguity, either comes in time to cause the other.* This is the basis both of habit and of association. Thus, in our case, the arms full of toys have frequently been followed quickly by the box, and the box in turn by the word "box." The box itself is subject to physical laws, and does not tend to be caused by the arms full of toys, however often it may in the past have followed them--always provided that, in the case in question, its physical position is such that voluntary movements cannot lead to it. But the word "box" and the image of the box are subject to the law of habit; hence it is possible for either to be caused by the arms full of toys. And we may lay it down generally that, whenever we use a word, either aloud or in inner speech, there is some sensation or image (either of which may be itself a word) which has frequently occurred at about the same time as the word, and now, through habit, causes the word. It follows that the law of habit is adequate to account for the use of words in the absence of their objects; moreover, it would be adequate even without introducing images. Although, therefore, images seem undeniable, we cannot derive an additional argument in their favour from the use of words, which could, theoretically, be explained without introducing images. *For a more exact statement of this law, with the limitations suggested by experiment, see A. Wohlgemuth, "On Memory and the Direction of Associations," "British Journal of Psychology," vol. v, part iv (March, 1913). When we understand a word, there is a reciprocal association between it and the images of what it "means." Images may cause us to use words which mean them, and these words, heard or read, may in turn cause the appropriate images. Thus speech is a means of producing in our hearers the images which are in us. Also, by a telescoped process, words come in time to produce directly the effects which would have been produced by the images with which they were associated. The general law of telescoped processes is that, if A causes B and B causes C, it will happen in time that A will cause C directly, without the intermediary of B. This is a characteristic of psychological and neural causation. In virtue of this law, the effects of images upon our actions come to be produced by words, even when the words do not call up appropriate images. The more familiar we are with words, the more our "thinking" goes on in words instead of images. We may, for example, be able to describe a person's appearance correctly without having at any time had any image of him, provided, when we saw him, we thought of words which fitted him; the words alone may remain with us as a habit, and enable us to speak as if we could recall a visual image of the man. In this and other ways the understanding of a word often comes to be quite free from imagery; but in first learning the use of language it would seem that imagery always plays a very important part. Images as well as words may be said to have "meaning"; indeed, the meaning of images seems more primitive than the meaning of words. What we call (say) an image of St. Paul's may be said to "mean" St. Paul's. But it is not at all easy to say exactly what constitutes the meaning of an image. A memory-image of a particular occurrence, when accompanied by a memory-belief, may be said to mean the occurrence of which it is an image. But most actual images do not have this degree of definiteness. If we call up an image of a dog, we are very likely to have a vague image, which is not representative of some one special dog, but of dogs in general. When we call up an image of a friend's face, we are not likely to reproduce the expression he had on some one particular occasion, but rather a compromise expression derived from many occasions. And there is hardly any limit to the vagueness of which images are capable. In such cases, the meaning of the image, if defined by relation to the prototype, is vague: there is not one definite prototype, but a number, none of which is copied exactly.* * Cf. Semon, Mnemische Empfindungen, chap. xvi, especially pp. 301-308. There is, however, another way of approaching the meaning of images, namely through their causal efficacy. What is called an image "of" some definite object, say St. Paul's, has some of the effects which the object would have. This applies especially to the effects that depend upon association. The emotional effects, also, are often similar: images may stimulate desire almost as strongly as do the objects they represent. And conversely desire may cause images*: a hungry man will have images of food, and so on. In all these ways the causal laws concerning images are connected with the causal laws concerning the objects which the images "mean." An image may thus come to fulfil the function of a general idea. The vague image of a dog, which we spoke of a moment ago, will have effects which are only connected with dogs in general, not the more special effects which would be produced by some dogs but not by others. Berkeley and Hume, in their attack on general ideas, do not allow for the vagueness of images: they assume that every image has the definiteness that a physical object would have This is not the case, and a vague image may well have a meaning which is general. * This phrase is in need of interpretation, as appears from the analysis of desire. But the reader can easily supply the interpretation for himself. In order to define the "meaning" of an image, we have to take account both of its resemblance to one or more prototypes, and of its causal efficacy. If there were such a thing as a pure imagination-image, without any prototype whatever, it would be destitute of meaning. But according to Hume's principle, the simple elements in an image, at least, are derived from prototypes-except possibly in very rare exceptional cases. Often, in such instances as our image of a friend's face or of a nondescript dog, an image is not derived from one prototype, but from many; when this happens, the image is vague, and blurs the features in which the various prototypes differ. To arrive at the meaning of the image in such a case, we observe that there are certain respects, notably associations, in which the effects of images resemble those of their prototypes. If we find, in a given case, that our vague image, say, of a nondescript dog, has those associative effects which all dogs would have, but not those belonging to any special dog or kind of dog, we may say that our image means "dog" in general. If it has all the associations appropriate to spaniels but no others, we shall say it means "spaniel"; while if it has all the associations appropriate to one particular dog, it will mean that dog, however vague it may be as a picture. The meaning of an image, according to this analysis, is constituted by a combination of likeness and associations. It is not a sharp or definite conception, and in many cases it will be impossible to decide with any certainty what an image means. I think this lies in the nature of things, and not in defective analysis. We may give somewhat more precision to the above account of the meaning of images, and extend it to meaning in general. We find sometimes that, IN MNEMIC CAUSATION, an image or word, as stimulus, has the same effect (or very nearly the same effect) as would belong to some object, say, a certain dog. In that case we say that the image or word means that object. In other cases the mnemic effects are not all those of one object, but only those shared by objects of a certain kind, e.g. by all dogs. In this case the meaning of the image or word is general: it means the whole kind. Generality and particularity are a matter of degree. If two particulars differ sufficiently little, their mnemic effects will be the same; therefore no image or word can mean the one as opposed to the other; this sets a bound to the particularity of meaning. On the other hand, the mnemic effects of a number of sufficiently dissimilar objects will have nothing discoverable in common; hence a word which aims at complete generality, such as "entity" for example, will have to be devoid of mnemic effects, and therefore of meaning. In practice, this is not the case: such words have VERBAL associations, the learning of which constitutes the study of metaphysics. The meaning of a word, unlike that of an image, is wholly constituted by mnemic causal laws, and not in any degree by likeness (except in exceptional cases). The word "dog" bears no resemblance to a dog, but its effects, like those of an image of a dog, resemble the effects of an actual dog in certain respects. It is much easier to say definitely what a word means than what an image means, since words, however they originated, have been framed in later times for the purpose of having meaning, and men have been engaged for ages in giving increased precision to the meanings of words. But although it is easier to say what a word means than what an image means, the relation which constitutes meaning is much the same in both cases. A word, like an image, has the same associations as its meaning has. In addition to other associations, it is associated with images of its meaning, so that the word tends to call up the image and the image tends to call up the word., But this association is not essential to the intelligent use of words. If a word has the right associations with other objects, we shall be able to use it correctly, and understand its use by others, even if it evokes no image. The theoretical understanding of words involves only the power of associating them correctly with other words; the practical understanding involves associations with other bodily movements. The use of words is, of course, primarily social, for the purpose of suggesting to others ideas which we entertain or at least wish them to entertain. But the aspect of words that specially concerns us is their power of promoting our own thought. Almost all higher intellectual activity is a matter of words, to the nearly total exclusion of everything else. The advantages of words for purposes of thought are so great that I should never end if I were to enumerate them. But a few of them deserve to be mentioned. In the first place, there is no difficulty in producing a word, whereas an image cannot always be brought into existence at will, and when it comes it often contains much irrelevant detail. In the second place, much of our thinking is concerned with abstract matters which do not readily lend themselves to imagery, and are apt to be falsely conceived if we insist upon finding images that may be supposed to represent them. The word is always concrete and sensible, however abstract its meaning may be, and thus by the help of words we are able to dwell on abstractions in a way which would otherwise be impossible. In the third place, two instances of the same word are so similar that neither has associations not capable of being shared by the other. Two instances of the word "dog" are much more alike than (say) a pug and a great dane; hence the word "dog" makes it much easier to think about dogs in general. When a number of objects have a common property which is important but not obvious, the invention of a name for the common property helps us to remember it and to think of the whole set of objects that possess it. But it is unnecessary to prolong the catalogue of the uses of language in thought. At the same time, it is possible to conduct rudimentary thought by means of images, and it is important, sometimes, to check purely verbal thought by reference to what it means. In philosophy especially the tyranny of traditional words is dangerous, and we have to be on our guard against assuming that grammar is the key to metaphysics, or that the structure of a sentence corresponds at all accurately with the structure of the fact that it asserts. Sayce maintained that all European philosophy since Aristotle has been dominated by the fact that the philosophers spoke Indo-European languages, and therefore supposed the world, like the sentences they were used to, necessarily divisible into subjects and predicates. When we come to the consideration of truth and falsehood, we shall see how necessary it is to avoid assuming too close a parallelism between facts and the sentences which assert them. Against such errors, the only safeguard is to be able, once in a way, to discard words for a moment and contemplate facts more directly through images. Most serious advances in philosophic thought result from some such comparatively direct contemplation of facts. But the outcome has to be expressed in words if it is to be communicable. Those who have a relatively direct vision of facts are often incapable of translating their vision into words, while those who possess the words have usually lost the vision. It is partly for this reason that the highest philosophical capacity is so rare: it requires a combination of vision with abstract words which is hard to achieve, and too quickly lost in the few who have for a moment achieved it. LECTURE XI. GENERAL IDEAS AND THOUGHT It is said to be one of the merits of the human mind that it is capable of framing abstract ideas, and of conducting nonsensational thought. In this it is supposed to differ from the mind of animals. From Plato onward the "idea" has played a great part in the systems of idealizing philosophers. The "idea" has been, in their hands, always something noble and abstract, the apprehension and use of which by man confers upon him a quite special dignity. The thing we have to consider to-day is this: seeing that there certainly are words of which the meaning is abstract, and seeing that we can use these words intelligently, what must be assumed or inferred, or what can be discovered by observation, in the way of mental content to account for the intelligent use of abstract words? Taken as a problem in logic, the answer is, of course, that absolutely nothing in the way of abstract mental content is inferable from the mere fact that we can use intelligently words of which the meaning is abstract. It is clear that a sufficiently ingenious person could manufacture a machine moved by olfactory stimuli which, whenever a dog appeared in its neighbourhood, would say, "There is a dog," and when a cat appeared would throw stones at it. The act of saying "There is a dog," and the act of throwing stones, would in such a case be equally mechanical. Correct speech does not of itself afford any better evidence of mental content than the performance of any other set of biologically useful movements, such as those of flight or combat. All that is inferable from language is that two instances of a universal, even when they differ very greatly, may cause the utterance of two instances of the same word which only differ very slightly. As we saw in the preceding lecture, the word "dog" is useful, partly, because two instances of this word are much more similar than (say) a pug and a great dane. The use of words is thus a method of substituting for two particulars which differ widely, in spite of being instances of the same universal, two other particulars which differ very little, and which are also instances of a universal, namely the name of the previous universal. Thus, so far as logic is concerned, we are entirely free to adopt any theory as to general ideas which empirical observation may recommend. Berkeley and Hume made a vigorous onslaught on "abstract ideas." They meant by an idea approximately what we should call an image. Locke having maintained that he could form an idea of triangle in general, without deciding what sort of triangle it was to be, Berkeley contended that this was impossible. He says: "Whether others, have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I dare be confident I have it not. I find, indeed, I have indeed a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But, then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of a man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever. To be plain, I own myself able to abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts of qualities separated from others, with which, though they are united in some object, yet it is possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract from one another, or conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion, by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid--which last are the two proper acceptations of ABSTRACTION. And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to ABSTRACT NOTIONS. It is said they are difficult and not to be attained without pains and study; we may therefore reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are confined only to the learned. "I proceed to examine what can be alleged in defence of the doctrine of abstraction, and try if I can discover what it is that inclines the men of speculation to embrace an opinion so remote from common sense as that seems to be. There has been a late excellent and deservedly esteemed philosopher who, no doubt, has given it very much countenance, by seeming to think the having abstract general ideas is what puts the widest difference in point of understanding betwixt man and beast. 'The having of general ideas,' saith he, 'is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain unto. For, it is evident we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs.' And a little after: 'Therefore, I think, we may suppose that it is in this that the species of brutes are discriminated from men, and it is that proper difference wherein they are wholly separated, and which at last widens to so wide a distance. For, if they have any ideas at all, and are not bare machines (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some reason. It seems as evident to me that they do, some of them, in certain instances reason as that they have sense; but it is only in particular ideas, just as they receive them from their senses. They are the best of them tied up within those narrow bounds, and have not (as I think) the faculty to enlarge them by any kind of abstraction.* ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. II, chap. xi, paragraphs 10 and 11.) I readily agree with this learned author, that the faculties of brutes can by no means attain to abstraction. But, then, if this be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animals, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number. The reason that is here assigned why we have no grounds to think brutes have abstract general ideas is, that we observe in them no use of words or any other general signs; which is built on this supposition-that the making use of words implies the having general ideas. From which it follows that men who use language are able to abstract or generalize their ideas. That this is the sense and arguing of the author will further appear by his answering the question he in another place puts: 'Since all things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general terms?' His answer is: 'Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas.' ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. III, chap. III, paragraph 6.) But it seems that a word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. For example, when it is said 'the change of motion is proportional to the impressed force,' or that 'whatever has extension is divisible,' these propositions are to be understood of motion and extension in general; and nevertheless it will not follow that they suggest to my thoughts an idea of motion without a body moved, or any determinate direction and velocity, or that I must conceive an abstract general idea of extension, which is neither line, surface, nor solid, neither great nor small, black, white, nor red, nor of any other determinate colour. It is only implied that whatever particular motion I consider, whether it be swift or slow, perpendicular, horizontal, or oblique, or in whatever object, the axiom concerning it holds equally true. As does the other of every particular extension, it matters not whether line, surface, or solid, whether of this or that magnitude or figure. "By observing how ideas become general, we may the better judge how words are made so. And here it is to be noted that I do not deny absolutely there are general ideas, but only that there are any ABSTRACT general ideas; for, in the passages we have quoted wherein there is mention of general ideas, it is always supposed that they are formed by abstraction, after the manner set forth in sections 8 and 9. Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. To make this plain by an example, suppose a geometrician is demonstrating the method of cutting a line in two equal parts. He draws, for instance, a black line of an inch in length: this, which in itself is a particular line, is nevertheless with regard to its signification general, since, as it is there used, it represents all particular lines whatsoever; so that what is demonstrated of it is demonstrated of all lines, or, in other words, of a line in general. And, as THAT PARTICULAR LINE becomes general by being made a sign, so the NAME 'line,' which taken absolutely is particular, by being a sign is made general. And as the former owes its generality not to its being the sign of an abstract or general line, but of all particular right lines that may possibly exist, so the latter must be thought to derive its generality from the same cause, namely, the various particular lines which it indifferently denotes." * * Introduction to "A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge," paragraphs 10, 11, and 12. Berkeley's view in the above passage, which is essentially the same as Hume's, does not wholly agree with modern psychology, although it comes nearer to agreement than does the view of those who believe that there are in the mind single contents which can be called abstract ideas. The way in which Berkeley's view is inadequate is chiefly in the fact that images are as a rule not of one definite prototype, but of a number of related similar prototypes. On this subject Semon has written well. In "Die Mneme," pp. 217 ff., discussing the effect of repeated similar stimuli in producing and modifying our images, he says: "We choose a case of mnemic excitement whose existence we can perceive for ourselves by introspection, and seek to ekphore the bodily picture of our nearest relation in his absence, and have thus a pure mnemic excitement before us. At first it may seem to us that a determinate quite concrete picture becomes manifest in us, but just when we are concerned with a person with whom we are in constant contact, we shall find that the ekphored picture has something so to speak generalized. It is something like those American photographs which seek to display what is general about a type by combining a great number of photographs of different heads over each other on one plate. In our opinion, the generalizations happen by the homophonic working of different pictures of the same face which we have come across in the most different conditions and situations, once pale, once reddened, once cheerful, once earnest, once in this light, and once in that. As soon as we do not let the whole series of repetitions resound in us uniformly, but give our attention to one particular moment out of the many... this particular mnemic stimulus at once overbalances its simultaneously roused predecessors and successors, and we perceive the face in question with concrete definiteness in that particular situation." A little later he says: "The result is--at least in man, but probably also in the higher animals--the development of a sort of PHYSIOLOGICAL abstraction. Mnemic homophony gives us, without the addition of other processes of thought, a picture of our friend X which is in a certain sense abstract, not the concrete in any one situation, but X cut loose from any particular point of time. If the circle of ekphored engrams is drawn even more widely, abstract pictures of a higher order appear: for instance, a white man or a negro. In my opinion, the first form of abstract concepts in general is based upon such abstract pictures. The physiological abstraction which takes place in the above described manner is a predecessor of purely logical abstraction. It is by no means a monopoly of the human race, but shows itself in various ways also among the more highly organized animals." The same subject is treated in more detail in Chapter xvi of "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," but what is said there adds nothing vital to what is contained in the above quotations. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the vague and the general. So long as we are content with Semon's composite image, we MAY get no farther than the vague. The question whether this image takes us to the general or not depends, I think, upon the question whether, in addition to the generalized image, we have also particular images of some of the instances out of which it is compounded. Suppose, for example, that on a number of occasions you had seen one negro, and that you did not know whether this one was the same or different on the different occasions. Suppose that in the end you had an abstract memory-image of the different appearances presented by the negro on different occasions, but no memory-image of any one of the single appearances. In that case your image would be vague. If, on the other hand, you have, in addition to the generalized image, particular images of the several appearances, sufficiently clear to be recognized as different, and as instances of the generalized picture, you will then not feel the generalized picture to be adequate to any one particular appearance, and you will be able to make it function as a general idea rather than a vague idea. If this view is correct, no new general content needs to be added to the generalized image. What needs to be added is particular images compared and contrasted with the generalized image. So far as I can judge by introspection, this does occur in practice. Take for example Semon's instance of a friend's face. Unless we make some special effort of recollection, the face is likely to come before us with an average expression, very blurred and vague, but we can at will recall how our friend looked on some special occasion when he was pleased or angry or unhappy, and this enables us to realize the generalized character of the vague image. There is, however, another way of distinguishing between the vague, the particular and the general, and this is not by their content, but by the reaction which they produce. A word, for example, may be said to be vague when it is applicable to a number of different individuals, but to each as individuals; the name Smith, for example, is vague: it is always meant to apply to one man, but there are many men to each of whom it applies.* The word "man," on the other hand, is general. We say, "This is Smith," but we do not say "This is man," but "This is a man." Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea when its effects are different from those appropriate to individuals. In what this difference consists it is, however, not easy to say. I am inclined to think that it consists merely in the knowledge that no one individual is represented, so that what distinguishes a general idea from a vague idea is merely the presence of a certain accompanying belief. If this view is correct, a general idea differs from a vague one in a way analogous to that in which a memory-image differs from an imagination-image. There also we found that the difference consists merely of the fact that a memory-image is accompanied by a belief, in this case as to the past. * "Smith" would only be a quite satisfactory representation of vague words if we failed to discriminate between different people called Smith. It should also be said that our images even of quite particular occurrences have always a greater or a less degree of vagueness. That is to say, the occurrence might have varied within certain limits without causing our image to vary recognizably. To arrive at the general it is necessary that we should be able to contrast it with a number of relatively precise images or words for particular occurrences; so long as all our images and words are vague, we cannot arrive at the contrast by which the general is defined. This is the justification for the view which I quoted on p. 184 from Ribot (op. cit., p. 32), viz. that intelligence progresses from the indefinite to the definite, and that the vague appears earlier than either the particular or the general. I think the view which I have been advocating, to the effect that a general idea is distinguished from a vague one by the presence of a judgment, is also that intended by Ribot when he says (op. cit., p. 92): "The generic image is never, the concept is always, a judgment. We know that for logicians (formerly at any rate) the concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes the judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination, combining two or several judgments. For the psychologists, on the contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the result of judgment (explicit or implicit), of similarities with exclusion of differences." A great deal of work professing to be experimental has been done in recent years on the psychology of thought. A good summary of such work up to the year agog is contained in Titchener's "Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes" (1909). Three articles in the "Archiv fur die gesammte Psychologie" by Watt,* Messer** and Buhler*** contain a great deal of the material amassed by the methods which Titchener calls experimental. * Henry J. Watt, "Experimentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des Denkens," vol. iv (1905) pp. 289-436. ** August Messer, "Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchu gen uber das Denken," vol. iii (1906), pp. 1-224. *** Karl Buhler, "Uber Gedanken," vol. ix (1907), pp. 297-365. For my part I am unable to attach as much importance to this work as many psychologists do. The method employed appears to me hardly to fulfil the conditions of scientific experiment. Broadly speaking, what is done is, that a set of questions are asked of various people, their answers are recorded, and likewise their own accounts, based upon introspection, of the processes of thought which led them to give those answers. Much too much reliance seems to me to be placed upon the correctness of their introspection. On introspection as a method I have spoken earlier (Lecture VI). I am not prepared, like Professor Watson, to reject it wholly, but I do consider that it is exceedingly fallible and quite peculiarly liable to falsification in accordance with preconceived theory. It is like depending upon the report of a shortsighted person as to whom he sees coming along the road at a moment when he is firmly convinced that Jones is sure to come. If everybody were shortsighted and obsessed with beliefs as to what was going to be visible, we might have to make the best of such testimony, but we should need to correct its errors by taking care to collect the simultaneous evidence of people with the most divergent expectations. There is no evidence that this was done in the experiments in question, nor indeed that the influence of theory in falsifying the introspection was at all adequately recognized. I feel convinced that if Professor Watson had been one of the subjects of the questionnaires, he would have given answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these investigations, which appears to me thoroughly justified. "These experiments," he says, "are not experiments at all in the sense of a scientific methodology; they are counterfeit experiments, that seem methodical simply because they are ordinarily performed in a psychological laboratory, and involve the co-operation of two persons, who purport to be experimenter and observer. In reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none of the special features by which we distinguish the introspections of experimental psychology from the casual introspections of everyday life."* Titchener, of course, dissents from this opinion, but I cannot see that his reasons for dissent are adequate. My doubts are only increased by the fact that Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists as his subjects. A trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have acquired the habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to have acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take Buhler's "Uber Gedanken" to illustrate the kind of results arrived at by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): "We ask ourselves the general question: 'WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE THINK?' Then we do not at all attempt a preliminary determination of the concept 'thought,' but choose for analysis only such processes as everyone would describe as processes of thought." The most important thing in thinking, he says, is "awareness that..." (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It is, he says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking. Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous presentations. "I assert rather that in principle every object can be thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous presentation (Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue colour on the picture that hangs in my room I can think with complete distinctness unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it is possible that the object should be given to me in another manner than by the help of sensations. How that is possible we shall see later." What he calls a thought (Gedanke) cannot be reduced, according to him, to other psychic occurrences. He maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of known rules (p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this theory that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is immediately capable of being dealt with on the lines with which the behaviourists have familiarized us. It is clear also that the supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective testimony of the persons experimented upon. I cannot think that there is sufficient certainty of their reliability in this negative observation to make us accept a difficult and revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have failed to observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the fact that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are concerned with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a great many intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over so quickly as to escape observation. * Titchener, op. cit., p. 79. I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general idea of "imageless thinking," concerning which there has been much controversy. The advocates of imageless thinking are not contending merely that there can be thinking which is purely verbal; they are contending that there can be thinking which proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own feeling is that they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in cases where habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike experimented with animals in cages, he found that the associations established were between a sensory stimulus and a bodily movement (not the idea of it), without the need of supposing any non-physiological intermediary (op. cit., p. 100 ff.). The same thing, it seems to me, applies to ourselves. A certain sensory situation produces in us a certain bodily movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering words. Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory stimulus and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a supposition. Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large proportion of our talk. What applies to uttered speech applies of course equally to the internal speech which is not uttered. I remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is any such phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of words, or that "ideas" have to be added to sensations and images as part of the material out of which mental phenomena are built. The question of the nature of our consciousness of the universal is much affected by our view as to the general nature of the relation of consciousness to its object. If we adopt the view of Brentano, according to which all mental content has essential reference to an object, it is then natural to suppose that there is some peculiar kind of mental content of which the object is a universal, as oppose to a particular. According to this view, a particular cat can be PERceived or imagined, while the universal "cat" is CONceived. But this whole manner of viewing our dealings with universals has to be abandoned when the relation of a mental occurrence to its "object" is regarded as merely indirect and causal, which is the view that we have adopted. The mental content is, of course, always particular, and the question as to what it "means" (in case it means anything) is one which cannot be settled by merely examining the intrinsic character of the mental content, but only by knowing its causal connections in the case of the person concerned. To say that a certain thought "means" a universal as opposed to either a vague or a particular, is to say something exceedingly complex. A horse will behave in a certain manner whenever he smells a bear, even if the smell is derived from a bearskin. That is to say, any environment containing an instance of the universal "smell of a bear" produces closely similar behaviour in the horse, but we do not say that the horse is conscious of this universal. There is equally little reason to regard a man as conscious of the same universal, because under the same circumstances he can react by saying, "I smell a bear." This reaction, like that of the horse, is merely closely similar on different occasions where the environment affords instances of the same universal. Words of which the logical meaning is universal can therefore be employed correctly, without anything that could be called consciousness of universals. Such consciousness in the only sense in which it can be said to exist is a matter of reflective judgment consisting in the observation of similarities and differences. A universal never appears before the mind as a single object in the sort of way in which something perceived appears. I THINK a logical argument could be produced to show that universals are part of the structure of the world, but they are an inferred part, not a part of our data. What exists in us consists of various factors, some open to external observation, others only visible to introspection. The factors open to external observation are primarily habits, having the peculiarity that very similar reactions are produced by stimuli which are in many respects very different from each other. Of this the reaction of the horse to the smell of the bear is an instance, and so is the reaction of the man who says "bear" under the same circumstances. The verbal reaction is, of course, the most important from the point of view of what may be called knowledge of universals. A man who can always use the word "dog" when he sees a dog may be said, in a certain sense, to know the meaning of the word "dog," and IN THAT SENSE to have knowledge of the universal "dog." But there is, of course, a further stage reached by the logician in which he not merely reacts with the word "dog," but sets to work to discover what it is in the environment that causes in him this almost identical reaction on different occasions. This further stage consists in knowledge of similarities and differences: similarities which are necessary to the applicability of the word "dog," and differences which are compatible with it. Our knowledge of these similarities and differences is never exhaustive, and therefore our knowledge of the meaning of a universal is never complete. In addition to external observable habits (including the habit of words), there is also the generic image produced by the superposition, or, in Semon's phrase, homophony, of a number of similar perceptions. This image is vague so long as the multiplicity of its prototypes is not recognized, but becomes universal when it exists alongside of the more specific images of its instances, and is knowingly contrasted with them. In this case we find again, as we found when we were discussing words in general in the preceding lecture, that images are not logically necessary in order to account for observable behaviour, i.e. in this case intelligent speech. Intelligent speech could exist as a motor habit, without any accompaniment of images, and this conclusion applies to words of which the meaning is universal, just as much as to words of which the meaning is relatively particular. If this conclusion is valid, it follows that behaviourist psychology, which eschews introspective data, is capable of being an independent science, and of accounting for all that part of the behaviour of other people which is commonly regarded as evidence that they think. It must be admitted that this conclusion considerably weakens the reliance which can be placed upon introspective data. They must be accepted simply on account of the fact that we seem to perceive them, not on account of their supposed necessity for explaining the data of external observation. This, at any rate, is the conclusion to which we are forced, so long as, with the behaviourists, we accept common-sense views of the physical world. But if, as I have urged, the physical world itself, as known, is infected through and through with subjectivity, if, as the theory of relativity suggests, the physical universe contains the diversity of points of view which we have been accustomed to regard as distinctively psychological, then we are brought back by this different road to the necessity for trusting observations which are in an important sense private. And it is the privacy of introspective data which causes much of the behaviourists' objection to them. This is an example of the difficulty of constructing an adequate philosophy of any one science without taking account of other sciences. The behaviourist philosophy of psychology, though in many respects admirable from the point of view of method, appears to me to fail in the last analysis because it is based upon an inadequate philosophy of physics. In spite, therefore, of the fact that the evidence for images, whether generic or particular, is merely introspective, I cannot admit that images should be rejected, or that we should minimize their function in our knowledge of what is remote in time or space. LECTURE XII. BELIEF Belief, which is our subject to-day, is the central problem in the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our philosophical outlook largely depends. Before embarking upon the detailed analysis of belief, we shall do well to note certain requisites which any theory must fulfil. (1) Just as words are characterized by meaning, so beliefs are characterized by truth or falsehood. And just as meaning consists in relation to the object meant, so truth and falsehood consist in relation to something that lies outside the belief. You may believe that such-and-such a horse will win the Derby. The time comes, and your horse wins or does not win; according to the outcome, your belief was true or false. You may believe that six times nine is fifty-six; in this case also there is a fact which makes your belief false. You may believe that America was discovered in 1492, or that it was discovered in 1066. In the one case your belief is true, in the other false; in either case its truth or falsehood depends upon the actions of Columbus, not upon anything present or under your control. What makes a belief true or false I call a "fact." The particular fact that makes a given belief true or false I call its "objective,"* and the relation of the belief to its objective I call the "reference" or the "objective reference" of the belief. Thus, if I believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the "objective" of my belief is Columbus's actual voyage, and the "reference" of my belief is the relation between my belief and the voyage--that relation, namely, in virtue of which the voyage makes my belief true (or, in another case, false). "Reference" of beliefs differs from "meaning" of words in various ways, but especially in the fact that it is of two kinds, "true" reference and "false" reference. The truth or falsehood of a belief does not depend upon anything intrinsic to the belief, but upon the nature of its relation to its objective. The intrinsic nature of belief can be treated without reference to what makes it true or false. In the remainder of the present lecture I shall ignore truth and falsehood, which will be the subject of Lecture XIII. It is the intrinsic nature of belief that will concern us to-day. * This terminology is suggested by Meinong, but is not exactly the same as his. (2) We must distinguish between believing and what is believed. I may believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, that all Cretans are liars, that two and two are four, or that nine times six is fifty-six; in all these cases the believing is just the same, and only the contents believed are different. I may remember my breakfast this morning, my lecture last week, or my first sight of New York. In all these cases the feeling of memory-belief is just the same, and only what is remembered differs. Exactly similar remarks apply to expectations. Bare assent, memory and expectation are forms of belief; all three are different from what is believed, and each has a constant character which is independent of what is believed. In Lecture I we criticized the analysis of a presentation into act, content and object. But our analysis of belief contains three very similar elements, namely the believing, what is believed and the objective. The objections to the act (in the case of presentations) are not valid against the believing in the case of beliefs, because the believing is an actual experienced feeling, not something postulated, like the act. But it is necessary first to complete our preliminary requisites, and then to examine the content of a belief. After that, we shall be in a position to return to the question as to what constitutes believing. (3) What is believed, and the believing, must both consist of present occurrences in the believer, no matter what may be the objective of the belief. Suppose I believe, for example, "that Caesar crossed the Rubicon." The objective of my belief is an event which happened long ago, which I never saw and do not remember. This event itself is not in my mind when I believe that it happened. It is not correct to say that I am believing the actual event; what I am believing is something now in my mind, something related to the event (in a way which we shall investigate in Lecture XIII), but obviously not to be confounded with the event, since the event is not occurring now but the believing is. What a man is believing at a given moment is wholly determinate if we know the contents of his mind at that moment; but Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was an historical physical event, which is distinct from the present contents of every present mind. What is believed, however true it may be, is not the actual fact that makes the belief true, but a present event related to the fact. This present event, which is what is believed, I shall call the "content" of the belief. We have already had occasion to notice the distinction between content and objective in the case of memory-beliefs, where the content is "this occurred" and the objective is the past event. (4) Between content and objective there is sometimes a very wide gulf, for example in the case of "Caesar crossed the Rubicon." This gulf may, when it is first perceived, give us a feeling that we cannot really "know" anything about the outer world. All we can "know," it may be said, is what is now in our thoughts. If Caesar and the Rubicon cannot be bodily in our thoughts, it might seem as though we must remain cut off from knowledge of them. I shall not now deal at length with this feeling, since it is necessary first to define "knowing," which cannot be done yet. But I will say, as a preliminary answer, that the feeling assumes an ideal of knowing which I believe to be quite mistaken. It assumes, if it is thought out, something like the mystic unity of knower and known. These two are often said to be combined into a unity by the fact of cognition; hence when this unity is plainly absent, it may seem as if there were no genuine cognition. For my part, I think such theories and feelings wholly mistaken: I believe knowing to be a very external and complicated relation, incapable of exact definition, dependent upon causal laws, and involving no more unity than there is between a signpost and the town to which it points. I shall return to this question on a later occasion; for the moment these provisional remarks must suffice. (5) The objective reference of a belief is connected with the fact that all or some of the constituents of its content have meaning. If I say "Caesar conquered Gaul," a person who knows the meaning of the three words composing my statement knows as much as can be known about the nature of the objective which would make my statement true. It is clear that the objective reference of a belief is, in general, in some way derivative from the meanings of the words or images that occur in its content. There are, however, certain complications which must be borne in mind. In the first place, it might be contended that a memory-image acquires meaning only through the memory-belief, which would seem, at least in the case of memory, to make belief more primitive than the meaning of images. In the second place, it is a very singular thing that meaning, which is single, should generate objective reference, which is dual, namely true and false. This is one of the facts which any theory of belief must explain if it is to be satisfactory. It is now time to leave these preliminary requisites, and attempt the analysis of the contents of beliefs. The first thing to notice about what is believed, i.e. about the content of a belief, is that it is always complex: We believe that a certain thing has a certain property, or a certain relation to something else, or that it occurred or will occur (in the sense discussed at the end of Lecture IX); or we may believe that all the members of a certain class have a certain property, or that a certain property sometimes occurs among the members of a class; or we may believe that if one thing happens, another will happen (for example, "if it rains I shall bring my umbrella"), or we may believe that something does not happen, or did not or will not happen (for example, "it won't rain"); or that one of two things must happen (for example, "either you withdraw your accusation, or I shall bring a libel action"). The catalogue of the sorts of things we may believe is infinite, but all of them are complex. Language sometimes conceals the complexity of a belief. We say that a person believes in God, and it might seem as if God formed the whole content of the belief. But what is really believed is that God exists, which is very far from being simple. Similarly, when a person has a memory-image with a memory-belief, the belief is "this occurred," in the sense explained in Lecture IX; and "this occurred" is not simple. In like manner all cases where the content of a belief seems simple at first sight will be found, on examination, to confirm the view that the content is always complex. The content of a belief involves not merely a plurality of constituents, but definite relations between them; it is not determinate when its constituents alone are given. For example, "Plato preceded Aristotle" and "Aristotle preceded Plato" are both contents which may be believed, but, although they consist of exactly the same constituents, they are different, and even incompatible. The content of a belief may consist of words only, or of images only, or of a mixture of the two, or of either or both together with one or more sensations. It must contain at least one constituent which is a word or an image, and it may or may not contain one or more sensations as constituents. Some examples will make these various possibilities clear. We may take first recognition, in either of the forms "this is of such-and-such a kind" or "this has occurred before." In either case, present sensation is a constituent. For example, you hear a noise, and you say to yourself "tram." Here the noise and the word "tram" are both constituents of your belief; there is also a relation between them, expressed by "is" in the proposition "that is a tram." As soon as your act of recognition is completed by the occurrence of the word "tram," your actions are affected: you hurry if you want the tram, or cease to hurry if you want a bus. In this case the content of your belief is a sensation (the noise) and a word ("tram") related in a way which may be called predication. The same noise may bring into your mind the visual image of a tram, instead of the word "tram." In this case your belief consists of a sensation and an image suitable related. Beliefs of this class are what are called "judgments of perception." As we saw in Lecture VIII, the images associated with a sensation often come with such spontaneity and force that the unsophisticated do not distinguish them from the sensation; it is only the psychologist or the skilled observer who is aware of the large mnemic element that is added to sensation to make perception. It may be objected that what is added consists merely of images without belief. This is no doubt sometimes the case, but is certainly sometimes not the case. That belief always occurs in perception as opposed to sensation it is not necessary for us to maintain; it is enough for our purposes to note that it sometimes occurs, and that when it does, the content of our belief consists of a sensation and an image suitably related. In a PURE memory-belief only images occur. But a mixture of words and images is very common in memory. You have an image of the past occurrence, and you say to yourself: "Yes, that's how it was." Here the image and the words together make up the content of the belief. And when the remembering of an incident has become a habit, it may be purely verbal, and the memory-belief may consist of words alone. The more complicated forms of belief tend to consist only of words. Often images of various kinds accompany them, but they are apt to be irrelevant, and to form no part of what is actually believed. For example, in thinking of the Solar System, you are likely to have vague images of pictures you have seen of the earth surrounded by clouds, Saturn and his rings, the sun during an eclipse, and so on; but none of these form part of your belief that the planets revolve round the sun in elliptical orbits. The only images that form an actual part of such beliefs are, as a rule, images of words. And images of words, for the reasons considered in Lecture VIII, cannot be distinguished with any certainty from sensations, when, as is often, if not usually, the case, they are kinaesthetic images of pronouncing the words. It is impossible for a belief to consist of sensations alone, except when, as in the case of words, the sensations have associations which make them signs possessed of meaning. The reason is that objective reference is of the essence of belief, and objective reference is derived from meaning. When I speak of a belief consisting partly of sensations and partly of words, I do not mean to deny that the words, when they are not mere images, are sensational, but that they occur as signs, not (so to speak) in their own right. To revert to the noise of the tram, when you hear it and say "tram," the noise and the word are both sensations (if you actually pronounce the word), but the noise is part of the fact which makes your belief true, whereas the word is not part of this fact. It is the MEANING of the word "tram," not the actual word, that forms part of the fact which is the objective of your belief. Thus the word occurs in the belief as a symbol, in virtue of its meaning, whereas the noise enters into both the belief and its objective. It is this that distinguishes the occurrence of words as symbols from the occurrence of sensations in their own right: the objective contains the sensations that occur in their own right, but contains only the meanings of the words that occur as symbols. For the sake of simplicity, we may ignore the cases in which sensations in their own right form part of the content of a belief, and confine ourselves to images and words. We may also omit the cases in which both images and words occur in the content of a belief. Thus we become confined to two cases: (a) when the content consists wholly of images, (b) when it consists wholly of words. The case of mixed images and words has no special importance, and its omission will do no harm. Let us take in illustration a case of memory. Suppose you are thinking of some familiar room. You may call up an image of it, and in your image the window may be to the left of the door. Without any intrusion of words, you may believe in the correctness of your image. You then have a belief, consisting wholly of images, which becomes, when put into words, "the window is to the left of the door." You may yourself use these words and proceed to believe them. You thus pass from an image-content to the corresponding word-content. The content is different in the two cases, but its objective reference is the same. This shows the relation of image-beliefs to word-beliefs in a very simple case. In more elaborate cases the relation becomes much less simple. It may be said that even in this very simple case the objective reference of the word-content is not quite the same as that of the image-content, that images have a wealth of concrete features which are lost when words are substituted, that the window in the image is not a mere window in the abstract, but a window of a certain shape and size, not merely to the left of the door, but a certain distance to the left, and so on. In reply, it may be admitted at once that there is, as a rule, a certain amount of truth in the objection. But two points may be urged to minimize its force. First, images do not, as a rule, have that wealth of concrete detail that would make it IMPOSSIBLE to express them fully in words. They are vague and fragmentary: a finite number of words, though perhaps a large number, would exhaust at least their SIGNIFICANT features. For--and this is our second point--images enter into the content of a belief through the fact that they are capable of meaning, and their meaning does not, as a rule, have as much complexity as they have: some of their characteristics are usually devoid of meaning. Thus it may well be possible to extract in words all that has meaning in an image-content; in that case the word-content and the image-content will have exactly the same objective reference. The content of a belief, when expressed in words, is the same thing (or very nearly the same thing) as what in logic is called a "proposition." A proposition is a series of words (or sometimes a single word) expressing the kind of thing that can be asserted or denied. "That all men are mortal," "that Columbus discovered America," "that Charles I died in his bed," "that all philosophers are wise," are propositions. Not any series of words is a proposition, but only such series of words as have "meaning," or, in our phraseology, "objective reference." Given the meanings of separate words, and the rules of syntax, the meaning of a proposition is determinate. This is the reason why we can understand a sentence we never heard before. You probably never heard before the proposition "that the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands habitually eat stewed hippopotamus for dinner," but there is no difficulty in understanding the proposition. The question of the relation between the meaning of a sentence and the meanings of the separate words is difficult, and I shall not pursue it now; I brought it up solely as being illustrative of the nature of propositions. We may extend the term "proposition" so as to cover the image-contents of beliefs consisting of images. Thus, in the case of remembering a room in which the window is to the left of the door, when we believe the image-content the proposition will consist of the image of the window on the left together with the image of the door on the right. We will distinguish propositions of this kind as "image-propositions" and propositions in words as "word-propositions." We may identify propositions in general with the contents of actual and possible beliefs, and we may say that it is propositions that are true or false. In logic we are concerned with propositions rather than beliefs, since logic is not interested in what people do in fact believe, but only in the conditions which determine the truth or falsehood of possible beliefs. Whenever possible, except when actual beliefs are in question, it is generally a simplification to deal with propositions. It would seem that image-propositions are more primitive than word-propositions, and may well ante-date language. There is no reason why memory-images, accompanied by that very simple belief-feeling which we decided to be the essence of memory, should not have occurred before language arose; indeed, it would be rash to assert positively that memory of this sort does not occur among the higher animals. Our more elementary beliefs, notably those that are added to sensation to make perception, often remain at the level of images. For example, most of the visual objects in our neighbourhood rouse tactile images: we have a different feeling in looking at a sofa from what we have in looking at a block of marble, and the difference consists chiefly in different stimulation of our tactile imagination. It may be said that the tactile images are merely present, without any accompanying belief; but I think this view, though sometimes correct, derives its plausibility as a general proposition from our thinking of explicit conscious belief only. Most of our beliefs, like most of our wishes, are "unconscious," in the sense that we have never told ourselves that we have them. Such beliefs display themselves when the expectations that they arouse fail in any way. For example, if someone puts tea (without milk) into a glass, and you drink it under the impression that it is going to be beer; or if you walk on what appears to be a tiled floor, and it turns out to be a soft carpet made to look like tiles. The shock of surprise on an occasion of this kind makes us aware of the expectations that habitually enter into our perceptions; and such expectations must be classed as beliefs, in spite of the fact that we do not normally take note of them or put them into words. I remember once watching a cock pigeon running over and over again to the edge of a looking-glass to try to wreak vengeance on the particularly obnoxious bird whom he expected to find there, judging by what he saw in the glass. He must have experienced each time the sort of surprise on finding nothing, which is calculated to lead in time to the adoption of Berkeley's theory that objects of sense are only in the mind. His expectation, though not expressed in words, deserved, I think, to be called a belief. I come now to the question what constitutes believing, as opposed to the content believed. To begin with, there are various different attitudes that may be taken towards the same content. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have a visual image of your breakfast-table. You may expect it while you are dressing in the morning; remember it as you go to your work; feel doubt as to its correctness when questioned as to your powers of visualizing; merely entertain the image, without connecting it with anything external, when you are going to sleep; desire it if you are hungry, or feel aversion for it if you are ill. Suppose, for the sake of definiteness, that the content is "an egg for breakfast." Then you have the following attitudes "I expect there will be an egg for breakfast"; "I remember there was an egg for breakfast"; "Was there an egg for breakfast?" "An egg for breakfast: well, what of it?" "I hope there will be an egg for breakfast"; "I am afraid there will be an egg for breakfast and it is sure to be bad." I do not suggest that this is a list of all possible attitudes on the subject; I say only that they are different attitudes, all concerned with the one content "an egg for breakfast." These attitudes are not all equally ultimate. Those that involve desire and aversion have occupied us in Lecture III. For the present, we are only concerned with such as are cognitive. In speaking of memory, we distinguished three kinds of belief directed towards the same content, namely memory, expectation and bare assent without any time-determination in the belief-feeling. But before developing this view, we must examine two other theories which might be held concerning belief, and which, in some ways, would be more in harmony with a behaviourist outlook than the theory I wish to advocate. (1) The first theory to be examined is the view that the differentia of belief consists in its causal efficacy I do not wish to make any author responsible for this theory: I wish merely to develop it hypothetically so that we may judge of its tenability. We defined the meaning of an image or word by causal efficacy, namely by associations: an image or word acquires meaning, we said, through having the same associations as what it means. We propose hypothetically to define "belief" by a different kind of causal efficacy, namely efficacy in causing voluntary movements. (Voluntary movements are defined as those vital movements which are distinguished from reflex movements as involving the higher nervous centres. I do not like to distinguish them by means of such notions as "consciousness" or "will," because I do not think these notions, in any definable sense, are always applicable. Moreover, the purpose of the theory we are examining is to be, as far as possible, physiological and behaviourist, and this purpose is not achieved if we introduce such a conception as "consciousness" or "will." Nevertheless, it is necessary for our purpose to find some way of distinguishing between voluntary and reflex movements, since the results would be too paradoxical, if we were to say that reflex movements also involve beliefs.) According to this definition, a content is said to be "believed" when it causes us to move. The images aroused are the same if you say to me, "Suppose there were an escaped tiger coming along the street," and if you say to me, "There is an escaped tiger coming along the street." But my actions will be very different in the two cases: in the first, I shall remain calm; in the second, it is possible that I may not. It is suggested, by the theory we are considering, that this difference of effects constitutes what is meant by saying that in the second case I believe the proposition suggested, while in the first case I do not. According to this view, images or words are "believed" when they cause bodily movements. I do not think this theory is adequate, but I think it is suggestive of truth, and not so easily refutable as it might appear to be at first sight. It might be objected to the theory that many things which we certainly believe do not call for any bodily movements. I believe that Great Britain is an island, that whales are mammals, that Charles I was executed, and so on; and at first sight it seems obvious that such beliefs, as a rule, do not call for any action on my part. But when we investigate the matter more closely, it becomes more doubtful. To begin with, we must distinguish belief as a mere DISPOSITION from actual active belief. We speak as if we always believed that Charles I was executed, but that only means that we are always ready to believe it when the subject comes up. The phenomenon we are concerned to analyse is the active belief, not the permanent disposition. Now, what are the occasions when, we actively believe that Charles I was executed? Primarily: examinations, when we perform the bodily movement of writing it down; conversation, when we assert it to display our historical erudition; and political discourses, when we are engaged in showing what Soviet government leads to. In all these cases bodily movements (writing or speaking) result from our belief. But there remains the belief which merely occurs in "thinking." One may set to work to recall some piece of history one has been reading, and what one recalls is believed, although it probably does not cause any bodily movement whatever. It is true that what we believe always MAY influence action. Suppose I am invited to become King of Georgia: I find the prospect attractive, and go to Cook's to buy a third-class ticket to my new realm. At the last moment I remember Charles I and all the other monarchs who have come to a bad end; I change my mind, and walk out without completing the transaction. But such incidents are rare, and cannot constitute the whole of my belief that Charles I was executed. The conclusion seems to be that, although a belief always MAY influence action if it becomes relevant to a practical issue, it often exists actively (not as a mere disposition) without producing any voluntary movement whatever. If this is true, we cannot define belief by the effect on voluntary movements. There is another, more theoretical, ground for rejecting the view we are examining. It is clear that a proposition can be either believed or merely considered, and that the content is the same in both cases. We can expect an egg for breakfast, or merely entertain the supposition that there may be an egg for breakfast. A moment ago I considered the possibility of being invited to become King of Georgia, but I do not believe that this will happen. Now, it seems clear that, since believing and considering have different effects if one produces bodily movements while the other does not, there must be some intrinsic difference between believing and considering*; for if they were precisely similar, their effects also would be precisely similar. We have seen that the difference between believing a given proposition and merely considering it does not lie in the content; therefore there must be, in one case or in both, something additional to the content which distinguishes the occurrence of a belief from the occurrence of a mere consideration of the same content. So far as the theoretical argument goes, this additional element may exist only in belief, or only in consideration, or there may be one sort of additional element in the case of belief, and another in the case of consideration. This brings us to the second view which we have to examine. * Cf. Brentano, "Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte," p. 268 (criticizing Bain, "The Emotions and the Will"). (1) The theory which we have now to consider regards belief as belonging to every idea which is entertained, except in so far as some positive counteracting force interferes. In this view belief is not a positive phenomenon, though doubt and disbelief are so. What we call belief, according to this hypothesis, involves only the appropriate content, which will have the effects characteristic of belief unless something else operating simultaneously inhibits them. James (Psychology, vol. ii, p. 288) quotes with approval, though inaccurately, a passage from Spinoza embodying this view: "Let us conceive a boy imagining to himself a horse, and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the existence of the horse, AND THE BOY HAS NO PERCEPTION WHICH ANNULS ITS EXISTENCE [James's italics], he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he may be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] affirms nothing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the horse [that horse, namely] has wings? For if the mind had nothing before it but the winged horse, it would contemplate the same as present, would have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged horse were joined to an idea which contradicted [tollit] its existence" ("Ethics," vol. ii, p. 49, Scholium). To this doctrine James entirely assents, adding in italics: "ANY OBJECT WHICH REMAINS UNCONTRADICTED IS IPSO FACTO BELIEVED AND POSITED AS ABSOLUTE REALITY." If this view is correct, it follows (though James does not draw the inference) that there is no need of any specific feeling called "belief," and that the mere existence of images yields all that is required. The state of mind in which we merely consider a proposition, without believing or disbelieving it, will then appear as a sophisticated product, the result of some rival force adding to the image-proposition a positive feeling which may be called suspense or non-belief--a feeling which may be compared to that of a man about to run a race waiting for the signal. Such a man, though not moving, is in a very different condition from that of a man quietly at rest And so the man who is considering a proposition without believing it will be in a state of tension, restraining the natural tendency to act upon the proposition which he would display if nothing interfered. In this view belief primarily consists merely in the existence of the appropriate images without any counteracting forces. There is a great deal to be said in favour of this view, and I have some hesitation in regarding it as inadequate. It fits admirably with the phenomena of dreams and hallucinatory images, and it is recommended by the way in which it accords with mental development. Doubt, suspense of judgment and disbelief all seem later and more complex than a wholly unreflecting assent. Belief as a positive phenomenon, if it exists, may be regarded, in this view, as a product of doubt, a decision after debate, an acceptance, not merely of THIS, but of THIS-RATHER-THAN-THAT. It is not difficult to suppose that a dog has images (possible olfactory) of his absent master, or of the rabbit that he dreams of hunting. But it is very difficult to suppose that he can entertain mere imagination-images to which no assent is given. I think it must be conceded that a mere image, without the addition of any positive feeling that could be called "belief," is apt to have a certain dynamic power, and in this sense an uncombated image has the force of a belief. But although this may be true, it accounts only for some of the simplest phenomena in the region of belief. It will not, for example, explain memory. Nor can it explain beliefs which do not issue in any proximate action, such as those of mathematics. I conclude, therefore, that there must be belief-feelings of the same order as those of doubt or disbelief, although phenomena closely analogous to those of belief can be produced by mere uncontradicted images. (3) I come now to the view of belief which I wish to advocate. It seems to me that there are at least three kinds of belief, namely memory, expectation and bare assent. Each of these I regard as constituted by a certain feeling or complex of sensations, attached to the content believed. We may illustrate by an example. Suppose I am believing, by means of images, not words, that it will rain. We have here two interrelated elements, namely the content and the expectation. The content consists of images of (say) the visual appearance of rain, the feeling of wetness, the patter of drops, interrelated, roughly, as the sensations would be if it were raining. Thus the content is a complex fact composed of images. Exactly the same content may enter into the memory "it was raining" or the assent "rain occurs." The difference of these cases from each other and from expectation does not lie in the content. The difference lies in the nature of the belief-feeling. I, personally, do not profess to be able to analyse the sensations constituting respectively memory, expectation and assent; but I am not prepared to say that they cannot be analysed. There may be other belief-feelings, for example in disjunction and implication; also a disbelief-feeling. It is not enough that the content and the belief-feeling should coexist: it is necessary that there should be a specific relation between them, of the sort expressed by saying that the content is what is believed. If this were not obvious, it could be made plain by an argument. If the mere co-existence of the content and the belief-feeling sufficed, whenever we were having (say) a memory-feeling we should be remembering any proposition which came into our minds at the same time. But this is not the case, since we may simultaneously remember one proposition and merely consider another. We may sum up our analysis, in the case of bare assent to a proposition not expressed in words, as follows: (a) We have a proposition, consisting of interrelated images, and possibly partly of sensations; (b) we have the feeling of assent, which is presumably a complex sensation demanding analysis; (c) we have a relation, actually subsisting, between the assent and the proposition, such as is expressed by saying that the proposition in question is what is assented to. For other forms of belief-feeling or of content, we have only to make the necessary substitutions in this analysis. If we are right in our analysis of belief, the use of words in expressing beliefs is apt to be misleading. There is no way of distinguishing, in words, between a memory and an assent to a proposition about the past: "I ate my breakfast" and "Caesar conquered Gaul" have the same verbal form, though (assuming that I remember my breakfast) they express occurrences which are psychologically very different. In the one case, what happens is that I remember the content "eating my breakfast"; in the other case, I assent to the content "Caesar's conquest of Gaul occurred." In the latter case, but not in the former, the pastness is part of the content believed. Exactly similar remarks apply to the difference between expectation, such as we have when waiting for the thunder after a flash of lightning, and assent to a proposition about the future, such as we have in all the usual cases of inferential knowledge as to what will occur. I think this difficulty in the verbal expression of the temporal aspects of beliefs is one among the causes which have hampered philosophy in the consideration of time. The view of belief which I have been advocating contains little that is novel except the distinction of kinds of belief-feeling--such as memory and expectation. Thus James says: "Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth...IN ITS INNER NATURE, BELIEF, OR THE SENSE OF REALITY, IS A SORT OF FEELING MORE ALLIED TO THE EMOTIONS THAN TO ANYTHING ELSE" ("Psychology," vol. ii, p. 283. James's italics). He proceeds to point out that drunkenness, and, still more, nitrous-oxide intoxication, will heighten the sense of belief: in the latter case, he says, a man's very soul may sweat with conviction, and he be all the time utterly unable to say what he is convinced of. It would seem that, in such cases, the feeling of belief exists unattached, without its usual relation to a content believed, just as the feeling of familiarity may sometimes occur without being related to any definite familiar object. The feeling of belief, when it occurs in this separated heightened form, generally leads us to look for a content to which to attach it. Much of what passes for revelation or mystic insight probably comes in this way: the belief-feeling, in abnormal strength, attaches itself, more or less accidentally, to some content which we happen to think of at the appropriate moment. But this is only a speculation, upon which I do not wish to lay too much stress. LECTURE XIII. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD The definition of truth and falsehood, which is our topic to-day, lies strictly outside our general subject, namely the analysis of mind. From the psychological standpoint, there may be different kinds of belief, and different degrees of certainty, but there cannot be any purely psychological means of distinguishing between true and false beliefs. A belief is rendered true or false by relation to a fact, which may lie outside the experience of the person entertaining the belief. Truth and falsehood, except in the case of beliefs about our own minds, depend upon the relations of mental occurrences to outside things, and thus take us beyond the analysis of mental occurrences as they are in themselves. Nevertheless, we can hardly avoid the consideration of truth and falsehood. We wish to believe that our beliefs, sometimes at least, yield KNOWLEDGE, and a belief does not yield knowledge unless it is true. The question whether our minds are instruments of knowledge, and, if so, in what sense, is so vital that any suggested analysis of mind must be examined in relation to this question. To ignore this question would be like describing a chronometer without regard to its accuracy as a time-keeper, or a thermometer without mentioning the fact that it measures temperature. Many difficult questions arise in connection with knowledge. It is difficult to define knowledge, difficult to decide whether we have any knowledge, and difficult, even if it is conceded that we sometimes have knowledge to discover whether we can ever know that we have knowledge in this or that particular case. I shall divide the discussion into four parts: I. We may regard knowledge, from a behaviourist standpoint, as exhibited in a certain kind of response to the environment. This response must have some characteristics which it shares with those of scientific instruments, but must also have others that are peculiar to knowledge. We shall find that this point of view is important, but not exhaustive of the nature of knowledge. II. We may hold that the beliefs that constitute knowledge are distinguished from such as are erroneous or uncertain by properties which are intrinsic either to single beliefs or to systems of beliefs, being in either case discoverable without reference to outside fact. Views of this kind have been widely held among philosophers, but we shall find no reason to accept them. III. We believe that some beliefs are true, and some false. This raises the problem of VERIFIABILITY: are there any circumstances which can justifiably give us an unusual degree of certainty that such and such a belief is true? It is obvious that there are circumstances which in fact cause a certainty of this sort, and we wish to learn what we can from examining these circumstances. IV. Finally, there is the formal problem of defining truth and falsehood, and deriving the objective reference of a proposition from the meanings of its component words. We will consider these four problems in succession. I. We may regard a human being as an instrument, which makes various responses to various stimuli. If we observe these responses from outside, we shall regard them as showing knowledge when they display two characteristics, ACCURACY and APPROPRIATENESS. These two are quite distinct, and even sometimes incompatible. If I am being pursued by a tiger, accuracy is furthered by turning round to look at him, but appropriateness by running away without making any search for further knowledge of the beast. I shall return to the question of appropriateness later; for the present it is accuracy that I wish to consider. When we are viewing a man from the outside, it is not his beliefs, but his bodily movements, that we can observe. His knowledge must be inferred from his bodily movements, and especially from what he says and writes. For the present we may ignore beliefs, and regard a man's knowledge as actually consisting in what he says and does. That is to say, we will construct, as far as possible, a purely behaviouristic account of truth and falsehood. If you ask a boy "What is twice two?" and the boy says "four," you take that as prima facie evidence that the boy knows what twice two is. But if you go on to ask what is twice three, twice four, twice five, and so on, and the boy always answers "four," you come to the conclusion that he knows nothing about it. Exactly similar remarks apply to scientific instruments. I know a certain weather-cock which has the pessimistic habit of always pointing to the north-east. If you were to see it first on a cold March day, you would think it an excellent weather-cock; but with the first warm day of spring your confidence would be shaken. The boy and the weather-cock have the same defect: they do not vary their response when the stimulus is varied. A good instrument, or a person with much knowledge, will give different responses to stimuli which differ in relevant ways. This is the first point in defining accuracy of response. We will now assume another boy, who also, when you first question him, asserts that twice two is four. But with this boy, instead of asking him different questions, you make a practice of asking him the same question every day at breakfast. You find that he says five, or six, or seven, or any other number at random, and you conclude that he also does not know what twice two is, though by good luck he answered right the first time. This boy is like a weather-cock which, instead of being stuck fast, is always going round and round, changing without any change of wind. This boy and weather-cock have the opposite defect to that of the previous pair: they give different responses to stimuli which do not differ in any relevant way. In connection with vagueness in memory, we already had occasion to consider the definition of accuracy. Omitting some of the niceties of our previous discussion, we may say that an instrument is ACCURATE when it avoids the defects of the two boys and weather-cocks, that is to say, when-- (a) It gives different responses to stimuli which differ in relevant ways; (b) It gives the same response to stimuli which do not differ in relevant ways. What are relevant ways depends upon the nature and purpose of the instrument. In the case of a weather-cock, the direction of the wind is relevant, but not its strength; in the case of the boy, the meaning of the words of your question is relevant, but not the loudness of your voice, or whether you are his father or his schoolmaster If, however, you were a boy of his own age, that would be relevant, and the appropriate response would be different. It is clear that knowledge is displayed by accuracy of response to certain kinds of stimuli, e.g. examinations. Can we say, conversely, that it consists wholly of such accuracy of response? I do not think we can; but we can go a certain distance in this direction. For this purpose we must define more carefully the kind of accuracy and the kind of response that may be expected where there is knowledge. From our present point of view, it is difficult to exclude perception from knowledge; at any rate, knowledge is displayed by actions based upon perception. A bird flying among trees avoids bumping into their branches; its avoidance is a response to visual sensations. This response has the characteristic of accuracy, in the main, and leads us to say that the bird "knows," by sight, what objects are in its neighbourhood. For a behaviourist, this must certainly count as knowledge, however it may be viewed by analytic psychology. In this case, what is known, roughly, is the stimulus; but in more advanced knowledge the stimulus and what is known become different. For example, you look in your calendar and find that Easter will be early next year. Here the stimulus is the calendar, whereas the response concerns the future. Even this can be paralleled among instruments: the behaviour of the barometer has a present stimulus but foretells the future, so that the barometer might be said, in a sense, to know the future. However that may be, the point I am emphasizing as regards knowledge is that what is known may be quite different from the stimulus, and no part of the cause of the knowledge-response. It is only in sense-knowledge that the stimulus and what is known are, with qualifications, identifiable. In knowledge of the future, it is obvious that they are totally distinct, since otherwise the response would precede the stimulus. In abstract knowledge also they are distinct, since abstract facts have no date. In knowledge of the past there are complications, which we must briefly examine. Every form of memory will be, from our present point of view, in one sense a delayed response. But this phrase does not quite clearly express what is meant. If you light a fuse and connect it with a heap of dynamite, the explosion of the dynamite may be spoken of, in a sense, as a delayed response to your lighting of the fuse. But that only means that it is a somewhat late portion of a continuous process of which the earlier parts have less emotional interest. This is not the case with habit. A display of habit has two sorts of causes: (a) the past occurrences which generated the habit, (b) the present occurrence which brings it into play. When you drop a weight on your toe, and say what you do say, the habit has been caused by imitation of your undesirable associates, whereas it is brought into play by the dropping of the weight. The great bulk of our knowledge is a habit in this sense: whenever I am asked when I was born, I reply correctly by mere habit. It would hardly be correct to say that getting born was the stimulus, and that my reply is a delayed response But in cases of memory this way of speaking would have an element of truth. In an habitual memory, the event remembered was clearly an essential part of the stimulus to the formation of the habit. The present stimulus which brings the habit into play produces a different response from that which it would produce if the habit did not exist. Therefore the habit enters into the causation of the response, and so do, at one remove, the causes of the habit. It follows that an event remembered is an essential part of the causes of our remembering. In spite, however, of the fact that what is known is SOMETIMES an indispensable part of the cause of the knowledge, this circumstance is, I think, irrelevant to the general question with which we are concerned, namely What sort of response to what sort of stimulus can be regarded as displaying knowledge? There is one characteristic which the response must have, namely, it must consist of voluntary movements. The need of this characteristic is connected with the characteristic of APPROPRIATENESS, which I do not wish to consider as yet. For the present I wish only to obtain a clearer idea of the sort of ACCURACY that a knowledge-response must have. It is clear from many instances that accuracy, in other cases, may be purely mechanical. The most complete form of accuracy consists in giving correct answers to questions, an achievement in which calculating machines far surpass human beings. In asking a question of a calculating machine, you must use its language: you must not address it in English, any more than you would address an Englishman in Chinese. But if you address it in the language it understands, it will tell you what is 34521 times 19987, without a moment's hesitation or a hint of inaccuracy. We do not say the machine KNOWS the answer, because it has no purpose of its own in giving the answer: it does not wish to impress you with its cleverness, or feel proud of being such a good machine. But as far as mere accuracy goes, the machine leaves nothing to be desired. Accuracy of response is a perfectly clear notion in the case of answers to questions, but in other cases it is much more obscure. We may say generally that an object whether animate or inanimate, is "sensitive" to a certain feature of the environment if it behaves differently according to the presence or absence of that feature. Thus iron is sensitive to anything magnetic. But sensitiveness does not constitute knowledge, and knowledge of a fact which is not sensible is not sensitiveness to that fact, as we have seen in distinguishing the fact known from the stimulus. As soon as we pass beyond the simple case of question and answer, the definition of knowledge by means of behaviour demands the consideration of purpose. A carrier pigeon flies home, and so we say it "knows" the way. But if it merely flew to some place at random, we should not say that it "knew" the way to that place, any more than a stone rolling down hill knows the way to the valley. On the features which distinguish knowledge from accuracy of response in general, not much can be said from a behaviourist point of view without referring to purpose. But the necessity of SOMETHING besides accuracy of response may be brought out by the following consideration: Suppose two persons, of whom one believed whatever the other disbelieved, and disbelieved whatever the other believed. So far as accuracy and sensitiveness of response alone are concerned, there would be nothing to choose between these two persons. A thermometer which went down for warm weather and up for cold might be just as accurate as the usual kind; and a person who always believes falsely is just as sensitive an instrument as a person who always believes truly. The observable and practical difference between them would be that the one who always believed falsely would quickly come to a bad end. This illustrates once more that accuracy of response to stimulus does not alone show knowledge, but must be reinforced by appropriateness, i.e. suitability for realizing one's purpose. This applies even in the apparently simple case of answering questions: if the purpose of the answers is to deceive, their falsehood, not their truth, will be evidence of knowledge. The proportion of the combination of appropriateness with accuracy in the definition of knowledge is difficult; it seems that both enter in, but that appropriateness is only required as regards the general type of response, not as regards each individual instance. II. I have so far assumed as unquestionable the view that the truth or falsehood of a belief consists in a relation to a certain fact, namely the objective of the belief. This view has, however, been often questioned. Philosophers have sought some intrinsic criterion by which true and false beliefs could be distinguished.* I am afraid their chief reason for this search has been the wish to feel more certainty than seems otherwise possible as to what is true and what is false. If we could discover the truth of a belief by examining its intrinsic characteristics, or those of some collection of beliefs of which it forms part, the pursuit of truth, it is thought, would be a less arduous business than it otherwise appears to be. But the attempts which have been made in this direction are not encouraging. I will take two criteria which have been suggested, namely, (1) self-evidence, (2) mutual coherence. If we can show that these are inadequate, we may feel fairly certain that no intrinsic criterion hitherto suggested will suffice to distinguish true from false beliefs. * The view that such a criterion exists is generally held by those whose views are in any degree derived from Hegel. It may be illustrated by the following passage from Lossky, "The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge" (Macmillan, 1919), p. 268: "Strictly speaking, a false judgment is not a judgment at all. The predicate does not follow from the subject S alone, but from the subject plus a certain addition C, WHICH IN NO SENSE BELONGS TO THE CONTENT OF THE JUDGMENT. What takes place may be a process of association of ideas, of imagining, or the like, but is not a process of judging. An experienced psychologist will be able by careful observation to detect that in this process there is wanting just the specific element of the objective dependence of the predicate upon the subject which is characteristic of a judgment. It must be admitted, however, that an exceptional power of observation is needed in order to distinguish, by means of introspection, mere combination of ideas from judgments." (1) Self-evidence.--Some of our beliefs seem to be peculiarly indubitable. One might instance the belief that two and two are four, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, nor one thing in two places, or that a particular buttercup that we are seeing is yellow. The suggestion we are to examine is that such: beliefs have some recognizable quality which secures their truth, and the truth of whatever is deduced from them according to self-evident principles of inference. This theory is set forth, for example, by Meinong in his book, "Ueber die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens." If this theory is to be logically tenable, self-evidence must not consist merely in the fact that we believe a proposition. We believe that our beliefs are sometimes erroneous, and we wish to be able to select a certain class of beliefs which are never erroneous. If we are to do this, it must be by some mark which belongs only to certain beliefs, not to all; and among those to which it belongs there must be none that are mutually inconsistent. If, for example, two propositions p and q were self-evident, and it were also self-evident that p and q could not both be true, that would condemn self-evidence as a guarantee of truth. Again, self-evidence must not be the same thing as the absence of doubt or the presence of complete certainty. If we are completely certain of a proposition, we do not seek a ground to support our belief. If self-evidence is alleged as a ground of belief, that implies that doubt has crept in, and that our self-evident proposition has not wholly resisted the assaults of scepticism. To say that any given person believes some things so firmly that he cannot be made to doubt them is no doubt true. Such beliefs he will be willing to use as premisses in reasoning, and to him personally they will seem to have as much evidence as any belief can need. But among the propositions which one man finds indubitable there will be some that another man finds it quite possible to doubt. It used to seem self-evident that there could not be men at the Antipodes, because they would fall off, or at best grow giddy from standing on their heads. But New Zealanders find the falsehood of this proposition self-evident. Therefore, if self-evidence is a guarantee of truth, our ancestors must have been mistaken in thinking their beliefs about the Antipodes self-evident. Meinong meets this difficulty by saying that some beliefs are falsely thought to be self-evident, but in the case of others it is self-evident that they are self-evident, and these are wholly reliable. Even this, however, does not remove the practical risk of error, since we may mistakenly believe it self-evident that a certain belief is self-evident. To remove all risk of error, we shall need an endless series of more and more complicated self-evident beliefs, which cannot possibly be realized in practice. It would seem, therefore, that self-evidence is useless as a practical criterion for insuring truth. The same result follows from examining instances. If we take the four instances mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, we shall find that three of them are logical, while the fourth is a judgment of perception. The proposition that two and two are four follows by purely logical deduction from definitions: that means that its truth results, not from the properties of objects, but from the meanings of symbols. Now symbols, in mathematics, mean what we choose; thus the feeling of self-evidence, in this case, seems explicable by the fact that the whole matter is within our control. I do not wish to assert that this is the whole truth about mathematical propositions, for the question is complicated, and I do not know what the whole truth is. But I do wish to suggest that the feeling of self-evidence in mathematical propositions has to do with the fact that they are concerned with the meanings of symbols, not with properties of the world such as external observation might reveal. Similar considerations apply to the impossibility of a thing being in two places at once, or of two things being in one place at the same time. These impossibilities result logically, if I am not mistaken, from the definitions of one thing and one place. That is to say, they are not laws of physics, but only part of the intellectual apparatus which we have manufactured for manipulating physics. Their self-evidence, if this is so, lies merely in the fact that they represent our decision as to the use of words, not a property of physical objects. Judgments of perception, such as "this buttercup is yellow," are in a quite different position from judgments of logic, and their self-evidence must have a different explanation. In order to arrive at the nucleus of such a judgment, we will eliminate, as far as possible, the use of words which take us beyond the present fact, such as "buttercup" and "yellow." The simplest kind of judgment underlying the perception that a buttercup is yellow would seem to be the perception of similarity in two colours seen simultaneously. Suppose we are seeing two buttercups, and we perceive that their colours are similar. This similarity is a physical fact, not a matter of symbols or words; and it certainly seems to be indubitable in a way that many judgments are not. The first thing to observe, in regard to such judgments, is that as they stand they are vague. The word "similar" is a vague word, since there are degrees of similarity, and no one can say where similarity ends and dissimilarity begins. It is unlikely that our two buttercups have EXACTLY the same colour, and if we judged that they had we should have passed altogether outside the region of self-evidence. To make our proposition more precise, let us suppose that we are also seeing a red rose at the same time. Then we may judge that the colours of the buttercups are more similar to each other than to the colour of the rose. This judgment seems more complicated, but has certainly gained in precision. Even now, however, it falls short of complete precision, since similarity is not prima facie measurable, and it would require much discussion to decide what we mean by greater or less similarity. To this process of the pursuit of precision there is strictly no limit. The next thing to observe (although I do not personally doubt that most of our judgments of perception are true) is that it is very difficult to define any class of such judgments which can be known, by its intrinsic quality, to be always exempt from error. Most of our judgments of perception involve correlations, as when we judge that a certain noise is that of a passing cart. Such judgments are all obviously liable to error, since there is no correlation of which we have a right to be certain that it is invariable. Other judgments of perception are derived from recognition, as when we say "this is a buttercup," or even merely "this is yellow." All such judgments entail some risk of error, though sometimes perhaps a very small one; some flowers that look like buttercups are marigolds, and colours that some would call yellow others might call orange. Our subjective certainty is usually a result of habit, and may lead us astray in circumstances which are unusual in ways of which we are unaware. For such reasons, no form of self-evidence seems to afford an absolute criterion of truth. Nevertheless, it is perhaps true that judgments having a high degree of subjective certainty are more apt to be true than other judgments. But if this be the case, it is a result to be demonstrated, not a premiss from which to start in defining truth and falsehood. As an initial guarantee, therefore, neither self-evidence nor subjective certainty can be accepted as adequate. (2) Coherence.--Coherence as the definition of truth is advocated by idealists, particularly by those who in the main follow Hegel. It is set forth ably in Mr. Joachim's book, "The Nature of Truth" (Oxford, 1906). According to this view, any set of propositions other than the whole of truth can be condemned on purely logical grounds, as internally inconsistent; a single proposition, if it is what we should ordinarily call false, contradicts itself irremediably, while if it is what we should ordinarily call true, it has implications which compel us to admit other propositions, which in turn lead to others, and so on, until we find ourselves committed to the whole of truth. One might illustrate by a very simple example: if I say "so-and-so is a married man," that is not a self-subsistent proposition. We cannot logically conceive of a universe in which this proposition constituted the whole of truth. There must be also someone who is a married woman, and who is married to the particular man in question. The view we are considering regards everything that can be said about any one object as relative in the same sort of way as "so-and-so is a married man." But everything, according to this view, is relative, not to one or two other things, but to all other things, so that from one bit of truth the whole can be inferred. The fundamental objection to this view is logical, and consists in a criticism of its doctrine as to relations. I shall omit this line of argument, which I have developed elsewhere.* For the moment I will content myself with saying that the powers of logic seem to me very much less than this theory supposes. If it were taken seriously, its advocates ought to profess that any one truth is logically inferable from any other, and that, for example, the fact that Caesar conquered Gaul, if adequately considered, would enable us to discover what the weather will be to-morrow. No such claim is put forward in practice, and the necessity of empirical observation is not denied; but according to the theory it ought to be. * In the article on "The Monistic Theory of Truth" in "Philosophical Essays" (Longmans, 1910), reprinted from the "Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society," 1906-7. Another objection is that no endeavour is made to show that we cannot form a consistent whole composed partly or wholly of false propositions, as in a novel. Leibniz's conception of many possible worlds seems to accord much better with modern logic and with the practical empiricism which is now universal. The attempt to deduce the world by pure thought is attractive, and in former times was largely supposed capable of success. But nowadays most men admit that beliefs must be tested by observation, and not merely by the fact that they harmonize with other beliefs. A consistent fairy-tale is a different thing from truth, however elaborate it may be. But to pursue this topic would lead us into difficult technicalities; I shall therefore assume, without further argument, that coherence is not sufficient as a definition of truth. III. Many difficult problems arise as regards the verifiability of beliefs. We believe various things, and while we believe them we think we know them. But it sometimes turns out that we were mistaken, or at any rate we come to think we were. We must be mistaken either in our previous opinion or in our subsequent recantation; therefore our beliefs are not all correct, and there are cases of belief which are not cases of knowledge. The question of verifiability is in essence this: can we discover any set of beliefs which are never mistaken or any test which, when applicable, will always enable us to discriminate between true and false beliefs? Put thus broadly and abstractly, the answer must be negative. There is no way hitherto discovered of wholly eliminating the risk of error, and no infallible criterion. If we believe we have found a criterion, this belief itself may be mistaken; we should be begging the question if we tried to test the criterion by applying the criterion to itself. But although the notion of an absolute criterion is chimerical, there may be relative criteria, which increase the probability of truth. Common sense and science hold that there are. Let us see what they have to say. One of the plainest cases of verification, perhaps ultimately the only case, consists in the happening of something expected. You go to the station believing that there will be a train at a certain time; you find the train, you get into it, and it starts at the expected time This constitutes verification, and is a perfectly definite experience. It is, in a sense, the converse of memory instead of having first sensations and then images accompanied by belief, we have first images accompanied by belief and then sensations. Apart from differences as to the time-order and the accompanying feelings, the relation between image and sensation is closely similar in the two cases of memory and expectation; it is a relation of similarity, with difference as to causal efficacy--broadly, the image has the psychological but not the physical effects that the sensation would have. When an image accompanied by an expectation-belief is thus succeeded by a sensation which is the "meaning" of the image, we say that the expectation-belief has been verified. The experience of verification in this sense is exceedingly familiar; it happens every time that accustomed activities have results that are not surprising, in eating and walking and talking and all our daily pursuits. But although the experience in question is common, it is not wholly easy to give a theoretical account of it. How do we know that the sensation resembles the previous image? Does the image persist in presence of the sensation, so that we can compare the two? And even if SOME image does persist, how do we know that it is the previous image unchanged? It does not seem as if this line of inquiry offered much hope of a successful issue. It is better, I think, to take a more external and causal view of the relation of expectation to expected occurrence. If the occurrence, when it comes, gives us the feeling of expectedness, and if the expectation, beforehand, enabled us to act in a way which proves appropriate to the occurrence, that must be held to constitute the maximum of verification. We have first an expectation, then a sensation with the feeling of expectedness related to memory of the expectation. This whole experience, when it occurs, may be defined as verification, and as constituting the truth of the expectation. Appropriate action, during the period of expectation, may be regarded as additional verification, but is not essential. The whole process may be illustrated by looking up a familiar quotation, finding it in the expected words, and in the expected part of the book. In this case we can strengthen the verification by writing down beforehand the words which we expect to find. I think all verification is ultimately of the above sort. We verify a scientific hypothesis indirectly, by deducing consequences as to the future, which subsequent experience confirms. If somebody were to doubt whether Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, verification could only be obtained from the future. We could proceed to display manuscripts to our historical sceptic, in which it was said that Caesar had behaved in this way. We could advance arguments, verifiable by future experience, to prove the antiquity of the manuscript from its texture, colour, etc. We could find inscriptions agreeing with the historian on other points, and tending to show his general accuracy. The causal laws which our arguments would assume could be verified by the future occurrence of events inferred by means of them. The existence and persistence of causal laws, it is true, must be regarded as a fortunate accident, and how long it will continue we cannot tell. Meanwhile verification remains often practically possible. And since it is sometimes possible, we can gradually discover what kinds of beliefs tend to be verified by experience, and what kinds tend to be falsified; to the former kinds we give an increased degree of assent, to the latter kinds a diminished degree. The process is not absolute or infallible, but it has been found capable of sifting beliefs and building up science. It affords no theoretical refutation of the sceptic, whose position must remain logically unassailable; but if complete scepticism is rejected, it gives the practical method by which the system of our beliefs grows gradually towards the unattainable ideal of impeccable knowledge. IV. I come now to the purely formal definition of the truth or falsehood of a belief. For this definition it is necessary first of all to consider the derivation of the objective reference of a proposition from the meanings of its component words or images. Just as a word has meaning, so a proposition has an objective reference. The objective reference of a proposition is a function (in the mathematical sense) of the meanings of its component words. But the objective reference differs from the meaning of a word through the duality of truth and falsehood. You may believe the proposition "to-day is Tuesday" both when, in fact, to-day is Tuesday, and when to-day is not Tuesday. If to-day is not Tuesday, this fact is the objective of your belief that to-day is Tuesday. But obviously the relation of your belief to the fact is different in this case from what it is in the case when to-day is Tuesday. We may say, metaphorically, that when to-day is Tuesday, your belief that it is Tuesday points TOWARDS the fact, whereas when to-day is not Tuesday your belief points AWAY FROM the fact. Thus the objective reference of a belief is not determined by the fact alone, but by the direction of the belief towards or away from the fact.* If, on a Tuesday, one man believes that it is Tuesday while another believes that it is not Tuesday, their beliefs have the same objective, namely the fact that it is Tuesday but the true belief points towards the fact while the false one points away from it. Thus, in order to define the reference of a proposition we have to take account not only of the objective, but also of the direction of pointing, towards the objective in the case of a true proposition and away from it in the case of a false one. * I owe this way of looking at the matter to my friend Ludwig Wittgenstein. This mode of stating the nature of the objective reference of a proposition is necessitated by the circumstance that there are true and false propositions, but not true and false facts. If to-day is Tuesday, there is not a false objective "to-day is not Tuesday," which could be the objective of the false belief "to-day is not Tuesday." This is the reason why two beliefs which are each other's contradictories have the same objective. There is, however, a practical inconvenience, namely that we cannot determine the objective reference of a proposition, according to this definition, unless we know whether the proposition is true or false. To avoid this inconvenience, it is better to adopt a slightly different phraseology, and say: The "meaning" of the proposition "to-day is Tuesday" consists in pointing to the fact "to-day is Tuesday" if that is a fact, or away from the fact "to-day is not Tuesday" if that is a fact. The "meaning" of the proposition "to-day is not Tuesday" will be exactly the opposite. By this hypothetical form we are able to speak of the meaning of a proposition without knowing whether it is true or false. According to this definition, we know the meaning of a proposition when we know what would make it true and what would make it false, even if we do not know whether it is in fact true or false. The meaning of a proposition is derivative from the meanings of its constituent words. Propositions occur in pairs, distinguished (in simple cases) by the absence or presence of the word "not." Two such propositions have the same objective, but opposite meanings: when one is true, the other is false, and when one is false, the other is true. The purely formal definition of truth and falsehood offers little difficulty. What is required is a formal expression of the fact that a proposition is true when it points towards its objective, and false when it points away from it, In very simple cases we can give a very simple account of this: we can say that true propositions actually resemble their objectives in a way in which false propositions do not. But for this purpose it is necessary to revert to image-propositions instead of word-propositions. Let us take again the illustration of a memory-image of a familiar room, and let us suppose that in the image the window is to the left of the door. If in fact the window is to the left of the door, there is a correspondence between the image and the objective; there is the same relation between the window and the door as between the images of them. The image-memory consists of the image of the window to the left of the image of the door. When this is true, the very same relation relates the terms of the objective (namely the window and the door) as relates the images which mean them. In this case the correspondence which constitutes truth is very simple. In the case we have just been considering the objective consists of two parts with a certain relation (that of left-to-right), and the proposition consists of images of these parts with the very same relation. The same proposition, if it were false, would have a less simple formal relation to its objective. If the image-proposition consists of an image of the window to the left of an image of the door, while in fact the window is not to the left of the door, the proposition does not result from the objective by the mere substitution of images for their prototypes. Thus in this unusually simple case we can say that a true proposition "corresponds" to its objective in a formal sense in which a false proposition does not. Perhaps it may be possible to modify this notion of formal correspondence in such a way as to be more widely applicable, but if so, the modifications required will be by no means slight. The reasons for this must now be considered. To begin with, the simple type of correspondence we have been exhibiting can hardly occur when words are substituted for images, because, in word-propositions, relations are usually expressed by words, which are not themselves relations. Take such a proposition as "Socrates precedes Plato." Here the word "precedes" is just as solid as the words "Socrates" and "Plato"; it MEANS a relation, but is not a relation. Thus the objective which makes our proposition true consists of TWO terms with a relation between them, whereas our proposition consists of THREE terms with a relation of order between them. Of course, it would be perfectly possible, theoretically, to indicate a few chosen relations, not by words, but by relations between the other words. "Socrates-Plato" might be used to mean "Socrates precedes Plato"; "Plato-Socrates" might be used to mean "Plato was born before Socrates and died after him"; and so on. But the possibilities of such a method would be very limited. For aught I know, there may be languages that use it, but they are not among the languages with which I am acquainted. And in any case, in view of the multiplicity of relations that we wish to express, no language could advance far without words for relations. But as soon as we have words for relations, word-propositions have necessarily more terms than the facts to which they refer, and cannot therefore correspond so simply with their objectives as some image-propositions can. The consideration of negative propositions and negative facts introduces further complications. An image-proposition is necessarily positive: we can image the window to the left of the door, or to the right of the door, but we can form no image of the bare negative "the window not to the left of the door." We can DISBELIEVE the image-proposition expressed by "the window to the left of the door," and our disbelief will be true if the window is not to the left of the door. But we can form no image of the fact that the window is not to the left of the door. Attempts have often been made to deny such negative facts, but, for reasons which I have given elsewhere,* I believe these attempts to be mistaken, and I shall assume that there are negative facts. * "Monist," January, 1919, p. 42 ff. Word-propositions, like image-propositions, are always positive facts. The fact that Socrates precedes Plato is symbolized in English by the fact that the word "precedes" occurs between the words "Socrates" and "Plato." But we cannot symbolize the fact that Plato does not precede Socrates by not putting the word "precedes" between "Plato" and "Socrates." A negative fact is not sensible, and language, being intended for communication, has to be sensible. Therefore we symbolize the fact that Plato does not precede Socrates by putting the words "does not precede" between "Plato" and "Socrates." We thus obtain a series of words which is just as positive a fact as the series "Socrates precedes Plato." The propositions asserting negative facts are themselves positive facts; they are merely different positive facts from those asserting positive facts. We have thus, as regards the opposition of positive and negative, three different sorts of duality, according as we are dealing with facts, image-propositions, or word-propositions. We have, namely: (1) Positive and negative facts; (2) Image-propositions, which may be believed or disbelieved, but do not allow any duality of content corresponding to positive and negative facts; (3) Word-propositions, which are always positive facts, but are of two kinds: one verified by a positive objective, the other by a negative objective. Owing to these complications, the simplest type of correspondence is impossible when either negative facts or negative propositions are involved. Even when we confine ourselves to relations between two terms which are both imaged, it may be impossible to form an image-proposition in which the relation of the terms is represented by the same relation of the images. Suppose we say "Caesar was 2,000 years before Foch," we express a certain temporal relation between Caesar and Foch; but we cannot allow 2,000 years to elapse between our image of Caesar and our image of Foch. This is perhaps not a fair example, since "2,000 years before" is not a direct relation. But take a case where the relation is direct, say, "the sun is brighter than the moon." We can form visual images of sunshine and moonshine, and it may happen that our image of the sunshine is the brighter of the two, but this is by no means either necessary or sufficient. The act of comparison, implied in our judgment, is something more than the mere coexistence of two images, one of which is in fact brighter than the other. It would take us too far from our main topic if we were to go into the question what actually occurs when we make this judgment. Enough has been said to show that the correspondence between the belief and its objective is more complicated in this case than in that of the window to the left of the door, and this was all that had to be proved. In spite of these complications, the general nature of the formal correspondence which makes truth is clear from our instances. In the case of the simpler kind of propositions, namely those that I call "atomic" propositions, where there is only one word expressing a relation, the objective which would verify our proposition, assuming that the word "not" is absent, is obtained by replacing each word by what it means, the word meaning a relation being replaced by this relation among the meanings of the other words. For example, if the proposition is "Socrates precedes Plato," the objective which verifies it results from replacing the word "Socrates" by Socrates, the word "Plato" by Plato, and the word "precedes" by the relation of preceding between Socrates and Plato. If the result of this process is a fact, the proposition is true; if not, it is false. When our proposition is "Socrates does not precede Plato," the conditions of truth and falsehood are exactly reversed. More complicated propositions can be dealt with on the same lines. In fact, the purely formal question, which has occupied us in this last section, offers no very formidable difficulties. I do not believe that the above formal theory is untrue, but I do believe that it is inadequate. It does not, for example, throw any light upon our preference for true beliefs rather than false ones. This preference is only explicable by taking account of the causal efficacy of beliefs, and of the greater appropriateness of the responses resulting from true beliefs. But appropriateness depends upon purpose, and purpose thus becomes a vital part of theory of knowledge. LECTURE XIV. EMOTIONS AND WILL On the two subjects of the present lecture I have nothing original to say, and I am treating them only in order to complete the discussion of my main thesis, namely that all psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone. Emotions are traditionally regarded by psychologists as a separate class of mental occurrences: I am, of course, not concerned to deny the obvious fact that they have characteristics which make a special investigation of them necessary. What I am concerned with is the analysis of emotions. It is clear that an emotion is essentially complex, and we have to inquire whether it ever contains any non-physiological material not reducible to sensations and images and their relations. Although what specially concerns us is the analysis of emotions, we shall find that the more important topic is the physiological causation of emotions. This is a subject upon which much valuable and exceedingly interesting work has been done, whereas the bare analysis of emotions has proved somewhat barren. In view of the fact that we have defined perceptions, sensations, and images by their physiological causation, it is evident that our problem of the analysis of the emotions is bound up with the problem of their physiological causation. Modern views on the causation of emotions begin with what is called the James-Lange theory. James states this view in the following terms ("Psychology," vol. ii, p. 449): "Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions, grief, fear, rage, love, is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that THE BODILY CHANGES FOLLOW DIRECTLY THE PERCEPTION OF THE EXCITING FACT, AND THAT OUR FEELING OF THE SAME CHANGES AS THEY OCCUR _IS_ THE EMOTION (James's italics). Common sense says: we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth." Round this hypothesis a very voluminous literature has grown up. The history of its victory over earlier criticism, and its difficulties with the modern experimental work of Sherrington and Cannon, is well told by James R. Angell in an article called "A Reconsideration of James's Theory of Emotion in the Light of Recent Criticisms."* In this article Angell defends James's theory and to me--though I speak with diffidence on a question as to which I have little competence--it appears that his defence is on the whole successful. * "Psychological Review," 1916. Sherrington, by experiments on dogs, showed that many of the usual marks of emotion were present in their behaviour even when, by severing the spinal cord in the lower cervical region, the viscera were cut off from all communication with the brain, except that existing through certain cranial nerves. He mentions the various signs which "contributed to indicate the existence of an emotion as lively as the animal had ever shown us before the spinal operation had been made."* He infers that the physiological condition of the viscera cannot be the cause of the emotion displayed under such circumstances, and concludes: "We are forced back toward the likelihood that the visceral expression of emotion is SECONDARY to the cerebral action occurring with the psychical state.... We may with James accept visceral and organic sensations and the memories and associations of them as contributory to primitive emotion, but we must regard them as re-enforcing rather than as initiating the psychosis."* * Quoted by Angell, loc. cit. Angell suggests that the display of emotion in such cases may be due to past experience, generating habits which would require only the stimulation of cerebral reflex arcs. Rage and some forms of fear, however, may, he thinks, gain expression without the brain. Rage and fear have been especially studied by Cannon, whose work is of the greatest importance. His results are given in his book, "Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage" (D. Appleton and Co., 1916). The most interesting part of Cannon's book consists in the investigation of the effects produced by secretion of adrenin. Adrenin is a substance secreted into the blood by the adrenal glands. These are among the ductless glands, the functions of which, both in physiology and in connection with the emotions, have only come to be known during recent years. Cannon found that pain, fear and rage occurred in circumstances which affected the supply of adrenin, and that an artificial injection of adrenin could, for example, produce all the symptoms of fear. He studied the effects of adrenin on various parts of the body; he found that it causes the pupils to dilate, hairs to stand erect, blood vessels to be constricted, and so on. These effects were still produced if the parts in question were removed from the body and kept alive artificially.* * Cannon's work is not unconnected with that of Mosso, who maintains, as the result of much experimental work, that "the seat of the emotions lies in the sympathetic nervous system." An account of the work of both these men will be found in Goddard's "Psychology of the Normal and Sub-normal" (Kegan Paul, 1919), chap. vii and Appendix. Cannon's chief argument against James is, if I understand him rightly, that similar affections of the viscera may accompany dissimilar emotions, especially fear and rage. Various different emotions make us cry, and therefore it cannot be true to say, as James does, that we "feel sorry because we cry," since sometimes we cry when we feel glad. This argument, however, is by no means conclusive against James, because it cannot be shown that there are no visceral differences for different emotions, and indeed it is unlikely that this is the case. As Angell says (loc. cit.): "Fear and joy may both cause cardiac palpitation, but in one case we find high tonus of the skeletal muscles, in the other case relaxation and the general sense of weakness." Angell's conclusion, after discussing the experiments of Sherrington and Cannon, is: "I would therefore submit that, so far as concerns the critical suggestions by these two psychologists, James's essential contentions are not materially affected." If it were necessary for me to take sides on this question, I should agree with this conclusion; but I think my thesis as to the analysis of emotion can be maintained without coming to a probably premature conclusion upon the doubtful parts of the physiological problem. According to our definitions, if James is right, an emotion may be regarded as involving a confused perception of the viscera concerned in its causation, while if Cannon and Sherrington are right, an emotion involves a confused perception of its external stimulus. This follows from what was said in Lecture VII. We there defined a perception as an appearance, however irregular, of one or more objects external to the brain. And in order to be an appearance of one or more objects, it is only necessary that the occurrence in question should be connected with them by a continuous chain, and should vary when they are varied sufficiently. Thus the question whether a mental occurrence can be called a perception turns upon the question whether anything can be inferred from it as to its causes outside the brain: if such inference is possible, the occurrence in question will come within our definition of a perception. And in that case, according to the definition in Lecture VIII, its non-mnemic elements will be sensations. Accordingly, whether emotions are caused by changes in the viscera or by sensible objects, they contain elements which are sensations according to our definition. An emotion in its entirety is, of course, something much more complex than a perception. An emotion is essentially a process, and it will be only what one may call a cross-section of the emotion that will be a perception, of a bodily condition according to James, or (in certain cases) of an external object according to his opponents. An emotion in its entirety contains dynamic elements, such as motor impulses, desires, pleasures and pains. Desires and pleasures and pains, according to the theory adopted in Lecture III, are characteristics of processes, not separate ingredients. An emotion--rage, for example--will be a certain kind of process, consisting of perceptions and (in general) bodily movements. The desires and pleasures and pains involved are properties of this process, not separate items in the stuff of which the emotion is composed. The dynamic elements in an emotion, if we are right in our analysis, contain, from our point of view, no ingredients beyond those contained in the processes considered in Lecture III. The ingredients of an emotion are only sensations and images and bodily movements succeeding each other according to a certain pattern. With this conclusion we may leave the emotions and pass to the consideration of the will. The first thing to be defined when we are dealing with Will is a VOLUNTARY MOVEMENT. We have already defined vital movements, and we have maintained that, from a behaviourist standpoint, it is impossible to distinguish which among such movements are reflex and which voluntary. Nevertheless, there certainly is a distinction. When we decide in the morning that it is time to get up, our consequent movement is voluntary. The beating of the heart, on the other hand, is involuntary: we can neither cause it nor prevent it by any decision of our own, except indirectly, as e.g. by drugs. Breathing is intermediate between the two: we normally breathe without the help of the will, but we can alter or stop our breathing if we choose. James ("Psychology," chap. xxvi) maintains that the only distinctive characteristic of a voluntary act is that it involves an idea of the movement to be performed, made up of memory-images of the kinaesthetic sensations which we had when the same movement occurred on some former occasion. He points out that, on this view, no movement can be made voluntarily unless it has previously occurred involuntarily.* * "Psychology," Vol. ii, pp. 492-3. I see no reason to doubt the correctness of this view. We shall say, then, that movements which are accompanied by kinaesthetic sensations tend to be caused by the images of those sensations, and when so caused are called VOLUNTARY. Volition, in the emphatic sense, involves something more than voluntary movement. The sort of case I am thinking of is decision after deliberation. Voluntary movements are a part of this, but not the whole. There is, in addition to them, a judgment: "This is what I shall do"; there is also a sensation of tension during doubt, followed by a different sensation at the moment of deciding. I see no reason whatever to suppose that there is any specifically new ingredient; sensations and images, with their relations and causal laws, yield all that seems to be wanted for the analysis of the will, together with the fact that kinaesthetic images tend to cause the movements with which they are connected. Conflict of desires is of course essential in the causation of the emphatic kind of will: there will be for a time kinaesthetic images of incompatible movements, followed by the exclusive image of the movement which is said to be willed. Thus will seems to add no new irreducible ingredient to the analysis of the mind. LECTURE XV. CHARACTERISTICS OF MENTAL PHENOMENA At the end of our journey it is time to return to the question from which we set out, namely: What is it that characterizes mind as opposed to matter? Or, to state the same question in other terms: How is psychology to be distinguished from physics? The answer provisionally suggested at the outset of our inquiry was that psychology and physics are distinguished by the nature of their causal laws, not by their subject matter. At the same time we held that there is a certain subject matter, namely images, to which only psychological causal laws are applicable; this subject matter, therefore, we assigned exclusively to psychology. But we found no way of defining images except through their causation; in their intrinsic character they appeared to have no universal mark by which they could be distinguished from sensations. In this last lecture I propose to pass in review various suggested methods of distinguishing mind from matter. I shall then briefly sketch the nature of that fundamental science which I believe to be the true metaphysic, in which mind and matter alike are seen to be constructed out of a neutral stuff, whose causal laws have no such duality as that of psychology, but form the basis upon which both physics and psychology are built. In search for the definition of "mental phenomena," let us begin with "consciousness," which is often thought to be the essence of mind. In the first lecture I gave various arguments against the view that consciousness is fundamental, but I did not attempt to say what consciousness is. We must find a definition of it, if we are to feel secure in deciding that it is not fundamental. It is for the sake of the proof that it is not fundamental that we must now endeavour to decide what it is. "Consciousness," by those who regard it as fundamental, is taken to be a character diffused throughout our mental life, distinct from sensations and images, memories, beliefs and desires, but present in all of them.* Dr. Henry Head, in an article which I quoted in Lecture III, distinguishing sensations from purely physiological occurrences, says: "Sensation, in the strict sense of the term, demands the existence of consciousness." This statement, at first sight, is one to which we feel inclined to assent, but I believe we are mistaken if we do so. Sensation is the sort of thing of which we MAY be conscious, but not a thing of which we MUST be conscious. We have been led, in the course of our inquiry, to admit unconscious beliefs and unconscious desires. There is, so far as I can see, no class of mental or other occurrences of which we are always conscious whenever they happen. * Cf. Lecture VI. The first thing to notice is that consciousness must be of something. In view of this, I should define "consciousness" in terms of that relation of an image of a word to an object which we defined, in Lecture XI, as "meaning." When a sensation is followed by an image which is a "copy" of it, I think it may be said that the existence of the image constitutes consciousness of the sensation, provided it is accompanied by that sort of belief which, when we reflect upon it, makes us feel that the image is a "sign" of something other than itself. This is the sort of belief which, in the case of memory, we expressed in the words "this occurred"; or which, in the case of a judgment of perception, makes us believe in qualities correlated with present sensations, as e.g., tactile and visual qualities are correlated. The addition of some element of belief seems required, since mere imagination does not involve consciousness of anything, and there can be no consciousness which is not of something. If images alone constituted consciousness of their prototypes, such imagination-images as in fact have prototypes would involve consciousness of them; since this is not the case, an element of belief must be added to the images in defining consciousness. The belief must be of that sort that constitutes objective reference, past or present. An image, together with a belief of this sort concerning it, constitutes, according to our definition, consciousness of the prototype of the image. But when we pass from consciousness of sensations to consciousness of objects of perception, certain further points arise which demand an addition to our definition. A judgment of perception, we may say, consists of a core of sensation, together with associated images, with belief in the present existence of an object to which sensation and images are referred in a way which is difficult to analyse. Perhaps we might say that the belief is not fundamentally in any PRESENT existence, but is of the nature of an expectation: for example, when we see an object, we expect certain sensations to result if we proceed to touch it. Perception, then, will consist of a present sensation together with expectations of future sensations. (This, of course, is a reflective analysis, not an account of the way perception appears to unchecked introspection.) But all such expectations are liable to be erroneous, since they are based upon correlations which are usual but not invariable. Any such correlation may mislead us in a particular case, for example, if we try to touch a reflection in a looking-glass under the impression that it is "real." Since memory is fallible, a similar difficulty arises as regards consciousness of past objects. It would seem odd to say that we can be "conscious" of a thing which does not or did not exist. The only way to avoid this awkwardness is to add to our definition the proviso that the beliefs involved in consciousness must be TRUE. In the second place, the question arises as to whether we can be conscious of images. If we apply our definition to this case, it seems to demand images of images. In order, for example, to be conscious of an image of a cat, we shall require, according to the letter of the definition, an image which is a copy of our image of the cat, and has this image for its prototype. Now, it hardly seems probable, as a matter of observation, that there are images of images, as opposed to images of sensations. We may meet this difficulty in two ways, either by boldly denying consciousness of images, or by finding a sense in which, by means of a different accompanying belief, an image, instead of meaning its prototype, can mean another image of the same prototype. The first alternative, which denies consciousness of images, has already been discussed when we were dealing with Introspection in Lecture VI. We then decided that there must be, in some sense, consciousness of images. We are therefore left with the second suggested way of dealing with knowledge of images. According to this second hypothesis, there may be two images of the same prototype, such that one of them means the other, instead of meaning the prototype. It will be remembered that we defined meaning by association a word or image means an object, we said, when it has the same associations as the object. But this definition must not be interpreted too absolutely: a word or image will not have ALL the same associations as the object which it means. The word "cat" may be associated with the word "mat," but it would not happen except by accident that a cat would be associated with a mat. And in like manner an image may have certain associations which its prototype will not have, e.g. an association with the word "image." When these associations are active, an image means an image, instead of meaning its prototype. If I have had images of a given prototype many times, I can mean one of these, as opposed to the rest, by recollecting the time and place or any other distinctive association of that one occasion. This happens, for example, when a place recalls to us some thought we previously had in that place, so that we remember a thought as opposed to the occurrence to which it referred. Thus we may say that we think of an image A when we have a similar image B associated with recollections of circumstances connected with A, but not with its prototype or with other images of the same prototype. In this way we become aware of images without the need of any new store of mental contents, merely by the help of new associations. This theory, so far as I can see, solves the problems of introspective knowledge, without requiring heroic measures such as those proposed by Knight Dunlap, whose views we discussed in Lecture VI. According to what we have been saying, sensation itself is not an instance of consciousness, though the immediate memory by which it is apt to be succeeded is so. A sensation which is remembered becomes an object of consciousness as soon as it begins to be remembered, which will normally be almost immediately after its occurrence (if at all); but while it exists it is not an object of consciousness. If, however, it is part of a perception, say of some familiar person, we may say that the person perceived is an object of consciousness. For in this case the sensation is a SIGN of the perceived object in much the same way in which a memory-image is a sign of a remembered object. The essential practical function of "consciousness" and "thought" is that they enable us to act with reference to what is distant in time or space, even though it is not at present stimulating our senses. This reference to absent objects is possible through association and habit. Actual sensations, in themselves, are not cases of consciousness, because they do not bring in this reference to what is absent. But their connection with consciousness is very close, both through immediate memory, and through the correlations which turn sensations into perceptions. Enough has, I hope, been said to show that consciousness is far too complex and accidental to be taken as the fundamental characteristic of mind. We have seen that belief and images both enter into it. Belief itself, as we saw in an earlier lecture, is complex. Therefore, if any definition of mind is suggested by our analysis of consciousness, images are what would naturally suggest themselves. But since we found that images can only be defined causally, we cannot deal with this suggestion, except in connection with the difference between physical and psychological causal laws. I come next to those characteristics of mental phenomena which arise out of mnemic causation. The possibility of action with reference to what is not sensibly present is one of the things that might be held to characterize mind. Let us take first a very elementary example. Suppose you are in a familiar room at night, and suddenly the light goes out. You will be able to find your way to the door without much difficulty by means of the picture of the room which you have in your mind. In this case visual images serve, somewhat imperfectly it is true, the purpose which visual sensations would otherwise serve. The stimulus to the production of visual images is the desire to get out of the room, which, according to what we found in Lecture III, consists essentially of present sensations and motor impulses caused by them. Again, words heard or read enable you to act with reference to the matters about which they give information; here, again, a present sensible stimulus, in virtue of habits formed in the past, enables you to act in a manner appropriate to an object which is not sensibly present. The whole essence of the practical efficiency of "thought" consists in sensitiveness to signs: the sensible presence of A, which is a sign of the present or future existence of B, enables us to act in a manner appropriate to B. Of this, words are the supreme example, since their effects as signs are prodigious, while their intrinsic interest as sensible occurrences on their own account is usually very slight. The operation of signs may or may not be accompanied by consciousness. If a sensible stimulus A calls up an image of B, and we then act with reference to B, we have what may be called consciousness of B. But habit may enable us to act in a manner appropriate to B as soon as A appears, without ever having an image of B. In that case, although A operates as a sign, it operates without the help of consciousness. Broadly speaking, a very familiar sign tends to operate directly in this manner, and the intervention of consciousness marks an imperfectly established habit. The power of acquiring experience, which characterizes men and animals, is an example of the general law that, in mnemic causation, the causal unit is not one event at one time, but two or more events at two or more times.& A burnt child fears the fire, that is to say, the neighbourhood of fire has a different effect upon a child which has had the sensations of burning than upon one which has not. More correctly, the observed effect, when a child which has been burnt is put near a fire, has for its cause, not merely the neighbourhood of the fire, but this together with the previous burning. The general formula, when an animal has acquired experience through some event A, is that, when B occurs at some future time, the animal to which A has happened acts differently from an animal which A has not happened. Thus A and B together, not either separately, must be regarded as the cause of the animal's behaviour, unless we take account of the effect which A has had in altering the animal's nervous tissue, which is a matter not patent to external observation except under very special circumstances. With this possibility, we are brought back to causal laws, and to the suggestion that many things which seem essentially mental are really neural. Perhaps it is the nerves that acquire experience rather than the mind. If so, the possibility of acquiring experience cannot be used to define mind.* * Cf. Lecture IV. Very similar considerations apply to memory, if taken as the essence of mind. A recollection is aroused by something which is happening now, but is different from the effect which the present occurrence would have produced if the recollected event had not occurred. This may be accounted for by the physical effect of the past event on the brain, making it a different instrument from that which would have resulted from a different experience. The causal peculiarities of memory may, therefore, have a physiological explanation. With every special class of mental phenomena this possibility meets us afresh. If psychology is to be a separate science at all, we must seek a wider ground for its separateness than any that we have been considering hitherto. We have found that "consciousness" is too narrow to characterize mental phenomena, and that mnemic causation is too wide. I come now to a characteristic which, though difficult to define, comes much nearer to what we require, namely subjectivity. Subjectivity, as a characteristic of mental phenomena, was considered in Lecture VII, in connection with the definition of perception. We there decided that those particulars which constitute the physical world can be collected into sets in two ways, one of which makes a bundle of all those particulars that are appearances of a given thing from different places, while the other makes a bundle of all those particulars which are appearances of different things from a given place. A bundle of this latter sort, at a given time, is called a "perspective"; taken throughout a period of time, it is called a "biography." Subjectivity is the characteristic of perspectives and biographies, the characteristic of giving the view of the world from a certain place. We saw in Lecture VII that this characteristic involves none of the other characteristics that are commonly associated with mental phenomena, such as consciousness, experience and memory. We found in fact that it is exhibited by a photographic plate, and, strictly speaking, by any particular taken in conjunction with those which have the same "passive" place in the sense defined in Lecture VII. The particulars forming one perspective are connected together primarily by simultaneity; those forming one biography, primarily by the existence of direct time-relations between them. To these are to be added relations derivable from the laws of perspective. In all this we are clearly not in the region of psychology, as commonly understood; yet we are also hardly in the region of physics. And the definition of perspectives and biographies, though it does not yet yield anything that would be commonly called "mental," is presupposed in mental phenomena, for example in mnemic causation: the causal unit in mnemic causation, which gives rise to Semon's engram, is the whole of one perspective--not of any perspective, but of a perspective in a place where there is nervous tissue, or at any rate living tissue of some sort. Perception also, as we saw, can only be defined in terms of perspectives. Thus the conception of subjectivity, i.e. of the "passive" place of a particular, though not alone sufficient to define mind, is clearly an essential element in the definition. I have maintained throughout these lectures that the data of psychology do not differ in, their intrinsic character from the data of physics. I have maintained that sensations are data for psychology and physics equally, while images, which may be in some sense exclusively psychological data, can only be distinguished from sensations by their correlations, not by what they are in themselves. It is now necessary, however, to examine the notion of a "datum," and to obtain, if possible, a definition of this notion. The notion of "data" is familiar throughout science, and is usually treated by men of science as though it were perfectly clear. Psychologists, on the other hand, find great difficulty in the conception. "Data" are naturally defined in terms of theory of knowledge: they are those propositions of which the truth is known without demonstration, so that they may be used as premisses in proving other propositions. Further, when a proposition which is a datum asserts the existence of something, we say that the something is a datum, as well as the proposition asserting its existence. Thus those objects of whose existence we become certain through perception are said to be data. There is some difficulty in connecting this epistemological definition of "data" with our psychological analysis of knowledge; but until such a connection has been effected, we have no right to use the conception "data." It is clear, in the first place, that there can be no datum apart from a belief. A sensation which merely comes and goes is not a datum; it only becomes a datum when it is remembered. Similarly, in perception, we do not have a datum unless we have a JUDGMENT of perception. In the sense in which objects (as opposed to propositions) are data, it would seem natural to say that those objects of which we are conscious are data. But consciousness, as we have seen, is a complex notion, involving beliefs, as well as mnemic phenomena such as are required for perception and memory. It follows that no datum is theoretically indubitable, since no belief is infallible; it follows also that every datum has a greater or less degree of vagueness, since there is always some vagueness in memory and the meaning of images. Data are not those things of which our consciousness is earliest in time. At every period of life, after we have become capable of thought, some of our beliefs are obtained by inference, while others are not. A belief may pass from either of these classes into the other, and may therefore become, or cease to be, a belief giving a datum. When, in what follows, I speak of data, I do not mean the things of which we feel sure before scientific study begins, but the things which, when a science is well advanced, appear as affording grounds for other parts of the science, without themselves being believed on any ground except observation. I assume, that is to say, a trained observer, with an analytic attention, knowing the sort of thing to look for, and the sort of thing that will be important. What he observes is, at the stage of science which he has reached, a datum for his science. It is just as sophisticated and elaborate as the theories which he bases upon it, since only trained habits and much practice enable a man to make the kind of observation that will be scientifically illuminating. Nevertheless, when once it has been observed, belief in it is not based on inference and reasoning, but merely upon its having been seen. In this way its logical status differs from that of the theories which are proved by its means. In any science other than psychology the datum is primarily a perception, in which only the sensational core is ultimately and theoretically a datum, though some such accretions as turn the sensation into a perception are practically unavoidable. But if we postulate an ideal observer, he will be able to isolate the sensation, and treat this alone as datum. There is, therefore, an important sense in which we may say that, if we analyse as much as we ought, our data, outside psychology, consist of sensations, which include within themselves certain spatial and temporal relations. Applying this remark to physiology, we see that the nerves and brain as physical objects are not truly data; they are to be replaced, in the ideal structure of science, by the sensations through which the physiologist is said to perceive them. The passage from these sensations to nerves and brain as physical objects belongs really to the initial stage in the theory of physics, and ought to be placed in the reasoned part, not in the part supposed to be observed. To say we see the nerves is like saying we hear the nightingale; both are convenient but inaccurate expressions. We hear a sound which we believe to be causally connected with the nightingale, and we see a sight which we believe to be causally connected with a nerve. But in each case it is only the sensation that ought, in strictness, to be called a datum. Now, sensations are certainly among the data of psychology. Therefore all the data of the physical sciences are also psychological data. It remains to inquire whether all the data of psychology are also data of physical science, and especially of physiology. If we have been right in our analysis of mind, the ultimate data of psychology are only sensations and images and their relations. Beliefs, desires, volitions, and so on, appeared to us to be complex phenomena consisting of sensations and images variously interrelated. Thus (apart from certain relations) the occurrences which seem most distinctively mental, and furthest removed from physics, are, like physical objects, constructed or inferred, not part of the original stock of data in the perfected science. From both ends, therefore, the difference between physical and psychological data is diminished. Is there ultimately no difference, or do images remain as irreducibly and exclusively psychological? In view of the causal definition of the difference between images and sensations, this brings us to a new question, namely: Are the causal laws of psychology different from those of any other science, or are they really physiological? Certain ambiguities must be removed before this question can be adequately discussed. First, there is the distinction between rough approximate laws and such as appear to be precise and general. I shall return to the former presently; it is the latter that I wish to discuss now. Matter, as defined at the end of Lecture V, is a logical fiction, invented because it gives a convenient way of stating causal laws. Except in cases of perfect regularity in appearances (of which we can have no experience), the actual appearances of a piece of matter are not members of that ideal system of regular appearances which is defined as being the matter in question. But the matter is, after all, inferred from its appearances, which are used to VERIFY physical laws. Thus, in so far as physics is an empirical and verifiable science, it must assume or prove that the inference from appearances to matter is, in general, legitimate, and it must be able to tell us, more or less, what appearances to expect. It is through this question of verifiability and empirical applicability to experience that we are led to a theory of matter such as I advocate. From the consideration of this question it results that physics, in so far as it is an empirical science, not a logical phantasy, is concerned with particulars of just the same sort as those which psychology considers under the name of sensations. The causal laws of physics, so interpreted, differ from those of psychology only by the fact that they connect a particular with other appearances in the same piece of matter, rather than with other appearances in the same perspective. That is to say, they group together particulars having the same "active" place, while psychology groups together those having the same "passive" place. Some particulars, such as images, have no "active" place, and therefore belong exclusively to psychology. We can now understand the distinction between physics and psychology. The nerves and brain are matter: our visual sensations when we look at them may be, and I think are, members of the system constituting irregular appearances of this matter, but are not the whole of the system. Psychology is concerned, inter alia, with our sensations when we see a piece of matter, as opposed to the matter which we see. Assuming, as we must, that our sensations have physical causes, their causal laws are nevertheless radically different from the laws of physics, since the consideration of a single sensation requires the breaking up of the group of which it is a member. When a sensation is used to verify physics, it is used merely as a sign of a certain material phenomenon, i.e. of a group of particulars of which it is a member. But when it is studied by psychology, it is taken away from that group and put into quite a different context, where it causes images or voluntary movements. It is primarily this different grouping that is characteristic of psychology as opposed to all the physical sciences, including physiology; a secondary difference is that images, which belong to psychology, are not easily to be included among the aspects which constitute a physical thing or piece of matter. There remains, however, an important question, namely: Are mental events causally dependent upon physical events in a sense in which the converse dependence does not hold? Before we can discuss the answer to this question, we must first be clear as to what our question means. When, given A, it is possible to infer B, but given B, it is not possible to infer A, we say that B is dependent upon A in a sense in which A is not dependent upon B. Stated in logical terms, this amounts to saying that, when we know a many-one relation of A to B, B is dependent upon A in respect of this relation. If the relation is a causal law, we say that B is causally dependent upon A. The illustration that chiefly concerns us is the system of appearances of a physical object. We can, broadly speaking, infer distant appearances from near ones, but not vice versa. All men look alike when they are a mile away, hence when we see a man a mile off we cannot tell what he will look like when he is only a yard away. But when we see him a yard away, we can tell what he will look like a mile away. Thus the nearer view gives us more valuable information, and the distant view is causally dependent upon it in a sense in which it is not causally dependent upon the distant view. It is this greater causal potency of the near appearance that leads physics to state its causal laws in terms of that system of regular appearances to which the nearest appearances increasingly approximate, and that makes it value information derived from the microscope or telescope. It is clear that our sensations, considered as irregular appearances of physical objects, share the causal dependence belonging to comparatively distant appearances; therefore in our sensational life we are in causal dependence upon physical laws. This, however, is not the most important or interesting part of our question. It is the causation of images that is the vital problem. We have seen that they are subject to mnenic causation, and that mnenic causation may be reducible to ordinary physical causation in nervous tissue. This is the question upon which our attitude must turn towards what may be called materialism. One sense of materialism is the view that all mental phenomena are causally dependent upon physical phenomena in the above-defined sense of causal dependence. Whether this is the case or not, I do not profess to know. The question seems to me the same as the question whether mnemic causation is ultimate, which we considered without deciding in Lecture IV. But I think the bulk of the evidence points to the materialistic answer as the more probable. In considering the causal laws of psychology, the distinction between rough generalizations and exact laws is important. There are many rough generalizations in psychology, not only of the sort by which we govern our ordinary behaviour to each other, but also of a more nearly scientific kind. Habit and association belong among such laws. I will give an illustration of the kind of law that can be obtained. Suppose a person has frequently experienced A and B in close temporal contiguity, an association will be established, so that A, or an image of A, tends to cause an image of B. The question arises: will the association work in either direction, or only from the one which has occurred earlier to the one which has occurred later? In an article by Mr. Wohlgemuth, called "The Direction of Associations" ("British Journal of Psychology," vol. v, part iv, March, 1913), it is claimed to be proved by experiment that, in so far as motor memory (i.e. memory of movements) is concerned, association works only from earlier to later, while in visual and auditory memory this is not the case, but the later of two neighbouring experiences may recall the earlier as well as the earlier the later. It is suggested that motor memory is physiological, while visual and auditory memory are more truly psychological. But that is not the point which concerns us in the illustration. The point which concerns us is that a law of association, established by purely psychological observation, is a purely psychological law, and may serve as a sample of what is possible in the way of discovering such laws. It is, however, still no more than a rough generalization, a statistical average. It cannot tell us what will result from a given cause on a given occasion. It is a law of tendency, not a precise and invariable law such as those of physics aim at being. If we wish to pass from the law of habit, stated as a tendency or average, to something more precise and invariable, we seem driven to the nervous system. We can more or less guess how an occurrence produces a change in the brain, and how its repetition gradually produces something analogous to the channel of a river, along which currents flow more easily than in neighbouring paths. We can perceive that in this way, if we had more knowledge, the tendency to habit through repetition might be replaced by a precise account of the effect of each occurrence in bringing about a modification of the sort from which habit would ultimately result. It is such considerations that make students of psychophysiology materialistic in their methods, whatever they may be in their metaphysics. There are, of course, exceptions, such as Professor J. S. Haldane,* who maintains that it is theoretically impossible to obtain physiological explanations of psychical phenomena, or physical explanations of physiological phenomena. But I think the bulk of expert opinion, in practice, is on the other side. *See his book, "The New Physiology and Other Addresses" (Charles Griffin & Co., 1919). The question whether it is possible to obtain precise causal laws in which the causes are psychological, not material, is one of detailed investigation. I have done what I could to make clear the nature of the question, but I do not believe that it is possible as yet to answer it with any confidence. It seems to be by no means an insoluble question, and we may hope that science will be able to produce sufficient grounds for regarding one answer as much more probable than the other. But for the moment I do not see how we can come to a decision. I think, however, on grounds of the theory of matter explained in Lectures V and VII, that an ultimate scientific account of what goes on in the world, if it were ascertainable, would resemble psychology rather than physics in what we found to be the decisive difference between them. I think, that is to say, that such an account would not be content to speak, even formally, as though matter, which is a logical fiction, were the ultimate reality. I think that, if our scientific knowledge were adequate to the task, which it neither is nor is likely to become, it would exhibit the laws of correlation of the particulars constituting a momentary condition of a material unit, and would state the causal laws* of the world in terms of these particulars, not in terms of matter. Causal laws so stated would, I believe, be applicable to psychology and physics equally; the science in which they were stated would succeed in achieving what metaphysics has vainly attempted, namely a unified account of what really happens, wholly true even if not the whole of truth, and free from all convenient fictions or unwarrantable assumptions of metaphysical entities. A causal law applicable to particulars would count as a law of physics if it could be stated in terms of those fictitious systems of regular appearances which are matter; if this were not the case, it would count as a law of psychology if one of the particulars were a sensation or an image, i.e. were subject to mnemic causation. I believe that the realization of the complexity of a material unit, and its analysis into constituents analogous to sensations, is of the utmost importance to philosophy, and vital for any understanding of the relations between mind and matter, between our perceptions and the world which they perceive. It is in this direction, I am convinced, that we must look for the solution of many ancient perplexities. * In a perfected science, causal laws will take the form of differential equations--or of finite-difference equations, if the theory of quanta should prove correct. It is probable that the whole science of mental occurrences, especially where its initial definitions are concerned, could be simplified by the development of the fundamental unifying science in which the causal laws of particulars are sought, rather than the causal laws of those systems of particulars that constitute the material units of physics. This fundamental science would cause physics to become derivative, in the sort of way in which theories of the constitution of the atom make chemistry derivative from physics; it would also cause psychology to appear less singular and isolated among sciences. If we are right in this, it is a wrong philosophy of matter which has caused many of the difficulties in the philosophy of mind--difficulties which a right philosophy of matter would cause to disappear. The conclusions at which we have arrived may be summed up as follows: I. Physics and psychology are not distinguished by their material. Mind and matter alike are logical constructions; the particulars out of which they are constructed, or from which they are inferred, have various relations, some of which are studied by physics, others by psychology. Broadly speaking, physics group particulars by their active places, psychology by their passive places. II. The two most essential characteristics of the causal laws which would naturally be called psychological are SUBJECTIVITY and MNEMIC CAUSATION; these are not unconnected, since the causal unit in mnemic causation is the group of particulars having a given passive place at a given time, and it is by this manner of grouping that subjectivity is defined. III. Habit, memory and thought are all developments of mnemic causation. It is probable, though not certain, that mnemic causation is derivative from ordinary physical causation in nervous (and other) tissue. IV. Consciousness is a complex and far from universal characteristic of mental phenomena. V. Mind is a matter of degree, chiefly exemplified in number and complexity of habits. VI. All our data, both in physics and psychology, are subject to psychological causal laws; but physical causal laws, at least in traditional physics, can only be stated in terms of matter, which is both inferred and constructed, never a datum. In this respect psychology is nearer to what actually exists. 
42055	----	Transcriber's note: The author's use of three asterisks * * * to serve as ellipses has been preserved as printed in the original publication. [Illustration: William Walker Atkinson] YOUR MIND AND HOW TO USE IT A Manual of Practical Psychology by WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON It is not enough merely to have a sound mind--one must also learn how to use it, if he would become mentally efficient. Published by the Elizabeth Towne Co., Holyoke, Mass. L.N. Fowler & Co., London. Copyright, 1911. Elizabeth Towne. Copyrighted in the United States and England. Contents. CHAPTER PAGE I. WHAT IS THE MIND 5 II. THE MECHANISM OF MENTAL STATES 11 III. THE GREAT NERVE CENTERS 17 IV. CONSCIOUSNESS 24 V. ATTENTION 29 VI. PERCEPTION 36 VII. MEMORY 45 VIII. MEMORY (continued) 54 IX. IMAGINATION 62 X. THE FEELINGS 72 XI. THE EMOTIONS 79 XII. THE INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONS 88 XIII. THE PASSIONS 96 XIV. THE SOCIAL EMOTIONS 104 XV. THE RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS 111 XVI. THE ÆSTHETIC EMOTIONS 117 XVII. THE INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS 125 XVIII. THE ROLE OF THE EMOTIONS 131 XIX. THE EMOTIONS AND HAPPINESS 136 XX. THE INTELLECT 143 XXI. CONCEPTION 151 XXII. CLASSES OF CONCEPTS 158 XXIII. JUDGMENTS 164 XXIV. PRIMARY LAWS OF THOUGHT 171 XXV. REASONING 176 XXVI. INDUCTIVE REASONING 181 XXVII. DEDUCTIVE REASONING 186 XXVIII. FALLACIOUS REASONING 193 XXIX. THE WILL 201 XXX. WILL-TRAINING 213 XXXI. WILL-TONIC 219 CHAPTER I. What is the Mind? Psychology is generally considered to be the science of mind, although more properly it is the science of mental states--thoughts, feelings, and acts of volition. It was formerly the custom of writers on the subject of psychology to begin by an attempt to define and describe the nature of mind, before proceeding to a consideration of the subject of the various mental spates and activities. But more recent authorities have rebelled against this demand, and have claimed that it is no more reasonable to hold that psychology should be held to an explanation of the ultimate nature of mind than it is that physical science be held to an explanation of the ultimate nature of matter. The attempt to explain the ultimate nature of either is futile--no actual necessity exists for explanation in either case. Physics may explain the phenomena of matter, and psychology the phenomena of mind, without regard to the ultimate nature of the substance of either. The science of physics has progressed steadily during the past century, notwithstanding the fact that the theories regarding the ultimate nature of matter have been revolutionized during that period. The facts of the phenomena of matter remain, notwithstanding the change of theory regarding the nature of matter itself. Science demands and holds fast to facts, regarding theories as but working hypotheses at the best. Some one has said that "theories are but the bubbles with which the grown-up children of science amuse themselves." Science holds several well-supported, though opposing, theories regarding the nature of electricity, but the _facts_ of the phenomena of electricity, and the application thereof, are agreed upon by the disputing theorists. And so it is with psychology; the facts regarding mental states are agreed upon, and methods of developing mental powers are effectively employed, without regard to whether mind is a product of the brain, or the brain merely an organ of the mind. The fact that the brain and nervous system are employed in the phenomena of thought is conceded by all, and that is all that is necessary for a basis for the science of psychology. Disputes regarding the ultimate nature of mind are now generally passed over to the philosophers and metaphysicians, while psychology devotes its entire attention to studying the laws of mental activities, and to discovering methods of mental development. Even philosophy is beginning to tire of the eternal "why" and is devoting its attention to the "how" phase of things. The pragmatic spirit has invaded the field of philosophy, expressing itself in the words of Prof. William James, who said: "Pragmatism is the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed necessities; and of looking forward toward last things, _fruits_, _consequences_, _facts_." Modern psychology is essentially pragmatic in its treatment of the subject of the mind. Leaving to metaphysics the old arguments and disputes regarding the ultimate nature of mind, it bends all its energies upon discovering the laws of mental activities and states, and developing methods whereby the mind may be trained to perform better and more work, to conserve its energies, to concentrate its forces. To modern psychology the mind is _something to be used_, not merely something about which to speculate and theorize. While the metaphysicians deplore this tendency, the practical people of the world rejoice. MIND DEFINED. Mind is defined as "the faculty or power whereby thinking creatures, feel, think, and will." This definition is inadequate and circular in nature, but this is unavoidable, for mind can be defined only in its own terms and only by reference to its own processes. Mind, except in reference to its own activities, cannot be defined or conceived. It is known to itself only through its activities. Mind without mental states is a mere abstraction--a word without a corresponding mental image or concept. Sir William Hamilton expressed the matter as clearly as possible, when he said: "What we mean by mind is simply _that which_ perceives, thinks, feels, wills, and desires." Without the perceiving, thinking, feeling, willing, and desiring, it is impossible to form a clear conception or mental image of mind; deprived of its phenomena it becomes the merest abstraction. "THINK ABOUT THAT WHICH THINKS." Perhaps the simplest method of conveying the idea of the existence and nature of the mind is that attributed to a celebrated German teacher of psychology who was wont to begin his course by bidding his students think of something, his desk, for example. Then he would say, "Now think of _that which thinks about the desk_." Then, after a pause, he would add, "This thing which thinks about the desk, and about which you are now thinking, is the subject matter of our study of psychology." The professor could not have said more had he lectured for a month. Professor Gordy has well said on this point: "The mind must either be _that which_ thinks, feels, and wills, or it must be the thoughts, feelings, and acts of will of which we are conscious--mental facts, in one word. But what can we know about _that which_ thinks, feels, and wills, and what can we find out about it? Where is it? You will probably say, in the brain. But, if you are speaking literally, if you say that it is in the brain, as a pencil is in the pocket, then you must mean that it takes up room, that it occupies space, and that would make it very much like a material thing. In truth, the more carefully you consider it, the more plainly you will see what thinking men have known for a long time--that we do not know and cannot learn anything about the thing which thinks, and feels, and wills. It is beyond the range of human knowledge. The books which define psychology as the science of mind have not a word to say about that which thinks, and feels, and wills. They are entirely taken up with these thoughts and feelings and acts of the will,--mental facts, in a word,--trying to tell us what they are, and to arrange them in classes, and tell us the circumstances or conditions under which they exist. It seems to me that it would be better to define psychology as _the science of the experiences, phenomena, or facts of the mind, soul, or self--of mental facts, in a word_." In view of the facts of the case, and following the example of the best of the modern authorities, in this book we shall leave the consideration of the question of the ultimate nature of mind to the metaphysicians, and shall confine ourselves to the _mental facts_, the laws governing them, and the best methods of governing and using them in "the business of life." The classification and method of development to be followed in this book is as follows:-- I. The mechanism of mental states, _i.e._, the brain, nervous system, sense organs, etc. II. The fact of Consciousness and its planes. III. Mental processes or faculties, _i.e._, (1) Sensation and Perception; (2) Representation, or Imagination and Memory; (3) Feeling or Emotion; (4) Intellect, or Reason and Understanding; (5) Will or Volition. Mental states depend upon the physical mechanism for manifestation, whatever may be the ultimate nature of mind. Mental states, whatever their special character, will be found to fit into one of the above five general classes of mental activities. CHAPTER II. The Mechanism of Mental States. The mechanism of mental states--the mental machinery by means of which we feel, think, and will--consists of the brain, nervous system, and the organs of sense. No matter what may be the real nature of mind,--no matter what may be the theory held regarding its activities,--it must be admitted that the mind is dependent upon this mechanism for the manifestation of what we know as mental states. Wonderful as is the mind, it is seen to be dependent upon this physical mechanism for the expression of its activities. And this dependence is not upon the brain alone, but also upon the entire nervous system. The best authorities agree that the higher and more complex mental states are but an evolution of simple sensation, and that they are dependent upon sensation for their raw material of feeling and thought. Therefore it is proper that we begin by a consideration of the machinery of sensation. This necessitates a previous consideration of the nerves. THE NERVES. The body is traversed by an intricate system of nerves, which has been likened to a great telegraph system. The nerves transmit sensations from the various parts of the body to the great receiving office of the brain. They also serve to transmit the motor impulses from the brain to the various parts of the body, which impulses result in motion of appropriate parts of the body. There are also other nerves with which we have no concern in this book, but which perform certain physiological functions, such as digestion, secretion, excretion, and circulation. Our chief concern, at this point, is with the sensory nerves. The sensory nerves convey the impressions of the outside world to the brain. The brain is the great central station of the sensory nerves, the latter having countless sending stations in all parts of the body, the "wires" terminating in the skin. When these nervous terminal stations are irritated or excited, they send to the brain messages calling for attention. This is true not only of the nerves of touch or feeling, but also of those concerned with the respective senses of sight, smell, taste, and hearing. In fact, the best authorities hold that all the five senses are but an evolution of the primary sense of touch or feeling. THE SENSE OF TOUCH. The nerves of the sense of touch have their ending in the outer covering or skin of the body. They report _contact_ with other physical objects. By means of these reports we are aware not only of contact with the outside object, but also of many facts concerning the nature of that object, as for instance, its degree of hardness, roughness, etc., and its temperature. Some of these nerve ends are very sensitive, as, for example, those of the tip of the tongue and finger ends, while others are comparatively lacking in sensitiveness, as, for illustration, those of the back. Certain of these sensory nerves confine themselves to reporting contact and degrees of pressure, while others concern themselves solely with reporting the degrees of temperature of the objects with which their ends come in contact. Some of the latter respond to the higher degrees of heat, while others respond only to the lower degrees of cold. The nerves of certain parts of the body respond more readily and distinctly to temperature than do those of other parts. To illustrate, the nerves of the cheek are quite responsive to heat impressions. THE SENSE OF SIGHT. The nerves of the sense of sight terminate in the complex optical apparatus which in popular terminology is known as "the eye." What is known as "the retina" is a very sensitive nervous membrane which lines the inner, back part of the eye, and in which the fibers of the optic nerve terminate. The optical instrument of the eye conveys the focused light vibrations to the nerves of the retina, from which the impulse is transmitted to the brain. But, contrary to the popular notion, the nerves of the eye do not gauge distances, nor form inferences of any kind; that is distinctly the work of the mind. The simple office of the optical nerves consists in reporting color and degrees of intensity of the light waves. THE SENSE OF HEARING. The nerves of the sense of hearing terminate in the inner part of the ear. The tympanum, or "ear drum," receives the sound vibrations entering the cavities of the ear, and, intensifying and adapting them, it passes them on to the ends of the auditory nerve in the internal ear, which conveys the sensation to the brain. The auditory nerve reports to the brain the degrees of pitch, intensity, quality, and harmony, respectively, of the sound waves reaching the tympanum. As is well known, there are certain vibrations of sound which are too low for the auditory nerve to register, and others too high for it to record, both classes, however, capable of being recorded by scientific instruments. It is also regarded as certain that some of the lower animals are conscious of sound vibrations which are not registered by the human auditory nerves. THE SENSE OF SMELL. The nerves of the sense of smell terminate in the mucous membrane of the nostrils. In order that these nerves report the odor of outside objects, actual contact of minute particles of the object with the mucous membrane of the nostrils is necessary. This is possible only by the passage through the nostrils of air containing these particles; mere nearness to the nostril will not suffice. These particles are for the most part composed of tenuous gases. Certain substances affect the olfactory nerves much more than do others, the difference arising from the chemical composition of the substance. The olfactory nerves convey the report to the brain. THE SENSE OF TASTE. The nerves of the sense of taste terminate in the tongue, or rather in the tiny cells of the tongue which are called "taste buds." Substances taken into the mouth chemically affect these tiny cells, and an impulse is transmitted to the gustatory nerves, which then report the sensation to the brain. The authorities claim that taste sensations may be reduced to five general classes, viz.: sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and "hot." There are certain nerve centers having important offices in the production and expression of mental states, located in the skull and in the spinal column--the brain and the spinal cord--which we shall consider in the following chapter. CHAPTER III. The Great Nerve Centers. The great nerve centers which play an important part in the production and expression of mental states are those of the brain and spinal cord, respectively. THE SPINAL CORD. The spinal cord is that cord or rope of nerve substance which is inclosed in the spinal column or "backbone." It leaves the lower part of the skull and extends downward in the interior of the spinal column for about eighteen inches. It is continuous with the brain, however, and it is difficult to determine where one begins and the other ends. It is composed of a mass of gray matter surrounded by a covering of white matter. From the spinal cord, along its length, emerge thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves which branch out to each side of the body and connect with the various smaller nerves, extending to all parts of the system. The spinal cord is the great central cable of the nervous telegraphic system, and any injury to or obstruction of it cripples or paralyzes those portions of the body the nerves of which enter the spinal cord below the seat of the injury or obstruction. Injuries or obstructions of this kind not only inhibit the sensory reports from the affected area, but also inhibit the motor impulses from the brain which are intended to move the limbs or parts of the body. THE GANGLIA OR "TINY BRAINS." What are known as ganglia, or tiny bunches of nerve cells, are found in various parts of the nervous system, including the spinal nerves. These groups of nerve cells are sometimes called "little brains," and perform quite important offices in the mechanism of thought and action. The spinal ganglia receive sensory reports, and issue motor impulses, in many cases, without troubling the central brain regarding the matter. These activities are known as "reflex nervous action." REFLEX ACTION. What is known as reflex nervous action is one of the most wonderful of the activities of the nervous and mental mechanism, and the knowledge thereof usually comes as a surprise to the average person, for he is generally under the impression that these activities are possible only to the central brain. It is a fact that not only is the central brain really a trinity of three brains, but that, in addition to these, every one has a great number of "little brains" distributed over his nervous system, any and all of which are capable of receiving sensory reports and also of sending forth motor impulses. It is quite worth while for one to become acquainted with this wonderful form of neuro-mental activity. A cinder enters the eye, the report reaches a ganglion, a motor impulse is sent forth, and the eyelid closes. The same result ensues if an object approaches the eye but without actually entering it. In either case the person is not conscious of the sensation and motor impulse until the latter has been accomplished. This is reflex action. The instinctive movement of the tickled foot is another instance. The jerking away of the hand burnt by the lighted end of the cigar, or pricked by the point of the pin, is another instance. The involuntary activities, and those known as unconscious activities, result from reflex action. More than this, it is a fact that many activities originally voluntary become what is known as "acquired reflexes," or "motor habits," by means of certain nervous centers acquiring the habit of sending forth certain motor impulses in response to certain sensory reports. The familiar movements of our lives are largely performed in this way, as, for instance, walking, using knife and fork, operating typewriters, machines of all kinds, writing, etc. The squirming of a decapitated snake, the muscular movements of a decapitated frog, and the violent struggles, fluttering, and leaps of the decapitated fowl, are instances of reflex action. Medical reports indicate that in cases of decapitation even man may manifest similar reflex action in some cases. Thus we may see that we may _feel_ and _will_ by means of our "little brains" as well as by the central brain or brains. Whatever mind may be, it is certain that in these processes it employs other portions of the nervous system than the central brain. THE THREE BRAINS. What is known as the brain of man is really a trinity of three brains, known respectively as (1) the _medulla oblongata_, (2) the _cerebellum_, and (3) the _cerebrum_. If one wishes to limit the mental activity to conscious intellectual effort, then and then only is he correct in considering the cerebrum or large brain as "the brain." _The Medulla Oblongata._--The medulla oblongata is an enlargement of the spinal cord at the base of the brain. Its office is that of controlling the involuntary activities of the body, such as respiration, circulation, assimilation, etc. In a broad sense, its activities may be said to be of the nature of highly developed and complex reflex activities. It manifests chiefly through the sympathetic nervous system which controls the vital functions. It does not need to call on the large brain in these matters, ordinarily, and is able to perform its tasks without the plane of ordinary consciousness. _The Cerebellum._--The cerebellum, also known as "the little brain," lies just above the medulla oblongata, and just below the rear portion of the cerebrum or great brain. It combines the nature of a purely reflex center on the one hand, with that of "habit mind" on the other. In short, it fills a place between the activities of the cerebrum and the medulla oblongata, having some of the characteristics of each. It is the organ of a number of important acquired reflexes, such as walking, and many other familiar muscular movements, which have first been consciously acquired and then become habitual. The skilled skater, bicyclist, typist, or machinist depends upon the cerebellum for the ease and certainty with which he performs his movements "without thinking of them." One may be said never to have thoroughly acquired a set of muscular movements such as we have mentioned, until the cerebellum has taken over the task and relieved the cerebrum of the conscious effort. One's technique is never perfected until the cerebellum assumes control and direction of the necessary movements and the impulses are sent forth from below the plane of ordinary consciousness. _The Cerebrum._--The cerebrum, or "great brain" (which is regarded as "the brain" by the average person), is situated in the upper portion of the skull, and occupies by far the larger portion of the cavity of the skull. It is divided into two great divisions or hemispheres. The best of the modern authorities are agreed that the cerebrum has zones or areas of specialized functioning, some of which receive the sensory reports of the nerves and organs of sense, while others send forth the motor impulses which result in voluntary physical action. Many of these areas or zones have been located by science, while others remain as yet unlocated. The probability is that in time science will succeed in correctly locating the area or zone of each and every class of sensation and motor impulse. THE CORTEX. The area of thought, memory, and imagination has not been clearly located, except that these mental states are believed to have their seat in the _cortex_ or outer thin rind of gray brain matter which envelopes and covers the mass of brain substance. It is, moreover, considered probable that the higher processes of reasoning are performed in or by the cortex of the frontal lobes. The cortex of a person of average intelligence, if spread out on a flat surface, measures about four square feet. The higher the degree of intelligence possessed by a lower animal or human being, as a rule, the deeper and more numerous are the folds or convolutions of the cortex, and the finer its structure. It may be stated as a general rule, with but very few exceptions, that the higher the degree of intelligence in a lower animal or human being, the greater is the area of its cortex in proportion to the size of the brain. The cortex, it must be remembered, is folded into deep furrows or convolutions, the brain in shape, divisions, and convolutions resembling the inner portion of an English walnut. The interior of the two hemispheres of the cerebrum is composed largely of connective nerves which doubtless serve to produce and maintain the unity of function of the mental processes. While physiological psychology has performed great work in discovering brain-centers and explaining much of the mechanism of mental processes, it has but touched the most elementary and simple of the mental processes. The higher processes have so far defied analysis or explanation in the terms of physiology. CHAPTER IV. Consciousness. The fact of consciousness is the great mystery of psychology. It is difficult even to define the term, although every person of average intelligence understands what is sought to be conveyed by it. Webster defines it as "knowledge of one's own existence, sensations, mental operations, etc.; immediate knowledge or perception of any object, state, or sensation; being aware; being sensible of." Another authority defines the term as "the state of being aware of one's sensations; the power, faculty, or mental state of being aware of one's own existence, condition at the moment, thoughts, feelings, and actions." Halleck's definition is: "That indefinable characteristic of mental states which causes us to be aware of them." It will be seen that the idea of "awareness" is the essence of the idea of consciousness. But, at the last, we are compelled to acknowledge that it is impossible to closely define consciousness, for it is something so entirely unique and different from anything else that we have no other terms at all synonymous to it. We can define it only in its own terms, as will be seen by reference to the definitions above given. And it is equally impossible to clearly account for its appearance and being. Huxley has well said: "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about by the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the jinnee when Aladdin rubbed his lamp." All that we can ever know regarding the nature of consciousness must be learned from turning the consciousness in ourselves back upon itself--by focusing consciousness upon its own mental operations by means of introspection. By turning inward the conscious gaze we may perceive the flow of the stream of thought from its rise from the subconscious regions of the mind to its final disappearance in the same region. It is a common error to suppose that we are directly conscious of objects outside of ourselves. This is impossible, for there is no direct knowledge of such outside objects. We are conscious merely of our sensations of, or mental images of, the outside objects. All that it is possible for us to be directly conscious of are our own mental experiences or states. We cannot be directly conscious of anything outside of our own minds. We are not directly conscious of the tree which we _see_; we are directly conscious merely of the sensation of the nerves arising from the impact of the light waves carrying the image of the tree. We are not directly conscious of the tree when we touch it and perceive its character in that way; we are directly conscious merely of the sensation reported by the nerves in the finger tips which have come in contact with the tree. We are directly conscious even of our own bodies only in the same way. It is necessary for the mind to experience that of which it may become conscious. We are conscious only of (1) that which our mind is experiencing at this moment, or (2) that which it has experienced in the past, and which is being re-experienced this moment by the process of the memory, or which is being re-combined or re-arranged this moment by the imagination. SUBCONSCIOUS PLANES. But it must not be thought that every mental state or mental fact is in the field of consciousness. This error has been exploded for many years. The fact is now recognized that the field of consciousness is a very narrow and limited one, and that the great field of mental activity lies outside of its narrow limits. Beyond and outside of the narrow field of consciousness lies the great subconscious storehouse of memory in which are stored the experiences of the past, to be drawn again into the field of consciousness by an effort of the will in the act of recollection, or by association in ordinary remembrance. In that great region, also, the mind manifests many of its activities and performs much of its work. In that great region are evolved the emotions and feelings which play such an important part in our lives, and which often manifest a vague disturbing unrest long before they rise to the plane of consciousness. In that great region are produced the ideas, feelings, and conceptions which arise to the plane of consciousness and manifest that which men call "genius." On the subconscious plane the imagination does much of its work, and startles its owner by presenting him with the accomplished result in the field of consciousness. In the subconscious field is performed that peculiar process of mental mastication, digestion, and assimilation with which all brain workers are familiar, and which absorbs the raw mental material given it, separates, digests, and assimilates it, and re-presents it to the conscious faculties sometime after as a transformed substance. It has been estimated that at least eighty-five per cent. of our mental activities are performed below or outside of the field of consciousness. The psychology of to-day is paying much attention to this formerly neglected great area or areas of the mind. The psychology of to-morrow will pay still greater attention to it. The best of the modern authorities agree that in the great field of subconscious mentation is to be found the explanation of much that is unexplainable otherwise. In fact, it is probable that before long consciousness will be regarded as a mere _focusing of attention_ upon mental states, and the objects of consciousness merely as that portion of the contents of the mind in the field of mental vision created by such focusing. CHAPTER V. Attention. Intimately connected with the object of consciousness is that process of the mind which we call "attention." Attention is generally defined as "the application of the mind to a mental state." It is often referred to as "concentrated consciousness," but others have ventured the somewhat daring conjecture that consciousness itself is rather the result of attention, instead of the latter being an incident of consciousness. We shall not attempt to discuss this question here, except to state that consciousness depends very materially upon the degree of attention bestowed upon its object. The authorities place great importance upon the intelligent direction of the attention, and hold that without this the higher forms of knowledge are impossible. It is the common belief that we feel, see, hear, taste, or smell whenever objects affecting those senses come in contact with the organs of sense governing them. But this is only a partial truth. The real truth is that we become conscious of the report of these senses only when the attention is directed toward the sensation, voluntarily or involuntarily. That is to say, that in many cases although the sense nerves and organs report a disturbance, the mind does not become consciously aware of the report unless the attention is directed toward it either by an act of will or else by reflex action. For instance, the clock may strike loudly, and yet we may not be conscious of the fact, for we are concentrating our attention upon a book; or we may eat the choicest food without tasting it, for we are listening intently to the conversation of our charming neighbor. We may fail to perceive some startling occurrence happening under our very eyes, for we are buried in deep thought concerning something far removed from the present scene. There are many cases on record showing that one may be so interested in speaking, thinking, or acting that he will not experience pain that would otherwise be intolerable. Writers have forgotten their pain in the concentrated interest bestowed upon their work; mothers have failed to feel pain when their infants required urgent attention; orators have been so carried away by their own eloquence that they have failed to feel the pricking of the pin by means of which their friends have sought to attract their attention. Not only perception and feeling depend largely upon attention, but the processes of reasoning, memory, and even of will, depend upon attention for much of their manifestation. Psychologists divide attention into two general classes, viz.: (1) voluntary attention and (2) involuntary attention. Voluntary attention is attention directed by the will to some object of our own more or less deliberate selection. It requires a distinct effort of the will in order to focus the attention in this way, and many persons are scarcely aware of its existence, so seldom do they manifest it. Voluntary attention is the result of training and practice, and marks the man of strong will, concentration, and character. Some authorities go so far as to say that much of that which is commonly called "will power" is really but a developed form of voluntary attention, the man of "strong will" holding before him the one idea which he wishes to realize. Involuntary attention, often called "reflex attention," is attention called forth by a nervous response to some sense stimulus. This is the common form of attention, and is but the same form which is so strongly manifested by children whose attention is caught by every new object, but which cannot be held for any length of time by a familiar or uninteresting one. It is of the utmost importance that one should cultivate his power of voluntary attention. Not only is the will power strengthened and developed in this way, but every mental faculty is developed by reason thereof. The training of the voluntary attention is the first step in mental development. TRAINING THE ATTENTION. That the voluntary attention may be deliberately trained and developed is a fact which many of the world's greatest men have proved for themselves. There is only one way to train and develop any mental power of faculty--and that is _by practice and use_. By practice, interest may be given to objects previously uninteresting, and thus the use of the attention develops the interest which further holds it. Interest is the natural road over which attention travels easily, but interest itself may be induced by concentrated attention. By studying and examining an object, the attention brings to light many new and novel features regarding the thing, and these produce a new interest which in turn attracts further and continued attention. There is no royal road to the development of voluntary attention. The only true method is _work_, _practice_, _and use_. You must practice on uninteresting things, the primary interest being your desire to develop the power of voluntary attention. But as you begin to attend to the uninteresting thing you will become interested in the task for its own sake. Take some object and "place your mind upon it." Think of its nature, where it came from, its use, its associations, its probable future, of things related to it, etc., etc. Keep the attention firmly upon it, and shut out all outside ideas. Then, after a little practice of this kind, lay aside the object for the time being, and take it up again the next day, endeavoring to discover new points of interest in it. The main thing to be sought is _to hold the thing in your mind_, and this can be done only by _discovering features of interest in it_. The interest-loving attention may rebel at this task at first, and will seek to wander from the path into the green pastures which are found on each side thereof. But you must bring the mind back to the task, again and again. After a time the mind will become accustomed to the drill, and will even begin to enjoy it. Give it some variety by occasionally changing the objects of examination. The object need not always be something to be looked at. Instead, select some subject in history or literature, and "run it down," endeavoring to bring to light all the facts relating to it that are possible to you. _Anything_ may be used as the subject or object of your inquiry; but what is chosen must be held in the field of conscious attention firmly and fixedly. The habit once acquired, you will find the practice most fascinating. You will invent new subjects or objects of inquiry, investigation, and thought, which in themselves will well repay you for your work and time. But never lose sight of the main point--the development of the power of voluntary attention. In studying the methods of developing and training the voluntary attention, the student should remember that _any_ exercise which develops the will, will result in developing the attention; and, likewise, any exercise which develops the voluntary attention will tend to strengthen the will. The will and attention are so closely bound together that what affects one also influences the other. This fact should be borne in mind, and the exercises and practices based upon it. In practicing concentration of voluntary attention, it should be remembered that concentrating consists not only of _focusing_ the attention upon a given object or subject, but also of the _shutting out_ of impressions from other objects or subjects. Some authorities advise that the student endeavor to listen to one voice among many, or one instrument among the many of a band or orchestra. Others advise the practice of concentrating on the reading of a book in a room filled by persons engaged in conversation, and similar exercises. Whatever aids in _narrowing the circle_ of attention at a given moment tends to develop the power of voluntary attention. The study of mathematics and logic is also held to be an excellent practice in concentration of voluntary attention, inasmuch as these studies require close concentration and attention. Attention is also developed by any study or practice which demands _analysis_ of a whole into its parts, and then the _synthesis_ or building up of a whole from its scattered parts. Each of the senses should play a part in the exercises, and in addition to this the mind should be trained to concentrate upon some one idea held within itself--some mental image or abstract idea existing independently of any object of immediate sense report. CHAPTER VI. Perception. It is a common mistake that we _perceive_ everything that is reported to the mind by the senses. As a matter of fact we perceive but a very small portion of the reports of the senses. There are thousands of sights reported by our eyes, sounds reported by our ears, smells reported by our nostrils, and contacts reported by our nerves of touch, every day of our lives, but which are not _perceived_ or _observed_ by the mind. We perceive and observe only when the attention, reflex or voluntary, is directed to the report of the senses, and when the mind interprets the report. While perception depends upon the reports of the senses for its raw material, it depends entirely upon the application of the mind for its complete manifestation. The student usually experiences great difficulty in distinguishing between _sensation_ and _perception_. A sensation is a simple report of the senses, which is received in consciousness. Perception is the _thought_ arising from the _feeling_ of the sensation. Perception usually combines several sensations into one thought or percept. By sensation the mind _feels_; by perception it _knows_ that it feels, and recognizes the object causing the sensation. Sensation merely brings a report from outside objects, while perception identifies the report with the object which caused it. Perception _interprets_ the reports of sensation. Sensation reports a flash of light from above; perception interprets the light as starlight, or moonlight, or sunlight, or as the flash of a meteor. Sensation reports a sharp, pricking, painful contact; perception interprets it as the prick of a pin. Sensation reports a red spot on a green background; perception interprets it as a berry on a bush. Moreover, while we may perceive a simple single sensation, our perceptions are usually of a group of sensations. Perception is usually employed in grouping sensations and identifying them with the object or objects causing them. In its identification it draws upon whatever memory of past experiences the mind may possess. Memory, imagination, feeling, and thought are called into play, to some extent, in every clear perception. The infant has but feeble perception, but as it gains experience it begins to manifest perceptions and form percepts. Sensations resemble the letters of the alphabet, and perception the forming of words and sentences from the letters. Thus _c_, _a_, and _t_ symbolize sensations, while the word "cat," formed from them, symbolizes the perception of the object. It is held that all knowledge begins with sensation; that the mental history of the race or individual begins with its first sensation. But, while this is admitted, it must be remembered that sensation simply provides the simple, elementary, raw material of thought. The first process of _actual thought_, or knowledge, begins with perception. From our percepts all of our higher concepts and ideas are formed. Perception depends upon association of the sensation with other sensations previously experienced; it is based upon experience. The greater the experience, the greater is the possibility of perception, all else being equal. When perception begins, the mind loses sight of the sensation in itself, for it identifies it as a quality of the thing producing it. The sensation of light is thought of as a quality of the star; the pricking sensation is thought of as a quality of the pin or chestnut bur; the sensation of odor is thought of as a quality of the rose. In the case of the rose, the several sensations of sight, touch, and smell, in their impression of the qualities of color, shape, softness, and perfume, are grouped together in the percept of the complete object of the flower. A _percept_ is "that which is perceived; the object of the act of perception." The percept, of course, is a mental state corresponding with its outside object. It is a combination of several sensations which are regarded as the qualities of the outside object, to which are combined the memories of past experiences, ideas, feelings, and thoughts. A percept, then, while the simplest form of thought, is seen to be a mental state. The formation of a percept consists of three gradual stages, viz.: (1) The attention forms definite conscious sensations from indefinite nervous reports; (2) the mind interprets these definite conscious sensations and attributes them to the outside object causing them; (3) the related sensations are grouped together, their unity perceived, and they are regarded as qualities of the outside object. The plain distinction between a sensation and a percept may be fixed in the mind by remembering the following: _A sensation is a feeling_; _a percept is a simple thought identifying one or more sensations_. A sensation is merely the conscious recognition of an excitation of a nerve end; a percept results from a distinct mental process regarding the sensation. DEVELOPING PERCEPTION. It is of the utmost importance that we develop and train our powers of perception. For our education depends very materially upon our perceptive power. What matters it to us if the outside world be filled with manifold objects, if we do not perceive them to exist? Upon perception depends the material of our mental world. Many persons go through the world without perceiving even the most obvious facts. Their eyes and ears are perfect instruments, their nerves convey accurate reports, but the perceptive faculties of the mind fail to observe and interpret the report of the senses. They see and hear distinctly, but the reports of the senses are not observed or noted by them; they mean nothing to them. One may see many things, and yet _observe_ but few. It is not upon what we see or hear that our stock of knowledge depends, so much as it does upon what we perceive, notice, or observe. Not only is one's stock of practical knowledge largely based upon developed perception, but one's success also depends materially upon the same faculties. In business and professional life the successful man is usually he who has developed perceptive powers; he who has learned to perceive, observe, and note. The man who perceives and takes mental notes of what occurs in his world is the man who is apt to know things when such knowledge is needed. In this age of "book education" we find that the young people are not nearly so observant as are those children who had to depend upon the powers of perception for their knowledge. The young Arab or Indian will observe more in an hour than the civilized child will in a day. To live in a world of books tends, in many cases, to weaken the powers of observation and perception. Perception may be developed by practice. Begin by taking notice of the things seen and heard in your usual walks. Keep wide open the eyes of the mind. Notice the faces of people, their walk, their characteristics. Look for interesting and odd things, and you will see them. Do not go through life in a daydream, but keep a sharp lookout for things of interest and value. The most familiar things will repay you for the time and work of examining them in detail, and the practice gained by such tasks will prove valuable in your development of perception. An authority remarks that very few persons, even those living in the country, know whether a cow's ears are above, below, behind, or in front of her horns; nor whether cats descend trees head first or tail first. Very few persons can distinguish between the leaves of the various kinds of familiar trees in their neighborhood. Comparatively few persons are able to describe the house in which they live, at least beyond the most general features--the details are unknown. Houdin, the French conjurer, was able to pass by a shop window and perceive every article in it, and then repeat what he had seen. But he acquired this skill only by constant and gradual practice. He himself decried his skill and claimed that it was as nothing compared to that of the fashionable woman who can pass another woman on the street and "take in" her entire attire, from head to foot, at one glance, and "be able to describe not only the fashion and quality of the stuffs, but also say if the lace be real or only machine made." A former president of Yale is said to have been able to glance at a book and read a quarter of a page at one time. Any study or occupation which requires _analysis_ will develop the power of perception. Consequently, if we will analyze the things we see, resolving them into their parts or elements, we will likewise develop the perceptive faculties. It is a good exercise to examine some small object and endeavor to discover as many separate points of perception as possible, noting them on a sheet of paper. The most familiar object, if carefully examined, will yield rich returns. If two persons will enter into a contest of this kind, the spirit of rivalry and competition will quicken the powers of observation. Those who have had the patience and perseverance to systematically practice exercises of this kind, report that they notice a steady improvement from the very start. But even if one does not feel inclined to practice in this way, it will be found possible _to begin to take notice_ of the details of things one sees, the expression of persons' faces, the details of their dress, their tone of voice, the quality of the goods we handle, and _the little things especially_. Perception, like attention, follows interest; but, likewise, interest may be created in things by observing their details, peculiarities, and characteristics. The best knowledge gained by one is that resulting from his own personal perception. There is a nearness and trueness about that which one _knows_ in this way which is lacking in that which he merely _believes_ because he has read or heard it. One can make such knowledge a part of himself. Not only is one's knowledge dependent upon what he perceives, but his very character also results from the character of his percepts. The influence of environment is great--and what is environment but things perceived about one? It is not so much what lies outside of one, as what part of it gets _inside_ of one by perception. By directing his attention to desirable objects, and perceiving as much of them as is possible, one really builds his own character at will. The world needs good "perceivers" in all the walks of life. It finds a shortage of them, and is demanding them loudly, being willing to pay a good price for their services. The person who can voluntarily perceive and observe the details of any profession, business, or trade will go far in that vocation. The education of children should take the faculty of perception into active consideration. The kindergarten has taken some steps in this direction, but there is much more to be done. CHAPTER VII. Memory. Psychologists class as "representative mental processes" those known as memory and imagination, respectively. The term "representation" is used in psychology to indicate the processes of re-presentation or presenting again to consciousness that which has formerly been presented to it but which afterward passed from its field. As Hamilton says: "The general capability of knowledge necessarily requires that, besides the power of evoking out of unconsciousness one portion of our retained knowledge in preference to another, we possess the faculty of representing in consciousness what is thus evoked." Memory is the primary representative faculty or power of the mind. Imagination depends upon memory for its material, as we shall see when we consider that faculty. Every mental process which involves the remembrance, recollection, or representation of a sensation, perception, mental image, thought, or idea previously experienced must depend upon memory for its material. Memory is the great storehouse of the mind in which are placed the records of previous mental experiences. It is a part of the great subconscious field of mental activity, and the greater part of its work is performed below the plane of consciousness. It is only when its results are passed into the field of consciousness that we are aware of its existence. We know memory only by its works. Of its nature we know but little, although certain of its principal laws and principles have been discovered. It was formerly customary to class memory with the various faculties of the mind, but later psychology no longer so considers it. Memory is now regarded as a power of the general mind, manifesting in connection with every faculty of the mind. It is now regarded as belonging to the great subconscious field of mentation, and its explanation must be sought there. It is utterly unexplainable otherwise. The importance of memory cannot be overestimated. Not only does a man's character and education depend chiefly upon it, but his very mental being is bound up with it. If there were no memory, man would never progress mentally beyond the mental state of the newborn babe. He would never be able to profit by experience. He would never be able to form clear perceptions. He would never be able to reason or form judgments. The processes of thought depend for material upon the memory of past experiences; this material lacking, there can be no thought. Memory has two important general functions, viz.: (1) The _retention_ of impressions and experiences; and (2) the _reproduction_ of the impressions and experiences so retained. It was formerly held that the memory retained only a portion of the impressions and experiences originally noted by it. But the present theory is that it retains every impression and experience which is noted by it. It is true that many of these impressions are never reproduced in consciousness, but experiments tend to prove, nevertheless, that the records are still in the memory and that appropriate and sufficiently strong stimuli will bring them into the field of consciousness. The phenomena of somnambulism, dreams, hysteria, delirium, approach of death, etc., show that the subconscious mind has an immense accumulation of apparently forgotten facts, which unusual stimuli will serve to recall. The power of the memory to reproduce the retained impressions and experiences is variously called remembrance, recollection, or memory. This power varies materially in various individuals, but it is an axiom of psychology that the memory of any person may be developed and trained by practice. The ability to recall depends to a great extent upon the clearness and depth of the original impression, which in turn depends upon the degree of attention given to it at the time of its occurrence. Recollection is also greatly aided by the law of association, or the principle whereby one mental fact is linked to another. The more facts to which a given fact is linked, the greater the ease by which it is recalled or remembered. Recollection is also greatly assisted by use and exercise. Like the fingers, the memory cells of the brain become expert and efficient by use and exercise, or stiff and inefficient by lack of the same. In addition to the phases of retention and reproduction, there are two important phases of memory, viz.: (3) Recognition of the reproduced impression or experience; and (4) localization of the impression, or its reference to a more or less definite time and place. The recognition of the recalled impression is quite important. It is not enough that the impression be retained and recalled. If we are not able to recognize the recalled impression as having been experienced before, the recollection will be of but little use to us in our thought processes; the purposes of thought demand that we shall be able to identify the recalled impression with the original one. Recognition is really re-cognition--re-knowing. Recognition is akin to perception. The mind becomes conscious of the recalled impression just as it becomes conscious of the sensation. It then recognizes the relation of the recalled impression to the original one just as it realizes the relation of the sensation to its object. The localization of the recalled and recognized impression is also important. Even if we recognize the recalled impression, it will be of comparatively little use to us unless we are able to locate it as having happened yesterday, last week, last month, last year, ten years ago, or at some time in the past; and as having happened in our office, house, or in such-and-such a place in the street, or in some distant place. Without the power of localization we should be unable to connect and associate the remembered fact with the time, place, and persons with which it should be placed to be of use and value to us in our thought processes. RETENTION. The retention of a mental impression in the memory depends very materially upon the clearness and depth of the original impression. And this clearness and depth, as we have previously stated, depend upon the degree of attention bestowed upon the original impression. Attention, then, is the important factor in the forming and recording of impressions. The rule is: _Slight attention, faint record_; _marked attention, clear and deep record_. To fix this fact in the mind, the student may think of the retentive and reproductive phases of memory as a phonographic record. The receiving diaphragm of the phonograph represents the sense organs, and the recording needle represents the _attention_. The needle makes the record on the cylinder deep or faint according to the condition of the needle. A loud sound may be recorded but faintly, if the needle is not properly adjusted. And, further, it must be remembered that the strength of the reproduction depends almost entirely upon the clearness and depth of the original impression on the cylinder; as is the record, so is the reproduction. It will be well for the student to carry this symbol of the phonograph in his mind; it will aid him in developing his powers of memory. In this connection we should remember that attention depends largely upon interest. Therefore we would naturally expect to find that we remember interesting things far more readily than those which lack interest. This supposition is borne out in actual experience. This accounts for the fact that every one remembers a certain class of things better than he does others. One remembers faces, another dates, another spoken conversation, another written words, and so on. It will be found, as a rule, that each person is interested in the class of things which he most easily remembers. The artist easily remembers faces and details of faces, or scenery and details thereof. The musician easily recalls passages or bars of music, often of a most complicated nature. The speculator easily recalls the quotations of his favorite stocks. The racing man recalls without difficulty the "odds" posted on a certain horse on a certain day, or the details of a race which was run many years ago. The moral is: _Arouse and induce an interest in the things which you wish to remember_. This interest may be aroused by studying the things in question, as we have suggested in a preceding chapter. VISUALIZATION IN MEMORY. Many of the best authorities hold that original impressions may be made clear and deep, and the process of reproduction accordingly rendered more efficient, by the practice of _visualizing_ the thing to be remembered. By visualizing is meant the formation of a _mental image_ of the thing in the imagination. If you wish to remember the appearance of anything, look at it closely, with attention, and then turning away from it endeavor to reproduce its appearance as a mental picture in the mind. If this is done, a particularly clear impression will be made in the memory, and when you recall the thing you will find that you will also recall the clear mental image of it. Of course the greater the number of details observed and included in the original mental image, the greater the remembered detail. PERCEPTION IN MEMORY. Not only is attention necessary in forming clear memory records, but careful perception is also important. Without clear perception there is a lack of detail in the retained record, and the element of association is lacking. It is not enough to merely remember the thing itself; we should also remember _what_ it is, and all about it. The practice of the methods of developing perception, given in a preceding lesson, will tend to develop and train the retentive, reproductive, recognitive, and locative powers of the memory. The rule is: _The greater the degree of perception accorded a thing, the greater the detail of the retained impression, and the greater the ease of the recollection_. UNDERSTANDING AND MEMORY. Another important point in acquiring impressions in memory is this: _That the better the understanding of the subject or object, the clearer the impressions regarding it, and the clearer the recollection of it_. This fact is proved by experiment and experience. A subject which will be remembered only with difficulty under ordinary circumstances will be easily remembered if it is fully explained to the person, and accompanied by a few familiar illustrations or examples. It is very difficult to remember a meaningless string of words, while a sentence which conveys a clear meaning may be memorized easily. If we understand _what a thing is for_, its uses and employment, we remember it far more easily than if we lack this understanding. Elbringhaus, who conducted a number of experiments along this line, reports that he could memorize a stanza of poetry in about one tenth the time required to memorize the same amount of nonsense syllables. Gordy states that he once asked a capable student of the Johns Hopkins University to give him an account of a lecture to which he had just listened. "I cannot do it," replied the student; "it was not logical." The rule is: _The more one knows about a certain thing, the more easily is that thing remembered_. This is a point worth noting. CHAPTER VIII. Memory--Continued. The subject of memory cannot be touched upon intelligently without a consideration of the Law of Association, one of the important psychological principles. THE LAW OF ASSOCIATION. What is known in psychology as the Law of Association is based on the fact that _no idea exists in the mind except in association with other ideas_. This is not generally recognized, and the majority of persons will dispute the law at first thought. But the existence and appearance of ideas in the mind are governed by a mental law as invariable and constant as the physical law of gravitation. Every idea has associations with other ideas. Ideas travel in groups, and one group is associated with another group, and so on, until in the end every idea in one's mind is associated directly or indirectly with every other idea. Theoretically, at least, it would be possible to begin with one idea in the mind of a person, and then gradually unwind his entire stock of ideas like the yarn on the ball. Our thoughts proceed according to this law. We sit down in a "brown study" and proceed from one subject to another, until we are unable to remember any connection between the first thought and the last. But each step of the reverie was connected with the one preceding and the one succeeding it. It is interesting to trace back these connections. Poe based one of his celebrated detective stories on this law. The reverie may be broken into by a sudden impression from outside, and we will then proceed from that impression, connecting it with something else already in our experience, and starting a new chain of sequence. Often we fail to trace the associations governing our ideas, but the chain is there nevertheless. One may think of a past scene or experience without any apparent cause. A little thought will show that something seen, or a few notes of a song floating to the ears, or the fragrance of a flower, has supplied the connecting link between the past and the present. A suggestion of mignonette will recall some past event in which the perfume played a part; some one's handkerchief, perhaps, carried the same odor. Or an old familiar tune reminds one of some one, something, or some place in the past. A familiar feature in the countenance of a passer-by will start one thinking of some one else who had that kind of a mouth, that shaped nose, or that expression of the eye--and away he will be off in a sequence of remembered experiences. Often the starting idea, or the connecting links, may appear but dimly in consciousness; but rest assured they are always there. In fact, we frequently accept this law, unconsciously and without realizing its actual existence. For instance, one makes a remark, and at once we wonder, "How did he come to think of that?" and, if we are shrewd, we may discover what was in his mind before he spoke. There are two general classes of association of ideas in memory, viz.: (1) Association of contiguity, and (2) logical association. Association of contiguity is that form of association depending upon the previous association in time or space of ideas which have been impressed on the mind. For instance, if you met Mr. and Mrs. Wetterhorn and were introduced to them one after the other, thereafter you will naturally remember Mr. W. when you think of Mrs. W., and vice versa. You will naturally remember Napoleon when you think of Wellington, or Benedict Arnold when you think of Major André, for the same reason. You will also naturally remember _b_ and _c_ when you think of _a_. Likewise, you will think of abstract time when you think of abstract space, of thunder when you think of lightning, of colic when you recall green apples, of love making and moonlight nights when you think of college days. In the same way we remember things which occurred just before or just after the event in our mind at the moment; of things near in space to the thing of which we are thinking. Logical association depends upon the relation of likeness or difference between several things thought of. Things thus associated may have never come into the mind at the same previous time, nor are they necessarily connected in time and space. One may think of a book, and then proceed by association to think of another book by the same author, or of another author treating of the same subject. Or he may think of a book directly opposed to the first, the relation of distinct difference causing the associated idea. Logical association depends upon _inner relations_, and not upon the outer relations of time and space. This _innerness_ of relation between things not connected in space or time is discovered only by experience and education. The educated man realizes many points of relationship between things that are thought by the uneducated man to be totally unrelated. Wisdom and knowledge consist largely in the recognition of relations between things. ASSOCIATION IN MEMORY. It follows from a consideration of the Law of Association that when one wishes to impress a thing upon the memory he should, as an authority says, "Multiply associations; entangle the fact you wish to remember in a net of as many associations as possible, especially those that are logical." Hence the advice to place your facts in groups and classes in the memory. As Blackie says: "Nothing helps the mind so much as order and classification. Classes are always few, individuals many; to know the class well is to know what is most essential in the character of the individual, and what burdens the memory least to retain." REPETITION IN MEMORY. Another important principle of memory is that the impressions acquire depth and clearness by repetition. Repeat a line of poetry once, and you may remember it; repeat it again, and your chances of remembering it are greatly increased; repeat it a sufficient number of times, and you cannot escape remembering it. The illustration of the phonograph record will help you to understand the reason of this. The rule is: _Constant repetition deepens memory impressions; frequent reviewing and recalling what has been memorized tends to keep the records clear and clean, beside deepening the impression at each review_. GENERAL RULES OF MEMORY. The following general rules will be of service to the student who wishes to develop his memory:-- _Making Impressions._ (1) Bestow attention. (2) Cultivate interest. (3) Manifest perception. (4) Cultivate understanding. (5) Form associations. (6) Repeat and review. _Recalling Impressions._ (1) Endeavor to get hold of the loose end of association, and then unwind your memory ball of yarn. (2) When you recall an impression, send it back with energy to deepen the impression, and attach it to as many new associations as possible. (3) Practice a little memorizing and recalling each day, if only a line of verse. The memory improves by practice, and deteriorates by neglect and disuse. (4) Demand good service of your memory, and it will learn to respond. Learn to trust it, and it will rise to the occasion. How can you expect your memory to give good service when you continually abuse it and tell every one of "the wretched memory I have; I can never remember anything"? Your memory is very apt to accept your statements as truth; our mental faculties have an annoying habit of taking us at our word in these matters. Tell your memory what you expect it to do; then trust it and refrain from abusing it and giving it a bad name. FINAL ADVICE. Finally, remember this rule: You get out of your memory only that which you place in it. Place in it good, clear, deep impressions, and it will reproduce good, clear, strong recollections. Think of your memory as a phonographic record, and take care that you place the right kind of impressions upon it. In memory you reap that which you have sown. You must give to the memory before you can receive from it. Of one thing you may rest assured, namely, that unless you take sufficient interest in the things to be remembered, you will find that the memory will not take sufficient interest in them to remember them. Memory demands interest before it will take interest in the task. It demands attention before it will give attention. It demands understanding before it will give understanding. It demands association before it will respond to association. It demands repetition before it will repeat. The memory is a splendid instrument, but it stands on its dignity and asserts its rights. It belongs to the old dispensation--it demands compensation and believes in giving only in equal measure to what it receives. Our advice is to get acquainted with your memory, and make friends with it. Treat it well and it will serve you well. But neglect it, and it will turn its back on you. CHAPTER IX. Imagination. The imagination belongs to the general class of mental processes called the representative faculties, by which is meant the processes in which there are re-presented, or presented again, to consciousness impressions previously presented to it. As we have indicated elsewhere, the imagination is dependent upon memory for its materials--its records of previous impressions. But imagination is more than mere memory or recollection of these previously experienced and recorded impressions. There is, in addition to the re-presentation and recollection, a process of arranging the recalled impressions into new forms and new combinations. The imagination not only gathers together the old impressions, but also _creates_ new combinations and forms from the material so gathered. Psychology gives us many hairsplitting definitions and distinctions between simple reproductive imagination and memory, but these distinctions are technical and as a rule perplexing to the average student. In truth, there is very little, if any, difference between simple reproductive imagination and memory, although when the imagination indulges in constructive activity a new feature enters into the process which is absent in pure memory operations. In simple reproductive imagination there is simply the formation of the mental image of some previous experience--the reproduction of a previous mental image. This differs very little from memory, except that the recalled image is clearer and stronger. In the same way in ordinary memory, in the manifestation of recollection, there is often the same clear, strong mental image that is produced in reproductive imagination. The two mental processes blend into each other so closely that it is practically impossible to draw the line between them, in spite of the technical differences urged by the psychologists. Of course the mere remembrance of a person who presents himself to one is nearer to pure memory than to imagination, for the process is that of recognition. But the memory or remembrance of the same person when he is absent from sight is practically that of reproductive imagination. Memory, in its stage of recognition, exists in the child mind before reproductive imagination is manifested. The latter, therefore, is regarded as a higher mental process. But still higher in the scale is that which is known as _constructive imagination_. This form of imagination appears at a later period of child mentation, and is regarded as a later evolution of mental processes of the race. Gordy makes the following distinction between the two phases of imagination: "The difference between reproductive imagination and constructive imagination is that the images resulting from reproductive imagination are _copies of past experience_, while those resulting from constructive imagination are not. * * * To learn whether any particular image, or combination of images, is the product of reproductive or constructive imagination, all we have to do is to learn whether or not it is a copy of a past experience. Our memories, of course, are defective, and we may be uncertain on that account; but apart from that, we need be in no doubt whatever." Many persons hearing for the first time the statement of psychologists that the imaginative faculties can re-present and re-produce or re-combine only the images which have previously been impressed upon the mind, are apt to object that they can, and frequently do, image things which they have not previously experienced. But can they and do they? Is it not true that what they believe to be original creations of the imagination are merely _new combinations_ of original impressions? For instance, no one ever saw a unicorn, and yet some one originally imagined its form. But a little thought will show that the image of the unicorn is merely that of an animal having the head, neck, and body of a horse, with the beard of a goat, the legs of a buck, the tail of a lion, and a long, tapering horn, spirally twisted, in the middle of the forehead. Each of the several parts of the unicorn exists in some living animal, although the unicorn, composed of all of these parts, is non-existent outside of fable. In the same way the centaur is composed of the body, legs, and tail of the horse and the trunk, head, and arms of a man. The satyr has the head, body, and arms of a man, with the horns, legs, and hoofs of a goat. The mermaid has the head, arms, and trunk of a woman, joined at the waist to the body and tail of a fish. The mythological "devil" has the head, body, and arms of a man, with the horns, legs, and cloven foot of the lower animal, and a peculiar tail composed of that of some animal but tipped with a spearhead. Each of these characteristics is composed of familiar images of experience. The imagination may occupy itself for a lifetime turning out impossible animals of this kind, but every part thereof will be found to correspond to something existent in nature, and experienced by the mind of the person creating the strange beast. In the same way the imagination may picture a familiar person or thing acting in an unaccustomed manner, the latter having no basis in fact so far as the individual person or thing is concerned, but being warranted by some experience concerning other persons or things. For instance, one may easily form the image of a dog swimming under water like a fish, or climbing a tree like a cat. Likewise, one may form a mental image of a learned, bewigged High Chancellor, or a venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, dressed like a clown, standing on his head, balancing a colored football on his feet, sticking his tongue in his cheek and winking at the audience. In the same way one may imagine a railroad running across a barren desert, or a steep mountain, upon which there is not as yet a rail laid. The bridge across a river may be imaged in the same way. In fact, this is the way that everything is mentally created, constructed, or invented--the old materials being combined in a new way, and arranged in a new fashion. Some psychologists go so far as to say that no mental image of memory is an exact reproduction of the original impression; that there are always changes due to the unconscious operation of the constructive imagination. The constructive imagination is able to "tear things to pieces" in search for material, as well as to "join things together" in its work of building. The importance of the imagination in all the processes of intellectual thought is great. Without imagination man could not reason or manifest any intellectual process. It is impossible to consider the subject of thought without first regarding the processes of imagination. And yet it is common to hear persons speak of the imagination as if it were a faculty of mere fancy, useless and without place in the practical world of thought. DEVELOPING THE IMAGINATION. The imagination is capable of development and training. The general rules for development of the imagination are practically those which we have stated in connection with the development of the memory. There is the same necessity for plenty of material; for the formation of clear and deep impressions and clear-cut mental images; the same necessity for repeated impression, and the frequent use and employment of the faculty. The practice of visualization, of course, strengthens the power of the imagination as it does that of the memory, the two powers being intimately related. The imagination may be strengthened and trained by deliberately recalling previous impressions and then combining them into new relations. The materials of memory may be torn apart and then re-combined and re-grouped. In the same way one may enter into the feelings and thoughts of other persons by imagining one's self in their place and endeavoring to act out in imagination the life of such persons. In this way one may build up a much fuller and broader conception of human nature and human motives. In this place, also, we should caution the student against the common waste of the powers of the imagination, and the dissipation of its powers in idle fancies and daydreams. Many persons misuse their imagination in this way and not only weaken its power for effective work but also waste their time and energy. Daydreams are notoriously unfit for the real, practical work of life. IMAGINATION AND IDEALS. And, finally, the student should remember that in the category of the imaginative powers must be placed that phase of mental activity which has so much to do with the making or marring of one's life--the formation of ideals. Our ideals are the patterns after which we shape our life. According to the nature of our ideals is the character of the life we lead. Our ideals are the supports of that which we call _character_. It is a truth, old as the race, and now being perceived most clearly by thinkers, that indeed "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he." The influence of our ideals is perceived to affect not only our character but also our place and degree of success in life. We grow to be that of which we have held ideals. If we create an ideal, either of general qualities or else these qualities as manifested by some person living or dead, and keep that ideal ever before us, we cannot help developing traits and qualities corresponding to those of our ideal. Careful thought will show that character depends greatly upon the nature of our ideals; therefore we see the effect of the imagination in character building. Moreover, our imagination has an important bearing on our actions. Many a man has committed an imprudent or immoral act which he would not have done had he been possessed of an imagination which showed him the probable results of the action. In the same way many men have been inspired to great deeds and achievements by reason of their imagination picturing to them the possible results of certain action. The "big things" in all walks of life have been performed by men who had sufficient imagination to picture the possibilities of certain courses or plans. The railroads, bridges, telegraph lines, cable lines, and other works of man are the results of the imagination of some men. The good fairy godmother always provides a vivid and lively imagination among the gifts she bestows upon her beloved godchildren. Well did the old philosopher pray to the gods: "And, with all, give unto me a clear and active imagination." The dramatic values of life depend upon the quality of the imagination. Life without imagination is mechanical and dreary. Imagination may increase the susceptibility to pain, but it pays for this by increasing the capacity for joy and happiness. The pig has but little imagination,--little pain and little joy,--but who envies the pig? The person with a clear and active imagination is in a measure a creator of his world, or at least a re-creator. He takes an active part in the creative activities of the universe, instead of being a mere pawn pushed here and there in the game of life. Again, the divine gift of sympathy and understanding depends materially upon the possession of a good imagination. One can never understand the pain or problems of another unless he first can imagine himself in the place of the other. Imagination is at the very heart of sympathy. One may be possessed of great capacity for feeling, but owing to his lack of imagination may never have this feeling called into action. The person who would sympathize with others must first learn to understand them and feel their emotions. This he can do only if he has the proper degree of imagination. Those who reach the heart of the people must first be reached by the feelings of the people. And this is possible only to him whose imagination enables him to picture himself in the same condition as others, and thus awaken his latent feelings and sympathies and understanding. Thus it is seen that the imagination touches not only our intellectual life but also our emotional nature. Imagination is the very life of the soul. CHAPTER X. The Feelings. In thinking of the mind and its activities we are accustomed to the general idea that the mental processes are chiefly those of intellect, reason, thought. But, as a fact, the greater part of the mental activities are those concerned with feeling and emotion. The intellect is the youngest child of the mind, and while making its presence strenuously known in the manner of all youngest children so that one is perhaps justified in regarding it as "the whole thing" in the family, nevertheless it really plays but a comparatively small part in the general work of the mental family. The activities of the "feeling" side of life greatly outnumber those of the "thinking" side, are far stronger in their influence and effect, as a rule, and, in fact, so color the intellectual processes, unconsciously, as to constitute their distinctive quality except in the case of a very few advanced thinkers. But there is a difference between "feeling" and "emotion," as the terms are employed in psychology. The former is the simple phase, the latter the complex. Generally speaking, the resemblance or difference is akin to that existing between sensation and perception, as explained in a previous chapter. Beginning with the simple, in order later on to reach the complex, we shall now consider that which is known as simple "feeling." The term "feeling," as used in this connection in psychology, has been defined as "the simple _agreeable_ or _disagreeable_ side of any mental state." These agreeable or disagreeable sides of mental states are quite distinct from the act of knowing, which accompanies them. One may perceive and thus "know" that another is speaking to him and be fully aware of the words being used and of their meaning. Ordinarily, and so far as pure thought processes are concerned, this would complete the mental state. But we must reckon on the feeling side as well as on the thinking side of the mental state. Accordingly we find that the knowledge of the words of the other person and the meaning thereof results in a mental state agreeable or disagreeable. In the same way the reading of the words of a book, the hearing of a song, or a sight or scene perceived, may result in a more or less strong feeling, agreeable or disagreeable. This sense of agreeable or disagreeable consciousness is the essential characteristic of what we call "feeling." It is very difficult to explain feeling except in its own terms. We know very well what we mean, or what another means, when it is said that we or he "_feels_ sad," or has "a joyous feeling," or "a feeling of interest." And yet we shall find it very hard to explain the mental state except in terms of feeling itself. Our knowledge depends entirely upon our previous experience of the feeling. As an authority says: "If we have never felt pleasure, pain, fear, or sorrow, a quarto volume cannot make us understand what such a mental state is." Every mental state is not distinguished by strong feeling. There are certain mental states which are concerned chiefly with intellectual effort, and in which all trace of feeling seems to be absent, unless, as some have claimed, the "feeling" of interest or the lack of same is a faint form of the feeling of pleasure or pain. Habit may dull the feeling of a mental state until it is apparently neutral, but there is generally a faint feeling of like or dislike still left. The elementary forms of feeling are closely allied with those of simple sensation. But experiments have revealed that there is a distinction in consciousness. It has been discovered that one is often conscious of the "touch" of a heated object before he is of the feeling or pain resulting from it. Psychologists have pointed out another distinction, namely: When we experience a sensation we are accustomed to refer it to the outside thing which is the object of it, as when we touch the heated object; but when we experience a feeling we instinctively refer it to ourself, as when the heated object gives us pain. As an authority has said: "My feelings belong to me; but my sensations seem to belong to the object which caused them." Another proof of the difference and distinction between sensation and feeling is the fact that the same sensation will produce different feelings in different persons experiencing the former, even at the same time. For instance, the same sight will cause one person to feel elated, and the other depressed; the same words will produce a feeling of joy in one, and a feeling of sorrow in another. The same sensation will produce different feelings in the same person at different times. An authority well says: "You drop your purse, and you see it lying on the ground as you stoop to pick it up, with no feeling either of pleasure or pain. But if you see it after you have lost it and have hunted for it a long time in vain, you have a pronounced feeling of pleasure." There is a vast range of degree and kind in feeling. Gordy says: "All forms of pleasure and pain are called feelings. Between the pleasure which comes from eating a peach and that which results from solving a difficult problem, or learning good news of a friend, or thinking of the progress of civilization--between the pain that results from a cut in the hand and that which results from the failure of a long-cherished plan or the death of a friend--there is a long distance. But the one group are all pleasures; the other all pains. And, whatever the source of the pleasure or pain, it is alike feeling." There are many different kinds of feelings. Some arise from sensations of physical comfort or discomfort; others from purely physiological conditions; others from the satisfaction of accustomed tastes, or the dissatisfaction arising from the stimulation of unaccustomed tastes; others from the presence or absence of comfort; others from the presence or absence of things or persons for whom we have an affection or liking. Over-indulgence often transforms the feeling of pleasure into that of pain; and, likewise, habit and practice may cause us to experience a pleasurable feeling from that which formerly inspired feeling of an opposite kind. Feelings also differ in degree; that is to say, some things cause us to experience pleasurable feelings of a greater intensity than do others, and some cause us to experience painful feelings of a greater intensity than do others. These degrees of intensity depend more or less upon the habit or experience of the individual. As a general rule, feelings may be classified into (1) those arising from physical sensations, and (2) those arising from ideas. The feelings depending upon physical sensations arise either from inherited tendencies and inclinations or from acquired habits and experience. It is an axiom of the evolutionary school that any physical activity that has been a habit of the race, long continued, becomes an instinctive pleasure-giving activity in the individual. For instance, the race for many generations was compelled to hunt, fish, travel, swim, etc., in order to maintain existence. The result is that we, the descendants, are apt to find pleasure in the same activities as sport, games, exercise, etc. Many of our tendencies and feelings are inherited in this way. To these we have added many acquired habits of physical activity, which follow the same rule, _i.e._, that habit and practice impart more or less pleasurable feeling. We find more pleasure in doing those things which we can do easily or quite well than in the opposite kind of things. The feelings depending upon ideas may also arise from inheritance. Many of our mental tendencies and inclinations have come down to us from the past. There are certain feelings that are born in one, without a doubt; that is to say, there is a great capacity for such feelings which will be transformed into manifestation upon the presentation of the proper stimulus. Other mental feelings depend upon our individual past experience, association, or suggestions from others--upon our past environment, in fact. The ideals of those around us will cause us to experience pleasure or pain, as the case may be, under certain circumstances; the force of suggestion along these lines is very strong indeed. Not only do we experience feelings in response to present sensations, but the recollection of some previous experience will also arouse feeling. In fact, feelings of this kind are closely bound up with memory and imagination. Persons of vivid imagination are apt to feel far more than others. They suffer more, and enjoy more. Our sympathies, which depend largely upon our imaginative power, are the cause of many of our feelings of this kind. Many of the facts which we generally ascribe to feeling are really a part of the phenomena of emotion, the latter being the more complex phase of feeling. For the purposes of this consideration we have regarded simple feeling as the raw material of emotion, the relation being compared to that existing between sensation and perception. In our consideration of emotion we shall see the fuller manifestation of feeling, and its more complex expressions. CHAPTER XI. The Emotions. As we have seen in the preceding lessons, an emotion is the more complex phase of feeling. As a rule an emotion arises from a number of feelings. Moreover, it is of a higher order of mental activity. As we have seen, a feeling may arise either from a physical sensation or from an idea. Emotion, however, as a rule, is dependent upon _an idea_ for its expression, and always upon an idea for its direction and its continuance. Feeling, of course, is the elemental spirit of all emotional states, and, as an authority has said, is the thread upon which the emotional states are strung. Halleck says: "When representative ideas appear, the feeling in combination with them produces emotion. After the waters of the Missouri combine with another stream, they receive a different name, although they flow toward the gulf in as great volume as before. Suppose we liken the feeling due to sensation to the Missouri River; the train of representative ideas to the Mississippi before its junction with the Missouri. Emotion may then be likened to the Mississippi _after_ its junction--after feeling has combined with representative ideas. The emotional stream will not be broader and deeper than before. This analogy is employed only to make the distinction clearer. The student must remember that mental powers are never actually as distinct as two rivers before their union. * * * The student must beware of thinking that we have done with feeling when we consider emotion. Just as the waters of the Missouri flow on until they reach the gulf, so does feeling run through every emotional state." In the above analogy the term "representative ideas," of course, means the ideas of memory and imagination as explained in previous chapters. There is a close relation between emotion and the physical expression thereof--a peculiar mutual action and reaction between the mental state and the physical action accompanying it. Psychologists are divided regarding this relation. One school holds that the physical expression follows and results from the mental state. For instance, we hear or see something, and thereupon experience the feeling or emotion of anger. This emotional feeling reacts upon the body and causes an increased heart beat, a tight closing of the lips, a frown and lowered eyebrows, and clinched fists. Or we may perceive something which causes the feeling or emotion of fear, which reacts upon the body and produces pallor, raising of the hair, dropping of the jaw, opening of the eyelids, trembling of the legs, etc. According to this school, and the popular idea, the mental state precedes and causes the physical expression. But another school of psychology, of which the late Prof. William James is a leading authority, holds that the physical expression precedes and causes the mental state. For instance, in the cases above cited, the perception of the anger-causing or fear-causing sight first causes a reflex action upon the muscles, according to inherited race habits of expression. This muscular expression and activity, in turn, is held to react upon the mind and to cause the feeling or emotion of anger or fear, as the case may be. Professor James, in some of his works, makes a forcible argument in support of this theory, and his opinions have influenced the scientific thought of the day upon this subject. Others, however, have sought to combat his theory by equally forcible argument, and the subject is still under lively and spirited discussion in psychological circles. Without taking sides in the above controversy, many psychologists proceed upon the hypothesis that there is a mutual action and reaction between emotional mental states and the appropriate physical expression thereof, each in a measure being the cause of the other, and each likewise being the effect of the other. For instance, in the cases above cited, the perception of the anger-producing or fear-producing sight causes, almost or quite simultaneously, the emotional mental state of anger or fear, as the case may be, and the physical expression thereof. Then rapidly ensues a series of mental and physical reactions. The mental state acts upon the physical expression and intensifies it. The physical expression in turn reacts upon the mental state and induces a more intense degree of the emotional feeling. And so on, until the mental state and physical expression reach their highest point and then begin to subside from exhaustion of energy. This middle-ground conception meets all the requirements of the facts, and is probably more nearly correct than either extreme theory. Darwin in his classic work, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," has thrown a great light on the subject of the expression of emotion in physical motions. The Florentine scientist, Paolo Mantegazza, added to Darwin's work with ideas of his own and countless examples drawn from his own experience and observation. The work of François Delsarte, the founder of the school of expression which bears his name, is also a most valuable addition to the thought on this subject. The subject of the relation and reaction between emotional feeling and physical expression is a most fascinating one, and one in which we may expect interesting and valuable discoveries during the next twenty years. The relation and reaction above mentioned are interesting not only from the viewpoint of theory but also because of their practicable application in emotional development and training. It is an established truth of psychology that each physical expression of an emotional state serves to intensify the latter; it is pouring oil on the fire. Likewise, it is equally true that the repression of the physical expression of an emotion tends to restrain and inhibit the emotion itself. Halleck says: "If we watch a person growing angry, we shall see the emotion increase as he talks loud, frowns deeply, clinches his fist, and gesticulates wildly. Each expression of his passion is reflected back upon the original anger and adds fuel to the fire. If he resolutely inhibits the muscular expressions of his anger, it will not attain great intensity, and it will soon die a quiet death. * * * Not without reason are those persons called cold blooded who habitually restrain as far as possible the expression of their emotion; who never frown or throw any feeling into their tones, even when a wrong inflicted upon some one demands aggressive measures. There is here no wave of bodily expression to flow back and augment the emotional state." In this connection we call your attention to the familiar and oft-quoted passage from the works of Prof. William James: "Refuse to express a passion and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: If we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it does not gradually thaw." Along the same lines Halleck says: "Actors have frequently testified to the fact that emotion will arise if they go through the appropriate muscular movements. In talking to a character on the stage, if they clinch the fists and frown, they often find themselves becoming really angry; if they start with counterfeit laughter, they find themselves growing cheerful. A German professor says that he cannot walk with a schoolgirl's mincing step and air without feeling frivolous." The wise student will acquire a great control over his emotional nature if he will re-read and study the above statements and quotations until he has grasped their spirit and essence. In those few lines he is given a philosophy of self-control and self-mastery that will be worth much to him if he will but apply it in practice. Patience, perseverance, practice, and will are required, but the reward is great. Even to those who have not the persistency to apply this truth fully, there will be a partial reward if they will use it to the extent of restraining so far as possible any undue physical expression of undesirable emotional excitement. Some writers seem to regard capacity for great emotional excitement and expression as a mark of a rich and full character or noble soul. This is far from being true. While it is a fact that the cultivation of certain emotions tends to create a noble character and a full life, it is equally true that the tendency to "gush" and indulge in hysterical or sentimental excesses is a mark of an ill-controlled nature and a weak, rather than strong, character. Moreover, it is a fact that excess in emotional excitement and expression tends toward the dissipation of the finer and nobler feelings which otherwise would seek an outlet in actual doing and practical action. In the language of the old Scotch engineer in the story, they are like the old locomotive which "spends sae much steam at the whustle that she hae nane left to gae by." Emotional excitement and expression are largely dependent upon habit and indulgence, although there is a great difference, of course, in the emotional nature and tendencies of various persons. Emotions, like physical actions or intellectual processes, become habitual by repetition. And habit renders all physical or mental actions easy of repetition. Each time one manifests anger, the deeper the mental path is made, and the easier it is to travel that path the next time. In the same way each time that anger is conquered and inhibited, the easier will it be to restrain it the next time. In the same way desirable habits of emotion and expression may be formed. Another point in the cultivation, training, and restraint of the emotions is that which has to do with the control of the ideas which we allow to come into the mind. Ideative habits may be formed--_are_ formed, in fact, by the majority of persons. We may cultivate the habit of looking on the bright side of things; of looking for the best in those we meet; of expecting the best things instead of the worst. By resolutely refusing to give welcome to ideas calculated to arouse certain emotions, feelings, passions, desires, sentiments, or similar mental states, we may do much to prevent the arousing of the emotion itself. Emotions usually are called forth by some idea, and if we shut out the idea we may prevent the emotional feeling from appearing. In this connection the universal rule of psychology may be applied: _A mental state may be inhibited or restrained by turning the attention to the opposite mental state_. The control of the attention is really the control of every mental state. We may use the will in the direction of the control of the attention--the development and direction of voluntary attention--and thus actually control every phase of mental activity. The will is nearest to the ego, or central being of man, and the attention is the chief tool and instrument of the will. This fact cannot be repeated too often. If it is impressed upon the mind it will prove to be useful and valuable in many emergencies of mental life. He who controls his attention controls his mind, and in controlling his mind controls himself. CHAPTER XII. The Instinctive Emotions. Many attempts to classify the emotions have been made by the psychologists, but the best authorities hold that beyond the purpose of ordinary convenience in considering the subject _any_ classification is scientifically useless by reason of its incompleteness. As James cleverly puts it: "Any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and as natural as any other, if it only serves some purpose." The difficulty attending the attempted classification arises from the fact that every emotion is more or less complex, and is made up of various feelings and shades of emotional excitement. Each emotion blends into others. Just as a few elements of matter may be grouped into hundreds of thousands of combinations, so the elements of feeling may be grouped into thousands of shades of emotion. It is said that the two elements of carbon and hydrogen form combinations resulting in five thousand varieties of material substance, "from anthracite to marsh gas, from black coke to colorless naphtha." The same thing may be said of the emotional combinations formed from two principal elements of feeling. Moreover, the close distinction between sensation and feeling on the one hand, and between feeling and emotion on the other, serves to further complicate the task. For the purposes of our consideration, let us divide the emotions into five general classes, as follows: (1) Instinctive emotions, (2) social emotions, (3) religious emotions, (4) æsthetic emotions, (5) intellectual emotions. We shall now consider each of the above five classes in turn. THE INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONS. Instinct is defined as "unconscious, involuntary, or unreasoning prompting to any action," or "the natural unreasoning impulse by which an animal is guided to the performance of any action, without thought of improving the method." An authority says: "Instinct is a natural impulse leading animals, even prior to all experience, to perform certain actions tending to the welfare of the individual or the perpetuation of the species, apparently without understanding the object at which they may be supposed to aim, or deliberating as to the best methods to employ. In many cases, as in the construction of the cells of the bee, there is a perfection about the result which reasoning man could not have equaled, except by an application of the higher mathematics to direct the operations carried out. Mr. Darwin considers that animals, in time past as now, have varied in their mental qualities, and that those variations are inherited. Instincts also vary slightly in a state of nature. This being so, natural selection can ultimately bring them to a high degree of perfection." It was formerly the fashion to ascribe instinct in the lower animals, and in man, to something akin to "innate ideas" implanted in each species and thereafter continued by inheritance. But the application of the idea of evolution to the science of psychology has resulted in brushing away these old ideas. To-day it holds that that which we call "instinct" is the result of gradual development in the course of evolution, the accumulated experience of the race being stored away in the race memory, each individual adding a little thereto by his acquired habits and experiences. Psychologists now hold that the lower forms of these race tendencies are closely akin to purely reflex actions, and the higher forms, which are known as "instinctive emotions," are phenomena of the subconscious mind resulting from race memory and race experience. Clodd says: "Instinct is the higher form of reflex action. The salmon migrates from sea to river; the bird makes its nest or migrates from one zone to another by an unvarying route, even leaving its young behind to perish; the bee builds its six-sided cell; the spider spins its web; the chick breaks its way through the shell, balances itself, and picks up grains of corn; the newborn babe sucks its mother's breast--all in virtue of like acts on the part of their ancestors, which, arising in the needs of the creature, and gradually becoming automatic, have not varied during long ages, the tendency to repeat them being transmitted within the germ from which insect, fish, bird, and man have severally sprung." Schneider says: "It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a dark cavern, or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, partly from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may lurk in these localities--a suspicion due to stories we have heard and read. But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been carefully guarded from all ghost stories are nevertheless terrified and cry if led into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there. Even an adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals over him in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed conviction that not the slightest danger is near. This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own houses after dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider that our savage ancestors through immemorable generations were accustomed to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears, and were for the most part attacked by such beasts during the night and in the woods, and that thus an inseparable association between the perceptions of darkness, caverns, woods, and fear took place, and was inherited." James says: "Nothing is commoner than the remark that man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by reason. * * * We may confidently say that however uncertain man's reactions upon his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with those of the lower mammals, the uncertainty is probably not due to their possession of any principles of action which he lacks. _On the contrary, man possesses all the impulses that they have, and a great many more besides._ * * * High places cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here again individuals differ. The utterly blind instinctive character of the motor impulses here is shown by the fact that they are almost always entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to suppress them. * * * Certain ideas of supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror. This horror is probably explicable as the result of a combination of simple horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its maximum, many unusual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving pictures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. * * * In view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors play so specific and constant a part in many nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period have been more normal objects of the environment than now. The evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the consciousness of the cave men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of a more recent date." Instinctive emotion manifests as an impulse arising from the dim recesses of the feeling or emotional nature--an incentive toward a dimly conscious end. It differs from the almost purely automatic nature of certain forms of reflex process, for its beginning is a feeling arising from the subconscious regions, which strives to excite an activity of conscious volition. The feeling is from the subconscious, but the activity is conscious. The end may not be perceived in consciousness, or at least is but dimly perceived, but the action leading to the end is in full consciousness. Instinct is seen to have its origin in the past experiences of the race, transmitted by heredity and preserved in the race memory. It has for its object the preservation of the individual and of the species. Its end is often something far removed in time from the moment, or the welfare of the species rather than that of the individual; for instance, the caterpillar providing for its future states, or the bird building its nest, or the bees building cells and providing honey for their successors, for very few bees live to partake of the honey which they have gathered and stored--they are animated by "the spirit of the hive." The most elementary forms of the instinctive emotions are those which have to do with the preservation of the individual, his comfort, and personal physical welfare. This class of emotions comprises what are generally known as purely "selfish" feelings, having little or no concern for the welfare of others. In this class we find the emotional feelings which have to do with the satisfaction of hunger and thirst, the securing of comfortable quarters and warm clothing, and the spirit of combat and strife arising from the desire to obtain these. These elemental feelings had their birth early in the history of life, and indeed life itself depended very materially upon them for its preservation and continuance. It was necessary for the primitive living thing to be "selfish." When man appeared, only those survived who manifested these feelings strongly; the others were pushed to the wall and perished. Even in our civilization the man below the average in this class of feelings will find it difficult to survive. CHAPTER XIII. The Passions. Arising from the most elemental instinctive emotions, we find what may be termed "the passions." By the term "passion" is meant those strong feelings in which the elemental selfish instincts are manifested in relation to other persons, either in the phase of attraction or repulsion. In this class we find the elementary phases of love, and the feelings of hate, anger, jealousy, revenge, etc. This class of emotions usually manifests violently, as compared with the other emotions. The passions generally arise from self-preservation, race preservation and reproduction, self-interest, self-aggrandizement, etc., and may be regarded as a more complex phase of the elemental instinctive emotions. The elemental instinctive emotions of self-preservation and self-comfort cause the individual to experience and manifest the passional emotions of desire for combat, anger, hate, revenge, etc., while the instinctive emotions leading to reproduction and continuance of the race give rise to the passional emotions of sexual love, jealousy, etc. The desire to attract the other sex increases ambition, vanity, love of display, and other feelings. It is only when this class of emotions blends with the higher emotions that the passions become purified and refined. But it must not be forgotten that these emotions were very necessary for the welfare of the race in the early stage of its evolution, and that they still play an active part in human life, under the greater or less restraint imposed by civilized society. Nor should it be forgotten that from these emotions have evolved the highest love of one human being for another. From instinctive sexual love and the "racial instinct" have developed the higher affection of man for woman, and woman for man, in all their beautiful manifestations--and the love of the parent for the child, and the love of the child for the parent. The first manifestation of altruism arises in the love of the living creature for its mate, and in the love of the parents for their offspring. In certain forms of life where the association of the sexes is merely for the moment, and is not followed by protection, mutual aid, and companionship, there is found an absence of mutual affection of any kind, the only feeling being an elemental reproductive instinct bringing the male and female together for the moment--an almost purely reflex activity. In the same way, in the cases of certain animals (the rattlesnake, for instance) in which the young are able to protect themselves from birth, there is seen a total absence of parental affection or the return thereof. Human love between the sexes, in its higher and lower degrees, is a natural evolution from passional emotion of a low order, due to the growth of social, ethical, moral, and æsthetic emotion arising from the necessities of the increasing complexity and development of human life. The simpler forms of passional emotion are almost entirely instinctive in their manifestation. Indeed, in many cases, there appears to be but little more than a high form of reflex nervous action. The following words of William James give us an interesting view of this fact of life: "The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, not because he has any notion either of life or of death or of self-preservation. He acts in each case separately and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision, he _must_ pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears there, he _must_ retire if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he _must_ withdraw his feet from water, and his face from flame, etc. * * * Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange things in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the hen, for instance, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she have some sort of prophetic inkling of the result? The only answer is _ad hominem_. We can only interpret the instinct of brutes by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on soft floors? Why do they sit around a stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, with their faces toward its middle rather than to the wall? Why does the maiden interest the youth so much that everything about her seems more important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature likes its own ways, and takes to following them as a matter of course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find that most of them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel that it is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not one man in a million, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of its utility. He eats because the food tastes good, and makes him want more. If you should ask him _why_ he wants to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool." James continues: "It takes, in short, what Berkeley called a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask the _why_ of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions arise as: Why do we smile when pleased and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits upside down? The common man can only say, '_Of course_ we smile, _of course_ our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, _of course_ we love the maiden--that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!' And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in the presence of particular objects. They, too, are _a priori_ syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to the bear, the she bear. To the broody hen the notion would seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating, precious, and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. Thus we may be sure that however mysterious some animals' instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them. And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse and every step of that instinct shines with its own sufficient light, and seems at the moment the only externally right and proper thing to do. It may be done for its own sake exclusively." One has very little need, as a rule, to develop the passional emotions. Instinct has taken pretty good care that we shall have our share of this class of feelings. But there is a need to train, restrain, govern, and control these emotions, for the conditions which brought about their original being have changed. Our social conventions require that we should subordinate these passional feelings, to some extent at least. Society insists that we must restrict our love impulses to certain limits and to certain quarters, and that we subdue our anger and hate, except toward the enemies of our land, the disturbers of public peace, and the menacers of the social conventions of our time and land. The public welfare requires that we inhibit our fighting impulses, except in cases of self-defense or war. Public policy requires that we keep our ambitions within reasonable limits, which limits change from time to time, of course. In short, society has stepped in and insisted that man, as a social being, must not only acquire a _social conscience_ but must also develop sociable emotions and inhibit his unsociable ones. The evolution of man's nature has caused him unconsciously to modify his elemental, instinctive, passional emotions, and subordinate them to the dictates of social, ethical, moral, and æsthetic feelings and ideals, and to intellectual considerations. Even the original elemental instincts of the lower animals have been modified by reason of the social requirements of the pack, herd, or drove, until the modified instinct is now the ruling force. The general principles of emotional control, restraint, and mastery, as given in a preceding chapter, are applicable to the particular class of emotions now under consideration here. (1) By refraining from the physical expression, one may at least partially inhibit the emotion. (2) By refusing to create the habit, one may more easily manifest control. (3) By refusing to dwell upon the idea or mental picture of the exciting object, one may lessen the stimulus. (4) By cultivating the opposite class of emotions, one may inhibit any class of feeling. (5) And, finally, by acquiring a control of the attention, by means of the will, one has the reins firmly in hand, and may drive or hold back the steeds of passion as he wills. The passions are like fiery horses, useful if well under control, but most dangerous if the control is lost. The ego is the driver, the will his hands, attention the reins, habit the bit, and the passions the horses. To drive the chariot of life under social conditions, the ego must have strong hands (will) to tighten or loosen the reins of attention. He must also employ a well designed and shaped bit of habit. Without strong hands, good reins, and well-adjusted bit, the fiery steeds of passion may gain control and, running away, dash the chariot and its driver over the precipice and on to the jagged rocks below. CHAPTER XIV. The Social Emotions. As man became a social animal he developed new traits of character, new habits of action, new ideals, new customs, and consequently new emotions. Emotions long entertained and long manifested by the race become more or less instinctive, and are passed along in the form of either (_a_) inherited stimulus akin to, but lesser in degree and force than, the more elemental emotions; or (_b_) of inherited _tendency_ to manifest the acquired emotional feeling upon the presentation of sufficiently strong stimuli. Hence arises that which we have called "the social emotions." Under the classification of "the social emotions" are those acquired tendencies of action and feeling of the race which are more or less altruistic, and are concerned with the welfare of others and one's duties and obligations toward society and our fellow men. In this class are found the emotions which impel us to perform what we consider or feel to be our duty toward our neighbors, and our obligations and duty toward the state, as expressed in its laws, the customs of men of our country, or the ideals of the community. In another phase it manifests as sympathy, fellow feeling, and "kindness" in general. In its first phase we find civic virtue, law-abiding inclination, honesty, "square dealing," and patriotism; in its second phase we find sympathy for others, charity, mutual aid, the alleviation of poverty and suffering, the erection of asylums for orphans and the aged, hospitals for the sick, and the formation of societies for general charitable work. In many cases we find the social, ethical, and moral emotions closely allied with religious emotion, and by many these are supposed to be practically identical, but there is a vast difference in spite of their frequent association. For instance, we find many persons of high civic virtue, of exalted moral ideals, and manifesting ethical qualities of the most advanced type, who are lacking in the ordinary religious feelings. On the other hand, we too frequently find persons professing great religious zeal, and apparently experiencing the most intense religious emotional feeling, who are deficient in social, civic, ethical, and moral qualities, in the best sense of these terms. The aim of all religion worthy of the name, however, is to encourage ethical and moral as well as religious emotions. We must here make the distinction between those manifesting the actions termed ethical and moral _because they feel that way_, and those who merely comply with the conventional requirements _because they fear the consequences_ of their violation. The first class have the true social, ethical, and moral feelings, tastes, ideals, and inclinations; while the second manifest merely the elementary feelings of self-preservation and selfish prudence. The first class are "good" because they feel that way and find it natural to be so; while the others are "good" merely because they have to be or be punished by legal penalty or public opinion, loss of prestige, loss of financial support, etc. The social, moral, and ethical emotions are believed to have arisen in the race by reason of the association of individuals in communities and the rise of the necessity for mutual aid and forbearance. Even many of the species of the lower animals have social, moral, or ethical codes of their own, based on the experience of the species or family, infractions of which they punish severely. In the same way sympathy and the altruistic feelings are supposed to have arisen. The community of interest and understanding in the tribe, family, or clan brought not only the feeling of natural defense and protection but also the finer, inner sympathetic feeling of the pains and sufferings of their associates. This, in the progress of the race, has developed into broader and more complex ideals and feelings. Theology explains the moral feelings as resulting from conscience, which it holds to be a special faculty of the mind, or soul, divinely given. Science, while admitting the existence of the state of feelings which we call "conscience," denies its supernatural origin, and ascribes it to the result of evolution, heredity, experience, education, and suggestion. Conscience, according to science, is a compound of intellectual and emotional states. Conscience is not an invariable or infallible guide, but _depends entirely upon the heredity, education, experience, and environment of the individual_. It accompanies the moral and ethical codes of the race, which vary with time and with country. Actions which were thought right a century ago are condemned now; likewise, things condemned a century ago are thought right now. What is commended in Turkey is condemned in England, and vice versa. Moral tastes and ideals, like æsthetic ones, vary with time and country. There is no absolute code which has been always true, in all places. There is an evolution in the ideals of morals and ethics as in everything else, and "conscience" and the moral and ethical emotions accompany the changing ideals. Many of the moral and ethical principles originally arose from necessity or utility, but have since developed into natural, spontaneous feeling on the part of the race. It is held that the race is rapidly developing a "social conscience" which will cause the wiping out of many social conditions which are now the disgrace of civilization. It is predicted that in time the race will look back upon the existence of poverty in our civilization as our generation now looks back upon the existence of slavery, imprisonment for debt, capital punishment for the theft of a loaf of bread, the killing of prisoners of war, etc. It is thought that, in time, wars of conquest will be deemed as utterly immoral as to-day is regarded the murder of a body of men by a band of pirates or bandits. In the same way the economic slavery of to-day will be seen as immoral as now seems the physical slavery of the past. In not far distant time it will seem incredible that society could have ever allowed one of its members to die of hunger in the streets, or of poverty and inattention in the sick room of the hovel. Not only will the ideals and feelings of ethical and moral responsibility change and evolve, but the feelings of personal sympathy will evolve in accordance therewith. At least such is the dream and prophecy of some of the world's greatest thinkers. The social, ethical, and moral emotions may be developed by a study of the evolution and meaning of society on the one hand, and the perception of the condition of the lives of less fortunate individuals on the other. The first will awaken new ideas of the history and real meaning of social association and mutual intercourse, and will develop a new sense of responsibility, duty, and civic and social pride. The second will awaken understanding and sympathy, and a desire to do what one can to help those who are "the under dog," and also to bring about a better state of affairs in general. The study of history and civilization, of sociology and civics, will do much in the first direction. The study of human-kind, and its life problems and condition, will do the same in the second case. In both cases there will be awakened a new sense of "right and wrong"--a new conception of "ought and ought not"--regarding one's relations to the race, society, and his fellow beings. Let no one deceive himself or herself by the smug assumption that the race has entirely emerged from barbarism and is now on the top wave of civilization. The truth, as known to all careful and conscientious thinkers, is that we are but _half_ civilized, if, indeed, that much. Many of our customs and conventions are those of a half-barbarous people. Our ideals are low, our customs often vile. We lack not only high ideals but in many cases we show a lack of sanity in our social conventions. But evolution is moving us slowly ahead. A better day is dawning. The signs are in the air, to be seen by all thoughtful men. Civilization is climbing the ladder, aided by the evolution of the social, ethical, and moral emotions and the development of the intellect. In connection with this phase of the emotions, we invite the student to consider the following excellent words of Professor Davidson in his "History of Greek Education": "It is not enough for a man to understand the conditions of rational life in his own time. He must likewise _love_ these conditions and _hate_ whatever leads to life of an opposite kind. This is only another way of saying that he must love the good and hate the evil; for the good is simply what conduces to rational or moral life, and the evil simply what leads away from it. It is perfectly obvious, as soon as it is pointed out, that all immoral life is due to a false distribution of affection, which again is often, though by no means always, due to a want of intellectual cultivation. He that attributes to anything a value greater or less than it really possesses, in the order of things, has already placed himself in a false relation to it, and will certainly, when he comes to act with reference to it, act immorally." CHAPTER XV. The Religious Emotions. By "the religious emotions" is meant that class of emotional feeling arising from the faith and belief in, or consciousness of the presence of, supernatural beings, powers, entities, or forces. This form of emotion is regarded as distinct from the ethical and moral emotions, although frequently found in connection therewith. Likewise, it is independent of any special form of intellectual belief, for it is far more fundamental and often exists without creed, philosophy, or stated belief, the only manifestation in such cases being a "feeling" of the existence of supernatural beings, forces, and powers to which man has a relation and to which he owes obedience. To those who may think that this is too narrow a conception of religious emotion we refer the following definition of "religion" from the dictionaries: "The acts or feelings which result from the belief of a god, or gods, having superior control over matter, life, or destiny. Religion is subjective, designating the feelings and acts of men which relate to God; theology is objective, denoting the science which investigates the existence, laws, and attributes of God;" or (objectively) "the outer form and embodiment which the inward spirit of a true or a false devotion assumes," (subjectively) "the feeling of veneration with which the worshiper regards the Being he adores." Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," says that the feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. He is of the opinion that no man can experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. The authorities generally agree with Darwin, although the more recent study of the history of religion has shown that religious feeling has a far more primitive origin than that indicated by Darwin. It is true that the lower animals are not deemed capable of anything approaching religious feeling, unless there is a feeling approaching it in the attitude of the dog and horse and other domestic animals toward their masters. But man, as soon as he is able to attribute natural phenomena to a supernatural cause and power, manifests a crude religious feeling and emotion. He begins by believing in, fearing, and worshiping natural forces and objects, such as the sun, the moon, the wind, thunder and lightning, the ocean, rivers, mountains, etc. It is claimed that there is no natural object that has not been deified and worshiped by some people at some time in the history of the race. Later, man acquired the anthropomorphic conception of deities and created many gods in his own image, endowing them with his own attributes, qualities, and characteristics. The mental characteristics and morals of a people can always be ascertained by a knowledge of the average conception of deity held by them. Polytheism, or the belief in many gods, was succeeded by monotheism, or belief in one god. Monotheism ranges from the crudest conception of a manlike god to the highest conception of a spiritual Being transcending all human qualities, attributes, or characteristics. Man began by believing in many god _things_, then in many god _persons_, then in a one god-person, then in one God who is a spirit, then in One Universal Spirit which is God. It is a far cry from the savage, manlike god of old to the conception of the Universal Spirit of the "God-drunken philosopher," Spinoza. The extreme of religious belief is that which holds that "there is nothing but God--all else is illusion," of pantheistic idealism. Buddhism (at least in its original form) discarded the idea of a Supreme Being, and held that Ultimate Reality is but Universal _Law_; hence the accusation that Buddhism is an "atheistic religion," although it is one of the world's greatest religions, having over 400,000,000 followers. But the _beliefs_ of the religious person may be considered as resulting from intellectual processes; his religious _feelings and emotions_ arise from another part of his mental being. It is the testimony of the authorities of all religions that religious conviction is an inner experience rather than an intellectual conception. The emotional element is always active in religious manifestations everywhere. The purely intellectual religion is naught but a philosophy. Religion without feeling and emotion is an anomaly. In all true religion there exists a feeling of inner assurance and faith, love, awe, dependence, submission, reverence, gratitude, hope, and perhaps fear. The emotional element must always be present, not necessarily in the form of emotional excess, as in the case of revival hysteria or the dance of the whirling dervishes, but at least in the form of the calm, fervent feeling of "that peace which passeth understanding." When religion departs from the emotional phase it becomes merely a "school of philosophy," or an "ethical culture society." The student must not lose sight of the uplifting influence of true religious emotion by reason of his knowledge of its lowly origin. Like the lotus, which has its roots in the slimy, filthy mud of the river, and its stem in the muddy, stagnant, and foul waters thereof, but its beautiful flower unfolded in the clear air and facing the sun, so is religious feeling responsible for some of the most beautiful and uplifting ideals and actions of the race. If its origin and history contain much that is not consistent with the highest ideals of the race to-day, it is not the fault of religion but of the race itself. Religion, like all else in the universal manifestation, is under the laws of evolution, growth, and development. What the religion of the future may be, we know not. But the prophets of the race are dreaming visions of a religion as much higher than that of to-day as the latter is higher than the crude fetichism of the savage. The following quotation from John Fiske's "Through Nature to God" is appropriate in this place. Fiske says: "My aim is to show that 'that other influence,' that inward conviction, the craving for a final cause, the theistic assumption, is itself one of the master facts of the universe, and as much entitled to respect as any fact in physical nature can possibly be. The argument flashed upon me about ten years ago while reading Herbert Spencer's controversy with Frederic Harrison concerning the nature and reality of religion. Because Spencer derived historically the greater part of modern belief in an Unseen World from the savage's primeval world of dreams and ghosts, some of his critics maintained that logical consistency required him to dismiss the modern belief as utterly false; otherwise he would be guilty of seeking to evolve truth from falsehood. 'By no means,' replied Spencer. 'Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the religious consciousness is the final development of a consciousness which at the outset contained a germ of truth obscured by multitudinous errors.'" Fiske, in this connection, quotes the Tennysonian question:-- "'Who forged that other influence, That heat of inward evidence, By which he doubts against the sense?'" The religious emotions may be developed by allowing the mind to dwell upon the Power underlying the universe of fleeting, changing forms; by reading prose and poetry in which an appeal is made to the religious instinct; by listening to music which awakens the emotion of reverence and awe; and, finally, by meditating upon the inner spirit immanent in every living being. As an old Hindu sage once said: "There are many paths by which men arrive at a knowledge of the presence of God, but there is but one goal and destination." CHAPTER XVI. The Aesthetic Emotions. By "the æsthetic emotions" is meant those emotional feelings which are concerned with the perception of beauty or taste, and by reason of which we "like" or "dislike" certain perceptions of sensory impressions. In order to get a clearer idea, let us consider what is meant by "beauty" and "taste." "Beauty" is defined as "that quality or assemblage of qualities in an object which gives the eye or the ear intense pleasure; or that characteristic in an object which gratifies the intellect or moral feeling." "Taste" (in this sense of the term) is defined as "nice perception, or the power of perceiving and relishing excellence in human performances; the power of appreciating the finer qualities of art; the faculty of discerning beauty, order, congruity, proportion, symmetry, or whatever constitutes excellence, particularly in the fine arts or literature; the faculty of the mind by which we both perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature and art. The possession of taste insures grace and beauty in the works of an artist, and the avoidance of all that is low or mean. It is as often the result of an innate sense of beauty or propriety as of art education, and no genius can compensate for the want of it. * * * Tastes differ so much among individuals, nations, or in different ages and conditions of civilization that it is utterly impossible to set up a standard of taste applicable to all men and to all stages in the evolution of society." The æsthetic sense, feeling, and emotion are products of the later stages of the evolution of the mind of man. Their roots, however, may be seen in the crude attempts at decoration and adornment in the savage, and still further back in the tendency of certain birds to adorn their nests or "bowers." Moreover, some sense of beauty must exist in the lower animals, which are influenced thereby in the selection of their mates, the bright plumage of the birds, and the coloring of the insects and higher animals evidencing the existence of at least a primitive æsthetic sense. Herbert Spencer says that one characteristic of the æsthetic feelings is that they are separated from the functions vitally requisite and necessary to sustain life, and it is not until the latter are reasonably well satisfied that the former begin to manifest in force. The authorities hold that the basic element concerned in the manifestation of the æsthetic emotional feeling is the _sensory_ element, which consists of the pleasure arising from the perception of objects of vision or hearing which are deemed beautiful. There is a certain nervous satisfaction which arises from the perception of the sensation of the sight of a beautiful thing, or of the hearing of beautiful sound. Just _why_ certain sights prove agreeable and others disagreeable, or certain sounds pleasant and others unpleasant, is very difficult to determine. Association and habit may have something to do with the beauty of sight object, and there may be natural harmony of vibration in colors as there is in sound. In the case of sounds there is undoubtedly a natural harmony between the vibrations of certain notes of the scale and inharmony between others. Some have held that the secret of the enjoyment of music is found in the natural appreciation of rhythm, as rhythm is a cosmic manifestation evident in everything from great to small. But these theories do not account for the differences existing in the tastes regarding color and music manifested by different individuals, races, and classes of people. Grant Allen says: "The vulgar are pleased with great masses of color, especially red, orange, and purple, which give their coarse, nervous organization the requisite stimulus. The refined, with nerves of less caliber, but greater discriminativeness, require delicate combinations of complementaries and prefer neutral tints to the glare of the primary hues. Children and savages love to dress in all the colors of the rainbow." In the same way persons of certain types of taste are pleased with "rag time" and cheap, rollicking songs or dances, while others shudder at these and find delight in the classic productions of the great composers. There is also the _intellectual_ element to be reckoned with in the æsthetic emotions. The intellect must discover the beauty in certain objects before the emotion is aroused by the perception. Halleck says: "Every time the mind discerns unity amid variety, order, rhythm, proportion, or symmetry, an æsthetic emotion arises. * * * The traveler with a trained intellect will see far more beauty than an ignorant one. In looking at a cathedral, a large part of the æsthetic enjoyment comes from tracing out the symmetry, from comparing part with part. Not until this process is complete will the full beauty of the structure as a whole be perceived. If the traveler knows something of mediæval architecture before starting on his European trip, he will see far more beauty. The opposite of the æsthetic, which we call the ugly, is the unsymmetrical, the disorderly--that in which we can discover no rhythm, plan, or beauty." The element of _associative suggestion_ also enters into the manifestation of æsthetic emotional feeling. The mind accepts the suggestion of the beauty of certain styles of art, or the excellence of certain classes of music. There are fashions in art and music, as in clothes, and what is thought beautiful to-day may be deemed hideous to-morrow. This is not entirely due to the evolution of taste, for in many cases the old fashions are revived and again deemed beautiful. There is, moreover, the effect of the association of the object of emotion with certain events or persons. This association renders the thing popular, and therefore agreeable and beautiful for the time being. The suggestion in a story will often cause the beauty of a certain scene, or the harmony of a certain piece of music, to dawn upon thousands of persons. Some noted person sets the seal of approval upon a certain picture or musical composition and lo! the multitude calls it beautiful. It must not be supposed, however, that the crowd always counterfeits this sense of beauty and excellence which has been suggested to it. On the contrary, genuine æsthetic feeling often results from the discovery so made. There is style and fashion in the use of words, resulting from fashion, which gives rise to æsthetic feelings regarding them. These feelings do not arise from the consideration of the nature of the object expressed by the word; of two words designating the same thing, one causes disgust and the other at least passive tolerance. For instance, in speaking of the sensible moisture which is emitted from the pores of the skin, we may use either of the respective terms "sweat" or "perspiration." Both mean the same thing, and have an equally respectable origin. But to many persons the word "sweat" causes unpleasant æsthetic emotion, while the word "perspiration" is accepted without remonstrance. Some persons abhor the term "victuals," while "viands" or "food" are accepted without protest. There is often an unpleasant, low, vulgar association connected with some words which accounts for the disfavor with which they are received, and which association is absent from the more "polite" terms employed to indicate the same thing. But in other cases there is nothing but the simple suggestion of fashion and style to account for the æsthetic acceptance or rejection. It is possible that some psychologist of the future will establish the truth of the theory now tentatively advanced by a few investigators, namely, that taste and the sense of beauty depend almost entirely upon the element of suggestion, manifested as association, influence of authority, habit, fashion, imitation, etc. It is known that the emotional nature is peculiarly liable to suggestion, and that tastes may be created or destroyed by repeated suggestion under the most favorable circumstances. It is thought likely that if we could trace back to its roots every emotion of taste, we would find it arising from some associative, suggestive influence connected with another and more elemental class of emotions. Regarding the fact that there is no universal standard of taste or beauty, Halleck says: "It has been said that æsthetics cannot be treated in a scientific way because there is no standard of taste. '_De gustibus non est disputandum_' ('there is no disputing about tastes') is an old proverb. Of two equally intelligent persons, the one may like a certain book, the other dislike it. * * * While it is true that the standard of taste is a varying one within certain limits, it is no more so than that of morals. As men's nervous systems, education, and associations differ, we may scientifically conclude that their tastes must differ. The greater the uniformity in the factors the less does the product vary. On the other hand, within certain limits, the standard of æsthetics is relatively uniform. _It is fixed by the majority of intelligent people of any age and country._ To estimate the standard by which to judge of the correctness of language or of the literary taste of any era, we examine the conversations of the best speakers, the works of the standard writers." The æsthetic emotions may be developed and cultivated by exercise and practice, and particularly by association and familiarity with beautiful things, and with those who have "good taste." Appreciation of beauty is more or less contagious, up to a certain point of development, at least, and if one wishes to recognize, understand, and appreciate beauty, he should go where beauty is, and where its votaries are gathered. The study of standard works of art, or objects of nature, or the best productions of the composers of music, will do much to develop and unfold one's higher æsthetic feelings and understanding. It is claimed by some of the best authorities that to develop the finer and higher æsthetic feelings and understanding we must learn to find beauty and excellence in things removed from ourselves or our selfish interests. The narrow, selfish emotions kill the æsthetic feelings--the two cannot exist together. The person whose thoughts are centered on himself or herself very rarely finds beauty or excellence in works of art or music. Grant Allen well sums up the subject in the following words: "_Good taste is the progressive product of progressing fineness and discrimination in the nerves, educated attention, high and noble emotional constitution, and increasing intellectual faculties._" CHAPTER XVII. The Intellectual Emotions. By "the intellectual emotions" is meant that class of emotional feeling resulting from the presence of objects of intellectual interest. This class of emotions depends for its satisfaction upon the exercise of the intellectual faculties, from the most simple to the most complex, and including perception, memory, imagination, reason, judgment, and all the logical faculties. Those who are accustomed to employing the mind through voluntary attention, particularly in the direction of creative ideation or constructive imagination, experience these emotions to a greater or less degree. The exercise of perception, if we are skilled therein, gives us a pleasurable feeling, and if we succeed in making an interesting or important discovery by reason thereof, we experience a strong degree of emotional satisfaction. Likewise, we experience agreeable feelings when we are able to remember distinctly something which might well have been forgotten, or when we succeed in recalling something which had escaped our memory for the moment. In the same way the exercise of the imagination is a source of great pleasure in many cases in the direction of writing, planning, inventing, or other creative processes, or even in the building of air castles. The exercise of the logical faculties gives great pleasure to those in whom these faculties are well developed. Halleck well says: "There was probably not a happier moment in Newton's life than when he had succeeded in demonstrating that the same power which caused the apple to fall held the moon and the planets in their orbits. When Watts discovered that steam might be harnessed like a horse, when an inventor succeeds in perfecting a labor-lightening device, whenever an obscurity is cleared away, the reason for a thing understood, and a baffling instance brought under a general law, intellectual emotion results." The pleasurable feelings we experience upon the reading of a good book, or the discovery of real poetry, are forms of intellectual emotion. The same class of emotional feeling is aroused when we witness a good play. Among other instances of this class we mention the perception of clever work of any kind, intricate machinery, ingenious devices, helpful improvements, or other works of man which indicate the existence of thought and inventive ability in the designer or builder. To appreciate mental work of this kind we must bring a mind developed along the same or similar lines. It has well been said that before one can take away anything from a book he must bring something to it. It takes mentality to recognize and appreciate mentality or the work of mentality. The study of scientific subjects is a source of great pleasure to those who are inclined to such pursuits. To the scientific mind the study of the latest work on the favorite branch gives a joy which nothing else is capable of arousing. To the philosopher the works of other philosophers of the same school give intense satisfaction. It is claimed that the sense of humor and wit is an intellectual emotion, for it depends upon the detection of the ludicrous features of a happening. Certain psychologists have held that the distinctive element of humor is the feeling attendant upon the perception of incongruity; while that of wit is the feeling of superiority on the part of the witty person, and the corresponding chagrin of the object of his wit. It would seem, however, that the appreciation of wit must depend upon the intellectual perception of cleverness of expression and the pleasure resulting from the discovery thereof, and that the feeling of humor is aroused principally by reason of the incongruous element; the feeling of self-satisfaction as contrasted with the discomfiture of the other person belongs to the more selfish emotions. An authority says: "Humor is a mental faculty which tends to discover incongruous resemblances between things which essentially differ, or essential differences between things put forth as the same, the result being internal mirth or an outburst of laughter. Wit does so likewise, but the two are different. Humor has deep human sympathy, and loves men while raising a laugh against their weaknesses. Wit is deficient in sympathy, and there is often a sting in its ridicule. Somewhat contemptuous of mankind, it has not the patience to study them thoroughly, but must content itself with noting superficial resemblances or differences. Humor is patient and keenly observant, and penetrates beneath the surface; while, therefore, the sallies of wit are often one-sided and unfair, those of humor are, as a rule, just and wise." The development and cultivation of the intellectual emotions depend, of course, upon education, training, exercise, and practice. The cultivation of the intellect (which has been referred to, in part, in the previous parts of this book, and which will be again considered in the chapters devoted to the intellect) results in the development and cultivation of the emotions accompanying intellectual effort. In a general way, however, it may be said that the reading of the best works of fiction, science, and philosophy will bring out in time the best form of intellectual enjoyment and feeling. The highest gives the best--that is the rule. The present chapter should be read and studied in connection with those devoted to the intellect. BLENDED EMOTIONS. As we have said at the beginning of our consideration of the subject of the emotions, the majority of emotions are composed of several feelings, and tend to blend and combine emotional elements. For instance, the emotion of sexual love certainly has its origin in the instinctive feelings of the race, and its motive element is that of passion. But passion is far from being all there is in human sexual love. Above the plane of passion is found the social emotion of companionship, protection, and care; the desire for the welfare of the loved one; the mingling of the love of the parent with that of the mate. Human love manifests many of the altruistic emotions during its course. The welfare of the loved one becomes the chief concern of life, often stronger even than self-preservation. The joy of the loved one becomes the greatest joy, far surpassing the more selfish forms of happiness. Then come the æsthetic feelings, which find satisfaction in the two "liking the same things," sympathy and community of feeling being the connecting link. The several ideals of the two combining, there is produced an idealistic union, which is often called "spiritual harmony." Finally, there is found the blending of the intellectual emotions, in which harmony there exists one of the highest forms of pleasure satisfaction between two persons of opposite sexes. It is said that the more things that a man and woman "like" in common, the closer will be their "liking" for each other. "I love you because you love the things I love," is no rare thought and expression. So it is seen that though born in elemental instinct and passion, human sexual love is something far different in its flowering. And yet without its root it would not be, and cannot be. This is an excellent example of the complex nature of the most common emotions. It may be used as a typical illustration. What is true of it is also true, in a way and in a degree, of every other form of emotion. Therefore in studying a particular emotion, be not too quick to cry, "It is this; it is that!" but rather seek to say, "It is composed of this and that, of this and that!" Few, if any, emotions are simple; the majority are very complex. Hence the difficulty of satisfactory classification, and the danger of dogmatic definition. CHAPTER XVIII. The Role of the Emotions. The average person greatly underestimates the part played by the emotional nature in the mental activities of the individual. He is inclined to the opinion that, with the exception of the occasional manifestation of some strong emotional feeling, the majority of persons go through life using only the reasoning and reflective faculties in deciding the problems of life and guiding the mental course of action. There can be no greater mistake concerning the mental activities. So far from being subordinate to the intellect, the emotional nature in the majority of cases dominates the reasoning faculties. There are but very few persons who are able to detach themselves, even in a small degree, from the feelings, and to decide questions cold-bloodedly by pure reason or intellectual effort. Moreover, there are but few persons whose wills are guided by pure reason; the feelings supply the motive for the majority of acts of will. The intellect, even when used, is generally employed to better carry out the dictates of feeling and desire. Much of our reasoning is performed in order to justify our feelings, or to find proofs for the position dictated by our desires, feelings, sympathies, prejudices, or sentiments. It has been said that "men seek not reasons but _excuses for their actions_." Moreover, in the elementary processes of the intellect the emotions play an important part. We have seen that attention largely follows interest, and interest results from feeling. Therefore our attention, and that which arises from it, is dependent largely upon the feelings. Thus feeling asserts its power in guarding the very outer gate of knowledge, and determines largely what shall or shall not enter therein. It is one of the constantly-appearing paradoxes of psychology, that while feelings have originally arisen from attention, it is equally true that attention depends largely upon the interest resulting from the feelings. This is readily admitted in the case of involuntary attention, which always goes out toward objects of interest and feeling, but is likewise true of even voluntary attention, which we direct to something of greater or more nearly ultimate interest than the things of lesser or more immediate interest. Sully says: "By an act of will I may resolve to turn my attention to something--say a passage in a book. But if, after the preliminary process of adjustment of the mental eye the object opens up no interesting phase, all the willing in the world will not produce a calm, settled state of concentration. The will introduces mind and object; it cannot force an attachment between them. No compulsion of attention ever succeeded in making a young child cordially embrace and appropriate, by an act of concentration, an unsuitable and therefore uninteresting object. We thus see that even voluntary interest is not removed from the sway of interest. What the will _does_ is to determine _the kind of interest_ that shall prevail at the moment." Again, we may see that memory is largely dependent upon interest in recording and recalling its impressions. We remember and recall most easily that which most greatly interests us. In proportion to the lack of interest in a thing do we find difficulty in remembering or recalling it. This is equally true of the imagination, for it refuses to dwell upon that which is _not_ interesting. Even in the reasoning processes we find the will balking at uninteresting subjects, but galloping along, pushing before it the rolling chair of interesting intellectual application. Our judgments are affected by our feelings. It is much easier to approve of the actions of some person we like, or whose views accord with our own, than of an individual whose personality and views are distasteful to us. It is very difficult to prevent prejudice, for or against, from influencing our judgments. It is also true that we "find that for which we look" in things and persons, and that which we expect and look for is often dependent upon our feelings. If we dislike a person or thing we are usually able to perceive no end of undesirable things in him or it; while if we are favorably inclined we easily find many admirable qualities in the same person or thing. A little change in our feeling often results in the formation of an entirely new set of judgments regarding a person or thing. Halleck well says: "On the one hand the emotions are favorable to intellectual action, since they supply the interest one feels in study. One may feel intensely concerning a certain subject and be all the better student. Hence the emotions are not, as was formerly thought, entirely hostile to intellectual action. Emotion often quickens the perception, burns things indelibly into the memory, and doubles the rapidity of thought. On the other hand strong feelings often vitiate every operation of the intellect. They cause us to see only what we wish to, to remember only what interests our narrow feeling at the time, and to reason from selfish data only. * * * Emotion puts the magnifying end of the telescope to our intellectual eyes where our own interests are concerned, the minimizing end when we are looking at the interest of others. * * * _Thought_ _is deflected when it passes through an emotional medium, just as a sunbeam is when it strikes water._" As for the will, the best authorities hold that it is almost if not entirely dependent upon desire for its motive force. As desire is an outgrowth and development of feeling and emotion, it is seen that even the will depends upon feeling for its inciting motives and its direction. We shall consider this point at greater detail in the chapters devoted to the activities of the will. We would remind you again, at this point, of the great triangle of the mind, the emotional, ideative, and volitional activities--feeling, thinking, and willing--and their constant reaction upon each other and absolute interdependence. We find that our feelings arise from previous willing and ideation, and are aroused by ideas and repressed by will; again we see that our ideas are largely dependent upon the interest supplied by our feelings, and that our judgments are influenced by the emotive side of our mental life, the will also having its part to play in the matter. We also see that the will is called into activity by the feelings, and often guided or restrained by our thoughts, the will, indeed, being considered as moved entirely by our feelings and ideas. Thus is the trinity of mental forces seen ever in mutual relation--constant action and reaction ever existing between them. CHAPTER XIX. The Emotions and Happiness. "Happiness" has been defined by an authority as "the pleasurable emotion arising from the gratification of all desires; the enjoyment of pleasure without pain." Another has said that "happiness is the state in which all desires are satisfied." But these definitions have been attacked. It is held by many that a state of the absolute _satisfaction_ of desire would not be happiness, for happiness consists largely in pleasurable anticipation and imaginings which disappear upon the realization of the desire. It is held that absolute satisfaction would be a negative state. Paley expressed a better idea when he said that "any condition may be denominated 'happy' in which the amount or aggregate of pleasure exceeds that of pain, and the degree of happiness depends upon the quantity of this excess." Some have held that an existing contrast between pain and pleasure (the balance being in favor of the latter) is necessary to establish happiness. Be this as it may, it is admitted by all that one's happiness or unhappiness depends entirely upon one's emotional nature and the degree of the satisfaction thereof. And it is generally admitted that to be happy is the great aim and object of the life of the majority of persons,--if, indeed, not of _every_ person,--the happiness, of course, depending upon the quality and degree of the emotions forming the person's emotional nature. Thus it is seen that we are dependent upon the emotional side of our mental life in this as in nearly everything else making life worth while. Theologians have often sought to point out that happiness is not the goal of life and living, but human nature has always insisted that happiness is the greatest end, and philosophy has generally supported it. But wisdom shows that happiness is not always dependent upon the pleasure of the moment, for the sacrifice of immediate pleasure frequently results in a much greater happiness in the future. In the same way an immediate disagreeable task often gains for us a greater satisfaction in the future. Likewise, it is frequently greater happiness to sacrifice a personal pleasure for the happiness of others than it would be to enjoy the pleasure of the moment at the expense of the pain of the other. There is often a far greater pleasure resulting from an altruistic action of self-sacrifice than in the performance of the selfish, egoistic act. But, as the subtle reasoner may insist, the result is the same--the ultimate happiness and satisfaction of the self. This conclusion does not rob the altruistic act of its virtue, however, for the person who finds his greatest pleasure in giving pleasure to others is to be congratulated--as is the community which shelters him. There is no virtue in pain, suffering, sacrifice, or unhappiness _for its own sake_. This illusion of asceticism is vanishing from the human mind. Sacrifice on the part of the individual is valuable and valid only when it results in higher present or future happiness for the individual or some one else. There is no virtue in pain, physical or mental, except as a step to a greater good for ourselves or others. Pain at the best is merely nature's alarm and warning of "not this way." It is also held that pain serves to bring out pleasure by contrast, and is therefore valuable in this way. Be this as it may, no normal individual deliberately seeks ultimate pain in preference to ultimate happiness; the greatest ultimate happiness to one's self and to those he loves is the normal and natural goal of the normal person. But the concept of "those he loves," in many cases, includes the race as well as the immediate family. Wisdom shows the individual that the greatest happiness comes to him who controls and restrains many of his feelings. Dissipation results in pain and unhappiness ultimately. The doctrine of thoughtless indulgence is unphilosophical and is contradicted by the experience of the race. Moreover, wisdom shows that the highest happiness comes not from the indulgence of the physical feelings alone, or to excess, but rather from the cultivation, development, and manifestation of the higher feelings--the social, æsthetic, and intellectual emotions. The higher pleasures of life, literature, art, music, science, invention, constructive imagination, etc., yield a satisfaction and happiness keener and more enduring than can possibly the lower forms of feeling. But the human being must not despise any part of his emotional being. Everything has its uses, which are good; and its abuses, which are bad. Every part of one's being, mental and physical, is well to use; but no part is well used if it uses the individual instead of being itself used. A recent writer has held that the end and aim of life should not be the pursuit of happiness, but rather the building of character. The obvious answer is that the two are identical in spirit, for to the man who appreciates the value of character, its attainment is the greatest happiness; the wise teach that the greatest happiness comes to him who is possessed of a well-rounded, developed character. Another writer has said that "the aim of life should be self-improvement, with a due regard to the interest of others." This is but saying that the greatest happiness to the wise man lies in this course. Any one who is wise enough, or great enough, to make these ends the aim and goal of life will find the greatest happiness therefrom. Arnold Bennett advances as a good working philosophy of life: "cheerfulness, kindliness, and rectitude." Can any one doubt that this course would bring great ultimate happiness? Happiness consists in that which "contents the spirit," and the latter depends entirely upon the character of the feelings and emotions entertained by one, as weighed in the balance of reason, and as passed upon by judgment and the sense of right action. The greatest degree of happiness, or at least the greatest ratio of pleasure over pain, is obtained by a careful and intelligent cultivation of the feeling side of one's being in connection with the cultivation of the intellect and the mastery of the will. To be able to bring the capacity for enjoyment to its highest; to be able to intelligently choose that which will bring the greatest ultimate happiness in accordance with right action; and, finally, to be able to use the will in the direction of holding fast to that which is good and rejecting that which is bad--this is the power of creating happiness. The feelings, the intellect, and the will--here, as ever--combine to manifest the result. Finally, it must be remembered that all human happiness consists in part of the ability to bear pain--to suffer. There must be the dash of Stoicism in the wise Epicurean. One must learn to pluck from pain, suffering, and unhappiness the secret drop of honey which lies at its heart, and which consists in the knowledge of the meaning and use of pain and the means whereby it may be transmuted into knowledge and experience, from which later happiness may be distilled. To profit by pain, to transmute suffering into joy, to transform present unhappiness into a future greater happiness--this is the privilege of the philosopher. * * * * * The mental states and activities known as "desire" are a direct development of the feeling and emotional phase of the mind and form the motive power of the will. Desire, in fact, may be said to be composed of feeling on one side and will on the other. But the influence of the intellect or reasoning faculties has a most important part to play in the evolution of feeling into desire, and in the consequent action of the will by the presentation and weighing of conflicting desires. Therefore, the logical place for the consideration of the activities of the intellect is at this point--between emotion and will. Accordingly, we shall leave the subject of feeling and emotion for the present, to be taken up again in connection with the subject of _desire_, after we have considered the intellectual processes of the mind. But, as has been indicated, we shall see the presence and influence of the feelings and emotions even in the activities of the intellect. CHAPTER XX. The Intellect. The class of mental states or processes grouped together under the name of "intellectual processes," forms the second great division of the mental states, the two others being "feeling" and "will," respectively. "Intellect" has been defined as follows: "The part or faculty of the human mind by which it knows, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; the thinking faculty; the understanding;" also as "that faculty of the human mind by which it receives or comprehends the ideas communicated to it by the senses or the perception, or other means, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; the power or faculty to perceive objects in their relations; the power to judge and comprehend; also the capacity for higher forms of knowledge, as distinguished from the power to perceive and imagine." In the preceding chapters we have seen that the individual is able to experience sensations in consciousness, and that he is able to _perceive_ them mentally, the latter being the first step in intellectual activity. We have also seen that he is able to reproduce the perception by means of memory and imagination, and that by means of the latter he is able to re-combine and rearrange the objects of perception. We have also seen that he has what are known as "feelings," which depend upon his previous experience and that of his progenitors. So far the mind has been considered merely as a receiving and reproducing instrument, with the added attachment of the re-combining power of the imagination. Up to this point the mind may be compared to the phonographic cylinder, with an attachment capable of re-combining its recorded impressions. The impressions are received and perceived, are stored away, are reproduced, and by the use of the imagination are re-combined. Up to this point the mind is seen to be more or less of an automatic, instinctive faculty. It may be traced from the purely reflex activity of the lowest forms of life up through the lower animals, step by step, until a very high degree of mental power is perceived in animals like the horse, dog, or elephant. But there is something lacking. There is missing that peculiar power of thinking in symbols and abstract conceptions which distinguishes the human race and which is closely bound up with the faculty of language or expressing thoughts in words. The comparatively high mental process of the lower animals is dwarfed by the human faculty of "thinking." And _thinking_ is the manifestation of the intellect. What is it to _think_? Strange to say, very few persons can answer this question correctly at first. They find themselves inclined to answer the inquiry in the words of the child: "Why, to think is to _think_!" Let us see if we can make it plain. The dictionary definition is a little too technical to be of much use to the beginner, but here it is: "To employ any of the intellectual powers except that of simple perception through the senses." But what are the "intellectual powers" so employed, and how are they employed? Let us see. Stating the matter plainly in common terms, we may say that "thinking" is the mental process of (1) comparing our perceptions of things with each other, noting the points of likeness and of difference; (2) classifying them according to the ascertained likeness or difference, and thus tying them up in mental bundles with each set of "things of a kind" in its own bundle; (3) forming the abstract, symbolic mental idea (concept) of each class of things, so grouped, which we may afterward use as we use figures in mathematical calculations; (4) using these concepts in order to form _inferences_, that is, to reason from the known to the unknown, and to form judgments regarding things; (5) comparing these judgments and deducing higher judgments from them; and so on. Without thinking, man would be dependent upon each particular experience for his knowledge, except so far as memory and imagination could instinctively aid him. By thought processes he is enabled to infer that if certain things be true of one of a certain kind of things, the same thing may be expected from others of the same class. As he is able to note points of likeness or difference, he is able to form clearer and truer inferences. In addition, he is able to apply his constructive imagination to the rearrangement and recombination of things whose nature he has discovered, and thus progress along the line of material achievement as well as of knowledge. It must be remembered, however, that the intellect depends entirely for its material upon the perception, which in turn receives its raw material from the senses. The intellect merely groups together the material of perception, makes inferences, draws conclusions from, and forms conclusions regarding, them, and in the case of constructive imagination recombines them in effective forms and arrangement. The intellect is the last in order in the course of mental evolution. It appears last in order in the mind of the child, but it often persists in old age after the feelings have grown dim and the memory weak. CONCEPTS. What is known as the "concept" is the first fruit of the elemental processes of thought. The various images of outside objects are sensed, then perceived, and then grouped according to their likenesses and differences, and the result is the production of concepts. It is difficult to define a concept so as to convey any meaning to the beginner. For instance, the dictionaries give the definition as "an abstract, general conception, idea, or notion formed in the mind." Not very clear this, is it? Perhaps we can understand it better if we say that the terms dog, cat, man, horse, house, etc., each expresses a concept. Every term expresses a concept; every general name of a thing or quality is a term applied to the concept. We shall see this a little clearer as we proceed. We form a concept in this way: (1) We _perceive_ a number of things; (2) then we notice certain _qualities_ possessed by things--certain properties, attributes, or characteristics which make the thing what it is; (3) then we _compare_ these qualities of the thing with the qualities of other things and see that there is a likeness in some cases, in various degrees, and a difference in other cases, in various degrees; (4) then we _generalize_ or _classify_ the perceived things according to their ascertained likenesses and differences; (5) then we form a _general idea_ or _concept_ embodying each class of thing; and, finally, we give to the concept a _term_, or _name_, which is its symbol. The concept is a _general idea_ of a class of things; the _term_ is the expression of that general idea. The concept is the idea of a class of things; the term is the _label_ affixed to the thing. To illustrate this last distinction, let us take the concept and term of "bird," for instance. By perception, comparison, and classification of the qualities of living things we have arrived at the conclusion that there exists a great general class the qualities of which may be stated thus: "Warm-blooded, feathered, winged, oviparous, vertebrate." To this general class of quality-possessing animals we apply the English term "bird." The name is merely a symbol. In German the term is _vogel_; in Latin, _avis_; but in each and every case the _general idea_ or _concept_ above stated, _i.e._, "warm-blooded, feathered, winged, oviparous, vertebrate," is meant. If anything is found having all of those particular qualities, then we know it must be what we call a "bird." And everything that we call a "bird" must have those qualities. The term "bird" is the symbol for that particular combination of qualities existing in a thing. There is a difference between a mental image of the imagination and a concept. The mental image must always be of a _particular_ thing, while the concept is always an idea of a _general class_ of things which cannot be clearly pictured in the mind. For instance, the imagination may form the mental picture of any known bird, or even of an imaginary bird, but that bird always will be a distinct, _particular_ bird. Try to form a mental picture of the general class of birds--how will you do it? Do you realize the difficulty? First, such an image would have to include the characteristics of the large birds, such as the eagle, ostrich, and condor; and of the small birds, such as the wren and humming bird. It must be a composite of the shape of all birds, from the ostrich, swan, eagle, crane, down to the sparrow, swallow, and humming bird. It must picture the particular qualities of birds of prey, water birds, and domestic fowls, as well as the grain eaters. It must exhibit all the colors found in bird life, from the brightest reds and greens down to the sober grays and browns. A little thought will show that a clear mental image of such a concept is impossible. What the most of us do, when we think of "bird," is to picture a vague, flying shape of dull color; but when we stop to think that the term must also include the waddling duck and the scratching barnyard chicken, we see that our mental image is faulty. The trouble is that the term "bird" really means "all-bird," and we cannot picture an "all-bird" from the very nature of the case. Our terms, therefore, are like mathematical figures, or algebraic symbols, which we use for ease, speed, and clearness of thinking. The trouble does not end here. Concepts not only include the general idea of _things_, but also the general idea of the _qualities of things_. Thus sweetness, hardness, courage, and energy are concepts, but we cannot form a mental image of them by themselves. We may picture a sweet _thing_, but not sweetness itself. So you see that a concept is a purely abstract mental idea--a symbol--akin to the figures 1, 2, 3, etc., and used in the same way. They _stand_ for general classes of things. A "term" is the verbal and written expression of the general idea or concept. The student is requested to fix these distinctions in his mind, so as to render further understanding of them easy. CHAPTER XXI. Conception. The process of conception has been well defined by Gordy as "that act of mind by which it forms an idea of a class; or that act of the mind that enables us to use general names intelligently." He adds: "It is, of course, understood that I am using the word 'class' to denote an indefinite number of individuals that resemble each other in certain particulars." PERCEPTION. The first step in conception, as we have seen, is that of perception. It is readily perceived that the character of our intellectual processes depends materially upon the variety, clearness, and accuracy of our perceptions. Therefore, again, we would refer our students to the chapter in which we have stated the importance of clear perception. MEMORY. The future steps of conception depend materially upon the clearness of the memory, as we can classify objects only by remembering their qualities beyond the immediate moment of actual, original perception. Therefore, the memory should be strengthened for this as well as other objects. ABSTRACTION. The second step in conception is that of the mental abstraction of qualities from the observed thing. That is, we must perceive and then mentally _set aside_ the observed qualities of the thing. For instance, man first perceived the existence of certain qualities in things. He found that a certain number of things possessed some of these qualities in common, while others possessed other qualities in the same way, and thus arose classification from comparison. But both comparison and classification are possible only by abstraction, or _the perception of the quality as a "thing"_; thus, the abstraction of the idea of the quality of _sweetness_ from the idea of sugar. Sweetness is a _quality_ rather than a thing itself. It is something possessed by sugar which helps to make sugar what it is. Color, shape, size, mental qualities, habits of action--these are some of the qualities first observed in things and abstracted from them in thought. Redness, sweetness, hardness, softness, largeness, smallness, fragrance, swiftness, slowness, fierceness, gentleness, warmness, coldness, etc.--these are abstracted qualities of things. Of course these qualities are really never divorced from things, but the mind divorces them in order to make thinking easier. An authority says: "Animals are incapable of making abstractions, and that is the reason why they cannot develop formal thought. * * * Abstract thought is identical with rational thought, which is the characteristic feature of the thought of speaking beings. This is the reason why abstract thought is upon earth the exclusive property of man, and why brutes are incapable of abstract thought. The process of naming is the mechanism of abstraction, for names establish the mental independence of the objects named." The processes of abstraction depend upon attention--concentrated attention. Attention directed to the qualities of a thing tends to abstract the qualities in thought from the thing itself. Mill says: "Abstraction is primarily the result of attention." Hamilton says: "Attention and abstraction are only the same process viewed in different relations." Cultivation of the power of abstraction means principally cultivation of attention. Any mental activity which tends toward _analysis_ or separation of a thing into its parts, qualities, or elements will serve to cultivate and develop the power of abstraction. The habit of converting _qualities_ into concepts is acquired by _transforming adjective terms into their corresponding noun terms_. For instance, a piece of colored candy possesses the _qualities_ of being round, hard, red, sweet, etc. Transforming these adjective qualities into noun terms we have the _concepts_ of roundness, hardness, redness, and sweetness, respectively. COMPARISON. The third step in conception is that of _comparison_, in which the qualities of several things are compared or examined for likenesses and differences. We find many qualities in which the several things differ, and a few in which there is a likeness. Classes are formed from resemblances or likenesses, while individuals are separated from apparent classes by detection of differences. Finally, it is found that separate things, while having many points of difference which indicate their individuality, nevertheless have a few points of likeness which indicate that they belong to the same general family or class. The detection of likenesses and differences in the qualities of various things is an important mental process. Many of the higher thought processes depend largely upon the ability to compare things properly. The development of attention and perception tends to develop the power of comparison. CLASSIFICATION OR GENERALIZATION. The fourth step in conception is that of classification or generalization, whereby we place individual things in a mental bundle or class, and then this bundle in company with other bundles into a higher class, and so on. Thus we group all the individual small birds having certain characteristics into a species, then several related species into a larger family, and this into a still larger, until finally we group all the bird families into the great family which we call "birds" and of which the simple term "bird" expresses the general concept. Jevons says: "We classify things together whenever we observe that they are like each other in any respect, and therefore think of them together. In classifying a collection of objects, we do not merely put together into groups those which resemble each other, but we also divide each class into smaller ones in which the resemblance is more complete. Thus the class of _white substances_ may be divided into those which are solid, and those which are fluid, so that we get the two minor classes of solid-white and fluid-white substances. It is desirable to have names by which to show that one class is contained in another, and, accordingly, we call the class which is divided into two or more smaller ones the _genus_, and the smaller ones into which it is divided, the _species_." Every _species_ is a small family of the individuals composing it, and at the same time is an individual species of the genus just above it; the _genus_, in turn, is a family of several species, and at the same time an individual genus in the greater family or genus above it. The student may familiarize himself with the idea of generalization by considering himself as an individual, John Smith. John represents that unit of generalization. The next step is to combine John with the other Smiths of his immediate family. Then this family may be grouped with his near blood relations, and so on, until finally all the related Smiths, near and remote, are grouped together in a great Smith family. Or, in the same way, the family group may be enlarged until it takes in all the white people in a county, then all the white people in the state, then all in the United States; then all the white races, then all the white and other light-skinned races, then all mankind. Then, if one is inclined, the process may be continued until it embraces every living creature from moneron to man. Reversing the process, living creatures may be divided and subdivided until all mankind is seen to stand as a class. Then the race of man may be divided into sub-races according to color; then the white race may be subdivided into Americans and non-Americans. Then the Americans may be divided into inhabitants of the several states, or into Indianans and non-Indianans; then into the inhabitants of the several counties of Indiana, and thus the Posey Countians are reached. Then the Posey County people are divided into Smiths and non-Smiths; then the Smith family into its constituent family groups, and then into the smaller families, and so on, until the classification reaches one particular John Smith, who at last is found to be an individual--in a class by himself. This is the story of the ascending and descending processes of generalization. CHAPTER XXII. Classes of Concepts. In the preceding chapter we have seen the process of conception--of the forming of concepts. _The idea of a general class of things or qualities is a concept._ Each concept contains the qualities which are _common to all_ the individuals composing the class, but not those qualities which pertain only to the minor classes or the individuals. For instance, the concept of "bird" will necessarily include the common qualities of warm-bloodedness, featheredness, wingedness, oviparousness, and vertebratedness. But it will _not_ include color, special shape, size, or special features or characteristics of the subfamilies or individuals composing the great class. The class comprises the individuals and subclasses composing it; the concept includes the general and common qualities which _all_ in the class possess. A _percept_ is the mental image of a particular thing; a _concept_ is the mental idea of the general qualities of a class of things. A percept arises from the perception of a sensation; a concept is a purely mental, abstract creation, whose only existence is in the world of ideas and which has no corresponding individual object in the world of sense. There are two general classes of concepts, namely: (1) concrete concepts, in which the common qualities of a class of things are combined into one conceptual idea, such as "bird," of which we have spoken; (2) abstract concepts, in which is combined the idea of some _quality_ common to a number of things, such as "sweetness" or "redness." Jevons's well-known rule for terms is an aid in remembering this classification: "_A concrete term is the name of a thing; an abstract term is the name of a quality of a thing._" It is a peculiar fact and rule of concrete concepts that (1) the larger the class of things embraced in a concept, the smaller are its general qualities; and (2) the larger the number of general qualities included in a concept, the smaller the number of individuals embraced by it. For instance, the term "bird" embraces a great number of individuals--all the birds that are in existence, in fact, but it has but few general qualities, as we have seen. On the contrary, the concept "stork" has a much larger number of general qualities, but embraces far fewer individuals. Finally, the individual is reached, and we find that it has more qualities than any class can have; but it is composed of the smallest possible number of individuals, one. The secret is this: No two individuals can have as many qualities _in common_ as each has individually, unless they are precisely alike, which is impossible in nature. IMPERFECT CONCEPTS. It is said that outside of strictly scientific definitions very few persons agree in their concepts of the same thing. Each has his or her own concept of the particular thing which he or she expresses by the same term. A number of persons asked to define a common term like "love," "religion," "faith," "belief," etc., will give such a variety of answers as to cause wonderment. As Green says: "My idea or image is mine alone--the reward of careless observation if imperfect; of attentive, careful, and varied observation if correct. Between mine and yours a great gulf is fixed. No man can pass from mine to yours, or from yours to mine. Neither in any proper sense of the term can mine be conveyed to you. Words do not convey thoughts; they are not vehicles of thoughts in any true sense of that term. A word is simply a common symbol which each associates with his own idea or image." The reason of the difference in the concepts of several persons is that very few of our concepts are nearly perfect; the majority of them are quite imperfect and incomplete. Jevons gives us an idea of this in his remarks on classification: "Things may seem to be very much like each other which are not so. Whales, porpoises, seals, and several other animals live in the sea exactly like a fish; they have a similar shape and are usually classed among fish. People are said to go whale fishing. Yet these animals are not really fish at all, but are much more like dogs and horses and other quadrupeds than they are like fish. They cannot live entirely under water and breathe the air contained in the water like fish, but they have to come to the surface at intervals to take breath. Similarly, we must not class bats with birds because they fly about, although they have what would be called wings; these wings are not like those of birds, and, in truth, bats are much more like rats and mice than they are like birds. Botanists used at one time to classify plants according to their size, as trees, shrubs, or herbs, but we now know that a great tree is often more similar in character to a tiny herb than it is to other great trees. A daisy has little resemblance to a great Scotch thistle; yet the botanist regards them as very similar. The lofty growing bamboo is a kind of grass, and the sugar cane also belongs to the same class with wheat and oats." It is a matter of importance that clear concepts should be formed regarding at least the familiar things of life. The list of clear concepts should be added to from time to time by study, investigation, and examination. The dictionary should be consulted frequently, and a term studied until one has a clear meaning of the concept the term seeks to express. A good encyclopedia (not necessarily an expensive one, in these days of cheap editions) will also prove very useful in this respect. As Halleck says: "It must be borne in mind that most of our concepts are subject to change during our entire life; that at first they are made only in a tentative way; that experience may show us, at any time, that they have been erroneously formed, that we have abstracted too little or too much, made the class too wide or too narrow, or that here a quality must be added or there one taken away." It is a good practice to make a memorandum of anything of which you may hear, but of which you know nothing, and then later to make a brief but thorough investigation of that thing, by means of the dictionary and encyclopedia, and of whatever good works may be obtained on the subject, not leaving it until you feel that you have obtained at least a _clear idea_ of what the thing really _means_. A half hour each evening devoted to exercise of this kind will result in a wonderful increase of general information. We have heard of a man who made a practice of reading a short article in the encyclopedia every evening, giving preference to subjects generally classed as familiar. In a year he made a noticeable advance in general knowledge as well as habits of thought. In five years he was looked upon by his associates as a man of a remarkably large field of general information and of more than ordinary intelligence, which verdict was a just one. As a rule we waste far more time on worthless fiction than we are willing to devote to a little self-improvement of this kind. We shrink at the idea of a general course of instructive reading, little realizing that we can take our study in small installments and at a very little cost in time or labor. Our concepts form the material which our intellect uses in its reasoning processes. No matter how good a reasoner one may be, unless he has a good supply of general information about the things of which he is reasoning, he will not make much real headway. We must begin at the bottom and build a firm foundation upon which the intellectual structure may be erected. This foundation is composed of _facts_. These facts are represented by our clear and correct concepts. CHAPTER XXIII. Judgments. We have seen the several steps of the mental process whereby simple sensations are transformed into percepts and then into concepts or general ideas. The formation of the concept is considered as the first great step in thinking. The second great step in thinking is that of the formation of the "judgment." The definition of "judgment," as the term is used in logic; is "the comparing together in the mind of two ideas of things, and determining whether they agree or disagree with each other, or that one of them does or does not belong to the other. Judgment is, therefore, (_a_) affirmative or (_b_) negative, as (_a_) 'Snow is white,' or (_b_) 'All white men are not Europeans.'" What in logic is called a "proposition" is the expression in words of a logical judgment. Hyslop defined the term "proposition" as follows: "Any affirmation or denial of an agreement between two conceptions." For instance, we compare the concepts "sparrow" and "bird" and find that there is an agreement, and that the former belongs to the latter; this mental process is a _judgment_. We then announce the judgment in the _proposition_: "The sparrow is a bird." In the same way we compare the concepts "bat" and "bird," find that there is a disagreement, and form the judgment that neither belongs to the other, which we express in the proposition: "The bat is not a bird." Or we may form the judgment that "sweetness" is a quality of "sugar," which we express in the proposition: "Sugar is sweet." Likewise, we may form the judgment which results in the proposition: "Vinegar is not sweet." While the process of judgment is generally considered as constituting the second great step of thinking, coming after the formation of the concept, and consisting of the comparing of concepts, it must be remembered that the act of judging is far more elementary than this, for it is found still farther back in the history of thought processes. By that peculiar law of paradox which we find everywhere operative in mind processes, the same process of forming judgments which is used in comparing concepts also has been used in forming the same concepts in the stage of comparison. In fact, the result of all comparison, high or low, must be _a judgment_. Halleck says: "Judgment is necessary in forming concepts. When we decide that a quality is or is not common to a class, we are really judging. This is another evidence of the complexity and unified action of the mind." Brooks says: "The power of judgment is of great value in its products. It is involved in or accompanies every act of the intellect, and thus lies at the foundation of all intellectual activity. It operates directly in every act of the understanding, and even aids the other faculties of the mind in completing their activities and products. * * * Strictly speaking, every intelligent act of the mind is accompanied with a judgment. To know is to discriminate and, therefore, to judge. Every sensation or cognition involves a knowledge and so a judgment that it exists. The mind cannot think at all without judging; to think is to judge. Even in forming the notions which judgment compares, the mind judges. Every notion or concept implies a previous act of judgment to form it; in forming a concept we compare the common attributes before we unite them, and comparison is judgment. It is thus true that 'Every concept is a contracted judgment; every judgment an expanded concept.'" It is needless to say that as judgments lie at the base of our thinking, and also appear in every part of its higher structure, the importance of correct judgment in thought cannot be overestimated. But it is often very difficult to form correct judgment even regarding the most familiar things around us. Halleck says: "In actual life things present themselves to us with their qualities disguised or obscured by other conflicting qualities. Men had for ages seen burning substances and had formed a concept of them. A certain hard, black, stony substance had often been noticed, and a concept had been formed of it. This concept was imperfect; but it is very seldom that we meet with perfect, sharply-defined concepts in actual life. So it happened that for ages the concept of burning substance was never linked by judgment to the concept of stone coal. The combustible quality in the coal was overshadowed by its stony attributes. 'Of course stone will not burn,' people said. One cannot tell how long the development of mankind was retarded for that very reason. England would not to-day be manufacturing products for the rest of the world had not some one judged coal to be a combustible substance. * * * Judgment is ever silently working and comparing things that to past ages seemed dissimilar; and it is constantly abstracting and leaving out of the field of view those qualities which have simply served to obscure the point at issue." Gordy says: "The credulity of children is proverbial; but if we get our facts at first hand, if we study 'the living, learning, playing child,' we shall see that he is quite as remarkable for incredulity as for credulity. The explanation is simple: _He tends to believe the first suggestion that comes into his mind, no matter from what source_; and since his belief is not the result of any rational process, he cannot be made to disbelieve it in any rational way. Hence it is that he is very credulous about any matter about which he has no ideas; but let the idea once get possession of his mind, and he is quite as remarkable for incredulity as before for credulity. * * * If we study the larger child,--the man with a child's mind, an uneducated man,--we shall have the same truth forced upon us. If the beliefs of men were due to processes of reasoning, where they have not reasoned they would not believe. But do we find it so? Is it not true that the men who have the most positive opinions on the largest variety of subjects--so far as they have ever heard of them--are precisely those who have the least right to them? Socrates, we remember, was counted the wisest man in Athens because he alone resisted his natural tendency to believe in the absence of evidence; he alone would not delude himself with the conceit of knowledge without the reality; and it would scarcely be too much to say that the intellectual strength of men is in direct proportion to the number of things they are absolutely certain of. * * * I do not, of course, mean to intimate that we should have no opinions about matters that we have not personally investigated. We take, and ought to take, the opinion of some men about law, and others about medicine, and others about particular sciences, and so on. But we should clearly realize the difference between holding an opinion on trust and holding it as the result of our own investigations." Brooks says: "It should be one of the leading objects of the culture of young people to lead them to acquire the habit of forming judgments. They should not only be led to see things but to have opinions about things. They should be trained to see things in their relations and to put these relations into definite propositions. Their ideas of objects should be worked up into thoughts concerning the objects. Those methods of teaching are best which tend to excite a thoughtful habit of mind that notices the similitudes and diversities of objects and endeavors to read the thoughts which they embody and of which they are the symbols." The study of logic, geometry, and the natural sciences is recommended for exercise of the faculty of judgment and the development thereof. The study and practice of even the lower branches of mathematics are also helpful in this direction. The game of checkers or chess is recommended by many authorities. Some have advocated the practice of solving enigmas, problems, rebuses, etc., as giving exercise to this faculty of the mind. The cultivation of the "Why?" attitude of mind, and the answering of one's own mental questions, is also helpful, if not carried to excess. "Doubting Thomas" is not always a term of reproach in these days of scientific habits of thought, and "the man from Missouri" has many warm admirers. CHAPTER XXIV. Primary Laws of Thought. In connection with this subject we herewith call the attention of the student to the well-known Primary Laws of Thought which have been recognized as valid from the time of the ancient Greek logicians. These laws are self-evident, and are uncontradictable. They are axiomatic. Jevons says of them: "Students are seldom able to see at first their full meaning and importance. All arguments may be explained when these self-evident laws are granted; and it is not too much to say that the whole of logic will be plain to those who will constantly use these laws as their key." Here are the Three Primary Laws of Thought:-- I. _Law of Identity._ "Whatever is, _is_." II. _Law of Contradiction._ "Nothing can both be and not be." III. _Law of Excluded Middle._ "Everything must either be or not be; there is no middle course." I. The first of these laws, called "_The Law of Identity_," informs us that a thing is always itself, no matter under what guise or form it is perceived or may present itself. An animal is always a bird if it possesses the general characteristics of a "bird," no matter whether it exhibits the minor characteristics of an eagle, a wren, a stork, or a humming bird. In the same way a whale is a mammal because it possesses the general characteristics of a mammal notwithstanding that it swims in the water like a fish. Also, sweetness is always sweetness, whether manifested in sugar, honey, flowers, or products of coal tar. If a thing _is_ that thing, then it _is_, and it cannot be logically claimed that it _is not_. II. The second of these laws, called "_The Law of Contradiction_," informs us that the same quality or class cannot be both affirmed and denied of a thing at the same time and place. A sparrow cannot be said to be both "bird" and "not bird" at the same time. Neither can sugar be said to be "sweet" and "not sweet" at the same time. A piece of iron may be "hot" at one end and "not hot" at another, but it cannot be both "hot" and "not hot" at the same place at the same time. III. The third of these laws, called "_The Law of Excluded Middle_," informs us that a given quality or class _must_ be affirmed or denied to _everything_ at any given time and place. Everything either must be of a certain class or not, must possess a certain quality or not, at a given time or place. There is no other alternative or middle course. It is axiomatic that any statement _must_ either be or not be true of a certain other thing at any certain time and place; there is no escape from this. Anything _either_ must be "black" or "not black," a bird or not a bird, alive or not alive, at any certain time or place. There is nothing else that it can be; it cannot both be and not be at the same time and place, as we have seen; therefore, it must either be or not be that which is asserted of it. The judgment must decide which alternative; but it has only two possible choices. But the student must not confuse opposite qualities or things with "not-ness." A thing may be "black" or "not black," but it need not be white to be "not black," for blue is likewise "not black" just as it is "not white." The neglect of this fact frequently causes error. We must always affirm either the existence or non-existence of a quality in a thing; but this is far different from affirming or denying the existence of the opposite quality. Thus a thing may be "not hard" and yet it does not follow that it is "soft"; it may be _neither_ hard nor soft. FALLACIOUS APPLICATION. There exists what are known as "fallacies" of application of these primary laws. A fallacy is an unsound argument or conclusion. For instance, because a particular man is found to be a liar, it is fallacious to assume that "_all_ men are liars," for lying is a particular quality of the individual man, and not a general quality of the family of men. In the same way because a stork has long legs and a long bill, it does not follow that all birds must have these characteristics simply because the stork is a bird. _It is fallacious to extend an individual quality to a class._ But it is sound judgment to assume that a class quality must be possessed by all individuals in that class. It is a far different proposition which asserts that "_some_ birds are black," from that which asserts that "_all_ birds are black." The same rule, of course, is true regarding negative propositions. Another fallacy is that which assumes that because the affirmative or negative proposition has not been, or cannot be, proved, it follows that the opposite proposition must be true. The true judgment is simply "not proven." Another fallacious judgment is that which is based on attributing absolute quality to that which is but relative or comparative. For instance, the terms "hot" and "cold" are relative and comparative, and simply denote one's relative opinion regarding a fixed and certain degree of temperature. The _certain_ thing is the degree of temperature, say 75 degrees Fahrenheit; of this we may logically claim that it _is_ or _is not_ true at a certain time or place. It either _is_ 75 degrees Fahrenheit or it _is not_. But to one man this may seem _warm_ and to another _cold_; both are right in their judgments, so far as their own relative feelings are concerned. But neither can claim absolutely that it is _warm_ or _cold_. Therefore, it is a fallacy to ascribe absolute quality to a relative one. The _absolute fact_ comes under the Law of Excluded Middle, but a personal opinion is not an absolute fact. There are other fallacies which will be considered in other chapters of this book, under their appropriate heading. CHAPTER XXV. Reasoning. Reasoning, the third great step in thinking, may be said to consist of ascertaining new truths from old ones, new judgments from old ones, unknown facts from known ones; in short, of proceeding logically from the known to the unknown, using the known as the foundation for the unknown which is sought to be known. Gordy gives us the following excellent definition of the term: "Reasoning is the act of going from the known to the unknown through other beliefs; of basing judgment upon judgments; reaching beliefs through beliefs." Reasoning, then, is seen to be a process of building a structure of judgments, one resting upon the other, the topmost point being the final judgment, but the whole constituting an edifice of judgment. This may be seen more clearly when the various forms of reasoning are considered. IMMEDIATE REASONING. The simplest form of reasoning is that known as "immediate reasoning," by which is meant reasoning by directly comparing two judgments without the intervention of the third judgment, which is found in the more formal classes of reasoning. This form of reasoning depends largely upon the application of the Three Primary Laws of Thought, to which we have referred in a previous chapter. It will be seen that _if_ (_a_) a thing is always itself, then (_b_) all that is included in it must partake of its nature. Thus, the bird family has certain class characteristics, therefore by immediate reasoning we know that _any_ member of that family must possess those class characteristics, whatever particular characteristics it may have in addition. And we likewise know that we cannot attribute the _particular_ characteristics, as a matter of course, to the other members of the class. Thus, though all sparrows are birds, it is not true that all birds are sparrows. "All biscuits are bread; but all bread is not biscuit." In the same way we know that a thing cannot be bird and mammal at the same time, for the mammals form a not-bird family. And, likewise, we know that everything _must_ be either bird or not bird, but that being not bird does not mean being a mammal, for there are many other not-bird things than mammals. In this form of reasoning distinction is always made between the _universal_ or general class, which is expressed by the word _all_, and the _particular_ or individual, which is expressed by the word "some." Many persons fail to note this difference in their reasoning, and fallaciously reason, for instance, that because _some_ swans are white, _all_ swans must be so, which is a far different thing from reasoning that if _all_ is so and so, then _some_ must be so and so. Those who are interested in this subject are referred to some elementary text-book on logic, as the detailed consideration is too technical for consideration here. REASONING BY ANALOGY. Reasoning by analogy is an elementary form of reasoning, and is the particular kind of reasoning employed by the majority of persons in ordinary thought. It is based upon the unconscious recognition by the human mind of the principle which is expressed by Jevons as: "_If two or more things resemble each other in many points, they will probably resemble each other in more points._" The same authority says: "Reasoning by analogy differs only in degree from that kind of reasoning called '_generalization_.' When _many things_ resemble each other in a _few properties_, we argue about them by generalization. When a _few things_ resemble each other in _many properties_, it is a case of analogy." While this form of reason is frequently employed with more or less satisfactory results, it is always open to a large percentage of error. Thus, persons have been poisoned by toadstools by reason of false analogous reasoning that because mushrooms are edible, then toadstools, which resemble them, must also be fit for food; or, in the same way, because certain berries resemble other edible berries they must likewise be good food. As Brooks says: "To infer that because John Smith has a red nose and is also a drunkard, then Henry Jones, who also has a red nose, is also a drunkard, would be dangerous inference. Conclusions of this kind drawn from analogy are frequently dangerous." Halleck says: "Many false analogies are manufactured, and it is excellent thought training to expose them. The majority of people think so little that they swallow these false analogies just as newly-fledged robins swallow small stones dropped into their mouths." Jevons, one of the best authorities on the subject, says: "There is no way in which we can really assure ourselves that we are arguing safely by analogy. The only rule that can be given is this: That the more closely two things resemble each other, the more likely it is that they are the same in other respects, especially in points closely connected with those observed. In order to be clear about our conclusions, we ought, in fact, never to rest satisfied with mere analogy, but ought to try to discover the general laws governing the case. * * * We find that reasoning by analogy is not to be depended upon, unless we make such an inquiry into the causes and laws of the things in question that we really employ inductive and deductive reasoning." HIGHER FORMS OF REASONING. The two higher forms of reasoning are known, respectively, as (1) inductive reasoning, or inference from particular facts to general laws; and (2) deductive reasoning, or inference from general truths to particular truths. While the class distinction is made for the purpose of clear consideration, it must not be forgotten that the two forms of reasoning are generally found in combination. Thus, in inductive reasoning many steps are taken by the aid of deductive reasoning; and, likewise, before we can reason deductively from general truths to particular ones we must have discovered the general truths by inductive reasoning from particular facts. Thus there is a unity in all reasoning processes as there is in all mental operations. Inductive reasoning is a _synthetical_ process; deductive reasoning, an _analytical_ one. In the first we combine and build up, in the latter we dissect and separate. CHAPTER XXVI. Inductive Reasoning. Inductive reasoning is based upon the axiom: "_What is true of the many is true of the whole._" This axiom is based upon man's belief in the uniformity of nature. Inductive reasoning is a mental ladder by which we climb from particular facts to general laws, but the ladder rests upon the belief that the universe is governed by law. The steps in inductive reasoning are as follows:-- I. Observation, investigation, and examination of particular facts or things. If we wish to know the general characteristics of the bird family, we must first examine a sufficient number of birds of many kinds so as to discover the comparatively few general characteristics possessed by _all_ of the bird family, as distinct from the particular characteristics possessed by only _some_ of that family. The greater the number of individuals examined, the narrower becomes our list of the general qualities common to _all_. In the same way we must examine many kinds of flowers before we come to the few general qualities common to all flowers, which we combine in the general concept of "flower." The same, of course, is true regarding the discovery of general laws from particular facts. We examine the facts and then work toward a general law which will explain them. For instance, the Law of Gravitation was discovered by the observation and investigation of the fact that all objects are attracted to the earth; further investigation revealed the fact that all material objects are attracted to each other; then the general law was discovered, or, rather, the hypothesis was advanced, was found to explain the facts, and was verified by further experiments and observation. II. The second step in inductive reasoning is the making of an hypothesis. An hypothesis is a proposition or principle assumed as a _possible_ explanation for a set or class of facts. It is regarded as a "working theory," which must be examined and tested in connection with the facts before it is finally accepted. For instance, after the observation that a number of magnets attracted steel, it was found reasonable to advance the hypothesis that "all magnets attract steel." In the same way was advanced the hypothesis that "all birds are warm-blooded, winged, feathered, oviparous vertebrates." Subsequent observation and experiment established the hypothesis regarding the magnet, and regarding the general qualities of the bird family. If a single magnet had been found which did not attract steel, then the hypothesis would have fallen. If a single bird had been discovered which was not warm-blooded, then that quality would have been stricken from the list of the necessary characteristics of all birds. A theory is merely an hypothesis which has been verified or established by continued and repeated observation, investigation, and experiment. Hypotheses and theories arise very frequently from the subconscious assimilation of a number of particular facts and the consequent flashing of a "great guess," or "sacred suspicion of the truth," into the conscious field of attention. The scientific imagination plays an important part in this process. There is, of course, a world of difference between a "blind guess" based upon insufficient data and a "scientific guess" resulting from the accumulation of a vast store of careful and accurate information. As Brooks says: "The forming of an hypothesis requires a suggestive mind, a lively fancy, a philosophic imagination that catches a glimpse of the idea through the form or sees the law standing behind the fact." But accepted theories, in the majority of cases, arise only by testing out and rejecting many promising hypotheses and finally settling upon the one which best answers all the requirements and best explains the facts. As an authority says: "To try wrong guesses is with most persons the only way to hit upon right ones." III. Testing the hypothesis by deductive reasoning is the third step in inductive reasoning. This test is made by applying the hypothetical principle to particular facts or things; that is, to follow out mentally the hypothetical principle to its logical conclusion. This may be done in this way: "If _so and so_ is correct, then it follows that _thus and so_ is true," etc. If the conclusion agrees with reason, then the test is deemed satisfactory so far as it has gone. But if the result proves to be a logical absurdity or inconsistent with natural facts, then the hypothesis is discredited. IV. Practical verification of the hypothesis is the fourth step in inductive reasoning. This step consists of the actual comparison of observed facts with the "logical conclusions" arising from applying deductive reasoning to the general principle assumed as a premise. The greater number of facts agreeing with the conclusions arising from the premise of the hypothesis, the greater is deemed the "probability" of the latter. The authorities generally assume an hypothesis to be _verified_ when it accounts for _all_ the facts which properly are related to it. Some extremists contend, however, that before an hypothesis may be considered as absolutely verified, it must not only account for all the associated facts but that also there must be no other possible hypothesis to account for the same facts. The "facts" referred to in this connection may be either (1) observed phenomena, or (2) the conclusions of deductive reasoning arising from the assumption of the hypothesis, or (3) the agreement between the observed facts and the logical conclusions. The last combination is generally regarded as the most logical. The verification of an hypothesis must be "an all-around one," and there must be an agreement between the observed facts and the logical conclusions in the case--the hypothesis must "fit" the facts, and the facts must "fit" the hypothesis. The "facts" are the glass slipper of the Cinderella legend--the several sisters of Cinderella were discarded hypotheses, the slipper and the sisters not "fitting." When Cinderella's foot was found to be the one foot upon which the glass slipper fitted, then the Cinderella hypothesis was considered to have been proved--the glass slipper was hers and the prince claimed his bride. CHAPTER XXVII. Deductive Reasoning. We have seen in the preceding chapter that from particular facts we reason inductively to general principles or truths. We have also seen that one of the steps of inductive reasoning is the testing of the hypothesis by deductive reasoning. We shall now also see that the results of inductive reasoning are used as premises or bases for deductive reasoning. These two forms of reasoning are opposites and yet complementary to each other; they are in a sense independent and yet are interdependent. Brooks says: "The two methods of reasoning are the reverse of each other. One goes from particulars to generals; the other from generals to particulars. One is a process of analysis; the other is a process of synthesis. One rises from facts to laws; the other descends from laws to facts. Each is independent of the other, and each is a valid and essential method of inference." Halleck well expresses the spirit of deductive reasoning as follows: "After induction has classified certain phenomena and thus given us a major premise, we may proceed deductively to apply the inference to any new specimen that can be shown to belong to that class. Induction hands over to deduction a ready-made premise. Deduction takes that as a fact, making no inquiry regarding its truth. Only after general laws have been laid down, after objects have been classified, after major premises have been formed, can deduction be employed." Deductive reasoning proceeds from general principles to particular facts. It is a descending process, analytical in its nature. It rests upon the fundamental axiomatic basis that "_whatever is true of the whole is true of its parts_," or "_whatever is true of the universal is true of the particulars_." The process of deductive reasoning may be stated briefly as follows: (1) A general principle of a class is stated as a _major premise_; (2) a particular thing is stated as belonging to that general class, this statement being the _minor premise_; therefore (3) the general class principle is held to apply to the particular thing, this last statement being the _conclusion_. (_A "premise" is "a proposition assumed to be true."_) The following gives us an illustration of the above process:-- I. (_Major premise_)--A bird is a warm-blooded, feathered, winged, oviparous vertebrate. II. (_Minor premise_)--The sparrow is a bird; therefore III. (_Conclusion_)--The sparrow is a warm-blooded, feathered, winged, oviparous vertebrate. Or, again:-- I. (_Major premise_)--Rattlesnakes frequently bite when enraged, and their bite is poisonous. II. (_Minor premise_)--This snake before me is a rattlesnake; therefore III. (_Conclusion_)--This snake before me may bite when enraged, and its bite will be poisonous. The average person may be inclined to object that he is not conscious of going through this complicated process when he reasons about sparrows or rattlesnakes. But he _does_, nevertheless. He is not conscious of the steps, because mental habit has accustomed him to the process, and it is performed more or less automatically. But these three steps manifest in all processes of deductive reasoning, even the simplest. The average person is like the character in the French play who was surprised to learn that he had "been talking prose for forty years without knowing it." Jevons says that the majority of persons are equally surprised when they find out that they have been using logical forms, more or less correctly, without having realized it. He says: "A large number even of educated persons have no clear idea of what logic is. Yet, in a certain way, every one must have been a logician since he began to speak." There are many technical rules and principles of logic which we cannot attempt to consider here. There are, however, a few elementary principles of correct reasoning which should have a place here. What is known as a "syllogism" is the expression in words of the various parts of the complete process of reasoning or argument. Whately defines it as follows: "A syllogism is an argument expressed in strict logical form so that its conclusiveness is manifest from the structure of the expression alone, without any regard to the meaning of the term." In short, _if_ the two premises are accepted as correct, it follows that there can be only one true logical conclusion resulting therefrom. In abstract or theoretical reasoning the word "_if_" is assumed to precede each of the two premises, the "therefore" before the conclusion resulting from the "if," of course. The following are the general rules governing the syllogism:-- I. Every syllogism must consist of three, and no more than three, propositions, namely (1) the major premise, (2) the minor premise, and (3) the conclusion. II. The conclusion must naturally follow from the premises, otherwise the syllogism is invalid and constitutes a fallacy or sophism. III. One premise, at least, must be affirmative. IV. If one premise is negative, the conclusion must be negative. V. One premise, at least, must be universal or general. VI. If one premise is particular, the conclusion also must be particular. The last two rules (V. and VI.) contain the essential principles of all the rules regarding syllogisms, and any syllogism which breaks them will be found also to break other rules, some of which are not stated here for the reason that they are too technical. These two rules may be tested by constructing syllogisms in violation of their principles. The reason for them is as follows: (Rule V.) Because "from two particular premises no conclusion can be drawn," as, for instance: (1) Some men are mortal; (2) John is a man. We cannot reason from this either that John _is_ or _is not_ mortal. The major premise should read "_all_ men." (Rule VI.) Because "a universal conclusion can be drawn only from two universal premises," an example being needless here, as the conclusion is so obvious. CULTIVATION OF REASONING FACULTIES. There is no royal road to the cultivation of the reasoning faculties. There is but the old familiar rule: Practice, exercise, use. Nevertheless there are certain studies which tend to develop the faculties in question. The study of arithmetic, especially mental arithmetic, tends to develop correct habits of reasoning from one truth to another--from cause to effect. Better still is the study of geometry; and best of all, of course, is the study of logic and the practice of working out its problems and examples. The study of philosophy and psychology also is useful in this way. Many lawyers and teachers have drilled themselves in geometry solely for the purpose of developing their logical reasoning powers. Brooks says: "So valuable is geometry as a discipline that many lawyers and others review their geometry every year in order to keep the mind drilled to logical habits of thinking. * * * The study of logic will aid in the development of the power of deductive reasoning. It does this, first, by showing the method by which we reason. To know how we reason, to see the laws which govern the reasoning process, to analyze the syllogism and see its conformity to the laws of thought, is not only an exercise of reasoning but gives that knowledge of the process that will be both a stimulus and a guide to thought. No one can trace the principles and processes of thought without receiving thereby an impetus to thought. In the second place, the study of logic is probably even more valuable because it gives practice in deductive thinking. This, perhaps, is its principal value, since the mind reasons instinctively without knowing how it reasons. One can think without the knowledge of the science of thinking just as one can use language correctly without a knowledge of grammar; yet as the study of grammar improves one's speech, so the study of logic can but improve one's thought." In the opinion of the writer hereof, one of the best though simple methods of cultivating the faculties of reasoning is to acquaint one's self thoroughly with the more common _fallacies_ or forms of false reasoning--so thoroughly that not only is the false reasoning detected at once but also the _reason_ of its falsity is readily understood. To understand the wrong ways of reasoning is to be on guard against them. By guarding against them we tend to eliminate them from our thought processes. If we eliminate the false we have the true left in its place. Therefore we recommend the weeding of the logical garden of the common fallacies, to the end that the flowers of pure reason may flourish in their stead. Accordingly, we think it well to call your attention in the next chapter to the more common fallacies, and the reason of their falsity. CHAPTER XXVIII. Fallacious Reasoning. A fallacy is defined as "an unsound argument or mode of arguing which, while appearing to be decisive of a question, is in reality not so; or a fallacious statement or proposition in which the error is not readily apparent. When a fallacy is used to deceive others, it is called 'sophistry,'" It is important that the student should understand the nature of the fallacy and understand its most common forms. As Jevons says: "In learning how to do right it is always desirable to be informed as to the ways in which we are likely to go wrong. In describing to a man the road which he should follow, we ought to tell him not only the turnings which he is to take but also the turnings which he is to avoid. Similarly, it is a useful part of logic which teaches us the ways and turnings by which people most commonly go astray in reasoning." In presenting the following brief statement regarding the more common forms of fallacy, we omit so far as possible the technical details which belong to text-books on logic. FALLACIES. I. _True Collective but False Particular._--An example of this fallacy is found in the argument that because the French race, collectively, are excitable, therefore a particular Frenchman must be excitable. Or that because the Jewish race, collectively, are good business people, therefore the particular Jew must be a good business man. This is as fallacious as arguing that because a man may drown in the ocean he should avoid the bath, basin, or cup of water. There is a vast difference between the whole of a thing and its separate parts. Nitric acid and glycerin, separately, are not explosive, but, combined, they form nitro-glycerin, a most dangerous and powerful explosive. Reversing this form of illustration, we remind you of the old saying: "Salt is a good thing; but one doesn't want to be put in pickle." II. _Irrelevant Conclusion._--This fallacy consists in introducing in the conclusion matter not contained in the premises, or in the confusing of the issue. For instance: (1) All men are sinful; (2) John Smith is a man; therefore (3) John Smith is a horse thief. This may sound absurd, but many arguments are as fallacious as this, and for the same reason. Or another and more subtle form: (1) All thieves are liars; (2) John Smith is a liar; therefore (3) John Smith is a thief. The first example arises from the introduction of new matter, and the last from the confusion of the issue. III. _False Cause._--This fallacy consists in attributing cause to a thing which is merely coincident with, or precedent to, the effect. For instance: (1) The cock crows just before or at the moment of sunrise; therefore (2) the cock-crowing is the cause of the sunrise. Or, again: (1) Bad crops followed the election of a Whig president; therefore (2) the Whig party is the cause of the bad crops. Or, again: (1) Where civilization is the highest, there we find the greatest number of high hats; therefore (2) high hats are the cause of civilization. IV. _Circular Reasoning._--In this form of fallacy the person reasoning or arguing endeavors to explain or prove a thing by itself or its own terms. For instance: (1) The Whig party is honest because it advocates honest principles; (2) the Whig principles are honest because they are advocated by an honest party. A common form of this fallacy in its phase of sophistry is the use of synonyms in such a manner that they seem to express more than the original conception, whereas they are really but other terms for the same thing. An historic example of circular reasoning is the following: (1) The Church of England is the true Church, because it was established by God; (2) it must have been established by God, because it is the true Church. This form of sophistry is most effective when employed in long arguments in which it is difficult to detect it. V. _Begging the Question._--This fallacy arises from the use of a false premise, or at least of a premise the truth of which is not admitted by the opponent. It may be stated, simply, as "_the unwarranted assumption of a premise, generally the major premise_." Many persons in public life argue in this way. They boldly assert an unwarranted premise, and then proceed to argue logically from it. The result is confusing to the average person, for, the steps of the reasoning being logical, it seems as if the argument is sound, the fact of the unwarranted premise being overlooked. The person using this form of sophistry proceeds on Aaron Burr's theory of truth being "that which is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained." Bulwer makes one of his characters mention a particularly atrocious form of this fallacy (although an amusing one) in the following words: "Whenever you are about to utter something astonishingly false, always begin with: 'It is an acknowledged fact,' etc. Sir Robert Filmer was a master of this manner of writing. Thus with what a solemn face that great man attempted to cheat. He would say: '_It is a truth undeniable_ that there cannot be any multitude of men whatsoever, either great or small, etc., but that in the same multitude there is one man among them _that in nature hath a right to be King of all the rest--as being the next heir of Adam_!'" Look carefully for the major premise of propositions advanced in argument, spoken or written. Be sure that the person making the proposition is not "begging the question" by _the unwarranted assumption of the premise_. GENERAL RULE OF INFERENCE. Hyslop says concerning valid inferences and fallacious ones: "We cannot infer _anything_ we please from any premises we please. We must conform to certain definite rules or principles. Any violation of them will be a fallacy. There are two simple rules which should not be violated: (1) _The subject-matter in the conclusion should be of the same general kind as in the premises_; (2) _the facts constituting the premises must be accepted and must not be fictitious_." A close observance of these rules will result in the detection and avoidance of the principal forms of fallacious reasoning and sophistry. SOPHISTICAL ARGUMENTS. There are a number of tricky practices resorted to by persons in argument, that are fallacious in intent and result, which we do not consider here in detail as they scarcely belong to the particular subject of this book. A brief mention, however, may be permitted in the interest of general information. Here are the principal ones:-- (1) Arguing that a proposition is correct because the opponent cannot prove the contrary. The fallacy is seen when we realize that the statement, "The moon is made of green cheese," is not proved because we cannot prove the contrary. No amount of failure to _disprove_ a proposition really _proves_ it; and no amount of failure to _prove_ a proposition really _disproves_ it. As a general rule, the burden of proof rests upon the person stating the proposition, and his opponent is not called upon to disprove it or else have it considered proved. The old cry of "You cannot _prove_ that it is _not_ so" is based upon a fallacious conception. (2) Abuse of the opponent, his party, or his cause. This is no real argument or reasoning. It is akin to proving a point by beating the opponent over the head. (3) Arguing that an opponent does not live up to his principles is no argument against the principles he advocates. A man may advocate the principle of temperance and yet drink to excess. This simply proves that he preaches better than he practices; but the truth of the principle of temperance is not affected in any way thereby. The proof of this is that he may change his practices; and it cannot be held that the change of his personal habits improves or changes the nature of the principle. (4) Argument of authority is not based on logic. Authority is valuable when really worthy, and merely as corroboration or adding weight; but it is not logical argument. The _reasons_ of the authority alone constitute a real argument. The abuse of this form of argument is shown, in the above reference to "begging the question," in the quotation from Bulwer. (5) Appeal to prejudice or public opinion is not a valid argument, for public opinion is frequently wrong and prejudice is often unwarranted. And, at the best, they "have nothing to do with the case" from the standpoint of logic. The abuse of testimony and claimed evidence is also worthy of examination, but we cannot go into the subject here. FALLACIES OF PREJUDICE. But perhaps the most dangerous of all fallacies in the search for truth on the part of the most of us are those which arise from the following:-- (1) The tendency to reason from what we feel and wish to be true, rather than from the actual facts of the case, which causes us unconsciously to assume the mental attitude of "if the facts agree with our likes and pet theories, all is well; if they do not, so much the worse for the facts." (2) The tendency in all of us to perceive only the facts that agree with our theories and to ignore the others. We find that for which we seek, and overlook that which does not interest us. Our discoveries follow our interest, and our interest follows our desires and beliefs. The intelligent man or woman realizes these tendencies of human nature and endeavors to avoid them in his or her own reasoning, but is keenly conscious of them in the arguments and reasoning of others. A failure to observe and guard one's self against these tendencies results in bigotry, intolerance, narrowness, and intellectual astigmatism. CHAPTER XXIX. The Will. The activities of the will comprise the third great class of mental processes. Psychologists always have differed greatly in their conception of just what constitutes these activities. Even to-day it is difficult to obtain a dictionary definition of the will that agrees with the best opinion on the subject. The dictionaries adhere to the old classification and conception which regarded the will as "that faculty of the mind or soul by which it chooses or decides." But with the growth of the idea that the will acts according to the strongest motive, and that the motive is supplied by the average struck between the desires of the moment, under the supervision of the intellect, the conception of will as the choosing and deciding faculty is passing from favor. In the place of the older conception has come the newer one which holds that the will is primarily concerned with _action_. It is difficult to place the will in the category of mental processes. But it is generally agreed that it abides in the very center of the mental being, and is closely associated with what is called the ego, or self. The will seems to have at least three general phases, viz.: (1) The phase of desire, (2) the phase of deliberation or choice, and (3) the phase of expression in action. In order to understand the will, it is necessary to consider each of these three phases of its activities. (1). DESIRE. The first phase of will, which is called "desire," is in itself somewhat complex. On its lower side it touches, and, in fact, blends into, feeling and emotion. Its center consists of a state of _tension_, akin to that of a coiled spring or a cat crouching ready for a spring. On its higher side it touches, penetrates, and blends into the other phases of the will which we have mentioned. Desire is defined as "a feeling, emotion, or excitement of the mind directed toward the attainment, enjoyment, or possession of some object from which pleasure, profit, or gratification is expected." Halleck gives us the following excellent conception of the moving spirit of desire: "_Desire has for its object something which will bring pleasure or get rid of pain, immediate or remote, for the individual or for some one in whom he is interested. Aversion, or a striving away from something, is merely the negative aspect of desire._" In Halleck's statement, above quoted, we have the explanation of the part played by the intellect in the activities of will. The intellect is able to perceive the relations between present action and future results, and is able to point the way toward the suppression of some desires in order that other and better ones may be manifested. It also serves its purposes in regulating the "striking of the average" between conflicting desires. Without the intervention of the intellect, the temporary desire of the moment would invariably be acted upon without regard to future results or consequences to one's self and others. It also serves to point out the course of action calculated to give the most satisfactory expression of the desire. While it is a fact that the action of will depends almost entirely upon the motive force of desire, it is likewise true that desire may be created, regulated, suppressed, and even killed by the action of the will. The will, by giving or refusing attention to a certain class of desires, may either cause them to grow and wax strong, or else die and fade away. It must be remembered, however, that this use of the will itself springs from another set of desires or feelings. Desire is aroused by feelings or emotions rising from the subconscious planes of the mind and seeking expression and manifestation. We have considered the nature of the feelings and emotions in previous chapters, which should be read in connection with the present one. It should be remembered that the feeling or emotional side of desire arises from either inherited race memories existing as instincts, or from the memory of the past experiences of the individual. In some cases the feeling first manifests in a vague unrest caused by subconscious promptings and excitement. Then the imagination pictures the object of the feeling, or certain memory images connected with it, and the desire thus manifests on the plane of consciousness. The entrance of the desire feeling into consciousness is accompanied by that peculiar _tension_ which marks the second phase of desire. This tension, when sufficiently strong, passes into the third phase of desire, or that in which desire blends into will action. Desire in this stage makes a demand upon will for expression and action. From mere feeling, and tension of feeling, it becomes _a call to action_. But before expression and action are given to it, the second phase of will must manifest at least for a moment; this second phase is that known as deliberation, or the weighing and balancing of desires. (2). DELIBERATION. The second phase of will, known as deliberation, is more than the purely intellectual process which the term would indicate. The intellect plays an important part, it is true, but there is also an almost instinctive and automatic _weighing and balancing of desires_. There is seldom only one desire presenting its claims upon the will at any particular moment. It is true that occasionally there arises an emotional desire of such dominant power and strength that it crowds out every other claimant at the bar of deliberation. But such instances are rare, and as a rule there are a host of rival claimants, each insisting upon its rights in the matter at issue. In the man of weak or undeveloped and untrained intellect, the struggle is usually little more than a brief combat between several desires, in which _the strongest at the moment wins_. But with the development of intellect new factors arise and new forces are felt. Moreover, the more complex one's emotional nature, and the greater the development of the higher forms of feeling, the more intense is the struggle of deliberation or the fight of the desires. We see, in Halleck's definition, that desire has not only the object of "bringing pleasure or getting rid of pain" for the individual, but that the additional element of the welfare of "some one in whom he is interested" is added, which element is often the deciding factor. This element, of course, arises from the development and cultivation of one's emotional nature. In the same way we also see that it is not merely the _immediate_ welfare of one's self or those in whom one is interested that speaks before the bar, but also the more _remote_ welfare. This consideration of future welfare depends upon the intellect and cultivated imagination under its control. Moreover, the trained intellect is able to discover possible greater satisfaction in some course of action other than in the one prompted by the clamoring desire of the moment. This explains why the judgment and action of an intelligent man, as a rule, are far different from those of the unintelligent one; and also why a man of culture tends toward different action from that of the uncultured; and likewise, why the man of broad sympathies and high ideals acts in a different way from one of the opposite type. But the principle is ever the same--the feelings manifest in desire, the greatest ultimate satisfaction apparent at the moment is sought, and the strongest set of desires wins the day. Halleck's comment on this point is interesting. He says: "Desire is not always proportional to the idea of one's own selfish pleasure. Many persons, after forming an idea of the vast amount of earthly distress, desire to relieve it, and the desire goes out in action, as the benevolent societies in every city testify. Here the individual pleasure is none the less, but it is secondary, coming from the pleasure of others. The desire of the _near_ often raises a stronger desire than the _remote_. A child frequently prefers a thing immediately if it is only one tenth as good as something he might have a year hence. A student often desires more the leisure of to-day than the success of future years. Though admonished to study, he wastes his time and thus loses incomparably greater future pleasure when he is tossed to the rear in the struggle for existence." The result of this weighing and balancing of the desire is, or should be, _decision and choice_, which then passes into action. But many persons seem unable to "make up their own mind," and require a push or urge from without before they will act. Others decide, without proper use of the intellect, upon what they call "impulse," but which is merely impatience. Some are like the fabled donkey which starved to death when placed at an equal distance between two equally attractive haystacks and was unable to decide towards which to move. Others follow the example of Jeppe, in the comedy, who, when given a coin with which to buy a piece of soap for his wife, stood on the corner deliberating whether to obey orders or to buy a drink with the money. He wants the drink, but realizes that his wife will beat him if he returns without the soap. "My stomach says drink; my back says soap," says Jeppe. "But," finally he remarks, "is not a man's stomach more to him than his back? Yes, says I." The final decision depends upon the striking a balance between the desires,--the weighing of desire for and desire against,--desire for this and desire for something else. The strength of the several desires depends upon nearness and present interest arising from attention, as applied to the feelings and emotions arising from heredity, environment, experience, and education, which constitute character; and also upon the degree of intellectual clearness and power in forming correct judgments between the desires. It must be remembered, however, that the intellect appears not as an opponent of the principle of the satisfaction of desire, but merely as an instrument of the ego in determining which course of action will result in the greatest ultimate satisfaction, direct or indirect, present or future. For, _at the last, every individual acts so as to bring himself the greatest satisfaction, immediate or future, direct or indirect, either personal or through the welfare of others, as this may appear to him at the particular moment of deliberation_. We always act in the direction of that which will greater "content our spirit." This will be found to be the spirit of all decisions, although the motive is often hidden and difficult to find even by the individual himself, many of the strongest motives having their origin in the subconscious planes of mentality. (3). ACTION. The third and final phase of will is that known as action--the act of volition by which the desire-idea is expressed in physical or mental activity. The old conception of the will held that the decisive phase of the will was its characteristic and final phase, ignoring the fact that the very essence or spirit of will is bound up with _action_. Even those familiar with the newer conception frequently assume that the act of decision is the final phase of will, ignoring the fact that we frequently _decide_ to do a thing and yet may never carry out the intention and decision. The act of willing is not complete unless action is expressed. There must be the manifestation of the motor element or phase of will, else the will process is incomplete. A weakness of this last phase of will affects the entire will and renders its processes ineffective. The world is filled with persons who are able to _decide_ what is best to do, and what should be done, but who never actually _act_ upon the decision. The few persons who promptly follow up the decision with vigorous action are those who accomplish the world's work. Without the full manifestation of this third phase of will the other two phases are useless. TYPES OF WILL. So far we have considered merely the highest type of will--that which is accompanied by conscious deliberation, in which the intellect takes an active part. In this process, not only do the conflicting feelings push themselves forward with opposing claims for recognition, but the intellect is active in examining the case and offering valuable testimony as to the comparative merits of the various claimants and the effect of certain courses of action upon the individual. There are, however, several lower forms of will manifestation which we should briefly consider in passing. _Reflex Action._--The will is moved to action by the reflex activities of the nervous system which have been mentioned in the earlier chapters of this book. In this general type we find unconscious reflex action, such as that manifested when a sleeper is touched and moves away, or when the frog's leg twitches when the nerve end is excited. We also find conscious reflex action, such as that manifested by the winking of the eye, or the performance of habitual physical motion, such as the movement in walking, operating the sewing machine or typewriter, playing the piano, etc. _Impulsive Action._--The will is often moved to action by a dim idea or faint perception of purpose or impulse. The action is almost instinctive, although there is a vague perception of purpose. For instance, we feel an impulse to turn toward the source of a strange sound or sight, or other source of interest or curiosity. Or we may feel an impulse arising from the subconscious plane of our mind, causing a dimly-conscious idea of movement or action to relieve the tension. For instance, one may feel a desire to exercise, or to seek fresh air or green fields, although he had not been thinking of these things at the time. These impulses arise from a subconscious feeling of fatigue or desire for change, which, added to a fleeting idea, produces the impulse. Unless an impulse is inhibited by the will activities inspired by other desires, habits, ideas, or ideals, we act upon it in precisely the same way that a young child or animal does. Hoffding says of this type of action: "The psychological condition of the impulse is, that with the momentary feeling and sensation should be combined a more or less clear idea of something which may augment the pleasure or diminish the pain of the moment." _Instinctive Action._--The will is frequently moved to action by an instinctive stimulus. This form of will activity closely resembles the last mentioned form, and often it is impossible to distinguish between the two. The activities of the bee in building its comb and storing its honey, the work of the silkworm and caterpillar in building their resting places, are examples of this form of action. Indeed, even the building of the nest of the bird may be so classed. In these cases there is an intelligent action toward a definite end, but the animal is unconscious of that end. The experiences of the remote ancestors of these creatures recorded their impressions upon the subconscious mind of the species, and they are transmitted in some way to all of that species. The nervous system of every living thing is a record cylinder of the experiences of its early ancestors, and these cylinders tend to reproduce these impressions upon appropriate occasions. In preceding chapters we have shown that even man is under the influence of instinct to a greater extent than he imagines himself to be. CHAPTER XXX. Will-Training. It is of the utmost importance that the individual develop, cultivate, and train his will so as to bring it under the influence of the higher part of his mental and moral being. While the will is used most effectively in developing and training the intellect and building character, it itself must be trained by itself to habitually come under the guidance of the intellect and under the influence of that which we call character. The influence of the trained will upon the several mental faculties is most marked. There are no faculties which may not be cultivated by the will. The first and great task of the will in this direction is the control and direction of the attention. The will determines the kind of interest that shall prevail at the moment, and the kind of interest largely determines the character of the man, his tastes, his feelings, his thoughts, his acts. Gordy says: "Coöperating with a pre-existing influence, the will can make a weaker one prevail over a stronger. * * * It determines which of pre-existing influences shall have control over the mind." Moreover, concentrated and continued attention depends entirely upon the exercise of the will. As Gordy says: "If the will relaxes its hold upon the activities of the mind, the attention is liable to be carried away by any one of the thousands of ideas that the laws of association are constantly bringing into our minds." Even in the matter of mental images the will asserts its sway, and the imagination may be trained to be the obedient servant of the developed will. Regarding the influence of the will upon character, Davidson says: "It is not enough for a man to understand correctly and love duly the conditions of moral life in his own time; he must, still further, be willing and able to fulfill these conditions. And he certainly cannot do this unless his will is trained to perfect freedom, so that it responds, with the utmost readiness, to the suggestions of his discriminating intelligence and the movements of his chastened affections." Halleck says: "We gradually make our characters by separate acts of will, just as a blacksmith by repeated blows beats out a horseshoe or an anchor from a shapeless mass of iron. A finished anchor or horseshoe was never the product of a single blow." TRAINING THE WILL. Perhaps the best way to train the will is to _use_ it intelligently, and with a purpose. The training of any faculty of the mind is at the same time a training of the will. The attention being so closely allied to the will, it follows that a careful training of attention will result in a strengthening of the will. The training of the emotional side of one's nature also brings results in the strengthening of the will. Halleck gives his students excellent advice regarding the training of the will. It would be hard to find anything better along these lines than the following from his pen: "Nothing schools the will, and renders it ready for effort in this complex world, better than accustoming it to face disagreeable things. Professor James advises all to do something occasionally for no other reason than that they would rather not do it, if it is nothing more than giving up a seat in a street car. He likens such effort to the insurance that a man pays on his house. He has something that he can fall back on in time of trouble. A will schooled in this way is always ready to respond, no matter how great the emergency. While another would be crying over spilled milk, the possessor of such a will has already found another cow. * * * The only way to secure such a will is to practice doing disagreeable things. There are daily opportunities. * * * A man who had declared his aversion to what he deemed the dry facts of political economy was one day found knitting his brow over a chapter of John Stuart Mill. When a friend expressed surprise, the man replied: 'I am playing the schoolmaster with myself. I am reading this because I dislike it.' Such a man has the elements of success in him. * * * On the other hand, the one who habitually avoids disagreeable action is training his will to be of no use to him at a time when supreme effort is demanded. Such a will can never elbow its way to the front in life." HABITS. Habits are the beaten track over which the will travels. The beaten path of habit is the line of least resistance to the will. One who would train his will must needs pay attention to providing it with the proper mental paths over which to travel. The rule for the creation of habits is simply this: _Travel over the mental path as often as possible_. The rule for breaking undesirable habits is this: _Cultivate the opposite habit_. In these two rules is expressed the gist of what has been written on the subject. Professor William James has left to the world some invaluable advice regarding the cultivation of right habits. He bases his rules upon those of Professor Bain, elaborates these, and adds some equally good ones. We herewith quote freely from both James and Bain on this subject; it is the best ever written regarding habit building. I. "In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, launch yourself with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of it not occurring at all."--_James._ II. "Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Every lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up--a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again."--_James._ "It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances."--_Bain._ III. "Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing _motor effects_, that resolves and aspirations communicate their new 'set' to the brain."--_James._ "The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by which the moral will may multiply its strength and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture making."--_Bain._ IV. "Keep the faculty alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little, unnecessary points; do every day something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. * * * The man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."--_James._ CHAPTER XXXI. Will-Tonic. In addition to the general rules for developing and training the will given in the preceding chapter, we ask you to tone up and strengthen the will by the inspiration to be derived from the words of some of the world's great thinkers and doers. In these words there is such a vital statement of the recognition, realization, and manifestation of that something within, which we call "will," that it is a dull soul, indeed, which is not inspired by the contagion of the idea. These expressions are the milestones on the Path of Attainment, placed by those who have preceded us on the journey. We submit these quotations without comment; they speak for themselves. WORDS OF THE WISE. "They can who think they can. Character is a perfectly educated will." "Nothing can resist the will of a man who knows what is true and wills what is good." "In all difficulties advance and will, for within you is a power, a living force, which the more you trust and learn to use will annihilate the opposition of matter." "The star of the unconquered will, It rises in my breast, Serene and resolute and still, And calm and self-possessed. "So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, 'Thou must!' The youth replies, 'I can!'" "The longer I live, the more certain I am that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy,--invincible determination,--a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory. That quality will do anything that can be done in this world, and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged creature a man without it."--_Buxton._ "The human will, that force unseen, The offspring of a deathless soul, Can hew a way to any goal, Though walls of granite intervene. "You will be what you will to be; Let failure find its false content In that poor word environment, But spirit scorns it and is free. "It masters time, it conquers space, It cows that boastful trickster, chance, And bids the tyrant circumstance Uncrown and fill a servant's place." "Resolve is what makes a man manifest; not puny resolve, not crude determinations, not errant purpose, but that strong and indefatigable will which treads down difficulties and danger as a boy treads down the heaving frost lands of winter, which kindles his eye and brain with a proud pulse beat toward the unattainable. Will makes men giants."--_Donald G. Mitchell._ "There is no chance, no destiny, no fate Can circumvent, or hinder, or control The firm resolve of a determined soul. Gifts count for nothing, will alone is great; All things give way before it soon or late. What obstacle can stay the mighty force Of the sea-seeking river in its course, Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait? Each well-born soul must win what it deserves. Let the fools prate of luck. The fortunate Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves, Whose slightest action, or inaction, Serves the one great aim. Why, even death itself Stands still and waits an hour sometimes For such a will." --_Ella Wheeler Wilcox._ "I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment." --_Lord Beaconsfield._ "A passionate desire and an unwearied will can perform impossibilities, or what may seem to be such to the cold and feeble."--_Sir John Simpson._ "It is wonderful how even the casualties of life seem to bow to a spirit that will not bow to them, and yield to subserve a design which they may, in their first apparent tendency, threaten to frustrate. When a firm, decisive spirit is recognized, it is curious to see how the space clears around a man and leaves him room and freedom."--_John Foster._ "The great thing about General Grant is cool persistency of purpose. He is not easily excited, and he has got the grip of a bulldog. When he once gets his teeth in, nothing can shake him off."--_Abraham Lincoln._ "I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things are outside my door, _and I've got the key_. * * * Man was meant to be, and ought to be, stronger and more than anything that can happen to him. Circumstances, 'Fate,' 'Luck,' are all outside; and if he cannot change them, he can always _beat_ them."--_Charles F. Lummis._ "The truest wisdom is a resolute determination." "Impossible is a word found only in the dictionary of fools." "Circumstances! I _make_ circumstances!"--_Napoleon._ "He who fails only half wills."--_Suwarrow._ "That which the easiest becomes a habit in us is the will. Learn, then, to will strongly and decisively; thus fix your floating life, and leave it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by every wind that blows." "Man owes his growth chiefly to that active striving of the will,--that encounter which we call effort,--and it is astonishing to find how often results apparently impracticable are thus made possible. * * * It is will--force of purpose--that enables a man to do or be whatever he sets his mind upon being or doing." "A strong, defiant purpose is many-handed and lays hold of whatever is near that can serve it; it has a magnetic purpose that draws to itself whatever is kindred. * * * Let it be your first study to teach the world that you are not wood and straw; that there is some iron in you."--_Munger._ "It's _dogged_ as does it."--_Yorkshire Proverb._ "One talent with a will behind it will accomplish more than ten without it, as a thimbleful of powder in a rifle, the bore of whose barrel will give it direction, will do greater execution than a carload burned in the open air."--_O.S. Marden._ "Will may not endow man with talents or capacities; but it does one very important matter--it enables him to make the best, the very best, of his powers."--_Fothergill._ "Tender-handed stroke a nettle, And it stings you for your pains. Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as down remains." "Don't flinch; don't foul; but hit the line hard."--_Roosevelt._ "The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be." * * * * * Transcriber's note: Obvious typographcial errors and printer errors have been corrected without comment. Other than obvious errors, no attempt has been made to correct unconventional spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. The author's usage is preserved as printed in the original publication. 
743	----	THOUGHTS ON MAN HIS NATURE, PRODUCTIONS AND DISCOVERIES INTERSPERSED WITH SOME PARTICULARS RESPECTING THE AUTHOR By William Godwin Oh, the blood more stirs To rouse a lion, than to start a hare! SHAKESPEARE LONDON: EFFINGHAM WILSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE. 1831. PREFACE In the ensuing volume I have attempted to give a defined and permanent form to a variety of thoughts, which have occurred to my mind in the course of thirty-four years, it being so long since I published a volume, entitled, the Enquirer,--thoughts, which, if they have presented themselves to other men, have, at least so far as I am aware, never been given to the public through the medium of the press. During a part of this period I had remained to a considerable degree unoccupied in my character of an author, and had delivered little to the press that bore my name.--And I beg the reader to believe, that, since I entered in 1791 upon that which may be considered as my vocation in life, I have scarcely in any instance contributed a page to any periodical miscellany. My mind has been constitutionally meditative, and I should not have felt satisfied, if I had not set in order for publication these special fruits of my meditations. I had entered upon a certain career; and I held it for my duty not to abandon it. One thing further I feel prompted to say. I have always regarded it as my office to address myself to plain men, and in clear and unambiguous terms. It has been my lot to have occasional intercourse with some of those who consider themselves as profound, who deliver their oracles in obscure phraseology, and who make it their boast that few men can understand them, and those few only through a process of abstract reflection, and by means of unwearied application. To this class of the oracular I certainly did not belong. I felt that I had nothing to say, that it should be very difficult to understand. I resolved, if I could help it, not to "darken counsel by words without knowledge." This was my principle in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice. And I had my reward. I had a numerous audience of all classes, of every age, and of either sex. The young and the fair did not feel deterred from consulting my pages. It may be that that book was published in a propitious season. I am told that nothing coming from the press will now be welcomed, unless it presents itself in the express form of amusement. He who shall propose to himself for his principal end, to draw aside in one particular or another the veil from the majesty of intellectual or moral truth, must lay his account in being received with little attention. I have not been willing to believe this: and I publish my speculations accordingly. I have aimed at a popular, and (if I could reach it) an interesting style; and, if I am thrust aside and disregarded, I shall console myself with believing that I have not neglected what it was in my power to achieve. One characteristic of the present publication will not fail to offer itself to the most superficial reader. I know many men who are misanthropes, and profess to look down with disdain on their species. My creed is of an opposite character. All that we observe that is best and most excellent in the intellectual world, is man: and it is easy to perceive in many cases, that the believer in mysteries does little more, than dress up his deity in the choicest of human attributes and qualifications. I have lived among, and I feel an ardent interest in and love for, my brethren of mankind. This sentiment, which I regard with complacency in my own breast, I would gladly cherish in others. In such a cause I am well pleased to enrol myself a missionary. February 15, 1831. The particulars respecting the author, referred to in the title-page, will be found principally in Essays VII, IX, XIV, and XVIII. CONTENTS Essay. I. Of Body and Mind. The Prologue II. Of the Distribution of Talents III. Of Intellectual Abortion IV. Of the Durability of Human Achievements and Productions V. Of the Rebelliousness of Man VI. Of Human Innocence VII. Of the Duration of Human Life VIII. Of Human Vegetation IX. Of Leisure X. Of Imitation and Invention XI. Of Self-Love and Benevolence XII. Of the Liberty of Human Actions XIII. Of Belief XIV. Of Youth and Age XV. Of Love and Friendship XVI. Of Frankness and Reserve XVII. Of Ballot XVIII. Of Diffidence XIX. Of Self Complacence XX. Of Phrenology XXI. Of Astronomy XXII. Of the Material Universe XXIII. Of Human Virtue. The Epilogue THOUGHTS, &c. ESSAY I. OF BODY AND MIND. THE PROLOGUE. There is no subject that more frequently occupies the attention of the contemplative than man: yet there are many circumstances concerning him that we shall hardly admit to have been sufficiently considered. Familiarity breeds contempt. That which we see every day and every hour, it is difficult for us to regard with admiration. To almost every one of our stronger emotions novelty is a necessary ingredient. The simple appetites of our nature may perhaps form an exception. The appetite for food is perpetually renewed in a healthy subject with scarcely any diminution and love, even the most refined, being combined with one of our original impulses, will sometimes for that reason withstand a thousand trials, and perpetuate itself for years. In all other cases it is required, that a fresh impulse should be given, that attention should anew be excited, or we cannot admire. Things often seen pass feebly before our senses, and scarcely awake the languid soul. "Man is the most excellent and noble creature of the world, the principal and mighty work of God, the wonder of nature, the marvel of marvels(1)." (1) Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 1. Let us have regard to his corporeal structure. There is a simplicity in it, that at first perhaps we slightly consider. But how exactly is it fashioned for strength and agility! It is in no way incumbered. It is like the marble when it comes out of the hand of the consummate sculptor; every thing unnecessary is carefully chiseled away; and the joints, the muscles, the articulations, and the veins come out, clean and finished. It has long ago been observed, that beauty, as well as virtue, is the middle between all extremes: that nose which is neither specially long, nor short, nor thick, nor thin, is the perfect nose; and so of the rest. In like manner, when I speak of man generally, I do not regard any aberrations of form, obesity, a thick calf, a thin calf; I take the middle between all extremes; and this is emphatically man. Man cannot keep pace with a starting horse: but he can persevere, and beats him in the end. What an infinite variety of works is man by his corporeal form enabled to accomplish! In this respect he casts the whole creation behind him. What a machine is the human hand! When we analyse its parts and its uses, it appears to be the most consummate of our members. And yet there are other parts, that may maintain no mean rivalship against it. What a sublimity is to be attributed to his upright form! He is not fashioned, veluti pecora, quae natura prona atque ventri obedientia finxit. He is made coeli convexa tueri. The looks that are given him in his original structure, are "looks commercing with the skies." How surpassingly beautiful are the features of his countenance; the eyes, the nose, the mouth! How noble do they appear in a state of repose! With what never-ending variety and emphasis do they express the emotions of his mind! In the visage of man, uncorrupted and undebased, we read the frankness and ingenuousness of his soul, the clearness of his reflections, the penetration of his spirit. What a volume of understanding is unrolled in his broad, expanded, lofty brow! In his countenance we see expressed at one time sedate confidence and awful intrepidity, and at another godlike condescension and the most melting tenderness. Who can behold the human eye, suddenly suffused with moisture, or gushing with tears unbid, and the quivering lip, without unspeakable emotion? Shakespear talks of an eye, "whose bend could awe the world." What a miraculous thing is the human complexion! We are sent into the world naked, that all the variations of the blood might be made visible. However trite, I cannot avoid quoting here the lines of the most deep-thinking and philosophical of our poets: We understood Her by her sight: her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought. What a curious phenomenon is that of blushing! It is impossible to witness this phenomenon without interest and sympathy. It comes at once, unanticipated by the person in whom we behold it. It comes from the soul, and expresses with equal certainty shame, modesty, and vivid, uncontrollable affection. It spreads, as it were in so many stages, over the cheeks, the brow, and the neck, of him or her in whom the sentiment that gives birth to it is working. Thus far I have not mentioned speech, not perhaps the most inestimable of human gifts, but, if it is not that, it is at least the endowment, which makes man social, by which principally we impart our sentiments to each other, and which changes us from solitary individuals, and bestows on us a duplicate and multipliable existence. Beside which it incalculably increases the perfection of one. The man who does not speak, is an unfledged thinker; and the man that does not write, is but half an investigator. Not to enter into all the mysteries of articulate speech and the irresistible power of eloquence, whether addressed to a single hearer, or instilled into the ears of many,--a topic that belongs perhaps less to the chapter of body than mind,--let us for a moment fix our thoughts steadily upon that little implement, the human voice. Of what unnumbered modulations is it susceptible! What terror may it inspire! How may it electrify the soul, and suspend all its functions! How infinite is its melody! How instantly it subdues the hearer to pity or to love! How does the listener hang upon every note praying that it may last for ever, ----that even silence Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might Deny her nature, and be never more, Still to be so displaced. It is here especially that we are presented with the triumphs of civilisation. How immeasurable is the distance between the voice of the clown, who never thought of the power that dwells in this faculty, who delivers himself in a rude, discordant and unmodulated accent, and is accustomed to confer with his fellow at the distance of two fields, and the man who understands his instrument as Handel understood the organ, and who, whether he thinks of it or no, sways those that hear him as implicitly as Orpheus is said to have subdued the brute creation! From the countenance of man let us proceed to his figure. Every limb is capable of speaking, and telling its own tale. What can equal the magnificence of the neck, the column upon which the head reposes! The ample chest may denote an almost infinite strength and power. Let us call to mind the Apollo Belvidere, and the Venus de Medicis, whose very "bends are adornings." What loftiness and awe have I seen expressed in the step of an actress, not yet deceased, when first she advanced, and came down towards the audience! I was ravished, and with difficulty kept my seat! Pass we to the mazes of the dance, the inimitable charms and picturesque beauty that may be given to the figure while still unmoved, and the ravishing grace that dwells in it during its endless changes and evolutions. The upright figure of man produces, incidentally as it were, and by the bye, another memorable effect. Hence we derive the power of meeting in halls, and congregations, and crowded assemblies. We are found "at large, though without number," at solemn commemorations and on festive occasions. We touch each other, as the members of a gay party are accustomed to do, when they wait the stroke of an electrical machine, and the spark spreads along from man to man. It is thus that we have our feelings in common at a theatrical representation and at a public dinner, that indignation is communicated, and patriotism become irrepressible. One man can convey his sentiments in articulate speech to a thousand; and this is the nursing mother of oratory, of public morality, of public religion, and the drama. The privilege we thus possess, we are indeed too apt to abuse; but man is scarcely ever so magnificent and so awful, as when hundreds of human heads are assembled together, hundreds of faces lifted up to contemplate one object, and hundreds of voices uttered in the expression of one common sentiment. But, notwithstanding the infinite beauty, the magazine of excellencies and perfections, that appertains to the human body, the mind claims, and justly claims, an undoubted superiority. I am not going into an enumeration of the various faculties and endowments of the mind of man, as I have done of his body. The latter was necessary for my purpose. Before I proceeded to consider the ascendancy of mind, the dominion and loftiness it is accustomed to assert, it appeared but just to recollect what was the nature and value of its subject and its slave. By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the seat of sensation and reason. Where it resides we cannot tell, nor can authoritatively pronounce, as the apostle says, relatively to a particular phenomenon, "whether it is in the body, or out of the body." Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the great essence of, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately to perish, and of no greater account than as a clod of the valley. It was an important remark, suggested to me many years ago by an eminent physiologer and anatomist, that, when I find my attention called to any particular part or member of my body, I may be morally sure that there is something amiss in the processes of that part or member. As long as the whole economy of the frame goes on well and without interruption, our attention is not called to it. The intellectual man is like a disembodied spirit. He is almost in the state of the dervise in the Arabian Nights, who had the power of darting his soul into the unanimated body of another, human or brute, while he left his own body in the condition of an insensible carcase, till it should be revivified by the same or some other spirit. When I am, as it is vulgarly understood, in a state of motion, I use my limbs as the implements of my will. When, in a quiescent state of the body, I continue to think, to reflect and to reason, I use, it may be, the substance of the brain as the implement of my thinking, reflecting and reasoning; though of this in fact we know nothing. We have every reason to believe that the mind cannot subsist without the body; at least we must be very different creatures from what we are at present, when that shall take place. For a man to think, agreeably and with serenity, he must be in some degree of health. The corpus sanum is no less indispensible than the mens sana. We must eat, and drink, and sleep. We must have a reasonably good appetite and digestion, and a fitting temperature, neither too hot nor cold. It is desirable that we should have air and exercise. But this is instrumental merely. All these things are negatives, conditions without which we cannot think to the best purpose, but which lend no active assistance to our thinking. Man is a godlike being. We launch ourselves in conceit into illimitable space, and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars. We proceed without impediment from country to country, and from century to century, through all the ages of the past, and through the vast creation of the imaginable future. We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is said within a thick hedge to have plotted to shut in the flight of an eagle. We never find our attention called to any particular part or member of the body, except when there is somewhat amiss in that part or member. And, in like manner as we do not think of any one part or member in particular, so neither do we consider our entire microcosm and frame. The body is apprehended as no more important and of intimate connection to a man engaged in a train of reflections, than the house or apartment in which he dwells. The mind may aptly be described under the denomination of the "stranger at home." On set occasions and at appropriate times we examine our stores, and ascertain the various commodities we have, laid up in our presses and our coffers. Like the governor of a fort in time of peace, which was erected to keep out a foreign assailant, we occasionally visit our armoury, and take account of the muskets, the swords, and other implements of war it contains, but for the most part are engaged in the occupations of peace, and do not call the means of warfare in any sort to our recollection. The mind may aptly be described under the denomination of the "stranger at home." With their bodies most men are little acquainted. We are "like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass, who beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he is." In the ruminations of the inner man, and the dissecting our thoughts and desires, we employ our intellectual arithmetic, we add, and subtract, and multiply, and divide, without asking the aid, without adverting to the existence, of our joints and members. Even as to the more corporeal part of our avocations, we behold the external world, and proceed straight to the object of our desires, without almost ever thinking of this medium, our own material frame, unaided by which none of these things could be accomplished. In this sense we may properly be said to be spiritual existences, however imperfect may be the idea we are enabled to affix to the term spirit. Hence arises the notion, which has been entertained ever since the birth of reflection and logical discourse in the world, and which in some faint and confused degree exists probably even among savages, that the body is the prison of the mind. It is in this sense that Waller, after completing fourscore years of age, expresses himself in these affecting and interesting couplets. When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite. The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light by chinks that time hath made: Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become, As they draw near to their eternal home. Thus it is common with persons of elevated soul to talk of neglecting, overlooking, and taking small account of the body. It is in this spirit that the story is recorded of Anaxarchus, who, we are told, was ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar, and who, in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, "Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself." And it is in something of the same light that we must regard what is related of the North American savages. Beings, who scoff at their tortures, must have an idea of something that lies beyond the reach of their assailants. It is just however to observe, that some of the particulars here related, belong not less to the brute creation than to man. If men are imperfectly acquainted with their external figure and appearance, this may well be conceived to be still more predicable of the inferior animals. It is true that all of them seem to be aware of the part in their structure, where lie their main strength and means of hostility. Thus the bull attacks with his horns, and the horse with his heels, the beast of prey with his claws, the bird with his beak, and insects and other venomous creatures with their sting. We know not by what impulse they are prompted to the use of the various means which are so intimately connected with their preservation and welfare; and we call it instinct. We may be certain it does not arise from a careful survey of their parts and members, and a methodised selection of the means which shall be found most effectual for the accomplishment of their ends. There is no premeditation; and, without anatomical knowledge, or any distinct acquaintance with their image and likeness, they proceed straight to their purpose. Hence, even as men, they are more familiar with the figures and appearance of their fellows, their allies, or their enemies, than with their own. Man is a creature of mingled substance. I am many times a day compelled to acknowledge what a low, mean and contemptible being I am. Philip of Macedon had no need to give it in charge to a page, to repair to him every morning, and repeat, "Remember, sir, you are a man." A variety of circumstances occur to us, while we eat, and drink, and submit to the humiliating necessities of nature, that may well inculcate into us this salutary lesson. The wonder rather is, that man, who has so many things to put him in mind to be humble and despise himself, should ever have been susceptible of pride and disdain. Nebuchadnezzar must indeed have been the most besotted of mortals, if it were necessary that he should be driven from among men, and made to eat grass like an ox, to convince him that he was not the equal of the power that made him. But fortunately, as I have said, man is a "stranger at home." Were it not for this, how incomprehensible would be The ceremony that to great ones 'longs, The monarch's crown, and the deputed sword, The marshal's truncheon, and the judge's robe! How ludicrous would be the long procession and the caparisoned horse, the gilded chariot and the flowing train, the colours flying, the drums beating, and the sound of trumpets rending the air, which after all only introduce to us an ordinary man, no otherwise perhaps distinguished from the vilest of the ragged spectators, than by the accident of his birth! But what is of more importance in the temporary oblivion we are enabled to throw over the refuse of the body, it is thus we arrive at the majesty of man. That sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original endowments "in apprehension like a God," we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviae of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, added a youthful beauty and grace to his motions, and caused his eyes to flash with more than mortal fire. With what disdain, when I have been rapt in the loftiest moods of mind, do I look down upon my limbs, the house of clay that contains me, the gross flesh and blood of which my frame is composed, and wonder at a lodging, poorly fitted to entertain so divine a guest! A still more important chapter in the history of the human mind has its origin in these considerations. Hence it is that unenlightened man, in almost all ages and countries, has been induced, independently of divine revelation, to regard death, the most awful event to which we are subject, as not being the termination of his existence. We see the body of our friend become insensible, and remain without motion, or any external indication of what we call life. We can shut it up in an apartment, and visit it from day to day. If we had perseverance enough, and could so far conquer the repugnance and humiliating feeling with which the experiment would be attended, we might follow step by step the process of decomposition and putrefaction, and observe by what degrees the "dust returned unto earth as it was." But, in spite of this demonstration of the senses, man still believes that there is something in him that lives after death. The mind is so infinitely superior in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot persuade himself that it and the body perish together. There are two considerations, the force of which made man a religious animal. The first is, his proneness to ascribe hostility or benevolent intention to every thing of a memorable sort that occurs to him in the order of nature. The second is that of which I have just treated, the superior dignity of mind over body. This, we persuade ourselves, shall subsist uninjured by the mutations of our corporeal frame, and undestroyed by the wreck of the material universe. ESSAY II. OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF TALENTS. {Greek--omitted} Thucydides, Lib.I, cap. 84. SECTION I. PRESUMED DEARTH OF INTELLECTUAL POWER.--SCHOOLS FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUTH CONSIDERED.--THE BOY AND THE MAN COMPARED. One of the earliest judgments that is usually made by those whose attention is turned to the characters of men in the social state, is of the great inequality with which the gifts of the understanding are distributed among us. Go into a miscellaneous society; sit down at table with ten or twelve men; repair to a club where as many are assembled in an evening to relax from the toils of the day--it is almost proverbial, that one or two of these persons will perhaps be brilliant, and the rest "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable." Go into a numerous school--the case will be still more striking. I have been present where two men of superior endowments endeavoured to enter into a calculation on the subject; and they agreed that there was not above one boy in a hundred, who would be found to possess a penetrating understanding, and to be able to strike into a path of intellect that was truly his own. How common is it to hear the master of such a school say, "Aye, I am proud of that lad; I have been a schoolmaster these thirty years, and have never had such another!" The society above referred to, the dinner-party, or the club, was to a considerable degree select, brought together by a certain supposed congeniality between the individuals thus assembled. Were they taken indiscriminately, as boys are when consigned to the care of a schoolmaster, the proportion of the brilliant would not be a whit greater than in the latter case. A main criterion of the superiority of the schoolboy will be found in his mode of answering a casual question proposed by the master. The majority will be wholly at fault, will shew that they do not understand the question, and will return an answer altogether from the purpose. One in a hundred perhaps, perhaps in a still less proportion, will reply in a laudable manner, and convey his ideas in perspicuous and spirited language. It does not certainly go altogether so ill, with men grown up to years of maturity. They do not for the most part answer a plain question in a manner to make you wonder at their fatuity. A main cause of the disadvantageous appearance exhibited by the ordinary schoolboy, lies in what we denominate sheepishness. He is at a loss, and in the first place stares at you, instead of giving an answer. He does not make by many degrees so poor a figure among his equals, as when he is addressed by his seniors. One of the reasons of the latter phenomenon consists in the torpedo effect of what we may call, under the circumstances, the difference of ranks. The schoolmaster is a despot to his scholar; for every man is a despot, who delivers his judgment from the single impulse of his own will. The boy answers his questioner, as Dolon answers Ulysses in the Iliad, at the point of the sword. It is to a certain degree the same thing, when the boy is questioned merely by his senior. He fears he knows not what,--a reprimand, a look of lofty contempt, a gesture of summary disdain. He does not think it worth his while under these circumstances, to "gird up the loins of his mind." He cannot return a free and intrepid answer but to the person whom he regards as his equal. There is nothing that has so disqualifying an effect upon him who is to answer, as the consideration that he who questions is universally acknowledged to be a being of a higher sphere, or, as between the boy and the man, that he is the superior in conventional and corporal strength. Nor is it simple terror that restrains the boy from answering his senior with the same freedom and spirit, as he would answer his equal. He does not think it worth his while to enter the lists. He despairs of doing the thing in the way that shall gain approbation, and therefore will not try. He is like a boxer, who, though skilful, will not fight with one hand tied behind him. He would return you the answer, if it occurred without his giving himself trouble; but he will not rouse his soul, and task his strength to give it. He is careless; and prefers trusting to whatever construction you may put upon him, and whatever treatment you may think proper to bestow upon him. It is the most difficult thing in the world, for the schoolmaster to inspire into his pupil the desire to do his best. Among full-grown men the case is different. The schoolboy, whether under his domestic roof, or in the gymnasium, is in a situation similar to that of the Christian slaves in Algiers, as described by Cervantes in his History of the Captive. "They were shut up together in a species of bagnio, from whence they were brought out from time to time to perform certain tasks in common: they might also engage in pranks, and get into scrapes, as they pleased; but the master would hang up one, impale another, and cut off the ears of a third, for little occasion, or even wholly without it." Such indeed is the condition of the child almost from the hour of birth. The severities practised upon him are not so great as those resorted to by the proprietor of slaves in Algiers; but they are equally arbitrary and without appeal. He is free to a certain extent, even as the captives described by Cervantes; but his freedom is upon sufferance, and is brought to an end at any time at the pleasure of his seniors. The child therefore feels his way, and ascertains by repeated experiments how far he may proceed with impunity. He is like the slaves of the Romans on the days of the Saturnalia. He may do what he pleases, and command tasks to his masters, but with this difference--the Roman slave knew when the days of his licence would be over, and comported himself accordingly; but the child cannot foresee at any moment when the bell will be struck, and the scene reversed. It is commonly enough incident to this situation, that the being who is at the mercy of another, will practise, what Tacitus calls, a "vernacular urbanity," make his bold jests, and give utterance to his saucy innuendoes, with as much freedom as the best; but he will do it with a wary eye, not knowing how soon he may feel his chain plucked! and himself compulsorily reduced into the established order. His more usual refuge therefore is, to do nothing, and to wrap himself up in that neutrality towards his seniors, that may best protect him from their reprimand and their despotism. The condition of the full-grown man is different from that of the child, and he conducts himself accordingly. He is always to a certain degree under the control of the political society of which he is a member. He is also exposed to the chance of personal insult and injury from those who are stronger than he, or who may render their strength more considerable by combination and numbers. The political institutions which control him in certain respects, protect him also to a given degree from the robber and assassin, or from the man who, were it not for penalties and statutes, would perpetrate against him all the mischiefs which malignity might suggest. Civil policy however subjects him to a variety of evils, which wealth or corruption are accustomed to inflict under the forms of justice; at the same time that it can never wholly defend him from those violences to which he would be every moment exposed in what is called the state of nature. The full-grown man in the mean time is well pleased when he escapes from the ergastulum where he had previously dwelt, and in which he had experienced corporal infliction and corporal restraint. At first, in the newness of his freedom, he breaks out into idle sallies and escapes, and is like the full-fed steed that manifests his wantonness in a thousand antics and ruades. But this is a temporary extravagance. He presently becomes as wise and calculating, as the schoolboy was before him. The human being then, that has attained a certain stature, watches and poises his situation, and considers what he may do with impunity. He ventures at first with no small diffidence, and pretends to be twice as assured as he really is. He accumulates experiment after experiment, till they amount to a considerable volume. It is not till he has passed successive lustres, that he attains that firm step, and temperate and settled accent, which characterise the man complete. He then no longer doubts, but is ranged on the full level of the ripened members of the community. There is therefore little room for wonder, if we find the same individual, whom we once knew a sheepish and irresolute schoolboy, that hung his head, that replied with inarticulated monotony, and stammered out his meaning, metamorphosed into a thoroughly manly character, who may take his place on the bench with senators, and deliver a grave and matured opinion as well as the best. It appears then that the trial and review of full-grown men is not altogether so disadvantageous to the reckoning of our common nature, as that of boys at school. It is not however, that the full-grown man is not liable to be checked, reprimanded and rebuked, even as the schoolboy is. He has his wife to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles; he has his master, his landlord, or the mayor of his village, to tell him of his duty in an imperious style, and in measured sentences; if he is a member of a legislature, even there he receives his lessons, and is told, either in phrases of well-conceived irony, or by the exhibition of facts and reasonings which take him by surprise, that he is not altogether the person he deemed himself to be. But he does not mind it. Like Iago in the play, he "knows his price, and, by the faith of man, that he is worth no worse a place" than that which he occupies. He finds out the value of the check he receives, and lets it "pass by him like the idle wind"--a mastery, which the schoolboy, however he may affect it, never thoroughly attains to. But it unfortunately happens, that, before he has arrived at that degree of independence, the fate of the individual is too often decided for ever. How are the majority of men trampled in the mire, made "hewers of wood, and drawers of water," long, very long, before there was an opportunity of ascertaining what it was of which they were capable! Thus almost every one is put in the place which by nature he was least fit for: and, while perhaps a sufficient quantity of talent is extant in each successive generation, yet, for want of each man's being duly estimated, and assigned his appropriate duty, the very reverse may appear to be the case. By the time that they have attained to that sober self-confidence that might enable them to assert themselves, they are already chained to a fate, or thrust down to a condition, from which no internal energies they possess can ever empower them to escape. SECTION II. EQUALITY OF MAN WITH MAN.--TALENTS EXTENSIVELY DISTRIBUTED.--WAY IN WHICH THIS DISTRIBUTION IS COUNTERACTED.--THE APTITUDE OF CHILDREN FOR DIFFERENT PURSUITS SHOULD BE EARLY SOUGHT OUT.--HINTS FOR A BETTER SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.--AMBITION AN UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE. The reflections thus put down, may assist us in answering the question as to the way in which talents are distributed among men by the hand of nature. All things upon the earth and under the earth, and especially all organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom, fall into classes. It is by this means, that the child no sooner learns the terms, man, horse, tree, flower, than, if an object of any of these kinds which he has never seen before, is exhibited to him, he pronounces without hesitation, This is a man, a horse, a tree, a flower. All organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom are cast in a mould of given dimension and feature belonging to a certain number of individuals, though distinguished by inexhaustible varieties. It is by means of those features that the class of each individual is determined. To confine ourselves to man. All men, the monster and the lusus naturae excepted, have a certain form, a certain complement of limbs, a certain internal structure, and organs of sense--may we not add further, certain powers of intellect? Hence it seems to follow, that man is more like and more equal to man, deformities of body and abortions of intellect excepted, than the disdainful and fastidious censors of our common nature are willing to admit. I am inclined to believe, that, putting idiots and extraordinary cases out of the question, every human creature is endowed with talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to be apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted him. But the practices and modes of civilised life prompt us to take the inexhaustible varieties of man, as he is given into our guardianship by the bountiful hand of nature, and train him in one uniform exercise, as the raw recruit is treated when he is brought under the direction of his drill-serjeant. The son of the nobleman, of the country-gentleman, and of those parents who from vanity or whatever other motive are desirous that their offspring should be devoted to some liberal profession, is in nearly all instances sent to the grammar-school. It is in this scene principally, that the judgment is formed that not above one boy in a hundred possesses an acute understanding, or will be able to strike into a path of intellect that shall be truly his own. I do not object to this destination, if temperately pursued. It is fit that as many children as possible should have their chance of figuring in future life in what are called the higher departments of intellect. A certain familiar acquaintance with language and the shades of language as a lesson, will be beneficial to all. The youth who has expended only six months in acquiring the rudiments of the Latin tongue, will probably be more or less the better for it in all his future life. But seven years are usually spent at the grammar-school by those who are sent to it. I do not in many cases object to this. The learned languages are assuredly of slow acquisition. In the education of those who are destined to what are called the higher departments of intellect, a long period may advantageously be spent in the study of words, while the progress they make in theory and dogmatical knowledge is too generally a store of learning laid up, to be unlearned again when they reach the period of real investigation and independent judgment. There is small danger of this in the acquisition of words. But this method, indiscriminately pursued as it is now, is productive of the worst consequences. Very soon a judgment may be formed by the impartial observer, whether the pupil is at home in the study of the learned languages, and is likely to make an adequate progress. But parents are not impartial. There are also two reasons why the schoolmaster is not the proper person to pronounce: first, because, if he pronounces in the negative, he will have reason to fear that the parent will be offended; and secondly, because he does not like to lose his scholar. But the very moment that it can be ascertained, that the pupil is not at home in the study of the learned languages, and is unlikely to make an adequate progress, at that moment he should be taken from it. The most palpable deficiency that is to be found in relation to the education of children, is a sound judgment to be formed as to the vocation or employment in which each is most fitted to excel. As, according to the institutions of Lycurgus, as soon as a boy was born, he was visited by the elders of the ward, who were to decide whether he was to be reared, and would be made an efficient member of the commonwealth, so it were to be desired that, as early as a clear discrimination on the subject might be practicable, a competent decision should be given as to the future occupation and destiny of a child. But this is a question attended with no common degree of difficulty. To the resolving such a question with sufficient evidence, a very considerable series of observations would become necessary. The child should be introduced into a variety of scenes, and a magazine, so to speak, of those things about which human industry and skill may be employed, should be successively set before him. The censor who is to decide on the result of the whole, should be a person of great sagacity, and capable of pronouncing upon a given amount of the most imperfect and incidental indications. He should be clear-sighted, and vigilant to observe the involuntary turns of an eye, expressions of a lip, and demonstrations of a limb. The declarations of the child himself are often of very small use in the case. He may be directed by an impulse, which occurs in the morning, and vanishes in the evening. His preferences change as rapidly as the shapes we sometimes observe in the evening clouds, and are governed by whim or fantasy, and not by any of those indications which are parcel of his individual constitution. He desires in many instances to be devoted to a particular occupation, because his playfellow has been assigned to it before him. The parent is not qualified to judge in this fundamental question, because he is under the dominion of partiality, and wishes that his child may become a lord chancellor, an archbishop, or any thing else, the possessor of which condition shall be enabled to make a splendid figure in the world. He is not qualified, because he is an interested party, and, either from an exaggerated estimate of his child's merits, or from a selfish shrinking from the cost it might require to mature them, is anxious to arrive at a conclusion not founded upon the intrinsic claims of the case to be considered. Even supposing it to be sufficiently ascertained in what calling it is that the child will be most beneficially engaged, a thousand extrinsical circumstances will often prevent that from being the calling chosen. Nature distributes her gifts without any reference to the distinctions of artificial society. The genius that demanded the most careful and assiduous cultivation, that it might hereafter form the boast and ornament of the world, will be reared amidst the chill blasts of poverty; while he who was best adapted to make an exemplary carpenter or artisan, by being the son of a nobleman is thrown a thousand fathoms wide of his true destination. Human creatures are born into the world with various dispositions. According to the memorable saying of Themistocles, One man can play upon a psaltery or harp, and another can by political skill and ingenuity convert a town of small account, weak and insignificant, into a city noble, magnificent and great. It is comparatively a very little way that we can penetrate into the mysteries of nature. Music seems to be one of the faculties most clearly defined in early youth. The child who has received that destination from the hands of nature, will even in infancy manifest a singular delight in musical sounds, and will in no long time imitate snatches of a tune. The present professor of music in the university of Oxford contrived for himself, I believe at three years old, a way for playing on an instrument, the piano forte, unprompted by any of the persons about him. This is called having an ear. Instances nearly as precocious are related of persons, who afterwards distinguished themselves in the art of painting. These two kinds of original destination appear to be placed beyond the reach of controversy. Horace says, The poet is born a poet, and cannot be made so by the ingenuity of art: and this seems to be true. He sees the objects about him with an eye peculiarly his own; the sounds that reach his ear, produce an effect upon him, and leave a memory behind, different from that which is experienced by his fellows. His perceptions have a singular vividness. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And his imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, It is not probable that any trainings of art can give these endowments to him who has not received them from the gift of nature. The subtle network of the brain, or whatever else it is, that makes a man more fit for, and more qualified to succeed in, one occupation than another, can scarcely be followed up and detected either in the living subject or the dead one. But, as in the infinite variety of human beings no two faces are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, nor even two leaves plucked from the same tree(2), so it may reasonably be presumed, that there are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the touch of the bystander evanescent, which may give to each individual a predisposition to rise to a supreme degree of excellence in some certain art or attainment, over a million of competitors. (2) Papers between Clarke and Leibnitz, p. 95. It has been said that all these distinctions and anticipations are idle, because man is born without innate ideas. Whatever is the incomprehensible and inexplicable power, which we call nature, to which he is indebted for his formation, it is groundless to suppose, that that power is cognisant of, and guides itself in its operations by, the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in civilised society. A child is not designed by his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes, for he may be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and still less is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, or a juggler. It is true that we cannot suppose nature to be guided in her operations by the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in civilised society. But it is not the less true that one man is by his structure best fitted to excel in some one in particular of these multifarious pursuits, however fortuitously his individual structure and that pursuit may be brought into contact. Thus a certain calmness and steadiness of purpose, much flexibility, and a very accurate proportion of the various limbs of the body, are of great advantage in rope-dancing; while lightness of the fingers, and a readiness to direct our thoughts to the rapid execution of a purpose, joined with a steadiness of countenance adapted to what is figuratively called throwing dust in the eyes of the bystander, are of the utmost importance to the juggler: and so of the rest. It is as much the temper of the individual, as any particular subtlety of organ or capacity, that prepares him to excel in one pursuit rather than a thousand others. And he must have been a very inattentive observer of the indications of temper in an infant in the first months of his existence, who does not confess that there are various peculiarities in that respect which the child brings into the world with him. There is excellent sense in the fable of Achilles in the island of Scyros. He was placed there by his mother in female attire among the daughters of Lycomedes, that he might not be seduced to engage in the Trojan war. Ulysses was commissioned to discover him, and, while he exhibited jewels and various woman's ornaments to the princesses, contrived to mix with his stores a suit of armour, the sight of which immediately awakened the spirit of the hero. Every one has probably within him a string more susceptible than the rest, that demands only a kindred impression to be made, to call forth its latent character. Like the war-horse described in the Book of Job: "He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men; he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting." Nothing can be more unlike than the same man to himself, when he is touched, and not touched, upon the master-string That makes most harmony or discord to him. It is like the case of Manlius Torquatus in Livy, who by his father was banished among his hinds for his clownish demeanour and untractableness to every species of instruction that was offered him, but who, understanding that his parent was criminally arraigned for barbarous treatment of him, first resolutely resorted to the accuser, compelling him upon pain of death to withdraw his accusation, and subsequently, having surmounted this first step towards an energetic carriage and demeanour, proved one of the most illustrious characters that the Roman republic had to boast. Those children whose parents have no intention of training them to the highest departments of intellect, and have therefore no thought of bestowing on them a classical education, nevertheless for the most part send them to a school where they are to be taught arithmetic, and the principles of English grammar. I should say in this case, as I said before on the subject of classical education, that a certain initiation in these departments of knowledge, even if they are pursued a very little way, will probably be beneficial to all. But it will often be found, in these schools for more ordinary education, as in the school for classical instruction, that the majority of the pupils will be seen to be unpromising, and, what is usually called, dull. The mistake is, that the persons by whom this is perceived, are disposed to set aside these pupils as blockheads, and unsusceptible of any species of ingenuity. It is unreasonable that we should draw such a conclusion. In the first place, as has been already observed, it is the most difficult thing in the world for the schoolmaster to inspire into his pupil the desire to do his best. An overwhelming majority of lads at school are in their secret hearts rebels to the discipline under which they are placed. The instructor draws, one way, and the pupil another. The object of the latter is to find out how he may escape censure and punishment with the smallest expence of scholastic application. He looks at the task that is set him, without the most distant desire of improvement, but with alienated and averted eye. And, where this is the case, the wonder is not that he does not make a brilliant figure. It is rather an evidence of the slavish and subservient spirit incident to the majority of human beings, that he learns any thing. Certainly the schoolmaster, who judges of the powers of his pupil's mind by the progress he makes in what he would most gladly be excused from learning, must be expected perpetually to fall into the most egregious mistakes. The true test of the capacity of the individual, is where the desire to succeed, and accomplish something effective, is already awakened in the youthful mind. Whoever has found out what it is in which he is qualified to excel, from that moment becomes a new creature. The general torpor and sleep of the soul, which is incident to the vast multitude of the human species, is departed from him. We begin, from the hour in which our limbs are enabled to exert themselves freely, with a puerile love of sport. Amusement is the order of the day. But no one was ever so fond of play, that he had not also his serious moments. Every human creature perhaps is sensible to the stimulus of ambition. He is delighted with the thought that he also shall be somebody, and not a mere undistinguished pawn, destined to fill up a square in the chess-board of human society. He wishes to be thought something of, and to be gazed upon. Nor is it merely the wish to be admired that excites him: he acts, that he may be satisfied with himself. Self-respect is a sentiment dear to every heart. The emotion can with difficulty be done justice to, that a man feels, who is conscious that he is breathing his true element, that every stroke that he strikes will have the effect he designs, that he has an object before him, and every moment approaches nearer to that object. Before, he was wrapped in an opake cloud, saw nothing distinctly, and struck this way and that at hazard like a blind man. But now the sun of understanding has risen upon him; and every step that he takes, he advances with an assured and undoubting confidence. It is an admirable remark, that the book which we read at the very time that we feel a desire to read it, affords us ten times the improvement, that we should have derived from it when it was taken up by us as a task. It is just so with the man who chooses his occupation, and feels assured that that about which he is occupied is his true and native field. Compare this person with the boy that studies the classics, or arithmetic, or any thing else, with a secret disinclination, and, as Shakespear expresses it, "creeps like snail, unwillingly, to school." They do not seem as if they belonged to the same species. The result of these observations certainly strongly tends to support the proposition laid down early in the present Essay, that, putting idiots and extraordinary cases out of the question, every human creature is endowed with talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to be apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted him. SECTION III. ENCOURAGING VIEW OF OUR COMMON NATURE.--POWER OF SOUND EXPOSITION AFFORDED TO ALL.--DOCTRINE OF THIS ESSAY AND THE HYPOTHESIS OF HELVETIUS COMPARED.--THE WILLING AND UNWILLING PUPIL CONTRASTED.--MISCHIEVOUS TENDENCY OF THE USUAL MODES OF EDUCATION. What a beautiful and encouraging view is thus afforded us of our common nature! It is not true, as certain disdainful and fastidious censurers of their fellow-men would persuade us to believe, that a thousand seeds are sown in the wide field of humanity, for no other purpose than that half-a-dozen may grow up into something magnificent and splendid, and that the rest, though not absolutely extinguished in the outset, are merely suffered to live that they may furnish manure and nourishment to their betters. On the contrary, each man, according to this hypothesis, has a sphere in which he may shine, and may contemplate the exercise of his own powers with a well-grounded satisfaction. He produces something as perfect in its kind, as that which is effected under another form by the more brilliant and illustrious of his species. He stands forward with a serene confidence in the ranks of his fellow-creatures, and says, "I also have my place in society, that I fill in a manner with which I have a right to be satisfied." He vests a certain portion of ingenuity in the work he turns out. He incorporates his mind with the labour of his hands; and a competent observer will find character and individuality in it. He has therefore nothing of the sheepishness of the ordinary schoolboy, the tasks imposed upon whom by his instructor are foreign to the true bent of his mind, and who stands cowed before his seniors, shrinking under the judgment they may pass upon him, and the oppression they may exercise towards him. He is probably competent to talk in a manner that may afford instruction to men in other respects wise and accomplished, and is no less clear and well-digested in his discourse respecting the subjects to which his study and labour have been applied, than they are on the questions that have exercised the powers of analysis with which they are endowed. Like Elihu in the Book of Job, he says, "I am young, and you are old; I said therefore, Days shall speak, and multitude of years shall teach wisdom. But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment. Hearken therefore to me; and I also will shew my opinion." What however in the last instance is affirmed, is not always realised in the experiment. The humblest mechanic, who works con amore, and feels that he discharges his office creditably, has a sober satisfaction in the retrospect, and is able to express himself perspicuously and well on the subject that has occupied his industry. He has a just confidence in himself. If the occasion arises, on which he should speak on the subject of what he does, and the methods he adopts for effecting it, he will undoubtedly acquit himself to the satisfaction of those who hear him. He knows that the explanations he can afford will be sound and masculine, and will stand the test of a rigid examination. But, in proportion as he feels the ground on which he stands, and his own power to make it good, he will not fail to retire from an audience that is not willing to be informed by him. He will often appear in the presence of those, whom the established arrangements of society call his superiors, who are more copiously endowed with the treasures of language, and who, confident perhaps in the advantage of opulence, and what is called, however they may have received it, a liberal education, regard with disdain his artless and unornamented explanations. He did not, it may be, expect this. And, having experienced several times such unmerited treatment, he is not willing again to encounter it. He knew the worth of what he had to offer. And, finding others indisposed to listen to his suggestions, he contentedly confines them within the circle of his own thoughts. To this it must be added that, though he is able to explain himself perspicuously, yet he is not master of the graces of speech, nor even perhaps of the niceties of grammar. His voice is not tuned to those winning inflections by which men, accustomed to the higher ranks of society, are enabled so to express themselves, That aged ears play truant at their tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished, So sweet and voluble is their discourse. On the contrary there is a ruggedness in his manner that jars upon the sense. It is easy for the light and supercilious to turn him into ridicule. And those who will not be satisfied with the soundness of his matter, expounded, as he is able to expound it, in clear and appropriate terms, will yield him small credit, and listen to him with little delight. These considerations therefore bring us back again to the reasons of the prevalent opinion, that the majority of mankind are dull, and of apprehension narrow and confused. The mass of boys in the process of their education appear so, because little of what is addressed to them by their instructors, awakens their curiosity, and inspires them with the desire to excel. The concealed spark of ambition is not yet cleared from the crust that enveloped it as it first came from the hand of nature. And in like manner the elder persons, who have not experienced the advantages of a liberal education, or by whom small profit was made by those advantages, being defective in exterior graces, are generally listened to with impatience, and therefore want the confidence and the inclination to tell what they know. But these latter, if they are not attended to upon the subjects to which their attention and ingenuity have been applied, do not the less possess a knowledge and skill which are intrinsically worthy of applause. They therefore contentedly shut up the sum of their acquisitions in their own bosoms, and are satisfied with the consciousness that they have not been deficient in performing an adequate part in the generation of men among whom they live. Those persons who favour the opinion of the incessant improveableness of the human species, have felt strongly prompted to embrace the creed of Helvetius, who affirms that the minds of men, as they are born into the world, are in a state of equality, alike prepared for any kind of discipline and instruction that may be afforded them, and that it depends upon education only, in the largest sense of that word, including every impression that may be made upon the mind, intentional or accidental, from the hour of our birth, whether we shall be poets or philosophers, dancers or singers, chemists or mathematicians, astronomers or dissectors of the faculties of our common nature. But this is not true. It has already appeared in the course of this Essay, that the talent, or, more accurately speaking, the original suitableness of the individual for the cultivation, of music or painting, depends upon certain peculiarities that we bring into the world with us. The same thing may be affirmed of the poet. As, in the infinite variety of human beings, there are no two faces so alike that they cannot be distinguished, nor even two leaves plucked from the same tree, so there are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the touch of the bystander evanescent, which give to each individual a predisposition to rise to excellence in one particular art or attainment, rather than in any other. And this view of things, if well considered, is as favourable, nay, more so, to the hypothesis of the successive improveableness of the human species, as the creed of Helvetius. According to that philosopher, every human creature that is born into the world, is capable of becoming, or being made, the equal of Homer, Bacon or Newton, and as easily and surely of the one as the other. This creed, if sincerely embraced, no doubt affords a strong stimulus to both preceptor and pupil, since, if true, it teaches us that any thing can be made of any thing, and that, wherever there is mind, it is within the compass of possibility, not only that that mind can be raised to a high pitch of excellence, but even to a high pitch of that excellence, whatever it is, that we shall prefer to all others, and most earnestly desire. Still this creed will, after all, leave both preceptor and pupil in a state of feeling considerably unsatisfactory. What it sets before us, is too vast and indefinite. We shall be left long perhaps in a state of balance as to what species of excellence we shall choose; and, in the immense field of accessible improvement it offers to us, without land-mark or compass for the direction of our course, it is scarcely possible that we should feel that assured confidence and anticipation of success, which are perhaps indispensibly required to the completion of a truly arduous undertaking. But, upon the principles laid down in this Essay, the case is widely different. We are here presented in every individual human creature with a subject better fitted for one sort of cultivation than another. We are excited to an earnest study of the individual, that we may the more unerringly discover what pursuit it is for which his nature and qualifications especially prepare him. We may be long in choosing. We may be even on the brink of committing a considerable mistake. Our subsequent observations may enable us to correct the inference we were disposed to make from those which went before. Our sagacity is flattered by the result of the laborious scrutiny which this view of our common nature imposes upon us. In addition to this we reap two important advantages. In the first place, we feel assured that every child that is born has his suitable sphere, to which if he is devoted, he will not fail to make an honourable figure, or, in other words, will be seen to be endowed with faculties, apt, adroit, intelligent and acute. This consideration may reasonably stimulate us to call up all our penetration for the purpose of ascertaining the proper destination of the child for whom we are interested. And, secondly, having arrived at this point, we shall find ourselves placed in a very different predicament from the guardian or instructor, who, having selected at random the pursuit which his fancy dictates, and in the choice of which he is encouraged by the presumptuous assertions of a wild metaphysical philosophy, must often, in spite of himself, feel a secret misgiving as to the final event. He may succeed, and present to a wondering world a consummate musician, painter, poet, or philosopher; for even blind chance may sometimes hit the mark, as truly as the most perfect skill. But he will probably fail. Sudet multum, frustraque laboret. And, if he is disappointed, he will not only feel that disappointment in the ultimate result, but also in every step of his progress. When he has done his best, exerted his utmost industry, and consecrated every power of his soul to the energies he puts forth, he may close every day, sometimes with a faint shadow of success, and sometimes with entire and blank miscarriage. And the latter will happen ten thousand times, for once that the undertaking shall be blessed with a prosperous event. But, when the destination that is given to a child has been founded upon a careful investigation of the faculties, tokens, and accidental aspirations which characterise his early years, it is then that every step that is made with him, becomes a new and surer source of satisfaction. The moment the pursuit for which his powers are adapted is seriously proposed to him, his eyes sparkle, and a second existence, in addition to that which he received at his birth, descends upon him. He feels that he has now obtained something worth living for. He feels that he is at home, and in a sphere that is appropriately his own. Every effort that he makes is successful. At every resting-place in his race of improvement he pauses, and looks back on what he has done with complacency. The master cannot teach him so fast, as he is prompted to acquire. What a contrast does this species of instruction exhibit, to the ordinary course of scholastic education! There, every lesson that is prescribed, is a source of indirect warfare between the instructor and the pupil, the one professing to aim at the advancement of him that is taught, in the career of knowledge, and the other contemplating the effect that is intended to be produced upon him with aversion, and longing to be engaged in any thing else, rather than in that which is pressed upon his foremost attention. In this sense a numerous school is, to a degree that can scarcely be adequately described, the slaughter-house of mind. It is like the undertaking, related by Livy, of Accius Navius, the augur, to cut a whetstone with a razor--with this difference, that our modern schoolmasters are not endowed with the gift of working miracles, and, when the experiment falls into their hands, the result of their efforts is a pitiful miscarriage. Knowledge is scarcely in any degree imparted. But, as they are inured to a dogged assiduity, and persist in their unavailing attempts, though the shell of science, so to speak, is scarcely in the smallest measure penetrated, yet that inestimable gift of the author of our being, the sharpness of human faculties, is so blunted and destroyed, that it can scarcely ever be usefully employed even for those purposes which it was originally best qualified to effect. A numerous school is that mint from which the worst and most flagrant libels on our nature are incessantly issued. Hence it is that we are taught, by a judgment everlastingly repeated, that the majority of our kind are predestinated blockheads. Not that it is by any means to be recommended, that a little writing and arithmetic, and even the first rudiments of classical knowledge, so far as they can be practicably imparted, should be withheld from any. The mischief is, that we persist, month after month, and year after year, in sowing our seed, when it has already been fully ascertained, that no suitable and wholsome crop will ever be produced. But what is perhaps worse is, that we are accustomed to pronounce, that that soil, which will not produce the crop of which we have attempted to make it fertile, is fit for nothing. The majority of boys, at the very period when the buds of intellect begin to unfold themselves, are so accustomed to be told that they are dull and fit for nothing, that the most pernicious effects are necessarily produced. They become half convinced by the ill-boding song of the raven, perpetually croaking in their ears; and, for the other half, though by no means assured that the sentence of impotence awarded against them is just, yet, folding up their powers in inactivity, they are contented partly to waste their energies in pure idleness and sport, and partly to wait, with minds scarcely half awake, for the moment when their true destination shall be opened before them. Not that it is by any means to be desired that the child in his earlier years should meet with no ruggednesses in his way, and that he should perpetually tread "the primrose path of dalliance." Clouds and tempests occasionally clear the atmosphere of intellect, not less than that of the visible world. The road to the hill of science, and to the promontory of heroic virtue, is harsh and steep, and from time to time puts to the proof the energies of him who would ascend their topmost round. There are many things which every human creature should learn, so far as, agreeably to the constitution of civilised society, they can be brought within his reach. He should be induced to learn them, willingly if possible, but, if that cannot be thoroughly effected, yet with half a will. Such are reading, writing, arithmetic, and the first principles of grammar; to which shall be added, as far as may be, the rudiments of all the sciences that are in ordinary use. The latter however should not be brought forward too soon; and, if wisely delayed, the tyro himself will to a certain degree enter into the views of his instructor, and be disposed to essay Quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent. But, above all, the beginnings of those studies should be encouraged, which unfold the imagination, familiarise us with the feelings, the joys and sufferings of our fellow-beings, and teach us to put ourselves in their place and eagerly fly to their assistance. SECTION IV. HOW FAR OUR GENUINE PROPENSITIES AND VOCATION SHOULD BE FAVOURED.--SELF-REVERENCE RECOMMENDED.--CONCLUSION. I knew a man of eminent intellectual faculties(3), one of whose favourite topics of moral prudence was, that it is the greatest mistake in the world to suppose, that, when we have discovered the special aspiration of the youthful mind, we are bound to do every thing in our power to assist its progress. He maintained on the contrary, that it is our true wisdom to place obstacles in its way, and to thwart it: as we may be well assured that, unless it is a mere caprice, it will shew its strength in conquering difficulties, and that all the obstacles that we can conjure up will but inspire it with the greater earnestness to attain final success. (3) Henry Fuseli. The maxim here stated, taken to an unlimited extent, is doubtless a very dangerous one. There are obstacles that scarcely any strength of man would be sufficient to conquer. "Chill penury" will sometimes "repress the noblest rage," that almost ever animated a human spirit: and our wisest course will probably be, secretly to favour, even when we seem most to oppose, the genuine bent of the youthful aspirer. But the thing of greatest importance is, that we should not teach him to estimate his powers at too low a rate. One of the wisest of all the precepts comprised in what are called the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, is that, in which he enjoins his pupil to "reverence himself." Ambition is the noblest root that can be planted in the garden of the human soul: not the ambition to be applauded and admired, to be famous and looked up to, to be the darling theme of "stupid starers and of loud huzzas;" but the ambition to fill a respectable place in the theatre of society, to be useful and to be esteemed, to feel that we have not lived in vain, and that we are entitled to the most honourable of all dismissions, an enlightened self-approbation. And nothing can more powerfully tend to place this beyond our acquisition, even our contemplation, than the perpetual and hourly rebuffs which ingenuous youth is so often doomed to sustain from the supercilious pedant, and the rigid decision of his unfeeling elders. Self-respect to be nourished in the mind of the pupil, is one of the most valuable results of a well conducted education. To accomplish this, it is most necessary that it should never be inculcated into him, that he is dull. Upon the principles of this Essay, any unfavourable appearances that may present themselves, do not arise from the dulness of the pupil, but from the error of those upon whose superintendence he is cast, who require of him the things for which he is not adapted, and neglect those in which he is qualified to excel. It is further necessary, if self-respect is one of the most desirable results of a well-conducted education, that, as we should not humble the pupil in his own eyes by disgraceful and humiliating language, so we should abstain, as much as possible, from personal ill-treatment, and the employing towards him the measures of an owner towards his purchased or indentured slave. Indignity is of all things the most hostile to the best purposes of a liberal education. It may be necessary occasionally to employ, towards a human creature in his years of nonage, the stimulants of exhortation and remonstrance even in the pursuits to which he is best adapted, for the purpose of overcoming the instability and fits of idleness to which all men, and most of all in their early years, are subject: though in such pursuits a necessity of this sort can scarcely be supposed. The bow must not always be bent; and it is good for us that we should occasionally relax and play the fool. It may more readily be imagined, that some incitement may be called for in those things which, as has been mentioned above, it may be fit he should learn though with but half a will. All freaks must not be indulged; admonition is salutary, and that the pupil should be awakened by his instructor to sober reflection and to masculine exertion. Every Telemachus should have his Mentor.--But through the whole it is necessary that the spirit of the pupil should not be broken, and that he should not be treated with contumely. Stripes should in all instances be regarded as the last resort, and as a sort of problem set up for the wisdom of the wise to solve, whether the urgent case can arise in which it shall be requisite to have recourse to them. The principles here laid down have the strongest tendency to prove to us how little progress has yet been made in the art of turning human creatures to the best account. Every man has his place, in which if he can be fixed, the most fastidious judge cannot look upon him with disdain. But, to effect this arrangement, an exact attention is required to ascertain the pursuit in which he will best succeed. In India the whole mass of the members of the community is divided into castes; and, instead of a scrupulous attention being paid to the early intimations of individual character, it is already decided upon each, before he comes into the world, which child shall be a priest, and which a soldier, a physician, a lawyer, a merchant, and an artisan. In Europe we do not carry this so far, and are not so elaborately wrong. But the rudiments of the same folly flourish among us; and the accident of birth for the most part decides the method of life to which each individual with whatever violence shall be dedicated. A very few only, by means of energies that no tyranny can subdue, escape from the operation of this murderous decree. Nature never made a dunce. Imbecility of mind is as rare, as deformity of the animal frame. If this position be true, we have only to bear it in mind, feelingly to convince ourselves, how wholesale the error is into which society has hitherto fallen in the destination of its members, and how much yet remains to be done, before our common nature can be vindicated from the basest of all libels, the most murderous of all proscriptions. There is a passage in Voltaire, in which he expresses himself to this effect: "It is after all but a slight line of separation that divides the man of genius from the man of ordinary mould." I remember the place where, and the time when, I read this passage. But I have been unable to find the expression. It is however but reasonable that I should refer to it on this occasion, that I may hereby shew so eminent a modern concurring with the venerable ancient in an early era of letters, whose dictum I have prefixed to this Essay, to vouch to a certain extent for the truth of the doctrine I have delivered. ESSAY III. OF INTELLECTUAL ABORTION. In the preceding Essay I have endeavoured to establish the proposition, that every human creature, idiots and extraordinary cases excepted, is endowed with talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to be apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted him. There is however a sort of phenomenon, by no means of rare occurrence, which tends to place the human species under a less favourable point of view. Many men, as has already appeared, are forced into situations and pursuits ill assorted to their talents, and by that means are exhibited to their contemporaries in a light both despicable and ludicrous. But this is not all. Men are not only placed, by the absurd choice of their parents, or an imperious concurrence of circumstances, in destinations and employments in which they can never appear to advantage: they frequently, without any external compulsion, select for themselves objects of their industry, glaringly unadapted to their powers, and in which all their efforts must necessarily terminate in miscarriage. I remember a young man, who had been bred a hair-dresser, but who experienced, as he believed, the secret visitations of the Muse, and became inspired. "With sad civility, and aching head," I perused no fewer than six comedies from the pen of this aspiring genius, in no page of which I could discern any glimmering of poetry or wit, or in reality could form a guess what it was that the writer intended in his elaborate effusions. Such are the persons enumerated by Pope in the Prologue to his Satires, a parson, much bemused in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, A clerk, foredoomed his father's sou to cross, Who pens a stanza, when he should engross. Every manager of a theatre, and every publishing bookseller of eminence, can produce you in each revolving season whole reams, almost cartloads, of blurred paper, testifying the frequent recurrence of this phenomenon. The cause however of this painful mistake does not lie in the circumstance, that each man has not from the hand of nature an appropriate destination, a sphere assigned him, in which, if life should be prolonged to him, he might be secure of the respect of his neighbours, and might write upon his tomb, "I have filled an honourable career; I have finished my course." One of the most glaring infirmities of our nature is discontent. One of the most unquestionable characteristics of the human mind is the love of novelty. Omne ignotum pro magnifico est. We are satiated with those objects which make a part of our business in every day, and are desirous of trying something that is a stranger to us. Whatever we see through a mist, or in the twilight, is apt to be apprehended by us as something admirable, for the single reason that it is seen imperfectly. What we are sure that we can easily and adequately effect, we despise. He that goes into battle with an adversary of more powerful muscle or of greater practice than himself, feels a tingling sensation, not unallied to delight, very different from that which would occur to him, when his victory was easy and secure. Each man is conscious what it is that he can certainly effect. This does not therefore present itself to him as an object of ambition. We have many of us internally something of the spirit expressed by the apostle: "Forgetting the things that are behind, we press forward to those that remain." And, so long as this precept is soberly applied, no conduct can be more worthy of praise. Improvement is the appropriate race of man. We cannot stand still. If we do not go forward, we shall inevitably recede. Shakespear, when he wrote his Hamlet, did not know that he could produce Macbeth and Othello. But the progress of a man of reflection will be, to a considerable degree, in the path he has already entered. If he strikes into a new career, it will not be without deep premeditation. He will attempt nothing wantonly. He will carefully examine his powers, and see for what they are adapted. Sudet multum. He will be like the man, who first in a frail bark committed himself to the treachery of the waves. He will keep near to the shore; he will tremble for the audaciousness of his enterprise; he will feel that it calls for all his alertness and vigilance. The man of reflection will not begin, till he feels his mind swelling with his purposed theme, till his blood flows fitfully and with full pulses through his veins, till his eyes sparkle with the intenseness of his conceptions, and his "bosom labours with the God." But the fool dashes in at once. He does not calculate the dangers of his enterprise. He does not study the map of the country he has to traverse. He does not measure the bias of the ground, the rising knolls and the descending slopes that are before him. He obeys a blind and unreflecting impulse. His case bears a striking resemblance to what is related of Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith was a man of the most felicitous endowments. His prose flows with such ease, copiousness and grace, that it resembles the song of the sirens. His verses are among the most spirited, natural and unaffected in the English language. Yet he was not contented. If he saw a consummate dancer, he knew no reason why he should not do as well, and immediately felt disposed to essay his powers. If he heard an accomplished musician, he undertook to enter the lists with him. His conduct was of a piece with that of the countryman, who, cheapening spectacles, and making experiment of them for ever in vain upon the book before him, was at length asked, "Could you ever read without spectacles?" to which he was obliged to answer, "I do not know; I never tried." The vanity of Goldsmith was infinite; and his failure in such attempts must necessarily have been ludicrous. The splendour of the thing presented to our observation, awakens the spirit within us. The applause and admiration excited by certain achievements and accomplishments infects us with desire. We are like the youthful Themistocles, who complained that the trophies of Miltiades would not let him sleep. We are like the novice Guido, who, while looking on the paintings of Michael Angelo, exclaimed, "I also am a painter." Themistocles and Guido were right, for they were of kindred spirit to the great men they admired. But the applause bestowed on others will often generate uneasiness and a sigh, in men least of all qualified by nature to acquire similar applause. We are not contented to proceed in the path of obscure usefulness and worth. We are eager to be admired, and thus often engage in pursuits for which perhaps we are of all men least adapted Each one would be the man above him. And this is the cause why we see so many individuals, who might have passed their lives with honour, devote themselves to incredible efforts, only that they may be made supremely ridiculous. To this let it be added, that the wisest man that ever existed, never yet knew himself, especially in the morning of life. The person, who ultimately stamped his history with the most heroic achievements, was far perhaps even from suspecting, in the dawn of his existence, that he should realise the miracles that mark its maturity. He might be ready to exclaim, with Hazael in the Scriptures, "Is thy servant more than man, that he should do this great thing?" The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him. What wonder then, that, awaking from the insensibility and torpor which precede the activity of the soul, some men should believe in a fortune that shall never be theirs, and anticipate a glory they are fated never to sustain! And for the same reason, when unanticipated failure becomes their lot, they are unwilling at first to be discouraged, and find a certain gallantry in persevering, and "against hope believing in hope." This is the explanation of a countless multitude of failures that occur in the career of literature. Nor is this phenomenon confined to literature. In all the various paths of human existence, that appear to have something in them splendid and alluring, there are perpetual instances of daring adventures, unattended with the smallest rational hope of success. Optat ephippia bos piger. All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies. But, beside these instances of perfect and glaring miscarriage, there are examples worthy of a deeper regret, where the juvenile candidate sets out in the morning of life with the highest promise, with colours flying, and the spirit-stirring note of gallant preparation, when yet his voyage of life is destined to terminate in total discomfiture. I have seen such an one, whose early instructors regarded him with the most sanguine expectation, and his elders admired him, while his youthful competitors unreluctantly confessed his superiority, and gave way on either side to his triumphant career; and all this has terminated in nothing. In reality the splendid march of genius is beset with a thousand difficulties. "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." A multitude of unthought-of qualifications are required; and it depends at least as much upon the nicely maintained balance of these, as upon the copiousness and brilliancy of each, whether the result shall be auspicious. The progress of genius is like the flight of an arrow; a breath may turn it out of its course, and cause that course to terminate many a degree wide of its purposed mark. It is therefore scarcely possible that any sharpness of foresight can pronounce of the noblest beginnings whether they shall reach to an adequate conclusion. I have seen such a man, with the most fervent imagination, with the most diligent study, with the happiest powers of memory, and with an understanding that apparently took in every thing, and arranged every thing, at the same time that by its acuteness it seemed able to add to the accumulated stores of foregone wisdom and learning new treasures of its own; and yet this man shall pass through the successive stages of human life, in appearance for ever active, for ever at work, and leave nothing behind that shall embalm his name to posterity, certainly nothing in any degree adequately representing those excellencies, which a chosen few, admitted to his retired and his serenest hours, knew to reside in him. There are conceptions of the mind, that come forth like the coruscations of lightning. If you could fix that flash, it would seem as if it would give new brightness to the sons of men, and almost extinguish the luminary of day. But, ere you can say it is here, it is gone. It appears to reveal to us the secrets of the world unknown; but the clouds congregate again, and shut in upon us, before we had time to apprehend its full radiance and splendour. To give solidity and permanence to the inspirations of genius two things are especially necessary. First, that the idea to be communicated should be powerfully apprehended by the speaker or writer; and next, that he should employ words and phrases which might convey it in all its truth to the mind of another. The man who entertains such conceptions, will not unfrequently want the steadiness of nerve which is required for their adequate transmission. Suitable words will not always wait upon his thoughts. Language is in reality a vast labyrinth, a scene like the Hercinian Forest of old, which, we are told, could not be traversed in less than sixty days. If we do not possess the clue, we shall infallibly perish in the attempt, and our thoughts and our memory will expire with us. The sentences of this man, when he speaks, or when he writes, will be full of perplexity and confusion. They will be endless, and never arrive at their proper termination. They will include parenthesis on parenthesis. We perceive the person who delivers them, to be perpetually labouring after a meaning, but never reaching it. He is like one flung over into the sea, unprovided with the skill that should enable him to contend with the tumultuous element. He flounders about in pitiable helplessness, without the chance of extricating himself by all his efforts. He is lost in unintelligible embarrassment. It is a delightful and a ravishing sight, to observe another man come after him, and tell, without complexity, and in the simplicity of self-possession, unconscious that there was any difficulty, all that his predecessor had fruitlessly exerted himself to unfold. There are a multitude of causes that will produce a miscarriage of this sort, where the richest soil, impregnated with the choicest seeds of learning and observation, shall entirely fail to present us with such a crop as might rationally have been anticipated. Many such men waste their lives in indolence and irresolution. They attempt many things, sketch out plans, which, if properly filled up, might illustrate the literature of a nation, and extend the empire of the human mind, but which yet they desert as soon as begun, affording us the promise of a beautiful day, that, ere it is noon, is enveloped in darkest tempests and the clouds of midnight. They skim away from one flower in the parterre of literature to another, like the bee, without, like the bee, gathering sweetness from each, to increase the public stock, and enrich the magazine of thought. The cause of this phenomenon is an unsteadiness, ever seduced by the newness of appearances, and never settling with firmness and determination upon what had been chosen. Others there are that are turned aside from the career they might have accomplished, by a visionary and impracticable fastidiousness. They can find nothing that possesses all the requisites that should fix their choice, nothing so good that should authorise them to present it to public observation, and enable them to offer it to their contemporaries as something that we should "not willingly let die." They begin often; but nothing they produce appears to them such as that they should say of it, "Let this stand." Or they never begin, none of their thoughts being judged by them to be altogether such as to merit the being preserved. They have a microscopic eye, and discern faults unworthy to be tolerated, in that in which the critic himself might perceive nothing but beauty. These phenomena have introduced a maxim which is current with many, that the men who write nothing, and bequeath no record of themselves to posterity, are not unfrequently of larger calibre, and more gigantic standard of soul, than such as have inscribed their names upon the columns of the temple of Fame. And certain it is, that there are extraordinary instances which appear in some degree to countenance this assertion. Many men are remembered as authors, who seem to have owed the permanence of their reputation rather to fortune than merit. They were daring, and stepped into a niche that was left in the gallery of art or of science, where others of higher qualifications, but of unconquerable modesty, held back. At the same time persons, whose destiny caused them to live among the elite of an age, have seen reason to confess that they have heard such talk, such glorious and unpremeditated discourse, from men whose thoughts melted away with the breath that uttered them, as the wisest of their vaunted contemporary authors would in vain have sought to rival. The maxim however, notwithstanding these appearances, may safely be pronounced to be a fallacious one. It has been received in various quarters with the greater indulgence, inasmuch as the human mind is prone in many cases to give a more welcome reception to seeming truths, that present us at the first blush the appearance of falshood. It must however be recollected that the human mind consists in the first instance merely of faculties prepared to be applied to certain purposes, and susceptible of improvement. It cannot therefore happen, that the man, who has chosen a subject towards which to direct the energy of his faculties, who has sought on all sides for the materials that should enable him to do that subject justice, who has employed upon it his contemplations by day, and his meditations during the watches of the night, should not by such exercise greatly invigorate his powers. In this sense there was much truth in the observation of the author who said, "I did not write upon the subject you mention because I understood it; but I understood it afterward, because I had written upon it." The man who merely wanders through the fields of knowledge in search of its gayest flowers and of whatever will afford him the most enviable amusement, will necessarily return home at night with a very slender collection. He that shall apply himself with self-denial and an unshrinking resolution to the improvement of his mind, will unquestionably be found more fortunate in the end. He is not deterred by the gulphs that yawn beneath his feet, or the mountains that may oppose themselves to his progress. He knows that the adventurer of timid mind, and that is infirm of purpose, will never make himself master of those points which it would be most honourable to him to subdue. But he who undertakes to commit to writing the result of his researches, and to communicate his discoveries to mankind, is the genuine hero. Till he enters on this task, every thing is laid up in his memory in a certain confusion. He thinks he possesses a thing whole; but, when he brings it to the test, he is surprised to find how much he was deceived. He that would digest his thoughts and his principles into a regular system, is compelled in the first place to regard them in all their clearness and perspicuity, and in the next place to select the fittest words by which they may be communicated to others. It is through the instrumentality of words that we are taught to think accurately and severely for ourselves; they are part and parcel of all our propositions and theories. It is therefore in this way that a preceptor, by undertaking to enlighten the mind of his pupil, enlightens his own. He becomes twice the man in the sequel, that he was when he entered on his task. We admire the amateur student in his public essays, as we admire a jackdaw or a parrot: he does considerably more than could have been expected from him. In attending to the subject of this Essay we have been led to observe the different ways, in which the mind of man may be brought into a position tending to exhibit its powers in a less creditable and prepossessing point of view, than that in which all men, idiots and extraordinary cases excepted, are by nature qualified to appear. Many, not contented with those occupations, modest and humble in certain cases, to which their endowments and original bent had designed them, shew themselves immoderately set upon more alluring and splendid pursuits in which they are least qualified to excel. Other instances there are, still more entitled to our regret, where the individual is seen to be gifted with no ordinary qualities, where his morning of life has proved auspicious, and the highest expectations were formed of a triumphant career, while yet in the final experiment he has been found wanting, and the "voyage of his life" has passed "in shallows and in miseries." But our survey of the subject of which I treat will not be complete, unless we add to what has been said, another striking truth respecting the imperfection of man collectively taken. The examples of which the history of our species consists, not only abound in cases, where, from mistakes in the choice of life, or radical and irremediable imperfection in the adventurer, the most glaring miscarriages are found to result,--but it is also true, that all men, even the most illustrious, have some fatal weakness, obliging both them and their rational admirers to confess, that they partake of human frailty, and belong to a race of beings which has small occasion to be proud. Each man has his assailable part. He is vulnerable, though it be only like the fabled Achilles in his heel. We are like the image that Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream, of which though the head was of fine gold, and the breast and the arms were silver, yet the feet were partly only of iron, and partly of clay. No man is whole and entire, armed at all points, and qualified for every undertaking, or even for any one undertaking, so as to carry it through, and to make the achievement he would perform, or the work he would produce, in all its parts equal and complete. It is a gross misapprehension in such men as, smitten with admiration of a certain cluster of excellencies, or series of heroic acts, are willing to predicate of the individual to whom they belong, "This man is consummate, and without alloy." Take the person in his retirement, in his hours of relaxation, when he has no longer a part to play, and one or more spectators before whom he is desirous to appear to advantage, and you shall find him a very ordinary man. He has "passions, dimensions, senses, affections, like the rest of his fellow-creatures, is fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter." He will therefore, when narrowly observed, be unquestionably found betraying human weaknesses, and falling into fits of ill humour, spleen, peevishness and folly. No man is always a sage; no bosom at all times beats with sentiments lofty, self-denying and heroic. It is enough if he does so, "when the matter fits his mighty mind." The literary genius, who undertakes to produce some consummate work, will find himself pitiably in error, if he expects to turn it out of his hands, entire in all its parts, and without a flaw. There are some of the essentials of which it is constituted, that he has mastered, and is sufficiently familiar with them; but there are others, especially if his work is miscellaneous and comprehensive, to which he is glaringly incompetent. He must deny his nature, and become another man, if he would execute these parts, in a manner equal to that which their intrinsic value demands, or to the perfection he is able to give to his work in those places which are best suited to his powers. There are points in which the wisest man that ever existed is no stronger than a child. In this sense the sublimest genius will be found infelix operas summa, nam ponere totum nescit. And, if he properly knows himself, and is aware where lies his strength, and where his weakness, he will look for nothing more in the particulars which fall under the last of these heads, than to escape as he can, and to pass speedily to things in which he finds himself at home and at his ease. Shakespear we are accustomed to call the most universal genius that ever existed. He has a truly wonderful variety. It is almost impossible to pronounce in which he has done best, his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or Othello. He is equally excellent in his comic vein as his tragic. Falstaff is in his degree to the full as admirable and astonishing, as what he achieved that is noblest under the auspices of the graver muse. His poetry and the fruits of his imagination are unrivalled. His language, in all that comes from him when his genius is most alive, has a richness, an unction, and all those signs of a character which admits not of mortality and decay, for ever fresh as when it was first uttered, which we recognise, while we can hardly persuade ourselves that we are not in a delusion. As Anthony Wood says(4), "By the writings of Shakespear and others of his time, the English tongue was exceedingly enriched, and made quite another thing than what it was before." His versification on these occasions has a melody, a ripeness and variety that no other pen has reached. (4) Athenae Oxonienses, vol. i. p. 592. Yet there were things that Shakespear could not do. He could not make a hero. Familiar as he was with the evanescent touches of mind en dishabille, and in its innermost feelings, he could not sustain the tone of a character, penetrated with a divine enthusiasm, or fervently devoted to a generous cause, though this is truly within the compass of our nature, and is more than any other worthy to be delineated. He could conceive such sentiments, for there are such in his personage of Brutus; but he could not fill out and perfect what he has thus sketched. He seems even to have had a propensity to bring the mountain and the hill to a level with the plain. Caesar is spiritless, and Cicero is ridiculous, in his hands. He appears to have written his Troilus and Cressida partly with a view to degrade, and hold up to contempt, the heroes of Homer; and he has even disfigured the pure, heroic affection which the Greek poet has painted as existing between Achilles and Patroclus with the most odious imputations. And, as he could not sustain an heroic character throughout, so neither could he construct a perfect plot, in which the interest should be perpetually increasing, and the curiosity of the spectator kept alive and in suspense to the last moment. Several of his plays have an unity of subject to which nothing is wanting; but he has not left us any production that should rival that boast of Ancient Greece in the conduct of a plot, the OEdipus Tyrannus, a piece in which each act rises upon the act before, like a tower that lifts its head story above story to the skies. He has scarcely ever given to any of his plays a fifth act, worthy of those that preceded; the interest generally decreases after the third. Shakespear is also liable to the charge of obscurity. The most sagacious critics dispute to this very hour, whether Hamlet is or is not mad, and whether Falstaff is a brave man or a coward. This defect is perhaps partly to be imputed to the nature of dramatic writing. It is next to impossible to make words, put into the mouth of a character, develop all those things passing in his mind, which it may be desirable should be known. I spoke, a short time back, of the language of Shakespear in his finest passages, as of unrivalled excellence and beauty; I might almost have called it miraculous. O, si sic omnia! It is to be lamented that this felicity often deserts him. He is not seldom cramp, rigid and pedantic. What is best in him is eternal, of all ages and times; but what is worst, is crusted with an integument, almost more cumbrous than that of any other writer, his contemporary, the merits of whose works continue to invite us to their perusal. After Shakespear, it is scarcely worth while to bring forward any other example, of a writer who, notwithstanding his undoubted claims to excellencies of the highest order, yet in his productions fully displays the inequality and non-universality of his genius. One of the most remarkable instances may be alleged in Richardson, the author of Clarissa. In his delineation of female delicacy, of high-souled and generous sentiments, of the subtlest feelings and even mental aberrations of virtuous distress strained beyond the power of human endurance, nothing ever equalled this author. But he could not shape out the image of a perfect gentleman, or of that winning gaiety of soul, which may indeed be exemplified, but can never be defined, and never be resisted. His profligate is a man without taste; and his coquettes are insolent and profoundly revolting. He has no resemblance of the art, so conspicuous in Fletcher and Farquhar, of presenting to the reader or spectator an hilarity, bubbling and spreading forth from a perennial spring, which we love as surely as we feel, which communicates its own tone to the bystander, and makes our very hearts dance within us with a responsive sportiveness. We are astonished however that the formal pedant has acquitted himself of his uncongenial task with so great a display of intellectual wealth; and, though he has not presented to us the genuine picture of an intellectual profligate, or of that lovely gaiety of the female spirit which we have all of us seen, but which it is scarcely possible to fix and to copy, we almost admire the more the astonishing talent, that, having undertaken a task for which it was so eminently unfit, yet has been able to substitute for the substance so amazing a mockery, and has treated with so much copiousness and power what it was unfit ever to have attempted. ESSAY IV. OF THE DURABILITY OF HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS AND PRODUCTIONS. There is a view of the character of man, calculated more perhaps than any other to impress us with reverence and awe. Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him. All other animals have but one object in view in their more considerable actions, the supply of the humbler accommodations of their nature. Man has a power sufficient for the accomplishment of this object, and a residue of power beyond, which he is able, and which he not unfrequently feels himself prompted, to employ in consecutive efforts, and thus, first by the application and arrangement of material substances, and afterward by the faculty he is found to possess of giving a permanent record to his thoughts, to realise the archetypes and conceptions which previously existed only in his mind. One method, calculated to place this fact strongly before us, is, to suppose ourselves elevated, in a balloon or otherwise, so as to enable us to take an extensive prospect of the earth on which we dwell. We shall then see the plains and the everlasting hills, the forests and the rivers, and all the exuberance of production which nature brings forth for the supply of her living progeny. We shall see multitudes of animals, herds of cattle and of beasts of prey, and all the varieties of the winged tenants of the air. But we shall also behold, in a manner almost equally calculated to arrest our attention, the traces and the monuments of human industry. We shall see castles and churches, and hamlets and mighty cities. We shall see this strange creature, man, subjecting all nature to his will. He builds bridges, and he constructs aqueducts. He "goes down to the sea in ships," and variegates the ocean with his squadrons and his fleets. To the person thus mounted in the air to take a wide and magnificent prospect, there seems to be a sort of contest between the face of the earth, as it may be supposed to have been at first, and the ingenuity of man, which shall occupy and possess itself of the greatest number of acres. We cover immense regions of the globe with the tokens of human cultivation. Thus the matter stands as to the exertions of the power of man in the application and arrangement of material substances. But there is something to a profound and contemplative mind much more extraordinary, in the effects produced by the faculty we possess of giving a permanent record to our thoughts. From the development of this faculty all human science and literature take their commencement. Here it is that we most distinctly, and with the greatest astonishment, perceive that man is a miracle. Declaimers are perpetually expatiating to us upon the shortness of human life. And yet all this is performed by us, when the wants of our nature have already by our industry been supplied. We manufacture these sublimities and everlasting monuments out of the bare remnants and shreds of our time. The labour of the intellect of man is endless. How copious is the volume, and how extraordinary the variety, of our sciences and our arts! The number of men is exceedingly great in every civilised state of society, that make these the sole object of their occupation. And this has been more or less the condition of our species in all ages, ever since we left the savage and the pastoral modes of existence. From this view of the history of man we are led by an easy transition to the consideration of the nature and influence of the love of fame in modifying the actions of the human mind. We have already stated it to be one of the characteristic distinctions of our species to erect monuments which outlast the existence of the persons that produced them. This at first was accidental, and did not enter the design of the operator. The man who built himself a shed to protect him from the inclemency of the seasons, and afterwards exchanged that shed for a somewhat more commodious dwelling, did not at first advert to the circumstance that the accommodation might last, when he was no longer capable to partake of it. In this way perhaps the wish to extend the memory of ourselves beyond the term of our mortal existence, and the idea of its being practicable to gratify that wish, descended upon us together. In contemplating the brief duration and the uncertainty of human life, the idea must necessarily have occurred, that we might survive those we loved, or that they might survive us. In the first case we inevitably wish more or less to cherish the memory of the being who once was an object of affection to us, but of whose society death has deprived us. In the second case it can scarcely happen but that we desire ourselves to be kindly recollected by those we leave behind us. So simple is the first germ of that longing after posthumous honour, which presents us with so memorable effects in the page of history. But, previously to the further consideration of posthumous fame, let us turn our attention for a moment to the fame, or, as in that sense it is more usually styled, popularity, which is the lot of a few favoured individuals while they live. The attending to the subject in this point of view, will be found to throw light upon the more extensive prospect of the question to which we will immediately afterwards proceed. Popularity is an acquisition more level to the most ordinary capacities, and therefore is a subject of more general ambition, than posthumous fame. It addresses itself to the senses. Applause is a species of good fortune to which perhaps no mortal ear is indifferent. The persons who constitute the circle in which we are applauded, receive us with smiles of approbation and sympathy. They pay their court to us, seem to be made happy by our bare presence among them, and welcome us to their houses with congratulation and joy. The vulgar portion of mankind scarcely understand the question of posthumous fame, they cannot comprehend how panegyric and honour can "soothe the dull, cold ear of death:" but they can all conceive the gratification to be derived from applauding multitudes and loud huzzas. One of the most obvious features however that attends upon popularity, is its fugitive nature. No man has once been popular, and has lived long, without experiencing neglect at least, if he were not also at some time subjected to the very intelligible disapprobation and censure of his fellows. The good will and kindness of the multitude has a devouring appetite, and is like a wild beast that you should stable under your roof, which, if you do not feed with a continual supply, will turn about and attack its protector. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,-- That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds, And give to dust, that is a little gilt, More laud than they will give to gold o'erdusted. Cromwel well understood the nature of this topic, when he said, as we are told, to one of his military companions, who called his attention to the rapturous approbation with which they were received by the crowd on their return from a successful expedition, "Ah, my friend, they would accompany us with equal demonstrations of delight, if, upon no distant occasion, they were to see us going to be hanged!" The same thing which happens to the popularity attendant on the real or imaginary hero of the multitude, happens also in the race after posthumous fame. As has already been said, the number of men is exceedingly great in every civilised state of society, who make the sciences and arts engendered by the human mind, the sole or the principal objects of their occupation. This will perhaps be most strikingly illustrated by a retrospect of the state of European society in the middle, or, as they are frequently styled, the dark ages. It has been a vulgar error to imagine, that the mind of man, so far as relates to its active and inventive powers, was sunk into a profound sleep, from which it gradually recovered itself at the period when Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and the books and the teachers of the ancient Greek language were dispersed through Europe. The epoch from which modern invention took its rise, commenced much earlier. The feudal system, one of the most interesting contrivances of man in society, was introduced in the ninth century; and chivalry, the offspring of that system, an institution to which we are mainly indebted for refinement of sentiment, and humane and generous demeanour, in the eleventh. Out of these grew the originality and the poetry of romance. These were no mean advancements. But perhaps the greatest debt which after ages have contracted to this remote period, arose out of the system of monasteries and ecclesiastical celibacy. Owing to these a numerous race of men succeeded to each other perpetually, who were separated from the world, cut off from the endearments of conjugal and parental affection, and who had a plenitude of leisure for solitary application. To these men we are indebted for the preservation of the literature of Rome, and the multiplied copies of the works of the ancients. Nor were they contented only with the praise of never-ending industry. They forged many works, that afterwards passed for classical, and which have demanded all the perspicacity of comparative criticism to refute. And in these pursuits the indefatigable men who were dedicated to them, were not even goaded by the love of fame. They were satisfied with the consciousness of their own perseverance and ingenuity. But the most memorable body of men that adorned these ages, were the Schoolmen. They may be considered as the discoverers of the art of logic. The ancients possessed in an eminent degree the gift of genius; but they have little to boast on the score of arrangement, and discover little skill in the strictness of an accurate deduction. They rather arrive at truth by means of a felicity of impulse, than in consequence of having regularly gone through the process which leads to it. The schools of the middle ages gave birth to the Irrefragable and the Seraphic doctors, the subtlety of whose distinctions, and the perseverance of whose investigations, are among the most wonderful monuments of the intellectual power of man. The thirteenth century produced Thomas Aquinas, and Johannes Duns Scotus, and William Occam, and Roger Bacon. In the century before, Thomas a Becket drew around him a circle of literary men, whose correspondence has been handed down to us, and who deemed it their proudest distinction that they called each other philosophers. The Schoolmen often bewildered themselves in their subtleties, and often delivered dogmas and systems that may astonish the common sense of unsophisticated understandings. But such is man. So great is his persevering labour, his invincible industry, and the resolution with which he sets himself, year after year, and lustre after lustre, to accomplish the task which his judgment and his zeal have commanded him to pursue. But I return to the question of literary fame. All these men, and men of a hundred other classes, who laboured most commendably and gallantly in their day, may be considered as swept away into the gulph of oblivion. As Swift humorously says in his Dedication to Prince Posterity, "I had prepared a copious list of Titles to present to your highness, as an undisputed argument of the prolificness of human genius in my own time: the originals were posted upon all gates and corner's of streets: but, returning in a very few hours to take a review, they were all torn down, and fresh ones put in their places. I enquired after them among readers and booksellers, but in vain: the memorial of them was lost among men; their place was no more to be found." It is a just remark that had been made by Hume(5): "Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age. In a successive period these have been universally exploded; their absurdity has been detected; other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave way to their successors; and nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry. Just expressions of passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain public applause, which they maintain for ever. Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus and Descartes may successively yield to each other: but Terence and Virgil maintain an universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men. The abstract philosophy of Cicero has lost its credit: the vehemence of his oratory is still the object of our admiration." (5) Essays, Part 1, Essay xxiii. A few examples of the instability of fame will place this question in the clearest light. Nicholas Peiresk was born in the year 1580. His progress in knowledge was so various and unprecedented, that, from the time that he was twenty-one years of age, he was universally considered as holding the helm of learning in his hand, and guiding the commonwealth of letters. He died at the age of fifty-seven. The academy of the Humoristi at Rome paid the most extraordinary honours to his memory; many of the cardinals assisted at his funeral oration; and a collection of verses in his praise was published in more than forty languages. Salmasius was regarded as a prodigy of learning; and various princes and powers entered into a competition who should be so fortunate as to secure his residence in their states. Christina, queen of Sweden, having obtained the preference, received him with singular reverence and attention; and, Salmasius being taken ill at Stockholm, and confined to his bed, the queen persisted with her own hand to prepare his caudles, and mend his fire. Yet, but for the accident of his having had Milton for his adversary, his name would now be as little remembered, even by the generality of the learned, as that of Peiresk. Du Bartas, in the reign of Henry the Fourth of France, was one of the most successful poets that ever existed. His poem on the Creation of the World went through upwards of thirty editions in the course of five or six years, was translated into most European languages, and its commentators promised to equal in copiousness and number the commentators on Homer. One of the most admired of our English poets about the close of the sixteenth century, was Donne. Unlike many of those trivial writers of verse who succeeded him after an interval of forty or fifty years, and who won for themselves a brilliant reputation by the smoothness of their numbers, the elegance of their conceptions, and the politeness of their style, Donne was full of originality, energy and vigour. No man can read him without feeling himself called upon for earnest exercise of his thinking powers, and, even with the most fixed attention and application, the student is often obliged to confess his inability to take in the whole of the meaning with which the poet's mind was perceptibly fraught. Every sentence that Donne writes, whether in verse or prose, is exclusively his own. In addition to this, his thoughts are often in the noblest sense of the word poetical; and passages may be quoted from him that no English poet may attempt to rival, unless it be Milton and Shakespear. Ben Jonson observed of him with great truth and a prophetic spirit: "Donne for not being understood will perish." But this is not all. If Waller and Suckling and Carew sacrificed every thing to the Graces, Donne went into the other extreme. With a few splendid and admirable exceptions, his phraseology and versification are crabbed and repulsive. And, as poetry is read in the first place for pleasure, Donne is left undisturbed on the shelf, or rather in the sepulchre; and not one in an hundred even among persons of cultivation, can give any account of him, if in reality they ever heard of his productions. The name of Shakespear is that before which every knee must bow. But it was not always so. When the first novelty of his pieces was gone, they were seldom called into requisition. Only three or four of his plays were upon the acting list of the principal company of players during the reign of Charles the Second; and the productions of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Shirley, were acted three times for once of his. At length Betterton revived, and by his admirable representation gave popularity to, Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear, a popularity they have ever since retained. But Macbeth was not revived (with music, and alterations by sir William Davenant) till 1674; and Lear a few years later, with love scenes and a happy catastrophe by Nahum Tate. In the latter part of the reign of Charles the Second, Dryden and Otway and Lee held the undisputed supremacy in the serious drama. Such was the insensibility of the English public to nature, and her high priest, Shakespear. The only one of their productions that has survived upon the theatre, is Venice Preserved: and why it has done so it is difficult to say; or rather it would be impossible to assign a just and honourable reason for it. All the personages in this piece are of an abandoned and profligate character. Pierre is a man resolved to destroy and root up the republic by which he was employed, because his mistress, a courtesan, is mercenary, and endures the amorous visits of an impotent old lecher. Jaffier, without even the profession of any public principle, joins in the conspiracy, because he has been accustomed to luxury and prodigal expence and is poor. He has however no sooner entered into the plot, than he betrays it, and turns informer to the government against his associates. Belvidera instigates him to this treachery, because she cannot bear the thought of having her father murdered, and is absurd enough to imagine that she and her husband shall be tender and happy lovers ever after. Their love in the latter acts of the play is a continued tirade of bombast and sounding nonsense, without one real sentiment, one just reflection, or one strong emotion working from the heart, and analysing the nature of man. The folly of this love can only be exceeded, by the abject and despicable crouching and fawning of Jaffier to the man he had so basely betrayed, and their subsequent reconciliation. There is not a production in the whole realms of fiction, that has less pretension to manly, or even endurable feeling, or to common propriety. The total defect of a moral sense in this piece is strongly characteristic of the reign in which it was written. It has in the mean while a richness of melody, and a picturesqueness of action, that enables it to delude, and that even draws tears from the eyes of, persons who can be won over by the eye and the ear, with almost no participation of the understanding. And this unmeaning rant and senseless declamation sufficed for the time to throw into shade those exquisite delineations of character, those transcendent bursts of passion, and that perfect anatomy of the human heart, which render the master-pieces of Shakespear a property for all nations and all times. While Shakespear was partly forgotten, it continued to be totally unknown that he had contemporaries as inexpressibly superior to the dramatic writers that have appeared since, as these contemporaries were themselves below the almighty master of scenic composition. It was the fashion to say, that Shakespear existed alone in a barbarous age, and that all his imputed crudities, and intermixture of what was noblest with unparalleled absurdity and buffoonery, were to be allowed for to him on that consideration. Cowley stands forward as a memorable instance of the inconstancy of fame. He was a most amiable man; and the loveliness of his mind shines out in his productions. He had a truly poetic frame of soul; and he pours out the beautiful feelings that possessed him unreservedly and at large. He was a great sufferer in the Stuart cause, he had been a principal member of the court of the exiled queen; and, when the king was restored, it was a deep sentiment among his followers and friends to admire the verses of Cowley. He was "the Poet." The royalist rhymers were set lightly by in comparison with him. Milton, the republican, who, by his collection published during the civil war, had shewn that he was entitled to the highest eminence, was unanimously consigned to oblivion. Cowley died in 1667; and the duke of Buckingham, the author of the Rehearsal, eight years after, set up his tomb in the cemetery of the nation, with an inscription, declaring him to be at once "the Pindar, the Horace and Virgil of his country, the delight and the glory of his age, which by his death was left a perpetual mourner."--Yet--so capricious is fame--a century has nearly elapsed, since Pope said, Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art, But still I love the language of his heart. As Cowley was the great royalist poet after the Restoration, Cleveland stood in the same rank during the civil war. In the publication of his works one edition succeeded to another, yearly or oftener, for more than twenty years. His satire is eminently poignant; he is of a strength and energy of thinking uncommonly masculine; and he compresses his meaning so as to give it every advantage. His imagination is full of coruscation and brilliancy. His petition to Cromwel, lord protector of England, when the poet was under confinement for his loyal principles, is a singular example of manly firmness, great independence of mind, and a happy choice of topics to awaken feelings of forbearance and clemency. It is unnecessary to say that Cleveland is now unknown, except to such as feel themselves impelled to search into things forgotten. It would be endless to adduce all the examples that might be found of the caprices of fame. It has been one of the arts of the envious to set up a contemptible rival to eclipse the splendour of sterling merit. Thus Crowne and Settle for a time disturbed the serenity of Dryden. Voltaire says, the Phaedra of Pradon has not less passion than that of Racine, but expressed in rugged verse and barbarous language. Pradon is now forgotten: and the whole French poetry of the Augustan age of Louis the Fourteenth is threatened with the same fate. Hayley for a few years was applauded as the genuine successor of Pope; and the poem of Sympathy by Pratt went through twelve editions. For a brief period almost each successive age appears fraught with resplendent genius; but they go out one after another; they set, "like stars that fall, to rise no more." Few indeed are endowed with that strength of construction, that should enable them to ride triumphant on the tide of ages. It is the same with conquerors. What tremendous battles have been fought, what oceans of blood have been spilled, by men who were resolved that their achievements should be remembered for ever! And now even their names are scarcely preserved; and the very effects of the disasters they inflicted on mankind seem to be swept away, as of no more validity than things that never existed. Warriors and poets, the authors of systems and the lights of philosophy, men that astonished the earth, and were looked up to as Gods, even like an actor on the stage, have strutted their hour, and then been heard of no more. Books have the advantage of all other productions of the human head or hand. Copies of them may be multiplied for ever, the last as good as the first, except so far as some slight inadvertent errors may have insinuated themselves. The Iliad flourishes as green now, as on the day that Pisistratus is said first to have stamped upon it its present order. The songs of the Rhapsodists, the Scalds, and the Minstrels, which once seemed as fugitive as the breath of him who chaunted them, repose in libraries, and are embalmed in collections. The sportive sallies of eminent wits, and the Table Talk of Luther and Selden, may live as long as there shall be men to read, and judges to appreciate them. But other human productions have their date. Pictures, however admirable, will only last as long as the colours of which they are composed, and the substance on which they are painted. Three or four hundred years ordinarily limit the existence of the most favoured. We have scarcely any paintings of the ancients, and but a small portion of their statues, while of these a great part are mutilated, and various members supplied by later and inferior artists. The library of Bufo is by Pope described, where busts of poets dead, And a true Pindar stood without a head. Monumental records, alike the slightest and the most solid, are subjected to the destructive operation of time, or to the being removed at the caprice or convenience of successive generations. The pyramids of Egypt remain, but the names of him who founded them, and of him whose memory they seemed destined to perpetuate, have perished together. Buildings for the use or habitation of man do not last for ever. Mighty cities, as well as detached edifices, are destined to disappear. Thebes, and Troy, and Persepolis, and Palmyra have vanished from the face of the earth. "Thorns and brambles have grown up in their palaces: they are habitations for serpents, and a court for the owl." There are productions of man however that seem more durable than any of the edifices he has raised. Such are, in the first place, modes of government. The constitution of Sparta lasted for seven hundred years. That of Rome for about the same period. Institutions, once deeply rooted in the habits of a people, will operate in their effects through successive revolutions. Modes of faith will sometimes be still more permanent. Not to mention the systems of Moses and Christ, which we consider as delivered to us by divine inspiration, that of Mahomet has continued for twelve hundred years, and may last, for aught that appears, twelve hundred more. The practices of the empire of China are celebrated all over the earth for their immutability. This brings us naturally to reflect upon the durability of the sciences. According to Bailly, the observation of the heavens, and a calculation of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, in other words, astronomy, subsisted in maturity in China and the East, for at least three thousand years before the birth of Christ: and, such as it was then, it bids fair to last as long as civilisation shall continue. The additions it has acquired of late years may fall away and perish, but the substance shall remain. The circulation of the blood in man and other animals, is a discovery that shall never be antiquated. And the same may be averred of the fundamental elements of geometry and of some other sciences. Knowledge, in its most considerable branches shall endure, as long as books shall exist to hand it down to successive generations. It is just therefore, that we should regard with admiration and awe the nature of man, by whom these mighty things have been accomplished, at the same time that the perishable quality of its individual monuments, and the temporary character and inconstancy of that fame which in many instances has filled the whole earth with its renown, may reasonably quell the fumes of an inordinate vanity, and keep alive in us the sentiment of a wholsome diffidence and humility. ESSAY V. OF THE REBELLIOUSNESS OF MAN. There is a particular characteristic in the nature of the human mind, which is somewhat difficult to be explained. Man is a being of a rational and an irrational nature. It has often been said that we have two souls. Araspes, in the Cyropedia, adopts this language to explain his inconsistency, and desertion of principle and honour. The two souls of man, according to this hypothesis, are, first, animal, and, secondly, intellectual. But I am not going into any thing of this slight and every-day character. Man is a rational being. It is by this particular that he is eminently distinguished from the brute creation. He collects premises and deduces conclusions. He enters into systems of thinking, and combines systems of action, which he pursues from day to day, and from year to year. It is by this feature in his constitution that he becomes emphatically the subject of history, of poetry and fiction. It is by this that he is raised above the other inhabitants of the globe of earth, and that the individuals of our race are made the partners of "gods, and men like gods." But our nature, beside this, has another section. We start occasionally ten thousand miles awry. We resign the sceptre of reason, and the high dignity that belongs to us as beings of a superior species; and, without authority derived to us from any system of thinking, even without the scheme of gratifying any vehement and uncontrolable passion, we are impelled to do, or at least feel ourselves excited to do, something disordinate and strange. It seems as if we had a spring within us, that found the perpetual restraint of being wise and sober insupportable. We long to be something, or to do something, sudden and unexpected, to throw the furniture of our apartment out at window, or, when we are leaving a place of worship, in which perhaps the most solemn feelings of our nature have been excited, to push the grave person that is just before us, from the top of the stairs to the bottom. A thousand absurdities, wild and extravagant vagaries, come into our heads, and we are only restrained from perpetrating them by the fear, that we may be subjected to the treatment appropriated to the insane, or may perhaps be made amenable to the criminal laws of our country. A story occurs to me, which I learned from the late Dr. Parr at Hatton, that may not unhappily illustrate the point I am endeavouring to explain. Dr. Samuel Clarke, rector of St. James's, Westminster, the especial friend of Sir Isaac Newton, the distinguished editor of the poems of Homer, and author of the Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, was one day summoned from his study, to receive two visitors in the parlour. When he came downstairs, and entered the room, he saw a foreigner, who by his air seemed to be a person of distinction, a professor perhaps of some university on the continent; and an alderman of London, a relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner. The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire, surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with the whimsical nature of this unexpected metamorphosis, and the extraordinary solemnity of his kinsman's demeanour, as to have felt impelled, almost immediately upon entering the room, to snatch the wig from the alderman's head, and throw it against the ceiling: after which this eminent person immediately escaped, and retired to his own apartment. I was informed from the same authority, that Clarke, after exhausting his intellectual faculties by long and intense study, would not unfrequently quit his seat, leap upon the table, and place himself cross-legged like a tailor, being prompted, by these antagonist sallies, to relieve himself from the effect of the too severe strain he had previously put upon his intellectual powers. But the deviousness and aberration of our human faculties frequently amount to something considerably more serious than this. I will put a case. I will suppose myself and another human being together, in some spot secure from the intrusion of spectators. A musket is conveniently at hand. It is already loaded. I say to my companion, "I will place myself before you; I will stand motionless: take up that musket, and shoot me through the heart." I want to know what passes in the mind of the man to whom these words are addressed. I say, that one of the thoughts that will occur to many of the persons who should be so invited, will be, "Shall I take him at his word?" There are two things that restrain us from acts of violence and crime. The first is, the laws of morality. The second is, the construction that will be put upon our actions by our fellow-creatures, and the treatment we shall receive from them.--I put out of the question here any particular value I may entertain for my challenger, or any degree of friendship and attachment I may feel for him. The laws of morality (setting aside the consideration of any documents of religion or otherwise I may have imbibed from my parents and instructors) are matured within us by experience. In proportion as I am rendered familiar with my fellow-creatures, or with society at large, I come to feel the ties which bind men to each other, and the wisdom and necessity of governing my conduct by inexorable rules. We are thus further and further removed from unexpected sallies of the mind, and the danger of suddenly starting away into acts not previously reflected on and considered. With respect to the censure and retaliation of other men on my proceeding, these, by the terms of my supposition, are left out of the question. It may be taken for granted, that no man but a madman, would in the case I have stated take the challenger at his word. But what I want to ascertain is, why the bare thought of doing so takes a momentary hold of the mind of the person addressed? There are three principles in the nature of man which contribute to account for this. First, the love of novelty. Secondly, the love of enterprise and adventure. I become insupportably wearied with the repetition of rotatory acts and every-day occurrences. I want to be alive, to be something more than I commonly am, to change the scene, to cut the cable that binds my bark to the shore, to launch into the wide sea of possibilities, and to nourish my thoughts with observing a train of unforeseen consequences as they arise. A third principle, which discovers itself in early childhood, and which never entirely quits us, is the love of power. We wish to be assured that we are something, and that we can produce notable effects upon other beings out of ourselves. It is this principle, which instigates a child to destroy his playthings, and to torment and kill the animals around him. But, even independently of the laws of morality, and the fear of censure and retaliation from our fellow-creatures, there are other things which would obviously restrain us from taking the challenger in the above supposition at his word. If man were an omnipotent being, and at the same time retained all his present mental infirmities, it would be difficult to say of what extravagances he would be guilty. It is proverbially affirmed that power has a tendency to corrupt the best dispositions. Then what would not omnipotence effect? If, when I put an end to the life of a fellow-creature, all vestiges of what I had done were to disappear, this would take off a great part of the control upon my actions which at present subsists. But, as it is, there are many consequences that "give us pause." I do not like to see his blood streaming on the ground. I do not like to witness the spasms and convulsions of a dying man. Though wounded to the heart, he may speak. Then what may be chance to say? What looks of reproach may he cast upon me? The musket may miss fire. If I wound him, the wound may be less mortal than I contemplated. Then what may I not have to fear? His dead body will be an incumbrance to me. It must be moved from the place where it lies. It must be buried. How is all this to be done by me? By one precipitate act, I have involved myself in a long train of loathsome and heart-sickening consequences. If it should be said, that no one but a person of an abandoned character would fail, when the scene was actually before him, to feel an instant repugnance to the proposition, yet it will perhaps be admitted, that almost every reader, when he regards it as a supposition merely, says to himself for a moment, "Would I? Could I?" But, to bring the irrationality of man more completely to the test, let us change the supposition. Let us imagine him to be gifted with the powers of the fabled basilisk, "to monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks." His present impulses, his passions, his modes of reasoning and choosing shall continue; but his "will is neighboured to his act;" whatever he has formed a conception of with preference, is immediately realised; his thought is succeeded by the effect; and no traces are left behind, by means of which a shadow of censure or suspicion can be reflected on him. Man is in truth a miracle. The human mind is a creature of celestial origin, shut up and confined in a wall of flesh. We feel a kind of proud impatience of the degradation to which we are condemned. We beat ourselves to pieces against the wires of our cage, and long to escape, to shoot through the elements, and be as free to change at any instant the place where we dwell, as to change the subject to which our thoughts are applied. This, or something like this, seems to be the source of our most portentous follies and absurdities. This is the original sin upon which St. Austin and Calvin descanted. Certain Arabic writers seem to have had this in their minds, when they tell us, that there is a black drop of blood in the heart of every man, in which is contained the fomes peccati, and add that, when Mahomet was in the fourth year of his age, the angel Gabriel caught him up from among his playfellows, and taking his heart from his bosom, squeezed out of it this first principle of frailty, in consequence of which he for ever after remained inaccessible to the weaknesses of other men(6). (6) Life of Mahomet, by Prideaux. It is the observation of sir Thomas Browne: "Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." One of the most remarkable examples of this is to be found in the pyramids of Egypt. They are generally considered as having been erected to be the tombs of the kings of that country. They have no opening by which for the light of heaven to enter, and afford no means for the accommodation of living man. An hundred thousand men are said to have been constantly employed in the building; ten years to have been consumed in hewing and conveying the stones, and twenty more in completing the edifice. Of the largest the base is a square, and the sides are triangles, gradually diminishing as they mount in the air. The sides of the base are two hundred and twenty feet in length, and the perpendicular height is above one hundred and fifty-five feet. The figure of the pyramid is precisely that which is most calculated for duration: it cannot perish by accident; and it would require almost as much labour to demolish it, as it did to raise it at first. What a light does this fact convey into the inmost recesses of the human heart! Man reflects deeply, and with feelings of a mortified nature, upon the perishableness of his frame, and the approaching close, so far as depends upon the evidence of our senses, of his existence. He has indeed an irrepressible "longing after immortality;" and this is one of the various and striking modes in which he has sought to give effect to his desire. Various obvious causes might be selected, which should be calculated to give birth to the feeling of discontent. One is, the not being at home. I will here put together some of the particulars which make up the idea of home in the most emphatical sense of the word. Home is the place where a man is principally at his ease. It is the place where he most breathes his native air: his lungs play without impediment; and every respiration brings a pure element, and a cheerful and gay frame of mind. Home is the place where he most easily accomplishes all his designs; he has his furniture and materials and the elements of his occupations entirely within his reach. Home is the place where he can be uninterrupted. He is in a castle which is his in full propriety. No unwelcome guests can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb his contemplations; he is the master, and can command a silence equal to that of the tomb, whenever he pleases. In this sense every man feels, while cribbed in a cabin of flesh, and shut up by the capricious and arbitrary injunctions of human communities, that he is not at home. Another cause of our discontent is to be traced to the disparity of the two parts of which we are composed, the thinking principle, and the body in which it acts. The machine which constitutes the visible man, bears no proportion to our thoughts, our wishes and desires. Hence we are never satisfied; we always feel the want of something we have not; and this uneasiness is continually pushing us on to precipitate and abortive resolves. I find in a book, entitled, Illustrations of Phrenology, by Sir George Mackenzie, Baronet, the following remark. 'If this portrait be correctly drawn, the right side does not quite agree with the left in the region of ideality. This dissimilarity may have produced something contradictory in the feelings of the person it represents, which he may have felt extremely annoying(7).' An observation of this sort may be urged with striking propriety as to the dissimilar attributes of the body and the thinking principle in man. (7) The remark thus delivered is applied to the portrait of the author of the present volume. It is perhaps thus that we are to account for a phenomenon, in itself sufficiently obvious, that our nature has within it a principle of boundless ambition, a desire to be something that we are not, a feeling that we are out of our place, and ought to be where we are not. This feeling produces in us quick and earnest sallies and goings forth of the mind, a restlessness of soul, and an aspiration after some object that we do not find ourselves able to chalk out and define. Hence comes the practice of castle-building, and of engaging the soul in endless reveries and imaginations of something mysterious and unlike to what we behold in the scenes of sublunary life. Many writers, having remarked this, have endeavoured to explain it from the doctrine of a preexistent state, and have said that, though we have no clear and distinct recollection of what happened to us previously to our being launched in our present condition, yet we have certain broken and imperfect conceptions, as if, when the tablet of the memory was cleared for the most part of the traces of what we had passed through in some other mode of being, there were a few characters that had escaped the diligence of the hand by which the rest had been obliterated. It is this that, in less enlightened ages of the world, led men to engage so much of their thoughts upon supposed existences, which, though they might never become subject to our organs of vision, were yet conceived to be perpetually near us, fairies, ghosts, witches, demons and angels. Our ancestors often derived suggestions from these, were informed of things beyond the ken of ordinary faculties, were tempted to the commission of forbidden acts, or encouraged to proceed in the paths of virtue. The most remarkable of these phenomena was that of necromancy, sorcery and magic. There were men who devoted themselves to "curious arts," and had books fraught with hidden knowledge. They could "bedim" The noon-tide sun, call forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war: to the dread, rattling thunder They could give fire, and rift even Jove's stout oak With his own bolt--graves at their command Have waked their sleepers, oped and let them forth. And of these things the actors in them were so certain, that many witches were led to the stake, their guilt being principally established on their own confessions. But the most memorable matters in the history of the black art, were the contracts which those who practised it not unfrequently entered into with the devil, that he should assist them by his supernatural power for ten or twenty years, and, in consideration of this aid, they consented to resign their souls into his possession, when the period of the contract was expired. In the animal creation there are some species that may be tamed, and others whose wildness is irreclaimable. Horace says, that all men are mad: and no doubt mankind in general has one of the features of madness. In the ordinary current of our existence we are to a considerable degree rational and tractable. But we are not altogether safe. I may converse with a maniac for hours; he shall talk as soberly, and conduct himself with as much propriety, as any other of the species who has never been afflicted with his disease; but touch upon a particular string, and, before you are aware of it, he shall fly out into the wildest and most terrifying extravagances. Such, though in a greatly inferior degree, are the majority of human beings. The original impulse of man is uncontrolableness. When the spirit of life first descends upon us, we desire and attempt to be as free as air. We are impatient of restraint. This is the period of the empire of will. There is a power within us that wars against the restraint of another. We are eager to follow our own impulses and caprices, and are with difficulty subjected to those who believe they best know how to control inexperienced youth in a way that shall tend to his ultimate advantage. The most moderate and auspicious method in which the old may endeavour to guide and control the pursuits of the young, undoubtedly is by the conviction of the understanding. But this is not always easy. It is not at all times practicable fully to explain to the apprehension of a very young person the advantage, which at a period a little more advanced he would be able clearly to recognise. There is a further evil appertaining to this view of the subject. A young man even, in the early season of life, is not always disposed to obey the convictions of his understanding. He has prescribed to himself a task which returns with the returning day; but he is often not disposed to apply. The very sense that it is what he conceives to be an incumbent duty, inspires him with reluctance. An obvious source of this reluctance is, that the convictions of our understanding are not always equally present to us. I have entered into a deduction of premises, and arrived at a conclusion; but some of the steps of the chain are scarcely obvious to me, at the time that I am called upon to act upon the conclusion I have drawn. Beside which, there was a freshness in the first conception of the reasons on which my conduct was to be framed, which, by successive rehearsals, and by process of time, is no longer in any degree spirit-stirring and pregnant. This restiveness and impracticability are principally incident to us in the period of youth. By degrees the novelties of life wear out, and we become sober. We are like soldiers at drill, and in a review. At first we perform our exercise from necessity, and with an ill grace. We had rather be doing almost any thing else. By degrees we are reconciled to our occupation. We are like horses in a manege, or oxen or dogs taught to draw the plough, or be harnessed to a carriage. Our stubbornness is subdued; we no longer exhaust our strength in vain efforts to free ourselves from the yoke. Conviction at first is strong. Having arrived at years of discretion, I revolve with a sobered mind the different occupations to which my efforts and my time may be devoted, and determine at length upon that which under all the circumstances displays the most cogent recommendations. Having done so, I rouse my faculties and direct my energies to the performance of my task. By degrees however my resolution grows less vigorous, and my exertions relax. I accept any pretence to be let off, and fly into a thousand episodes and eccentricities. But, as the newness of life subsides, the power of temptation becomes less. That conviction, which was at first strong, and gradually became fainter and less impressive, is made by incessant repetitions a part of my nature. I no more think of doubting its truth, than of my own existence. Practice has rendered the pursuits that engage me more easy, till at length I grow disturbed and uncomfortable if I am withheld from them. They are like my daily bread. If they are not afforded me, I grow sick and attenuated, and my life verges to a close. The sun is not surer to rise, than I am to feel the want of my stated employment. It is the business of education to tame the wild ass, the restive and rebellious principle, in our nature. The judicious parent or instructor essays a thousand methods to accomplish his end. The considerate elder tempts the child with inticements and caresses, that he may win his attention to the first rudiments of learning. He sets before him, as he grows older, all the considerations and reasons he can devise, to make him apprehend the advantage of improvement and literature. He does his utmost to make his progress easy, and to remove all impediments. He smooths the path by which he is to proceed, and endeavours to root out all its thorns. He exerts his eloquence to inspire his pupil with a love for the studies in which he is engaged. He opens to him the beauties and genius of the authors he reads, and endeavours to proceed with him hand in hand, and step by step. He persuades, he exhorts, and occasionally he reproves. He awakens in him the love of excellence, the fear of disgrace, and an ambition to accomplish that which "the excellent of the earth" accomplished before him. At a certain period the young man is delivered into his own hands, and becomes an instructor to himself. And, if he is blessed with an ingenuous disposition, he will enter on his task with an earnest desire and a devoted spirit. No person of a sober and enlarged mind can for a moment delude himself into the opinion that, when he is delivered into his own hands, his education is ended. In a sense to which no one is a stranger, the education of man and his life terminate together. We should at no period of our existence be backward to receive information, and should at all times preserve our minds open to conviction. We should through every day of our lives seek to add to the stores of our knowledge and refinement. But, independently of this more extended sense of the word, a great portion of the education of the young man is left to the direction of the man himself. The epoch of entire liberty is a dangerous period, and calls upon him for all his discretion, that he may not make an ill use of that, which is in itself perhaps the first of sublunary blessings. The season of puberty also, and all the excitements from this source, "that flesh is heir to," demand the utmost vigilance and the strictest restraint. In a word, if we would counteract the innate rebelliousness of man, that indocility of mind which is at all times at hand to plunge us into folly, we must never slumber at our post, but govern ourselves with steady severity, and by the dictates of an enlightened understanding. We must be like a skilful pilot in a perilous sea, and be thoroughly aware of all the rocks and quicksands, and the multiplied and hourly dangers that beset our navigation. In this Essay I have treated of nothing more than the inherent restiveness and indocility of man, which accompany him at least through all the earlier sections and divisions of his life. I have not treated of those temptations calculated to lead him into a thousand excesses and miseries, which originate in our lower nature, and are connected with what we call the passion of love. Nor have I entered upon the still more copious chapter, of the incentives and provocations which are administered to us by those wants which at all times beset us as living creatures, and by the unequal distribution of property generally in civil society. I have not considered those attributes of man which may serve indifferently for good or for ill, as he may happen to be or not to be the subject of those fiercer excitements, that will oft times corrupt the most ingenuous nature, and have a tendency to inspire into us subtle schemes and a deep contrivance. I have confined myself to the consideration of man, as yet untamed to the modes of civilised community, and unbroken to the steps which are not only prescribed by the interests of our social existence, but which are even in some degree indispensible to the improvement and welfare of the individual. I have considered him, not as he is often acted upon by causes and motives which seem almost to compel him to vice, but merely as he is restless, and impatient, and disdainful both of the control of others, and the shackles of system. For the same reason I have not taken notice of another species of irrationality, and which seems to answer more exactly to the Arabic notion of the fomes peccati, the black drop of blood at the bottom of the heart. We act from motives apprehended by the judgment; but we do not stop at them. Once set in motion, it will not seldom happen that we proceed beyond our original mark. We are like Othello in the play: Our blood begins our safer guides to rule; And passion, having our best judgment quelled, Assays to lead the way. This is the explanation of the greatest enormities that have been perpetrated by man, and the inhuman deeds of Nero and Caligula. We proceed from bad to worse. The reins of our discretion drop from our hands. It fortunately happens however, that we do not in the majority of cases, like Phaeton in the fable, set the world on fire; but that, with ordinary men, the fiercest excesses of passion extend to no greater distance than can be reached by the sound of their voice. ESSAY VI. OF HUMAN INNOCENCE. One of the most obvious views which are presented to us by man in society is the inoffensiveness and innocence that ordinarily characterise him. Society for the greater part carries on its own organization. Each man pursues his proper occupation, and there are few individuals that feel the propensity to interrupt the pursuits of their neighbours by personal violence. When we observe the quiet manner in which the inhabitants of a great city, and, in the country, the frequenters of the fields, the high roads, and the heaths, pass along, each engrossed by his private contemplations, feeling no disposition to molest the strangers he encounters, but on the contrary prepared to afford them every courteous assistance, we cannot in equity do less than admire the innocence of our species, and fancy that, like the patriarchs of old, we have fallen in with "angels unawares." There are a few men in every community, that are sons of riot and plunder, and for the sake of these the satirical and censorious throw a general slur and aspersion upon the whole species. When we look at human society with kind and complacent survey, we are more than half tempted to imagine that men might subsist very well in clusters and congregated bodies without the coercion of law; and in truth criminal laws were only made to prevent the ill-disposed few from interrupting the regular and inoffensive proceedings of the vast majority. From what disposition in human nature is it that all this accommodation and concurrence proceed? It is not primarily love. We feel in a very slight degree excited to good will towards the stranger whom we accidentally light upon in our path. Neither is it fear. It is principally forecast and prudence. We have a sensitiveness, that forbids us for a slight cause to expose ourselves to we know not what. We are unwilling to be disturbed. We have a mental vis inertiae, analogous to that quality in material substances, by means of which, being at rest, they resist being put into a state of motion. We love our security; we love our respectability; and both of these may be put to hazard by our rashly and unadvisedly thrusting ourselves upon the course of another. We like to act for ourselves. We like to act with others, when we think we can foresee the way in which the proposed transaction will proceed, and that it will proceed to our wish. Let us put the case, that I am passing along the highway, destitute and pennyless, and without foresight of any means by which I am to procure the next meal that my nature requires. The vagrant, who revolves in his mind the thought of extorting from another the supply of which he is urgently in need, surveys the person upon whom he meditates this violence with a scrutinising eye. He considers, Will this man submit to my summons without resistance, or in what manner will he repel my trespass? He watches his eye, he measures his limbs, his strength, and his agility. Though they have met in the deserts of Africa, where there is no law to punish the violator, he knows that he exposes himself to a fearful hazard; and he enters upon his purpose with desperate resolve. All this and more must occur to the man of violence, within the pale of a civilised community. Begging is the mildest form in which a man can obtain from the stranger he meets, the means of supplying his urgent necessities. But, even here, the beggar knows that he exposes himself not only to refusal, but to the harsh and opprobrious terms in which that refusal may be conveyed. In this city there are laws against begging; and the man that asks alms of me, is an offender against the state. In country-towns it is usual to remark a notice upon entering, to say, Whoever shall be found begging in this place, shall be set in the stocks. There are modes however in which I may accost a stranger, with small apprehension that I shall be made to repent of it. I may enquire of him my way to the place towards which my business or my pleasure invites me. Ennius of old has observed, that lumen de lumine, to light my candle at my neighbour's lamp, is one of the privileges that the practices of civil society concede. But it is not merely from forecast and prudence that we refrain from interrupting the stranger in his way. We have all of us a certain degree of kindness for a being of our own species. A multitude of men feel this kindness for every thing that has animal life. We would not willingly molest the stranger who has done us no injury. On the contrary we would all of us to a certain extent assist him, under any unforeseen casualty and tribulation. A part therefore of the innocence that characterises our species is to be attributed to philanthropy. Childhood is diffident. Children for the most part are averse to the addressing themselves to strangers, unless in cases where, from the mere want of anticipation and reflection, they proceed as if they were wholly without the faculty of making calculations and deducing conclusions. The child neither knows himself nor the stranger he meets in his path. He has not measured either the one or the other. He does not know what the stranger may be able, or may likely be prompted to do to him, nor what are his own means of defence or escape. He takes refuge therefore in a wary, sometimes an obstinate silence. It is for this reason that a boy at school often appears duller and more inept, than would be the amount of a fair proportion to what he is found to be when grown up to a man. As we improve in judgment and strength, we know better ourselves and others, and in a majority of instances take our due place in the ranks of society. We acquire a modest and cautious firmness, yield what belongs to another, and assert what is due to ourselves. To the last however, we for the most part retain the inoffensiveness described in the beginning of this Essay. How comes it then that our nature labours under so bitter an aspersion? We have been described as cunning, malicious and treacherous. Other animals herd together for mutual convenience; and their intercourse with their species is for the most part a reciprocation of social feeling and kindness. But community among men, we are told, is that condition of human existence, which brings out all our evil qualities to the face of day. We lie in wait for, and circumvent each other by multiplied artifices. We cannot depend upon each other for the truth of what is stated to us; and promises and the most solemn engagements often seem as if they were made only to mislead. We are violent and deadly in our animosities, easily worked up to ferocity, and satisfied with scarcely any thing short of mutilation and blood. We are revengeful: we lay up an injury, real or imaginary, in the store-house of an undecaying memory, waiting only till we can repay the evil we have sustained tenfold, at a time when our adversary shall be lulled in unsuspecting security. We are rapacious, with no symptom that the appetite for gain within us will ever be appeased; and we practise a thousand deceits, that it may be the sooner, and to the greater degree glutted. The ambition of man is unbounded; and he hesitates at no means in the course it prompts him to pursue. In short, man is to man ever the most fearful and dangerous foe: and it is in this view of his nature that the king of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver, "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your race to be the most pernicious generation of little, odious vermin, that were ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." The comprehensive faculties of man therefore, and the refinements and subtlety of his intellect, serve only to render him the more formidable companion, and to hold us up as a species to merited condemnation. It is obvious however that the picture thus drawn is greatly overcharged, that it describes a very small part of our race, and that even as to them it sets before us a few features only, and a partial representation. History--the successive scenes of the drama in which individuals play their part--is a labyrinth, of which no man has as yet exactly seized the clue. It has long since been observed, that the history of the four great monarchies, of tyrannies and free states, of chivalry and clanship, of Mahometanism and the Christian church, of the balance of Europe and the revolution of empires, is little else than a tissue of crimes, exhibiting nations as if they were so many herds of ferocious animals, whose genuine occupation was to tear each other to pieces, and to deform their mother-earth with mangled carcases and seas of blood. But it is not just that we should establish our opinion of human nature purely from the records of history. Man is alternately devoted to tranquillity and to violence. But the latter only affords the proper materials of narration. When he is wrought upon by some powerful impulse, our curiosity is most roused to observe him. We remark his emotions, his energies, his tempest. It is then that he becomes the person of a drama. And, where this disquietude is not the affair of a single individual, but of several persons together, of nations, it is there that history finds her harvest. She goes into the field with all the implements of her industry, and fills her storehouses and magazines with the abundance of her crop. But times of tranquillity and peace furnish her with no materials. They are dismissed in a few slight sentences, and leave no memory behind. Let us divide this spacious earth into equal compartments, and see in which violence, and in which tranquillity prevails. Let us look through the various ranks and occupations of human society, and endeavour to arrive at a conclusion of a similar sort. The soldier by occupation, and the officer who commands him, would seem, when they are employed in their express functions, to be men of strife. Kings and ministers of state have in a multitude of instances fallen under this description. Conquerors, the firebrands of the earth, have sufficiently displayed their noxious propensities. But these are but a small part of the tenantry of the many-peopled globe. Man lives by the sweat of his brow. The teeming earth is given him, that by his labour he may raise from it the means of his subsistence. Agriculture is, at least among civilised nations, the first, and certainly the most indispensible of professions. The profession itself is the emblem of peace. All its occupations, from seed-time to harvest, are tranquil; and there is nothing which belongs to it, that can obviously be applied to rouse the angry passions, and place men in a frame of hostility to each other. Next to the cultivator, come the manufacturer, the artificer, the carpenter, the mason, the joiner, the cabinet-maker, all those numerous classes of persons, who are employed in forming garments for us to wear, houses to live in, and moveables and instruments for the accommodation of the species. All these persons are, of necessity, of a peaceable demeanour. So are those who are not employed in producing the conveniencies of life, but in conducting the affairs of barter and exchange. Add to these, such as are engaged in literature, either in the study of what has already been produced, or in adding to the stock, in science or the liberal arts, in the instructing mankind in religion and their duties, or in the education of youth. "Civility," "civil," are indeed terms which express a state of peaceable occupation, in opposition to what is military, and imply a tranquil frame of mind, and the absence of contention, uproar and violence. It is therefore clear, that the majority of mankind are civil, devoted to the arts of peace, and so far as relates to acts of violence innocent, and that the sons of rapine constitute the exception to the general character. We come into the world under a hard and unpalatable law, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." It is a bitter decree that is promulgated against us, "He that will not work, neither shall he eat." We all of us love to do our own will, and to be free from the manacles of restraint. What our hearts "find us to do," that we are disposed to execute "with all our might." Some men are lovers of strenuous occupation. They build and they plant; they raise splendid edifices, and lay out pleasure-grounds of mighty extent. Or they devote their minds to the acquisition of knowledge; they ----outwatch the bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds, or what vast regions hold The immortal mind. Others again would waste perhaps their whole lives in reverie and idleness. They are constituted of materials so kindly and serene, that their spirits never flag from want of occupation and external excitement. They could lie for ever on a sunny bank, in a condition divided between thinking and no thinking, refreshed by the fanning breeze, viewing the undulations of the soil, and the rippling of the brook, admiring the azure heavens, and the vast, the bold, and the sublime figure of the clouds, yielding themselves occasionally to "thick-coming fancies," and day-dreams, and the endless romances of an undisciplined mind; And find no end, in wandering mazes lost. But all men, alike the busy of constitution and the idle, would desire to follow the impulses of their own minds, unbroken in upon by harsh necessity, or the imperious commands of their fellows. We cannot however, by the resistless law of our existence, live, except the few who by the accident of their birth are privileged to draw their supplies from the labour of others, without exerting ourselves to procure by our efforts or ingenuity the necessaries of food, lodging and attire. He that would obtain them for himself in an uninhabited island, would find that this amounted to a severe tax upon that freedom of motion and thought which would otherwise be his inheritance. And he who has his lot cast in a populous community, exists in a condition somewhat analogous to that of a negro slave, except that he may to a limited extent select the occupation to which he shall addict himself, or may at least starve, in part or in whole, uncontroled, and at his choice. Such is, as it were, the universal lot. 'Tis destiny unshunnable like death: Even then this dire necessity falls on us, When we do quicken. I go forth in the streets, and observe the occupations of other men. I remark the shops that on every side beset my path. It is curious and striking, how vast are the ingenuity and contrivance of human beings, to wring from their fellow-creatures, "from the hard hands of peasants" and artisans, a part of their earnings, that they also may live. We soon become feelingly convinced, that we also must enter into the vast procession of industry, upon pain that otherwise, Like to an entered tide, they all rush by, And leave you hindmost: there you lie, For pavement to the abject rear, o'errun And trampled on. It is through the effect of this necessity, that civilised communities become what they are. We all fall into our ranks. Each one is member of a certain company or squadron. We know our respective places, and are marshaled and disciplined with an exactness scarcely less than that of the individuals of a mighty army. We are therefore little disposed to interrupt the occupations of each other. We are intent upon the peculiar employment to which we have become devoted. We "rise up early, and lie down late," and have no leisure to trouble ourselves with the pursuits of others. Hence of necessity it happens in a civilised community, that a vast majority of the species are innocent, and have no inclination to molest or interrupt each other's avocations. But, as this condition of human society preserves us in comparative innocence, and renders the social arrangement in the midst of which we exist, to a certain degree a soothing and agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and determining "which grain will grow, and which will not," to apply themselves to the redeeming such as are worthy of their care from the oblivious gulph into which the mass of the species is of necessity plunged. It is therefore an ill saying, when applied in the most rigorous extent, "Let every man maintain himself, and be his own provider: why should we help him?" The help however that we should afford to our fellow-men requires of us great discernment in its administration. The deceitfulness of appearances is endless. And nothing can well be at the same time more lamentable and more ludicrous, than the spectacle of those persons, the weaver, the thresher, and the mechanic, who by injudicious patronage are drawn from their proper sphere, only to exhibit upon a larger stage their imbecility and inanity, to shew those moderate powers, which in their proper application would have carried their possessors through life with respect, distorted into absurdity, and used in the attempt to make us look upon a dwarf, as if he were one of the Titans who in the commencement of recorded time astonished the earth. It is also true to a great degree, that those efforts of the human mind are most healthful and vigorous, in which the possessor of talents "administers to himself," and contends with the different obstacles that arise, --------throwing them aside, And stemming them with hearts of controversy. Many illustrious examples however may be found in the annals of literature, of patronage judiciously and generously applied, where men have been raised by the kindness of others from the obscurest situations, and placed on high, like beacons, to illuminate the world. And, independently of all examples, a sound application of the common sense of the human mind would teach us, that the worthies of the earth, though miracles, are not omnipotent, and that a certain aid, from those who by counsel or opulence are enabled to afford it, have oft times produced the noblest effects, have carried on the generous impulse that works within us, and prompted us manfully to proceed, when the weakness of our nature was ready to give in from despair. But the thing that in this place it was most appropriate to say, is, that we ought not quietly to affirm, of the man whose mind nature or education has enriched with extraordinary powers, "Let him maintain himself, and be his own provider: why should we help him?" It is a thing deeply to be regretted, that such a man will frequently be compelled to devote himself to pursuits comparatively vulgar and inglorious, because he must live. Much of this is certainly inevitable. But what glorious things might a man with extraordinary powers effect, were he not hurried unnumbered miles awry by the unconquerable power of circumstances? The life of such a man is divided between the things which his internal monitor strongly prompts him to do, and those which the external power of nature and circumstances compels him to submit to. The struggle on the part of his better self is noble and admirable. The less he gives way, provided he can accomplish the purpose to which he has vowed himself, the more he is worthy of the admiration of the world. If, in consequence of listening too much to the loftier aspirations of his nature, he fails, it is deeply to be regretted--it is a man to a certain degree lost--but surely, if his miscarriage be not caused by undue presumption, or the clouds and unhealthful atmosphere of self-conceit, he is entitled to the affectionate sympathy and sorrow of every generous mind. ESSAY VII. OF THE DURATION OF HUMAN LIFE. The active and industrious portion of the human species in civilised countries, is composed of those who are occupied in the labour of the hand, and in the labour of the head. The following remarks expressly apply only to the latter of these classes, principally to such as are occupied in productive literature. They may however have their use to all persons a considerable portion of whose time is employed in study and contemplation, as, if well founded, they will form no unimportant chapter in the science of the human mind. In relation to all the members of the second class then, I should say, that human life is made up of term and vacation, in other words, of hours that may be intellectually employed, and of hours that cannot be so employed. Human life consists of years, months and days: each day contains twenty-four hours. Of these hours how many belong to the province of intellect? "There is," as Solomon says, "a time for all things." There must be a time for sleep, a time for recreation, a time for exercise, a time for supplying the machine with nourishment, and a time for digestion. When all these demands have been supplied, how many hours will be left for intellectual occupation? These remarks, as I have said, are intended principally to apply to the subject of productive literature. Now, of the hours that remain when all the necessary demands of human life have been supplied, it is but a portion, perhaps a small portion, that can be beneficially, judiciously, employed in productive literature, or literary composition. It is true, that there are many men who will occupy eight, ten, or twelve hours in a day, in the labour of composition. But it may be doubted whether they are wisely so occupied. It is the duty of an author, inasmuch as he is an author, to consider, that he is to employ his pen in putting down that which shall be fit for other men to read. He is not writing a letter of business, a letter of amusement, or a letter of sentiment, to his private friend. He is writing that which shall be perused by as many men as can be prevailed on to become his readers. If he is an author of spirit and ambition, he wishes his productions to be read, not only by the idle, but by the busy, by those who cannot spare time to peruse them but at the expence of some occupations which ought not to be suspended without an adequate occasion. He wishes to be read not only by the frivolous and the lounger, but by the wise, the elegant, and the fair, by those who are qualified to appreciate the merit of a work, who are endowed with a quick sensibility and a discriminating taste, and are able to pass a sound judgment on its beauties and defects. He advances his claim to permanent honours, and desires that his lucubrations should be considered by generations yet unborn. A person, so occupied, and with such aims, must not attempt to pass his crudities upon the public. If I may parody a celebrated aphorism of Quintilian, I would say, "Magna debetur hominibus reverentia(8):" in other words, we should carefully examine what it is that we propose to deliver in a permanent form to the taste and understanding of our species. An author ought only to commit to the press the first fruits of his field, his best and choicest thoughts. He ought not to take up the pen, till he has brought his mind into a fitting tone, and ought to lay it down, the instant his intellect becomes in any degree clouded, and his vital spirits abate of their elasticity. (8) Mankind is to be considered with reverence. There are extraordinary cases. A man may have so thoroughly prepared himself by long meditation and study, he may have his mind so charged with an abundance of thought, that it may employ him for ten or twelve hours consecutively, merely to put down or to unravel the conceptions already matured in his soul. It was in some such way, that Dryden, we are told, occupied a whole night, and to a late hour in the next morning, in penning his Alexander's Feast. But these are the exceptions. In most instances two or three hours are as much as an author can spend at a time in delivering the first fruits of his field, his choicest thoughts, before his intellect becomes in some degree clouded, and his vital spirits abate of their elasticity. Nor is this all. He might go on perhaps for some time longer with a reasonable degree of clearness. But the fertility which ought to be his boast, is exhausted. He no longer sports in the meadows of thought, or revels in the exuberance of imagination, but becomes barren and unsatisfactory. Repose is necessary, and that the soil should be refreshed with the dews of another evening, the sleep of a night, and the freshness and revivifying influence of another morning. These observations lead, by a natural transition, to the question of the true estimate and value of human life, considered as the means of the operations of intellect. A primary enquiry under this head is as to the duration of life: Is it long, or short? The instant this question is proposed, I hear myself replied to from all quarters: What is there so well known as the brevity of human life? "Life is but a span." It is "as a tale that is told." "Man cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." We are "as a sleep; or as grass: in the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth." The foundation of this sentiment is obvious. Men do not live for ever. The longest duration of human existence has an end: and whatever it is of which that may be affirmed, may in some sense be pronounced to be short. The estimation of our existence depends upon the point of view from which we behold it. Hope is one of our greatest enjoyments. Possession is something. But the past is as nothing. Remorse may give it a certain solidity; the recollection of a life spent in acts of virtue may be refreshing. But fruition, and honours, and fame, and even pain, and privations, and torment, when they ere departed, are but like a feather; we regard them as of no account. Taken in this sense, Dryden's celebrated verses are but a maniac's rant: To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day: Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate are mine. Not heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been has been, and I have had my hour. But this way of removing the picture of human life to a certain distance from us, and considering those things which were once in a high degree interesting as frivolous and unworthy of regard, is not the way by which we shall arrive at a true and just estimation of life. Whatever is now past, and is of little value, was once present: and he who would form a sound judgment, must look upon every part of our lives as present in its turn, and not suffer his opinion to be warped by the consideration of the nearness or remoteness of the object he contemplates. One sentence, which has grown into a maxim for ever repeated, is remarkable for the grossest fallacy: Ars longa, vita brevis(9). I would fain know, what art, compared with the natural duration of human life from puberty to old age, is long. (9) Art is long; life is short. If it is intended to say, that no one man can be expected to master all possible arts, or all arts that have at one time or another been the subject of human industry, this indeed is true. But the cause of this does not lie in the limited duration of human life, but in the nature of the faculties of the mind. Human understanding and human industry cannot embrace every thing. When we take hold of one thing, we must let go another. Science and art, if we would pursue them to the furthest extent of which we are capable, must be pursued without interruption. It would therefore be more to the purpose to say, Man cannot be for ever young. In the stream of human existence, different things have their appropriate period. The knowledge of languages can perhaps be most effectually acquired in the season of nonage. At riper years one man devotes himself to one science or art, and another man to another. This man is a mathematician; a second studies music; a third painting. This man is a logician; and that man an orator. The same person cannot be expected to excel in the abstruseness of metaphysical science, and in the ravishing effusions of poetical genius. When a man, who has arrived at great excellence in one department of art or science, would engage himself in another, he will be apt to find the freshness of his mind gone, and his faculties no longer distinguished by the same degree of tenacity and vigour that they formerly displayed. It is with the organs of the brain, as it is with the organs of speech, in the latter of which we find the tender fibres of the child easily accommodating themselves to the minuter inflections and variations of sound, which the more rigid muscles of the adult will for the most part attempt in vain. If again, by the maxim, Ars longa, vita brevis, it is intended to signify, that we cannot in any art arrive at perfection; that in reality all the progress we can make is insignificant; and that, as St. Paul says, we must "not count ourselves to have already attained; but that, forgetting the things that are behind, it becomes us to press forward to the prize of our calling,"--this also is true. But this is only ascribable to the limitation of our faculties, and that even the shadow of perfection which man is capable to reach, can only be attained by the labour of successive generations. The cause does not lie in the shortness of human life, unless we would include in its protracted duration the privilege of being for ever young; to which we ought perhaps to add, that our activity should never be exhausted, the freshness of our minds never abate, and our faculties for ever retain the same degree of tenacity and vigour, as they had in the morning of life, when every thing was new, when all that allured or delighted us was seen accompanied with charms inexpressible, and, as Dryden expresses it(10), "the first sprightly running" of the wine of life afforded a zest never after to be hoped for. (10) Aurengzebe. I return then to the consideration of the alleged shortness of life. I mentioned in the beginning of this Essay, that "human life consists of years, months and days; each day containing twenty-four hours." But, when I said this, I by no means carried on the division so far as it might be carried. It has been calculated that the human mind is capable of being impressed with three hundred and twenty sensations in a second of time.(11) (11) See Watson on Time, Chapter II. "How infinitely rapid is the succession of thought! While I am speaking, perhaps no two ideas are in my mind at the same time, and yet with what facility do I slide from one to another! If my discourse be argumentative, how often do I pass in review the topics of which it consists, before I utter them; and, even while I am speaking, continue the review at intervals, without producing any pause in my discourse! How many other sensations are experienced by me during this period, without so much as interrupting, that is, without materially diverting, the train of my ideas! My eye successively remarks a thousand objects that present themselves. My mind wanders to the different parts of my body, and receives a sensation from the chair on which I sit, or the table on which I lean. It reverts to a variety of things that occurred in the course of the morning, in the course of yesterday, the most remote from, the most unconnected with, the subject that might seem wholly to engross me. I see the window, the opening of a door, the snuffing of a candle. When these most perceptibly occur, my mind passes from one to the other, without feeling the minutest obstacle, or being in any degree distracted by their multiplicity(12)." (12) Political Justice, Book IV, Chapter ix. If this statement should appear to some persons too subtle, it may however prepare us to form a due estimate of the following remarks. "Art is long." No, certainly, no art is long, compared with the natural duration of human life from puberty to old age. There is perhaps no art that may not with reasonable diligence be acquired in three years, that is, as to its essential members and its skilful exercise. We may improve afterwards, but it will be only in minute particulars, and only by fits. Our subsequent advancement less depends upon the continuance of our application, than upon the improvement of the mind generally, the refining of our taste, the strengthening our judgment, and the accumulation of our experience. The idea which prevails among the vulgar of mankind is, that we must make haste to be wise. The erroneousness of this notion however has from time to time been detected by moralists and philosophers; and it has been felt that he who proceeds in a hurry towards the goal, exposes himself to the imminent risk of never reaching it. The consciousness of this danger has led to the adoption of the modified maxim, Festina lente, Hasten, but with steps deliberate and cautious. It would however be a more correct advice to the aspirant, to say, Be earnest in your application, but let your march be vigilant and slow. There is a doggrel couplet which I have met with in a book on elocution: Learn to speak slow: all other graces Will follow in their proper places. I could wish to recommend a similar process to the student in the course of his reading. Toplady, a celebrated methodist preacher of the last age, somewhere relates a story of a coxcomb, who told him that he had read over Euclid's Elements of Geometry one afternoon at his tea, only leaving out the A's and B's and crooked lines, which seemed to be intruded merely to retard his progress. Nothing is more easy than to gabble through a work replete with the profoundest elements of thinking, and to carry away almost nothing, when we have finished. The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose on us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward debate, or require that we should often go back, compare one observation and statement with another, and does not call upon us to combine and knit together the disjecta membra. It is an observation which has often been repeated, that, when we come to read an excellent author a second and a third time, we find in him a multitude of things, that we did not in the slightest degree perceive in a first reading. A careful first reading would have a tendency in a considerable degree to anticipate this following crop. Nothing is more certain than that a schoolboy gathers much of his most valuable instruction when his lesson is not absolutely before him. In the same sense the more mature student will receive most important benefit, when he shuts his book, and goes forth in the field, and ruminates on what he has read. It is with the intellectual, as with the corporeal eye: we must retire to a certain distance from the object we would examine, before we can truly take in the whole. We must view it in every direction, "survey it," as Sterne says, "transversely, then foreright, then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and foreshortenings(13);" and thus only can it be expected that we should adequately comprehend it. (13) Tristram Shandy, Vol. IV, Chap. ii. But the thing it was principally in my purpose to say is, that it is one of the great desiderata of human life, not to accomplish our purposes in the briefest time, to consider "life as short, and art as long," and therefore to master our ends in the smallest number of days or of years, but rather to consider it as an ample field that is spread before us, and to examine how it is to be filled with pleasure, with advantage, and with usefulness. Life is like a lordly garden, which it calls forth all the skill of the artist to adorn with exhaustless variety and beauty; or like a spacious park or pleasure-ground, all of whose inequalities are to be embellished, and whose various capacities of fertilisation, sublimity or grace, are to be turned to account, so that we may wander in it for ever, and never be wearied. We shall perhaps understand this best, if we take up the subject on a limited scale, and, before we consider life in its assigned period of seventy years, first confine our attention to the space of a single day. And we will consider that day, not as it relates to the man who earns his subsistence by the labour of his hands, or to him who is immersed in the endless details of commerce. But we will take the case of the man, the whole of whose day is to be disposed of at his own discretion. The attention of the curious observer has often been called to the tediousness of existence, how our time hangs upon our hands, and in how high estimation the art is held, of giving wings to our hours, and making them pass rapidly and cheerfully away. And moralists of a cynical disposition have poured forth many a sorrowful ditty upon the inconsistency of man, who complains of the shortness of life, at the same time that he is put to the greatest straits how to give an agreeable and pleasant occupation to its separate portions. "Let us hear no more," say these moralists, "of the transitoriness of human existence, from men to whom life is a burthen, and who are willing to assign a reward to him that shall suggest to them an occupation or an amusement untried before." But this inconsistency, if it merits the name, is not an affair of artificial and supersubtle refinement, but is based in the fundamental principles of our nature. It is unavoidable that, when we have reached the close of any great epoch of our existence, and still more when we have arrived at its final term, we should regret its transitory nature, and lament that we have made no more effectual use of it. And yet the periods and portions of the stream of time, as they pass by us, will often be felt by us as insufferably slow in their progress, and we would give no inconsiderable sum to procure that the present section of our lives might come to an end, and that we might turn over a new leaf in the volume of existence. I have heard various men profess that they never knew the minutes that hung upon their hands, and were totally unacquainted with what, borrowing a term from the French language, we call ennui. I own I have listened to these persons with a certain degree of incredulity, always excepting such as earn their subsistence by constant labour, or as, being placed in a situation of active engagement, have not the leisure to feel apathy and disgust. But we are talking here of that numerous class of human beings, who are their own masters, and spend every hour of the day at the choice of their discretion. To these we may add the persons who are partially so, and who, having occupied three or four hours of every day in discharge of some function necessarily imposed on them, at the striking of a given hour go out of school, and employ themselves in a certain industry or sport purely of their own election. To go back then to the consideration of the single day of a man, all of whose hours are at his disposal to spend them well or ill, at the bidding of his own judgment, or the impulse of his own caprice. We will suppose that, when he rises from his bed, he has sixteen hours before him, to be employed in whatever mode his will shall decide. I bar the case of travelling, or any of those schemes for passing the day, which by their very nature take the election out of his hands, and fill up his time with a perpetual motion, the nature of which is ascertained from the beginning. With such a man then it is in the first place indispensibly necessary, that he should have various successive occupations. There is no one study or intellectual enquiry to which a man can apply sixteen hours consecutively, unless in some extraordinary instances which can occur but seldom in the course of a life. And even then the attention will from time to time relax, and the freshness of mental zeal and activity give way, though perhaps, after the lapse of a few minutes they may be revived and brought into action again. In the ordinary series of human existence it is desirable that, in the course of the same day, a man should have various successive occupations. I myself for the most part read in one language at one part of the day, and in another at another. I am then in the best health and tone of spirits, when I employ two or three hours, and no more, in the act of writing and composition. There must also in the sixteen hours be a time for meals. There should be a time for fresh air and bodily exercise. It is in the nature of man, that we should spend a part of every day in the society of our fellows, either at public spectacles and places of concourse, or in the familiar interchange of conversation with one, two, or more persons with whom we can give ourselves up to unrestrained communication. All human life, as I have said, every day of our existence, consists of term and vacation; and the perfection of practical wisdom is to interpose these one with another, so as to produce a perpetual change, a well-chosen relief, and a freshness and elastic tone which may bid defiance to weariness. Taken then in this point of view, what an empire does the man of leisure possess in each single day of his life! He disposes of his hours much in the same manner, as the commander of a company of men whom it is his business to train in the discipline of war. This officer directs one party of his men to climb a mountain, and another to ford or swim a stream which rushes along the valley. He orders this set to rush forward with headlong course, and the other to wheel, and approach by circuitous progress perhaps to the very same point. He marches them to the right and the left. He then dismisses them from the scene of exercise, to furbish their arms, to attend to their accoutrements, or to partake of necessary refection. Not inferior to this is the authority of the man of leisure in disposing of the hours of one single day of his existence. And human life consists of many such days, there being three hundred and sixty-five in each year that we live. How infinitely various may be the occupations of the life of man from puberty to old age! We may acquire languages; we may devote ourselves to arts; we may give ourselves up to the profoundness of science. Nor is any one of these objects incompatible with the others, nor is there any reason why the same man should not embrace many. We may devote one portion of the year to travelling, and another to all the abstractions of study. I remember when I was a boy, looking forward with terror to the ample field of human life, and saying, When I have read through all the books that have been written, what shall I do afterwards? And there is infinitely more sense in this, than in the ludicrous exclamations of men who complain of the want of time, and say that life affords them no space in which to act their imaginings. On the contrary, when a man has got to the end of one art or course of study, he is compelled to consider what he shall do next. And, when we have gone through a cycle of as many acquisitions, as, from the limitation of human faculties, are not destructive of each other, we shall find ourselves frequently reduced to the beginning some of them over again. Nor is this the least agreeable occupation of human leisure. The book that I read when I was a boy, presents quite a new face to me as I advance in the vale of years. The same words and phrases suggest to me a new train of ideas. And it is no mean pleasure that I derive from the singular sensation of finding the same author and the same book, old and yet not old, presenting to me cherished and inestimable recollections, and at the same time communicating mines of wealth, the shaft of which was till now unexplored. The result then of these various observations is to persuade the candid and ingenuous man, to consider life as an important and ample possession, to resolve that it shall be administered with as much judgment and deliberation as a person of true philanthropy and wisdom would administer a splendid income, and upon no occasion so much to think upon the point of in how short a time an interesting pursuit is to be accomplished, as by what means it shall be accomplished in a consummate and masterly style. Let us hear no more, from those who have to a considerable degree the command of their hours, the querulous and pitiful complaint that they have no time to do what they ought to do and would wish to do; but let them feel that they have a gigantic store of minutes and hours and days and months, abundantly sufficient to enable them to effect what it is especially worthy of a noble mind to perform! ESSAY VIII. OF HUMAN VEGETATION. There is another point of view from which we may look at the subject of time as it is concerned with the business of human life, that will lead us to conclusions of a very different sort from those which are set down in the preceding Essay. Man has two states of existence in a striking degree distinguished from each other: the state in which he is found during his waking hours; and the state in which he is during sleep. The question has been agitated by Locke and other philosophers, "whether the soul always thinks," in other words, whether the mind, during those hours in which our limbs lie for the most part in a state of inactivity, is or is not engaged by a perpetual succession of images and impressions. This is a point that can perhaps never be settled. When the empire of sleep ceases, or when we are roused from sleep, we are often conscious that we have been to that moment busily employed with that sort of conceptions and scenes which we call dreams. And at times when, on waking, we have no such consciousness, we can never perhaps be sure that the shock that waked us, had not the effect of driving away these fugitive and unsubstantial images. There are men who are accustomed to say, they never dream. If in reality the mind of man, from the hour of his birth, must by the law of its nature be constantly occupied with sensations or images (and of the contrary we can never be sure), then these men are all their lives in the state of persons, upon whom the shock that wakes them, has the effect of driving away such fugitive and unsubstantial images.--Add to which, there may be sensations in the human subject, of a species confused and unpronounced, which never arrive at that degree of distinctness as to take the shape of what we call dreaming. So much for man in the state of sleep. But during our waking hours, our minds are very differently occupied at different periods of the day. I would particularly distinguish the two dissimilar states of the waking man, when the mind is indolent, and when it is on the alert. While I am writing this Essay, my mind may be said to be on the alert. It is on the alert, so long as I am attentively reading a book of philosophy, of argumentation, of eloquence, or of poetry. It is on the alert, so long as I am addressing a smaller or a greater audience, and endeavouring either to amuse or instruct them. It is on the alert, while in silence and solitude I endeavour to follow a train of reasoning, to marshal and arrange a connected set of ideas, or in any other way to improve my mind, to purify my conceptions, and to advance myself in any of the thousand kinds of intellectual process. It is on the alert, when I am engaged in animated conversation, whether my cue be to take a part in the reciprocation of alternate facts and remarks in society, or merely to sit an attentive listener to the facts and remarks of others. This state of the human mind may emphatically be called the state of activity and attention. So long as I am engaged in any of the ways here enumerated, or in any other equally stirring mental occupations which are not here set down, my mind is in a frame of activity. But there is another state in which men pass their minutes and hours, that is strongly contrasted with this. It depends in some men upon constitution, and in others upon accident, how their time shall be divided, how much shall be given to the state of activity, and how much to the state of indolence. In an Essay I published many years ago there is this passage. "The chief point of difference between the man of talent and the man without, consists in the different ways in which their minds are employed during the same interval. They are obliged, let us suppose, to walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner. The dull man goes straight forward; he has so many furlongs to traverse. He observes if he meets any of his acquaintance; he enquires respecting their health and their family. He glances perhaps the shops as he passes; he admires the fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn. If he experiences any flights of fancy, they are of a short extent; of the same nature as the flights of a forest-bird, clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass the rest of his life in a farm-yard. On the other hand the man of talent gives full scope to his imagination. He laughs and cries. Unindebted to the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole soul is employed. He enters into nice calculations; he digests sagacious reasonings. In imagination he declaims or describes, impressed with the deepest sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest rapture. He makes a thousand new and admirable combinations. He passes through a thousand imaginary scenes, tries his courage, tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes gradually prepared to meet almost any of the many-coloured events of human life. He consults by the aid of memory the books he has read, and projects others for the future instruction and delight of mankind. If he observe the passengers, he reads their countenances, conjectures their past history, and forms a superficial notion of their wisdom or folly, their virtue or vice, their satisfaction or misery. If he observe the scenes that occur, it is with the eye of a connoisseur or an artist. Every object is capable of suggesting to him a volume of reflections. The time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to Hyde-Park-Corner. In almost every other respect it is dissimilar;(14)." (14) Enquirer, Part 1, Essay V. This passage undoubtedly contains a true description of what may happen, and has happened. But there lurks in this statement a considerable error. It has appeared in the second Essay of this volume, that there is not that broad and strong line of distinction between the wise man and the dull that has often been supposed. We are all of us by turns both the one and the other. Or, at least, the wisest man that ever existed spends a portion of his time in vacancy and dulness; and the man, whose faculties are seemingly the most obtuse, might, under proper management from the hour of his birth, barring those rare exceptions from the ordinary standard of mind which do not deserve to be taken into the account, have proved apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his organisation especially fitted him(15). (15) See above, Essay 3. Many men without question, in a walk of the same duration as that above described between Temple-Bar and Hyde-Park-Corner, have passed their time in as much activity, and amidst as strong and various excitements, as those enumerated in the passage above quoted. But the lives of all men, the wise, and those whom by way of contrast we are accustomed to call the dull, are divided between animation and comparative vacancy; and many a man, who by the bursts of his genius has astonished the world, and commanded the veneration of successive ages, has spent a period of time equal to that occupied by a walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner, in a state of mind as idle, and as little affording materials for recollection, as the dullest man that ever breathed the vital air. The two states of man which are here attempted to be distinguished, are, first, that in which reason is said to fill her throne, in which will prevails, and directs the powers of mind or of bodily action in one channel or another; and, secondly, that in which these faculties, tired of for ever exercising their prerogatives, or, being awakened as it were from sleep, and having not yet assumed them, abandon the helm, even as a mariner might be supposed to do, in a wide sea, and in a time when no disaster could be apprehended, and leave the vessel of the mind to drift, exactly as chance might direct. To describe this last state of mind I know not a better term that can be chosen, than that of reverie. It is of the nature of what I have seen denominated BROWN STUDY(16) a species of dozing and drowsiness, in which all men spend a portion of the waking part of every day of their lives. Every man must be conscious of passing minutes, perhaps hours of the day, particularly when engaged in exercise in the open air, in this species of neutrality and eviration. It is often not unpleasant at the time, and leaves no sinking of the spirits behind. It is probably of a salutary nature, and may be among the means, in a certain degree beneficial like sleep, by which the machine is restored, and the man comes forth from its discipline reinvigorated, and afresh capable of his active duties. (16) Norris, and Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language. This condition of our nature has considerably less vitality in it, than we experience in a complete and perfect dream. In dreaming we are often conscious of lively impressions, of a busy scene, and of objects and feelings succeeding each other with rapidity. We sometimes imagine ourselves earnestly speaking: and the topics we treat, and the words we employ, are supplied to us with extraordinary fluency. But the sort of vacancy and inoccupation of which I here treat, has a greater resemblance to the state of mind, without distinct and clearly unfolded ideas, which we experience before we sink into sleep. The mind is in reality in a condition, more properly accessible to feeling and capable of thought, than actually in the exercise of either the one or the other. We are conscious of existence and of little more. We move our legs, and continue in a peripatetic state; for the man who has gone out of his house with a purpose to walk, exercises the power of volition when he sets out, but proceeds in his motion by a semi-voluntary act, by a sort of vis inertiae, which will not cease to operate without an express reason for doing so, and advances a thousand steps without distinctly willing any but the first. When it is necessary to turn to the right or the left, or to choose between any two directions on which he is called upon to decide, his mind is so far brought into action as the case may expressly require, and no further. I have here instanced in the case of the peripatetic: but of how many classes and occupations of human life may not the same thing be affirmed? It happens to the equestrian, as well as to him that walks on foot. It occurs to him who cultivates the fruits of the earth, and to him who is occupied in any of the thousand manufactures which are the result of human ingenuity. It happens to the soldier in his march, and to the mariner on board his vessel. It attends the individuals of the female sex through all their diversified modes of industry, the laundress, the housemaid, the sempstress, the netter of purses, the knotter of fringe, and the worker in tambour, tapestry and embroidery. In all, the limbs or the fingers are employed mechanically; the attention of the mind is only required at intervals; and the thoughts remain for the most part in a state of non-excitation and repose. It is a curious question, but extremely difficult of solution, what portion of the day of every human creature must necessarily be spent in this sort of intellectual indolence. In the lower classes of society its empire is certainly very great; its influence is extensive over a large portion of the opulent and luxurious; it is least among those who are intrusted in the more serious affairs of mankind, and among the literary and the learned, those who waste their lives, and consume the midnight-oil, in the search after knowledge. It appeared with sufficient clearness in the immediately preceding Essay, that the intellect cannot be always on the stretch, nor the bow of the mind for ever bent. In the act of composition, unless where the province is of a very inferior kind, it is likely that not more than two or three hours at a time can be advantageously occupied. But in literary labour it will often occur, that, in addition to the hours expressly engaged in composition, much time may be required for the collecting materials, the collating of authorities, and the bringing together a variety of particulars, so as to sift from the mass those circumstances which may best conduce to the purpose of the writer. In all these preliminary and inferior enquiries it is less necessary that the mind should be perpetually awake and on the alert, than in the direct office of composition. The situation is considerably similar of the experimental philosopher, the man who by obstinate and unconquerable application resolves to wrest from nature her secrets, and apply them to the improvement of social life, or to the giving to the human mind a wider range or a more elevated sphere. A great portion of this employment consists more in the motion of the hands and the opportune glance of the eye, than in the labour of the head, and allows to the operator from time to time an interval of rest from the momentous efforts of invention and discovery, and the careful deduction of consequences in the points to be elucidated. There is a distinction, sufficiently familiar to all persons who occupy a portion of their time in reading, that is made between books of instruction, and books of amusement. From the student of mathematics or any of the higher departments of science, from the reader of books of investigation and argument, an active attention is demanded. Even in the perusal of the history of kingdoms and nations, or of certain memorable periods of public affairs, we can scarcely proceed with any satisfaction, unless in so far as we collect our thoughts, compare one part of the narrative with another, and hold the mind in a state of activity. We are obliged to reason while we read, and in some degree to construct a discourse of our own, at the same time that we follow the statements of the author before us. Unless we do this, the sense and spirit of what we read will be apt to slip from under our observation, and we shall by and by discover that we are putting together words and sounds only, when we purposed to store our minds with facts and reflections. We apprehended not the sense of the writer even when his pages were under our eye, and of consequence have nothing laid up in the memory after the hour of reading is completed. In works of amusement it is otherwise, and most especially in writings of fiction. These are sought after with avidity by the idle, because for the most part they are found to have the virtue of communicating impressions to the reader, even while his mind remains in a state of passiveness. He finds himself agreeably affected with fits of mirth or of sorrow, and carries away the facts of the tale, at the same time that he is not called upon for the act of attention. This is therefore one of the modes of luxury especially cultivated in a highly civilized state of society. The same considerations will also explain to us the principal part of the pleasure that is experienced by mankind in all states of society from public shews and exhibitions. The spectator is not called upon to exert himself; the amusement and pleasure come to him, while he remains voluptuously at his ease; and it is certain that the exertion we make when we are compelled to contribute to, and become in part the cause of our own entertainment, is more than the human mind is willing to sustain, except at seasons in which we are specially on the alert and awake. This is further one of the causes why men in general feel prompted to seek the society of their fellows. We are in part no doubt called upon in select society to bring our own information along with us, and a certain vein of wit, humour or narrative, that we may contribute our proportion to the general stock. We read the newspapers, the newest publications, and repair to places of fashionable amusement and resort; partly that we may at least be upon a par with the majority of the persons we are likely to meet. But many do not thus prepare themselves, nor does perhaps any one upon all occasions. There is another state of human existence in which we expressly dismiss from our hands the reins of the mind, and suffer our minutes and our hours to glide by us undisciplined and at random. This is, generally speaking, the case in a period of sickness. We have no longer the courage to be on the alert, and to superintend the march of our thoughts. It is the same with us for the most part when at any time we lie awake in our beds. To speak from my own experience, I am in a restless and uneasy state while I am alone in my sitting-room, unless I have some occupation of my own choice, writing or reading, or any of those employments the pursuit of which was chosen at first, and which is more or less under the direction of the will afterwards. But when awake in my bed, either in health or sickness, I am reasonably content to let my thoughts flow on agreeably to those laws of association by which I find them directed, without giving myself the trouble to direct them into one channel rather than another, or to marshal and actively to prescribe the various turns and mutations they may be impelled to pursue. It is thus that we are sick; and it is thus that we die. The man that guides the operations of his own mind, is either to a certain degree in bodily health, or in that health of mind which shall for a longer or shorter time stand forward as the substitute of the health of the body. When we die, we give up the game, and are not disposed to contend any further. It is a very usual thing to talk of the struggles of a man in articulo mortis. But this is probably, like so many other things that occur to us in this sublunary stage, a delusion. The bystander mistakes for a spontaneous contention and unwillingness to die, what is in reality nothing more than an involuntary contraction and convulsion of the nerves, to which the mind is no party, and is even very probably unconscious.--But enough of this, the final and most humiliating state through which mortal men may be called on to pass. I find then in the history of almost every human creature four different states or modes of existence. First, there is sleep. In the strongest degree of contrast to this there is the frame in which we find ourselves, when we write! or invent and steadily pursue a consecutive train of thinking unattended with the implements of writing, or read in some book of science or otherwise which calls upon us for a fixed attention, or address ourselves to a smaller or greater audience, or are engaged in animated conversation. In each of these occupations the mind may emphatically be said to be on the alert. But there are further two distinct states or kinds of mental indolence. The first is that which we frequently experience during a walk or any other species of bodily exercise, where, when the whole is at an end, we scarcely recollect any thing in which the mind has been employed, but have been in what I may call a healthful torpor, where our limbs have been sufficiently in action to continue our exercise, we have felt the fresh breeze playing on our cheeks, and have been in other respects in a frame of no unpleasing neutrality. This may be supposed greatly to contribute to our bodily health. It is the holiday of the faculties: and, as the bow, when it has been for a considerable time unbent, is said to recover its elasticity, so the mind, after a holiday of this sort, comes fresh, and with an increased alacrity, to those occupations which advance man most highly in the scale of being. But there is a second state of mental indolence, not so complete as this, but which is still indolence, inasmuch as in it the mind is passive, and does not assume the reins of empire. Such is the state in which we are during our sleepless hours in bed; and in this state our ideas, and the topics that successively occur, appear to go forward without remission, while it seems that it is this busy condition of the mind, and the involuntary activity of our thoughts, that prevent us from sleeping. The distinction then between these two sorts of indolence is, that in the latter our ideas are perfectly distinct, are attended with consciousness, and can, as we please, be called up to recollection. This therefore is not what we understand by reverie. In these waking hours which are spent by us in bed, the mind is no less busy, than it is in sleep during a dream. The other and more perfect sort of mental indolence, is that which we often experience during our exercise in the open air. This is of the same nature as the condition of thought which seems to be the necessary precursor of sleep, and is attended with no precise consciousness. By the whole of the above statement we are led to a new and a modified estimate of the duration of human life. If by life we understand mere susceptibility, a state of existence in which we are accessible at any moment to the onset of sensation, for example, of pain--in this sense our life is commensurate, or nearly commensurate, to the entire period, from the quickening of the child in the womb, to the minute at which sense deserts the dying man, and his body becomes an inanimate mass. But life, in the emphatical sense, and par excellence, is reduced to much narrower limits. From this species of life it is unavoidable that we should strike off the whole of the interval that is spent in sleep; and thus, as a general rule, the natural day of twenty-four hours is immediately reduced to sixteen. Of these sixteen hours again, there is a portion that falls under the direction of will and attention, and a portion that is passed by us in a state of mental indolence. By the ordinary and least cultivated class of mankind, the husbandman, the manufacturer, the soldier, the sailor, and the main body of the female sex, much the greater part of every day is resigned to a state of mental indolence. The will does not actively interfere, and the attention is not roused. Even the most intellectual beings of our species pass no inconsiderable portion of every day in a similar condition. Such is our state for the most part during the time that is given to bodily exercise, and during the time in which we read books of amusement merely, or are employed in witnessing public shews and exhibitions. That portion of every day of our existence which is occupied by us with a mind attentive and on the alert, I would call life in a transcendant sense. The rest is scarcely better than a state of vegetation. And yet not so either. The happiest and most valuable thoughts of the human mind will sometimes come when they are least sought for, and we least anticipated any such thing. In reading a romance, in witnessing a performance at a theatre, in our idlest and most sportive moods, a vein in the soil of intellect will sometimes unexpectedly be broken up, "richer than all the tribe" of contemporaneous thoughts, that shall raise him to whom it occurs, to a rank among his species altogether different from any thing he had looked for. Newton was led to the doctrine of gravitation by the fall of an apple, as he indolently reclined under the tree on which it grew. "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies." Polemon, when intoxicated, entered the school of Xenocrates, and was so struck with the energy displayed by the master, and the thoughts he delivered, that from that moment he renounced the life of dissipation he had previously led, and applied himself entirely to the study of philosophy. --But these instances are comparatively of rare occurrence, and do not require to be taken into the account. It is still true therefore for the most part, that not more than eight hours in the day are passed by the wisest and most energetic, with a mind attentive and on the alert. The remainder is a period of vegetation only. In the mean time we have all of us undoubtedly to a certain degree the power of enlarging the extent of the period of transcendant life in each day of our healthful existence, and causing it to encroach upon the period either of mental indolence or of sleep.--With the greater part of the human species the whole of their lives while awake, with the exception of a few brief and insulated intervals, is spent in a passive state of the intellectual powers. Thoughts come and go, as chance, or some undefined power in nature may direct, uninterfered with by the sovereign will, the steersman of the mind. And often the understanding appears to be a blank, upon which if any impressions are then made, they are like figures drawn in the sand which the next tide obliterates, or are even lighter and more evanescent than this. Let me add, that the existence of the child for two or three years from the period of his birth, is almost entirely a state of vegetation. The impressions that are made upon his sensorium come and go, without either their advent or departure being anticipated, and without the interference of the will. It is only under some express excitement, that the faculty of will mounts its throne, and exercises its empire. When the child smiles, that act is involuntary; but, when he cries, will presently comes to mix itself with the phenomenon. Wilfulness, impatience and rebellion are infallible symptoms of a mind on the alert. And, as the child in the first stages of its existence puts forth the faculty of will only at intervals, so for a similar reason this period is but rarely accompanied with memory, or leaves any traces of recollection for our after-life. There are other memorable states of the intellectual powers, which if I did not mention, the survey here taken would seem to be glaringly imperfect. The first of these is madness. In this humiliating condition of our nature the sovereignty of reason is deposed: Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray. The mind is in a state of turbulence and tempest in one instant, and in another subsides into the deepest imbecility; and, even when the will is occasionally roused, the link which preserved its union with good sense and sobriety is dissolved, and the views by which it has the appearance of being regulated, are all based in misconstruction and delusion. Next to madness occur the different stages of spleen, dejection and listlessness. The essence of these lies in the passiveness and neutrality of the intellectual powers. In as far as the unhappy sufferer could be roused to act, the disease would be essentially diminished, and might finally be expelled. But long days and months are spent by the patient in the midst of all harassing imaginations, and an everlasting nightmare seems to sit on the soul, and lock up its powers in interminable inactivity. Almost the only interruption to this, is when the demands of nature require our attention, or we pay a slight and uncertain attention to the decencies of cleanliness and attire. In all these considerations then we find abundant occasion to humble the pride and vain-glory of man. But they do not overturn the principles delivered in the preceding Essay respecting the duration of human life, though they certainly interpose additional boundaries to limit the prospects of individual improvement. ESSAY IX. OF LEISURE. The river of human life is divided into two streams; occupation and leisure--or, to express the thing more accurately, that occupation, which is prescribed, and may be called the business of life, and that occupation, which arises contingently, and not so much of absolute and set purpose, not being prescribed: such being the more exact description of these two divisions of human life, inasmuch as the latter is often not less earnest and intent in its pursuits than the former. It would be a curious question to ascertain which of these is of the highest value. To this enquiry I hear myself loudly and vehemently answered from all hands in favour of the first. "This," I am told by unanimous acclamation, "is the business of life." The decision in favour of what we primarily called occupation, above what we called leisure, may in a mitigated sense be entertained as true. Man can live with little or no leisure, for millions of human beings do so live: but the species to which we belong, and of consequence the individuals of that species, cannot exist as they ought to exist, without occupation. Granting however the paramount claims that occupation has to our regard, let us endeavour to arrive at a just estimate of the value of leisure. It has been said by some one, with great appearance of truth, that schoolboys learn as much, perhaps more, of beneficial knowledge in their hours of play, as in their hours of study. The wisdom of ages has been applied to ascertain what are the most desirable topics for the study of the schoolboy. They are selected for the most part by the parent. There are few parents that do not feel a sincere and disinterested desire for the welfare of their children. It is an unquestionable maxim, that we are the best judges of that of which we have ourselves had experience; and all parents have been children. It is therefore idle and ridiculous to suppose that those studies which have for centuries been chosen by the enlightened mature for the occupation of the young, have not for the most part been well chosen. Of these studies the earliest consist in the arts of reading and writing. Next follows arithmetic, with perhaps some rudiments of algebra and geometry. Afterward comes in due order the acquisition of languages, particularly the dead languages; a most fortunate occupation for those years of man, in which the memory is most retentive, and the reasoning powers have yet acquired neither solidity nor enlargement. Such are the occupations of the schoolboy in his prescribed hours of study. But the schoolboy is cooped up in an apartment, it may be with a number of his fellows. He is seated at a desk, diligently conning the portion of learning that is doled out to him, or, when he has mastered his lesson, reciting it with anxious brow and unassured lips to the senior, who is to correct his errors, and pronounce upon the sufficiency of his industry. All this may be well: but it is a new and more exhilarating spectacle that presents itself to our observation, when he is dismissed from his temporary labours, and rushes impetuously out to the open air, and gives free scope to his limbs and his voice, and is no longer under the eye of a censor that shall make him feel his subordination and dependence. Meanwhile the question under consideration was, not in which state he experienced the most happiness, but which was productive of the greatest improvement. The review of the human subject is conveniently divided under the heads of body and mind. There can be no doubt that the health of the body is most promoted by those exercises in which the schoolboy is engaged during the hours of play. And it is further to be considered that health is required, not only that we may be serene, contented and happy, but that we may be enabled effectually to exert the faculties of the mind. But there is another way, in which we are called upon to consider the division of the human subject under the heads of body and mind. The body is the implement and instrument of the mind, the tool by which most of its purposes are to be effected. We live in the midst of a material world, or of what we call such. The greater part of the pursuits in which we engage, are achieved by the action of the limbs and members of the body upon external matter. Our communications with our fellow-men are all of them carried on by means of the body. Now the action of the limbs and members of the body is infinitely improved by those exercises in which the schoolboy becomes engaged during his hours of play. In the first place it is to be considered that we do those things most thoroughly and in the shortest time, which are spontaneous, the result of our own volition; and such are the exercises in which the schoolboy engages during this period. His heart and soul are in what he does. The man or the boy must be a poor creature indeed, who never does any thing but as he is bid by another. It is in his voluntary acts and his sports, that he learns the skilful and effective use of his eye and his limbs. He selects his mark, and he hits it. He tries again and again, effort after effort, and day after day, till he has surmounted the difficulty of the attempt, and the rebellion of his members. Every articulation and muscle of his frame is called into action, till all are obedient to the master-will; and his limbs are lubricated and rendered pliant by exercise, as the limbs of the Grecian athleta were lubricated with oil. Thus he acquires, first dexterity of motion, and next, which is of no less importance, a confidence in his own powers, a consciousness that he is able to effect what he purposes, a calmness and serenity which resemble the sweeping of the area, and scattering of the saw-dust, upon which the dancer or the athlete is to exhibit with grace, strength and effect. So much for the advantages reaped by the schoolboy during his hours of play as to the maturing his bodily powers, and the improvement of those faculties of his mind which more immediately apply to the exercise of his bodily powers. But, beside this, it is indispensible to the well-being and advantage of the individual, that he should employ the faculties of his mind in spontaneous exertions. I do not object, especially during the period of nonage, to a considerable degree of dependence and control. But his greatest advancement, even then, seems to arise from the interior impulses of his mind. The schoolboy exercises his wit, and indulges in sallies of the thinking principle. This is wholsome; this is fresh; it has twice the quickness, clearness and decision in it, that are to be found in those acts of the mind which are employed about the lessons prescribed to him. In school our youth are employed about the thoughts, the acts and suggestions of other men. This is all mimicry, and a sort of second-hand business. It resembles the proceeding of the fresh-listed soldier at drill; he has ever his eye on his right-hand man, and does not raise his arm, nor advance his foot, nor move his finger, but as he sees another perform the same motion before him. It is when the schoolboy proceeds to the playground, that he engages in real action and real discussion. It is then that he is an absolute human being and a genuine individual. The debates of schoolboys, their discussions what they shall do, and how it shall be done, are anticipations of the scenes of maturer life. They are the dawnings of committees, and vestries, and hundred-courts, and ward-motes, and folk-motes, and parliaments. When boys consult when and where their next cricket-match shall be played, it may be regarded as the embryo representation of a consult respecting a grave enterprise to be formed, or a colony to be planted. And, when they enquire respecting poetry and prose, and figures and tropes, and the dictates of taste, this happily prepares them for the investigations of prudence, and morals, and religious principles, and what is science, and what is truth. It is thus that the wit of man, to use the word in the old Saxon sense, begins to be cultivated. One boy gives utterance to an assertion; and another joins issue with him, and retorts. The wheels of the engine of the brain are set in motion, and, without force, perform their healthful revolutions. The stripling feels himself called upon to exert his presence of mind, and becomes conscious of the necessity of an immediate reply. Like the unfledged bird, he spreads his wings, and essays their powers. He does not answer, like a boy in his class, who tasks his understanding or not, as the whim of the moment shall prompt him, where one boy honestly performs to the extent of his ability, and others disdain the empire assumed over them, and get off as cheaply as they can. He is no longer under review, but is engaged in real action. The debate of the schoolboy is the combat of the intellectual gladiator, where he fences and parries and thrusts with all the skill and judgment he possesses. There is another way in which the schoolboy exercises his powers during his periods of leisure. He is often in society; but he is ever and anon in solitude. At no period of human life are our reveries so free and untrammeled, as at the period here spoken of. He climbs the mountain-cliff; and penetrates into the depths of the woods. His joints are well strung; he is a stranger to fatigue. He rushes down the precipice, and mounts again with ease, as though he had the wings of a bird. He ruminates, and pursues his own trains of reflection and discovery, "exhausting worlds," as it appears to him, "and then imagining new." He hovers on the brink of the deepest philosophy, enquiring how came I here, and to what end. He becomes a castle-builder, constructing imaginary colleges and states, and searching out the businesses in which they are to be employed, and the schemes by which they are to be regulated. He thinks what he would do, if he possessed uncontrolable strength, if he could fly, if he could make himself invisible. In this train of mind he cons his first lessons of liberty and independence. He learns self-reverence, and says to himself, I also am an artist, and a maker. He ruffles himself under the yoke, and feels that he suffers foul tyranny when he is driven, and when brute force is exercised upon him, to compel him to a certain course, or to chastise his faults, imputed or real. Such are the benefits of leisure to the schoolboy: and they are not less to man when arrived at years of discretion. It is good for us to have some regular and stated occupation. Man may be practically too free; this is frequently the case with those who have been nurtured in the lap of opulence and luxury. We were sent into the world under the condition, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." And those who, by the artificial institutions of society, are discharged from this necessity, are placed in a critical and perilous situation. They are bound, if they would consult their own well-being, to contrive for themselves a factitious necessity, that may stand them in the place of that necessity which is imposed without appeal on the vast majority of their brethren. But, if it is desirable that every man should have some regular and stated occupation, so it is certainly not less desirable, that every man should have his seasons of relaxation and leisure. Unhappy is the wretch, whose condition it is to be perpetually bound to the oar, and who is condemned to labour in one certain mode, during all the hours that are not claimed by sleep, or as long as the muscles of his frame, or the fibres of his fingers will enable him to persevere. "Apollo himself," says the poet, "does not always bend the bow." There should be a season, when the mind is free as air, when not only we should follow without restraint any train of thinking or action, within the bounds of sobriety, and that is not attended with injury to others, that our own minds may suggest to us, but should sacrifice at the shrine of intellectual liberty, and spread our wings, and take our flight into untried regions. It is good for man that he should feel himself at some time unshackled and autocratical, that he should say, This I do, because it is prescribed to me by the conditions without which I cannot exist, or by the election which in past time I deliberately made; and this, because it is dictated by the present frame of my spirit, and is therefore that in which the powers my nature has entailed upon me may be most fully manifested. In addition to which we are to consider, that a certain variety and mutation of employments is best adapted to humanity. When my mind or my body seems to be overwrought by one species of occupation, the substitution of another will often impart to me new life, and make me feel as fresh as if no labour had before engaged me. For all these reasons it is to be desired, that we should possess the inestimable privilege of leisure, that in the revolving hours of every day a period should arrive, at which we should lay down the weapons of our labour, and engage in a sport that may be no less active and strenuous than the occupation which preceded it. A question, which deserves our attention in this place, is, how much of every day it behoves us to give to regular and stated occupation, and how much is the just and legitimate province of leisure. It has been remarked in a preceding Essay(17), that, if my main and leading pursuit is literary composition, two or three hours in the twenty-four will often be as much as can advantageously and effectually be so employed. But this will unavoidably vary according to the nature of the occupation: the period above named may be taken as the MINIMUM. (17) See above, Essay 7. Such, let us say, is the portion of time which the man of letters is called on to devote to literary composition. It may next be fitting to enquire as to the humbler classes of society, and those persons who are engaged in the labour of the hands, how much time they ought to be expected to consume in their regular and stated occupations, and how much would remain to them for relaxation and leisure. It has been said(18), that half an hour in the day given by every member of the community to manual labour, might be sufficient for supplying the whole with the absolute necessaries of life. But there are various considerations that would inevitably lengthen this period. In a community which has made any considerable advance in the race of civilisation, many individuals must be expected to be excused from any portion of manual labour. It is not desirable that any community should be contented to supply itself with necessaries only. There are many refinements in life, and many advances in literature and the arts, which indispensibly conduce to the rendering man in society a nobler and more exalted creature than he could otherwise be; and these ought not to be consigned to neglect. (18) Political Justice, Book VIII, Chap. VI. On the other hand however it is certain, that much of the ostentation and a multitude of the luxuries which subsist in European and Asiatic society are just topics of regret, and that, if ever those improvements in civilisation take place which philosophy has essayed to delineate, there would be a great abridgment of the manual labour that we now see around us, and the humbler classes of the community would enter into the inheritance of a more considerable portion of leisure than at present falls to their lot. But it has been much the habit, for persons not belonging to the humbler classes of the community, and who profess to speculate upon the genuine interests of human society, to suppose, however certain intervals of leisure may conduce to the benefit of men whose tastes have been cultivated and refined, and who from education have many resources of literature and reflection at all times at their beck, yet that leisure might prove rather pernicious than otherwise to the uneducated and the ignorant. Let us enquire then how these persons would be likely to employ the remainder of their time, if they had a greater portion of leisure than they at present enjoy.--I would add, that the individuals of the humbler classes of the community need not for ever to merit the appellation of the uneducated and ignorant. In the first place, they would engage, like the schoolboy, in active sports, thereby giving to their limbs, which, in rural occupation and mechanical labour, are somewhat too monotonously employed, and contract the stiffness and experience the waste of a premature old age, the activity and freedom of an athlete, a cricketer, or a hunter. Nor do these occupations only conduce to the health of the body, they also impart a spirit and a juvenile earnestness to the mind. In the next place, they may be expected to devote a part of the day, more than they do at present, to their wives and families, cultivating the domestic affections, watching the expanding bodies and minds of their children, leading them on in the road of improvement, warning them against the perils with which they are surrounded, and observing with somewhat of a more jealous and parental care, what it is for which by their individual qualities they are best adapted, and in what particular walk of life they may most advantageously be engaged. The father and the son would grow in a much greater degree friends, anticipating each other's wishes, and sympathising in each other's pleasures and pains. Thirdly, one infallible consequence of a greater degree of leisure in the lower classes would be that reading would become a more common propensity and amusement. It is the aphorism of one of the most enlightened of my contemporaries, "The schoolmaster is abroad:" and many more than at present would desire to store up in their little hoard a certain portion of the general improvement. We should no longer have occasion to say, But knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unrol. Nor should we be incited to fear that ever wakeful anticipation of the illiberal, that, by the too great diffusion of the wisdom of the wise, we might cease to have a race of men adapted to the ordinary pursuits of life. Our ploughmen and artificers, who obtained the improvements of intellect through the medium of leisure, would have already received their destination, and formed their habits, and would be disposed to consider the new lights that were opened upon them, as the ornament of existence, not its substance. Add to which, as leisure became more abundant, and the opportunities of intellectual improvement increased, they would have less motive to repine at their lot. It is principally while knowledge and information are new, that they are likely to intoxicate the brain of those to whose share they have fallen; and, when they are made a common stock upon which all men may draw, sound thinking and sobriety may be expected to be the general result. One of the scenes to which the leisure of the laborious classes is seen to induce them to resort, is the public-house; and it is inferred that, if their leisure were greater, a greater degree of drunkenness, dissipation and riot would inevitably prevail. In answer to this anticipation, I would in the first place assert, that the merits and demerits of the public-house are very unjustly rated by the fastidious among the more favoured orders of society. We ought to consider that the opportunities and amusements of the lower orders of society are few. They do not frequent coffee-houses; theatres and places of public exhibition are ordinarily too expensive for them; and they cannot engage in rounds of visiting, thus cultivating a private and familiar intercourse with the few whose conversation might be most congenial to them. We certainly bear hard upon persons in this rank of society, if we expect that they should take all the severer labour, and have no periods of unbending and amusement. But in reality what occurs in the public-house we are too much in the habit of calumniating. If we would visit this scene, we should find it pretty extensively a theatre of eager and earnest discussion. It is here that the ardent and "unwashed artificer," and the sturdy husbandman, compare notes and measure wits with each other. It is their arena of intellectual combat, the ludus literarius of their unrefined university. It is here they learn to think. Their minds are awakened from the sleep of ignorance; and their attention is turned into a thousand channels of improvement. They study the art of speaking, of question, allegation and rejoinder. They fix their thought steadily on the statement that is made, acknowledge its force, or detect its insufficiency. They examine the most interesting topics, and form opinions the result of that examination. They learn maxims of life, and become politicians. They canvas the civil and criminal laws of their country, and learn the value of political liberty. They talk over measures of state, judge of the intentions, sagacity and sincerity of public men, and are likely in time to become in no contemptible degree capable of estimating what modes of conducting national affairs, whether for the preservation of the rights of all, or for the vindication and assertion of justice between man and man, may be expected to be crowned with the greatest success: in a word, they thus become, in the best sense of the word, citizens. As to excess in drinking, the same thing may be expected to occur here, as has been remarked of late years in better company in England. In proportion as the understanding is cultivated, men are found to be less the victims of drinking and the grosser provocatives of sense. The king of Persia of old made it his boast that he could drink large quantities of liquor with greater impunity than any of his subjects. Such was not the case with the more polished Greeks. In the dark ages the most glaring enormities of that kind prevailed. Under our Charles the Second coarse dissipation and riot characterised the highest circles. Rochester, the most accomplished man and the greatest wit of our island, related of himself that, for five years together, he could not affirm that for any one day he had been thoroughly sober. In Ireland, a country less refined than our own, the period is not long past, when on convivial occasions the master of the house took the key from his door, that no one of his guests might escape without having had his dose. No small number of the contemporaries of my youth fell premature victims to the intemperance which was then practised. Now wine is merely used to excite a gayer and livelier tone of the spirits; and inebriety is scarcely known in the higher circles. In like manner, it may readily be believed that, as men in the lower classes of society become less ignorant and obtuse, as their thoughts are less gross, as they wear off the vestigia ruris, the remains of a barbarous state, they will find less need to set their spirits afloat by this animal excitement, and will devote themselves to those thoughts and that intercourse which shall inspire them with better and more honourable thoughts of our common nature. ESSAY X. OF IMITATION AND INVENTION. Of the sayings of the wise men of former times none has been oftener repeated than that of Solomon, "The thing that hath been, is that which is; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun." The books of the Old Testament are apparently a collection of the whole literary remains of an ancient and memorable people, whose wisdom may furnish instruction to us, and whose poetry abounds in lofty flights and sublime imagery. How this collection came indiscriminately to be considered as written by divine inspiration, it is difficult to pronounce. The history of the Jews, as contained in the Books of Kings and of Chronicles, certainly did not require the interposition of the Almighty for its production; and the pieces we receive as the compositions of Solomon have conspicuously the air of having emanated from a conception entirely human. In the book of Ecclesiastes, from which the above sentence is taken, are many sentiments not in accordance with the religion of Christ. For example; "That which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: all go to one place; all are of the dust, and turn to dust again. Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his works." And again, "The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing; their love, and their hatred, and their envy are perished; neither have they any more a reward." Add to this, "Wherefore I praise the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive: yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been." There can therefore be no just exception taken against our allowing ourselves freely to canvas the maxim cited at the head of this Essay. It certainly contains a sufficient quantity of unquestionable truth, to induce us to regard it as springing from profound observation, and comprehensive views of what is acted "under the sun." A wise man would look at the labours of his own species, in much the same spirit as he would view an ant-hill through a microscope. He would see them tugging a grain of corn up a declivity; he would see the tracks that are made by those who go, and who return; their incessant activity; and would find one day the copy of that which went before; and their labours ending in nothing: I mean, in nothing that shall carry forward the improvement of the head and the heart, either in the individual or society, or that shall add to the conveniences of life, or the better providing for the welfare of communities of men. He would smile at their earnestness and zeal, all spent in supplying the necessaries of the day, or, at most, providing for the revolution of the seasons, or for that ephemeral thing we call the life of man. Few things can appear more singular, when duly analysed, than that articulated air, which we denominate speech. It is not to be wondered at that we are proud of the prerogative, which so eminently distinguishes us from the rest of the animal creation. The dog, the cat, the horse, the bear, the lion, all of them have voice. But we may almost consider this as their reproach. They can utter for the greater part but one monotonous, eternal sound. The lips, the teeth, the palate, the throat, which in man are instruments of modifying the voice in such endless variety, are in this respect given to them in vain: while all the thoughts that occur, at least to the bulk of mankind, we are able to express in words, to communicate facts, feelings, passions, sentiments, to discuss, to argue, to agree, to issue commands on the one part, and report the execution on the other, to inspire lofty conceptions, to excite the deepest feeling of commiseration, and to thrill the soul with extacy, almost too mighty to be endured. Yet what is human speech for the most part but mere imitation? In the most obvious sense this stands out on the surface. We learn the same words, we speak the same language, as our elders. Not only our words, but our phrases are the same. We are like players, who come out as if they were real persons, but only utter what is set down for them. We represent the same drama every day; and, however stale is the eternal repetition, pass it off upon others, and even upon ourselves, as if it were the suggestion of the moment. In reality, in rural or vulgar life, the invention of a new phrase ought to be marked down among the memorable things in the calendar. We afford too much honour to ordinary conversation, when we compare it to the exhibition of the recognised theatres, since men ought for the most part to be considered as no more than puppets. They perform the gesticulations; but the words come from some one else, who is hid from the sight of the general observer. And not only the words, but the cadence: they have not even so much honour as players have, to choose the manner they may deem fittest by which to convey the sense and the passion of what they speak. The pronunciation, the dialect, all, are supplied to them, and are but a servile repetition. Our tempers are merely the work of the transcriber. We are angry, where we saw that others were angry; and we are pleased, because it is the tone to be pleased. We pretend to have each of us a judgment of our own: but in truth we wait with the most patient docility, till he whom we regard as the leader of the chorus gives us the signal, Here you are to applaud, and Here you are to condemn. What is it that constitutes the manners of nations, by which the people of one country are so eminently distinguished from the people of another, so that you cannot cross the channel from Dover to Calais, twenty-one miles, without finding yourself in a new world? Nay, I need not go among the subjects of another government to find examples of this; if I pass into Ireland, Scotland or Wales, I see myself surrounded with a new people, all of whose characters are in a manner cast in one mould, and all different from the citizens of the principal state and from one another. We may go further than this. Not only nations, but classes of men, are contrasted with each other. What can be more different than the gentry of the west end of this metropolis, and the money-making dwellers in the east? From them I will pass to Billingsgate and Wapping. What more unlike than a soldier and a sailor? the children of fashion that stroll in St. James's and Hyde Park, and the care-worn hirelings, that recreate themselves, with their wives and their brats, with a little fresh air on a Sunday near Islington? The houses of lords and commons have each their characteristic manners. Each profession has its own, the lawyer, the divine, and the man of medicine. We are all apes, fixing our eyes upon a model, and copying him, gesture by gesture. We are sheep, rushing headlong through the gap, when the bell-wether shews us the way. We are choristers, mechanically singing in a certain key, and giving breath to a certain tone. Our religion, our civil practices, our political creed, are all imitation. How many men are there, that have examined the evidences of their religious belief, and can give a sound "reason of the faith that is in them?" When I was a child, I was taught that there were four religions in the world, the Popish, the Protestant, the Mahometan, the Pagan. It is a phenomenon to find the man, who has held the balance steadily, and rendered full and exact justice to the pretensions of each of these. No: tell me the longitude and latitude in which a man is born, and I will tell you his religion. By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they so were bred: The priest continues what the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man. And, if this happens, where we are told our everlasting salvation is at issue, we may easily judge of the rest. The author, with one of whose dicta I began this Essay, has observed, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever." It is a maxim of the English constitution, that "the king never dies;" and the same may with nearly equal propriety be observed of every private man, especially if he have children. "Death," say the writers of natural history, "is the generator of life:" and what is thus true of animal corruption, may with small variation be affirmed of human mortality. I turn off my footman, and hire another; and he puts on the livery of his predecessor: he thinks himself somebody; but he is only a tenant. The same thing is true, when a country-gentleman, a noble, a bishop, or a king dies. He puts off his garments, and another puts them on. Every one knows the story of the Tartarian dervise, who mistook the royal palace for a caravansera, and who proved to his majesty by genealogical deduction, that he was only a lodger. In this sense the mutability, which so eminently characterises every thing sublunary, is immutability under another name. The most calamitous, and the most stupendous scenes are nothing but an eternal and wearisome repetition: executions, murders, plagues, famine and battle. Military execution, the demolition of cities, the conquest of nations, have been acted a hundred times before. The mighty conqueror, who "smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke," who "sat in the seat of God, shewing himself that he was God," and assuredly persuaded himself that he was doing something to be had in everlasting remembrance, only did that which a hundred other vulgar conquerors had done in successive ages of the world, whose very names have long since perished from the records of mankind. Thus it is that the human species is for ever engaged in laborious idleness. We put our shoulder to the wheel, and raise the vehicle out of the mire in which it was swallowed, and we say, I have done something; but the same feat under the same circumstances has been performed a thousand times before. We make what strikes us as a profound observation; and, when fairly analysed, it turns out to be about as sagacious, as if we told what's o'clock, or whether it is rain or sunshine. Nothing can be more delightfully ludicrous, than the important and emphatical air with which the herd of mankind enunciate the most trifling observations. With much labour we are delivered of what is to us a new thought; and, after a time, we find the same in a musty volume, thrown by in a corner, and covered with cobwebs and dust. This is pleasantly ridiculed in the well known exclamation, "Deuce take the old fellows who gave utterance to our wit, before we ever thought of it!" The greater part of the life of the mightiest genius that ever existed is spent in doing nothing, and saying nothing. Pope has observed of Shakespear's plays, that, "had all the speeches been printed without the names of the persons, we might have applied them with certainty to every speaker." To which another critic has rejoined, that that was impossible, since the greater part of what every man says is unstamped with peculiarity. We have all more in us of what belongs to the common nature of man, than of what is peculiar to the individual. It is from this beaten, turnpike road, that the favoured few of mankind are for ever exerting themselves to escape. The multitude grow up, and are carried away, as grass is carried away by the mower. The parish-register tells when they were born, and when they died: "known by the ends of being to have been." We pass away, and leave nothing behind. Kings, at whose very glance thousands have trembled, for the most part serve for nothing when their breath has ceased, but as a sort of distance-posts in the race of chronology. "The dull swain treads on" their relics "with his clouted shoon." Our monuments are as perishable as ourselves; and it is the most hopeless of all problems for the most part, to tell where the mighty ones of the earth repose. All men are aware of the frailty of life, and how short is the span assigned us. Hence every one, who feels, or thinks he feels the power to do so, is desirous to embalm his memory, and to be thought of by a late posterity, to whom his personal presence shall be unknown. Mighty are the struggles; everlasting the efforts. The greater part of these we well know are in vain. It is Aesop's mountain in labour: "Dire was the tossing, deep the groans:" and the result is a mouse. But is it always so? This brings us back to the question: "Is there indeed nothing new under the sun?" Most certainly there is something that is new. If, as the beast dies, so died man, then indeed we should be without hope. But it is his distinguishing faculty, that he can leave something behind, to testify that he has lived. And this is not only true of the pyramids of Egypt, and certain other works of human industry, that time seems to have no force to destroy. It is often true of a single sentence, a single word, which the multitudinous sea is incapable of washing away: Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis Annorum series, et fuga temporum. It is the characteristic of the mind and the heart of man, that they are progressive. One word, happily interposed, reaching to the inmost soul, may "take away the heart of stone, and introduce a heart of flesh." And, if an individual may be thus changed, then his children, and his connections, to the latest page of unborn history. This is the true glory of man, that "one generation doth not pass away, and another come, velut unda supervenit undam;" but that we leave our improvements behind us. What infinite ages of refinement on refinement, and ingenuity on ingenuity, seem each to have contributed its quota, to make up the accommodations of every day of civilised man; his table, his chair, the bed he lies on, the food he eats, the garments that cover him! It has often been said, that the four quarters of the world are put under contribution, to provide the most moderate table. To this what mills, what looms, what machinery of a thousand denominations, what ship-building, what navigation, what fleets are required! Man seems to have been sent into the world a naked, forked, helpless animal, on purpose to call forth his ingenuity to supply the accommodations that may conduce to his well-being. The saying, that "there is nothing new under the sun," could never have been struck out, but in one of the two extreme states of man, by the naked savage, or by the highly civilised beings among whom the perfection of refinement has produced an artificial feeling of uniformity. The thing most obviously calculated to impress us with a sense of the power, and the comparative sublimity of man, is, if we could make a voyage of some duration in a balloon, over a considerable tract of the cultivated and the desert parts of the earth. A brute can scarcely move a stone out of his way, if it has fallen upon the couch where he would repose. But man cultivates fields, and plants gardens; he constructs parks and canals; he turns the course of rivers, and stretches vast artificial moles into the sea; he levels mountains, and builds a bridge, joining in giddy height one segment of the Alps to another; lastly, he founds castles, and churches, and towers, and distributes mighty cities at his pleasure over the face of the globe. "The first earth has passed away, and another earth has come; and all things are made new." It is true, that the basest treacheries, the most atrocious cruelties, butcheries, massacres, violations of all the restraints of decency, and all the ties of nature, fields covered with dead bodies, and flooded with human gore, are all of them vulgar repetitions of what had been acted countless times already. If Nero or Caligula thought to perpetrate that which should stand unparalleled, they fell into the grossest error. The conqueror, who should lay waste vast portions of the globe, and destroy mighty cities, so that "thorns should come up in the palaces, and nettles in the fortresses thereof, and they should be a habitation of serpents, and a court for owls, and the wild beasts of the desert should meet there," would only do what Tamerlane, and Aurengzebe, and Zingis, and a hundred other conquerors, in every age and quarter of the world, had done before. The splendour of triumphs, and the magnificence of courts, are so essentially vulgar, that history almost disdains to record them. And yet there is something that is new, and that by the reader of discernment is immediately felt to be so. We read of Moses, that he was a child of ordinary birth, and, when he was born, was presently marked, as well as all the male children of his race, for destruction. He was unexpectedly preserved; and his first act, when he grew up, was to slay an Egyptian, one of the race to whom all his countrymen were slaves, and to fly into exile. This man, thus friendless and alone, in due time returned, and by the mere energy of his character prevailed upon his whole race to make common cause with him, and to migrate to a region, in which they should become sovereign and independent. He had no soldiers, but what were made so by the ascendancy of his spirit no counsellors but such as he taught to be wise, no friends but those who were moved by the sentiment they caught from him. The Jews he commanded were sordid and low of disposition, perpetually murmuring against his rule, and at every unfavourable accident calling to remembrance "the land of Egypt, where they had sat by the fleshpots, and were full." Yet over this race he retained a constant mastery, and finally made of them a nation whose customs and habits and ways of thinking no time has availed to destroy. This was a man then, that possessed the true secret to make other men his creatures, and lead them with an irresistible power wherever he pleased. This history, taken entire, has probably no parallel in the annals of the world. The invasion of Greece by the Persians, and its result, seem to constitute an event that stands alone among men. Xerxes led against this little territory an army of 5,280,000 men. They drank up rivers, and cut their way through giant-mountains. They were first stopped at Thermopylae by Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. They fought for a country too narrow to contain the army by which the question was to be tried. The contest was here to be decided between despotism and liberty, whether there is a principle in man, by which a handful of individuals, pervaded with lofty sentiments, and a conviction of what is of most worth in our nature, can defy the brute force, and put to flight the attack, of bones, joints and sinews, though congregated in multitudes, numberless as the waves of the sea, or the sands on its shore. The flood finally rolled back: and in process of time Alexander, with these Greeks whom the ignorance of the East affected to despise, founded another universal monarchy on the ruins of Persia. This is certainly no vulgar history. Christianity is another of those memorable chapters in the annals of mankind, to which there is probably no second. The son of a carpenter in a little, rocky country, among a nation despised and enslaved, undertook to reform the manners of the people of whom he was a citizen. The reformation he preached was unpalatable to the leaders of the state; he was persecuted; and finally suffered the death reserved for the lowest malefactors, being nailed to a cross. He was cut off in the very beginning of his career, before he had time to form a sect. His immediate representatives and successors were tax-gatherers and fishermen. What could be more incredible, till proved by the event, than that a religion thus begun, should have embraced in a manner the whole civilised world, and that of its kingdom there should be no visible end? This is a novelty in the history of the world, equally if we consider it as brought about by the immediate interposition of the author of all things, or regard it, as some pretend to do, as happening in the course of mere human events. Rome, "the eternal city," is likewise a subject that stands out from the vulgar history of the human race. Three times, in three successive forms, has she been the mistress of the world. First, by the purity, the simplicity, the single-heartedness, the fervour and perseverance of her original character she qualified herself to subdue all the nations of mankind. Next, having conquered the earth by her virtue and by the spirit of liberty, she was able to maintain her ascendancy for centuries under the emperors, notwithstanding all her astonishing profligacy and anarchy. And, lastly, after her secular ascendancy had been destroyed by the inroads of the northern barbarians, she rose like the phoenix from her ashes, and, though powerless in material force, held mankind in subjection by the chains of the mind, and the consummateness of her policy. Never was any thing so admirably contrived as the Catholic religion, to subdue the souls of men by the power of its worship over the senses, and, by its contrivances in auricular confession, purgatory, masses for the dead, and its claim magisterially to determine controversies, to hold the subjects it had gained in everlasting submission. The great principle of originality is in the soul of man. And here again we may recur to Greece, the parent of all that is excellent in art. Painting, statuary, architecture, poetry, in their most exquisite and ravishing forms, originated in this little province. Is not the Iliad a thing new, and that will for ever remain new? Whether it was written by one man, as I believe, or, as the levellers of human glory would have us think, by many, there it stands: all the ages of the world present us nothing that can come in competition with it. Shakespear is another example of unrivalled originality. His fame is like the giant-rivers of the world: the further it flows, the wider it spreads out its stream, and the more marvellous is the power with which it sweeps along. But, in reality, all poetry and all art, that have a genuine claim to originality, are new, the smallest, as well as the greatest. It is the mistake of dull minds only, to suppose that every thing has been said, that human wit is exhausted, and that we, who have unfortunately fallen upon the dregs of time, have no alternative left, but either to be silent, or to say over and over again, what has been well said already. There remain yet immense tracts of invention, the mines of which have been untouched. We perceive nothing of the strata of earth, and the hidden fountains of water, that we travel over, unconscious of the treasures that are immediately within our reach, till some person, endowed with the gift of a superior sagacity, comes into the country, who appears to see through the opake and solid mass, as we see through the translucent air, and tells us of things yet undiscovered, and enriches us with treasures, of which we had been hitherto entirely ignorant. The nature of the human mind, and the capabilities of our species are in like manner a magazine of undiscovered things, till some mighty genius comes to break the surface, and shew us the wonderful treasures that lay beneath uncalled for and idle. Human character is like the contents of an ample cabinet, brought together by the untired zeal of some curious collector, who tickets his rarities with numbers, and has a catalogue in many volumes, in which are recorded the description and qualities of the things presented to our view. Among the most splendid examples of character which the genius of man has brought to light, are Don Quixote and his trusty squire, sir Roger de Coverley, Parson Adams, Walter Shandy and his brother Toby. Who shall set bounds to the everlasting variety of nature, as she has recorded her creations in the heart of man? Most of these instances are recent, and sufficiently shew that the enterprising adventurer, who would aspire to emulate the illustrious men from whose writings these examples are drawn, has no cause to despair. Vulgar observers pass carelessly by a thousand figures in the crowded masquerade of human society, which, when inscribed on the tablet by the pencil of a master, would prove not less wondrous in the power of affording pleasure, nor less rich as themes for inexhaustible reflection, than the most admirable of these. The things are there, and all that is wanting is an eye to perceive, and a pen to record them. As to a great degree we may subscribe to the saying of the wise man, that "there is nothing new under the sun," so in a certain sense it may also be affirmed that nothing is old. Both of these maxims may be equally true. The prima materia, the atoms of which the universe is composed, is of a date beyond all record; and the figures which have yet been introduced into the most fantastic chronology, may perhaps be incompetent to represent the period of its birth. But the ways in which they may be compounded are exhaustless. It is like what the writers on the Doctrine of Chances tell us of the throwing of dice. How many men now exist on the face of the earth? Yet, if all these were brought together, and if, in addition to this, we could call up all the men that ever lived, it may be doubted, whether any two would be found so much alike, that a clear-sighted and acute observer might not surely distinguish the one from the other. Leibnitz informs us, that no two leaves of a tree exist in the most spacious garden, that, upon examination, could be pronounced perfectly similar(19). (19) See above, Essay 2. The true question is not, whether any thing can be found that is new, but whether the particulars in which any thing is new may not be so minute and trifling, as scarcely to enter for any thing, into that grand and comprehensive view of the whole, in which matters of obvious insignificance are of no account. But, if art and the invention of the human mind are exhaustless, science is even more notoriously so. We stand but on the threshold of the knowledge of nature, and of the various ways in which physical power may be brought to operate for the accommodation of man. This is a business that seems to be perpetually in progress; and, like the fall of bodies by the power of gravitation, appears to gain in momentum, in proportion as it advances to a greater distance from the point at which the impulse was given. The discoveries which at no remote period have been made, would, if prophesied of, have been laughed to scorn by the ignorant sluggishness of former generations; and we are equally ready to regard with incredulity the discoveries yet unmade, which will be familiar to our posterity. Indeed every man of a capacious and liberal mind is willing to admit, that the progress of human understanding in science, which is now going on, is altogether without any limits that by the most penetrating genius can be assigned. It is like a mighty river, that flows on for ever and for ever, as far as the words, "for ever," can have a meaning to the comprehension of mortals. The question that remains is, our practicable improvement in literature and morals, and here those persons who entertain a mean opinion of human nature, are constantly ready to tell us that it will be found to amount to nothing. However we may be continually improving in mechanical knowledge and ingenuity, we are assured by this party, that we shall never surpass what has already been done in poetry and literature, and, which is still worse, that, however marvellous may be our future acquisitions in science and the application of science, we shall be, as much as ever, the creatures of that vanity, ostentation, opulence and the spirit of exclusive accumulation, which has hitherto, in most countries (not in all countries), generated the glaring inequality of property, and the oppression of the many for the sake of pampering the folly of the few. There is another circumstance that may be mentioned, which, particularly as regards the question of repetition and novelty that is now under consideration, may seem to operate in an eminent degree in favour of science, while it casts a most discouraging veil over poetry and the pure growth of human fancy and invention. Poetry is, after all, nothing more than new combinations of old materials. Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuit prius in sensu. The poet has perhaps in all languages been called a maker, a creator: but this seems to be a vain-glorious and an empty boast. He is a collector of materials only, which he afterwards uses as best he may be able. He answers to the description I have heard given of a tailor, a man who cuts to pieces whatever is delivered to him from the loom, that he may afterwards sew it together again. The poet therefore, we may be told, adds nothing to the stock of ideas and conceptions already laid up in the storehouse of mind. But the man who is employed upon the secrets of nature, is eternally in progress; day after day he delivers in to the magazine of materials for thinking and acting, what was not there before; he increases the stock, upon which human ingenuity and the arts of life are destined to operate. He does not, as the poet may be affirmed by his censurers to do, travel for ever in a circle, but continues to hasten towards a goal, while at every interval we may mark how much further he has proceeded from the point at which his race began. Much may be said in answer to this, and in vindication and honour of the poet and the artist. All that is here alleged to their disadvantage, is in reality little better than a sophism. The consideration of the articles he makes use of, does not in sound estimate detract from the glories of which he is the artificer. Materiem superat opus. He changes the nature of what he handles; all that he touches is turned into gold. The manufacture he delivers to us is so new, that the thing it previously was, is no longer recognisable. The impression that he makes upon the imagination and the heart, the impulses that he communicates to the understanding and the moral feeling, are all his own; and, "if there is any thing lovely and of good report, if there is any virtue and any praise," he may well claim our applauses and our thankfulness for what he has effected. There is a still further advantage that belongs to the poet and the votarist of polite literature, which ought to be mentioned, as strongly calculated to repress the arrogance of the men of science, and the supercilious contempt they are apt to express for those who are engrossed by the pursuits of imagination and taste. They are for ever talking of the reality and progressiveness of their pursuits, and telling us that every step they take is a point gained, and gained for the latest posterity, while the poet merely suits himself to the taste of the men among whom he lives, writes up to the fashion of the day, and, as our manners turn, is sure to be swept away to the gulph of oblivion. But how does the matter really stand? It is to a great degree the very reverse of this. The natural and experimental philosopher has nothing sacred and indestructible in the language and form in which he delivers truths. New discoveries and experiments come, and his individual terms and phrases and theories perish. One race of natural philosophers does but prepare the way for another race, which is to succeed. They "blow the trumpet, and give out the play." And they must be contented to perish before the brighter knowledge, of which their efforts were but the harbingers. The Ptolemaic system gave way to Tycho Brahe, and his to that of Copernicus. The vortices of Descartes perished before the discoveries of Newton; and the philosophy of Newton already begins to grow old, and is found to have weak and decaying parts mixed with those which are immortal and divine. In the science of mind Aristotle and Plato are set aside; the depth of Malebranche, and the patient investigation of Locke have had their day; more penetrating, and concise, and lynx-eyed reasoners of our own country have succeeded; the German metaphysicians seem to have thrust these aside; and it perhaps needs no great degree of sagacity to foresee, that Kant and Fichte will at last fare no better than those that went before them. But the poet is immortal. The verses of Homer are of workmanship no less divine, than the armour of his own Achilles. His poems are as fresh and consummate to us now, as they were to the Greeks, when the old man of Chios wandered in person through the different cities, rehearsing his rhapsodies to the accompaniment of his lute. The language and the thoughts of the poet are inextricably woven together; and the first is no more exposed to decay and to perish than the last. Presumptuous innovators have attempted to modernise Chaucer, and Spenser, and other authors, whose style was supposed to have grown obsolete. But true taste cannot endure the impious mockery. The very words that occurred to these men, when the God descended, and a fire from heaven tingled in all their veins, are sacred, are part of themselves; and you may as well attempt to preserve the man when you have deprived him of all his members, as think to preserve the poet when you have taken away the words that he spoke. No part of his glorious effusions must perish; and "the hairs of his head are all numbered." ESSAY XI. OF SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE. NO question has more memorably exercised the ingenuity of men who have speculated upon the structure of the human mind, than that of the motives by which we are actuated in our intercourse with our fellow-creatures. The dictates of a plain and unsophisticated understanding on the subject are manifest; and they have been asserted in the broadest way by the authors of religion, the reformers of mankind, and all persons who have been penetrated with zeal and enthusiasm for the true interests of the race to which they belong. "The end of the commandment," say the authors of the New Testament, "is love." "This is the great commandment of the law, Thou shalt love thy maker with all thy heart; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." "For none of us liveth to himself; and no man dieth to himself." The sentiments of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for so many centuries as their institutions retained their original purity, were cast in a mould of a similar nature. A Spartan was seldom alone; they were always in society with each other. The love of their country and of the public good was their predominant passion, they did not imagine that they belonged to themselves, but to the state. After the battle of Leuctra, in which the Spartans were defeated by the Thebans, the mothers of those who were slain congratulated one another, and went to the temples to thank the Gods, that their children had done their duty; while the relations of those who survived the defeat were inconsolable. The Romans were not less distinguished by their self-denying patriotism. It was in this spirit that Brutus put his two sons to death for conspiring against their country. It was in this spirit that the Fabii perished at their fort on the Cremera, and the Decii devoted themselves for the public. The rigour of self-denial in a true Roman approached to a temper which moderns are inclined to denominate savage. In the times of the ancient republics the impulse of the citizens was to merge their own individuality in the interests of the state. They held it their duty to live but for their country. In this spirit they were educated; and the lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years. In a more recent period we have learned to model our characters by a different standard. We seldom recollect the society of which we are politically members, as a whole, but are broken into detached parties, thinking only for the most part of ourselves and our immediate connections and attachments. This change in the sentiments and manners of modern times has among its other consequences given birth to a new species of philosophy. We have been taught to affirm, that we can have no express and pure regard for our fellow-creatures, but that all our benevolence and affection come to us through the strainers of a gross or a refined self-love. The coarser adherents of this doctrine maintain, that mankind are in all cases guided by views of the narrowest self-interest, and that those who advance the highest claims to philanthropy, patriotism, generosity and self-sacrifice, are all the time deceiving others, or deceiving themselves, and use a plausible and high-sounding language merely, that serves no other purpose than to veil from observation "that hideous sight, a naked human heart." The more delicate and fastidious supporters of the doctrine of universal self-love, take a different ground. They affirm that "such persons as talk to us of disinterestedness and pure benevolence, have not considered with sufficient accuracy the nature of mind, feeling and will. To understand," they say, "is one thing, and to choose another." The clearest proposition that ever was stated, has, in itself, no tendency to produce voluntary action on the part of the percipient. It can be only something apprehended as agreeable or disagreeable to us, that can operate so as to determine the will. Such is the law of universal nature. We act from the impulse of our own desires and aversions; and we seek to effect or avert a thing, merely because it is viewed by us as an object of gratification or the contrary. The virtuous man and the vicious are alike governed by the same principle; and it is therefore the proper business of a wise instructor of youth, and of a man who would bring his own sentiments and feelings into the most praise-worthy frame, to teach us to find our interest and gratification in that which shall be most beneficial to others." When we proceed to examine the truth of these statements, it certainly is not strictly an argument to say, that the advocate of self-love on either of these hypotheses cannot consistently be a believer in Christianity, or even a theist, as theism is ordinarily understood. The commandments of the author of the Christian religion are, as we have seen, purely disinterested: and, especially if we admit the latter of the two explanations of self-love, we shall be obliged to confess, on the hypothesis of this new philosophy, that the almighty author of the universe never acts in any of his designs either of creation or providence, but from a principle of self-love. In the mean time, if this is not strictly an argument, it is however but fair to warn the adherents of the doctrine I oppose, of the consequences to which their theory leads. It is my purpose to subvert that doctrine by means of the severest demonstration; but I am not unwilling, before I begin, to conciliate, as far as may be, the good-will of my readers to the propositions I proceed to establish. I will therefore further venture to add, that, upon the hypothesis of self-love, there can be no such thing as virtue. There are two circumstances required, to entitle an action to be denominated virtuous. It must have a tendency to produce good rather than evil to the race of man, and it must have been generated by an intention to produce such good. The most beneficent action that ever was performed, if it did not spring from the intention of good to others, is not of the nature of virtue. Virtue, where it exists in any eminence, is a species of conduct, modelled upon a true estimate of the good intended to be produced. He that makes a false estimate, and prefers a trivial and partial good to an important and comprehensive one, is vicious(20). (20) Political Justice, Book 11, Chap. IV. It is admitted on all hands, that it is possible for a man to sacrifice his own existence to that of twenty others. But the advocates of the doctrine of self-love must say, that he does this that he may escape from uneasiness, and because he could not bear to encounter the inward upbraiding with which he would be visited, if he acted otherwise. This in reality would change his action from an act of virtue to an act of vice. So far as belongs to the real merits of the case, his own advantage or pleasure is a very insignificant consideration, and the benefit to be produced, suppose to a world, is inestimable. Yet he falsely and unjustly prefers the first, and views the latter as trivial; nay, separately taken, as not entitled to the smallest regard. If the dictates of impartial justice be taken into the account, then, according to the system of self-love, the best action that ever was performed, may, for any thing we know, have been the action, in the whole world, of the most exquisite and deliberate injustice. Nay, it could not have been otherwise, since it produced the greatest good, and therefore was the individual instance, in which the greatest good was most directly postponed to personal gratification(21). Such is the spirit of the doctrine I undertake to refute. (21) Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. X. But man is not in truth so poor and pusillanimous a creature as this system would represent. It is time however to proceed to the real merits of the question, to examine what in fact is the motive which induces a good man to elect a generous mode of proceeding. Locke is the philosopher, who, in writing on Human Understanding, has specially delivered the doctrine, that uneasiness is the cause which determines the will, and urges us to act. He says(22), "The motive we have for continuing in the same state, is only the present satisfaction we feel in it; the motive to change is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change of state, or upon any new action, but some uneasiness. This is the great motive that works on the mind." (22) Book II, Chap. XXI, Sect. 29. It is not my concern to enquire, whether Locke by this statement meant to assert that self-love is the only principle of human action. It has at any rate been taken to express the doctrine which I here propose to refute. And, in the first place, I say, that, if our business is to discover the consideration entertained by the mind which induces us to act, this tells us nothing. It is like the case of the Indian philosopher(23), who, being asked what it was that kept the earth in its place, answered, that it was supported by an elephant, and that elephant again rested on a tortoise. He must be endowed with a slender portion of curiosity, who, being told that uneasiness is that which spurs on the mind to act, shall rest satisfied with this explanation, and does not proceed to enquire, what makes us uneasy? (23) Locke on Understanding, Book 11, Chap. XIII, Sect. 19. An explanation like this is no more instructive, than it would be, if, when we saw a man walking, or grasping a sword or a bludgeon, and we enquired into the cause of this phenomenon, any one should inform us that he walks, because he has feet, and he grasps, because he has hands. I could not commodiously give to my thoughts their present form, unless I had been previously furnished with pens and paper. But it would be absurd to say, that my being furnished with pens and paper, is the cause of my writing this Essay on Self-love and Benevolence. The advocates of self-love have, very inartificially and unjustly, substituted the abstract definition of a voluntary agent, and made that stand for the motive by which he is prompted to act. It is true, that we cannot act without the impulse of desire or uneasiness; but we do not think of that desire and uneasiness; and it is the thing upon which the mind is fixed that constitutes our motive. In the boundless variety of the acts, passions and pursuits of human beings, it is absurd on the face of it to say that we are all governed by one motive, and that, however dissimilar are the ends we pursue, all this dissimilarity is the fruit of a single cause. One man chooses travelling, another ambition, a third study, a fourth voluptuousness and a mistress. Why do these men take so different courses? Because one is partial to new scenes, new buildings, new manners, and the study of character. Because a second is attracted by the contemplation of wealth and power. Because a third feels a decided preference for the works of Homer, or Shakespear, or Bacon, or Euclid. Because a fourth finds nothing calculated to stir his mind in comparison with female beauty, female allurements, or expensive living. Each of these finds the qualities he likes, intrinsically in the thing he chooses. One man feels himself strongly moved, and raised to extacy, by the beauties of nature, or the magnificence of architecture. Another is ravished with the divine excellencies of Homer, or of some other of the heroes of literature. A third finds nothing delights him so much as the happiness of others, the beholding that happiness increased, and seeing pain and oppression and sorrow put to flight. The cause of these differences is, that each man has an individual internal structure, directing his partialities, one man to one thing, and another to another. Few things can exceed the characters of human beings in variety. There must be something abstractedly in the nature of mind, which renders it accessible to these varieties. For the present we will call it taste. One man feels his spirits regaled with the sight of those things which constitute wealth, another in meditating the triumphs of Alexander or Caesar, and a third in viewing the galleries of the Louvre. Not one of these thinks in the outset of appropriating these objects to himself; not one of them begins with aspiring to be the possessor of vast opulence, or emulating the triumphs of Caesar, or obtaining in property the pictures and statues the sight of which affords him so exquisite delight. Even the admirer of female beauty, does not at first think of converting this attractive object into a mistress, but on the contrary desires, like Pygmalion, that the figure he beholds might become his solace and companion, because he had previously admired it for itself. Just so the benevolent man is an individual who finds a peculiar delight in contemplating the contentment, the peace and heart's ease of other men, and sympathises in no ordinary degree with their sufferings. He rejoices in the existence and diffusion of human happiness, though he should not have had the smallest share in giving birth to the thing he loves. It is because such are his tastes, and what above all things he prefers, that he afterwards becomes distinguished by the benevolence of his conduct. The reflex act of the mind, which these new philosophers put forward as the solution of all human pursuits, rarely presents itself but to the speculative enquirer in his closet. The savage never dreams of it. The active man, engaged in the busy scenes of life, thinks little, and on rare occasions of himself, but much, and in a manner for ever, of the objects of his pursuit. Some men are uniform in their character, and from the cradle to the grave prefer the same objects that first awakened their partialities. Other men are inconsistent and given to change, are "every thing by starts, and nothing long." Still it is probable that, in most cases, he who performs an act of benevolence, feels for the time that he has a peculiar delight in contemplating the good of his fellow-man. The doctrine of the modern philosophers on this point, is in many ways imbecil and unsound. It is inauspicious to their creed, that the reflex act of the mind is purely the affair of experience. Why did the liberal-minded man perform his first act of benevolence? The answer of these persons ought to be, because the recollection of a generous deed is a source of the truest delight. But there is an absurdity on the face of this solution. We do not experimentally know the delight which attends the recollection of a generous deed, till a generous deed has been performed by us. We do not learn these things from books. And least of all is this solution to the purpose, when the business is to find a solution that suits the human mind universally, the unlearned as well as the learned, the savage as well as the sage. And surely it is inconsistent with all sound reasoning, to represent that as the sole spring of our benevolent actions, which by the very terms will not fit the first benevolent act in which any man engaged. The advocates of the doctrine of "self-love the source of all our actions," are still more puzzled, when the case set before them is that of the man, who flies, at an instant's warning, to save the life of the child who has fallen into the river, or the unfortunate whom he beholds in the upper story of a house in flames. This man, as might be illustrated in a thousand instances, treats his own existence as unworthy of notice, and exposes it to multiplied risks to effect the object to which he devotes himself. They are obliged to say, that this man anticipates the joy he will feel in the recollection of a noble act, and the cutting and intolerable pain he will experience in the consciousness that a human being has perished, whom it was in his power to save. It is in vain that we tell them that, without a moment's consideration, he tore off his clothes, or plunged into the stream with his clothes on, or rushed up a flaming stair-case. Still they tell us, that he recollected what compunctious visitings would be his lot if he remained supine--he felt the sharpest uneasiness at sight of the accident before him, and it was to get rid of that uneasiness, and not for the smallest regard to the unhappy being he has been the means to save, that he entered on the hazardous undertaking. Uneasiness, the knowledge of what inwardly passes in the mind, is a thing not in the slightest degree adverted to but in an interval of leisure. No; the man here spoken of thinks of nothing but the object immediately before his eyes; he adverts not at all to himself; he acts only with an undeveloped, confused and hurried consciousness that he may be of some use, and may avert the instantly impending calamity. He has scarcely even so much reflection as amounts to this. The history of man, whether national or individual, and consequently the acts of human creatures which it describes, are cast in another mould than that which the philosophy of self-love sets before us. A topic that from the earliest accounts perpetually presents itself in the records of mankind, is self-sacrifice, parents sacrificing themselves for their children, and children for their parents. Cimon, the Athenian, yet in the flower of his youth, voluntarily became the inmate of a prison, that the body of his father might receive the honours of sepulture. Various and unquestionable are the examples of persons who have exposed themselves to destruction, and even petitioned to die, that so they might save the lives of those, whose lives they held dearer than their own. Life is indeed a thing, that is notoriously set at nothing by generous souls, who have fervently devoted themselves to an overwhelming purpose. There have been instances of persons, exposed to all the horrors of famine, where one has determined to perish by that slowest and most humiliating of all the modes of animal destruction, that another, dearer to him than life itself, might, if possible, be preserved. What is the true explanation of these determinations of the human will? Is it, that the person, thus consigning himself to death, loved nothing but himself, regarded only the pleasure he might reap, or the uneasiness he was eager to avoid? Or, is it, that he had arrived at the exalted point of self-oblivion, and that his whole soul was penetrated and ingrossed with the love of those for whom he conceived so exalted a partiality? This sentiment so truly forms a part of our nature, that a multitude of absurd practices, and a multitude of heart-rending fables, have been founded upon the consciousness of man in different ages and nations, that these modes of thinking form a constituent part of our common existence. In India there was found a woman, whose love to the deceased partner of her soul was so overwhelming, that she resolved voluntarily to perish on his funeral pile. And this example became so fascinating and admirable, that, by insensible degrees, it grew into a national custom with the Hindoos, that, by a sort of voluntary constraint, the widows of all men of a certain caste, should consign themselves to the flames with the dead bodies of their husbands. The story of Zopyrus cutting off his nose and ears, and of Curtius leaping into the gulph, may be fictitious: but it was the consciousness of those by whom these narratives were written that they drew their materials from the mighty store-house of the heart of man, that prompted them to record them. The institutions of clientship and clans, so extensively diffused in different ages of the world, rests upon this characteristic of our nature, that multitudes of men may be trained and educated so, as to hold their existence at no price, when the life of the individual they were taught unlimitedly to reverence might be preserved, or might be defended at the risk of their destruction. The principal circumstance that divides our feelings for others from our feelings for ourselves, and that gives, to satirical observers, and superficial thinkers, an air of exclusive selfishness to the human mind, lies in this, that we can fly from others, but cannot fly from ourselves. While I am sitting by the bed-side of the sufferer, while I am listening to the tale of his woes, there is comparatively but a slight line of demarcation, whether they are his sorrows or my own. My sympathy is vehemently excited towards him, and I feel his twinges and anguish in a most painful degree. But I can quit his apartment and the house in which he dwells, can go out in the fields, and feel the fresh air of heaven fanning my hair, and playing upon my cheeks. This is at first but a very imperfect relief. His image follows me; I cannot forget what I have heard and seen; I even reproach myself for the mitigation I involuntarily experience. But man is the creature of his senses. I am every moment further removed, both in time and place, from the object that distressed me. There he still lies upon the bed of agony: but the sound of his complaint, and the sight of all that expresses his suffering, are no longer before me. A short experience of human life convinces us that we have this remedy always at hand ("I am unhappy, only while I please")(24); and we soon come therefore to anticipate the cure, and so, even while we are in the presence of the sufferer, to feel that he and ourselves are not perfectly one. (24) Douglas. But with our own distempers and adversities it is altogether different. It is this that barbs the arrow. We may change the place of our local existence; but we cannot go away from ourselves. With chariots, and embarking ourselves on board of ships, we may seek to escape from the enemy. But grief and apprehension enter the vessel along with us; and, when we mount on horseback, the discontent that specially annoyed us, gets up behind, and clings to our sides with a hold never to be loosened(25). (25) Horace. Is it then indeed a proof of selfishness, that we are in a greater or less degree relieved from the anguish we endured for our friend, when other objects occupy us, and we are no longer the witnesses of his sufferings? If this were true, the same argument would irresistibly prove, that we are the most generous of imaginable beings, the most disregardful of whatever relates to ourselves. Is it not the first ejaculation of the miserable, "Oh, that I could fly from myself? Oh, for a thick, substantial sleep!" What the desperate man hates is his own identity. But he knows that, if for a few moments he loses himself in forgetfulness, he will presently awake to all that distracted him. He knows that he must act his part to the end, and drink the bitter cup to the dregs. He can do none of these things by proxy. It is the consciousness of the indubitable future, from which we can never be divorced, that gives to our present calamity its most fearful empire. Were it not for this great line of distinction, there are many that would feel not less for their friend than for themselves. But they are aware, that his ruin will not make them beggars, his mortal disease will not bring them to the tomb, and that, when he is dead, they may yet be reserved for many years of health, of consciousness and vigour. The language of the hypothesis of self-love was well adapted to the courtiers of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. The language of disinterestedness was adapted to the ancient republicans in the purest times of Sparta and Rome. But these ancients were not always disinterested; and the moderns are not always narrow, self-centred and cold. The ancients paid, though with comparative infrequency, the tax imposed upon mortals, and thought of their own gratification and ease; and the moderns are not utterly disqualified for acts of heroic affection. It is of great consequence that men should come to think correctly on this subject. The most snail-blooded man that exists, is not so selfish as he pretends to be. In spite of all the indifference he professes towards the good of others, he will sometimes be detected in a very heretical state of sensibility towards his wife, his child or his friend; he will shed tears at a tale of distress, and make considerable sacrifices of his own gratification for the relief of others. But his creed is a pernicious one. He who for ever thinks, that his "charity must begin at home," is in great danger of becoming an indifferent citizen, and of withering those feelings of philanthropy, which in all sound estimation constitute the crowning glory of man. He will perhaps have a reasonable affection towards what he calls his own flesh and blood, and may assist even a stranger in a case of urgent distress.--But it is dangerous to trifle with the first principles and sentiments of morality. And this man will scarcely in any case have his mind prepared to hail the first dawnings of human improvement, and to regard all that belongs to the welfare of his kind as parcel of his own particular estate. The creed of self-love will always have a tendency to make us Frenchmen in the frivolous part of that character, and Dutchmen in the plodding and shopkeeping spirit of barter and sale. There is no need that we should beat down the impulse of heroism in the human character, and be upon our guard against the effervescences and excess of a generous sentiment. One of the instructors of my youth was accustomed to say to his pupils, "Do not be afraid to commit your thoughts to paper in all the fervour and glow of your first conception: when you come to look at them the next day, you will find this gone off to a surprising degree." As this was no ill precept for literary composition, even so in our actions and moral conduct we shall be in small danger of being too warm-hearted and too generous. Modern improvements in education are earnest in recommending to us the study of facts, and that we should not waste the time of young persons upon the flights of imagination. But it is to imagination that we are indebted for our highest enjoyments; it tames the ruggedness of uncivilised nature, and is the never-failing associate of all the considerable advances of social man, whether in throwing down the strong fences of intellectual slavery, or in giving firmness and duration to the edifice of political freedom. And who does not feel that every thing depends upon the creed we embrace, and the discipline we exercise over our own souls? The disciple of the theory of self-love, if of a liberal disposition, will perpetually whip himself forward "with loose reins," upon a spiritless Pegasus, and say, "I will do generous things; I will not bring into contempt the master I serve--though I am conscious all the while that this is but a delusion, and that, however I brag of generosity, I do not set a step forward, but singly for my own ends, and my own gratification." Meanwhile, this is all a forced condition of thought; and the man who cherishes it, will be perpetually falling back into the cold, heartless convictions he inwardly retains. Self-love is the unwholesome, infectious atmosphere in which he dwells; and, however he may seek to rise, the wings of his soul will eternally be drawn downwards, and he cannot be pervaded, as he might have been, with the free spirit of genuine philanthropy. To be consistent, he ought continually to grow colder and colder; and the romance, which fired his youth, and made him forget the venomous potion he had swallowed, will fade away in age, rendering him careless of all but himself, and indifferent to the adversity and sufferings of all of whom he hears, and all with whom he is connected. On the other hand, the man who has embraced the creed of disinterested benevolence, will know that it is not his fitting element to "live for himself, or to die for himself." Whether he is under the dominion of family-affection, friendship, patriotism, or a zeal for his brethren of mankind, he will feel that he is at home. The generous man therefore looks forward to the time when the chilling and wretched philosophy of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth shall be forgotten, and a fervent desire for the happiness and improvement of the human species shall reign in all hearts. I am not especially desirous of sheltering my opinions under the authority of great names: but, in a question of such vital importance to the true welfare of men in society, no fair advantage should be neglected. The author of the system of "self-love the source of all our actions" was La Rochefoucault; and the whole herd of the French philosophers have not been ashamed to follow in the train of their vaunted master. I am grieved to say, that, as I think, the majority of my refining and subtilising countrymen of the present day have enlisted under his banner. But the more noble and generous view of the subject has been powerfully supported by Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson and Hume. On the last of these I particularly pique myself; inasmuch as, though he became naturalised as a Frenchman in a vast variety of topics, the greatness of his intellectual powers exempted him from degradation in this. That however which I would chiefly urge in the way of authority, is the thing mentioned in the beginning of this Essay, I mean, the sentiments that have animated the authors of religion, that characterise the best ages of Greece and Rome, and that in all cases display themselves when the loftiest and most generous sentiments of the heart are called into action. The opposite creed could only have been engendered in the dregs of a corrupt and emasculated court; and human nature will never shew itself what it is capable of being, till the last remains of a doctrine, invented in the latter part of the seventeenth century, shall have been consigned to the execration they deserve. ESSAY XII. OF THE LIBERTY OF HUMAN ACTIONS. The question, which has been attended with so long and obstinate debates, concerning the metaphysical doctrines of liberty and necessity, and the freedom of human actions, is not even yet finally and satisfactorily settled. The negative is made out by an argument which seems to amount to demonstration, that every event requires a cause, a cause why it is as it is and not otherwise, that the human will is guided by motives, and is consequently always ruled by the strongest motive, and that we can never choose any thing, either without a motive of preference, or in the way of following the weaker, and deserting the stronger motive(26). (26) Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. VII. Why is it then that disbelief or doubt should still subsist in a question so fully decided? For the same reason that compels us to reject many other demonstrations. The human mind is so constituted as to oblige us, if not theoretically, at least practically, to reject demonstration, and adhere to our senses. The case is thus in the great question of the non-existence of an external world, or of matter. How ever much the understanding may be satisfied of the truth of the proposition by the arguments of Berkeley and others, we no sooner go out into actual life, than we become convinced, in spite of our previous scepticism or unbelief, of the real existence of the table, the chair, and the objects around us, and of the permanence and reality of the persons, both body and mind, with whom we have intercourse. If we were not, we should soon become indifferent to their pleasure and pain, and in no long time reason ourselves into the opinion that the one was not more desirable than the other, and conduct ourselves accordingly. But there is a great difference between the question of a material world, and the question of liberty and necessity. The most strenuous Berkleian can never say, that there is any contradiction or impossibility in the existence of matter. All that he can consistently and soberly maintain is, that, if the material world exists, we can never perceive it, and that our sensations, and trains of impressions and thinking go on wholly independent of that existence. But the question of the freedom of human actions is totally of another class. To say that in our choice we reject the stronger motive, and that we choose a thing merely because we choose it, is sheer nonsense and absurdity; and whoever with a sound understanding will fix his mind upon the state of the question will perceive its impossibility. In the mean time it is not less true, that every man, the necessarian as well as his opponent, acts on the assumption of human liberty, and can never for a moment, when he enters into the scenes of real life, divest himself of this persuasion. Let us take separately into our consideration the laws of matter and of mind. We acknowledge generally in both an established order of antecedents and consequents, or of causes and effects. This is the sole foundation of human prudence and of all morality. It is because we foresee that certain effects will follow from a certain mode of conduct, that we act in one way rather than another. It is because we foresee that, if the soil is prepared in a certain way, and if seed is properly scattered and covered up in the soil thus prepared, a crop will follow, that we engage in the labours of agriculture. In the same manner, it is because we foresee that, if lessons are properly given, and a young person has them clearly explained to him, certain benefits will result, and because we are apprised of the operation of persuasion, admonition, remonstrance, menace, punishment and reward, that we engage in the labours of education. All the studies of the natural philosopher and the chemist, all our journeys by land and our voyages by sea, and all the systems and science of government, are built upon this principle, that from a certain method of proceeding, regulated by the precepts of wisdom and experience, certain effects may be expected to follow. Yet, at the same time that we admit of a regular series of cause and effect in the operations both of matter and mind, we never fail, in our reflections upon each, to ascribe to them an essential difference. In the laws by which a falling body descends to the earth, and by which the planets are retained in their orbits, in a word, in all that relates to inanimate nature, we readily assent to the existence of absolute laws, so that, when we have once ascertained the fundamental principles of astronomy and physics, we rely with perfect assurance upon the invariable operation of these laws, yesterday, to-day, and for ever. As long as the system of things, of which we are spectators, and in which we act our several parts, shall remain, so long have the general phenomena of nature gone on unchanged for more years of past ages than we can define, and will in all probability continue to operate for as many ages to come. We admit of no variation, but firmly believe that, if we were perfectly acquainted with all the causes, we could, without danger of error, predict all the effects. We are satisfied that, since first the machine of the universe was set going, every thing in inanimate nature has taken place in a regular course, and nothing has happened and can happen, otherwise than as it actually has been and will be. But we believe, or, more accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by these passions. But we are fully penetrated with the notion, that mind is an arbiter, that it sits on its throne, and decides, as an absolute prince, this may or that; in short, that, while inanimate nature proceeds passively in an eternal chain of cause and effect, mind is endowed with an initiating power, and forms its determinations by an inherent and indefeasible prerogative. Hence arises the idea of contingency relative to the acts of living and sentient beings, and the opinion that, while, in the universe of matter, every thing proceeds in regular course, and nothing has happened or can happen, otherwise than as it actually has been or will be, in the determinations and acts of living beings each occurrence may be or not be, and waits the mastery of mind to decide whether the event shall be one way or the other, both issues being equally possible till that decision has been made. Thus, as was said in the beginning, we have demonstration, all the powers of our reasoning faculty, on one side, and the feeling, of our minds, an inward persuasion of which with all our efforts we can never divest ourselves, on the other. This phenomenon in the history of every human creature, had aptly enough been denominated, the "delusive sense of liberty(27)." (27) The first writer, by whom this proposition was distinctly enunciated, seems to have been Lord Kaimes, in his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, published in 1751. But this ingenious author was afterwards frightened with the boldness of his own conclusions, and in the subsequent editions of his work endeavoured ineffectually to explain away what he had said. And, though the philosopher in his closet will for the most part fully assent to the doctrine of the necessity of human actions, yet this indestructible feeling of liberty, which accompanies us from the cradle to the grave, is entitled to our serious attention, and has never obtained that consideration from the speculative part of mankind, which must by no means be withheld, if we would properly enter into the mysteries of our nature. The necessarian has paid it very imperfect attention to the impulses which form the character of man, if he omits this chapter in the history of mind, while on the other hand the advocate of free will, if he would follow up his doctrine rigorously into all its consequences, would render all speculations on human character and conduct superfluous, put an end to the system of persuasion, admonition, remonstrance, menace, punishment and reward, annihilate the very essence of civil government, and bring to a close all distinction between the sane person and the maniac. With the disciples of the latter of these doctrines I am by no means specially concerned. I am fully persuaded, as far as the powers of my understanding can carry me, that the phenomena of mind are governed by laws altogether as inevitable as the phenomena of matter, and that the decisions of our will are always in obedience to the impulse of the strongest motive. The consequences of the principle implanted in our nature, by which men of every creed, when they descend into the scene of busy life, pronounce themselves and their fellow-mortals to be free agents, are sufficiently memorable. From hence there springs what we call conscience in man, and a sense of praise or blame due to ourselves and others for the actions we perform. How poor, listless and unenergetic would all our performances be, but for this sentiment! It is in vain that I should talk to myself or others, of the necessity of human actions, of the connection between cause and effect, that all industry, study and mental discipline will turn to account, and this with infinitely more security on the principle of necessity, than on the opposite doctrine, every thing I did would be without a soul. I should still say, Whatever I may do, whether it be right or wrong, I cannot help it; wherefore then should I trouble the master-spirit within me? It is either the calm feeling of self-approbation, or the more animated swell of the soul, the quick beatings of the pulse, the enlargement of the heart, the glory sparkling in the eye, and the blood flushing into the cheek, that sustains me in all my labours. This turns the man into what we conceive of a God, arms him with prowess, gives him a more than human courage, and inspires him with a resolution and perseverance that nothing can subdue. In the same manner the love or hatred, affection or alienation, we entertain for our fellow-men, is mainly referable for its foundation to the "delusive sense of liberty." "We approve of a sharp knife rather than a blunt one, because its capacity is greater. We approve of its being employed in carving food, rather than in maiming men or other animals, because that application of its capacity is preferable. But all approbation or preference is relative to utility or general good. A knife is as capable as a man, of being employed in purposes of utility; and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes, is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient, is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity(28)." These are the sentiments dictated to us by the doctrine of the necessity of human actions. (28) Political Justice, Book IV, Chap. VIII. But how different are the feelings that arise within us, as soon as we enter into the society of our fellow-creatures! "The end of the commandment is love." It is the going forth of the heart towards those to whom we are bound by the ties of a common nature, affinity, sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able to sustain ourselves. The affection we entertain for those towards whom our partiality and kindness are excited, is the life of our life. It is to this we are indebted for all our refinement, and, in the noblest sense of the word, for all our humanity. Without it we should have had no sentiment (a word, however abused, which, when properly defined, comprises every thing that is the crown of our nature), and no poetry.--Love and hatred, as they regard our fellow-creatures, in contradistinction to the complacency, or the feeling of an opposite nature, which is excited in us towards inanimate objects, are entirely the offspring of the delusive sense of liberty. (29) Thomas Paine. The terms, praise and blame, express to a great degree the same sentiments as those of love and hatred, with this difference, that praise and blame in their simplest sense apply to single actions, whereas love and hatred are produced in us by the sum of those actions or tendencies, which constitute what we call character. There is also another difference, that love and hatred are engendered in us by other causes as well as moral qualities; but praise and blame, in the sense in which they are peculiarly applied to our fellow-mortals, are founded on moral qualities only. In love and hatred however, when they are intense or are lasting, some reference to moral qualities is perhaps necessarily implied. The love between the sexes, unless in cases where it is of a peculiarly transient nature, always comprises in it a belief that the party who is the object of our love, is distinguished by tendencies of an amiable nature, which we expect to see manifesting themselves in affectionate attentions and acts of kindness. Even the admiration we entertain for the features, the figure, and personal graces of the object of our regard, is mixed with and heightened by our expectation of actions and tones that generate approbation, and, if divested of this, would be of small signification or permanence. In like manner in the ties of affinity, or in cases where we are impelled by the consideration, "He also is a man as well as I," the excitement will carry us but a little way, unless we discover in the being towards whom we are moved some peculiarities which may beget a moral partiality and regard. And, as towards our fellow-creatures, so in relation to ourselves, our moral sentiments are all involved with, and take their rise in, the delusive sense of liberty. It is in this that is contained the peculiar force of the terms virtue, duty, guilt and desert. We never pronounce these words without thinking of the action to which they refer, as that which might or might not be done, and therefore unequivocally approve or disapprove in ourselves and others. A virtuous man, as the term is understood by all, as soon as we are led to observe upon those qualities, and the exhibition of those qualities in actual life, which constitute our nature, is a man who, being in full possession of the freedom of human action, is engaged in doing those things which a sound judgment of the tendencies of what we do pronounces to be good. Duty is a term that can scarcely be said to have a meaning, except that which it derives from the delusive sense of liberty. According to the creed of the necessarian, it expresses that mode of action on the part of the individual, which constitutes the best possible application of his capacity to the general benefit(30). In the mean time, if we confine ourselves to this definition, it may as well be taken to describe the best application of a knife, or any other implement proceeding from the hands of the manufacturer, as of the powers of a human being. But we surely have a very different idea in our minds, when we employ the term duty. It is not agreeable to the use of language that we should use this term, except we speak of a being in the exercise of volition. (30) Political Justice, Book II, Chap. IV. Duty then means that which may justly be required of a human creature in the possession of liberty of action. It includes in its proper sense the conception of the empire of will, the notion that mind is an arbiter, that it sits on its throne, and decides, as an absolute prince, this way or that. Duty is the performance of what is due, the discharge of a debt (debitum). But a knife owes nothing, and can in no sense be said to be held to one sort of application rather than another; the debt can only belong to a human being in possession of his liberty, by whom the knife may be applied laudably or otherwise. A multitude of terms instantly occur to us, the application of which is limited in the same manner as the term duty is limited: such are, to owe, obligation, debt, bond, right, claim, sin, crime, guilt, merit and desert. Even reward and punishment, however they may be intelligible when used merely in the sense of motives employed, have in general acceptation a sense peculiarly derived from the supposed freedom of the human will. The mode therefore in which the advocates of the doctrine of necessity have universally talked and written, is one of the most memorable examples of the hallucination of the human intellect. They have at all times recommended that we should translate the phrases in which we usually express ourselves on the hypothesis of liberty, into the phraseology of necessity, that we should talk no other language than that which is in correspondence with the severest philosophy, and that we should exert ourselves to expel all fallacious notions and delusions so much as from our recollection. They did not perceive what a wide devastation and destruction they were proposing of all the terms and phrases that are in use in the communications between man and man in actual life.--They might as well have recommended that we should rigorously bear in mind on the ordinary occasions of life, that there is no such thing as colour, that which we ordinary call by that name having no existence in external objects, but belonging only to our way of perceiving them. The language which is suggested to us by the conception of the freedom of human actions, moulds the very first articulations of a child, "I will," and "I will not;" and is even distinctly conveyed by his gestures, before he arrives at the power of articulation. This is the explanation and key to his vehement and ungovernable movements, and his rebellion. The petulance of the stripling, the fervent and energetic exertions of the warrior, and the calm and unalterable resolution of the sage, all imply the same thing. Will, and a confidence in its efficiency, "travel through, nor quit us till we die." It is this which inspires us with invincible perseverance, and heroic energies, while without it we should be the most inert and soulless of blocks, the shadows of what history records and poetry immortalises, and not men. Free will is an integral part of the science of man, and may be said to constitute its most important chapter. We might with as much propriety overlook the intelligence of the senses, that medium which acquaints us with an external world or what we call such, we might as well overlook the consideration of man's reason, his imagination or taste, as fail to dwell with earnest reflection and exposition upon that principle which lies at the foundation of our moral energies, fills us with a moral enthusiasm, prompts all our animated exertions on the theatre of the world, whether upon a wide or a narrow scale, and penetrates us with the most lively and fervent approbation or disapprobation of the acts of ourselves and others in which the forwarding or obstructing human happiness is involved. But, though the language of the necessarian is at war with the indestructible feelings of the human mind, and though his demonstrations will for ever crumble into dust, when brought to the test of the activity of real life, yet his doctrines, to the reflecting and enlightened, will by no means be without their use. In the sobriety of the closet, we inevitably assent to his conclusions; nor is it easy to conceive how a rational man and a philosopher abstractedly can entertain a doubt of the necessity of human actions. And the number of these persons is perpetually increasing; enlarged and dispassionate views of the nature of man and the laws of the universe are rapidly spreading in the world. We cannot indeed divest ourselves of love and hatred, of the sentiments of praise and blame, and the ideas of virtue, duty, obligation, debt, bond, right, claim, sin, crime, guilt, merit and desert. And, if we could do so, the effects would be most pernicious, and the world be rendered a blank. We shall however unquestionably, as our minds grow enlarged, be brought to the entire and unreserved conviction, that man is a machine, that he is governed by external impulses, and is to be regarded as the medium only through the intervention of which previously existing causes are enabled to produce certain effects. We shall see, according to an expressive phrase, that he "could not help it," and, of consequence, while we look down from the high tower of philosophy upon the scene of human affairs, our prevailing emotion will be pity, even towards the criminal, who, from the qualities he brought into the world, and the various circumstances which act upon him from infancy, and form his character, is impelled to be the means of the evils, which we view with so profound disapprobation, and the existence of which we so entirely regret. There is an old axiom of philosophy, which counsels us to "think with the learned, and talk with the vulgar;" and the practical application of this axiom runs through the whole scene of human affairs. Thus the most learned astronomer talks of the rising and setting of the sun, and forgets in his ordinary discourse that the earth is not for ever at rest, and does not constitute the centre of the universe. Thus, however we reason respecting the attributes of inanimate matter and the nature of sensation, it never occurs to us, when occupied with the affairs of actual life, that there is no heat in fire, and no colour in the rainbow. In like manner, when we contemplate the acts of ourselves and our neighbours, we can never divest ourselves of the delusive sense of the liberty of human actions, of the sentiment of conscience, of the feelings of love and hatred, the impulses of praise and blame, and the notions of virtue, duty, obligation, right, claim, guilt, merit and desert. And it has sufficiently appeared in the course of this Essay, that it is not desirable that we should do so. They are these ideas to which the world we live in is indebted for its crowning glory and greatest lustre. They form the highest distinction between men and other animals, and are the genuine basis of self-reverence, and the conceptions of true nobility and greatness, and the reverse of these attributes, in the men with whom we live, and the men whose deeds are recorded in the never-dying page of history. But, though the doctrine of the necessity of human actions can never form the rule of our intercourse with others, it will still have its use. It will moderate our excesses, and point out to us that middle path of judgment which the soundest philosophy inculcates. We shall learn, according to the apostolic precept, to "be angry, and sin not, neither let the sun go down upon our wrath." We shall make of our fellow-men neither idols to worship, nor demons to be regarded with horror and execration. We shall think of them, as of players, "that strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more." We shall "weep, as though we wept not, and rejoice, as though we rejoiced not, seeing that the fashion of this world passeth away." And, most of all, we shall view with pity, even with sympathy, the men whose frailties we behold, or by whom crimes are perpetrated, satisfied that they are parts of one great machine, and, like ourselves, are driven forward by impulses over which they have no real control. ESSAY XIII. OF BELIEF. One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason. Beasts reason. They are instructed by experience; and, guided by what they have already known of the series of events, they infer from the sense of what has gone before, an assured expectation of what is to follow. Hence, "beast walks with man, joint tenant of the shade;" and their sagacity is in many instances more unerring than ours, because they have no affectation to mislead them; they follow no false lights, no glimmering intimation of something half-anticipating a result, but trust to the plain, blunt and obvious dictates of their simple apprehension. This however is but the first step in the scale of reason, and is in strictness scarcely entitled to the name. We set off from the same point from which they commence their career. But the faculty of articulate speech comes in, enabling us to form the crude elements of reason and inference into a code. We digest explanations of things, assigning the particulars in which they resemble other classes, and the particulars by which they are distinguished from whatever other classes have fallen under our notice. We frame propositions, and, detaching ourselves from the immediate impressions of sense, proceed to generalities, which exist only, in a way confused, and not distinctly adverted to, in the conceptions of the animal creation. It is thus that we arrive at science, and go forward to those subtleties, and that perspicuity of explanation, which place man in a distinct order of being, leaving all the other inhabitants of earth at an immeasurable distance below him. It is thus that we communicate our discoveries to each other, and hand down the knowledge we have acquired, unimpaired and entire, through successive ages, and to generations yet unborn. But in certain respects we pay a very high price for this distinction. It is to it that we must impute all the follies, extravagances and hallucinations of human intellect. There is nothing so absurd that some man has not affirmed, rendering himself the scorn and laughing-stock of persons of sounder understanding. And, which is worst, the more ridiculous and unintelligible is the proposition he has embraced, the more pertinaciously does he cling to it; so that creeds the most outrageous and contradictory have served as the occasion or pretext for the most impassioned debates, bloody wars, inhuman executions, and all that most deeply blots and dishonours the name of man--while often, the more evanescent and frivolous are the distinctions, the more furious and inexpiable have been the contentions they have produced. The result of the whole, in the vast combinations of men into tribes and nations, is, that thousands and millions believe, or imagine they believe, propositions and systems, the terms of which they do not fully understand, and the evidence of which they have not considered. They believe, because so their fathers believed before them. No phrase is more commonly heard than, "I was born a Christian;" "I was born a Catholic, or a Protestant." The priest continues what the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man. But this sort of belief forms no part of the subject of the present Essay. My purpose is to confine myself to the consideration of those persons, who in some degree, more or less, exercise the reasoning faculty in the pursuit of truth, and, having attempted to examine the evidence of an interesting and weighty proposition, satisfy themselves that they have arrived at a sound conclusion. It is however the rarest thing in the world, for any one to found his opinion, simply upon the evidence that presents itself to him of the truth of the proposition which comes before him to be examined. Where is the man that breaks loose from all the shackles that in his youth had been imposed upon hills, and says to Truth, "Go on; whithersoever thou leadest, I am prepared to follow?" To weigh the evidence for and against a proposition, in scales so balanced, that the "division of the twentieth part of one poor scruple, the estimation of a hair," shall be recognised and submitted to, is the privilege of a mind of no ordinary fairness and firmness. The Scriptures say "The heart of man is deceitful above all things." The thinking principle within us is so subtle, has passed through so many forms of instruction, and is under the influence and direction of such a variety of causes, that no man can accurately pronounce by what impulse he has been led to the conclusion in which he finally reposes. Every ingenuous person, who is invited to embrace a certain profession, that of the church for example, will desire, preparatorily to his final determination, to examine the evidences and the merits of the religion he embraces, that he may enter upon his profession under the influence of a sincere conviction, and be inspired with that zeal, in singleness of heart, which can alone prevent his vocation from being disgraceful to him. Yet how many motives are there, constraining him to abide in an affirmative conclusion? His friends expect this from him. Perhaps his own inclination leads him to select this destination rather than any other. Perhaps preferment and opulence wait upon his decision. If the final result of his enquiries lead him to an opposite judgment, to how much obloquy will he be exposed! Where is the man who can say that no unconscious bias has influenced him in the progress of his investigation? Who shall pronounce that, under very different circumstances, his conclusions would not have been essentially other than they are? But the enquiry of an active and a searching mind does not terminate on a certain day. He will be for ever revising and reconsidering his first determinations. It is one of the leading maxims of an honourable mind, that we must be, at all times, and to the last hour of our existence, accessible to conviction built upon new evidence, or upon evidence presented in a light in which it had not before been viewed. If then the probationer for the clerical profession was under some bias in his first investigation, how must it be expected to be with him, when he has already taken the vow, and received ordination? Can he with a calm and unaltered spirit contemplate the possibility, that the ground shall be cut away from under him, and that, by dint of irrefragable argument, he shall be stripped of his occupation, and turned out naked and friendless into the world? But this is only one of the broadest and most glaring instances. In every question of paramount importance there is ever a secret influence urging me earnestly to desire to find one side of the question right and the other wrong. Shall I be a whig or a tory, believe a republic or a mixed monarchy most conducive to the improvement and happiness of mankind, embrace the creed of free will or necessity? There is in all cases a "strong temptation that waketh in the heart." Cowardice urges me to become the adherent of that creed, which is espoused by my nearest friends, or those who are most qualified to serve me. Enterprise and a courageous spirit on the contrary bid me embrace the tenet, the embracing of which shall most conduce to my reputation for extraordinary perspicuity and acuteness, and gain me the character of an intrepid adventurer, a man who dares commit himself to an unknown voyage. In the question of religion, even when the consideration of the profession of an ecclesiastic does not occur, yet we are taught to believe that there is only one set of tenets that will lead us in the way of salvation. Faith is represented as the first of all qualifications. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin." With what heart then does a man set himself to examine, and scrupulously weigh the evidence on one side and the other, when some undiscerned frailty, some secret bias that all his care cannot detect, may lurk within, and insure for him the "greater condemnation?" I well remember in early life, with what tingling sensation and unknown horror I looked into the books of the infidels and the repositories of unlawful tenets, lest I should be seduced. I held it my duty to "prove all things;" but I knew not how far it might be my fate; to sustain the penalty attendant even upon an honourable and virtuous curiousity. It is one of the most received arguments of the present day against religious persecution, that the judgments we form are not under the authority of our will, and that, for what it is not in our power to change, it is unjust we should be punished: and there is much truth in this. But it is not true to the fullest extent. The sentiments we shall entertain, are to a considerable degree at the disposal of inticements on the one side, and of menaces and apprehension on the other. That which we wish to believe, we are already greatly in progress to embrace; and that which will bring upon us disgrace and calamity, we are more than half prepared to reject. Persecution however is of very equivocal power: we cannot embrace one faith and reject another at the word of command. It is a curious question to decide how far punishments and rewards may be made effectual to determine the religion of nations and generations of men. They are often unsuccessful. There is a feeling in the human heart, that prompts us to reject with indignation this species of tyranny. We become more obstinate in clinging to that which we are commanded to discard. We place our honour and our pride in the firmness of our resistance. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Yet there is often great efficacy in persecution. It was the policy of the court of Versailles that brought almost to nothing the Huguenots of France. And there is a degree of persecution, if the persecuting party has the strength and the inexorableness to employ it, that it is perhaps beyond the prowess of human nature to stand up against. The mind of the enquiring man is engaged in a course of perpetual research; and ingenuousness prompts us never to be satisfied with the efforts that we have made, but to press forward. But mind, as well as body, has a certain vis inertiae, and moves only as it is acted upon by impulses from without. With respect to the adopting new opinions, and the discovery of new truths, we must be indebted in the last resort, either to books, or the oral communications of our fellow-men, or to ideas immediately suggested to us by the phenomena of man or nature. The two former are the ordinary causes of a change of judgment to men: they are for the most part minds of a superior class only, that are susceptible of hints derived straight from the external world, without the understandings of other men intervening, and serving as a conduit to the new conceptions introduced. The two former serve, so to express it, for the education of man, and enable us to master, in our own persons, the points already secured, and the wisdom laid up in the great magazine of human knowledge; the last imparts to us the power of adding to the stock, and carrying forward by one step and another the improvements of which our nature is susceptible. It is much that books, the unchanging records of the thoughts of men in former ages, are able to impart to us. For many of the happiest moments of our lives, for many of the purest and most exalted feelings of the human heart, we are indebted to them. Education is their province; we derive from them civilization and refinement; and we may affirm of literature, what Otway has said of woman, "We had been brutes without you." It is thus that the acquisitions of the wise are handed down from age to age, and that we are enabled to mount step after step on the ladder of paradise, till we reach the skies. But, inestimable as is the benefit we derive from books, there is something more searching and soul-stirring in the impulse of oral communication. We cannot shut our ears, as we shut our books; we cannot escape from the appeal of the man who addresses us with earnest speech and living conviction. It is thus, we are told, that, when Cicero pleaded before Caesar for the life of Ligarius, the conqueror of the world was troubled, and changed colour again and again, till at length the scroll prepared for the condemnation of the patriot fell from his hand. Sudden and irresistible conviction is chiefly the offspring of living speech. We may arm ourselves against the arguments of an author; but the strength of reasoning in him who addresses us, takes us at unawares. It is in the reciprocation of answer and rejoinder that the power of conversion specially lies. A book is an abstraction. It is but imperfectly that we feel, that a real man addresses us in it, and that what he delivers is the entire and deep-wrought sentiment of a being of flesh and blood like ourselves, a being who claims our attention, and is entitled to our deference. The living human voice, with a countenance and manner corresponding, constrains us to weigh what is said, shoots through us like a stroke of electricity, will not away from our memory, and haunts our very dreams. It is by means of this peculiarity in the nature of mind, that it has been often observed that there is from time to time an Augustan age in the intellect of nations, that men of superior powers shock with each other, and that light is struck from the collision, which most probably no one of these men would have given birth to, if they had not been thrown into mutual society and communion. And even so, upon a narrower scale, he that would aspire to do the most of which his faculties are susceptible, should seek the intercourse of his fellows, that his powers may be strengthened, and he may be kept free from that torpor and indolence of soul, which, without external excitement, are ever apt to take possession of us. The man, who lives in solitude, and seldom communicates with minds of the same class as his own, works out his opinions with patient scrutiny, returns to the investigation again and again, imagines that he had examined the question on all sides, and at length arrives at what is to him a satisfactory conclusion. He resumes the view of this conclusion day after day; he finds in it an unalterable validity; he says in his heart, "Thus much I have gained; this is a real advance in the search after truth; I have added in a defined and palpable degree to what I knew before." And yet it has sometimes happened, that this person, after having been shut up for weeks, or for a longer period, in his sanctuary, living, so far as related to an exchange of oral disquisitions with his fellow-men, like Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island, shall come into the presence of one, equally clear-sighted, curious and indefatigable with himself, and shall hear from him an obvious and palpable statement, which in a moment shivers his sightly and glittering fabric into atoms. The statement was palpable and near at hand; it was a thin, an almost imperceptible partition that hid it from him; he wonders in his heart that it never occurred to his meditations. And yet so it is: it was hid from him for weeks, or perhaps for a longer period: it might have been hid from him for twenty years, if it had not been for the accident that supplied it. And he no sooner sees it, than he instantly perceives that the discovery upon which he plumed himself, was an absurdity, of which even a schoolboy might be ashamed. A circumstance not less curious, among the phenomena which belong to this subject of belief, is the repugnance incident to the most ingenuous minds, which we harbour against the suddenly discarding an opinion we have previously entertained, and the adopting one which comes recommended to us with almost the force of demonstration. Nothing can be better founded than this repugnance. The mind of man is of a peculiar nature. It has been disputed whether we can entertain more than one idea at a time. But certain it is, that the views of the mind at any one time are considerably narrowed. The mind is like the slate of a schoolboy, which can contain only a certain number of characters of a given size, or like a moveable panorama, which places a given scene or landscape before me, and the space assigned, and which comes within the limits marked out to my perception, is full. Many things are therefore almost inevitably shut out, which, had it not been so, might have essentially changed the view of the case, and have taught me that it was a very different conclusion at which I ought to have arrived. At first sight nothing can appear more unreasonable, than that I should hesitate to admit the seemingly irresistible force of the argument presented to me. An ingenuous disposition would appear to require that, the moment the truth, or what seems to be the truth, is set before me, I should pay to it the allegiance to which truth is entitled. If I do otherwise, it would appear to argue a pusillanimous disposition, a mind not prompt and disengaged to receive the impression of evidence, a temper that loves something else better than the lustre which all men are bound to recognise, and that has a reserve in favour of ancient prejudice, and of an opinion no longer supported by reason. In fact however I shall act most wisely, and in the way most honourable to my character, if I resolve to adjourn the debate. No matter how complete the view may seem which is now presented to my consideration, or how irresistible the arguments: truth is too majestic a divinity, and it is of too much importance that I should not follow a delusive semblance that may shew like truth, not to make it in the highest degree proper that I should examine again and again, before I come to the conclusion to which I mean to affix my seal, and annex my sanction, "This is the truth." The ancient Goths of Germany, we are told, had a custom of debating every thing of importance to their state twice, once in the high animation of a convivial meeting, and once in the serene stillness of a morning consultation. Philip of Macedon having decided a cause precipitately, the party condemned by him immediately declared his resolution to appeal from the sentence. And to whom, said the king, wilt thou appeal? To Philip, was the answer, in the entire possession of his understanding. Such is the nature of the human mind--at least, such I find to be the nature of my own--that many trains of thinking, many chains of evidence, the result of accumulated facts, will often not present themselves, at the time when their presence would be of the highest importance. The view which now comes before me is of a substance so close and well-woven, and of colours so brilliant and dazzling, that other matters in a certain degree remote, though of no less intrinsic importance, and equally entitled to influence my judgment in the question in hand, shall be entirely shut out, shall be killed, and fail to offer themselves to my perceptions. It is a curious circumstance which Pope, a man of eminent logical power and acuteness, relates, that, having at his command in his youth a collection of all the tracts that had been written on both sides in the reign of James the Second, he applied himself with great assiduity to their perusal, and the consequence was, that he was a Papist and Protestant by turns, according to the last book he read(31). (31) Correspondence with Atterbury, Letter IV. This circumstance in the structure of the human understanding is well known, and is the foundation of many provisions that occur in the constitution of political society. How each man shall form his creed, and arrange those opinions by which his conduct shall be regulated, is of course a matter exclusively subjected to his own discretion. But, when he is called upon to act in the name of a community, and to decide upon a question in which the public is interested, he of necessity feels himself called upon to proceed with the utmost caution. A judge on the bench, a chancellor, is not contented with that sudden ray of mental illumination to which an ingenuous individual is often disposed to yield in an affair of abstract speculation. He feels that he is obliged to wait for evidence, the nature of which he does not yet anticipate, and to adjourn his decision. A deliberative council or assembly is aware of the necessity of examining a question again and again. It is upon this principle that the two houses of the English parliament are required to give a first, a second and a third reading, together with various other forms and technicalities, to the provision that is brought before them, previously to its passing into a law. And there is many a fundamental dogma and corner-stone of the sentiments that I shall emphatically call my own, that is of more genuine importance to the individual, than to a nation is a number of those regulations, which by courtesy we call acts of parliament. Nothing can have a more glaring tendency to subvert the authority of my opinion among my fellow-men, than instability. "What went ye out into the wilderness to see" said Jesus Christ: "a reed shaken with the wind?" We ought at all times to be open to conviction. We ought to be ever ready to listen to evidence. But, conscious of our human frailty, it is seldom that we ought immediately to subscribe to the propositions, however specious, that are now for the first time presented to us. It is our duty to lay up in our memory the suggestions offered upon any momentous question, and not to suffer them to lose their inherent weight and impressiveness; but it is only through the medium of consideration and reconsideration, that they can become entitled to our full and unreserved assent. The nature of belief, or opinion, has been well illustrated by Lord Shaftesbury(32). There are many notions or judgments floating in the mind of every man, which are mutually destructive of each other. In this sense men's opinions are governed by high and low spirits, by the state of the solids and fluids of the human body, and by the state of the weather. But in a paramount sense that only can be said to be a man's opinion which he entertains in his clearest moments, and from which, when he is most himself, he is least subject to vary. In this emphatical sense, I should say, a man does not always know what is his real opinion. We cannot strictly be said to believe any thing, in cases where we afterwards change our opinion without the introduction of some evidence that was unknown to us before. But how many are the instances in which we can be affirmed to be in the adequate recollection of all the evidences and reasonings which have at some time occurred to us, and of the opinions, together with the grounds on which they rested, which we conceived we had justly and rationally entertained? The considerations here stated however should by no means be allowed to inspire us with indifference in matters of opinion. It is the glory and lustre of our nature, that we are capable of receiving evidence, and weighing the reasons for and against any important proposition in the balance of an impartial and enlightened understanding. The only effect that should be produced in us, by the reflection that we can at last by no means be secure that we have attained to a perfect result, should be to teach us a wholsome diffidence and humility, and induce us to confess that, when we have done all, we are ignorant, dim-sighted and fallible, that our best reasonings may betray, and our wisest conclusions deceive us. (32) Enquiry concerning Virtue, Book 1, Part 1, Section ii. ESSAY XIV. OF YOUTH AND AGE. Magna debetur pueris reverentia. Quintilian. I am more doubtful in writing the following Essay than in any of those which precede, how far I am treating of human nature generally, or to a certain degree merely recording my own feelings as an individual. I am guided however in composing it, by the principle laid down in my Preface, that the purpose of my book in each instance should be to expand some new and interesting truth, or some old truth viewed under a new aspect, which had never by any preceding writer been laid before the public. Education, in the conception of those whose office it is to direct it, has various engines by means of which it is to be made effective, and among these are reprehension and chastisement. The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection. We look into our own bosoms, observe attentively every thing that passes there, anatomise our motives, trace step by step the operations of thought, and diligently remark the effects of external impulses upon our feelings and conduct. Philosophers, ever since the time in which Socrates flourished, to carry back our recollections no further, have found that the minds of men in the most essential particulars are framed so far upon the same model, that the analysis of the individual may stand in general consideration for the analysis of the species. Where this principle fails, it is not easy to suggest a proceeding that shall supply the deficiency. I look into my own breast; I observe steadily and with diligence what passes there; and with all the parade of the philosophy of the human mind I can do little more than this. In treating therefore of education in the point of view in which it has just been proposed, I turn my observation upon myself, and I proceed thus.--If I do not stand as a competent representative for the whole of my species, I suppose I may at least assume to be the representative of no inconsiderable number of them. I find then in myself, for as long a time as I can trace backward the records of memory, a prominent vein of docility. Whatever it was proposed to teach me, that was in any degree accordant with my constitution and capacity, I was willing to learn. And this limit is sufficient for the topic I am proposing to treat. I do not intend to consider education of any other sort, than that which has something in it of a liberal and ingenuous nature. I am not here discussing the education of a peasant, an artisan, or a slave. In addition to this vein of docility, which easily prompted me to learn whatever was proposed for my instruction and improvement, I felt in myself a sentiment of ambition, a desire to possess the qualifications which I found to be productive of esteem, and that should enable me to excel among my contemporaries. I was ambitious to be a leader, and to be regarded by others with feelings of complacency. I had no wish to rule by brute force and compulsion; but I was desirous to govern by love, and honour, and "the cords of a man." I do not imagine that, when I aver thus much of myself, I am bringing forward any thing unprecedented, or that multitudes of my fellow-men do not largely participate with me. The question therefore I am considering is, through what agency, and with what engines, a youth thus disposed, and with these qualifications, is to be initiated in all liberal arts. I will go back no further than to the commencement of the learning of Latin. All before was so easy to me, as never to have presented the idea of a task. I was immediately put into the accidence. No explanation was attempted to be given why Latin was to be of use to me, or why it was necessary to commit to memory the cases of nouns and the tenses of verbs. I know not whether this was owing to the unwillingness of my instructor to give himself the trouble, or to my supposed incapacity to apprehend the explanation. The last of these I do not admit. My docility however came to my aid, and I did not for a moment harbour any repugnance to the doing what was required of me. At first, and unassisted in the enquiry, I felt a difficulty in supposing that the English language, all the books in my father's library, did not contain every thing that it would be necessary for me to know. In no long time however I came to experience a pleasure in turning the thoughts expressed in an unknown tongue into my own; and I speedily understood that I could never be on a level with those eminent scholars whom it was my ambition to rival, without the study of the classics. What then were the obstacles, that should in any degree counteract my smooth and rapid progress in the studies suggested to me? I can conceive only two. First, the versatility and fickleness which in a greater or less degree beset all human minds, particularly in the season of early youth. However docile we may be, and willing to learn, there will be periods, when either some other object powerfully solicits us, or satiety creeps in, and makes us wish to occupy our attention with any thing else rather than with the task prescribed us. But this is no powerful obstacle. The authority of the instructor, a grave look, and the exercise of a moderate degree of patience will easily remove it in such a probationer as we are here considering. Another obstacle is presumption. The scholar is willing to conceive well of his own capacity. He has a vanity in accomplishing the task prescribed him in the shortest practicable time. He is impatient to go away from the business imposed upon him, to things of his own election, and occupations which his partialities and his temper prompt him to pursue. He has a pride in saying to himself, "This, which was a business given to occupy me for several hours, I can accomplish in less than one." But the presumption arising out of these views is easily subdued. If the pupil is wrong in his calculation, the actual experiment will speedily convince him of his error. He is humbled by and ashamed of his mistake. The merely being sent back to study his lesson afresh, is on the face of the thing punishment enough. It follows from this view of the matter, that an ingenuous youth, endowed with sufficient capacity for the business prescribed him, may be led on in the path of intellectual acquisition and improvement with a silken cord. It will demand a certain degree of patience on the part of the instructor. But Heaven knows, that this patience is sufficiently called into requisition when the instructor shall be the greatest disciplinarian that ever existed. Kind tones and encouragement will animate the learner amidst many a difficult pass. A grave remark may perhaps sometimes be called for. And, if the preceptor and the pupil have gone on like friends, a grave remark, a look expressive of rebuke, will be found a very powerful engine. The instructor should smooth the business of instruction to his pupil, by appealing to his understanding, developing his taste, and assisting him to remark the beauties of the composition on which he is occupied. I come now then to the consideration of the two engines mentioned in the commencement of this Essay, reprehension and chastisement. And here, as in what went before, I am reduced to the referring to my own experience, and looking back into the history of my own mind. I say then, that reprehension and reprimand can scarcely ever be necessary. The pupil should undoubtedly be informed when he is wrong. He should be told what it is that he ought to have omitted, and that he ought to have done. There should be no reserve in this. It will be worthy of the highest censure, if on these points the instructor should be mealy-mouthed, or hesitate to tell the pupil in the plainest terms, of his faults, his bad habits, and the dangers that beset his onward and honourable path. But this may be best, and most beneficially done, and in a way most suitable to the exigence, and to the party to be corrected, in a few words. The rest is all an unwholsome tumour, the disease of speech, and not the sound and healthful substance through which its circulation and life are conveyed. There is always danger of this excrescence of speech, where the speaker is the umpire, and feels himself at liberty, unreproved, to say what he pleases. He is charmed with the sound of his own voice. The periods flow numerous from his tongue, and he gets on at his ease. There is in all this an image of empire; and the human mind is ever prone to be delighted in the exercise of unrestricted authority. The pupil in this case stands before his instructor in an attitude humble, submissive, and bowing to the admonition that is communicated to him. The speaker says more than it was in his purpose to say; and he knows not how to arrest himself in his triumphant career. He believes that he is in no danger of excess, and recollects the old proverb that "words break no bones." But a syllable more than is necessary and justly measured, is materially of evil operation to ingenuous youth. The mind of such a youth is tender and flexible, and easily swayed one way or the other. He believes almost every thing that he is bid to believe; and the admonition that is given him with all the symptoms of friendliness and sincerity he is prompt to subscribe to. If this is wantonly aggravated to him, he feels the oppression, and is galled with the injustice. He knows himself guiltless of premeditated wrong. He has not yet learned that his condition is that of a slave; and he feels a certain impatience at his being considered as such, though he probably does not venture to express it. He shuts up the sense of this despotism in his own bosom; and it is his first lesson of independence and rebellion and original sin. It is one of the grossest mistakes of which we can be guilty, if we confound different offences and offenders together. The great and the small alike appear before us in the many-coloured scene of human society, and, if we reprehend bitterly and rate a juvenile sinner for the fault, which he scarcely understood, and assuredly had not premeditated, we break down at once a thousand salutary boundaries, and reduce the ideas of right and wrong in his mind to a portentous and terrible chaos. The communicator of liberal knowledge assuredly ought not to confound his office with that of a magistrate at a quarter-sessions, who though he does not sit in judgment upon transgressions of the deepest and most atrocious character, yet has brought before him in many cases defaulters of a somewhat hardened disposition, whose lot has been cast among the loose and the profligate, and who have been carefully trained to a certain audacity of temper, taught to look upon the paraphernalia of justice with scorn, and to place a sort of honour in sustaining hard words and the lesser visitations of punishment with unflinching nerve. If this is the judgment we ought to pass upon the bitter and galling and humiliating terms of reprehension apt to be made use of by the instructor to his pupil, it is unnecessary to say a word on the subject of chastisement. If such an expedient is ever to be had recourse to, it can only be in cases of contumaciousness and rebellion; and then the instructor cannot too unreservedly say to himself, "This is matter of deep humiliation to me: I ought to have succeeded by an appeal to the understanding and ingenuous feelings of youth; but I am reduced to a confession of my impotence." But the topic which, most of all, I was desirous to bring forward in this Essay, is that of the language so customarily employed by the impatient and irritated preceptor, "Hereafter, in a state of mature and ripened judgment, you will thank me for the severity I now exercise towards you." No; it may safely be answered: that time will never arrive. As, in one of my earlier Essays(33), I undertook to shew that there is not so much difference between the talents of one man and another as has often been apprehended, so we are guilty of a gross error in the way in which we divide the child from the man, and consider him as if he belonged to a distinct species of beings. (33) Essay II. I go back to the recollections of my youth, and can scarcely find where to draw the line between ineptness and maturity. The thoughts that occurred to me, as far back as I can recollect them, were often shrewd; the suggestions ingenious; the judgments not seldom acute. I feel myself the same individual all through. Sometimes I was unreasonably presumptuous, and sometimes unnecessarily distrustful. Experience has taught me in various instances a sober confidence in my decisions; but that is all the difference. So to express it, I had then the same tools to work with as now; but the magazine of materials upon which I had to operate was scantily supplied. Like the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the faculty, such as it was, was within me; but my shelves contained but a small amount of furniture: A beggarly account of empty boxes, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, Which, thinly scattered, served to make a shew. In speaking thus of the intellectual powers of my youth, I am however conceding too much. It is true, "Practice maketh perfect." But it is surprising, in apt and towardly youth, how much there is to commend in the first essays. The novice, who has his faculties lively and on the alert, will strike with his hammer almost exactly where the blow ought to be placed, and give nearly the precisely right force to the act. He will seize the thread it was fitting to seize; and, though he fail again and again, will shew an adroitness upon the whole that we scarcely know how to account for. The man whose career shall ultimately be crowned with success, will demonstrate in the beginning that he was destined to succeed. There is therefore no radical difference between the child and the man. His flesh becomes more firm and sinewy; his bones grow more solid and powerful; his joints are more completely strung. But he is still essentially the same being that he was. When a genuine philosopher holds a new-born child in his arms, and carefully examines it, he perceives in it various indications of temper and seeds of character. It was all there, though folded up and confused, and not obtruding itself upon the remark of every careless spectator. It continues with the child through life, grows with his growth, and never leaves him till he is at last consigned to the tomb. How absurd then by artful rules and positive institutions to undertake to separate what can never be divided! The child is occasionally grave and reflecting, and deduces well-founded inferences; he draws on the past, and plunges into the wide ocean of the future. In proportion as the child advances into the youth, his intervals of gravity increase, and he builds up theories and judgments, some of which no future time shall suffice to overturn. It is idle to suppose that the first activity of our faculties, when every thing is new and produces an unbated impression, when the mind is uncumbered, and every interest and every feeling bid us be observing and awake, should pass for nothing. We lay up stores then, which shall never be exhausted. Our minds are the reverse of worn and obtuse. We bring faculties into the world with us fresh from the hands of the all-bounteous giver; they are not yet moulded to a senseless routine; they are not yet corrupted by the ill lessons of effrontery, impudence and vice. Childhood is beautiful; youth is ingenuous; and it can be nothing but a principle which is hostile to all that most adorns this sublunary scene, that would with violence and despotic rule mar the fairest flower that creation has to boast. It happens therefore almost unavoidably that, when the man mature looks back upon the little incidents of his youth, he sees them to a surprising degree in the same light, and forms the same conclusions respecting them, as he did when they were actually passing. "The forgeries of opinion," says Cicero, "speedily pass away; but the rules and decisions of nature are strengthened." Bitter reproaches and acts of violence are the offspring of perturbation engendered upon imbecility, and therefore can never be approved upon a sober and impartial revision. And, if they are to be impeached in the judgment of an equal and indifferent observer, we may be sure they will be emphatically condemned by the grave and enlightened censor who looks back upon the years of his own nonage, and recollects that he was himself the victim of the intemperance to be pronounced upon. The interest that he must necessarily take in the scenes in which he once had an engrossing concern, will supply peculiar luminousness to his views. He taxes himself to be just. The transaction is over now, and is passed to the events that preceded the universal deluge. He holds the balance with a steadiness, which sets at defiance all attempts to give it a false direction one way or the other. But the judgment he made on the case at the time, and immediately after the humiliation he suffered, remains with him. It was the sentiment of his ripening youth; it was the opinion of his opening manhood; and it still attends him, when he is already fast yielding to the incroachments and irresistible assaults of declining years. ESSAY XV. OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. Who is it that says, "There is no love but among equals?" Be it who it may, it is a saying universally known, and that is in every one's mouth. The contrary is precisely the truth, and is the great secret of every thing that is admirable in our moral nature. By love it is my intention here to understand, not a calm, tranquil, and, as it were, half-pronounced feeling, but a passion of the mind. We may doubtless entertain an approbation of other men, without adverting to the question how they stand in relation to ourselves, as equals or otherwise. But the sentiment I am here considering, is that where the person in whom it resides most strongly sympathises with the joys and sorrows of another, desires his gratification, hopes for his welfare, and shrinks from the anticipation of his being injured; in a word, is the sentiment which has most the spirit of sacrifice in it, and prepares the person in whom it dwells, to postpone his own advantage to the advantage of him who is the object of it. Having placed love among the passions, which is no vehement assumption, I then say, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination. In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question. Whenever this sentiment prevails, I must have my attention fixed more on the absent than the present, more upon what I do not see than on what I do see. My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image. Sentiment is nothing, till you have arrived at a mystery and a veil, something that is seen obscurely, that is just hinted at in the distance, that has neither certain outline nor colour, but that is left for the mind to fill up according to its pleasure and in the best manner it is able. The great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children. Let not this appear a paradox. There is another relation in human society to which this epithet has more emphatically been given: but, if we analyse the matter strictly, we shall find that all that is most sacred and beautiful in the passion between the sexes, has relation to offspring. What Milton calls, "The rites mysterious of connubial love," would have little charm in them in reflection, to a mind one degree above the brutes, were it not for the mystery they include, of their tendency to give existence to a new human creature like ourselves. Were it not for this circumstance, a man and a woman would hardly ever have learned to live together; there scarcely could have been such a thing as domestic society; but every intercourse of this sort would have been "casual, joyless, unendeared;" and the propensity would have brought along with it nothing more of beauty, lustre and grace, than the pure animal appetites of hunger and thirst. Bearing in mind these considerations, I do not therefore hesitate to say, that the great model of the affection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children. The original feature in this sentiment is the conscious feeling of the protector and the protected. Our passions cannot subsist in lazy indolence; passion and action must operate on each other; passion must produce action, and action give strength to the tide of passion. We do not vehemently desire, where we can do nothing. It is in a very faint way that I entertain a wish to possess the faculty of flying; and an ordinary man can scarcely be said to desire to be a king or an emperor. None but a madman, of plebeian rank, falls in love with a princess. But shew me a good thing within my reach; convince me that it is in my power to attain it; demonstrate to me that it is fit for me, and I am fit for it; then begins the career of passion. In the same manner, I cannot love a person vehemently, and strongly interest myself in his miscarriages or success, till I feel that I can be something to him. Love cannot dwell in a state of impotence. To affect and be affected, this is the common nature I require; this is the being that is like unto myself; all other likeness resides in the logic and the definition, but has nothing to do with feeling or with practice. What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child? The affection he bears and its counterpart are the ornaments of the world, and the spring of every thing that makes life worth having. Whatever besides has a tendency to illustrate and honour our nature, descends from these, or is copied from these, grows out of them as the branches of a tree from the trunk, or is formed upon them as a model, and derives from them its shape, its character, and its soul. Yet there are men so industrious and expert to strip the world we live in of all that adorns it, that they can see nothing glorious in these affections, but find the one to be all selfishness, and the other all prejudice and superstition. The love of the parent to his child is nursed and fostered by two plain considerations; first, that the subject is capable of receiving much, and secondly, that my power concerning it is great and extensive. When an infant is presented to my observation, what a wide field of sentiment and reflection is opened to me! Few minds are industrious and ductile enough completely to compass this field, if the infant is only accidentally brought under their view. But, if it is an infant with which I begin to be acquainted to-day, and my acquaintance with which shall not end perhaps till one of us ceases to exist, how is it possible that the view of its little figure should not lead me to the meditation of its future history, the successive stages of human life, and the various scenes and mutations and vicissitudes and fortunes through which it is destined to pass? The Book of Fate lies open before me. This infant, powerless and almost impassive now, is reserved for many sorrows and many joys, and will one day possess a power, formidable and fearful to afflict those within its reach, or calculated to diffuse blessings, wisdom, virtue, happiness, to all around. I conceive all the various destinations of which man is susceptible; my fancy at least is free to select that which pleases me best; I unfold and pursue it in all its directions, observe the thorns and difficulties with which it is beset, and conjure up to my thoughts all that it can boast of inviting, delightful and honourable. But if the infant that is near to me lays hold of my imagination and affections at the moment in which he falls under my observation, how much more do I become interested in him, as he advances from year to year! At first, I have the blessing of the gospel upon me, in that, "having not seen, yet I believe." But, as his powers expand, I understand him better. His little eye begins to sparkle with meaning; his tongue tells a tale that may be understood; his very tones, and gestures, and attitudes, all inform me concerning what he shall be. I am like a florist, who has received a strange plant from a distant country. At first he sees only the stalk, and the leaves, and the bud having yet no other colour than that of the leaves. But as he watches his plant from day to day, and from hour to hour, the case which contains the flower divides, and betrays first one colour and then another, till the shell gradually subsides more and more towards the stalk, and the figure of the flower begins now to be seen, and its radiance and its pride to expand itself to the ravished observer.--Every lesson that the child leans, every comment that he makes upon it, every sport that he pursues, every choice that he exerts, the demeanour that he adopts to his playfellows, the modifications and character of his little fits of authority or submission, all make him more and more an individual to me, and open a wider field for my sagacity or my prophecy, as to what he promises to be, and what he may be made. But what gives, as has already been observed, the point and the finish to all the interest I take respecting him, lies in the vast power I possess to influence and direct his character and his fortune. At first it is abstract power, but, when it has already been exerted (as the writers on politics as a science have observed of property), the sweat of my brow becomes mingled with the apple I have gathered, and my interest is greater. No one understands my views and projects entirely but myself, and the scheme I have conceived will suffer, if I do not complete it as I began. And there are men that say, that all this mystery, the most beautiful attitude of human nature, and the crown of its glory, is pure selfishness! Let us now turn from the view of the parental, to that of the filial affection. The great mistake that has been made on this subject, arises from the taking it nakedly and as a mere abstraction. It has been sagely remarked, that when my father did that which occasioned me to come into existence, he intended me no benefit, and therefore I owe him no thanks. And the inference which has been made from this wise position is, that the duty of children to parents is a mere imposture, a trick, employed by the old to defraud the young out of their services. I grant most readily, that the mere material ligament that binds together the father and the child, by itself is worthless, and that he who owes nothing more than this to his father, owes him nothing. The natural, unanimated relationship is like the grain of mustard-seed in the discourses of Jesus Christ, "which indeed is the least of all seeds; but, when it is unfolded and grows up, it becomes a mighty tree, so that the birds of the air may come and lodge in its branches." The hard and insensible man may know little of the debt he owes to his father; but he that is capable of calling up the past, and beholding the things that are not as if they now were, will see the matter in a very different light. Incalculable are the privations (in a great majority of instances), the toils, the pains, the anxieties, that every child imposes on his father from the first hour of his existence. If he could know the ceaseless cares, the tender and ardent feelings, the almost incredible efforts and exertions, that have accompanied him in his father's breast through the whole period of his growth, instead of thinking that he owed his parent nothing, he would stand still and wonder that one human creature could do so much for another. I grant that all this may be done for a child by a stranger, and that then in one sense the obligation would be greater. It is however barely possible that all this should be done. The stranger wants the first exciting cause, the consideration, "This creature by the great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast upon my care." And, as the tie in the case of the stranger was not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in the sequel. The little straggler is like the duckling hatched in the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the nursling begins to be acquainted with its own qualities, it may plunge itself into another element, and swim away from its benefactor. Even if we put all these considerations out of the question, still the affection of the child to its parent of adoption, wants the kernel, and, if I may so speak, the soul, of the connection which has been formed and modelled by the great hand of nature. If the mere circumstance of filiation and descent creates no debt, it however is the principle of a very close connection. One of the most memorable mysteries of nature, is how, out of the slightest of all connections (for such, literally speaking, is that between father and child), so many coincidences should arise. The child resembles his parent in feature, in temperament, in turn of mind, and in class of disposition, while at the same time in many particulars, in these same respects, he is a new and individual creature. In one view therefore the child is merely the father multiplied and repeated. Now one of the indefeasible principles of affection is the partaking of a common nature; and as man is a species by himself, so to a certain degree is every nation and every family; and this consideration, when added to the moral and spiritual ties already treated of, undoubtedly has a tendency to give them their zest and perfection. But even this is not the most agreeable point of view in which we may consider the filial affection. I come back to my first position, that where there is no imagination, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love. No parent ever understood his child, and no child ever understood his parent. We have seen that the affectionate parent considers his child like a flower in the bud, as a mine of power that is to be unfolded, as a creature that is to act and to pass through he knows not what, as a canvas that "gives ample room and verge enough," for his prophetic soul to hang over in endless visions, and his intellectual pencil to fill up with various scenes and fortunes. And, if the parent does not understand his child, certainly as little does the child understand his parent. Wherever this relation subsists in its fairest form, the parent is as a God, a being qualified with supernatural powers, to his offspring. The child consults his father as an oracle; to him he proposes all his little questions; from him he learns his natural philosophy, his morals, his rules of conduct, his religion, and his creed. The boy is uninformed on every point; and the father is a vast Encyclopedia, not merely of sciences, but of feelings, of sagacity, of practical wisdom, and of justice, which the son consults on all occasions, and never consults in vain. Senseless and inexpert is that parent, who endeavours to govern the mind by authority, and to lay down rugged and peremptory dogmas to his child; the child is fully and unavoidably prepared to receive every thing with unbounded deference, and to place total reliance in the oracle which nature has assigned him. Habits, how beautiful! Inestimable benefit of nature, that has given me a prop against which to sustain my unripened strength, and has not turned me loose to wander with tottering steps amidst the vast desert of society! But it is not merely for contemplative wisdom that the child honours his parent; he sees in him a vast fund of love, attachment and sympathy. That he cannot mistake; and it is all a mystery to him. He says, What am I, that I should be the object of this? and whence comes it? He sees neither the fountain from which it springs, nor the banks that confine it. To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore. To the bounty of its operations he trusts implicitly. The stores of judgment and knowledge he finds in his father, prompt him to trust it. In many instances where it appeared at first obscure and enigmatical, the event has taught him to acknowledge its soundness. The mutinousness of passion will sometimes excite a child to question the decrees of his parent; it is very long before his understanding, as such, comes to set up a separate system, and teaches him to controvert the decisions of his father. Perhaps I ought earlier to have stated, that the filial connection we have here to consider, does not include those melancholy instances where some woful defect or utter worthlessness in the parent counteracts the natural course of the affections, but refers only to cases, where the character of father is on the whole sustained with honour, and the principle of the connection is left to its true operation. In such cases the child not only observes for himself the manifestations of wisdom and goodness in his parent, but is also accustomed to hear well of him from all around. There is a generous conspiracy in human nature, not to counteract the honour borne by the offspring to him from whom he sprung, and the wholsome principle of superiority and dependence which is almost indispensible between persons of different ages dwelling under the same roof. And, exclusively of this consideration, the men who are chiefly seen by the son are his father's friends and associates; and it is the very bent, and, as it were, law of our nature, that we do not associate much, but with persons whom we favour, and who are prepared to mention us with kindness and honour. Thus every way the child is deeply imbued with veneration for his parent, and forms the habit of regarding him as his book of wisdom, his philosopher and guide. He is accustomed to hear him spoken of as a true friend, an active ally, and a pattern of justice and honour; and he finds him so. Now these are the true objects of affection,--wisdom and beneficence; and the human heart loves this beneficence better when it is exercised towards him who loves, first, because inevitably in almost all instances we are best pleased with the good that is done to ourselves, and secondly, because it can scarcely happen but that we in that case understand it best, both in its operation and its effects. The active principles of religion are all moulded upon this familiar and sensible relation of father and child: and to understand whet the human heart is capable to conceive on this subject, we have only to refer to the many eloquent and glowing treatises that have been written upon the love of God to his creatures, and the love that the creature in return owes to his God. I am not now considering religion in a speculative point of view, or enquiring among the different sects and systems of religion what it is that is true; but merely producing religion as an example of what have been the conceptions of the human mind in successive ages of the world on the subject of love. This All that we behold, the immensity of the universe, the admirable harmony and subtlety of its structure, as they appear in the vastest and the minutest bodies, is considered by religion, as the emanation of pure love, a mighty impulse and ardour in its great author to realise the idea existing in his mind, and to produce happiness. The Providence that watches over us, so that not a sparrow dies unmarked, and that "the great Sensorium of the world vibrates, if a hair of our head but falls to the ground in the remotest desert of his creation," is still unremitted, never-satiated love. And, to go from this to the peculiarities of the Christian doctrine, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends: God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son to suffer, to be treated contumeliously, and to die with ignominy, that we might live." If on the other hand we consider the love which the creature must naturally pay to his creator, we shall find that the affection we can suppose the most ingenuous child to bear to the worthiest parent, is a very faint image of the passion which may be expected to grow out of this relation. In God, as he is represented to us in the books of the worthiest divines, is every thing that can command love; wisdom to conceive, power to execute, and beneficence actually to carry into effect, whatever is excellent and admirable. We are lost in contemplating the depth and immensity of his perfections. "Every good and every perfect gift is from the universal Father, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The most soothing and gratifying of all sentiments, is that of entire confidence in the divine goodness, a reliance which no adversity can shake, and which supports him that entertains it under every calamity, that sees the finger of God in every thing that comes to pass, that says, "It is good for me to be afflicted," believes, that "all things work together for blessings" to the pious and the just, and is intimately persuaded that "our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is the means and the earnest of a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." If we descend from these great archetypes, the love between parent and child, and between the creator and his creature, we shall still find the same inequality the inseparable attendant upon the most perfect ties of affection. The ancients seem to have conceived the truest and most exalted ideas on the subject of friendship. Among the most celebrated instances are the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Aeneas and Achates, Cyrus and Araspes, Alexander and Hephaestion, Scipio and Laelius. In each of these the parties are, the true hero, the man of lofty ambition, the magnificent personage in whom is concentred every thing that the historian or the poet was able to realise of excellence, and the modest and unpretending individual in whom his confidence was reposed. The grand secret of the connection is unfolded in the saying of the Macedonian conqueror, "Craterus loves the king, but Hephaestion loves Alexander." Friendship is to the loftier mind the repose, the unbending of the soul. The great man (whatever may be the department in which his excellence consists) has enough of his greatness, when he stands before the world, and receives the homage that is paid to his merits. Ever and anon he is anxious to throw aside this incumbrance, and be as a man merely to a man. He wishes to forget the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of greatness, and to be that only which he is himself. He desires at length to be sure, that he receives no adulation, that he is accosted with no insincerity, and that the individual to whose society he has thought proper to withdraw, has no by-ends, no sinister purposes in all his thoughts. What he seeks for, is a true friend, a being who sincerely loves, one who is attached to him, not for the accidents that attend him, but for what most strictly belongs to him, and of which he cannot be divested. In this friend there is neither interested intention nor rivalry. Such are the characteristic features of the superior party in these exemplars of friendship among the ancients. Of the unpretending, unassuming party Homer, the great master of the affections and emotions in remoter ages, has given us the fullest portrait in the character of Patroclus. The distinguishing feature of his disposition is a melting and affectionate spirit, the concentred essence of tenderness and humanity. When Patroclus comes from witnessing the disasters of the Greeks, to collect a report of which he had been sent by Achilles, he is "overwhelmed with floods of tears, like a spring which pours down its waters from the steep edge of a precipice." It is thus that Jupiter characterises him when he lies dead in the field of battle: Thou (addressing himself in his thoughts to Hector) hast slain the friend of Achilles, not less memorable for the blandness of his temper, than the bravery of his deeds. It is thus that Menelaus undertakes to excite the Grecian chiefs to rescue his body: Let each man recollect the sweetness of his disposition for, as long as he lived, he was unremitted in kindness to all. When Achilles proposes the games at the funeral, he says, "On any other occasion my horses should have started for the prize, but now it cannot be. They have lost their incomparable groom, who was accustomed to refresh their limbs with water, and anoint their flowing manes; and they are inconsolable." Briseis also makes her appearance among the mourners, avowing that, "when her husband had been slain in battle, and her native city laid in ashes, this generous man prevented her tears, averring to her, that she should be the wife of her conqueror, and that he would himself spread the nuptial banquet for her in the hero's native kingdom of Phthia." The reciprocity which belongs to a friendship between unequals may well be expected to give a higher zest to their union. Each party is necessary to the other. The superior considers him towards whom he pours out his affection, as a part of himself. The head is not more native to the heart, The hand more instrumental to the mouth. He cannot separate himself from him, but at the cost of a fearful maim. When the world is shut out by him, when he retires into solitude, and falls back upon himself, then his unpretending friend is most of all necessary to him. He is his consolation and his pleasure, the safe coffer in which he reposits all his anxieties and sorrows. If the principal, instead of being a public man, is a man of science, this kind of unbending becomes certainly not the less welcome to him. He wishes occasionally to forget the severity of his investigations, neither to have his mind any longer wound up and stretched to the height of meditation, nor to feel that he needs to be any way on his guard, or not completely to give the rein to all his sallies and the sportiveness of his soul. Having been for a considerable time shut up in sequestered reflection, he wishes, it may be, to have the world, the busy impassioned world, brought to his ears, without his being obliged to enter into its formalities and mummeries. If he desires to speak of the topics which had so deeply engaged him, he can keep as near the edge as he pleases, and drop or resume them as his fancy may prompt. And it seems useless to say, how much his modest and unassuming friend will be gratified in being instrumental to relieve the labours of his principal, in feeling that he is necessary to him, and in meditating on the delight he receives in being made the chosen companion and confident of him whom he so ardently admires. It was precisely in this spirit, that Fulke Greville, two hundred years ago, directed that it should be inscribed on his tomb, "Here lies the friend of Sir Philip Sidney." Tenderness on the one part, and a deep feeling of honour and respect on the other, give a completeness to the union which it must otherwise for ever want. "There is no limit, none," to the fervour with which the stronger goes forward to protect the weak; while in return the less powerful would encounter a thousand deaths rather than injury should befall the being to whom in generosity and affection he owes so much. In the mean time, though inequality is necessary to give this completeness to friendship, the inequality must not be too great. The inferior party must be able to understand and appreciate the sense and the merits of him to whom he is thus bound. There must be no impediment to hinder the communications of the principal from being fully comprehended, and his sentiments entirely participated. There must be a boundless confidence, without apprehension that the power of the stronger party can by the remotest possibility be put forth ungenerously. "Perfect love casteth out fear." The evangelist applies this aphorism even to the love of the creature to his creator. "The Lord spake unto Moses, face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend." In the union of which I am treating the demonstrative and ordinary appearance will be that of entire equality, which is heightened by the inner, and for the greater part unexplained and undeveloped, impression of a contrary nature. There is in either party a perfect reliance, an idea of inequality with the most entire assurance that it can never operate unworthily in the stronger party, or produce insincerity or servility in the weaker. There will in reality always be some reserve, some shadow of fear between equals, which in the friendship of unequals, if happily assorted, can find no place. There is a pouring out of the heart on the one side, and a cordial acceptance on the other, which words are inadequate to describe. To proceed. If from friendship we go forward to that which in all languages is emphatically called love, we shall still find ourselves dogged and attended by inequality. Nothing can be more certain, however we may seek to modify and abate it, than the inequality of the sexes. Let us attend to it as it stands in Milton: For contemplation he and velour formed For softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she for God in him. Thus it is painted to us as having been in Paradise; and with similar inequality have the sexes subsisted in all ages and nations since. If it were possible to take from the fair sex its softness and attractive grace, and endow it instead with audacious, masculine and military qualities, there is scarcely any one that does not perceive, with whatever advantages it might be attended in other respects, that it would be far from tending to cherish and increase the passion of love. It is in reality obvious, that man and woman, as they come from the hands of nature, are so much upon a par with each other, as not to afford the best subjects between whom to graft a habit of entire, unalterable affection. In the scenes of vulgar and ordinary society, a permanent connection between persons of opposite sexes is too apt to degenerate into a scene of warfare, where each party is for ever engaged in a struggle for superiority, and neither will give way. A penetrating observer, with whom in former days I used intimately to converse, was accustomed to say, that there was generally more jarring and ill blood between the two parties in the first year of their marriage, than during all the remainder of their lives. It is at length found necessary, as between equally matched belligerents on the theatre of history, that they should come to terms, make a treaty of peace, or at least settle certain laws of warfare, that they may not waste their strength in idle hostilities. The nations of antiquity had a way of settling this question in a very summary mode. As certain Oriental tribes have determined that women have no souls, and that nothing can be more proper than to shut them up, like singing birds in cages, so the Greeks and Romans for the most part excluded their females from the society of the more martial sex. Marriage with them was a convenience merely; and the husband and wife were in reality nothing more than the master and the slave. This point once settled as a matter of national law, there was certainly in most cases little danger of any vexatious rivalship and struggle for power. But there is nothing in which the superiority of modern times over the ancient has been more conspicuous, than in our sentiments and practices on this subject. This superiority, as well as several other of our most valuable acquisitions, took its rise in what we call the dark ages. Chivalry was for the most part the invention of the eleventh century. Its principle was built upon a theory of the sexes, giving to each a relative importance, and assigning to both functions full of honour and grace. The knights (and every gentleman during that period in due time became a knight) were taught, as the main features of their vocation, the "love of God and the ladies." The ladies in return were regarded as the genuine censors of the deeds of knighthood. From these principles arose a thousand lessons of humanity. The ladies regarded it as their glory to assist their champions to arm and to disarm, to perform for them even menial services, to attend them in sickness, and to dress their wounds. They bestowed on them their colours, and sent them forth to the field hallowed with their benedictions. The knights on the other hand considered any slight towards the fair sex as an indelible stain to their order; they contemplated the graceful patronesses of their valour with a feeling that partook of religious homage and veneration, and esteemed it as perhaps the first duty of their profession, to relieve the wrongs, and avenge the injuries of the less powerful sex. This simple outline as to the relative position of the one sex and the other, gave a new face to the whole scheme and arrangements of civil society. It is like those admirable principles in the order of the material universe, or those grand discoveries brought to light from time to time by superior genius, so obvious and simple, that we wonder the most common understanding could have missed them, yet so pregnant with results, that they seem at once to put a new life and inspire a new character into every part of a mighty and all-comprehensive mass. The passion between the sexes, in its grosser sense, is a momentary impulse merely; and there was danger that, when the fit and violence of the passion was over, the whole would subside into inconstancy and a roving disposition, or at least into indifference and almost brutal neglect. But the institutions of chivalry immediately gave a new face to this. Either sex conceived a deep and permanent interest in the other. In the unsettled state of society which characterised the period when these institutions arose, the defenceless were liable to assaults of multiplied kinds, and the fair perpetually stood in need of a protector and a champion. The knights on the other hand were taught to derive their fame and their honour from the suffrages of the ladies. Each sex stood in need of the other; and the basis of their union was mutual esteem. The effect of this was to give a hue of imagination to all their intercourse. A man was no longer merely a man, nor a woman merely a woman. They were taught mutual deference. The woman regarded her protector as something illustrious and admirable; and the man considered the smiles and approbation of beauty as the adequate reward of his toils and his dangers. These modes of thinking introduced a nameless grace into all the commerce of society. It was the poetry of life. Hence originated the delightful narratives and fictions of romance; and human existence was no longer the bare, naked train of vulgar incidents, which for so many ages of the world it had been accustomed to be. It was clothed in resplendent hues, and wore all the tints of the rainbow. Equality fled and was no more; and love, almighty, perdurable love, came to supply its place. By means of this state of things the vulgar impulse of the sexes towards each other, which alone was known to the former ages of the world, was transformed into somewhat of a totally different nature. It became a kind of worship. The fair sex looked upon their protectors, their fathers, their husbands, and the whole train of their chivalry, as something more than human. There was a grace in their motions, a gallantry in their bearing, and a generosity in their spirit of enterprise, that the softness of the female heart found irresistible. Nor less on the other hand did the knights regard the sex to whose service and defence they were sworn, as the objects of their perpetual deference. They approached them with a sort of gallant timidity, listened to their behests with submission, and thought the longest courtship and devotion nobly recompensed by the final acceptance of the fair. The romance and exaggeration characteristic of these modes of thinking have gradually worn away in modern times; but much of what was most valuable in them has remained. Love has in later ages never been divested of the tenderness and consideration, which were thus rendered some of its most estimable features. A certain desire in each party to exalt the other, and regard it as worthy of admiration, became inextricably interwoven with the simple passion. A sense of the honour that was borne by the one to the other, had the happiest effect in qualifying the familiarity and unreserve in the communion of feelings and sentiments, without which the attachment of the sexes cannot subsist. It is something like what the mystic divines describe of the beatific vision, where entire wonder and adoration are not judged to be incompatible with the most ardent affection, and all meaner and selfish regards are annihilated. From what has been thus drawn together and recapitulated it seems clearly to follow, as was stated in the beginning, that love cannot exist in its purest form and with a genuine ardour, where the parties are, and are felt by each other to be, on an equality; but that in all cases it is requisite there should be a mutual deference and submission, agreeably to the apostolic precept, "Likewise all of you be subject one to the other." There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness; each party must feel that it stands in need of the other, and without the other cannot be complete; each party must be alike conscious of the power of receiving and conferring benefit; and there must be the anticipation of a distant future, that may every day enhance the good to be imparted and enjoyed, and cause the individuals thus united perpetually to become more sensible of the fortunate event which gave them to each other, and has thus entailed upon each a thousand advantages in which they could otherwise never have shared. ESSAY XVI. OF FRANKNESS AND RESERVE. Animals are divided into the solitary and the are gregarious: the former being only occasionally associated with its mate, and perhaps engaged in the care of its offspring; the latter spending their lives in herds and communities. Man is of this last class or division. Where the animals of any particular species live much in society, it seems requisite that in some degree they should be able to understand each other's purposes, and to act with a certain portion of concert. All other animals are exceedingly limited in their powers of communication. But speech renders that being whom we justly entitle the lord of the creation, capable of a boundless interchange of ideas and intentions. Not only can we communicate to each other substantively our elections and preferences: we can also exhort and persuade, and employ reasons and arguments to convince our fellows, that the choice we have made is also worthy of their adoption. We can express our thoughts, and the various lights and shades, the bleedings, of our thoughts. Language is an instrument capable of being perpetually advanced in copiousness, perspicuity and power. No principle of morality can be more just, than that which teaches us to regard every faculty we possess as a power intrusted to us for the benefit of others as well as of ourselves, and which therefore we are bound to employ in the way which shall best conduce to the general advantage. "Speech was given us, that by it we might express our thoughts(34);" in other words, our impressions, ideas and conceptions. We then therefore best fulfil the scope of our nature, when we sincerely and unreservedly communicate to each other our feelings and apprehensions. Speech should be to man in the nature of a fair complexion, the transparent medium through which the workings of the mind should be made legible. (34) Moliere. I think I have somewhere read of Socrates, that certain of his friends expostulated with him, that the windows of his house were so constructed that every one who went by could discover all that passed within. "And wherefore not?" said the sage. "I do nothing that I would wish to have concealed from any human eye. If I knew that all the world observed every thing I did, I should feel no inducement to change my conduct in the minutest particular." It is not however practicable that frankness should be carried to the extent above mentioned. It has been calculated that the human mind is capable of being impressed with three hundred and twenty sensations in a second of time. At all events we well know that, even "while I am speaking, a variety of sensations are experienced by me, without so much as interrupting, that is, without materially diverting, the train of my ideas. My eye successively remarks a thousand objects that present themselves, and my mind wanders to the different parts of my body, without occasioning the minutest obstacle to my discourse, or my being in any degree distracted by the multiplicity of these objects(35)." It is therefore beyond the reach of the faculty of speech, for me to communicate all the sensations I experience; and I am of necessity reduced to a selection. (35) See above, Essay 7. Nor is this the whole. We do not communicate all that we feel, and all that we think; for this would be impertinent. We owe a certain deference and consideration to our fellow-men; we owe it in reality to ourselves. We do not communicate indiscriminately all that passes within us. The time would fail us; and "the world would not contain the books that might be written." We do not speak merely for the sake of speaking; otherwise the communication of man with his fellow would be but one eternal babble. Speech is to be employed for some useful purpose; nor ought we to give utterance to any thing that shall not promise to be in some way productive of benefit or amusement. Frankness has its limits, beyond which it would cease to be either advantageous or virtuous. We are not to tell every thing: but we are not to conceal any thing, that it would be useful or becoming in us to utter. Our first duty regarding the faculty of speech is, not to keep back what it would be beneficial to our neighbour to know. But this is a negative sincerity only. If we would acquire a character for frankness, we must be careful that our conversation is such, as to excite in him the idea that we are open, ingenuous and fearless. We must appear forward to speak all that will give him pleasure, and contribute to maintain in him an agreeable state of being. It must be obvious that we are not artificial and on our guard.--After all, it is difficult to lay down rules on this subject: the spring of whatever is desirable respecting it, must be in the temper of the man with whom others have intercourse. He must be benevolent, sympathetic and affectionate. His heart must overflow with good-will; and he must be anxious to relieve every little pain, and to contribute to the enjoyment and complacent feelings, of those with whom he is permanently or accidentally connected. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." There are two considerations by which we ought to be directed in the exercise of the faculty of speech. The first is, that we should tell our neighbour all that it would be useful to him to know. We must have no sinister or bye ends. "No man liveth to himself." We are all of us members of the great congregation of mankind. The same blood should circulate through every limb and every muscle. Our pulses should beat time to each other; and we should have one common sensorium, vibrating throughout, upon every material accident that occurs, and when any object is at stake essentially affecting the welfare of our fellow-beings. We should forget ourselves in the interest that we feel for the happiness of others; and, if this were universal, each man would be a gainer, inasmuch as he lost himself, and was cared and watched for by many. In all these respects we must have no reserve. We should only consider what it is that it would be beneficial to have declared. We must not look back to ourselves, and consult the dictates of a narrow and self-interested prudence. The whole essence of communication is adulterated, if, instead of attending to the direct effects of what suggests itself to our tongue, we are to consider how by a circuitous route it may react upon our own pleasures and advantage. Nor only are we bound to communicate to our neighbour all that it will be useful to him to know. We have many neighbours, beside those to whom we immediately address ourselves. To these our absent fellow-beings, we owe a thousand duties. We are bound to defend those whom we hear aspersed, and who are spoken unworthily of by the persons whom we incidentally encounter. We should be the forward and spontaneous advocates of merit in every shape and in every individual in whom we know it to exist. What a character would that man make for himself, of whom it was notorious that he consecrated his faculty of speech to the refuting unjust imputations against whomsoever they were directed, to the contradicting all false and malicious reports, and to the bringing forth obscure and unrecognised worth from the shades in which it lay hid! What a world should we live in, if all men were thus prompt and fearless to do justice to all the worth they knew or apprehended to exist! Justice, simple justice, if it extended no farther than barely to the faculty of speech, would in no long time put down all misrepresentation and calumny, bring all that is good and meritorious into honour, and, so to speak, set every man in his true and rightful position. But whoever would attempt this, must do it in all honour, without parade, and with no ever-and-anon looking back upon his achievement, and saying, See to how much credit I am entitled!--as if he laid more stress upon himself, the doer of this justice, than upon justice in its intrinsic nature and claims. But we not only owe something to the advantage and interest of our neighbours, but something also to the sacred divinity of Truth. I am not only to tell my neighbour whatever I know that may be beneficial to him, respecting his position in society, his faults, what other men appear to contemplate that may conduce to his advantage or injury, and to advise him how the one may best be forwarded, or the other defeated and brought to nothing: I am bound also to consider in what way it may be in my power so to act on his mind, as shall most enlarge his views, confirm and animate his good resolutions, and meliorate his dispositions and temper. We are all members of one great community: and we shall never sufficiently discharge our duty in that respect, till, like the ancient Spartans, the love of the whole becomes our predominant passion, and we cease to imagine that we belong to ourselves, so much as to the entire body of which we are a part. There are certain views in morality, in politics, and various other important subjects, the general prevalence of which will be of the highest benefit to the society of which we are members; and it becomes us in this respect, with proper temperance and moderation, to conform ourselves to the zealous and fervent precept of the apostle, to "promulgate the truth and be instant, in season and out of season," that we may by all means leave some monument of our good intentions behind us, and feel that we have not lived in vain. There is a maxim extremely in vogue in the ordinary intercourses of society, which deserves to be noticed here, for the purpose of exposing it to merited condemnation. It is very common between friends, or persons calling themselves such, to say, "Do not ask my advice in a certain crisis of your life; I will not give it; hereafter, if the thing turns out wrong, you will reflect on me, and say that it was at my suggestion that you were involved in calamity." This is a dastardly excuse, and shews a pitiful selfishness in the man that urges it. It is true, that we ought ever to be on the alert, that we may not induce our friend into evil. We should be upon our guard, that we may not from overweening arrogance and self-conceit dictate to another, overpower his more sober judgment, and assume a rashness for him, in which perhaps we would not dare to indulge for ourselves. We should be modest in our suggestions, and rather supply him with materials for decision, than with a decision absolutely made. There may however be cases where an opposite proceeding is necessary. We must arrest our friend, nay, even him who is merely our fellow-creature, with a strong arm, when we see him hovering on the brink of a precipice, or the danger is so obvious, that nothing but absolute blindness could conceal it from an impartial bystander. But in all cases our best judgment should always be at the service of our brethren of mankind. "Give to him that asketh thee; and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." This may not always be practicable or just, when applied to the goods of fortune: but the case of advice, information, and laws of conduct, comes within that of Ennius, to suffer our neighbour to light his candle at our lamp. To do so will enrich him, without making us a jot the poorer. We should indeed respect the right of private judgment, and scarcely in any case allow our will to supersede his will in his own proper province. But we should on no account suffer any cowardly fears for ourselves, to induce us to withhold from him any assistance that our wider information or our sounder judgment might supply to him. The next consideration by which we should be directed in the exercise of the faculty of speech, is that we should employ it so as should best conduce to the pleasure of our neighbour. Man is a different creature in the savage and the civilised state. It has been affirmed, and it may be true, that the savage man is a stranger to that disagreeable frame of mind, known by the name of ennui. He can pore upon the babbling stream, or stretch himself upon a sunny bank, from the rising to the setting of the sun, and be satisfied. He is scarcely roused from this torpid state but by the cravings of nature. If they can be supplied without effort, he immediately relapses into his former supineness; and, if it requires search, industry and exertion to procure their gratification, he still more eagerly embraces the repose, which previous fatigue renders doubly welcome. But, when the mind has once been wakened up from its original lethargy, when we have overstepped the boundary which divides the man from the beast, and are made desirous of improvement, while at the same moment the tumultuous passions that draw us in infinitely diversified directions are called into act, the case becomes exceedingly different. It might be difficult at first to rouse man from his original lethargy: it is next to impossible that he should ever again be restored to it. The appetite of the mind being once thoroughly awakened in society, the human species are found to be perpetually craving after new intellectual food. We read, we write, we discourse, we ford rivers, and scale mountains, and engage in various pursuits, for the pure pleasure that the activity and earnestness of the pursuit afford us. The day of the savage and the civilised man are still called by the same name. They may be measured by a pendulum, and will be found to be of the same duration. But in all other points of view they are inexpressibly different. Hence therefore arises another duty that is incumbent upon us as to the exercise of the faculty of speech. This duty will be more or less urgent according to the situation in which we are placed. If I sit down in a numerous assembly, if I become one of a convivial party of ten or twelve persons, I may unblamed be for the greater part, or entirely silent, if I please. I must appear to enter into their sentiments and pleasures, or, if I do not, I shall be an unwelcome guest; but it may scarcely be required for me to clothe my feelings with articulate speech. But, when my society shall be that of a few friends only, and still more if the question is of spending hours or days in the society of a single friend, my duty becomes altered, and a greater degree of activity will be required from me. There are cases, where the minor morals of the species will be of more importance than those which in their own nature are cardinal. Duties of the highest magnitude will perhaps only be brought into requisition upon extraordinary occasions; but the opportunities we have of lessening the inconveniences of our neighbour, or of adding to his accommodations and the amount of his agreeable feelings, are innumerable. An acceptable and welcome member of society therefore will not talk, only when he has something important to communicate. He will also study how he may amuse his friend with agreeable narratives, lively remarks, sallies of wit, or any of those thousand nothings, which' set off with a wish to please and a benevolent temper, will often entertain more and win the entire good will of the person to whom they are addressed, than the wisest discourse, or the vein of conversation which may exhibit the powers and genius of the speaker to the greatest advantage. Men of a dull and saturnine complexion will soon get to an end of all they felt it incumbent on them to say to their comrades. But the same thing will probably happen, though at a much later period, between friends of an active mind, of the largest stores of information, and whose powers have been exercised upon the greatest variety of sentiments, principles, and original veins of thinking. When two such men first fall into society, each will feel as if he had found a treasure. Their communications are without end; their garrulity is excited, and converts into a perennial spring. The topics upon which they are prompted to converse are so numerous, that one seems to jostle out the other. It may proceed thus from day to day, from month to month, and perhaps from year to year. But, according to the old proverb, "It is a long lane that has no turning." The persons here described will have a vast variety of topics upon which they are incited to compare their opinions, and will lay down these topics and take them up again times without number. Upon some, one of the parties will feel himself entirely at home while the other is comparatively a novice, and, in others, the advantage will be with the other; so that the gain of both, in this free and unrestrained opening of the soul, will be incalculable. But the time will come, like as in perusing an author of the most extraordinary genius and the most versatile powers, that the reading of each other's minds will be exhausted. They know so much of each other's tone of thinking, that all that can be said will be anticipated. The living voice, the sparkling eye, and the beaming countenance will do much to put off the evil day, when we shall say, I have had enough. But the time will come in which we shall feel that this after all is but little, and we shall become sluggish, ourselves to communicate, or to excite the dormant faculties of our friend, when the spring, the waters of which so long afforded us the most exquisite delight, is at length drawn dry. I remember in my childish years being greatly struck with that passage in the Bible, where it is written, "But I say unto you, that, for every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account in the day of judgment:" and, as I was very desirous of conforming myself to the directions of the sacred volume, I was upon the point of forming a sort of resolution, that I would on no account open my mouth to speak, without having a weighty reason for uttering the thing I felt myself prompted to say. But practical directions of this sort are almost in all cases of ambiguous interpretation. From the context of this passage it is clear, that by "idle words" we are to understand vicious words, words tending to instil into the mind unauthorised impulses, that shew in the man who speaks "a will most rank, foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural," and are calculated to render him by whom they are listened to, light and frivolous of temper, and unstrung for the graver duties of human life. But idle words, in the sense of innocent amusement, are not vicious. "There is a time for all things." Amusement must not encroach upon or thrust aside the real business, the important engagements, and the animated pursuits of man. But it is entitled to take its turn unreproved. Human life is so various, and the disposition and temper of the mind of so different tones and capacity, that a wise man will "frame his face to all occasions." Playfulness, if not carried to too great an extreme, is an additional perfection in human nature. We become relieved from our more serious cares, and better fitted to enter on them again after an interval. To fill up the days of our lives with various engagements, to make one occupation succeed to another, so as to liberate us from the pains of ennui, and the dangers of what may in an emphatical sense be called idleness, is no small desideratum. That king may in this sense be admitted to have formed no superficial estimate of our common nature, who is said to have proclaimed a reward to the individual that should invent a new amusement. And, to consider the question as it stands in relation to the subject of the present Essay, a perpetual gravity and a vigilant watch to be placed on the door of our lips, would be eminently hostile to that frankness which is to be regarded as one of the greatest ornaments of our nature. "It is meet, that we should make merry and be glad." A formal countenance, a demure, careful and unaltered cast of features, is one of the most disadvantageous aspects under which human nature can exhibit itself. The temper must be enterprising and fearless, the manner firm and assured, and the correspondence between the heart and the tongue prompt and instantaneous, if we desire to have that view of man that shall do him the most credit, and induce us to form the most honourable opinion respecting him. On our front should sit fearless confidence and unsubdued hilarity. Our limbs should be free and unfettered, a state of the animal which imparts a grace infinitely more winning than that of the most skilful dancer. The very sound of our voice should be full, firm, mellow, and fraught with life and sensibility; of that nature, at the hearing of which every bosom rises, and every eye is lighted up. It is thus that men come to understand and confide in each other. This is the only frame that can perfectly conduce to our moral improvement, the awakening of our faculties, the diffusion of science, and the establishment of the purest notions and principles of civil and political liberty. ESSAY XVII. OF BALLOT. The subject of the preceding Essay leads by an obvious transition to the examination of a topic, which at present occupies to a considerable extent the attention of those who are anxious for the progress of public improvement, and the placing the liberties of mankind on the securest basis: I mean, the topic of the vote by ballot. It is admitted that the most beneficial scheme for the government of nations, is a government by representation: that is, that there shall be in every nation, or large collection of men, a paramount legislative assembly, composed of deputies chosen by the people in their respective counties, cities, towns, or departments. In what manner then shall these deputies be elected? The argument in favour of the election by ballot is obvious. In nearly all civilised countries there exists more or less an inequality of rank and property: we will confine our attention principally to the latter. Property necessarily involves influence. Mankind are but too prone to pay a superior deference to those who wear better clothes, live in larger houses, and command superior accommodations to those which fall to the lot of the majority. One of the main sources of wealth in civilised nations is the possession of land. Those who have a considerable allotment of land in property, for the most part let it out in farms on lease or otherwise to persons of an inferior rank, by whom it is cultivated. In this case a reciprocal relation is created between the landlord and the tenant: and, if the landlord conducts himself towards his tenant agreeably to the principles of honour and liberality, it is impossible that the tenant should not feel disposed to gratify his landlord, so far as shall be compatible with his own notions of moral rectitude, or the paramount interests of the society of which he is a member. If the proprietor of any extensive allotment of land does not let it out in farms, but retains it under his own direction, he must employ a great number of husbandmen and labourers; and over them he must be expected to exercise the same sort of influence, as under the former statement we supposed him to exercise over his tenants. The same principle will still operate wherever any one man in society is engaged in the expenditure of a considerable capital. The manufacturer will possess the same influence over his workmen, as the landed proprietor over his tenants or labourers. Even the person who possesses considerable opulence, and has no intention to engage in the pursuits of profit or accumulation, will have an ample retinue, and will be enabled to use the same species of influence over his retainers and trades-people, as the landlord exercises over his tenants and labourers, and the manufacturer over his workmen. A certain degree of this species of influence in society, is perhaps not to be excepted against. The possessor of opulence in whatever form, may be expected to have received a superior education, and, being placed at a certain distance from the minuter details and the lesser wheels in the machine of society, to have larger and more expansive views as to the interests of the whole. It is good that men in different ranks of society should be brought into intercourse with each other; it will subtract something from the prejudices of both, and enable each to obtain some of the advantages of the other. The division of rank is too much calculated to split society into parties having a certain hostility to each other. In a free state we are all citizens: it is desirable that we should all be friends. But this species of influence may be carried too far. To a certain extent it is good. Inasmuch as it implies the enlightening one human understanding by the sparks struck out from another, or even the communication of feelings between man and man, this is not to be deprecated. Some degree of courteous compliance and deference of the ignorant to the better informed, is inseparable from the existence of political society as we behold it; such a deference as we may conceive the candid and conscientious layman to pay to the suggestions of his honest and disinterested pastor. Every thing however that is more than this, is evil. There should be no peremptory mandates, and no threat or apprehension of retaliation and mischief to follow, if the man of inferior station or opulence should finally differ in opinion from his wealthier neighbour. We may admit of a moral influence; but there must be nothing, that should in the smallest degree border on compulsion. But it is unfortunately in the very nature of weak, erring and fallible mortals, to make an ill use of the powers that are confided to their discretion. The rich man in the wantonness of his authority will not stop at moral influence, but, if he is disappointed of his expectation by what he will call my wilfulness and obstinacy, will speedily find himself impelled to vindicate his prerogative, and to punish my resistance. In every such disappointment he will discern a dangerous precedent, and will apprehend that, if I escape with impunity, the whole of that ascendancy, which he has regarded as one of the valuable privileges contingent to his station, will be undermined. Opulence has two ways of this grosser sort, by which it may enable its possessor to command the man below him,--punishment and reward. As the holder, for example, of a large landed estate, or the administrator of an ample income, may punish the man who shews himself refractory to his will, so he may also reward the individual who yields to his suggestions. This, in whatever form it presents itself, may be classed under the general head of bribery. The remedy for all this therefore, real or potential, mischief, is said to lie in the vote by ballot, a contrivance, by means of which every man shall be enabled to give his vote in favour of or against any candidate that shall be nominated, in absolute secrecy, without it being possible for any one to discover on which side the elector decided,--nay, a contrivance, by which the elector is invited to practise mystery and concealment, inasmuch as it would seem an impertinence in him to speak out, when the law is expressly constructed to bid him act and be silent. If he speaks, he is guilty of a sort of libel on his brother-electors, who are hereby implicitly reproached by him for their impenetrableness and cowardice. We are told that the institution of the ballot is indispensible to the existence of a free state, in a country where the goods of fortune are unequally distributed. In England, as the right of sending members to parliament is apportioned at the time I am writing, the power of electing is bestowed with such glaring inequality, and the number of electors in many cases is so insignificant, as inevitably to give to the noble and the rich the means of appointing almost any representatives they think fit, so that the house of commons may more justly be styled the nominees of the upper house, than the deputies of the nation. And it is further said, Remedy this inequality as much as you please, and reform the state of the representation to whatever degree, still, so long as the votes at elections are required to be given openly, the reform will be unavailing, and the essential part of the mischief will remain. The right of giving our votes in secrecy, is the only remedy that can cut off the ascendancy of the more opulent members of the community over the rest, and give us the substance of liberty, instead of cheating us with the shadow. On the other side I would beg the reader to consider, that the vote by ballot, in its obvious construction, is not the symbol of liberty, but of slavery. What is it, that presents to every eye the image of liberty, and compels every heart to confess, This is the temple where she resides? An open front, a steady and assured look, an habitual and uninterrupted commerce between the heart and the tongue. The free man communicates with his neighbour, not in corners and concealed places, but in market-places and scenes of public resort; and it is thus that the sacred spark is caught from man to man, till all are inspired with a common flame. Communication and publicity are of the essence of liberty; it is the air they breathe; and without it they die. If on the contrary I would characterise a despotism, I should say, It implied a certain circumference of soil, through whose divisions and districts every man suspected his neighbour, where every man was haunted with the terror that "walls have ears," and only whispered his discontent, his hopes and his fears, to the trees of the forest and the silent streams. If the dwellers on this soil consulted together, it would be in secret cabals and with closed doors; engaging in the sacred cause of public welfare and happiness, as if it were a thing of guilt, which the conspirator scarcely ventured to confess to his own heart. A shrewd person of my acquaintance the other day, to whom I unadvisedly proposed a question as to what he thought of some public transaction, instantly replied with symptoms of alarm, "I beg to say that I never disclose my opinions upon matters either of religion or politics to any one." What did this answer imply as to the political government of the country where it was given? Is it characteristic of a free state or a tyranny? One of the first and highest duties that falls to the lot of a human creature, is that which he owes to the aggregate of reasonable beings inhabiting what he calls his country. Our duties are then most solemn and elevating, when they are calculated to affect the well being of the greatest number of men; and of consequence what a patriot owes to his native soil is the noblest theatre for his moral faculties. And shall we teach men to discharge this debt in the dark? Surely every man ought to be able to "render a reason of the hope that is in him," and give a modest, but an assured, account of his political conduct. When he approaches the hustings at the period of a public election, this is his altar, where he sacrifices in the face of men to that deity, which is most worth his adoration of all the powers whose single province is our sublunary state. But the principle of the institution of ballot is to teach men to perform their best actions under the cloke of concealment. When I return from giving my vote in the choice of a legislative representative, I ought, if my mode of proceeding were regulated by the undebauched feelings of our nature, to feel somewhat proud that I had discharged this duty, uninfluenced, uncorrupted, in the sincere frame of a conscientious spirit. But the institution of ballot instigates me carefully to conceal what I have done. If I am questioned respecting it, the proper reply which is as it were put into my mouth is, "You have no right to ask me; and I shall not tell." But, as every man does not recollect the proper reply at the moment it is wanted, and most men feel abashed, when a direct question is put to them to which they know they are not to return a direct answer, many will stammer and feel confused, will perhaps insinuate a falshood, while at the same time their manner to a discerning eye will, in spite of all their precautions, disclose the very truth. The institution of ballot not only teaches us that our best actions are those which we ought most steadily to disavow, but carries distrust and suspicion into all our most familiar relations. The man I want to deceive, and throw out in the keenness of his hunting, is my landlord. But how shall I most effectually conceal the truth from him? May I be allowed to tell it to my wife or my child? I had better not. It is a known maxim of worldly prudence, that the truth which may be a source of serious injury to me, is safest, when it is shut up in my own bosom. If I once let it out, there is no saying where the communication may stop. "Day unto day uttereth speech; and night unto night sheweth forth knowledge." And is this the proud attitude of liberty, to which we are so eager to aspire? After all, there will be some ingenuous men in the community, who will not know how for ever to suppress what is dearest to their hearts. But at any rate this institution holds out a prize to him that shall be most secret and untraceable in his proceedings, that shall "shoe his horses with felt," and proceed in all his courses with silence and suspicion. The first principle of morality to social man is, that we act under the eye of our fellows. The truly virtuous man would do as he ought, though no eye observed him. Persons, it is true, who deport themselves merely as "men-pleasers," for ever considering how the by-standers will pronounce of their conduct, are entitled to small commendation. The good man, it is certain, will see To do what virtue would, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. But, imperfect creatures as we mortals usually are, these things act and react upon each other. A man of honourable intentions will demean himself justly, from the love of right. But he is confirmed in his just dealing by the approbation of his fellows; and, if he were tempted to step awry, he would be checked by the anticipation of their censure. Such is the nature of our moral education. It is with virtue, as it is with literary fame. If I write well, I can scarcely feel secure that I do so, till I obtain the suffrage of some competent judges, confirming the verdict which I was before tempted to pronounce in my own favour. This acting as in a theatre, where men and Gods are judges of my conduct, is the true destination of man; and we cannot violate the universal law under which we were born, without having reason to fear the most injurious effects. And is this mysterious and concealed way of proceeding one of the forms through which we are to pass in the school of liberty? The great end of all liberal institutions is, to make a man fearless, frank as the day, acting from a lively and earnest impulse, which will not be restrained, disdains all half-measures, and prompts us, as it were, to carry our hearts in our hands, for all men to challenge, and all men to comment on. It is true, that the devisers of liberal institutions will have foremost in their thoughts, how men shall be secure in their personal liberty, unrestrained in the execution of what their thoughts prompt them to do, and uncontrolled in the administration of the fruits of their industry. But the moral end of all is, that a man shall be worthy of the name, erect, independent of mind, spontaneous of decision, intrepid, overflowing with all good feelings, and open in the expression of the sentiments they inspire. If man is double in his weightiest purposes, full of ambiguity and concealment, and not daring to give words to the impulses of his soul, what matters it that he is free? We may pronounce of this man, that he is unworthy of the blessing that has fallen to his lot, and will never produce the fruits that should be engendered in the lap of liberty. There is however, it should seem, a short answer to all this. It is in vain to expatiate to us upon the mischiefs of lying, hypocrisy and concealment, since it is only through them, as the way by which we are to march, that nations can be made free. This certainly is a fearful judgment awarded upon our species: but is it true? We are to begin, it seems, with concealing from our landlord, or our opulent neighbour, our political determinations; and so his corrupt influence will be broken, and the humblest individual will be safe in doing that which his honest and unbiased feelings may prompt him to do. No: this is not the way in which the enemy of the souls of men is to be defeated. We must not begin with the confession of our faint-heartedness and our cowardice. A quiet, sober, unaltered frame of judgment, that insults no one, that has in it nothing violent, brutal and defying, is the frame that becomes us. If I would teach another man, my superior in rank, how he ought to construe and decide upon the conduct I hold, I must begin by making that conduct explicit. It is not in morals, as it is in war. There stratagem is allowable, and to take the enemy by surprise. "Who enquires of an enemy, whether it is by fraud or heroic enterprise that he has gained the day?" But it is not so that the cause of liberty is to be vindicated in the civil career of life. The question is of reducing the higher ranks of society to admit the just immunities of their inferiors. I will not allow that they shall be cheated into it. No: no man was ever yet recovered to his senses in a question of morals, but by plain, honest, soul-commanding speech. Truth is omnipotent, if we do not violate its majesty by surrendering its outworks, and giving up that vantage-ground, of which if we deprive it, it ceases to be truth. It finds a responsive chord in every human bosom. Whoever hears its voice, at the same time recognises its power. However corrupt he may be, however steeped in the habits of vice, and hardened in the practices of tyranny, if it be mildly, distinctly, emphatically enunciated, the colour will forsake his cheek, his speech will alter and be broken, and he will feel himself unable to turn it off lightly, as a thing of no impression and validity. In this way the erroneous man, the man nursed in the house of luxury, a stranger to the genuine, unvarnished state of things, stands a fair chance of being corrected. But, if an opposite, and a truer way of thinking than that to which he is accustomed, is only brought to his observation by the reserve of him who entertains it, and who, while he entertains it, is reluctant to hold communion with his wealthier neighbour, who regards him as his adversary, and hardly admits him to be of the same common nature, there will be no general improvement. Under this discipline the two ranks of society will be perpetually more estranged, view each other with eye askance, and will be as two separate and hostile states, though inhabiting the same territory. Is this the picture we desire to see of genuine liberty, philanthropic, desirous of good to all, and overflowing with all generous emotions? I hate where vice can bolt her arguments, And virtue has no tongue to check her pride. The man who interests himself for his country and its cause, who acts bravely and independently, and knows that he runs some risk in doing so, must have a strange opinion of the sacredness of truth, if the very consciousness of having done nobly does not supply him with courage, and give him that simple, unostentatious firmness, which shall carry immediate conviction to the heart. It is a bitter lesson that the institution of ballot teaches, while it says, "You have done well; therefore be silent; whisper it not to the winds; disclose it not to those who are most nearly allied to you; adopt the same conduct which would suggest itself to you, if you had perpetrated an atrocious crime." In no long time after the commencement of the war of the allies against France, certain acts were introduced into the English parliament, declaring it penal by word or writing to utter any thing that should tend to bring the government into contempt; and these acts, by the mass of the adversaries of despotic power, were in way of contempt called the Gagging Acts. Little did I and my contemporaries of 1795 imagine, when we protested against these acts in the triumphant reign of William Pitt, that the soi-disant friends of liberty and radical reformers, when their turn of triumph came, would propose their Gagging Acts, recommending to the people to vote agreeably to their consciences, but forbidding them to give publicity to the honourable conduct they had been prevailed on to adopt! But all this reasoning is founded in an erroneous, and groundlessly degrading, opinion of human nature. The improvement of the general institutions of society, the correction of the gross inequalities of our representation, will operate towards the improvement of all the members of the community. While ninety-nine in an hundred of the inhabitants of England are carried forward in the scale of intellect and virtue, it would be absurd to suppose that the hundredth man will stand still, merely because he is rich. Patriotism is a liberal and a social impulse; its influence is irresistible; it is contagious, and is propagated by the touch; it is infectious, and mixes itself with the air that we breathe. Men are governed in their conduct in a surprising degree by the opinion of others. It was all very well, when noblemen were each of them satisfied of the equity and irresistible principle of their ascendancy, when the vulgar population felt convinced that passive obedience was entailed on them from their birth, when we were in a manner but just emancipated (illusorily emancipated!) from the state of serfs and villains. But a memorable melioration of the state of man will carry some degree of conviction to the hearts of all. The most corrupt will be made doubtful: many who had not gone so far in ill, will desert the banners of oppression. We see this already. What a shock was propagated through the island, when, the other day, a large proprietor, turning a considerable cluster of his tenants out of the houses and lands they occupied, because they refused to vote for a representative in parliament implicitly as he bade them, urged in his own justification, "Shall I not do what I will with my own?" This was all sound morals and divinity perhaps at the period of his birth. Nobody disputed it; or, if any one did, he was set down by the oracles of the vicinage as a crackbrained visionary. This man, so confident in his own prerogatives, had slept for the last twenty years, and awoke totally unconscious of what had been going on in almost every corner of Europe in the interval. A few more such examples; and so broad and sweeping an assumption will no more be heard of, and it will remain in the records of history, as a thing for the reality of which we have sufficient evidence, but which common sense repudiates, and which seems to demand from us a certain degree of credulity to induce us to admit that it had ever been. The manners of society are by no means so unchanged and unalterable as many men suppose. It is here, as in the case of excessive drinking, which I had lately occasion to mention(36). In rude and barbarous times men of the highest circles piqued themselves upon their power of swallowing excessive potations, and found pleasure in it. It is in this as in so many other vices, we follow implicitly where our elders lead the way. But the rage of drinking is now gone by; and you will with difficulty find a company of persons of respectable appearance, who assemble round a table for the purpose of making beasts of themselves. Formerly it was their glory; now, if any man unhappily retains the weakness, he hides it from his equals, as he would a loathsome disease. The same thing will happen as to parliamentary corruption, and the absolute authority that was exercised by landlords over the consciences of their tenants. He that shall attempt to put into act what is then universally condemned, will be a marked man, and will be generally shunned by his fellows. The eye of the world will be upon him, as the murderer fancies himself followed by the eye of omnipotence; and he will obey the general voice of the community, that he may be at peace with himself. (36) See above, Essay 9. Let us not then disgrace a period of memorable improvement, by combining it with an institution that should mark that we, the great body of the people, regard the more opulent members of the community as our foes. Let us hold out to them the right hand of fellowship; and they will meet us. They will be influenced, partly by ingenuous shame for the unworthy conduct which they and their fathers had so long pursued, and partly by sympathy for the genuine joy and expansion of heart that is spreading itself through the land. Scarcely any one can restrain himself from participating in the happiness of the great body of his countrymen; and, if they see that we treat them with generous confidence, and are unwilling to recur to the memory of former grievances, and that a spirit of philanthropy and unlimited good-will is the sentiment of the day, it can scarcely happen but that their conversion will be complete, and the harmony be made entire(37). (37) The subject of this Essay is resumed in the close of the following. ESSAY XVIII. OF DIFFIDENCE. The following Essay will be to a considerable degree in the nature of confession, like the Confessions of St. Augustine or of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It may therefore at first sight appear of small intrinsic value, and scarcely worthy of a place in the present series. But, as I have had occasion more than once to remark, we are all of us framed in a great measure on the same model, and the analysis of the individual may often stand for the analysis of a species. While I describe myself therefore, I shall probably at the same time be describing no inconsiderable number of my fellow-beings. It is true, that the duty of man under the head of Frankness, is of a very comprehensive nature. We ought all of us to tell to our neighbour whatever it may be of advantage to him to know, we ought to be the sincere and zealous advocates of absent merit and worth, and we are bound by every means in our power to contribute to the improvement of others, and to the diffusion of salutary truths through the world. From the universality of these precepts many readers might be apt to infer, that I am in my own person the bold and unsparing preacher of truth, resolutely giving to every man his due, and, agreeably to the apostle's direction, "instant in season, and out of season." The individual who answers to this description will often be deemed troublesome, often annoying; he will produce a considerable sensation in the circle of those who know him; and it will depend upon various collateral circumstances, whether he shall ultimately be judged a rash and intemperate disturber of the contemplations of his neighbours, or a disinterested and heroic suggester of new veins of thinking, by which his contemporaries and their posterity shall be essentially the gainers. I have no desire to pass myself upon those who may have any curiosity respecting me for better than I am; and I will therefore here put down a few particulars, which may tend to enable them to form an equitable judgment. One of the earliest passions of my mind was the love of truth and sound opinion. "Why should I," such was the language of my solitary meditations, "because I was born in a certain degree of latitude, in a certain century, in a country where certain institutions prevail, and of parents professing a certain faith, take it for granted that all this is right?--This is matter of accident. 'Time and chance happeneth to all:' and I, the thinking principle within me, might, if such had been the order of events, have been born under circumstances the very reverse of those under which I was born. I will not, if I can help it, be the creature of accident; I will not, like a shuttle-cock, be at the disposal of every impulse that is given me." I felt a certain disdain for the being thus directed; I could not endure the idea of being made a fool of, and of taking every ignis fatuus for a guide, and every stray notion, the meteor of the day, for everlasting truth. I am the person, spoken of in a preceding Essay(38), who early said to Truth, "Go on: whithersoever thou leadest, I am prepared to follow." (38) See above, Essay XIII. During my college-life therefore, I read all sorts of books, on every side of any important question, that were thrown in my way, or that I could hear of. But the very passion that determined me to this mode of proceeding, made me wary and circumspect in coming to a conclusion. I knew that it would, if any thing, be a more censurable and contemptible act, to yield to every seducing novelty, than to adhere obstinately to a prejudice because it had been instilled into me in youth. I was therefore slow of conviction, and by no means "given to change." I never willingly parted with a suggestion that was unexpectedly furnished to me; but I examined it again and again, before I consented that it should enter into the set of my principles. In proportion however as I became acquainted with truth, or what appeared to me to be truth, I was like what I have read of Melancthon, who, when he was first converted to the tenets of Luther, became eager to go into all companies, that he might make them partakers of the same inestimable treasures, and set before them evidence that was to him irresistible. It is needless to say, that he often encountered the most mortifying disappointment. Young and eager as I was in my mission, I received in this way many a bitter lesson. But the peculiarity of my temper rendered this doubly impressive to me. I could not pass over a hint, let it come from what quarter it would, without taking it into some consideration, and endeavouring to ascertain the precise weight that was to be attributed to it. It would however often happen, particularly in the question of the claims of a given individual to honour and respect, that I could see nothing but the most glaring injustice in the opposition I experienced. In canvassing the character of an individual, it is not for the most part general, abstract or moral, principles that are called into question: I am left in possession of the premises which taught me to admire the man whose character is contested; and conformably to those premises I see that his claim to the honour I have paid him is fully made out. In my communications with others, in the endeavour to impart what I deemed to be truth, I began with boldness: but I often found that the evidence that was to me irresistible, was made small account of by others; and it not seldom happened, as candour was my principle, and a determination to receive what could be strewn to be truth, let it come from what quarter it would, that suggestions were presented to me, materially calculated to stagger the confidence with which I had set out. If I had been divinely inspired, if I had been secured by an omniscient spirit against the danger of error, my case would have been different. But I was not inspired. I often encountered an opposition I had not anticipated, and was often presented with objections, or had pointed out to me flaws and deficiencies in my reasonings, which, till they were so pointed out, I had not apprehended. I had not lungs enabling me to drown all contradiction; and, which was still more material, I had not a frame of mind, which should determine me to regard whatever could be urged against me as of no value. I therefore became cautious. As a human creature, I did not relish the being held up to others' or to myself, as rash, inconsiderate and headlong, unaware of difficulties the most obvious, embracing propositions the most untenable, and "against hope believing in hope." And, as an apostle of truth, I distinctly perceived that a reputation for perspicacity and sound judgment was essential to my mission. I therefore often became less a speaker, than a listener, and by no means made it a law with myself to defend principles and characters I honoured, on every occasion on which I might hear them attacked. A new epoch occurred in my character, when I published, and at the time I was writing, my Enquiry concerning Political Justice. My mind was wrought up to a certain elevation of tone; the speculations in which I was engaged, tending to embrace all that was most important to man in society, and the frame to which I had assiduously bent myself, of giving quarter to nothing because it was old, and shrinking from nothing because it was startling and astounding, gave a new bias to my character. The habit which I thus formed put me more on the alert even in the scenes of ordinary life, and gave me a boldness and an eloquence more than was natural to me. I then reverted to the principle which I stated in the beginning, of being ready to tell my neighbour whatever it might be of advantage to him to know, to shew myself the sincere and zealous advocate of absent merit and worth, and to contribute by every means in my power to the improvement of others and to the diffusion of salutary truth through the world. I desired that every hour that I lived should be turned to the best account, and was bent each day to examine whether I had conformed myself to this rule. I held on this course with tolerable constancy for five or six years: and, even when that constancy abated, it failed not to leave a beneficial effect on my subsequent conduct. But, in pursuing this scheme of practice, I was acting a part somewhat foreign to my constitution. I was by nature more of a speculative than an active character, more inclined to reason within myself upon what I heard and saw, than to declaim concerning it. I loved to sit by unobserved, and to meditate upon the panorama before me. At first I associated chiefly with those who were more or less admirers of my work; and, as I had risen (to speak in the slang phrase) like "a star" upon my contemporaries without being expected, I was treated generally with a certain degree of deference, or, where not with deference and submission, yet as a person whose opinions and view of things were to be taken into the account. The individuals who most strenuously opposed me, acted with a consciousness that, if they affected to despise me, they must not expect that all the bystanders would participate in that feeling. But this was to a considerable degree the effect of novelty. My lungs, as I have already said, were not of iron; my manner was not overbearing and despotic; there was nothing in it to deter him who differed from me from entering the field in turn, and telling the tale of his views and judgments in contradiction to mine. I descended into the arena, and stood on a level with the rest. Beyond this, it occasionally happened that, if I had not the stentorian lungs, and the petty artifices of rhetoric and conciliation, that should carry a cause independently of its merits, my antagonists were not deficient in these respects. I had nothing in my favour to balance this, but a sort of constitutional equanimity and imperturbableness of temper, which, if I was at any time silenced, made me not look like a captive to be dragged at the chariot-wheels of my adversary. All this however had a tendency to subtract from my vocation as a missionary. I was no longer a knight-errant, prepared on all occasions by dint of arms to vindicate the cause of every principle that was unjustly handled, and every character that was wrongfully assailed. Meanwhile I returned to the field, occasionally and uncertainly. It required some provocation and incitement to call me out: but there was the lion, or whatever combative animal may more justly prefigure me, sleeping, and that might be awakened. There is another feature necessary to be mentioned, in order to make this a faithful representation. There are persons, it should seem, of whom it may be predicated, that they are semper parati. This has by no means been my case. My genius often deserted me. I was far from having the thought, the argument, or the illustration at all times ready, when it was required. I resembled to a certain degree the persons we read of, who are said to be struck as if with a divine judgment. I was for a moment changed into one of the mere herd, de grege porcus. My powers therefore were precarious, and I could not always be the intrepid and qualified advocate of truth, if I vehemently desired it. I have often, a few minutes afterwards, or on my return to my chambers, recollected the train of thinking, which world have strewn me off to advantage, and memorably done me honour, if I could have had it at my command the moment it was wanted. And so much for confession. I am by no means vindicating myself. I honour much more the man who is at all times ready to tell his neighbour whatever it may be of advantage to him to know, to shew himself the sincere and untemporising advocate of absent merit and worth, and to contribute by every means in his power to the improvement of others, and to the diffusion of salutary truths through the world. This is what every man ought to be, and what the best devised scheme of republican institutions would have a tendency to make us all. But, though the man here described is to a certain degree a deserter of his true place in society, and cannot be admitted to have played his part in all things well, we are by no means to pronounce upon him a more unfavourable judgment than he merits. Diffidence, though, where it disqualifies us in any way from doing justice to truth, either as it respects general principle or individual character, a defect, yet is on no account to be confounded in demerit with that suppression of truth, or misrepresentation, which grows out of actual craft and design. The diffident man, in some cases seldomer, and in some oftener and in a more glaring manner, deserts the cause of truth, and by that means is the cause of misrepresentation, and indirectly the propagator of falshood. But he is constant and sincere as far as he goes; he never lends his voice to falshood, or intentionally to sophistry; he never for an instant goes over to the enemy's standard, or disgraces his honest front by strewing it in the ranks of tyranny or imposture. He may undoubtedly be accused, to a certain degree, of dissimulation, or throwing into shade the thing that is, but never of simulation, or the pretending the thing to be that is not. He is plain and uniform in every thing that he professes, or to which he gives utterance; but, from timidity or irresolution, he keeps back in part the offering which he owes at the shrine where it is most honourable and glorious for man to worship. And this brings me back again to the subject of the immediately preceding Essay, the propriety of voting by ballot. The very essence of this scheme is silence. And this silence is not merely like that which is prompted by a diffident temper, which by fits is practiced by the modest and irresolute man, and by fits disappears before the sun of truth and through the energies of a temporary fortitude. It is uniform. It is not brought into act only, when the individual unhappily does not find in himself the firmness to play the adventurer. It becomes matter of system, and is felt as being recommended to us for a duty. Nor does the evil stop there. In the course of my ordinary communications with my fellow-men, I speak when I please, and I am silent when I please, and there is nothing specially to be remarked either way. If I speak, I am perhaps listened to; and, if I am silent, it is likely enough concluded that it is because I have nothing of importance to say. But in the question of ballot the case is far otherwise. There it is known that the voter has his secret. When I am silent upon a matter occurring in the usual intercourses of life where I might speak, nay, where we will suppose I ought to speak, I am at least guilty of dissimulation only. But the voter by ballot is strongly impelled to the practice of the more enormous sin of simulation. It is known, as I have said, that he has his secret. And he will often be driven to have recourse to various stratagems, that he may elude the enquirer, or that he may set at fault the sagacity of the silent observer. He has something that he might tell if he would, and he distorts himself in a thousand ways, that he may not betray the hoard which he is known to have in his custody. The institution of ballot is the fruitful parent of ambiguities, equivocations and lies without number. ESSAY XIX. OF SELF-COMPLACENCY. The subject of this Essay is intimately connected with those of Essays XI and XII, perhaps the most important of the series. It has been established in the latter, that human creatures are constantly accompanied in their voluntary actions with the delusive sense of liberty, and that our character, our energies, and our conscience of moral right and wrong, are mainly dependent upon this feature in our constitution. The subject of my present disquisition relates to the feeling of self-approbation or self-complacency, which will be found inseparable from the most honourable efforts and exertions in which mortal men can be engaged. One of the most striking of the precepts contained in what are called the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, is couched in the words, "Reverence thyself." The duties which are incumbent on man are of two sorts, negative and positive. We are bound to set right our mistakes, and to correct the evil habits to which we are prone; and we are bound also to be generously ambitious, to aspire after excellence, and to undertake such things as may reflect honour on ourselves, and be useful to others. To the practice of the former of these classes of duties we may be instigated by prohibitions, menaces and fear, the fear of mischiefs that may fall upon us conformably to the known series of antecedents and consequents in the course of nature, or of mischiefs that may be inflicted on us by the laws of the country in which we live, or as results of the ill will and disapprobation felt towards us by individuals. There is nothing that is necessarily generous or invigorating in the practice of our negative duties. They amount merely to a scheme for keeping us within bounds, and restraining us from those sallies and escapes, which human nature, undisciplined and left to itself, might betray us into. But positive enterprise, and great actual improvement cannot be expected by us in this way. All this is what the apostle refers to, when he speaks of "the law as a schoolmaster to bring us to liberty," after which he advises us "not to be again entangled with the yoke of bondage." On the other hand, if we would enter ourselves in the race of positive improvement, if we would become familiar with generous sentiments, and the train of conduct which such sentiments inspire, we must provide ourselves with the soil in which such things grow, and engage in the species of husbandry by which they are matured; in other words, we must be no strangers to self-esteem and self-complacency. The truth of this statement may perhaps be most strikingly illustrated, if we take for our example the progress of schoolboys under a preceptor. A considerable proportion of these are apt, diligent, and desirous to perform the tasks in which they are engaged, so as to satisfy the demands of their masters and parents, and to advance honourably in the path that is recommended to them. And a considerable proportion put themselves on the defensive, and propose to their own minds to perform exactly as much as shall exempt them from censure and punishment, and no more. Now I say of the former, that they cannot accomplish the purpose they have conceived, unless so far as they are aided by a sentiment of self-reverence. The difference of the two parties is, that the latter proceed, so far as their studies are concerned, as feeling themselves under the law of necessity, and as if they were machines merely, and the former as if they were under what the apostle calls "the law of liberty." We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity. But this is the smallest part of what is necessary. We must also be in good humour with ourselves. We must say, I can do that which I shall have just occasion to look back upon with satisfaction. It is the anticipation of this result, that stimulates our efforts, and carries us forward. Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire. It is incompatible with languor and neutrality. It implies the love of glory, perhaps of that glory which shall be attributed to us by others, or perhaps only of that glory which shall be reaped by us in the silent chambers of the mind. The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself. He sits down to his task with resolution, he approves of what he does in each step of the process, and in each enquires, Is this the thing I purposed to effect? And, as it is with the unfledged schoolboy, after the same manner it is with the man mature. He must have to a certain extent a good opinion of himself, he must feel a kind of internal harmony, giving to the circulations of his frame animation and cheerfulness, or he can never undertake and execute considerable things. The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation. He that undertakes any great achievement will, according to the vulgar phrase, "think twice," before he buckles up his resolution, and plunges into the ocean, which he has already surveyed with anxious glance while he remained on shore. Let our illustration be the case of Columbus, who, from the figure of the earth, inferred that there must be a way of arriving at the Indies by a voyage directly west, in distinction from the very complicated way hitherto practiced, by sailing up the Mediterranean, crossing the isthmus of Suez, and so falling down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. He weighed all the circumstances attendant on such an undertaking in his mind. He enquired into his own powers and resources, imaged to himself the various obstacles that might thwart his undertaking, and finally resolved to engage in it. If Columbus had not entertained a very good opinion of himself, it is impossible that he should have announced such a project, or should have achieved it. Again. Let our illustration be, of Homer undertaking to compose the Iliad. If he had not believed himself to be a man of very superior powers to the majority of the persons around him, he would most assuredly never have attempted it. What an enterprise! To describe in twenty-four books, and sixteen thousand verses, the perpetual warfare and contention of two great nations, all Greece being armed for the attack, and all the western division of Asia Minor for the defence: the war carried on by two vast confederacies, under numerous chiefs, all sovereign and essentially independent of each other. To conceive the various characters of the different leaders, and their mutual rivalship. To engage all heaven, such as it was then understood, as well as what was most respectable on earth, in the struggle. To form the idea, through twenty-four books, of varying the incidents perpetually, and keeping alive the attention of the reader or hearer without satiety or weariness. For this purpose, and to answer to his conception of a great poem, Homer appears to have thought it necessary that the action should be one; and he therefore took the incidental quarrel of Achilles and the commander in chief, the resentment of Achilles, and his consequent defection from the cause, till, by the death of Patroclus, and then of Hector, all traces of the misunderstanding first, and then of its consequences, should be fully obliterated. There is further an essential difference between the undertaking of Columbus and that of Homer. Once fairly engaged, there was for Columbus no drawing back. Being already at sea on the great Atlantic Ocean, he could not retrace his steps. Even when he had presented his project to the sovereigns of Spain, and they had accepted it, and still more when the ships were engaged, and the crews mustered, he must go forward, or submit to indelible disgrace. It is not so in writing a poem. The author of the latter may stop whenever he pleases. Of consequence, during every day of its execution, he requires a fresh stimulus. He must look back on the past, and forward on what is to come, and feel that he has considerable reason to be satisfied. The great naval discoverer may have his intervals of misgiving and discouragement, and may, as Pope expresses it, "wish that any one would hang him." He goes forward; for he has no longer the liberty to choose. But the author of a mighty poem is not in the same manner entangled, and therefore to a great degree returns to his work each day, "screwing his courage to the sticking-place." He must feel the same fortitude and elasticity, and be as entirely the same man of heroic energy, as when he first arrived at the resolution to engage. How much then of self-complacency and self-confidence do his undertaking and performance imply! I have taken two of the most memorable examples in the catalogue of human achievements: the discovery of a New World, and the production of the Iliad. But all those voluntary actions, or rather series and chains of actions, which comprise energy in the first determination, and honour in the execution, each in its degree rests upon self-complacency as the pillar upon which its weight is sustained, and without which it must sink into nothing. Self-complacency then being the indispensible condition of all that is honourable in human achievements, hence we may derive a multitude of duties, and those of the most delicate nature, incumbent on the preceptor, as well as a peculiar discipline to be observed by the candidate, both while he is "under a schoolmaster," and afterwards when he is emancipated, and his plan of conduct is to be regulated by his own discretion. The first duty of the preceptor is encouragement. Not that his face is to be for ever dressed in smiles, and that his tone is to be at all times that of invitation and courtship. The great theatre of the world is of a mingled constitution, made up of advantages and sufferings; and it is perhaps best that so should be the different scenes of the drama as they pass. The young adventurer is not to expect to have every difficulty smoothed for him by the hand of another. This were to teach him a lesson of effeminacy and cowardice. On the contrary it is necessary that he should learn that human life is a state of hardship, that the adversary we have to encounter does not always present himself with his fangs sheathed in the woolly softness which occasionally renders them harmless, and that nothing great or eminently honourable was ever achieved but through the dint of resolution, energy and struggle. It is good that the winds of heaven should blow upon him, that he should encounter the tempest of the elements, and occasionally sustain the inclemency of the summer's heat and winter's cold, both literally and metaphorically. But the preceptor, however he conducts himself in other respects, ought never to allow his pupil to despise himself, or to hold himself as of no account. Self-contempt can never be a discipline favourable to energy or to virtue. The pupil ought at all times to judge himself in some degree worthy, worthy and competent now to attempt, and hereafter to accomplish, things deserving of commendation. The preceptor must never degrade his pupil in his own eyes, but on the contrary must teach him that nothing but resolution and perseverance are necessary, to enable him to effect all that the judicious director can expect from him. He should be encouraged through every step of his progress, and specially encouraged when he has gained a certain point, and arrived at an important resting-place. It is thus we are taught the whole circle of what are called accomplishments, dancing, music, fencing, and the rest; and it is surely a strange anomaly, if those things which are most essential in raising the mind to its true standard, cannot be communicated with equal suavity and kindness, be surrounded with allurements, and regarded as sources of pleasure and genuine hilarity. In the mean time it is to be admitted that every human creature, especially in the season of youth, and not being the victim of some depressing disease either of body or mind, has in him a good obstinate sort of self-complacency, which cannot without much difficulty be eradicated. "Though he falleth seven times, yet will he rise again." And, when we have encountered various mortifications, and have been many times rebuked and inveighed against, we nevertheless recover our own good opinion, and are ready to enter into a fresh contention for the prize, if not in one kind, then in another. It is in allusion to this feature in the human character, that we have an expressive phrase in the English language,--"to break the spirit." The preceptor may occasionally perhaps prescribe to the pupil a severe task; and the young adventurer may say, Can I be expected to accomplish this? But all must be done in kindness. The generous attempter must be reminded of the powers he has within him, perhaps yet unexercised; with cheering sounds his progress must be encouraged; and, above all, the director of the course must take care not to tax him beyond his strength. And, be it observed, that the strength of a human creature is to be ascertained by two things; first, the abstract capacity, that the thing required is not beyond the power of a being so constituted to perform; and, secondly, we must take into the account his past achievements, the things he has already accomplished, and not expect that he is at once to overleap a thousand obstacles. For there is such a thing as a broken spirit. I remember a boy who was my schoolfellow, that, having been treated with uncalled for severity, never appeared afterwards in the scene of instruction, but with a neglected appearance, and the articles of his dress scarcely half put on. I was very young at the time, and viewed only the outside of things. I cannot tell whether he had any true ambition previously to his disgrace, but I am sure he never had afterwards. How melancholy an object is the man, who, "for the privilege to breathe, bears up and down the city A discontented and repining spirit Burthensome to itself," incapable of enterprise, listless, with no courage to undertake, and no anticipation of the practicability of success and honour! And this spectacle is still more affecting, when the subject shall be a human creature in the dawn of youth, when nature opens to him a vista of beauty and fruition on every side, and all is encouraging, redolent of energy and enterprise! To break the spirit of a man, bears a considerable resemblance to the breaking the main spring, or principal movement, of a complicated and ingeniously constructed machine. We cannot tell when it is to happen; and it comes at last perhaps at the time that it is least expected. A judicious superintendent therefore will be far from trying consequences in his office, and will, like a man walking on a cliff whose extremes are ever and anon crumbling away and falling into the ocean, keep much within the edge, and at a safe distance from the line of danger. But this consideration has led me much beyond the true subject of this Essay. The instructor of youth, as I have already said, is called upon to use all his skill, to animate the courage, and maintain the cheerfulness and self-complacency of his pupil. And, as such is the discipline to be observed to the candidate, while he is "under a schoolmaster," so, when he is emancipated, and his plan of conduct is to be regulated by his own discretion, it is necessary that he should carry forward the same scheme, and cultivate that tone of feeling, which should best reconcile him to himself, and, by teaching him to esteem himself and bear in mind his own value, enable him to achieve things honourable to his character, and memorably useful to others. Melancholy, and a disposition anticipating evil are carefully to be guarded against, by him who is desirous to perform his part well on the theatre of society. He should habitually meditate all cheerful things, and sing the song of battle which has a thousand times spurred on his predecessors to victory. He should contemplate the crown that awaits him, and say to himself, I also will do my part, and endeavour to enrol myself in the select number of those champions, of whom it has been predicated that they were men, of whom, compared with the herd of ordinary mortals, "the world," the species among whom they were rated, "was not worthy." Another consideration is to be recollected here. Without self-complacency in the agent no generous enterprise is to be expected, and no train of voluntary actions, such as may purchase honour to the person engaged in them. But, beside this, there is no true and substantial happiness but for the self-complacent. "The good man," as Solomon says, "is satisfied from himself." The reflex act is inseparable from the constitution of the human mind. How can any one have genuine happiness, unless in proportion as he looks round, and, "behold! every thing is very good?" This is the sunshine of the soul, the true joy, that gives cheerfulness to all our circulations, and makes us feel ourselves entire and complete. What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name. If I go into a school, and look round on a number of young faces, the scene is destitute of its true charm, unless so far as I see inward peace and contentment on all sides. And, if we require this eminently in the young, neither can it be less essential, when in growing manhood we have the real cares of the world to contend with, or when in declining age we need every auxiliary to enable us to sustain our infirmities. But, before I conclude my remarks on this subject, it is necessary that I should carefully distinguish between the thesis, that self-complacency is the indispensible condition of all that is honourable in human achievements, and the proposition contended against in Essay XI, that "self-love is the source of all our actions." Self-complacency is indeed the feeling without which we cannot proceed in an honourable course; but is far from being the motive that impels us to act. The motive is in the real nature and absolute properties of the good thing that is proposed to our choice: we seek the happiness of another, because his happiness is the object of our desire. Self-complacency may be likened to the bottle-holder in one of those contentions for bodily prowess, so characteristic of our old English manners. The bottle-holder is necessary to supply the combatant with refreshment, and to encourage him to persist; but it would be most unnatural to regard him as the cause of the contest. No: the parties have found reason for competition, they apprehend a misunderstanding or a rivalry impossible to be settled but by open contention, and the putting forth of mental and corporeal energy; and the bottle-holder is an auxiliary called in afterwards, his interference implying that the parties have already a motive to act, and have thrown down the gauntlet in token of the earnest good-will which animates them to engage. ESSAY XX. OF PHRENOLOGY. The following remarks can pretend to be nothing more than a few loose and undigested thoughts upon a subject, which has recently occupied the attention of many men, and obtained an extraordinary vogue in the world. It were to be wished, that the task had fallen into the hands of a writer whose studies were more familiar with all the sciences which bear more or less on the topic I propose to consider: but, if abler and more competent men pass it by, I feel disposed to plant myself in the breach, and to offer suggestions which may have the fortune to lead others, better fitted for the office than myself, to engage in the investigation. One advantage I may claim, growing out of my partial deficiency. It is known not to be uncommon for a man to stand too near to the subject of his survey, to allow him to obtain a large view of it in all its bearings. I am no anatomist: I simply take my stand upon the broad ground of the general philosophy of man. It is a very usual thing for fanciful theories to have their turn amidst the eccentricities of the human mind, and then to be heard of no more. But it is perhaps no ill occupation, now and then, for an impartial observer, to analyse these theories, and attempt to blow away the dust which will occasionally settle on the surface of science. If phrenology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, be a truth, I shall probably render a service to that truth, by endeavouring to shew where the edifice stands in need of more solid supports than have yet been assigned to it. If it be a falshood, the sooner it is swept away to the gulph of oblivion the better. Let the inquisitive and the studious fix their minds on more substantial topics, instead of being led away by gaudy and deceitful appearances. The human head, that crowning capital of the column of man, is too interesting a subject, to be the proper theme of every dabbler. And it is obvious, that the professors of this so called discovery, if they be rash and groundless in their assertions, will be in danger of producing momentous errors, of exciting false hopes never destined to be realised, and of visiting with pernicious blasts the opening buds of excellence, at the time when they are most exposed to the chance of destruction. I shall set out with acknowledging, that there is, as I apprehend, a science in relation to the human head, something like what Plato predicates of the statue hid in a block of marble. It is really contained in the block; but it is only the most consummate sculptor, that can bring it to the eyes of men, and free it from all the incumbrances, which, till he makes application of his art to it, surround the statue, and load it with obscurities and disfigurement. The man, who, without long study and premeditation, rushes in at once, and expects to withdraw the curtain, will only find himself disgraced by the attempt. There is a passage in an acute writer(39), whose talents singularly fitted him, even when he appeared totally immerged in mummery and trifles, to illustrate the most important truths, that is applicable to the point I am considering. (39) Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. 1. "Pray, what was that man's name,--for I write in such a hurry, I have no time to recollect or look for it,--who first made the observation, 'That there was great inconstancy in our air and climate?' Whoever he was, it was a just and good observation in him. But the corollary drawn from it, namely, 'That it is this which has furnished us with such a variety of odd and whimsical characters;'--that was not his;--it was found out by another man, at least a century and a half after him. Then again, that this copious storehouse of original materials is the true and natural cause that our comedies are so much better than those of France, or any others that have or can be wrote upon the continent;--that discovery was not fully made till about the middle of king William's reign, when the great Dryden, in writing one of his long prefaces (if I mistake not), most fortunately hit upon it. Then, fourthly and lastly, that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so strange an irregularity in our characters, cloth thereby in some sort make us amends, by giving us somewhat to make us merry with, when the weather will not suffer us to go out of doors,--that observation is my own; and was struck out by me this very rainy day, March 26, 1759, and betwixt the hour of nine and ten in the morning. "Thus--thus, my fellow-labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, aenigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of them ending, as these do, in ical,) has, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that acme of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advantages of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off." Nothing can be more true, than the proposition ludicrously illustrated in this passage, that real science is in most instances of slow growth, and that the discoveries which are brought to perfection at once, are greatly exposed to the suspicion of quackery. Like the ephemeron fly, they are born suddenly, and may be expected to die as soon. Lavater, the well known author of Essays on Physiognomy, appears to have been born seventeen years before the birth of Gall. He attempted to reduce into a system the indications of human character that are to be found in the countenance. Physiognomy, as a subject of ingenious and probable conjecture, was well known to the ancients. But the test, how far any observations that have been made on the subject are worthy the name of a science, will lie in its application by the professor to a person respecting whom he has had no opportunity of previous information. Nothing is more easy, when a great warrior, statesman, poet, philosopher or philanthropist is explicitly placed before us, than for the credulous inspector or fond visionary to examine the lines of his countenance, and to point at the marks which should plainly shew us that he ought to have been the very thing that he is. This is the very trick of gipsies and fortune-tellers. But who ever pointed to an utter stranger in the street, and said, I perceive by that man's countenance that he is one of the great luminaries of the world? Newton, or Bacon, or Shakespear would probably have passed along unheeded. Instances of a similar nature occur every day. Hence it plainly appears that, whatever may hereafter be known on the subject, we can scarcely to the present time be said to have overstepped the threshold. And yet nothing can be more certain than that there is a science of physiognomy, though to make use of an illustration already cited, it has not to this day been extricated out of the block of marble in which it is hid. Human passions, feelings and modes of thinking leave their traces on the countenance: but we have not, thus far, left the dame's school in this affair, and are not qualified to enter ourselves in the free-school for more liberal enquiries. The writings of Lavater on the subject of physiognomy are couched in a sort of poetic prose, overflowing with incoherent and vague exclamations, and bearing small resemblance to a treatise in which the elements of science are to be developed. Their success however was extraordinary; and it was probably that success, which prompted Gall first to turn his attention from the indications of character that are to be found in the face of man, to the study of the head generally, as connected with the intellectual and moral qualities of the individual. It was about four years before the commencement of the present century, that Gall appears to have begun to deliver lectures on the structure and external appearances of the human head. He tells us, that his attention was first called to the subject in the ninth year of his age (that is, in the year 1767), and that he spent thirty years in the private meditation of his system, before he began to promulgate it. Be that as it will, its most striking characteristic is that of marking out the scull into compartments, in the same manner as a country delineated on a map is divided into districts, and assigning a different faculty or organ to each. In the earliest of these diagrams that has fallen under my observation, the human scull is divided into twenty-seven compartments. I would say of craniology, as I have already said of physiognomy, that there is such a science attainable probably by man, but that we have yet made scarcely any progress in the acquiring it. As certain lines in the countenance are indicative of the dispositions of the man, so it is reasonable to believe that a certain structure of the head is in correspondence with the faculties and propensities of the individual. Thus far we may probably advance without violating a due degree of caution. But there is a wide distance between this general statement, and the conduct of the man who at once splits the human head into twenty-seven compartments. The exterior appearance of the scull is affirmed to correspond with the structure of the brain beneath. And nothing can be more analogous to what the deepest thinkers have already confessed of man, than to suppose that there is one structure of the brain better adapted for intellectual purposes than another. There is probably one structure better adapted than another, for calculation, for poetry, for courage, for cowardice, for presumption, for diffidence, for roughness, for tenderness, for self-control and the want of it. Even as some have inherently a faculty adapted for music or the contrary(40). (40) See above, Essay II. But it is not reasonable to believe that we think of calculation with one portion of the brain, and of poetry with another. It is very little that we know of the nature of matter; and we are equally ignorant as to the substance, whatever it is, in which the thinking principle in man resides. But, without adventuring in any way to dogmatise on the subject, we find so many analogies between the thinking principle, and the structure of what we call the brain, that we cannot but regard the latter as in some way the instrument of the former. Now nothing can be more certain respecting the thinking principle, than its individuality. It has been said, that the mind can entertain but one thought at one time; and certain it is, from the nature of attention, and from the association of ideas, that unity is one of the principal characteristics of mind. It is this which constitutes personal identity; an attribute that, however unsatisfactory may be the explanations which have been given respecting it, we all of us feel, and that lies at the foundation of all our voluntary actions, and all our morality. Analogous to this unity of thought and mind, is the arrangement of the nerves and the brain in the human body. The nerves all lead up to the brain; and there is a centrical point in the brain itself, in which the reports of the senses terminate, and at which the action of the will may be conceived to begin. This, in the language of our fathers, was called the "seat of the soul." We may therefore, without departing from the limits of a due caution and modesty, consider this as the throne before which the mind holds its court. Hither the senses bring in their reports, and hence the sovereign will issues his commands. The whole system appears to be conducted through the instrumentality of the nerves, along whose subtle texture the feelings and impressions are propagated. Between the reports of the senses and the commands of the will, intervenes that which is emphatically the office of the mind, comprising meditation, reflection, inference and judgment. How these functions are performed we know not; but it is reasonable to believe that the substance of the brain or of some part of the brain is implicated in them. Still however we must not lose sight of what has been already said, that in the action of the mind unity is an indispensible condition. Our thoughts can only hold their council and form their decrees in a very limited region. This is their retreat and strong hold; and the special use and functions of the remoter parts of the brain we are unable to determine; so utterly obscure and undefined is our present knowledge of the great ligament which binds together the body and the thinking principle. Enough however results from this imperfect view of the ligament, to demonstrate the incongruity and untenableness of a doctrine which should assign the indications of different functions, exercises and propensities of the mind to the exterior surface of the scull or the brain. This is quackery, and is to be classed with chiromancy, augury, astrology, and the rest of those schemes for discovering the future and unknown, which the restlessness and anxiety of the human mind have invented, built upon arbitrary principles, blundered upon in the dark, and having no resemblance to the march of genuine science. I find in sir Thomas Browne the following axioms of chiromancy: "that spots in the tops of the nails do signifie things past; in the middle, things present; and at the bottom, events to come: that white specks presage our felicity; blue ones our misfortunes: that those in the nails of the thumb have significations of honour, in the forefinger, of riches, and so respectively in the rest." Science, to be of a high and satisfactory character, ought to consist of a deduction of causes and effects, shewing us not merely that a thing is so, but why it is as it is, and cannot be otherwise. The rest is merely empirical; and, though the narrowness of human wit may often drive us to this; yet it is essentially of a lower order and description. As it depends for its authority upon an example, or a number of examples, so examples of a contrary nature may continually come in, to weaken its force, or utterly to subvert it. And the affair is made still worse, when we see, as in the case of craniology, that all the reasons that can be deduced (as here from the nature of mind) would persuade us to believe, that there can be no connection between the supposed indications, and the things pretended to be indicated. Craniology, or phrenology, proceeds exactly in the same train, as chiromancy, or any of those pretended sciences which are built merely on assumption or conjecture. The first delineations presented to the public, marked out, as I have said, the scull into compartments, in the same manner as a country delineated on a map is divided into districts. Geography is a real science, and accordingly, like other sciences, has been slow and gradual in its progress. At an early stage travellers knew little more than the shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Afterwards, they passed the straits of Hercules, and entered into the Atlantic. At length the habitable world was distributed into three parts, Europe, Asia, and Africa. More recently, by many centuries, came the discovery of America. It is but the other day comparatively, that we found the extensive island of New Holland in the Southern Ocean. The ancient geographers placed an elephant or some marine monster in the vacant parts of their maps, to signify that of these parts they knew nothing. Not so Dr. Gall. Every part of his globe of the human Scull, at least with small exceptions, is fully tenanted; and he, with his single arm, has conquered a world. The majority of the judgments that have been divulged by the professors of this science, have had for their subjects the sculls of men, whose habits and history have been already known. And yet with this advantage the errors and contradictions into which their authors have fallen are considerably numerous. Thus I find, in the account of the doctor's visit to the House of Correction and the Hospital of Torgau in July 1805, the following examples. "Every person was desirous to know what Dr. Gall would say about T--, who was known in the house as a thief full of cunning, and who, having several times made his escape, wore an additional iron. It was surprising, that he saw in him far less of the organ of cunning, than in many of the other prisoners. However it was proved, that examples, and conversation with other thieves in the house, had suggested to him the plan for his escape, and that the stupidity which he possesses was the cause of his being retaken." "We were much surprised to be told, that M., in whom Dr. Gall had not discovered the organ of representation, possessed extraordinary abilities in imitating the voice of animals; but we were convinced after enquiries, that his talent was not a natural one, but acquired by study. He related to us that, when he was a Prussian soldier garrisoned at Berlin, he used to deceive the waiting women in the Foundling Hospital by imitating the voice of exposed infants, and sometimes counterfeited the cry of a wild drake, when the officers were shooting ducks." "Of another Dr. Gall said, His head is a pattern of inconstancy and confinement, and there appears not the least mark of the organ of courage. This rogue had been able to gain a great authority among his fellow-convicts. How is this to be reconciled with the want of constancy which his organisation plainly indicates? Dr. Gall answered, He gained his ascendancy not by courage, but by cunning." It is well known, that in Thurtel, who was executed for one of the most cold-blooded and remorseless murders ever heard of, the phrenologists found the organ of benevolence uncommonly large. In Spurzheim's delineation of the human head I find six divisions of organs marked out in the little hemisphere over the eye, indicating six different dispositions. Must there not be in this subtle distribution much of what is arbitrary and sciolistic? It is to be regretted, that no person skilful in metaphysics, or the history of the human mind, has taken a share in this investigation. Many errors and much absurdity would have been removed from the statements of these theorists, if a proper division had been made between those attributes and propensities, which by possibility a human creature may bring into the world with him, and those which, being the pure growth of the arbitrary institutions of society, must be indebted to those institutions for their origin. I have endeavoured in a former Essay(41) to explain this distinction, and to shew how, though a human being cannot be born with an express propensity towards any one of the infinite pursuits and occupations which may be found in civilised society, yet that he may be fitted by his external or internal structure to excel in some one of those pursuits rather than another. But all this is overlooked by the phrenologists. They remark the various habits and dispositions, the virtues and the vices, that display themselves in society as now constituted, and at once and without consideration trace them to the structure that we bring into the world with us. (41) See above, Essay II. Certainly many of Gall's organs are a libel upon our common nature. And, though a scrupulous and exact philosopher will perhaps confess that he has little distinct knowledge as to the design with which "the earth and all that is therein" were made, yet he finds in it so much of beauty and beneficent tendency, as will make him extremely reluctant to believe that some men are born with a decided propensity to rob, and others to murder. Nor can any thing be more ludicrous than this author's distinction of the different organs of memory--of things, of places, of names, of language, and of numbers: organs, which must be conceived to be given in the first instance long before names or language or numbers had an existence. The followers of Gall have in a few instances corrected this: but what their denominations have gained in avoiding the grossest absurdities of their master, they have certainly lost in explicitness and perspicuity. There is a distinction, not unworthy to be attended to, that is here to be made between Lavater's system of physiognomy, and Gall's of craniology, which is much in favour of the former. The lines and characteristic expressions of the face which may so frequently be observed, are for the most part the creatures of the mind. This is in the first place a mode of observation more agreeable to the pride and conscious elevation of man, and is in the next place more suitable to morality, and the vindication of all that is most admirable in the system of the universe. It is just, that what is most frequently passing in the mind, and is entertained there with the greatest favour, should leave its traces upon the countenance. It is thus that the high and exalted philosopher, the poet, and the man of benevolence and humanity are sometimes seen to be such by the bystander and the stranger. While the malevolent, the trickish, and the grossly sensual, give notice of what they are by the cast of their features, and put their fellow-creatures upon their guard, that they may not be made the prey of these vices. But the march of craniology or phrenology, by whatever name it is called, is directly the reverse of this. It assigns to us organs, as far as the thing is explained by the professors either to the public or to their own minds, which are entailed upon us from our birth, and which are altogether independent, or nearly so, of any discipline or volition that can be exercised by or upon the individual who drags their intolerable chain. Thus I am told of one individual that he wants the organ of colour; and all the culture in the world can never supply that defect, and enable him to see colour at all, or to see it as it is seen by the rest of mankind. Another wants the organ of benevolence; and his case is equally hopeless. I shrink from considering the condition of the wretch, to whom nature has supplied the organs of theft and murder in full and ample proportions. The case is like that of astrology (Their stars are more in fault than they), with this aggravation, that our stars, so far as the faculty of prediction had been supposed to be attained, swayed in few things; but craniology climbs at once to universal empire; and in her map, as I have said, there are no vacant places, no unexplored regions and happy wide-extended deserts. It is all a system of fatalism. Independently of ourselves, and far beyond our control, we are reserved for good or for evil by the predestinating spirit that reigns over all things. Unhappy is the individual who enters himself in this school. He has no consolation, except the gratified wish to know distressing truths, unless we add to this the pride of science, that he has by his own skill and application purchased for himself the discernment which places him in so painful a preeminence. The great triumph of man is in the power of education, to improve his intellect, to sharpen his perceptions, and to regulate and modify his moral qualities. But craniology reduces this to almost nothing, and exhibits us for the most part as the helpless victims of a blind and remorseless destiny. In the mean time it is happy for us, that, as this system is perhaps the most rigorous and degrading that was ever devised, so it is in almost all instances founded upon arbitrary assumptions and confident assertion, totally in opposition to the true spirit of patient and laborious investigation and sound philosophy. It is in reality very little that we know of the genuine characters of men. Every human creature is a mystery to his fellow. Every human character is made up of incongruities. Of nearly all the great personages in history it is difficult to say what was decidedly the motive in which their actions and system of conduct originated. We study what they did, and what they said; but in vain. We never arrive at a full and demonstrative conclusion. In reality no man can be certainly said to know himself. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things." But these dogmatists overlook all those difficulties, which would persuade a wise man to suspend his judgment, and induce a jury of philosophers to hesitate for ever as to the verdict they would pronounce. They look only at the external character of the act by which a man honours or disgraces himself. They decide presumptuously and in a lump, This man is a murderer, a hero, a coward, the slave of avarice, or the votary of philanthropy; and then, surveying the outside of his head, undertake to find in him the configuration that should indicate these dispositions, and must be found in all persons of a similar character, or rather whose acts bear the same outward form, and seem analogous to his. Till we have discovered the clue that should enable us to unravel the labyrinth of the human mind, it is with small hopes of success that we should expect to settle the external indications, and decide that this sort of form and appearance, and that class of character, will always be found together. But it is not to be wondered at, that these disorderly fragments of a shapeless science should become the special favourites of the idle and the arrogant. Every man (and every woman), however destitute of real instruction, and unfitted for the investigation of the deep or the sublime mysteries of our nature, can use his eyes and his hands. The whole boundless congregation of mankind, with its everlasting varieties, is thus at once subjected to the sentence of every pretender: And fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. Nothing is more delightful to the headlong and presumptuous, than thus to sit in judgment on their betters, and pronounce ex cathedra on those, "whose shoe-latchet they are not worthy to stoop down and unloose." I remember, after lord George Gordon's riots, eleven persons accused were set down in one indictment for their lives, and given in charge to one jury. But this is a mere shadow, a nothing, compared with the wholesale and indiscriminating judgment of the vulgar phrenologist. ESSAY XXI. OF ASTRONOMY. SECTION I. It can scarcely be imputed to me as profane, if I venture to put down a few sceptical doubts on the science of astronomy. All branches of knowledge are to be considered as fair subjects of enquiry: and he that has never doubted, may be said, in the highest and strictest sense of the word, never to have believed. The first volume that furnished to me the groundwork of the following doubts, was the book commonly known by the name of Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, many parts and passages of which engaged my attention in my own study, in the house of a rural schoolmaster, in the year 1772. I cannot therefore proceed more fairly than by giving here an extract of certain passages in that book, which have relation to the present subject. I know not how far they have been altered in the edition of Guthrie which now lies before me, from the language of the book then in my possession; but I feel confident that in the main particulars they continue the same(42). (42) The article Astronomy, in this book, appears to have been written by the well known James Ferguson. "In passing rapidly over the heavens with his new telescope, the universe increased under the eye of Herschel; 44,000 stars, seen in the space of a few degrees, seemed to indicate that there were seventy-five millions in the heavens. But what are all these, when compared with those that fill the whole expanse, the boundless field of aether? "The immense distance of the fixed stars from our earth, and from each other, is of all considerations the most proper for raising our ideas of the works of God. Modern discoveries make it probable that each of these stars is a sun, having planets and comets revolving round it, as our sun has the earth and other planets revolving round him.--A ray of light, though its motion is so quick as to be commonly thought instantaneous, takes up more time in travelling from the stars to us, than we do in making a West-India voyage. A sound, which, next to light, is considered as the quickest body we are acquainted with, would not arrive to us from thence in 50,000 years. And a cannon-ball, flying at the rate of 480 miles an hour, would not reach us in 700,000 years. "From what we know of our own system, it may be reasonably concluded, that all the rest are with equal wisdom contrived, situated, and provided with accommodations for rational inhabitants. "What a sublime idea does this suggest to the human imagination, limited as are its powers, of the works of the Creator! Thousands and thousands of suns, multiplied without end, and ranged all around us, at immense distances from each other, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all in rapid motion, yet calm, regular and harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed them: and these worlds peopled with myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity!" The thought that would immediately occur to a dispassionate man in listening to this statement, would be, What a vast deal am I here called on to believe! Now the first rule of sound and sober judgment, in encountering any story, is that, in proportion to the magnitude and seemingly incredible nature of the propositions tendered to our belief, should be the strength and impregnable nature of the evidence by which those propositions are supported. It is not here, as in matters of religion, that we are called upon by authority from on high to believe in mysteries, in things above our reason, or, as it may be, contrary to our reason. No man pretends to a revelation from heaven of the truths of astronomy. They have been brought to light by the faculties of the human mind, exercised upon such facts and circumstances as our industry has set before us. To persons not initiated in the rudiments of astronomical science, they rest upon the great and high-sounding names of Galileo, Kepler, Halley and Newton. But, though these men are eminently entitled to honour and gratitude from their fellow-mortals, they do not stand altogether on the same footing as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, by whose pens has been recorded "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." The modest enquirer therefore, without pretending to put himself on an equality with these illustrious men, may be forgiven, when he permits himself to suggest a few doubts, and presumes to examine the grounds upon which he is called upon to believe all that is contained in the above passages. Now the foundations upon which astronomy, as here delivered, is built, are, first, the evidence of our senses, secondly, the calculations of the mathematician, and, in the third place, moral considerations. These have been denominated respectively, practical astronomy, scientific, and theoretical. As to the first of these, it is impossible for us on this occasion not to recollect what has so often occurred as to have grown into an every-day observation, of the fallibility of our senses. It may be doubted however whether this is a just statement. We are not deceived by our senses, but deceived in the inference we make from our sensations. Our sensations respecting what we call the external world, are chiefly those of length, breadth and solidity, hardness and softness, heat and cold, colour, smell, sound and taste. The inference which the generality of mankind make in relation to these sensations is, that there is something out of ourselves corresponding to the impressions we receive; in other words, that the causes of our sensations are like to the sensations themselves. But this is, strictly speaking, an inference; and, if the cause of a sensation is not like the sensation, it cannot precisely be affirmed that our senses deceive us. We know what passes in the theatre of the mind; but we cannot be said absolutely to know any thing, more. Modern philosophy has taught us, in certain cases, to controvert the position, that the causes of our sensations are like to the sensations themselves. Locke in particular has called the attention of the reasoning part of mankind to the consideration, that heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and odour offensive or otherwise, are perceptions, which imply a percipient being, and cannot exist in inanimate substances. We might with equal propriety ascribe pain to the whip that beats us, or pleasure to the slight alternation of contact in the person or thing that tickles us, as suppose that heat and cold, or taste, or smell are any thing but sensations. The same philosophers who have called our attention to these remarks, have proceeded to shew that the causes of our sensations of sound and colour have no precise correspondence, do not tally with the sensations we receive. Sound is the result of a percussion of the air. Colour is produced by the reflection of the rays of light; so that the same object, placed in a position, different as to the spectator, but in itself remaining unaltered, will produce in him a sensation of different colours, or shades of colour, now blue, now green, now brown, now black, and so on. This is the doctrine of Newton, as well as of Locke. It follows that, if there were no percipient being to receive these sensations, there would be no heat or cold, no taste, no smell, no sound, and no colour. Aware of this difference between our sensations in certain cases and the causes of these sensations, Locke has divided the qualities of substances in the material universe into primary and secondary, the sensations we receive of the primary representing the actual qualities of material substances, but the sensations we receive of what he calls the secondary having no proper resemblance to the causes that produce them. Now, if we proceed in the spirit of severe analysis to examine the primary qualities of matter, we shall not perhaps find so marked a distinction between those and the secondary, as the statement of Locke would have led us to imagine. The Optics of Newton were published fourteen years later than Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. In endeavouring to account for the uninterrupted transmission of rays of light through transparent substances, however hard they may be found to be, Newton has these observations. "Bodies are much more rare and porous, than is commonly believed. Water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer, than gold; and gold is so rare, as very readily, and without the least opposition, to transmit the magnetic effluvia, and easily to admit quicksilver into its pores, and to let water pass through it. From all which we may conclude, that gold has more pores than solid parts, and by consequence that water has above forty times more pores than parts. And he that shall find out an hypothesis, by which water may be so rare, and yet not capable of compression by force, may doubtless, by the same hypothesis, make gold, and water, and all other bodies, as much rarer as he pleases, so that light may find a ready passage through transparent substances(43)." (43) Newton, Optics, Book II, Part III, Prop. viii. Again: "The colours of bodies arise from the magnitude of the particles that reflect them. Now, if we conceive these particles of bodies to be so disposed among themselves, that the intervals, or empty spaces between them, may be equal in magnitude to them all; and that these particles may be composed of other particles much smaller, which have as much empty space between them as equals all the magnitudes of these smaller particles; and that in like manner these smaller particles are again composed of others much smaller, all which together are equal to all the pores, or empty spaces, between them; and so on perpetually till you come to solid particles, such as have no pores, or empty spaces within them: and if in any gross body there be, for instance, three such degrees of particles, the least of which are solid; this body will have seven times more pores than solid parts. But if there be four such degrees of particles, the least of which are solid, the body will have fifteen times more pores than solid parts. If there be five degrees, the body will have one and thirty times more pores than solid parts. If six degrees, the body will have sixty and three times more pores than solid parts. And so on perpetually(44)." (44) Ibid. In the Queries annexed to the Optics, Newton further suggests an opinion, that the rays of light are repelled by bodies without immediate contact. He observes that: "Where attraction ceases, there a repulsive virtue ought to succeed. And that there is such a virtue, seems to follow from the reflexions and inflexions of the rays of light. For the rays are repelled by bodies, in both these cases, without the immediate contact of the reflecting or inflecting body. It seems also to follow from the emission of light; the ray, so soon as it is shaken off from a shining body by the vibrating motion of the parts of the body, and gets beyond the reach of attraction, being driven away with exceeding great velocity. For that force, which is sufficient to turn it back in reflexion, may be sufficient to emit it. It seems also to follow from the production of air and vapour: the particles, when they are shaken off from bodies by heat or fermentation, so soon as they are beyond the reach of the attraction of the body, receding from it and also from one another, with great strength; and keeping at a distance, so as sometimes to take up a million of times more space than they did before, in the form of a dense body." Newton was of opinion that matter was made up, in the last resort, of exceedingly small solid particles, having no pores, or empty spaces within them. Priestley, in his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, carries the theory one step farther; and, as Newton surrounds his exceedingly small particles with spheres of attraction and repulsion, precluding in all cases their actual contact, Priestley is disposed to regard the centre of these spheres as mathematical points only. If there is no actual contact, then by the very terms no two particles of matter were ever so near to each other, but that they might be brought nearer, if a sufficient force could be applied for that purpose. You had only another sphere of repulsion to conquer; and, as there never is actual contact, the whole world is made up of one sphere of repulsion after another, without the possibility of ever arriving at an end. "The principles of the Newtonian philosophy," says our author, "were no sooner known, than it was seen how few in comparison, of the phenomena of nature, were owing to solid matter, and how much to powers, which were only supposed to accompany and surround the solid parts of matter. It has been asserted, and the assertion has never been disproved, that for any thing we know to the contrary, all the solid matter in the solar system might be contained within a nutshell(45)." (45) Priestley, Disquisitions, Section II. I know not by whom this illustration was first employed. Among other authors, I find, in Fielding (Joseph Andrews, Book II, Chap. II), a sect of philosophers spoken of, who "can reduce all the matter of the world into a nutshell." It is then with senses, from the impressions upon which we are impelled to draw such false conclusions, and that present us with images altogether unlike any thing that exists out of ourselves, that we come to observe the phenomena of what we call the universe. The first observation that it is here incumbent on us to make, and which we ought to keep ever at hand, to be applied as occasion may offer, is the well known aphorism of Socrates, that "we know only this, that we know nothing." We have no compass to guide us through the pathless waters of science; we have no revelation, at least on the subject of astronomy, and of the unnumbered inhabitable worlds that float in the ocean of ether; and we are bound therefore to sail, as the mariners of ancient times sailed, always within sight of land. One of the earliest maxims of ordinary prudence, is that we ought ever to correct the reports of one sense by the assistance of another sense. The things we here speak of are not matters of faith; and in them therefore it is but reason, that we should imitate the conduct of Didymus the apostle, who said, "Except I put my fingers into the prints of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." My eyes report to me an object, as having a certain magnitude, texture, and roughness or smoothness; but I require that my hands should confirm to me the evidence of my eyes. I see something that appears to be an island at an uncertain distance from the shore; but, if I am actuated by a laudable curiosity, and wish to possess a real knowledge, I take a boat, and proceed to ascertain by nearer inspection, whether that which I imagined to be an island is an island or no. There are indeed many objects with which we are conversant, that are in so various ways similar to each other, that, after having carefully examined a few, we are satisfied upon slighter investigation to admit the dimensions and character of others. Thus, having measured with a quadrant the height of a tower, and found on the narrowest search and comparison that the report of my instrument was right, I yield credit to this process in another instance, without being at the trouble to verify its results in any more elaborate method. The reason why we admit the inference flowing from our examination in the second instance, and so onward, with less scrupulosity and scepticism than in the first, is that there is a strict resemblance and analogy in the two cases. Experience is the basis of our conclusions and our conduct. I strike against a given object, a nail for example, with a certain degree of force, because I have remarked in myself and others the effect of such a stroke. I take food and masticate it, because I have found that this process contributes to the sound condition of my body and mind. I scatter certain seeds in my field, and discharge the other functions of an agriculturist, because I have observed that in due time the result of this industry is a crop. All the propriety of these proceedings depends upon the exact analogy between the old case and the new one. The state of the affair is still the same, when my business is merely that of an observer and a traveller. I know water from earth, land from sea, and mountains from vallies, because I have had experience of these objects, and confidently infer that, when certain appearances present themselves to my organs of sight, I shall find the same results to all my other senses, as I found when such appearances occurred to me before. But the interval that divides the objects which occur upon and under the earth, and are accessible in all ways to our examination, on the one hand, and the lights which are suspended over our heads in the heavens on the other, is of the broadest and most memorable nature. Human beings, in the infancy of the world, were contented reverently to behold these in their calmness and beauty, perhaps to worship them, and to remark the effects that they produced, or seemed to produce, upon man and the subjects of his industry. But they did not aspire to measure their dimensions, to enquire into their internal frame, or to explain the uses, far removed from our sphere of existence, which they might be intended to serve. It is however one of the effects of the improvement of our intellect, to enlarge our curiosity. The daringness of human enterprise is one of the prime glories of our nature. It is our boast that we undertake to "measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides." And, when success crowns the boldness of our aspirations after what vulgar and timorous prudence had pronounced impossible, it is then chiefly that we are seen to participate of an essence divine. What has not man effected by the boldness of his conceptions and the adventurousness of his spirit? The achievements of human genius have appeared so incredible, till they were thoroughly examined, and slowly established their right to general acceptance, that the great heroes of intellect were universally regarded by their contemporaries as dealers in magic, and implements of the devil. The inventor of the art of printing, that glorious instrument for advancing the march of human improvement, and the discoverer of the more questionable art of making gunpowder, alike suffered under this imputation. We have rendered the seas and the winds instruments of our pleasure, "exhausted the old world, and then discovered a new one," have drawn down lightning from heaven, and exhibited equal rights and independence to mankind. Still however it is incumbent on us to be no less wary and suspicious than we are bold, and not to imagine, because we have done much, that we are therefore able to effect every thing. As was stated in the commencement of this Essay, we know our own sensations, and we know little more. Matter, whether in its primary or secondary qualities, is certainly not the sort of thing the vulgar imagine it to be. The illustrious Berkeley has taught many to doubt of its existence altogether; and later theorists have gone farther than this, and endeavoured to shew, that each man, himself while he speaks on the subject, and you and I while we hear, have no conclusive evidence to convince us, that we may not, each of us, for aught we know, be the only thing that exists, an entire universe to ourselves. We will not however follow these ingenious persons to the startling extreme to which their speculations would lead us. But, without doing so, it will not misbecome us to be cautious, and to reflect what we do, before we take a leap into illimitable space. SECTION II. "The sun," we are told, "is a solid body, ninety-five millions of miles distant from the earth we inhabit, one million times larger in cubic measurement, and to such a degree impregnated with heat, that a comet, approaching to it within a certain distance, was by that approximation raised to a heat two thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron." It will be acknowledged, that there is in this statement much to believe; and we shall not be exposed to reasonable blame, if we refuse to subscribe to it, till we have received irresistible evidence of its truth. It has already been observed, that, for the greater part of what we imagine we know on the surface or in the bowels of the earth, we have, or may have if we please, the evidence of more than one of our senses, combining to lead to the same conclusion. For the propositions of astronomy we have no sensible evidence, but that of sight, and an imperfect analogy, leading from those visible impressions which we can verify, to a reliance upon those which we cannot. The first cardinal particular we meet with in the above statement concerning the sun, is the term, distance. Now, all that, strictly speaking, we can affirm respecting the sun and other heavenly bodies, is that we have the same series of impressions respecting them, that we have respecting terrestrial objects near or remote, and that there is an imperfect analogy between the one case and the other. Before we affirm any thing, as of our own knowledge and competence, respecting heavenly bodies which are said to be millions of millions of miles removed from us, it would not perhaps be amiss that we should possess ourselves of a certain degree of incontestible information, as to the things which exist on the earth we inhabit. Among these, one of the subjects attended with a great degree of doubt and obscurity, is the height of the mountains with which the surface of the globe we inhabit is diversified. It is affirmed in the received books of elementary geography, that the Andes are the highest mountains in the world. Morse, in his American Gazetteer, third edition, printed at Boston in 1810(46), says, "The height of Chimborazzo, the most elevated point of the vast chain of the Andes, is 20,280 feet above the level of the sea, which is 7102 feet higher than any other mountain in the known world:" thus making the elevation of the mountains of Thibet, or whatever other rising ground the compiler had in his thought, precisely 13,178 feet above the level of the sea, and no more. This decision however has lately been contradicted. Mr. Hugh Murray, in an Account of Discoveries and Travels in Asia, published in 1820, has collated the reports of various recent travellers in central Asia; and he states the height of Chumularee, which he speaks of as the most elevated point of the mountains of Thibet, as nearly 30,000 feet above the level of the sea. (46) Article, Andes. The elevation of mountains, till lately, was in no way attempted to be ascertained but by the use of the quadrant, and their height was so generally exaggerated, that Riccioli, one of the most eminent astronomers of the seventeenth century, gives it as his opinion that mountains, like the Caucasus, may have a perpendicular elevation of fifty Italian miles(47). Later observers have undertaken to correct the inaccuracy of these results through the application of the barometer, and thus, by informing themselves of the weight of the air at a certain elevation, proceeding to infer the height of the situation. (47) Rees, Encyclopedia; article, Mountains. There are many circumstances, which are calculated to induce a circumspect enquirer to regard the affirmative positions of astronomy, as they are delivered by the most approved modern writers, with considerable diffidence. They are founded, as has already been said, next to the evidence of our senses, upon the deductions of mathematical knowledge. Mathematics are either pure or mixed. Pure mathematics are concerned only with abstract propositions, and have nothing to do with the realities of nature. There is no such thing in actual existence as a mathematical point, line or surface. There is no such thing as a circle or square. But that is of no consequence. We can define them in words, and reason about them. We can draw a diagram, and suppose that line to be straight which is not really straight, and that figure to be a circle which is not strictly a circle. It is conceived therefore by the generality of observers, that mathematics is the science of certainty. But this is not strictly the case. Mathematics are like those abstract and imaginary existences about which they are conversant. They may constitute in themselves, and in the apprehension of an infallible being, a science of certainty. But they come to us mixed and incorporated with our imperfections. Our faculties are limited; and we may be easily deceived, as to what it is that we see with transparent and unerring clearness, and what it is that comes to us through a crooked medium, refracting and distorting the rays of primitive truth. We often seem clear, when in reality the twilight of undistinguishing night has crept fast and far upon us. In a train of deductions, as in the steps of an arithmetical process, an error may have insinuated itself imperceptibly at a very early stage, rendering all the subsequent steps a wandering farther and farther from the unadulterated truth. Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances. Mathematics may be the science of certainty to celestial natures, but not to man. But, if in the case of pure mathematics, we are exposed to the chances of error and delusion, it is much worse with mixed mathematics. The moment we step out of the high region of abstraction, and apply ourselves to what we call external nature, we have forfeited that sacred character and immunity, which we seemed entitled to boast, so long as we remained inclosed in the sanctuary of unmingled truth. As has already been said, we know what passes in the theatre of the mind; but we cannot be said absolutely to know any thing more. In our speculations upon actual existences we are not only subject to the disadvantages which arise from the limited nature of our faculties, and the errors which may insensibly creep upon us in the process. We are further exposed to the operation of the unevennesses and irregularities that perpetually occur in external nature, the imperfection of our senses, and of the instruments we construct to assist our observations, and the discrepancy which we frequently detect between the actual nature of the things about us and our impressions respecting them. This is obvious, whenever we undertake to apply the processes of arithmetic to the realities of life. Arithmetic, unsubjected to the impulses of passion and the accidents of created nature, holds on its course; but, in the phenomena of the actual world, "time and chance happeneth to them all." Thus it is, for example, in the arithmetical and geometrical ratios, set up in political economy by the celebrated Mr. Malthus. His numbers will go on smoothly enough, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, as representing the principle of population among mankind, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, the means of subsistence; but restiff and uncomplying nature refuses to conform herself to his dicta. Dr. Price has calculated the produce of one penny, put out at the commencement of the Christian era to five per cent. compound interest, and finds that in the year 1791 it would have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in three hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But what has this to do with the world in which we live? Did ever any one put out his penny to interest in this fashion for eighteen hundred years? And, if he did, where was the gold to be found, to satisfy his demand? Morse, in his American Gazetteer, proceeding on the principles of Malthus, tells us that, if the city of New York goes on increasing for a century in a certain ratio, it will by that time contain 5,257,493 inhabitants. But does any one, for himself or his posterity, expect to see this realised? Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, has observed that, as every man has two ancestors in the first ascending degree, and four in the second, so in the twentieth degree he has more than a million, and in the fortieth the square of that number, or upwards of a million millions. This statement therefore would have a greater tendency to prove that mankind in remote ages were numerous, almost beyond the power of figures to represent, than the opposite doctrine of Malthus, that they have a perpetual tendency to such increase as would infallibly bring down the most tremendous calamities on our posterity. Berkeley, whom I have already referred to on another subject, and who is admitted to be one of our profoundest philosophers, has written a treatise(48) to prove, that the mathematicians, who object to the mysteries supposed to exist in revealed religion, "admit much greater mysteries, and even falshoods in science, of which he alleges the doctrine of fluxions as an eminent example(49)." He observes, that their conclusions are established by virtue of a twofold error, and that these errors, being in contrary directions, are supposed to compensate each other, the expounders of the doctrine thus arriving at what they call truth, without being able to shew how, or by what means they have arrived at it. (48) The Analyst. (49) Life of Berkeley, prefixed to his Works. It is a memorable and a curious speculation to reflect, upon how slight grounds the doctrine of "thousands and thousands of suns, multiplied without end, and ranged all around us, at immense distances from each other, and attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds," mentioned in the beginning of this Essay, is built. It may be all true. But, true or false, it cannot be without its use to us, carefully to survey the road upon which we are advancing, the pier which human enterprise has dared to throw out into the vast ocean of Cimmerian darkness. We have constructed a pyramid, which throws into unspeakable contempt the vestiges of ancient Egyptian industry: but it stands upon its apex; it trembles with every breeze; and momentarily threatens to overwhelm in its ruins the fearless undertakers that have set it up. It gives us a mighty and sublime idea of the nature of man, to think with what composure and confidence a succession of persons of the greatest genius have launched themselves in illimitable space, with what invincible industry they have proceeded, wasting the midnight oil, racking their faculties, and almost wearing their organs to dust, in measuring the distance of Sirius and the other fixed stars, the velocity of light, and "the myriads of intelligent beings formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity," that people the numberless worlds of which they discourse. The illustrious names of Copernicus, Galileo, Gassendi, Kepler, Halley and Newton impress us with awe; and, if the astronomy they have opened before us is a romance, it is at least a romance more seriously and perseveringly handled than any other in the annals of literature. A vulgar and a plain man would unavoidably ask the astronomers, How came you so familiarly acquainted with the magnitude and qualities of the heavenly bodies, a great portion of which, by your own account, are millions of millions of miles removed from us? But, I believe, it is not the fashion of the present day to start so rude a question. I have just turned over an article on Astronomy in the Encyclopaedia Londinensis, consisting of one hundred and thirty-three very closely printed quarto pages, and in no corner of this article is any evidence so much as hinted at. Is it not enough? Newton and his compeers have said it. The whole doctrine of astronomy rests upon trigonometry, a branch of the science of mathematics which teaches us, having two sides and one angle, or two angles and one side, of a triangle given us, to construct the whole. To apply this principle therefore to the heavenly bodies, it is necessary for us to take two stations, the more remote from each other the better, from which our observations should be made. For the sake of illustration we will suppose them to be taken at the extremes of the earth's diameter, in other words, nearly eight thousand miles apart from each other, the thing itself having never been realised to that extent. From each of these stations we will imagine a line to be drawn, terminating in the sun. Now it seems easy, by means of a quadrant, to find the arch of a circle (in other words, the angle) included between these lines terminating in the sun, and the base formed by a right line drawn from one of these stations to the other, which in this case is the length of the earth's diameter. I have therefore now the three particulars required to enable me to construct my triangle. And, according to the most approved astronomical observations hitherto made, I have an isosceles triangle, eight thousand miles broad at its base, and ninety-five millions of miles in the length of each of the sides reaching from the base to the apex. It is however obvious to the most indifferent observer, that the more any triangle, or other mathematical diagram, falls within the limits which our senses can conveniently embrace, the more securely, when our business is practical, and our purpose to apply the result to external objects, can we rely on the accuracy of our results. In a case therefore like the present, where the base of our isosceles triangle is to the other two sides as eight units to twelve thousand, it is impossible not to perceive that it behoves us to be singularly diffident as to the conclusion at which we have arrived, or rather it behoves us to take for granted that we are not unlikely to fall into the most important error. We have satisfied ourselves that the sides of the triangle including the apex, do not form an angle, till they have arrived at the extent of ninety-five millions of miles. How are we sure that they do then? May not lines which have reached to so amazing a length without meeting, be in reality parallel lines? If an angle is never formed, there can be no result. The whole question seems to be incommensurate to our faculties. It being obvious that this was a very unsatisfactory scheme for arriving at the knowledge desired, the celebrated Halley suggested another method, in the year 1716, by an observation to be taken at the time of the transit of Venus over the sun(50). (50) Philosophical Transactions, Vol. XXIX, p. 454. It was supposed that we were already pretty accurately acquainted with the distance of the moon from the earth, it being so much nearer to us, by observing its parallax, or the difference of its place in the heavens as seen from the surface of the earth, from that in which it would appear if seen from its centre(51). But the parallax of the sun is so exceedingly small, as scarcely to afford the basis of a mathematical calculation(52). The parallax of Venus is however almost four times as great as that of the sun; and there must therefore be a very sensible difference between the times in which Venus may be seen passing over the sun from different parts of the earth. It was on this account apprehended, that the parallax of the sun, by means of observations taken from different places at the time of the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769, might be ascertained with a great degree of precision(53). (51) Bonnycastle, Astronomy, 7th edition, p. 262, et seq. (52) Ibid, p. 268. (53) Phil. Transactions, Vol. XXIX, p. 457. But the imperfectness of our instruments and means of observation have no small tendency to baffle the ambition of man in these curious investigations. "The true quantity of the moon's parallax," says Bonnycastle, "cannot be accurately determined by the methods ordinarily resorted to, on account of the varying declination of the moon, and the inconstancy of the horizontal refractions, which are perpetually changing according to the state the atmosphere is in at the time. For the moon continues but for a short time in the equinoctial, and the refraction at a mean rate elevates her apparent place near the horizon, half as much as her parallax depresses it(54)." (54) Astronomy, p. 265. "It is well known that the parallax of the sun can never exceed nine seconds, or the four-hundredth part of a degree(55)." "Observations," says Halley, "made upon the vibrations of a pendulum, to determine these exceedingly small angles, are not sufficiently accurate to be depended upon; for by this method of ascertaining the parallax, it will sometimes come out to be nothing, or even negative; that is, the distance will either be infinite, or greater than infinite, which is absurd. And, to confess the truth, it is hardly possible for a person to distinguish seconds with certainty by any instruments, however skilfully they may be made; and therefore it is not to be wondered at, that the excessive nicety of this matter should have eluded the many ingenious endeavours of the most able opetators."(56). (55) Ibid, p. 268. (56) Phil. Transactions, Vol. XXIX, p. 456. Such are the difficulties that beset the subject on every side. It is for the impartial and dispassionate observers who have mastered all the subtleties of the science, if such can be found, to determine whether the remedies that have been resorted to to obviate the above inaccuracies and their causes, have fulfilled their end, and are not exposed to similar errors. But it would be vain to expect the persons, who have "scorned delights, and lived laborious days" to possess themselves of the mysteries of astronomy, should be impartial and dispassionate, or be disposed to confess, even to their own minds, that their researches were useless, and their labours ended in nothing. It is further worthy of our attention, that the instruments with which we measure the distance of the earth from the sun and the planets, are the very instruments which have been pronounced upon as incompetent in measuring the heights of mountains(57). In the latter case therefore we have substituted a different mode for arriving at the truth, which is supposed to be attended with greater precision: but we have no substitute to which we can resort, to correct the mistakes into which we may fall respecting the heavenly bodies. (57) See above, Essay XXI. The result of the uncertainty which adheres to all astronomical observations is such as might have been expected. Common readers are only informed of the latest adjustment of the question, and are therefore unavoidably led to believe that the distance of the sun from the earth, ever since astronomy became entitled to the name of a science, has by universal consent been recognised as ninety-five millions of miles, or, as near as may be, twenty-four thousand semi-diameters of the earth. But how does the case really stand? Copernicus and Tycho Brahe held the distance to be twelve hundred semi-diameters; Kepler, who is received to have been perhaps the greatest astronomer that any age has produced, puts it down as three thousand five hundred semi-diameters; since his time, Riccioli as seven thousand; Hevelius as five thousand two hundred and fifty(58); some later astronomers, mentioned by Halley, as fourteen thousand; and Halley himself as sixteen thousand five hundred(59). (58) They were about thirty and forty years younger than Kepler respectively. (59) Halley, apud Philosophical Transactions, Vol. XXIX, p. 455. The doctrine of fluxions is likewise called in by the astronomers in their attempts to ascertain the distance and magnitude of the different celestial bodies which compose the solar system; and in this way their conclusions become subject to all the difficulties which Berkeley has alleged against that doctrine. Kepler has also supplied us with another mode of arriving at the distance and size of the sun and the planets: he has hazarded a conjecture, that the squares of the times of the revolution of the earth and the other planets are in proportion to the cubes of their distances from the sun, their common centre; and, as by observation we can arrive with tolerable certainty at a knowledge of the times of their revolutions, we may from hence proceed to the other matters we are desirous to ascertain. And that which Kepler seemed, as by a divine inspiration, to hazard in the way of conjecture, Newton professes to have demonstratively established. But the demonstration of Newton has not been considered as satisfactory by all men of science since his time. Thus far however we proceed as we may, respecting our propositions on the subject of the solar system. But, beyond this, all science, real or pretended, deserts us. We have no method for measuring angles, which can be applied to the fixed stars; and we know nothing of any revolutions they perform. All here therefore seems gratuitous: we reason from certain alleged analogies; and we can do no more. Huygens endeavoured to ascertain something on the subject, by making the aperture of a telescope so small, that the sun should appear through it no larger than Sirius, which he found to be only in the proportion of 1 to 27,664 times his diameter, as seen by the naked eye. Hence, supposing Sirius to be a globe of the same magnitude as the sun, it must be 27,664 times as distant from us as the sun, in other words, at a distance so considerable as to equal 345 million diameters of the earth(60). Every one must feel on how slender a thread this conclusion is suspended. (60) Encyclopaedia Londinensis, Vol. 11, p. 407. And yet, from this small postulate, the astronomers proceed to deduce the most astounding conclusions. They tell us, that the distance of the nearest fixed star from the earth is at least 7,600,000,000,000 miles, and of another they name, not less than 38 millions of millions of miles. A cannon-ball therefore, proceeding at the rate of about twenty miles in a minute would be 760,000 years in passing from us to the nearest fixed star, and 3,800,000 in passing to the second star of which we speak. Huygens accordingly concluded, that it was not impossible, that there might be stars at such inconceivable distances from us, that their light has not yet reached the earth since its creation(61). (61) Ibid, p. 408. The received system of the universe, founded upon these so called discoveries, is that each of the stars is a sun, having planets and comets revolving round it, as our sun has the earth and other planets revolving round him. It has been found also by the successive observations of astronomers, that a star now and then is totally lost, and that a new star makes its appearance which had never been remarked before: and this they explain into the creation of a new system from time to time by the Almighty author of the universe, and the destruction of an old system worn out with age(62). We must also remember the power of attraction every where diffused through infinite space, by means of which, as Herschel assures us, in great length of time a nebula, or cluster of stars, may be formed, while the projectile force they received in the beginning may prevent them from all coming together, at least for millions of ages. Some of these nebulae, he adds, cannot well be supposed to be at a less distance from us than six or eight thousand times the distance of Sirius(63). Kepler however denies that each star, of those which distinctly present themselves to our sight, can have its system of planets as our sun has, and considers them as all fixed in the same surface or sphere; since, if one of them were twice or thrice as remote as another, it would, supposing their real magnitudes to be equal, appear to be twice or thrice as small, whereas there is not in their apparent magnitudes the slightest difference(64). (62) Encycl. Lond. Vol. II, p. 411. (63) Ibid, p. 348. (64) Ibid, p. 411. Certainly the astronomers are a very fortunate and privileged race of men, who talk to us in this oracular way of "the unseen things of God from the creation of the world," hanging up their conclusions upon invisible hooks, while the rest of mankind sit listening gravely to their responses, and unreservedly "acknowledging that their science is the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful of all the sciences cultivated by man(65)." (65) Ferguson, Astronomy, Section 1. We have a sensation, which we call the sensation of distance. It comes to us from our sight and our other senses. It does not come immediately by the organ of sight. It has been proved, that the objects we see, previously to the comparison and correction of the reports of the organ of sight with those of the other senses, do not suggest to us the idea of distance, but that on the contrary whatever we see seems to touch the eye, even as the objects of the sense of feeling touch the skin. But, in proportion as we compare the impressions made upon our organs of sight with the impressions made on the other senses, we come gradually to connect with the objects we see the idea of distance. I put out my hand, and find at first that an object of my sense of sight is not within the reach of my hand. I put out my hand farther, or by walking advance my body in the direction of the object, and I am enabled to reach it. From smaller experiments I proceed to greater. I walk towards a tree or a building, the figure of which presents itself to my eye, but which I find upon trial to have been far from me. I travel towards a place that I cannot see, but which I am told lies in a certain direction. I arrive at the place. It is thus, that by repeated experiments I acquire the idea of remote distances. To confine ourselves however to the question of objects, which without change of place I can discover by the sense of sight. I can see a town, a tower, a mountain at a considerable distance. Let us suppose that the limit of my sight, so far as relates to objects on the earth, is one hundred miles. I can travel towards such an object, and thus ascertain by means of my other senses what is its real distance. I can also employ certain instruments, invented by man, to measure heights, suppose of a tower, and, by experiments made in ways independent of these instruments, verify or otherwise the report of these instruments. The height of the Monument of London is something more than two hundred feet. Other elevations, the produce of human labour, are considerably higher. It is in the nature of the mind, that we conclude from the observation that we have verified, to the accuracy of another, bearing a striking analogy to the former, that we have not verified. But analogy has its limits. Is it of irresistible certainty, or is it in fact to be considered as approaching to certainty, because we have verified an observation extending to several hundred feet, that an observation extending to ninety-five millions of miles, or to the incredible distances of which Herschel so familiarly talks, is to be treated as a fact, or laid down as a principle in science? Is it reasonable to consider two propositions as analogous, when the thing affirmed in the one is in dimension many million times as great as the thing affirmed in the other? The experience we have had as to the truth of the smaller, does it authorise us to consider the larger as unquestionable? That which I see with a bay of the sea or a wide river between, though it may appear very like something with which I am familiar at home, do I immediately affirm it to be of the same species and nature, or do I not regard it with a certain degree of scepticism, especially if, along with the resemblance in some points, it differs essentially, as for example in magnitude, in other points? We have a sensation, and we enquire into its cause. This is always a question of some uncertainty. Is its cause something of absolute and substantive existence without me, or is it not? Is its cause something of the very same nature, as the thing that gave me a similar sensation in a matter of comparatively a pigmy and diminutive extension? All these questions an untrained and inquisitive mind will ask itself in the propositions of astronomy. We must believe or not, as we think proper or reasonable. We have no way of verifying the propositions by the trial of our senses. There they lie, to be received by us in the construction that first suggests itself to us, or not. They are something like an agreeable imagination or fiction: and a sober observer, in cold blood, will be disposed deliberately to weigh both sides of the question, and to judge whether the probability lies in favour of the actual affirmation of the millions of millions of miles, and the other incredible propositions of the travelling of light, and the rest, which even the most cautious and sceptical of the retainers of modern astronomy, find themselves compelled to receive. But I shall be told, that the results of our observations of the distances of the heavenly bodies are unvaried. We have measured the distances and other phenomena of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their satellites, and they all fall into a grand system, so as to convey to every unprejudiced mind the conviction that this system is the truth itself. If we look at them day after day, and year after year, we see them for ever the same, and performing the same divine harmony. Successive astronomers in different ages and countries have observed the celestial orbs, and swept the heavens, and for ever bring us back the same story of the number, the dimensions, the distances, and the arrangement of the heavenly bodies which form the subject of astronomical science. This we have seen indeed not to be exactly the case. But, if it were, it would go a very little way towards proving the point it was brought to prove. It would shew that, the sensations and results being similar, the causes of those results must be similar to each other, but it would not shew that the causes were similar to the sensations produced. Thus, in the sensations which belong to taste, smell, sound, colour, and to those of heat and cold, there is all the uniformity which would arise, when the real external causes bore the most exact similitude to the perceptions they generate; and yet it is now universally confessed that tastes, scents, sounds, colours, and heat and cold do not exist out of ourselves. All that we are entitled therefore to conclude as to the magnitudes and distances of the heavenly bodies, is, that the causes of our sensations and perceptions, whatever they are, are not less uniform than the sensations and perceptions themselves. It is further alleged, that we calculate eclipses, and register the various phenomena of the heavenly bodies. Thales predicted an eclipse of the sun, which took place nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. The Babylonians, the Persians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese early turned their attention to astronomy. Many of their observations were accurately recorded; and their tables extend to a period of three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Does not all this strongly argue the solidity of the science to which they belong? Who, after this, will have the presumption to question, that the men who profess astronomy proceed on real grounds, and have a profound knowledge of these things, which at first sight might appear to be set at a distance so far removed from our ken? The answer to this is easy. I believe in all the astronomy that was believed by Thales. I do not question the statements relative to the heavenly bodies that were delivered by the wise men of the East. But the supposed discoveries that were made in the eighteenth, and even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, purporting to ascertain the precise distance of the sun, the planets, and even of the fixed stars, are matters entirely distinct from this. Among the earliest astronomers of Greece were Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Anaxagoras. Thales, we are told, held that the earth is a sphere or globe, Anaximenes that it is like a round, flat table; Anaximander that the sun is like a chariot-wheel, and is twenty-eight times larger than the earth. Anaxagoras was put in prison for affirming that the sun was by many degrees larger than the whole Peloponnesus(66). Kepler is of opinion that all the stars are at an equal distance from us, and are fixed in the same surface or sphere. (66) Plutarch, De Placitis Philosophorum. Diogenes Laertius. In reality the observations and the facts of astronomy do not depend either upon the magnitudes or the distances of the heavenly bodies. They proceed in the first place upon what may lie seen with the naked eye. They require an accurate and persevering attention. They may be assisted by telescopes. But they relate only to the sun and the planets. We are bound to ascertain, as nearly as possible, the orbits described by the different bodies in the solar system: but this has still nothing to do, strictly speaking, with their magnitudes or distances. It is required that we should know them in their relations to each other; but it is no preliminary of just, of practical, it might almost be said, of liberal science, that we should know any thing of them absolutely. The unlimited ambition of the nature of man has discovered itself in nothing more than this, the amazing superstructure which the votaries of contemplation within the last two hundred years have built upon the simple astronomy of the ancients. Having begun to compute the distances of miles by millions, it appears clearly that nothing can arrest the more than eagle-flight of the human mind. The distance of the nearest fixed star from the earth, we are informed, is at least 7,000,000,000,000 miles, and of another which the astronomers name, not less than 38 millions of millions of miles. The particles of light are said to travel 193,940 miles in every second, which is above a million times swifter than the progress of a cannon-ball(67). And Herschel has concluded, that the light issuing from the faintest nebulae he has discovered, must have been at this rate two millions of years in reaching the Barth(68). (67) Ferguson, Section 216. "Light moves," says Brewster, Optics, p. 2, "from one pole of the earth to the other in the 24th part of a second: a velocity which surpasses all comprehension." (68) Brinkley, Astronomy, p. 130. SECTION III. The next process of the modern astronomer is to affirm the innumerable orbs around us, discovered with the naked eye, or with which we are made acquainted by the aid of telescopes, to be all stocked with rational inhabitants. The argument for this is, that an all-wise and omnipotent creator could never have produced such immense bodies, dispersed through infinite space, for any meaner purpose, than that of peopling them with "intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity(69)." (69) See above, Essay XXI. Now it appears to me, that, in these assertions, the modern astronomers are taking upon themselves somewhat too boldly, to expound the counsels of that mysterious power, to which the universe is indebted for its arrangement and order. We know nothing of God but from his works. Certain speculative men have adventured to reason upon the source of all the system and the wonders that we behold, a priori, and, having found that the creator is all powerful, all wise, and of infinite goodness, according to their ideas of power, wisdom and goodness, have from thence proceeded to draw their inferences, and to shew us in what manner the works of his hands are arranged and conducted by him. This no doubt they have done with the purest intentions in the world; but it is not certain, that their discretion has equalled the boldness of their undertaking. The world that we inhabit, this little globe of earth, is to us an infinite mystery. Human imagination is unable to conceive any thing more consummate than the great outline of things below. The trees and the skies, the mountains and the seas, the rivers and the springs, appear as if the design had been to realise the idea of paradise. The freshness of the air, the silvery light of day, the magnificence of the clouds, the gorgeous and soothing colouring of the world, the profusion and exquisiteness of the fruits and flowers of the earth, are as if nothing but joy and delicious sensations had been intended for us. When we ascend to the animal creation, the scene is still more admirable and transporting. The birds and the beasts, the insects that skim the air, and the fishes that live in the great deep, are a magazine of wonders, that we may study for ever, without fear of arriving at the end of their excellence. Last of all, comes the crown of the creation, man, formed with looks erect, to commerce with the skies. What a masterpiece of workmanship is his form, while the beauty and intelligence of Gods seems to manifest itself in his countenance! Look at that most consummate of all implements, the human hand; think of his understanding, how composed and penetrating; of the wealth of his imagination; of the resplendent virtues he is qualified to display! "How wonderful are thy works, Oh God; in wisdom hast thou created them all!" But there are other parts of the system in which we live, which do not seem to correspond with those already enumerated. Before we proceed to people infinite space, it would be as well, if we surveyed the surface of the earth we inhabit. What vast deserts do we find in it; what immense tracks of burning sands! One half of the globe is perhaps irreclaimable to the use of man. Then let us think of earthquakes and tempests, of wasting hurricanes, and the number of vessels, freighted with human beings, that are yearly buried in the caverns of the ocean. Let us call to mind in man, the prime ornament of the creation, all the diseases to which his frame is subject, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums. The very idea of our killing, and subsisting upon the flesh of animals, surely somewhat jars with our conceptions of infinite benevolence. But, when we look at the political history of man, the case is infinitely worse. This too often seems one tissue of misery and vice. War, conquest, oppression, tyranny, slavery, insurrections, massacres, cruel punishments, degrading corporal infliction, and the extinction of life under the forms of law, are to be found in almost every page. It is as if an evil demon were let loose upon us, and whole nations, from one decad of years to another, were struck with the most pernicious madness. Certain reasoners tell us that this is owing to the freedom of will, without which man could not exist. But here we are presented with an alternative, from which it is impossible for human understanding to escape. Either God, according to our ideas of benevolence, would remove evil out of the world, and cannot; or he can, and will not. If he has the will and not the power, this argues weakness; if he has the power and not the will, this seems to be malevolence. Let us descend from the great stage of the nations, and look into the obscurities of private misery. Which of us is happy? What bitter springs of misery overflow the human heart, and are borne by us in silence! What cruel disappointments beset us! To what struggles are we doomed, while we struggle often in vain! The human heart seems framed, as if to be the capacious receptacle of all imaginable sorrows. The human frame seems constructed, as if all its fibres were prepared to sustain varieties of torment. "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth." But how often does that sweat prove ineffective! There are men of whom sorrow seems to be the destiny, from which they can never escape. There are hearts, into which by their constitution it appears as if serenity and content could never enter, but which are given up to all the furious passions, or are for ever the prey of repining and depression. Ah, little think the gay, licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power and affluence surround, How many pine in want! How many shrink Into the sordid hut, how many drink The cup of grief, and eat the bitter bread Of misery! And, which aggravates the evil, almost all the worst vices, the most unprincipled acts, and the darkest passions of the human mind, are bred out of poverty and distress. Satan, in the Book of Job, says to the Almighty, "Thou hast blessed the work of thy servant, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thy hand now, and take away all that he hath; and he will curse thee to thy face." The prayer of Agar runs, "Feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain." It is with a deep knowledge of the scenes of life, that the prophet pronounces, "My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." All reflecting persons, who have surveyed the state of the world in which we live, have been struck with the contrarieties of sublunary things; and many hypotheses have been invented to solve the enigma. Some have maintained the doctrine of two principles, Oromasdes and Arimanius, the genius of good and of evil, who are perpetually contending with each other which shall have the greatest sway in the fortunes of the world, and each alternately acquiring the upper hand. Others have inculcated the theory of the fall of man, that God at first made all things beautiful and good, but that man has incurred his displeasure, and been turned out of the paradise for which he was destined. Hence, they say, has arisen the corruption of our nature. "There is none that cloth good, no, not one. That every mouth may be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God." But the solution that has been most generally adopted, particularly in later days, is that of a future state of retribution, in which all the inequalities of our present condition shall be removed, the tears of the unfortunate and the sufferer shall be wiped from their eyes, and their agonies and miseries compensated. This, in other words, independently of the light of revelation, is to infer infinite wisdom and benevolence from what we see, and then, finding the actual phenomena not to correspond with our theories, to invent something of which we have no knowledge, to supply the deficiency. The astronomer however proceeds from what we see of the globe of earth, to fashion other worlds of which we have no direct knowledge. Finding that there is no part of the soil of the earth into which our wanderings can penetrate, that is not turned to the account of rational and happy beings, creatures capable of knowing and adoring their creator, that nature does nothing in vain, and that the world is full of the evidences of his unmingled beneficence, according to our narrow and imperfect ideas of beneficence, (for such ought to be our premises) we proceed to construct millions of worlds upon the plan we have imagined. The earth is a globe, the planets are globes, and several of them larger than our earth: the earth has a moon; several of the planets have satellites: the globe we dwell in moves in an orbit round the sun; so do the planets: upon these premises, and no more, we hold ourselves authorised to affirm that they contain "myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity." Having gone thus far, we next find that the fixed stars bear a certain resemblance to the sun; and, as the sun has a number of planets attendant on him, so, we say, has each of the fixed stars, composing all together "ten thousand times ten thousand" habitable worlds. All this is well, so long as we view it as a bold and ingenious conjecture. On any other subject it would be so regarded; and we should consider it as reserved for the amusement and gratification of a fanciful visionary in the hour, when he gives up the reins to his imagination. But, backed as it is by a complexity of geometrical right lines and curves, and handed forth to us in large quartos, stuffed with calculations, it experiences a very different fortune. We are told that, "by the knowledge we derive from astronomy, our faculties are enlarged, our minds exalted, and our understandings clearly convinced, and affected with the conviction, of the existence, wisdom, power, goodness, immutability and superintendency of the supreme being; so that, without an hyperbole, 'an undevout astronomer is mad(e)(70).'" (70) Ferguson, Astronomy, Section I. It is singular, how deeply I was impressed with this representation, while I was a schoolboy, and was so led to propose a difficulty to the wife of the master. I said, "I find that we have millions of worlds round us peopled with rational creatures. I know not that we have any decisive reason for supposing these creatures more exalted, than the wonderful species of which we are individuals. We are imperfect; they are imperfect. We fell; it is reasonable to suppose that they have fallen also. It became necessary for the second person in the trinity to take upon him our nature, and by suffering for our sins to appease the wrath of his father. I am unwilling to believe that he has less commiseration for the inhabitants of other planets. But in that case it may be supposed that since the creation he has been making a circuit of the planets, and dying on the cross for the sins of rational creatures in uninterrupted succession." The lady was wiser than I, admonished me of the danger of being over-inquisitive, and said we should act more discreetly in leaving those questions to the judgment of the Almighty. But thus far we have reasoned only on one side of the question. Our pious sentiments have led us to magnify the Lord in all his works, and, however imperfect the analogy, and however obscure the conception we can form of the myriads of rational creatures, all of them no doubt infinitely varied in their nature, their structure and faculties, yet to view the whole scheme with an undoubting persuasion of its truth. It is however somewhat in opposition to the ideas of piety formed by our less adventurous ancestors, that we should usurp the throne of God, Snatch from his hand the balance and the rod, and, by means of our telescopes and our calculations, penetrate into mysteries not originally intended for us. According to the received Mosaic chronology we are now in the five thousand eight hundred and thirty-fifth year from the creation: the Samaritan version adds to this date. It is therefore scarcely in the spirit of a Christian, that Herschel talks to us of a light, which must have been two millions of years in reaching the earth. Moses describes the operations of the Almighty, in one of the six days devoted to the work of creation, as being to place "lights in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day from the night, to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and to give light upon the earth; two great lights, the greater to rule the day, and the lesser the night; and the stars also." And Christ, prophesying what is to happen in the latter days, says, "The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven." Whatever therefore be the piety of the persons, who talk to us of "ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all peopled with rational creatures," it certainly is not a piety in precise accordance with the Christian scriptures. SECTION IV. It is also no more than just, that we should bear in mind the apparent fitness or otherwise, of these bodies, so far as we are acquainted with them, for the dwelling-place of rational creatures. Not to mention the probable extreme coldness of Jupiter and Saturn, the heat of the sunbeams in the planet Mercury is understood to be such as that water would unavoidably boil and be carried away(71), and we can scarcely imagine any living substance that would not be dissolved and dispersed in such an atmosphere. The moon, of which, as being so much nearer to us, we may naturally be supposed to know most, we are told by the astronomers has no water and no atmosphere, or, if any, such an atmosphere as would not sustain clouds and ascending vapour. To our eye, as seen through the telescope, it appears like a metallic substance, which has been burned by fire, and so reduced into the ruined and ragged condition in which we seem to behold it. The sun appears to be still less an appropriate habitation for rational, or for living creatures, than any of the planets. The comets, which describe an orbit so exceedingly eccentric, and are subject to all the excessive vicissitudes of heat and cold, are, we are told, admirably adapted for a scene of eternal, or of lengthened punishment for those who have acquitted themselves ill in a previous state of probation. Buffon is of opinion, that all the planets in the solar system were once so many portions of our great luminary, struck off from the sun by the blow of a comet, and so having received a projectile impulse calculated to carry them forward in a right line, at the same time that the power of attraction counteracts this impulse, and gives them that compound principle of motion which retains them in an orbicular course. In this sense it may be said that all the planets were suns; while on the contrary Herschel pronounces, that the sun itself is a planet, an opake body, richly stored with inhabitants(72). (71) Encyclopaedia Londinensis, Vol. II, p. 355. (72) Philosophical Transactions for 1795, p. 68. The modern astronomers go on to account to us for the total disappearance of a star in certain cases, which, they say, may be in reality the destruction of a system, such as that of our sun and its attendant planets, while the appearance of a new star may, in like manner, be the occasional creation of a new system of planets. "We ought perhaps," says Herschel, "to look upon certain clusters of stars, and the destruction of a star now and then in some thousands of ages, as the very means by which the whole is preserved and renewed. These clusters may be the laboratories of the universe, wherein the most salutary remedies for the decay of the whole are prepared(73)." (73) Philosophical Transactions for 1785, p. 217. All this must appear to a sober mind, unbitten by the rage which grows out of the heat of these new discoverers, to be nothing less than astronomy run mad. This occasional creation of new systems and worlds, is in little accordance with the Christian scriptures, or, I believe, with any sober speculation upon the attributes of the creator. The astronomer seizes upon some hint so fine as scarcely by any ingenuity to be arrested, immediately launches forth into infinite space, and in an instant returns, and presents us with millions of worlds, each of them peopled with ten thousand times ten thousand inhabitants. We spoke a while since of the apparent unfitness of many of the heavenly bodies for the reception of living inhabitants. But for all this these discoverers have a remedy. They remind us how unlike these inhabitants may be to ourselves, having other organs than ours, and being able to live in a very different temperature. "The great heat in the planet Mercury is no argument against its being inhabited; since the Almighty could as easily suit the bodies and constitutions of its inhabitants to the heat of their dwelling, as he has done ours to the temperature of our earth. And it is very probable that the people there have such an opinion of us, as we have of the inhabitants of Jupiter and Saturn; namely, that we must be intolerably cold, and have very little light at so great a distance from the sun." These are the remarks of Ferguson(74). One of our latest astronomers expresses himself to the same purpose. (74) Astronomy, Section 22. "We have no argument against the planets being inhabited by rational beings, and consequently by witnesses of the creator's power, magnificence and benevolence, unless it be said that some are much nearer the sun than the earth is, and therefore must be uninhabitable from heat, and those more distant from cold. Whatever objection this may be against their being inhabited by rational beings, of an organisation similar to those on the earth, it can have little force, when urged with respect to rational beings in general. "But we may examine without indulging too much in conjecture, whether it be not possible that the planets may be possessed by rational beings, and contain animals and vegetables, even little different from those with which we are familiar. "Is the sun the principal cause of the temperature of the earth? We have reason to suppose that it is not. The mean temperature of the earth, at a small depth from the surface, seems constant in summer and in winter, and is probably coeval with its first formation. "At the planet Mercury, the direct heat of the sun, or its power of causing heat, is six times greater than with us. If we suppose the mean temperature of Mercury to be the same as of the earth, and the planet to be surrounded with an atmosphere, denser than that of the earth, less capable of transmitting heat, or rather the influence of the sun to extricate heat, and at the same time more readily conducting it to keep up an evenness of temperature, may we not suppose the planet Mercury fit for the habitation of men, and the production of vegetables similar to our own? "At the Georgium Sidus, the direct influence of the sun is 360 times less than at the earth, and the sun is there seen at an angle not much greater than that under which we behold Venus, when nearest. Yet may not the mean temperature of the Georgium Sidus be nearly the same as that of the earth? May not its atmosphere more easily transmit the influence of the sun, and may not the matter of heat be more copiously combined, and more readily extricated, than with us? Whence changes of season similar to our own may take place. Even in the comets we may suppose no great change of temperature takes place, as we know of no cause which will deprive them of their mean temperature, and particularly if we suppose, that on their approach towards the sun, there is a provision for their atmosphere becoming denser. The tails they exhibit, when in the neighbourhood of the sun, seem in some measure to countenance this idea. "We can hardly suppose the sun, a body three hundred times larger than all the planets together, was created only to preserve the periodic motions, and give light and heat to the planets. Many astronomers have thought that its atmosphere only is luminous, and its body opake, and probably of the same constitution as the planets. Allowing therefore that its luminous atmosphere only extricates heat, we see no reason why the sun itself should not be inhabited(75)." (75) Brinkley, Elements of Astronomy, Chap. IX. There is certainly no end to the suppositions that may be made by an ingenious astronomer. May we not suppose that we might do nearly as well altogether without the sun, which it appears is at present of little use to us as to warmth and heat? As to light, the great creator might, for aught we know, find a substitute; feelers, for example, endued with a certain acuteness of sense: or, at all events, the least imaginable degree of light might answer every purpose to organs adapted to this kind of twilight. In that way the inhabitants of the Georgium Sidus are already sufficiently provided for; they appear to have as little benefit of the light as of the heat of the sun. How the satellites of the distant planets are supplied with light is a mystery, since their principals have scarcely any. Unless indeed, like the sun, they have a luminous atmosphere, competent to enlighten a whole system, themselves being opake. But in truth light in a greater or less degree seems scarcely worthy of a thought, since the inhabitants of the planet Mercury have not their eyes put out by a light, scarcely inferior in radiance to that which is reflected by those plates of burning brass, with which tyrants in some ages were accustomed to extinguish the sense of vision in their unfortunate victims. The comets also must be a delectable residence; that of 1680 completing its orbit in 576 years, and being at its greatest distance about eleven thousand two hundred millions of miles from the sun, and at its least within less than a third part of the sun's semi-diameter from its surface(76). They must therefore have delightful vicissitudes of light and the contrary; for, as to heat, that is already provided for. Archdeacon Brinkley's postulate is, that these bodies are "possessed by rational beings, and contain animals and vegetables, little different from those with which we are familiar." (76) Ferguson, Section 93. Now the only reason we have to believe in these extraordinary propositions, is the knowledge we possess of the divine attributes. From the force of this consideration it is argued that God will not leave any sensible area of matter unoccupied, and therefore that it is impossible that such vast orbs as we believe surround us even to the extent of infinite space, should not be "richly stored with rational beings, the capable witnesses of his power, magnificence and benevolence." All difficulties arising from the considerations of light, and heat, and a thousand other obstacles, are to give way to the perfect insight we have as to how the deity will conduct himself in every case that can be proposed. I am not persuaded that this is agreeable to religion; and I am still less convinced that it is compatible with the sobriety and sedateness of common sense. It is with some degree of satisfaction that I perceive lord Brougham, the reputed author of the Preliminary Discourse to the Library of Useful Knowledge, at the same time that he states the dimensions and distances of the heavenly bodies in the usual way, says not a word of their inhabitants. It is somewhat remarkable that, since the commencement of the present century, four new planets have been added to those formerly contained in the enumeration of the solar system. They lie between the planets Mars and Jupiter, and have been named Vesta, Juno, Ceres and Pallas. Brinkley speaks of them in this manner. "The very small magnitudes of the new planets Ceres and Pallas, and their nearly equal distances from the sun, induced Dr. Olbers, who discovered Pallas in 1802, nearly in the same place where he had observed Ceres a few months before, to conjecture that they were fragments of a larger planet, which had by some unknown cause been broken to pieces. It follows from the law of gravity, by which the planets are retained in their orbits, that each fragment would again, after every revolution about the sun, pass nearly through the place in which the planet was when the catastrophe happened, and besides the orbit of each fragment would intersect the continuation of the line joining this place and the sun. Thence it was easy to ascertain the two particular regions of the heavens through which all these fragments would pass. Also, by carefully noting the small stars thereabout, and examining them from time to time, it might be expected that more of the fragments would be discovered.--M. Harding discovered the planet Juno in one of these regions; and Dr. Olbers himself also, by carefully examining them (the small stars) from time to time, discovered Vesta." These additions certainly afford us a new epoch in the annals of the solar system, and of astronomy itself. It is somewhat remarkable, that Herschel, who in the course of his observations traced certain nebulae, the light from which must have been two millions of years in reaching the earth, should never have remarked these planets, which, so to speak, lay at his feet. It reminds one of Esop's astrologer, who, to the amusement of his ignorant countrymen, while he was wholly occupied in surveying the heavens, suddenly found himself plunged in a pit. These new planets also we are told are fragments of a larger planet: how came this larger planet never to have been discovered? Till Herschel's time we were content with six planets and the sun, making up the cabalistical number seven. He added another. But these four new ones entirely derange the scheme. The astronomers have not yet had opportunity to digest them into their places, and form new worlds of them. This is all unpleasant. They are, it seems, "fragments of a larger planet, which had by some unknown cause been broken to pieces." They therefore are probably not inhabited. How does this correspond with the goodness of God, which will suffer no mass of matter in his creation to remain unoccupied? Herschel talks at his ease of whole systems, suns with all their attendant planets, being consigned to destruction. But here we have a catastrophe happening before our eyes, and cannot avoid being shocked by it. "God does nothing in vain." For which of his lofty purposes has this planet been broken to pieces, and its fragments left to deform the system of which we are inhabitants; at least to humble the pride of man, and laugh to scorn his presumption? Still they perform their revolutions, and obey the projectile and gravitating forces, which have induced us to people ten thousand times ten thousand worlds. It is time, that we should learn modesty, to revere in silence the great cause to which the universe is indebted for its magnificence, its beauty and harmony, and to acknowledge that we do not possess the key that should unlock the mysteries of creation. One of the most important lessons that can be impressed on the human mind, is that of self-knowledge and a just apprehension of what it is that we are competent to achieve. We can do much. We are capable of much knowledge and much virtue. We have patience, perseverance and subtlety. We can put forth considerable energies, and nerve ourselves to resist great obstacles and much suffering. Our ingenuity is various and considerable. We can form machines, and erect mighty structures. The invention of man for the ease of human life, and for procuring it a multitude of pleasures and accommodations, is truly astonishing. We can dissect the human frame, and anatomise the mind. We can study the scene of our social existence, and make extraordinary improvements in the administration of justice, and in securing to ourselves that germ of all our noblest virtues, civil and political liberty. We can study the earth, its strata, its soil, its animals, and its productions, "from the cedar that is in Lebanon, to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall." But man is not omnipotent. If he aspires to be worthy of honour, it is necessary that he should compute his powers, and what it is they are competent to achieve. The globe of earth, with "all that is therein," is our estate and our empire. Let us be content with that which we have. It were a pitiful thing to see so noble a creature struggling in a field, where it is impossible for him to distinguish himself, or to effect any thing real. There is no situation in which any one can appear more little and ludicrous, than when he engages in vain essays, and seeks to accomplish that, which a moment's sober thought would teach him was utterly hopeless. Even astronomy is to a certain degree our own. We can measure the course of the sun, and the orbits of the planets. We can calculate eclipses. We can number the stars, assign to them their places, and form them into what we call constellations. But, when we pretend to measure millions of miles in the heavens, and to make ourselves acquainted with the inhabitants of ten thousand times ten thousand worlds and the accommodations which the creator has provided for their comfort and felicity, we probably engage in something more fruitless and idle, than the pigmy who should undertake to bend the bow of Ulysses, or strut and perform the office of a warrior clad in the armour of Achilles. How beautiful is the "firmament; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire!" Let us beware how we mar the magnificent scene with our interpolations and commentaries! Simplicity is of the essence of the truly great. Let us look at the operations of that mighty power from which we ourselves derive our existence, with humility and reverential awe! It may well become us. Let us not "presume into the heaven of heavens," unbidden, unauthorised guests! Let us adopt the counsel of the apostle, and allow no man to "spoil us through vain philosophy." The business of human life is serious; the useful investigations in which we may engage are multiplied. It is excellent to see a rational being conscious of his genuine province, and not idly wasting powers adapted for the noblest uses in unmeasured essays and ill-concocted attempts. ESSAY XXII. OF THE MATERIAL UNIVERSE. In the preceding Essay I have referred to the theory of Berkeley, whose opinion is that there is no such thing as matter in the sense in which it is understood by the writers on natural philosophy, and that the whole of our experience in that respect is the result of a system of accidents without an intelligible subject, by means of which antecedents and consequents flow on for ever in a train, the past succession of which man is able to record, and the future in many cases he is qualified to predict and to act upon. An argument more palpable and popular than that of Berkeley in favour of the same hypothesis, might be deduced from the points recapitulated in that Essay as delivered by Locke and Newton. If what are vulgarly denominated the secondary qualities of matter are in reality nothing but sensations existing in the human mind, then at any rate matter is a very different thing from what it is ordinarily apprehended to be. To which I add, in the second place, that, if matter, as is stated by Newton, consists in so much greater a degree of pores than solid parts, that the absolute particles contained in the solar system might, for aught we know, he contained in a nutshell(77), and that no two ever touched each other, or approached so near that they might not be brought nearer, provided a sufficient force could be applied for that purpose,--and if, as Priestley teaches, all that we observe is the result of successive spheres of attraction and repulsion, the centre of which is a mathematical point only, we then certainly come very near to a conclusion, which should banish matter out of the theatre of real existences(78). (77) See above, Essay XXI. (78) See above, Essay XXI. But the extreme subtleties of human intellect are perhaps of little further use, than to afford an amusement to persons of curious speculation, and whose condition in human society procures them leisure for such enquiries. The same thing happens here, as in the subject of my Twelfth Essay, on the Liberty of Human Actions. The speculator in his closet is one man: the same person, when he comes out of his retirement, and mixes in intercourse with his fellow-creatures, is another man. The necessarian, when he reasons on the everlasting concatenation of antecedents and consequents, proves to his own apprehension irrefragably, that he is a passive instrument, acted upon, and acting upon other things, in turn, and that he can never disengage himself from the operation of the omnipotent laws of physical nature, and the impulses of other men with whom he is united in the ties of society. But no sooner does this acute and ingenious reasoner come into active life and the intercourse of his fellowmen, than all these fine-drawn speculations vanish from his recollection. He regards himself and other men as beings endowed with a liberty of action, as possessed of a proper initiative power, and free to do a thing or not to do it, without being subject to the absolute and irresistible constraint of motives. It is from this internal and indefeasible sense of liberty, that we draw all our moral energies and enthusiasm, that we persevere heroically in defiance of obstacles and discouragements, that we praise or blame the actions of others, and admire the elevated virtues of the best of our contemporaries, and of those whose achievements adorn the page of history. It is in a manner of precisely the same sort as that which prevails in the philosophical doctrines of liberty and necessity, that we find ourselves impelled to feel on the question of the existence of the material universe. Berkeley, and as many persons as are persuaded by his or similar reasonings, feel satisfied in speculation that there is no such thing as matter in the sense in which it is understood by the writers on natural philosophy, and that all our notions of the external and actual existence of the table, the chair, and the other material substances with which we conceive ourselves to be surrounded, of woods, and mountains, and rivers, and seas, are mere prejudice and misconception. All this is very well in the closet, and as long as we are involved in meditation, and remain abstracted from action, business, and the exertion of our limbs and corporal faculties. But it is too fine for the realities of life. Berkeley, and the most strenuous and spiritualised of his followers, no sooner descend from the high tower of their speculations, submit to the necessities of their nature, and mix in the business of the world, than they become impelled, as strongly as the necessarian in the question of the liberty of human actions, not only to act like other men, but even to feel just in the same manner as if they had never been acquainted with these abstractions. A table then becomes absolutely a table, and a chair a chair: they are "fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, and warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter," as other men: and they make use of the refreshments which nature requires, with as true an orthodoxy, and as credulous a temper, as he who was never assailed with such refinements. Nature is too strong, to be prevailed on to retire, and give way to the authority of definitions and syllogistical deduction. But, when we have granted all this, it is however a mistake to say, that these "subtleties of human intellect are of little further use, than to afford an amusement to persons of curious speculation(79)." We have seen, in the case of the doctrine of philosophical necessity(80), that, though it can never form a rule for the intercourse between man and man, it may nevertheless be turned to no mean advantage. It is calculated to inspire us with temperance and toleration. It tends impressively to evince to us, that this scene of things is but like the shadows which pass before us in a magic lanthorn, and that, after all, men are but the tools, not the masters, of their fate. It corrects the illusions of life, much after the same manner as the spectator of a puppet-shew is enlightened, who should be taken within the curtain, and shewn how the wires are pulled by the master, which produce all the turmoil and strife that before riveted our attention. It is good for him who would arrive at all the improvement of which our nature is capable, at one time to take his place among the literal beholders of the drama, and at another to go behind the scenes, and remark the deceptions in their original elements, and the actors in their proper and natural costume. (79) See above, Essay XXII. (80) See above, Essay XII. And, as in the question of the liberty of human actions, so in that of the reality of the material universe, it is a privilege not to be despised, that we are so formed as to be able to dissect the subject that is submitted to our examination, and to strip the elements of which this sublunary scene is composed, of the disguise in which they present themselves to the vulgar spectator. It is little, after all, that we are capable to know; and the man of heroic mind and generous enterprise, will not refuse the discoveries that are placed within his reach. The subtleties of grammar are as the porch, which leads from the knowledge of words to the knowledge of things. The subtleties of mathematics defecate the grossness of our apprehension, and supply the elements of a sounder and severer logic. And in the same manner the faculty which removes the illusions of external appearance, and enables us to "look into the seeds of time," is one which we are bound to estimate at its genuine value. The more we refine our faculties, other things equal, the wiser we grow: we are the more raised above the thickness of the atmosphere that envelops our fellow-mortals, and are made partakers of a nature superhuman and divine. There is a curious question that has risen out of this proposition of Berkeley, of the supposed illusion we suffer in our conceptions of the material universe. It has been said, "Well then, I am satisfied that the chairs, the tables, and the other material substances with which I conceive myself to be surrounded, are not what they appear to be, but are merely an eternal chain of antecedents and consequents, going on according to what Leibnitz calls a 'preestablished harmony,' and thus furnishing the ground of the speculations which mortals cherish, and the motives of their proceeding. But, if thus, in the ordinary process of human affairs, we believe in matter, when in reality there is no such thing as matter, how shall we pronounce of mind, and the things which happen to us in our seeming intercourse with our fellow-men, and in the complexities of love and hatred, of kindred and friendship, of benevolence and misanthropy, of robbery and murder, and of the wholesale massacre of thousands of human beings which are recorded in the page of history? We absolutely know nothing of the lives and actions of others but through the medium of material impulse. And, if you take away matter, the bodies of our fellow-men, does it not follow by irresistible consequence that all knowledge of their minds is taken away also? Am not I therefore (the person engaged in reading the present Essay) the only being in existence, an entire universe to myself?" Certainly this is a very different conclusion from any that Berkeley ever contemplated. In the very title of the Treatise in which his notions on this subject are unfolded, he professes his purpose to be to remove "the grounds of scepticism, atheism and irreligion." Berkeley was a sincere Christian, and a man of the most ingenuous dispositions. Pope, in the Epilogue to his Satires, does not hesitate to ascribe to him "every virtue under heaven." He was for twenty years a prelate of the Protestant church. And, though his personal sentiments were in the highest degree philanthropical and amiable, yet, in his most diffusive production, entitled The Minute Philosopher, he treats "those who are called Free Thinkers" with a scorn and disdain, scarcely to be reconciled with the spirit of Christian meekness. There are examples however, especially in the fields of controversy, where an adventurous speculatist has been known to lay down premises and principles, from which inferences might be fairly deduced, incompatible with the opinions entertained by him who delivered them. It may therefore be no unprofitable research to enquire how far the creed of the non-existence of matter is to be regarded as in truth and reality countenancing the inference which has just been recited. The persons then, who refine with Berkeley upon the system of things so far, as to deny that there is any such thing as matter in the sense in which it is understood by the writers on natural philosophy, proceed on the ground of affirming that we have no reason to believe that the causes of our sensations have an express resemblance to the sensations themselves(81). That which gives us a sensation of colour is not itself coloured: and the same may be affirmed of the sensations of hot and cold, of sweet and bitter, and of odours offensive or otherwise. The immaterialist proceeds to say, that what we call matter has been strewn to be so exceedingly porous, that, for any thing we know, all the solid particles in the universe might be contained in a nutshell, that there is no such thing in the external world as actual contact, and that no two particles of matter were ever so near to each other, but that they might be brought nearer, if a sufficient force could be applied for that purpose. From these premises it seems to follow with sufficient evidence, that the causes of our sensations, so far as the material universe is concerned, bear no express resemblance to the sensations themselves. (81) See above, Essay XXI. How then does the question stand with relation to mind? Are those persons who deny the existence of matter, reduced, if they would be consistent in their reasonings, to deny, each man for himself, that he has any proper evidence of the existence of other minds than his own? He denies, while he has the sensation of colour, that there exists colour out of himself, unless in thinking and percipient beings constituted in a manner similar to that in which he is constituted. And the same of the sensations of hot and cold, sweet and bitter, and odours offensive or otherwise. He affirms, while he has the sensation of length, breadth and thickness, that there is no continuous substance out of himself, possessing the attributes of length, breadth and thickness in any way similar to the sensation of which he is conscious. He professes therefore that he has no evidence, arising from his observation of what we call matter, of the actual existence of a material world. He looks into himself, and all he finds is sensation; but sensation cannot be a property of inert matter. There is therefore no assignable analogy between the causes of his sensations, whatever they may be, and the sensations themselves; and the material world, such as we apprehend it, is the mere creature of his own mind. Let us next consider how this question stands as to the conceptions he entertains respecting the minds of other men. That which gives him the sensation of colour, is not any thing coloured out of himself; and that which gives him the sensation of length, breadth and thickness, is not any thing long, broad and thick in a manner corresponding with the impression he receives. There is nothing in the nature of a parallel, a type and its archetype, between that which is without him and that which is within, the impresser and the impression. This is the point supposed to be established by Locke and Newton, and by those who have followed the reasonings of these philosophers into their remotest consequences. But the case is far otherwise in the impressions we receive respecting the minds of other men. In colour it has been proved by these authors that there is no express correspondence and analogy between the cause of the sensation and the sensation. They are not part and counterpart. But in mind there is a precise resemblance and analogy between the conceptions we are led to entertain respecting other men, and what we know of ourselves. I and my associate, or fellow-man, are like two instruments of music constructed upon the same model. We have each of us, so to speak, the three great divisions of sound, base, tenor and treble. We have each the same number of keys, capable of being struck, consecutively or with alternations, at the will of the master. We can utter the same sound or series of sounds, or sounds of a different character, but which respond to each other. My neighbour therefore being of the same nature as myself, what passes within me may be regarded as amounting to a commanding evidence that he is a real being, having a proper and independent existence. There is further something still more impressive and irresistible in the notices I receive respecting the minds of other men. The sceptics whose reasonings I am here taking into consideration, admit, each man for himself, the reality of his own existence. There is such a thing therefore as human nature; for he is a specimen of it. Now the idea of human nature, or of man, is a very complex thing. He is in the first place the subject of sensible impressions, however these impressions are communicated to him. He has the faculties of thinking and feeling. He is subject to the law of the association of ideas, or, in other words, any one idea existing in his mind has a tendency to call up the ideas of other things which have been connected with it in his first experience. He has, be it delusive or otherwise, the sense of liberty of action. But we will go still further into detail as to the nature of man. Our lives are carried forward by the intervention of what we call meat, drink and sleep. We are liable to the accidents of health and sickness. We are alternately the recipients of joy and sorrow, of cheerfulness and melancholy. Our passions are excited by similar means, whether of love or hatred, complacency or indignation, sympathy or resentment. I could fill many pages with a description of the properties or accidents, which belong to man as such, or to which he is liable. Now with all these each man is acquainted in the sphere of his inward experience, whether he is a single being standing by himself, or is an individual belonging to a numerous species. Observe then the difference between my acquaintance with the phenomena of the material universe, and with the individuals of my own species. The former say nothing to me; they are a series of events and no more; I cannot penetrate into their causes; that which gives rise to my sensations, may or may not be similar to the sensations themselves. The follower of Berkeley or Newton has satisfied himself in the negative. But the case is very different in my intercourse with my fellow-men. Agreeably to the statement already made I know the reality of human nature; for I feel the particulars that constitute it within myself. The impressions I receive from that intercourse say something to me; for they talk to me of beings like myself. My own existence becomes multiplied in infinitum. Of the possibility of matter I know nothing; but with the possibility of mind I am acquainted; for I am myself an example. I am amazed at the consistency and systematic succession of the phenomena of the material universe; though I cannot penetrate the veil which presents itself to my grosser sense, nor see effects in their causes. But I can see, in other words, I have the most cogent reasons to believe in, the causes of the phenomena that occur in my apparent intercourse with my fellow-men. What solution so natural, as that they are produced by beings like myself, the duplicates, with certain variations, of what I feel within me? The belief in the reality of matter explains nothing. Supposing it to exist, if Newton is right, no particle of extraneous matter ever touched the matter of my body; and therefore it is not just to regard it as the cause of my sensations. It would amount to no more than two systems going on at the same time by a preestablished harmony, but totally independent of and disjointed from each other. But the belief in the existence of our fellow-men explains much. It makes level before us the wonder of the method of their proceedings, and affords an obvious reason why they should be in so many respects like our own. If I dismiss from my creed the existence of inert matter, I lose nothing. The phenomena, the train of antecedents and consequents, remain as before; and this is all that I am truly concerned with. But take away the existence of my fellow-men; and you reduce all that is, and all that I experience, to a senseless mummery. "You take my life, taking the thing whereon I live." Human nature, and the nature of mind, are to us a theme of endless investigation. "The proper study of mankind is man." All the subtlety of metaphysics, or (if there be men captious and prejudiced enough to dislike that term) the science of ourselves, depends upon it. The science of morals hangs upon the actions of men, and the effects they produce upon our brother-men, in a narrower or a wider circle. The endless, and inexpressibly interesting, roll of history relies for its meaning and its spirit upon the reality and substance of the subjects of which it treats. Poetry, and all the wonders and endless varieties that imagination creates, have this for their solution and their soul. Sympathy is the only reality of which we are susceptible; it is our heart of hearts: and, if the world had been "one entire and perfect chrysolite," without this it would have been no more than one heap of rubbish. Observe the difference between what we know of the material world, and what of the intellectual. The material goes on for ever according to certain laws that admit of no discrimination. They proceed upon a first principle, an impulse given them from the beginning of things. Their effects are regulated by something that we call their nature: fire burns; water suffocates; the substances around us that we call solid, depend for their effects, when put in motion, upon momentum and gravity. The principle that regulates the dead universe, "acts by general, not by partial laws." When the loose mountain trembles from on high, Shall gravitation cease, if you go by? No: the chain of antecedents and consequents proceeds in this respect for ever the same. The laws of what we call the material world continue unvaried. And, when the vast system of things was first set in motion, every thing, so far as depends on inert matter, was determined to the minutest particle, even to the end of time. The material world, or that train of antecedents and consequents which we understand by that term, goes on for ever in a train agreeably to the impulse previously given. It is deaf and inexorable. It is unmoved by the consideration of any accidents and miseries that may result, and unalterable. But man is a source of events of a very different nature. He looks to results, and is governed by views growing out of the contemplation of them. He acts in a way diametrically opposite to the action of inert matter, and "turns, and turns, and turns again," at the impulse of the thought that strikes him, the appetite that prompts, the passions that move, and the effects that he anticipates. It is therefore in a high degree unreasonable, to make that train of inferences which may satisfy us on the subject of material phenomena, a standard of what we ought to think respecting the phenomena of mind. It is further worthy of our notice to recollect, that the same reasonings which apply to our brethren of mankind, apply also to the brute creation. They, like ourselves, act from motives; that is, the elections they form are adopted by them for the sake of certain consequences they expect to see result from them. Whatever becomes therefore of the phenomena of what we call dead matter, we are here presented with tribes of being, susceptible of pleasure and pain, of hope and fear, of regard and resentment. How beautifully does this conviction vary the scene of things! What a source to us is the animal creation, of amusement, of curious observations upon the impulses of inferior intellect, of the exhaustless varieties of what we call instinct, of the care we can exercise for their accommodation and welfare, and of the attachment and affection we win from them in return! If I travel alone through pathless deserts, if I journey from the rising to the setting sun, with no object around me but nature's desolation, or the sublime, the magnificent and the exuberant scenery she occasionally presents, still I have that noble animal, the horse, and my faithful dog, the companions of my toil, and with whom, when my solitude would otherwise become insufferable, I can hold communion, and engage in dumb dialogues of sentiment and affection. I have heard of a man, who, talking to his friend on the subject of these speculations, said, "What then, are you so poor and pusillanimous a creature, that you could not preserve your serenity, be perfectly composed and content, and hold on your way unvaried, though you were convinced that you were the only real being in existence, and all the rest were mere phantasies and shadows?" If I had been the person to whom this speech was addressed, I should have frankly acknowledged, "I am the poor and pusillanimous creature you are disposed to regard with so much scorn." To adopt the sententious language of the Bible, "It is not good for man to be alone." All our faculties and attributes bear relation to, and talk to us of, other beings like ourselves. We might indeed eat, drink and sleep, that is, submit to those necessities which we so denominate, without thinking of any thing beyond ourselves; for these are the demands of our nature, and we know that we cannot subsist without them. We might make use of the alternate conditions of exercise and repose. But the life of our lives would be gone. As far as we bore in mind the creed we had adopted, of our single existence, we could neither love nor hate. Sympathy would be a solemn mockery. We could not communicate; for the being to whom our communication was addressed we were satisfied was a non-entity. We could not anticipate the pleasure or pain, the joy or sorrow, of another; for that other had no existence. We should be in a worse condition than Robinson Crusoe in the desolate island; for he believed in the existence of other men, and hoped and trusted that he should one day again enter into human society. We should be in a worse condition than Robinson Crusoe; for he at least was unannoyed in his solitude; while we are perpetually and per force intruded on, like a delirious man, by visions which we know to be unreal, but which we are denied the power to deliver ourselves from. We have no motive to any of the great and cardinal functions of human life; for there is no one in being, that we can benefit, or that we can affect. Study is nothing to us; for we have no use for it. Even science is unsatisfactory; unless we can communicate it by word or writing, can converse upon it, and compare notes with our neighbour. History is nothing; for there were no Greeks and no Romans; no freemen and no slaves; no kings and no subjects; no despots, nor victims of their tyranny; no republics, nor states immerged in brutal and ignominious servitude. Life must be inevitably a burthen to us, a dreary, unvaried, motiveless existence; and death must be welcomed, as the most desirable blessing that can visit us. It is impossible indeed that we should always recollect this our, by supposition, real situation; but, as often as we did, it would come over us like a blight, withering all the prospects of our industry, or like a scirocco, unbracing the nerves of our frame, and consigning us to the most pitiable depression. Thus far I have allowed myself to follow the refinements of those who profess to deny the existence of the material universe. But it is satisfactory to come back to that persuasion, which, from whatever cause it is derived, is incorporated with our very existence, and can never be shaken off by us. Our senses are too powerful in their operation, for it to be possible for us to discard them, and to take as their substitute, in active life, and in the earnestness of pursuit, the deductions of our logical faculty, however well knit and irresistible we may apprehend them to be. Speculation and common sense are at war on this point; and however we may "think with the learned," and follow the abstrusenesses of the philosopher, in the sequestered hour of our meditation, we must always act, and even feel, "with the vulgar," when we come abroad into the world. It is however no small gratification to the man of sober mind, that, from what has here been alleged, it seems to follow, that untutored mind, and the severest deductions of philosophy, agree in that most interesting of our concerns, our intercourse with our fellow-creatures. The inexorable reasoner, refining on the reports of sense, may dispose, as he pleases, of the chair, the table, and the so called material substances around him. He may include the whole solid matter of the universe in a nutshell, or less than a nutshell. But he cannot deprive me of that greatest of all consolations, the sustaining pillar of my existence, "the cordial drop Heaven in our cup has thrown,"--the intercourse of my fellow-creatures. When we read history, the subjects of which we read are realities; they do not "come like shadows, so depart;" they loved and acted in sober earnest; they sometimes perpetrated crimes; but they sometimes also achieved illustrious deeds, which angels might look down from their exalted abodes and admire. We are not deluded with mockeries. The woman I love, and the man to whom I swear eternal friendship, are as much realities as myself. If I relieve the poor, and assist the progress of genius and virtuous designs struggling with fearful discouragements, I do something upon the success of which I may safely congratulate myself. If I devote my energies to enlighten my fellow-creatures, to detect the weak places in our social institutions, to plead the cause of liberty, and to invite others to engage in noble actions and unite in effecting the most solid and unquestionable improvements, I erect to my name an eternal monument; or I do something better than this,--secure inestimable advantage to the latest posterity, the benefit of which they shall enjoy, long after the very name of the author shall, with a thousand other things great and small, have been swallowed up in the gulph of insatiable oblivion. ESSAY XXIII. OF HUMAN VIRTUE. THE EPILOGUE. The life of man is divided into many stages; and we shall not form a just estimate of our common nature, if we do not to a certain degree pass its successive periods in review, and observe it in its commencement, its progress, and its maturity. It has been attempted to be established in an early part of the present volume(82), that all men, idiots and extraordinary cases being put out of the question, are endowed with talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew them to be apt, adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which their organisation especially fitted them. We are bound therefore, particularly in the morning of life, to consider every thing that presents itself to us in the human form, with deference and attention. (82) See above, Essay III. "God," saith the Preacher, "made man upright; but he hath sought out many inventions." There is something loose and difficult of exposition in this statement; but we shall find an important truth hid beneath its obscurity. Junius Brutus, in the play, says to his son, I like thy frame: the fingers of the Gods I see have left their mastery upon thee; And the majestic prints distinct appear. Such is the true description of every well-formed and healthful infant that is born into the world. He is placed on the threshold of existence; and an eventful journey is open before him. For the first four or five years of life indeed he has little apprehension of the scenes that await him. But a child of quick apprehension early begins to have day-dreams, and to form imaginations of the various chances that may occur to him, and the things he shall have to do, when, according to the language of the story-books, he "goes out to seek his fortune." "God made man upright." Every child that is born, has within him a concealed magazine of excellence. His heart beats for every thing that is lovely and good; and whatever is set before him of that sort in honest colours, rouses his emulation. By how many tokens does he prove himself worthy of our approbation and love--the unaffected and ingenuous sobriety with which he listens to what addresses itself to his attention, the sweetness of his smile, his hearty laugh, the clear, bell tones of his voice, his sudden and assured impulses, and his bounding step! To his own heart he promises well of himself. Like Lear in the play, he says, "I will do such things!--What they are, yet I know not." But he is assured, frank and light-spirited. He thinks of no disguise. He "wears his heart upon his sleeve." He looks in the face of his seniors with the glistening eye of confidence, and expects to encounter sympathy and encouragement in return. Such is man, as he comes from the hands of his maker. Thus prepared, he is turned into the great field of society. Here he meets with much that he had not anticipated, and with many rebuffs. He is taught that he must accommodate his temper and proceedings to the expectations and prejudices of those around him. He must be careful to give no offence. With how many lessons, not always the most salutary and ingenuous, is this maxim pregnant! It calls on the neophyte to bear a wary eye, and to watch the first indications of disapprobation and displeasure in those among whom his lot is cast. It teaches him to suppress the genuine emotions of his soul. It informs him that he is not always to yield to his own impulses, but that he must "stretch forth his hands to another, and be carried whither he would not." It recommends to him falseness, and to be the thing in outward appearance that he is not in his heart. Still however he goes on. He shuts up his thoughts in his bosom; but they are not exterminated. On the contrary he broods over them with genial warmth; and the less they are exposed to the eye of day, the more perseveringly are they cherished. Perhaps he chooses some youthful confident of his imaginings: and the effect of this is, that he pours out his soul with uncontrolable copiousness, and with the fervour of a new and unchecked conceiving. It is received with answering warmth; or, if there is any deficiency in the sympathy of his companion, his mind is so earnest and full, that he does not perceive it. By and by, it may be, he finds that the discovery he had made of a friend, a brother of his soul, is, like so many of the visions of this world, hollow and fallacious. He grasped, as he thought, a jewel of the first water; and it turns out to be a vulgar pebble. No matter: he has gained something by the communication. He has heard from his own lips the imaginings of his mind shaped into articulate air; they grew more definite and distinct as he uttered them; they came by the very act to have more of reality, to be more tangible. He shakes off the ill-assorted companion that only encumbered him, and springs away in his race, more light of heart, and with a step more assured, than ever. By and by he becomes a young man. And, whatever checks he may have received before, it usually happens that all his hopes and projects return to him now with recruited strength. He has no longer a master. He no longer crouches to the yoke of subjection, and is directed this way and that at the judgment of another. Liberty is at all times dear to the free-soured and ingenuous; but never so much so, as when we wear it in its full gloss and newness. He never felt before, that he was sui juris, that he might go whithersoever he would, without asking leave, without consulting any other director than the law of his own mind. It is nearly at the same season that he arrives at the period of puberty, at the stature, and in a certain degree at the strength, which he is destined to attain. He is by general consent admitted to be at years of discretion. Though I have put all these things together, they do not, in the course of nature, all come at the same time. It is a memorable period, when the ingenuous youth is transferred from the trammels of the schoolmaster to the residence of a college. It was at the age of seventeen that, according to the custom of Rome, the youthful citizen put on the manly gown, and was introduced into the forum. Even in college-life, there is a difference in the privileges of the mere freshman, and of the youth who has already completed the first half of his period in the university. The season of what may be denominated the independence of the individual, is certainly in no small degree critical. A human being, suddenly emancipated from a state of subjection, if we may not call it slavery, and transported into a state of freedom, must be expected to be guilty of some extravagancies and follies. But upon the whole, with a small number of exceptions, it is creditable to human nature, that we take this period of our new powers and immunities with so much sobriety as we do. The young man then, calls to mind all that he imagined at an earlier season, and that he promised himself. He adds to this the new lights that he has since obtained, and the nearer and more distinct view that he has reached, of the realities of life. He recollects the long noviciate that he served to reach this period, the twenty years that he passed in ardent and palpitating expectation; and he resolves to do something worthy of all he had vowed and had imagined. He takes a full survey of his stores and endowments; and to the latter, from his enthusiasm and his self-love, he is morally sure to do justice. He says to himself, "What I purpose to do will not be achieved to-day. No; it shall be copious, and worthy of men's suffrage and approbation. But I will meditate it; I will sketch a grand outline; I will essay my powers in secret, and ascertain what I may be able to effect." The youth, whose morning of life is not utterly abortive, palpitates with the desire to promote the happiness of others, and with the desire of glory. We have an apt specimen of this in the first period of the reign of Nero. The historians, Tacitus in particular, have treated this with too much incredulity. It was the passion of that eminent man to indulge in subtleties, and to find hidden meanings in cases where in reality every thing is plain. We must not regard the panegyric of Seneca, and the devotion of Lucan to the imperial stripling, as unworthy of our attention. He was declared emperor before he had completed the eighteenth year of his age. No occasion for the exhibition of liberality, clemency, courtesy or kindness escaped him. He called every one by his name, and saluted all orders of men. When the senate shewed a disposition to confer on him peculiar honours, he interposed, he said, "Let them be bestowed when I have deserved them(83)." Seneca affirms, that in the first part of his reign, and to the time in which the philosopher dedicated to him his treatise of Clemency, he had "shed no drop of blood(84)." He adds, "If the Gods were this day to call thee to a hearing, thou couldst account to them for every man that had been intrusted to thy rule. Not an individual has been lost from the number, either by secret practices, or by open violence. This could scarcely have been, if thy good dispositions had not been natural, but assumed. No one can long personate a character. A pretended goodness will speedily give place to the real temper; while a sincere mind, and acts prompted by the heart, will not fail to go on from one stage of excellence to another(85)." (83) Suetonius, Nero, cap. 10. (84) De Clementia, Lib. I, cap. II. (85) De Clementia, cap. I. The philosopher expresses himself in raptures on that celebrated phrase of Nero, WOULD I HAD NEVER LEARNED TO WRITE! "An exclamation," he says, "not studied, not uttered for the purpose of courting popularity, but bursting insuppressibly from thy lips, and indicating the vehemence of the struggle between the kindness of thy disposition and the duties of thy office(86)." (86) Ibid., Lib. II, cap. I. How many generous purposes, what bright and heart-thrilling visions of beneficence and honour, does the young man, just starting in the race of life, conceive! There is no one in that period of existence, who has received a reasonable education, and has not in his very nonage been trod down in the mire of poverty and oppression, that does not say to himself, "Now is the time; and I will do something worthy to be remembered by myself and by others." Youth is the season of generosity. He calls over the catalogue of his endowments, his attainments, and his powers, and exclaims, "To that which I am, my contemporaries are welcome; it shall all be expended for their service and advantage." With what disdain he looks at the temptations of selfishness, effeminate indulgence, and sordid gain! He feels within himself that he was born for better things. His elders, and those who have already been tamed down and emasculated by the corrupt commerce of the world, tell him, "All this is the rhapsody of youth, fostered by inexperience; you will soon learn to know better; in no long time you will see these things in the same light in which we see them." But he despises the sinister prognostic that is held out to him, and feels proudly conscious that the sentiments that now live in his bosom, will continue to animate him to his latest breath. Youth is necessarily ingenuous in its thoughts, and sanguine in its anticipations of the future. But the predictions of the seniors I have quoted, are unfortunately in too many cases fulfilled. The outline of the scheme of civil society is in a high degree hostile to the growth and maturity of human virtue. Its unavoidable operation, except in those rare cases where positive institutions have arrested its tendency, has been to divide a great portion of its members, especially in large and powerful states, into those who are plentifully supplied with the means of luxury and indulgence, and those who are condemned to suffer the rigours of indigence. The young man who is born to the prospect of hereditary wealth, will not unfrequently feel as generous emotions, and as much of the spirit of self-denial, as the bosom of man is capable of conceiving. He will say, What am I, that I should have a monopoly of those things, which, if "well dispensed, in unsuperfluous, even proportion," would supply the wants of all? He is ready, agreeably to the advice of Christ to the young man in the Gospel, to "sell all that he has, and give to the poor," if he could be shewn how so generous a resolution on his part could be encountered with an extensive conspiracy of the well-disposed, and rendered available to the real melioration of the state of man in society. Who is there so ignorant, or that has lived in so barren and unconceiving a tract of the soil of earth, that has not his tale to tell of the sublime emotions and the generous purposes he has witnessed, which so often mark this beautiful era of our sublunary existence? But this is in the dawn of life, and the first innocence of the human heart. When once the young man of "great possessions" has entered the gardens of Alcina, when he has drunk of the cup of her enchantments, and seen all the delusive honour and consideration that, in the corruptness of modern times, are the lot of him who is the owner of considerable wealth, the dreams of sublime virtue are too apt to fade away. He was willing before, to be nourished with the simplest diet, and clad with the plainest attire. He knew that he was but a man like the rest of his species, and was in equity entitled to no more than they. But he presently learns a very different lesson. He believes that he cannot live without splendour and luxury; he regards a noble mansion, elegant vesture, horses, equipage, and an ample establishment, as things without which he must be hopelessly miserable. That income, which he once thought, if divided, would have secured the happiness and independence of many, he now finds scarcely sufficient to supply his increased and artificial cravings. But, if the rich are seduced and led away from the inspirations of virtue, it may easily be conceived how much more injurious, and beyond the power of control, are the effects on the poor. The mysterious source from which the talents of men are derived, cannot be supposed in their distribution to be regulated by the artificial laws of society, and to have one measure for those which are bestowed upon the opulent, and another for the destitute. It will therefore not seldom happen that powers susceptible of the noblest uses may be cast, like "seed sown upon stony places," where they have scarcely any chance to be unfolded and matured. In a few instances they may attract the attention of persons both able and willing to contribute to their being brought to perfection. In a few instances the principle may be so vigorous, and the tendency to excel so decisive, as to bid defiance to and to conquer every obstacle. But in a vast majority the promise will be made vain, and the hopes that might have been entertained will prove frustrate. What can be expected from the buds of the most auspicious infancy, if encountered in their earliest stage with the rigorous blasts of a polar climate? And not only will the germs of excellence be likely to be extinguished in the members of the lower class of the community, but the temptations to irregular acts and incroachments upon the laws for the security of property will often be so great, as to be in a manner irresistible. The man who perceives that, with all his industry, he cannot provide for the bare subsistence of himself and those dependent upon him, while his neighbour revels in boundless profusion, cannot but sometimes feel himself goaded to an attempt to correct this crying evil. What must be expected to become of that general good-will which is the natural inheritance of a well-constituted mind, when urged by so bitter oppression and such unendurable sufferings? The whole temper of the human heart must be spoiled, and the wine of life acquire a quality acrimonious and malignant. But it is not only in the extreme classes of society that the glaring inequality with which property is shared produces its injurious effects. All those who are born in the intermediate ranks are urged with a distempered ambition, unfavourable to independence of temper, and to true philanthropy. Each man aspires to the improvement of his circumstances, and the mounting, by one step and another, higher in the scale of the community. The contemplations of the mind are turned towards selfishness. In opulent communities we are presented with the genuine theatre for courts and kings. And, wherever there are courts, duplicity, lying, hypocrisy and cringing dwell as in their proper field. Next come trades and professions, with all the ignoble contemplations, the resolved smoothness, servility and falshood, by which they are enabled to gain a prosperous and triumphant career. It is by such means, that man, whom "God made upright," is led away into a thousand devious paths, and, long before the closing scene of his life, is rendered something the very reverse of what in the dawning of existence he promised to be. He is like Hazael in the Jewish history, who, when the prophet set before him the crying enormities he should hereafter perpetrate, exclaimed, "Is thy servant a dog," that he should degrade himself so vilely? He feels the purity of his purposes; but is goaded by one excitement and exasperation after another, till he becomes debased, worthless and criminal. This is strikingly illustrated in the story of Dr. Johnson and the celebrated Windham, who, when he was setting out as secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, expressed to his aged monitor, some doubts whether he could ever reconcile himself to certain indirect proceedings which he was afraid would be expected of him: to which the veteran replied, "Oh, sir, be under no alarm; in a short time, depend upon it, you will make a very pretty rascal(87)." (87) The phrase here used by Johnson is marked with the licentiousness we sometimes indulge in familiar conversation. Translate it into a general maxim; and it contains much melancholy truth. It is true also, that there are few individuals, who, in the urgent realities of life, have not occasionally descended from the heights of theoretical excellence. It is but just however to observe in the case of Windham, that, though he was a man of many errors, he was not the less characterised by high honour and eminent virtue. Such are the "inventions of man," or rather such is the operation of those institutions which ordinarily prevail in society. Still, however, much honour ought to be rendered to our common nature, since all of us are not led away by the potent spells of the enchantress. If the vulgar crew of the vessel of Ulysses were by Circe changed into brutes, so was not their commander. The human species is divided into two classes, the successfully tempted, and the tempted in vain. And, though the latter must be admitted to be a small minority, yet they ought to be regarded as the "salt of the earth," which preserves the entire mass from putridity and dishonour. They are like the remnant, which, if they had been to be found in the cities of the Asphaltic lake, the God of Abraham pronounced as worthy to redeem the whole community. They are like the two witnesses amidst the general apostasy, spoken of in the book of Revelations, who were the harbingers and forerunners of the millenium, the reign of universal virtue and peace. Their excellence only appears with the greater lustre amidst the general defection. Nothing can be more unjust than the spirit of general levelling and satire, which so customarily prevails. History records, if you will, the vices and follies of mankind. But does it record nothing else? Are the virtues of the best men, the noblest philosophers, and the most disinterested patriots of antiquity, nothing? It is impossible for two things to be more unlike than the general profligacy of the reigns of Charles the Second and Louis the Fifteenth on the one hand, and the austere virtues and the extinction of all private considerations in the general happiness and honour, which constitute the spirit of the best pages of ancient history, and which exalt and transfix the spirit of every ingenuous and high-souled reader, on the other. Let us then pay to human virtue the honour that is so justly its due! Imagination is indeed a marvellous power; but imagination never equalled history, the achievements which man has actually performed. It is in vain that the man of contemplation sits down in his closet; it is in vain that the poet yields the reins to enthusiasm and fancy: there is something in the realities of life, that excites the mind infinitely more, than is in the power of the most exalted reverie. The true hero cannot, like the poet, or the delineator of fictitious adventures, put off what he has to do till to-morrow. The occasion calls, and he must obey. He sees the obstacles, and the adversary he has to encounter, before him. He sees the individuals, for whose dear sake he resolves to expose himself to every hazard and every evil. The very circumstance, that he is called on to act in the face of the public, animates him. It is thus that resolution is produced, that martyrdom is voluntarily encountered, and that the deeds of genuine, pure and undeniable heroism are performed. Let then no man, in the supercilious spirit of a fancied disdain, allow himself to detract from our common nature. We are ourselves the models of all the excellence that the human mind can conceive. There have been men, whose virtues may well redeem all the contempt with which satire and detraction have sought to overwhelm our species. There have been memorable periods in the history of man, when the best, the most generous and exalted sentiments have swallowed up and obliterated all that was of an opposite character. And it is but just, that those by whom these things are fairly considered, should anticipate the progress of our nature, and believe that human understanding and human virtue will hereafter accomplish such things as the heart of man has never yet been daring enough to conceive. 
8909	----	THE SYSTEM OF NATURE, VOLUME I (of II) By Paul Henri Thiery (Baron d'Holbach) Introduction by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. PRODUCTION NOTES: First published in French in 1770 under the pseudonym of Mirabaud. This e-book based on a facsimile reprint of an English translation originally published 1820-21. This e-text covers the first of the original two volumes. INTRODUCTION Paul Henri Thiery, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was the center of the radical wing of the _philosophes_. He was friend, host, and patron to a wide circle that included Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Hume. Holbach wrote, translated, edited, and issued a stream of books and pamphlets, often under other names, that has made him the despair of bibliographers but has connected his name, by innuendo, gossip, and association, with most of what was written in defense of atheistic materialism in late eighteenth-century France. Holbach is best known for _The System of Nature_ (1770) and deservedly, since it is a clear and reasonably systematic exposition of his main ideas. His initial position determines all the rest of his argument. "There is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes all beings." Conceiving of nature as strictly limited to matter and motion, both of which have always existed, he flatly denies that there is any such thing as spirit or a supernatural. Mythology began, Holbach claims, when men were still in a state of nature and at the point when wise, strong, and for the most part benign men were arising as leaders and lawgivers. These leaders "formed discourses by which they spoke to the imaginations of their willing auditors," using the medium of poetry, because it "seem{ed} best adapted to strike the mind." Through poetry, then, and by means of "its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme, its harmony... the entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was personified, by its beautiful allegories." Thus mythology is given an essentially political origin. These early poets are literally legislators of mankind. "The first institutors of nations, and their immediate successors in authority, only spoke to the people by fables, allegories, enigmas, of which they reserved to themselves the right of giving an explanation." Holbach is rather condescending about the process, but since mythology is a representation of nature itself, he is far more tolerant of mythology than he is of the next step. "Natural philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians and theologians," and at this point a fatal error was introduced: the theologians made a distinction between the power of nature and nature itself, separated the two, made the power of nature prior to nature, and called it God. Thus man was left with an abstract and chimerical being on one side and a despoiled inert nature, destitute of power, on the other. In Holbach's critique the point at which theology split off from mythology marks the moment of nature's alienation from itself and paves the way for man's alienation from nature. Holbach is thus significant for Romantic interest in myth in two ways. First, he provides a clear statement of what can be loosely called the antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the Romantic era. Holbach was and is a reminder that the Romantic affirmation of myth was never easy, uncritical, or unopposed. Any new endorsement of myth had to be made in the teeth of Holbach and the other skeptics. The very vigor of the Holbachian critique of myth impelled the Romantics to think more deeply and defend more carefully any new claim for myth. Secondly, although Holbach's argument generally drove against myth and religion both, he did make an important, indeed a saving distinction between mythology and theology. Mythology is the more or less harmless personification of the power in and of nature; theology concerns itself with what for Holbach was the nonexistent power beyond or behind nature. By exploiting this distinction it would become possible for a Shelley, for example, to take a strong antitheological--even an anti-Christian--position without having to abandon myth. Holbach was one of William Godwin's major sources for his ideas about political justice, and Shelley, who discussed Holbach with Godwin, quotes extensively from _The System of Nature_ in _Queen Mab_. Furthermore, Volney's _Ruins_, another important book for Shelley, is directly descended from _The System of Nature_. On the other side, Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and Barlow. Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former perpetual secretary to the Académie française who had died ten years before), _La Système de la nature_ was translated and reprinted frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint was the most often reprinted or pirated version in English. A useful starting point for Holbach's work is Jerome Vercruysse, _Bibliographie descriptive des écrits du baron d'Holbach_ (Paris, 1971). The difficult subject of the essentially clandestine evolution of biblical criticism as an anti-Christian and antimyth critique in the early part of the eighteenth century, before the well-documented era of the biblical critic Eichhorn in Germany, is illuminated in Ira Wade, _The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700-1750_ (Princeton Univ. Press, 1938). Robert D. Richardson, Jr. University of Denver * * * * * {Illustration: Parke sculp't M. DE MIRABAUD} THE SYSTEM OF NATURE; OR, _THE LAWS_ OF THE MORAL AND PHYSICAL WORLD. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH OF M. DE MIRABAUD VOL. I. CONTENTS Preface PART I--Laws of Nature.--Of man.--The faculties of the soul. --Doctrine of immortality.--On happiness. CHAP. I. Nature and her laws. CHAP. II. Of motion and its origin. CHAP. III. Of matter--of its various combinations--of its diversified motion--or of the course of Nature. CHAP. IV. Laws of motion common to every being of Nature--attraction and repulsion--inert force-necessity. CHAP. V. Order and confusion--intelligence--chance. CHAP. VI. Moral and physical distinctions of man--his origin. CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system. CHAP. VII. The soul and the spiritual system. CHAP. VIII. The intellectual faculties derived from the faculty of feeling. CHAP. IX. The diversity of the intellectual faculties; they depend on physical causes, as do their moral qualities.--The natural principles of society--morals--politics. CHAP. X. The soul does not derive its ideas from itself--it has no innate ideas. CHAP. XI. Of the system of man's free-agency. CHAP. XII. An examination of the opinion which pretends that the system of fatalism is dangerous. CHAP. XIII. Of the immortality of the soul--of the doctrine of a future state--of the fear of death. CHAP. XIV. Education, morals, and the laws suffice to restrain man--of the desire of immortality--of suicide. CHAP. XV. Of man's true interest, or of the ideas he forms to himself of happiness.--Man cannot be happy without virtue. CHAP. XVI. The errors of man.--Upon what constitutes happiness.--The true source of his evils.--Remedies that may be applied. CHAP. XVII. Those ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature, are the only remedies for the evil of man.--Recapitulation.--Conclusions of the First Part. PREFACE _The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error. He resembles a child destitute of experience, full of ideal notions: a dangerous leaven mixes itself with all his knowledge: it is of necessity obscure, it is vacillating and false:--He takes the tone of his ideas on the authority of others, who are themselves in error, or else have an interest in deceiving him. To remove this Cimmerian darkness, these barriers to the improvement of his condition; to disentangle him from the clouds of error that envelope him; to guide him out of this Cretan labyrinth, requires the clue of Ariadne, with all the love she could bestow on Theseus. It exacts more than common exertion; it needs a most determined, a most undaunted courage--it is never effected but by a persevering resolution to act, to think for himself; to examine with rigour and impartiality the opinions he has adopted. He will find that the most noxious weeds have sprung up beside beautiful flowers; entwined themselves around their stems, overshadowed them with an exuberance of foliage, choaked the ground, enfeebled their growth, diminished their petals; dimmed the brilliancy of their colours; that deceived by their apparent freshness of their verdure, by the rapidity of their exfoliation, he has given them cultivation, watered them, nurtured them, when he ought to have plucked out their very roots. Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world; and hunts out misery in imaginary regions. He would be a metaphysician before he has become a practical philosopher. He quits the contemplation of realities to meditate on chimeras. He neglects experience to feed on conjecture, to indulge in hypothesis. He dares not cultivate his reason, because from his earliest days he has been taught to consider it criminal. He pretends to know his date in the indistinct abodes of another life, before he has considered of the means by which he is to render himself happy in the world he inhabits: in short, man disdains the study of Nature, except it be partially: he pursues phantoms that resemble an _ignis-fatuus_, which at once dazzle, bewilders, and affright: like the benighted traveller led astray by these deceptive exhalations of a swampy soil, he frequently quits the plain, the simple road of truth, by pursuing of which, he can alone ever reasonably hope to reach the goal of happiness. The most important of our duties, then, is to seek means by which we may destroy delusions that can never do more than mislead us. The remedies for these evils must be sought for in Nature herself; it is only in the abundance of her resources, that we can rationally expect to find antidotes to the mischiefs brought upon us by an ill directed, by an overpowering enthusiasm. It is time these remedies were sought; it is time to look the evil boldly in the face, to examine its foundations, to scrutinize its superstructure: reason, with its faithful guide experience, must attack in their entrenchments those prejudices, to which the human race has but too long been the victim. For this purpose reason must be restored to its proper rank,--it must be rescued from the evil company with which it is associated. It has been too long degraded--too long neglected--cowardice has rendered it subservient to delirium, the slave to falsehood. It must no longer be held down by the massive claims of ignorant prejudice. Truth is invariable--it is requisite to man--it can never harm him--his very necessities, sooner or later, make him sensible of this; oblige him to acknowledge it. Let us then discover it to mortals--let us exhibit its charms--let us shed it effulgence over the darkened road; it is the only mode by which man can become disgusted with that disgraceful superstition which leads him into error, and which but too often usurps his homage by treacherously covering itself with the mask of truth--its lustre can wound none but those enemies to the human race whose power is bottomed solely on the ignorance, on the darkness in which they have in almost every claimed contrived to involve the mind of man. Truth speaks not to those perverse beings:--her voice can only be heard by generous souls accustomed to reflection, whose sensibilities make them lament the numberless calamities showered on the earth by political and religious tyranny--whose enlightened minds contemplate with horror the immensity, the ponderosity of that series of misfortunes which error has in all ages overwhelmed mankind. To error must be attributed those insupportable chains which tyrants, which priests have forged for most nations. To error must be equally attributed that abject slavery into which the people of almost every country have fallen. Nature designed they should pursue their happiness by the most perfect freedom.--To error must be attributed those religious terrors which, in almost every climate, have either petrified man with fear, or caused him to destroy himself for coarse or fanciful beings. To error must be attributed those inveterate hatreds, those barbarous persecutions, those numerous massacres, those dreadful tragedies, of which, under pretext of serving the interests of heaven, the earth has been but too frequently made the theatre. It is error consecrated by religious enthusiasm, which produces that ignorance, that uncertainty in which man ever finds himself with regard to his most evident duties, his clearest rights, the most demonstrable truths. In short, man is almost everywhere a poor degraded captive, devoid of greatness of soul, of reason, or of virtue, whom his inhuman gaolers have never permitted to see the light of day. Let us then endeavour to disperse those clouds of ignorance, those mists of darkness, which impede man on his journey, which obscure his progress, which prevent his marching through life with a firm, with a steady grip. Let us try to inspire him with courage--with respect for his reason--with an inextinguishable love for truth--with a remembrance of Gallileo--to the end that he may learn to know himself--to know his legitimate rights--that he may learn to consult his experience, and no longer be the dupe of an imagination led astray by authority--that he may renounce the prejudices of his childhood--that he may learn to found his morals on his nature, on his wants, on the real advantage of society--that he may dare to love himself--that he may learn to pursue his true happiness by promoting that of others--in short, that he may no longer occupy himself with reveries either useless or dangerous--that he may become a virtuous, a rational being, in which case he cannot fail to become happy. If he must have his chimeras, let him at least learn to permit others to form theirs after their own fashion; since nothing can be more immaterial than the manner of men's thinking on subjects not accessible to reason, provided those thoughts be not suffered to embody themselves into actions injurious to others: above all, let him be fully persuaded that it is of the utmost importance to the inhabitants of this world to be JUST, KIND, and PEACEABLE. Far from injuring the cause of virtue, an impartial examination of the principles of this work will shew that its object is to restore truth to its proper temple, to build up an altar whose foundations shall be consolidated by morality, reason, and justice: from this sacred pane, virtue guarded by truth, clothed with experience, shall shed forth her radiance on delighted mortals; whose homage flowing consecutively shall open to the world a new aera, by rendering general the belief that happiness, the true end of man's existence, can never be attained but BY PROMOTING THAT OF HIS FELLOW CREATURE. In short, man should learn to know, that happiness is simply an emanative quality formed by reflection; that each individual ought to be the sun of his own system, continually shedding around him his genial rays; that these, re-acting, will keep his own existence constantly supplied with the requisite heat to enable him to put forth kindly fruit._ MIRABAUD'S SYSTEM OF NATURE Translated from the Original, By Samuel Wilkinson. PART I. LAWS OF NATURE--OF MAN--THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL--DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY--ON HAPPINESS. CHAP. I. _Nature and her Laws_. Man has always deceived himself when he abandoned experience to follow imaginary systems.--He is the work of nature.--He exists in Nature.--He is submitted to the laws of Nature.--He cannot deliver himself from them:--cannot step beyond them even in thought. It is in vain his mind would spring forward beyond the visible world: direful and imperious necessity ever compels his return--being formed by Nature, he is circumscribed by her laws; there exists nothing beyond the great whole of which he forms a part, of which he experiences the influence. The beings his fancy pictures as above nature, or distinguished from her, are always chimeras formed after that which he has already seen, but of which it is utterly impossible he should ever form any finished idea, either as to the place they occupy, or their manner of acting--for him there is not, there can be nothing out of that Nature which includes all beings. Therefore, instead of seeking out of the world he inhabits for beings who can procure him a happiness denied to him by Nature, let him study this Nature, learn her laws, contemplate her energies, observe the immutable rules by which she acts.--Let him apply these discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to her precepts, which nothing can alter.--Let him cheerfully consent to be ignorant of causes hid from him under the most impenetrable veil.--Let him yield to the decrees of a universal power, which can never be brought within his comprehension, nor ever emancipate him from those laws imposed on him by his essence. The distinction which has been so often made between the _physical_ and the _moral_ being, is evidently an abuse of terms. Man is a being purely physical: the moral man is nothing more than this physical being considered under a certain point of view; that is to say, with relation to some of his modes of action, arising out of his individual organization. But is not this organization itself the work of Nature? The motion or impulse to action, of which he is susceptible, is that not physical? His visible actions, as well as the invisible motion interiorly excited by his will or his thoughts, are equally the natural effects, the necessary consequences, of his peculiar construction, and the impulse he receives from those beings by whom he is always surrounded. All that the human mind has successively invented, with a view to change or perfect his being, to render himself happy, was never more than the necessary consequence of man's peculiar essence, and that of the beings who act upon him. The object of all his institutions, all his reflections, all his knowledge, is only to procure that happiness toward which he is continually impelled by the peculiarity of his nature. All that he does, all that he thinks, all that he is, all that he will be, is nothing more than what Universal Nature has made him. His ideas, his actions, his will, are the necessary effects of those properties infused into him by Nature, and of those circumstances in which she has placed him. In short, art is nothing but Nature acting with the tools she has furnished. Nature sends man naked and destitute into this world which is to be his abode: he quickly learns to cover his nakedness--to shelter himself from the inclemencies of the weather, first with artlessly constructed huts, and the skins of the beasts of the forest; by degrees he mends their appearance, renders them more convenient: he establishes manufactories to supply his immediate wants; he digs clay, gold, and other fossils from the bowels of the earth; converts them into bricks for his house, into vessels for his use, gradually improves their shape, and augments their beauty. To a being exalted above our terrestrial globe, man would not appear less subjected to the laws of Nature when naked in the forest painfully seeking his sustenance, than when living in civilized society surrounded with ease, or enriched with greater experience, plunged in luxury, where he every day invents a thousand new wants and discovers a thousand new modes of supplying them. All the steps taken by man to regulate his existence, ought only to be considered as a long succession of causes and effects, which are nothing more than the development of the first impulse given him by nature. The same animal, by virtue of his organization, passes successively from the most simple to the most complicated wants; it is nevertheless the consequence of his nature. The butterfly whose beauty we admire, whose colours are so rich, whose appearance is so brilliant, commences as an inanimate unattractive egg; from this, heat produces a worm, this becomes a chrysalis, then changes into that beautiful insect adorned with the most vivid tints: arrived at this stage he reproduces, he generates; at last despoiled of his ornaments, he is obliged to disappear, having fulfilled the task imposed on him by Nature, having performed the circle of transformation marked out for beings of his order. The same course, the same change takes place in the vegetable world. It is by a series of combinations originally interwoven with the energies of the aloe, that this plant is insensibly regulated, gradually expanded, and at the end of a number of years produces those flowers which announce its dissolution. It is equally so with man, who in all his motion, all the changes he undergoes, never acts but according to the laws peculiar to his organization, and to the matter of which he is composed. The _physical man_, is he who acts by the causes our faculties make us understand. The _moral man_, is he who acts by physical causes, with which our prejudices preclude us from becoming perfectly acquainted. The _wild man_ is a child destitute of experience, incapable of proceeding in his happiness, because he has not learnt how to oppose resistance to the impulses he receives from those beings by whom he is surrounded. The _civilized man_, is he whom experience and sociality have enabled to draw from nature the means of his own happiness, because he has learned to oppose resistance to those impulses he receives from exterior beings, when experience has taught him they would be destructive to his welfare. The _enlightened man_ is man in his maturity, in his perfection; who is capable of advancing his own felicity, because he has learned to examine, to think for himself, and not to take that for truth upon the authority of others, which experience has taught him a critical disquisition will frequently prove erroneous. The _happy man_ is he who knows how to enjoy the benefits bestowed upon him by nature: in other words, he who thinks for himself; who is thankful for the good he possesses; who does not envy the welfare of others, nor sigh after imaginary benefits always beyond his grasp. The _unhappy man_ is he who is incapacitated to enjoy the benefits of nature; that is, he who suffers others to think for him; who neglects the absolute good he possesses, in a fruitless search after ideal benefits; who vainly sighs after that which ever eludes his pursuit. It necessarily results, that man in his enquiry ought always to contemplate experience, and natural philosophy: These are what he should consult in his religion,--in his morals,--in his legislation,--in his political government,--in the arts,--in the sciences,--in his pleasures,--above all, in his misfortunes. Experience teaches that Nature acts by simple, regular, and invariable laws. It is by his senses, man is bound to this universal Nature; it is by his perception he must penetrate her secrets; it is from his senses he must draw experience of her laws. Therefore, whenever he neglects to acquire experience or quits its path, he stumbles into an abyss; his imagination leads him astray. All the errors of man are physical: he never deceives himself but when he neglects to return back to nature, to consult her laws, to call practical knowledge to his aid. It is for want of practical knowledge he forms such imperfect ideas of matter, of its properties, of its combinations, of its power, of its mode of action, and of the energies which spring from its essence. Wanting this experience, the whole universe, to him, is but one vast scene of error. The most ordinary results appear to him the most astonishing phenomena; he wonders at every thing, understands nothing, and yields the guidance of his actions to those interested in betraying his interests. He is ignorant of Nature, and he has mistaken her laws; he has not contemplated the necessary routine which she has marked out for every thing she holds. Mistaken the laws of Nature, did I say? He has mistaken himself: the consequence is, that all his systems, all his conjectures, all his reasonings, from which he has banished experience, are nothing more than a tissue of errors, a long chain of inconsistencies. Error is always prejudicial to man: it is by deceiving himself, the human race is plunged into misery. He neglected Nature; he did not comprehend her laws; he formed gods of the most preposterous and ridiculous kinds: these became the sole objects of his hope, and the creatures of his fear: he was unhappy, he trembled under these visionary deities; under the supposed influence of visionary beings created by himself; under the terror inspired by blocks of stone; by logs of wood; by flying fish; or the frowns of men, mortal as himself, whom his disturbed fancy had elevated above that Nature of which alone he is capable of forming any idea. His very posterity laughs at his folly, because experience has convinced them of the absurdity of his groundless fears--of his misplaced worship. Thus has passed away the ancient mythology, with all the trifling and nonsensical attributes attached to it by ignorance. Not understanding that Nature, equal in her distributions, entirely destitute of malice, follows only necessary and immutable laws, when she either produces beings or destroys them, when she causes those to suffer, whose construction creates sensibility; when she scatters among them good and evil; when she subjects them to incessant change--he did not perceive it was in the breast of Nature herself, that it was in her exuberance he ought to seek to satisfy his deficiencies; for remedies against his pains; for the means of rendering himself happy: he expected to derive these benefits from fantastic beings, whom he supposed to be above Nature; whom he mistakingly imagined to be the authors of his pleasures, and the cause of his misfortunes. From hence it appears that to his ignorance of Nature, man owes the creation of those illusive powers; under which he has so long trembled with fear; that superstitious worship, which has been the source of all his misery, and the evils entailed upon posterity. For want of clearly comprehending his own peculiar nature, his proper course, his wants, and his rights, man has fallen in society, from FREEDOM into SLAVERY. He had forgotten the purpose of his existence, or else he believed himself obliged to suppress the natural desires of his heart, to sacrifice his welfare to the caprice of chiefs, either elected by himself, or submitted to without examination. He was ignorant of the true policy of association--of the object of government; he disdained to listen to the voice of Nature, which loudly proclaimed the price of all submission to be protection and happiness: the end of all government is the benefit of the governed, not the exclusive advantage of the governors. He gave himself up without enquiry to men like himself, whom his prejudices induced him to contemplate as beings of a superior order, as Gods upon earth, they profited by his ignorance, took advantage of his prejudices, corrupted him, rendered him vicious, enslaved him, and made him miserable. Thus man, intended by Nature for the full enjoyment of liberty, to patiently search out her laws, to investigate her secrets, to cling to his experience; has, from a neglect of her salutary admonitions, from an inexcusable ignorance of his own peculiar essence, fallen into servility: has been wickedly governed. Having mistaken himself, he has remained ignorant of the indispensable affinity that subsists between him, and the beings of his own species: having mistaken his duty to himself, it consequently follows, he has mistaken his duty to others. He made a calculation in error of what his happiness required; he did not perceive, what he owed to himself, the excesses he ought to avoid, the desires he ought to resist, the impulses he ought to follow, in order to consolidate his felicity, to promote his comfort, and to further his advantage. In short, he was ignorant of his true interests; hence his irregularities, his excesses, his shameful extravagance, with that long train of vices, to which he has abandoned himself, at the expense of his preservation, at the hazard of his permanent prosperity. It is, therefore, ignorance of himself that has hindered man from enlightening his morals. The corrupt authorities to which he had submitted, felt an interest in obstructing the practice of his duties, even when he knew them. Time, with the influence of ignorance, aided by his corruption, gave them a strength not to be resisted by his enfeebled voice. His duties continued unperformed, and he fell into contempt both with himself and with others. The ignorance of Man has endured so long, he has taken such slow, such irresolute steps to ameliorate his condition, only because he has neglected to study Nature, to scrutinize her laws, to search out her expedients, to discover her properties, that his sluggishness finds its account, in permitting himself to be guided by example, rather than to follow experience, which demands activity; to be led by routine, rather than by his reason, which enjoins reflection; to take that for truth upon the authority of others, which would require a diligent and patient investigation. From hence may be traced the hatred man betrays for every thing that deviates from those rules to which he has been accustomed; hence his stupid, his scrupulous respect for antiquity, for the most silly, the most absurd and ridiculous institutions of his fathers: hence those fears that seize him, when the most beneficial changes are proposed to him, or the most likely attempts are made to better his condition. He dreads to examine, because he has been taught to hold it irreverent of something immediately connected with his welfare; his credulity suffers him to believe the interested advice, and spurns at those who wish to show him the danger of the road he is travelling. This is the reason why nations linger on in the most shameful lethargy, suffering under abuses handed down from century to century, trembling at the very idea of that which alone can repair their calamities. It is for want of energy, for want of consulting experience, that medicine, natural philosophy, agriculture, painting, in fact, all the useful sciences, have so long remained under the fetters of authority, have progressed so little: those who profess these sciences, prefer treading the beaten paths, however imperfect, rather than strike out new ones,--they prefer the phrensy of their imagination, their voluntary conjectures, to that laboured experience which alone can extract her secrets from Nature. Man, in short, whether from sloth or from terror, having abnegated the evidence of his senses, has been guided in all his actions, in all his enterprizes, by imagination, by enthusiasm, by habit, by preconceived opinions, but above all, by the influence of authority, which knew well how to deceive him, to turn his ignorance to esteem, his sloth to advantage. Thus imaginary, unsubstantial systems, have supplied the place of experience--of mature reflection--of reason. Man, petrified with his fears, intoxicated with the marvellous, stupified with sloth, surrendered his experience: guided by his credulity, he was unable to fall back upon it; he became consequently inexperienced; from thence he gave birth to the most ridiculous opinions, or else adopted all those vague chimeras, all those idle notions offered to him by men whose interest it was to continue him in that lamentable state of ignorance. Thus the human race has continued so long in a state of infancy, because man has been inattentive to Nature; has neglected her ways, because he has disdained experience--because he has thrown by his reason--because he has been enraptured with the marvellous and the supernatural,--because he has unnecessarily TREMBLED. These are the reasons there is so much trouble in conducting him from this state of childhood to that of manhood. He has had nothing but the most trifling hypotheses, of which he has never dared to examine either the principles or the proofs, because he has been accustomed to hold them sacred, to consider them as the most perfect truths, and which he is not permitted to doubt, even for an instant. His ignorance made him credulous; his curiosity made him swallow the wonderful: time confirmed him in his opinions, and he passed his conjectures from race to race for realities; a tyrannical power maintained him in his notions, because by those alone could society be enslaved. It was in vain that some faint glimmerings of Nature occasionally attempted the recall of his reason--that slight corruscations of experience sometimes threw his darkness into light, the interest of the few was founded on his enthusiasm; their pre-eminence depended on his love of the marvellous; their very existence rested on the firmness of his ignorance; they consequently suffered no opportunity to escape, of smothering even the transient flame of intelligence. The many were thus first deceived into credulity, then forced into submission. At length the whole science of man became a confused mass of darkness, falsehood, and contradictions, with here and there a feeble ray of truth, furnished by that Nature, of which he can never entirely divest himself; because, without his perception, his necessities are continually bringing him back to her resources. Let us then, if possible, raise ourselves above these clouds of prepossession! Let us quit the heavy atmosphere in which we are enucleated; let us in a more unsullied medium--in a more elastic current, contemplate the opinions of men, and observe their various systems. Let us learn to distrust a disordered conception; let us take that faithful monitor, experience, for our guide; let us consult Nature, examine her laws, dive into her stores; let us draw from herself, our ideas of the beings she contains; let us recover our senses, which interested error has taught us to suspect; let us consult that reason, which, for the vilest purposes has been so infamously calumniated, so cruelly dishonoured; let us examine with attention the visible world; let us try, if it will not enable us to form a supportable judgment of the invisible territory of the intellectual world: perhaps it may be found there has been no sufficient reason for distinguishing them--that it is not without motives, well worthy our enquiry, that two empires have been separated, which are equally the inheritance of nature. The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects; some of these causes are known to us, because they either strike immediately on our senses, or have been brought under their cognizance, by the examination of long experience; others are unknown to us, because they act upon us by effects, frequently very remote from their primary cause. An immense variety of matter, combined under an infinity of forms, incessantly communicates, unceasingly receives a diversity of impulses. The different qualities of this matter, its innumerable combinations, its various methods of action, which are the necessary consequence of these associations, constitute for man what he calls the ESSENCE of beings: it is from these varied essences that spring the orders, the classes, or the systems, which these beings respectively possess, of which the sum total makes up that which is known by the term _nature_. Nature, therefore, in its most significant meaning, is the great whole that results from the collection of matter, under its various combinations, with that contrariety of motion, which the universe presents to our view. Nature, in a less extended sense, or considered in each individual, is the whole that results from its essence; that is to say, the peculiar qualities, the combination, the impulse, and the various modes of action, by which it is discriminated from other beings. It is thus that MAN is, as a whole, or in his nature, the result of a certain combination of matter, endowed with peculiar properties, competent to give, capable of receiving, certain impulses, the arrangement of which is called _organization_; of which the essence is, to feel, to think, to act, to move, after a manner distinguished from other beings, with which he can be compared. Man, therefore, ranks in an order, in a system, in a class by himself, which differs from that of other animals, in whom we do not perceive those properties of which he is possessed. The different systems of beings, or if they will, their _particular natures_, depend on the general system of the great whole, or that Universal Nature, of which they form a part; to which every thing that exists is necessarily submitted and attached. Having described the proper definition that should be applied to the word NATURE, I must advise the reader, once for all, that whenever in the course of this work the expression occurs, that "Nature produces such or such an effect," there is no intention of personifying that nature which is purely an abstract being; it merely indicates that the effect spoken of necessarily springs from the peculiar properties of those beings which compose the mighty macrocosm. When, therefore, it is said, _Nature demands that man should pursue his own happiness_, it is to prevent circumlocution--to avoid tautology; it is to be understood, that it is the property of a being that feels, that thinks, that acts, to labour to its own happiness; in short, that is called _natural_, which is conformable to the essence of things, or to the laws, which Nature prescribes to the beings she contains, in the different orders they occupy, under the various circumstances through which they are obliged to pass. Thus health is _natural_ to man in a certain state; disease is _natural_ to him under other circumstances; dissolution, or if they will, death, is a _natural_ state for a body, deprived of some of those things, necessary to maintain the existence of the animal, &c. By ESSENCE is to be understood, that which constitutes a being, such as it is; the whole of the properties or qualities by which it acts as it does. Thus, when it is said, it is the _essence_ of a stone to fall, it is the same as saying that its descent is the necessary effect of its gravity--of its density--of the cohesion of its parts--of the elements of which it is composed. In short, the _essence_ of a being is its particular, its individual nature. CHAP. II. _Of Motion, and its Origin._ Motion is an effect by which a body either changes, or has a tendency to change, its position: that is to say, by which it successively corresponds with different parts of space, or changes its relative distance to other bodies. It is motion alone that establishes the relation between our senses and exterior or interior beings: it is only by motion that these beings are impressed upon us--that we know their existence--that we judge of their properties--that we distinguish the one from the other--that we distribute them into classes. The beings, the substances, or the various bodies of which Nature is the assemblage, are themselves effects of certain combinations or causes which become causes in their turn. A CAUSE is a being which puts another in motion, or which produces some change in it. The EFFECT is the change produced in one body, by the motion or presence of another. Each being, by its essence, by its peculiar nature, has the faculty of producing, is capable of receiving, has the power of communicating, a variety of motion. Thus some beings are proper to strike our organs; these organs are competent to receiving the impression, are adequate to undergoing changes by their presence. Those which cannot act on any of our organs, either immediately and by themselves, or immediately by the intervention of other bodies, exist not for us; since they can neither move us, nor consequently furnish us with ideas: they can neither be known to us, nor of course be judged of by us. To know an object, is to have felt it; to feel it, it is requisite to have been moved by it. To see, is to have been moved, by something acting on the visual organs; to hear, is to have been struck, by something on our auditory nerves. In short, in whatever mode a body may act upon us, whatever impulse we may receive from it, we can have no other knowledge of it than by the change it produces in us. Nature, as we have already said, is the assemblage of all the beings, consequently of all the motion of which we have a knowledge, as well as of many others of which we know nothing, because they have not yet become accessible to our senses. From the continual action and re-action of these beings, result a series of causes and effects; or a chain of motion guided by the constant and invariable laws peculiar to each being; which are necessary or inherent to its particular nature--which make it always act or move after a determinate manner. The different principles of this motion are unknown to us, because we are in many instances, if not in all, ignorant of what constitutes the essence of beings. The elements of bodies escape our senses; we know them only in the mass: we are neither acquainted with their intimate combination, nor the proportion of these combinations; from whence must necessarily result their mode of action, their impulse, or their different effects. Our senses bring us generally acquainted with two sorts of motion in the beings that surround us: the one is the motion of the mass, by which an entire body is transferred from one place to another. Of the motion of this genus we are perfectly sensible.--Thus, we see a stone fall, a ball roll, an arm move, or change its position. The other is an internal or concealed motion, which always depends on the peculiar energies of a body: that is to say, on its _essence_, or the combination, the action, and re-action of the minute--of the insensible particles of matter, of which that body is composed. This motion we do not see; we know it only by the alteration or change, which after some time we discover in these bodies or mixtures. Of this genus is that concealed motion which fermentation produces in the particles that compose flour, which, however scattered, however separated, unite, and form that mass which we call BREAD. Such also is the imperceptible motion by which we see a plant or animal enlarge, strengthen, undergo changes, and acquire new qualities, without our eyes being competent to follow its progression, or to perceive the causes which have produced these effects. Such also is the internal motion that takes place in man, which is called his INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES, his THOUGHTS, his PASSIONS, his will. Of these we have no other mode of judging, than by their action; that is, by those sensible effects which either accompany or follow them. Thus, when we see a man run away, we judge him to be interiorly actuated by the passion of fear. Motion, whether visible or concealed, is styled ACQUIRED, when it is impressed on one body by another; either by a cause to which we are a stranger, or by an exterior agent which our senses enable us to discover. Thus we call that _acquired motion_, which the wind gives to the sails of a ship. That motion which is excited in a body, that contains within itself the causes of those changes we see it undergo, is called SPONTANEOUS. Then it is said, this body acts or moves by its own peculiar energies. Of this kind is the motion of the man who walks, who talks, who thinks. Nevertheless, if we examine the matter a little closer, we shall be convinced, that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as spontaneous motion in any of the various bodies of Nature; seeing they are perpetually acting one upon the other; that all their changes are to be attributed to the causes, either visible or concealed, by which they are moved. The will of man is secretly moved or determined by some exterior cause that produces a change in him: we believe he moves of himself, because we neither see the cause that determined him, the mode in which it acted, nor the organ that it put in motion. That is called SIMPLE MOTION, which is excited in a body by a single cause. COMPOUND MOTION, that which is produced by two or more different causes; whether these causes are equal or unequal, conspiring differently, acting together or in succession, known or unknown. Let the motion of beings be of whatsoever nature it may, it is always the necessary consequence of their essence, or of the properties which compose them, and of those causes of which they experience the action. Each being can only move and act after a particular manner; that is to say, conformably to those laws which result from its peculiar essence, its particular combination, its individual nature: in short, from its specific energies, and those of the bodies from which it receives an impulse. It is this that constitutes the invariable laws of motion: I say _invariable_, because they can never change, without producing confusion in the essence of things. It is thus that a heavy body must necessarily fall, if it meets with no obstacle sufficient to arrest its descent; that a sensible body must naturally seek pleasure, and avoid pain; that fire must necessarily burn, and diffuse light. Each being, then, has laws of motion, that are adapted to itself, and constantly acts or moves according to these laws; at least when no superior cause interrupts its action. Thus, fire ceases to burn combustible matter, as soon as sufficient water is thrown into it, to arrest its progress. Thus, a sensible being ceases to seek pleasure, as soon as he fears that pain will be the result. The communication of motion, or the medium of action, from one body to another, also follows certain and necessary laws; one being can only communicate motion to another, by the affinity, by the resemblance, by the conformity, by the analogy, or by the point of contact, which it has with that other being. Fire can only propagate when it finds matter analogous to itself: it extinguishes when it encounters bodies which it cannot embrace; that is to say, that do not bear towards it a certain degree of relation or affinity. Every thing in the universe is in motion: the essence of matter is to act: if we consider its parts, attentively, we shall discover there is not a particle that enjoys absolute repose. Those which appear to us to be without motion, are, in fact, only in relative or apparent rest; they experience such an imperceptible motion, and expose it so little on their surfaces, that we cannot perceive the changes they undergo. All that appears to us to be at rest, does not, however, remain one instant in the same state. All beings are continually breeding, increasing, decreasing, or dispersing, with more or less dullness or rapidity. The insect called EPHEMERON, is produced and perishes in the same day; of consequence, it experiences the greatest changes of its being very rapidly, in our eyes. Those combinations which form the most solid bodies, which appear to enjoy the most perfect repose, are nevertheless decomposed, and dissolved in the course of time. The hardest stones, by degrees, give way to the contact of air. A mass of iron, which time, and the action of the atmosphere, has gnawed into rust, must have been in motion, from the moment of its formation, in the bowels of the earth, until the instant we behold it in this state of dissolution. Natural philosophers, for the most part, seem not to have sufficiently reflected on what they call the _nisus_; that is to say, the incessant efforts one body is making on another, but which, notwithstanding appear, to our superficial observation, to enjoy the most perfect repose. A stone of five hundred weight seems to rest quiet on the earth, nevertheless, it never ceases for an instant, to press with force upon the earth, which resists or repulses it in its turn. Will the assertion be ventured, that the stone and earth do not act? Do they wish to be undeceived? They have nothing to do but interpose their hand betwixt the earth and the stone; it will then be discovered, that notwithstanding its seeming repose, the stone has power adequate to bruise it; because the hand has not energies sufficient, within itself, to resist effectually both the stone and earth.--Action cannot exist in bodies without re-action. A body that experiences an impulse, an attraction, or a pressure of any kind, if it resists, clearly demonstrates by such resistance that it re-acts; from whence it follows, there is a concealed force, called by these philosophers _vis inertia_, that displays itself against another force; and this clearly demonstrates, that this inert force is capable of both acting and re-acting. In short, it will be found, on close investigation, that those powers which are called _dead_, and those which are termed _live_ or _moving_, are powers of the same kind; which only display themselves after a different manner. Permit us to go a greater distance yet. May we not say, that in those bodies, or masses, of which their whole become evident from appearances to us to be at rest, there is notwithstanding, a continual action, and counter-action, constant efforts, uninterrupted or communicated force, and continued opposition? In short, a _nisus_, by which the constituting portions of these bodies press one upon another, mutually resisting each other, acting and re-acting incessantly? that this reciprocity of action, this simultaneous re-action, keeps them united, causes their particles to form a mass, a body, and a combination, which, viewed in its whole, has the appearance of complete rest, notwithstanding no one of its particles really ceases to be in motion for a single instant? These collective masses appear to be at rest, simply by the equality of the motion--by the responsory impulse of the powers acting in them. Thus it appears that bodies enjoying perfect repose, really receive, whether upon their surface, or in their interior, a continual communicated force, from those bodies by which they are either surrounded or penetrated, dilated or contracted, rarified or condensed: in fact, from those which compose them; whereby their particles are incessantly acting and re-acting, or in continual motion, the effects of which are displayed by extraordinary changes. Thus heat rarifies and dilates metals, which is evidence deducible that a bar of iron, from the change of the atmosphere alone, must be in continual motion; that there is not a single particle in it that can be said to enjoy rest even for a single moment. In those hard bodies, indeed, the particles of which are in actual contact, and which are closely united, how is it possible to conceive, that air, cold, or heat, can act upon one of these particles, even exteriorly, without the motion being communicated to those which are most intimate and minute in their union? Without motion, how should we be able to comprehend the manner in which our sense of smelling is affected, by emanations escaping from the most solid bodies, of which all the particles appear to be at perfect rest? How could we, even by the assistance of a telescope, see the most distant stars, if there was not a progressive motion of light from these stars to the retina of our eye? Observation and reflection ought to convince us, that every thing in Nature is in continual motion--that there is not a single part, however small, that enjoys repose--that Nature acts in all--that she would cease to be Nature if she did not act. Practical knowledge teaches us, that without unceasing motion, nothing could be preserved--nothing could be produced--nothing could act in this Nature. Thus the idea of Nature necessarily includes that of motion. But it will be asked, and not a little triumphantly, from whence did she derive her motion? Our reply is, we know not, neither do they--that _we_ never shall, that _they_ never will. It is a secret hidden from us, concealed from them, by the most impenetrable veil. We also reply, that it is fair to infer, unless they can logically prove to the contrary, that it is in herself, since she is the great whole, out of which nothing can exist. We say this motion is a manner of existence, that flows, necessarily, out of the nature of matter; that matter moves by its own peculiar energies; that its motion is to be attributed to the force which is inherent in itself; that the variety of motion, and the phenomena which result, proceed from the diversity of the properties--of the qualities--of the combinations, which are originally found in the primitive matter, of which Nature is the assemblage. Natural philosophers, for the most part, have regarded as inanimate, or as deprived of the faculty of motion, those bodies which are only moved by the intervention of some agent or exterior cause; they have considered themselves justified in concluding, that the matter which forms these bodies is perfectly inert in its nature. They have not forsaken this error, although they must have observed, that whenever a body is left to itself, or disengaged from those obstructions which oppose themselves to its descent, it has a tendency to fall or to approach the centre of the earth, by a motion uniformly accelerated; they have rather chosen to suppose a visionary exterior cause, of which they themselves had but an imperfect idea, than admit that these bodies held their motion from their own peculiar nature. These philosophers, also, notwithstanding they saw above them an infinite number of globes that moved with great rapidity round a common centre, still adhered to their favourite opinions; and never ceased to suppose some whimsical causes for these movements, until the immortal NEWTON clearly demonstrated that it was the effect of the gravitation of these celestial bodies towards each other. Experimental philosophers, however, and amongst them the great Newton himself, have held the cause of gravitation as inexplicable. Notwithstanding the great weight of this authority, it appears manifest that it may be deduced from the motion of matter, by which bodies are diversely determined. Gravitation is nothing more than a mode of moving--a tendency towards a centre: to speak strictly, all motion is relative gravitation; since that which falls relatively to us, rises, with relation to other bodies. From this it follows, that every motion in our microcosm is the effect of gravitation; seeing that there is not in the universe either top or bottom, nor any absolute centre. It should appear, that the weight of bodies depends on their configuration, as well external as internal, which gives them that form of action which is called gravitation. Thus, for instance, a piece of lead, spherically formed, falls quickly and direct: reduce this ball into very thin plates, it will be sustained in the air for a much longer time: apply to it the action of fire, this lead will rise in the atmosphere: here, then, the same metal, variously modified, has very different modes of action. A very simple observation would have sufficed to make the philosophers, antecedent to Newton, feel the inadequateness of the causes they admitted to operate with such powerful effect. They had a sufficiency to convince themselves, in the collision of two bodies, which they could contemplate, and in the known laws of that motion, which these always communicate by reason of their greater or less compactness; from whence they ought to have inferred, that the density of _subtle_ or _ethereal_ matter, being considerably less than that of the planets, it could only communicate to them a very feeble motion, quite insufficient to produce that velocity of action, of which they could not possibly avoid being the witnesses. If Nature had been viewed uninfluenced by prejudice, they must have been long since convinced that matter acts by its own peculiar activity; that it needs no exterior communicative force to set it in motion. They might have perceived that whenever mixed bodies were placed in a situation to act on each other, motion was instantly excited; and that these mixtures acted with a force capable of producing the most surprising results. If particles of iron, sulphur, and water be mixed together, these bodies thus capacitated to act on each other, are heated by degrees, and ultimately produce a violent combustion. If flour be wetted with water, and the mixture closed up, it will be found, after some lapse of time, (by the aid of a microscope) to have produced organized beings that enjoy life, of which the water and the flour were believed incapable: it is thus that inanimate matter can pass into life, or animate matter, which is in itself only an assemblage of motion. Reasoning from analogy, which the philosophers of the present day do not hold incompatible, the production of a man, independent of the ordinary means, would not be more astonishing than that of an insect with flour and water. Fermentation and putrid substances, evidently produce living animals. We have here the principle; with proper materials, principles can always be brought into action. That generation which is styled _uncertain_ is only so for those who do not reflect, or who do not permit themselves, attentively, to observe the operations of Nature. The generative of motion, and its developement, as well as the energy of matter, may be seen everywhere; more particularly in those unitions in which fire, air, and water, find themselves combined. These elements, or rather these mixed bodies, are the most volatile, the most fugitive of beings; nevertheless in the hands of Nature, they are the essential agents employed to produce the most striking phenomena. To these we must ascribe the effects of thunder, the eruption of volcanoes, earthquakes, &c. Science offers to our consideration an agent of astonishing force, in gunpowder, the instant it comes in contact with fire. In short, the most terrible effects result from the combination of matter, which is generally believed to be dead and inert. These facts prove, beyond a doubt, that motion is produced, is augmented, is accelerated in matter, without the help of any exterior agent: therefore it is reasonable to conclude that motion is the necessary consequence of immutable laws, resulting from the essence, from the properties existing in the different elements, and the various combinations of these elements. Are we not justified, then, in concluding, from these precedents, that there may be an infinity of other combinations, with which we are unacquainted, competent to produce a great variety of motion in matter, without being under the necessity of having recourse, for the explanation, to agents who are more difficult to comprehend than even the effects which are attributed to them? Had man but paid proper attention to what passed under his review, he would not have sought out of Nature, a power distinguished from herself, to set her in action, and without which he believes she cannot move. If, indeed, by Nature is meant a heap of dead matter, destitute of peculiar qualities purely passive, we must unquestionably seek out of this Nature the principle of her motion. But if by Nature be understood, what it really is, a whole, of which the numerous parts are endowed with various properties, which oblige them to act according to these properties; which are in a perpetual ternateness of action and reaction; which press, which gravitate towards a common center, whilst others depart from and fly off towards the periphery, or circumference; which attract and repel; which by continual approximation and constant collision, produce and decompose all the bodies we behold; then, I say, there is no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers, to account for the formation of things, and those extraordinary appearances which are the result of motion. Those who admit a cause exterior to matter, are obliged to believe that this cause produced all the motion by which matter is agitated in giving it existence. This belief rests on another, namely, that matter could begin to exist; an hypothesis that, until this moment, has never been satisfactorily demonstrated. To produce from nothing, or the CREATION, is a term that cannot give us the least idea of the formation of the universe; it presents no sense, upon which the mind can rely. In fact, the human mind is not adequate to conceive a moment of non-existence, or when all shall have passed away; even admitting this to be a truth, it is no truth for us, because by the very nature of our organization, we cannot admit positions as facts, of which no evidence can be adduced that has relation to our senses; we may, indeed, consent to believe it, because others say it; but will any rational being be satisfied with such an admission? Can any moral good spring from such blind assurance? Is it consistent with sound doctrine, with philosophy, or with reason? Do we, in fact, pay any respect to the intellectual powers of another, when we say to him, "I will believe this, because in all the attempts you have ventured, for the purpose of proving what you say, you have entirely failed; and have been at last obliged to acknowledge you know nothing about the matter?" What moral reliance ought we to have on such people? Hypothesis may succeed hypothesis; system may destroy system: a new set of ideas may overturn the ideas of a former day. Other Gallileos may be condemned to death--other Newtons may arise--we may reason--argue--dispute--quarrel--punish and destroy: nay, we may even exterminate those who differ from us in opinion; but when we have done all this, we shall be obliged to fall back upon our original darkness--to confess, that that which has no relation with our senses, that which cannot manifest itself to us by some of the ordinary modes by which other things are manifested, has no existence for us--is not comprehensible by us--can never entirely remove our doubt--can never seize on our stedfast belief; seeing it is that of which we cannot form even a notion; in short, that it is that, which as long as we remain what we are, must be hidden from us by a veil, which no power, no faculty, no energy we possess, is able to remove. All who are not enslaved by prejudice agree to the truth of the position, that _nothing can be made of nothing_. Many theologians have acknowledged Nature to be an active whole. Almost all the ancient philosophers were agreed to regard the world as eternal. OCELLUS LUCANUS, speaking of the universe, says, "_it has always been, and it always will be_." VATABLE and GROTIUS assure us, that to render the Hebrew phrase in the first chapter of GENESIS correctly, we must say, "_when God made heaven and earth, matter was without form._" If this be true, and every Hebraist can judge for himself, then the word which has been rendered _created_, means only to fashion, form, arrange. We know that the Greek words _create_ and _form_, have always indicated the same thing. According to ST. JEROME, _creare_ has the same meaning as _condere_, to found, to build. The Bible does not anywhere say in a clear manner, that the world was made of nothing. TERTULLIAN and the father PETAU both admit, that "_this is a truth established more by reason than by authority._" ST. JUSTIN seems to have contemplated matter as eternal, since he commends PLATO for having said, that "_God, in the creation of the world, only gave impulse to matter, and fashioned it._" BURNET and PYTHAGORAS were entirely of this opinion, and even our Church Service may be adduced in support; for although it admits by implication a beginning, it expressly denies an end: "_As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end._" It is easy to perceive that that which cannot cease to exist, must have always been. Motion becomes still more obscure, when creation, or the formation of matter, is attributed to a SPIRITUAL being; that is to say, to a being which has no analogy, no point of contact, with it--to a being which has neither extent or parts, and cannot, therefore, be susceptible of motion, as we understand the term; this being only the change of one body, relatively to another body, in which the body moved presents successively different parts to different points of space. Moreover, as all the world are nearly agreed that matter can never be totally annihilated, or cease to exist; by what reasoning, I would ask, do they comprehend--how understand--that that which cannot cease to be, could ever have had a beginning? If, therefore, it be asked, whence came matter? it is very reasonable to say it has always existed. If it be inquired, whence proceeds the motion that agitates matter? the same reasoning furnishes the answer; namely, that as motion is coeval with matter, it must have existed from all eternity, seeing that motion is the necessary consequence of its existence--of its essence--of its primitive properties, such as its extent, its gravity, its impenetrability, its figure, &c. By virtue of these essential constituent properties, inherent in all matter, and without which it is impossible to form an idea of it, the various matter of which the universe is composed must from all eternity have pressed against, each other--have gravitated towards a center--have clashed--have come in contact--have been attracted--have been repelled--have been combined--have been separated: in short, must have acted and moved according to the essence and energy peculiar to each genus, and to each of its combinations. Existence supposes properties in the thing that exists: whenever it has properties, its mode of action must necessarily flow from those properties which constitute, its mode of being. Thus, when a body is ponderous, it must fall; when it falls, it must come in collision with the bodies it meets in its descent; when it is dense, when it is solid, it must, by reason of this density, communicate motion to the bodies with which it clashes; when it has analogy, when it has affinity with these bodies, it must be attracted, must be united with them; when it has no point of analogy with them, it must be repulsed. From which it may be fairly inferred, that in supposing, as we are under the necessity of doing, the existence of matter, we must suppose it to have some kind of properties; from which its motion, or modes of action, must necessarily flow. To form the universe, DESCARTES asked but matter and motion: a diversity of matter sufficed for him; variety of motion was the consequence of its existence, of its essence, of its properties: its different modes of action would be the necessary consequence of its different modes of being. Matter without properties would be a mere nothing; therefore, as soon as matter exists, it must act; as soon as it is various, it must act variously; if it cannot commence to exist, it must have existed from all eternity; if it has always existed, it can never cease to be: if it can never cease to be, it can never cease to act by its own energy. Motion is a manner of being, which matter derives from its peculiar existence. The existence, then, of matter is a fact: the existence of motion is another fact. Our visual organs point out to us matter with different essences, forming a variety of combinations, endowed with various properties that discriminate them. Indeed, it is a palpable error to believe that matter is a homogeneous body, of which the parts differ from each other only by their various modifications. Among the individuals of the same species that come under our notice, no two resemble exactly; and it is therefore evident that the difference of situation alone will, necessarily, carry a diversity more or less sensible, not only in the modifications, but also in the essence, in the properties, in the entire system of beings. This truth was well understood by the profound and subtle LEIBNITZ. If this principle be properly digested, and experience seems always to produce evidence of its truth, we must be convinced that the matter or primitive elements which enter into the composition of bodies, are not of the same nature, and consequently, can neither have the same properties, nor the same modifications; and if so, they cannot have the same mode of moving and acting. Their activity or motion, already different, can be diversified to infinity, augmented or diminished, accelerated or retarded, according to the combinations, the proportions, the pressure, the density, the volume of the matter, that enters their composition. The endless variety to be produced, will need no further illustration than the commonest book of arithmetic furnishes us, where it will be found, that to ring all the changes that can be produced on twelve bells only, would occupy a space of more than ninety-one years. The element of fire is visibly more active and more inconstant than that of earth. This is more solid and ponderous than fire, air, or water. According to the quantity of these elements, which enter the composition of bodies, these must act diversely, and their motion must in some measure partake the motion peculiar to each of their constituent parts. Elementary fire appears to be in Nature the principle of activity; it may be compared to a fruitful leaven, that puts the mass into fermentation and gives it life. Earth appears to be the principle of solidity in bodies, from its impenetrability, and by the firm coherence of its parts. Water is a medium, to facilitate the combination of bodies, into which it enters itself, as a constituent part. Air is a fluid whose business it seems to be, to furnish the other elements with the space requisite to expand, to exercise their motion, and which is, moreover, found proper to combine with them. These elements, which our senses never discover in a pure state--which are continually and reciprocally set in motion by each other--which are always acting and re-acting, combining and separating, attracting and repelling--are sufficient to explain to us the formation of all the beings we behold. Their motion is uninterruptedly and reciprocally produced from each other; they are alternately causes and effects. Thus, they form a vast circle of generation and destruction--of combination and decomposition, which, it is quite reasonable to suppose, could never have had a beginning, and which, consequently can never have an end. In short, Nature is but an immense chain of causes and effects, which unceasingly flow from each other. The motion of particular beings depends on the general motion, which is itself maintained by individual motion. This is strengthened or weakened, accelerated or retarded, simplified or complicated, procreated or destroyed, by a variety of combinations and circumstances, which every moment change the directions, the tendency, the modes of existing, and of acting, of the different beings that receive its impulse. If it were true, as has been asserted by some philosophers, that every thing has a tendency to form one unique or single mass, and in that unique mass the instant should arrive when all was in _nisus_, all would eternally remain in this state; to all eternity there would be no more than one Being and one effort: this would be eternal and universal death. If we desire to go beyond this, to find the principle of action in matter, to trace the origin of things, it is for ever to fall back upon difficulties; it is absolutely to abridge the evidence of our senses; by which only we can understand, by which alone we can judge of the causes acting upon them, or the impulse by which they are set in action. Let us, therefore, content ourselves with saying WHAT is supported by our experience, and by all the evidence we are capable of understanding; against the truth of which not a shadow of proof, such as our reason can admit, has ever been adduced--which has been maintained by philosophers in every age--which theologians themselves have not denied, but which many of them have upheld; namely, that _matter always existed; that it moves by virtue of its essence; that all the phenomena of Nature is ascribable to the diversified motion of the variety of matter she contains; and which, like the phoenix, is continually regenerating out of its own ashes._ CHAP. III. _Of Matter.--Of its various Combinations.--Of its diversified Motion, or of the Course of Nature._ We know nothing of the elements of bodies, but we know some of their properties or qualities; and we distinguish their various matter by the effect or change produced on our senses; that is to say, by the variety of motion their presence excites in us. In consequence, we discover in them, extent, mobility, divisibility, solidity, gravity, and inert force. From these general and primitive properties flow a number of others, such as density, figure, colour, ponderosity, &c. Thus, relatively to us, matter is all that affects our senses in any manner whatever; the various properties we attribute to matter, by which we discriminate its diversity, are founded on the different impressions we receive on the changes they produce in us. A satisfactory definition of matter has not yet been given. Man, deceived and led astray by his prejudices, formed but vague, superficial, and imperfect notions concerning it. He looked upon it as an unique being, gross and passive, incapable of either moving by itself, of forming combinations, or of producing any thing by its own energies. Instead of this unintelligible jargon, he ought to have contemplated it as a _genus_ of beings, of which the individuals, although they might possess some common properties, such as extent, divisibility, figure, &c. should not, however, be all ranked in the same class, nor comprised under the same general denomination. An example will serve more fully to explain what we have asserted, throw its correctness into light, and facilitate the application. The properties common to all matter, are extent, divisibility, impenetrability, figure, mobility, or the property of being moved in mass. FIRE, beside these general properties, common to all matter, enjoys also the peculiar property of being put into activity by a motion that produces on our organs of feeling the sensation of heat; and by another, that communicates to our visual organs the sensation of light. Iron, in common with matter in general, has extent and figure; is divisible, and moveable in mass: if fire be combined with it in a certain proportion, the iron acquires two new properties; namely, those of exciting in us similar sensations of heat and light, which were excited by the element of fire, but which the iron had not, before its combination with the igneous matter. These distinguishing properties are inseparable from matter, and the phenomena that result, may, in the strictest sense of the word, be said to result necessarily. If we contemplate a little the paths of Nature--if, for a time, we trace the beings in this Nature, under the different states through which, by reason of their properties, they are compelled to pass; we shall discover, that it is to motion, and motion only, that is to be ascribed all the changes, all the combinations, all the forms, in short, all the various modifications of matter. That it is by motion every thing that exists is produced, experiences change, expands, and is destroyed. It is motion that alters the aspect of beings; that adds to, or takes away from their properties; which obliges each of them, by a consequence of its nature, after having occupied a certain rank or order, to quit it, to occupy another, and to contribute to the generation, maintenance, and decomposition of other beings, totally different in their bulk, rank, and essence. In what experimental philosophers have styled the THREE ORDERS OF NATURE, that is to say, the _mineral_, the _vegetable_, and _animal_ worlds, they have established, by the aid of motion, a transmigration, an exchange, a continual circulation in the particles of matter. Nature has occasion in one place, for those particles which, for a time, she has placed in another. These particles, after having, by particular combinations, constituted beings endued with peculiar essences, with specific properties, with determinate modes of action, dissolve and separate with more or less facility; and combining in a new manner, they form new beings. The attentive observer sees this law execute itself, in a manner more or less prominent, through all the beings by which he is surrounded. He sees nature full of _erratic germe_, some of which expand themselves, whilst others wait until motion has placed them in their proper situation, in suitable wombs or matrices, in the necessary circumstances, to unfold, to increase, to render them more perceptible by the addition of other substances of matter analogous to their primitive being. In all this we see nothing but the effect of motion, necessarily guided, modified, accelerated or slackened, strengthened or weakened, by reason of the various properties that beings successively acquire and lose; which, every moment, infallibly produces alterations in bodies more or less marked. Indeed, these bodies cannot be, strictly speaking, the same in any two successive moments of their existence; they must, every instant, either acquire or lose: in short, they are obliged to undergo continual variations in their essences, in their properties, in their energies, in their masses, in their qualities, in their mode of existence. Animals, after they have been expanded in, and brought out of, the wombs that are suitable to the elements of their machine, enlarge, strengthen, acquire new properties, new energies, new faculties; either by deriving nourishment from plants analogous to their being, or by devouring other animals whose substance is suitable to their preservation; that is to say, to repair the continual deperdition or loss of some portion of their own substance, that is disengaging itself every instant. These same animals are nourished, preserved, strengthened, and enlarged, by the aid of air, water, earth, and fire. Deprived of air, or of the fluid that surrounds them, that presses on them, that penetrates them, that gives them their elasticity, they presently cease to live. Water, combined with this air, enters into their whole mechanism of which it facilitates the motion. Earth serves them for a basis, by giving solidity to their texture: it is conveyed by air and water, which carry it to those parts of the body with which it can combine. Fire itself, disguised and enveloped under an infinity of forms, continually received into the animal, procures him heat, continues him in life, renders him capable of exercising his functions. The aliments, charged with these various principles, entering into the stomach, re-establish the nervous system, and restore, by their activity, and the elements which compose them, the machine which begins to languish, to be depressed, by the loss it has sustained. Forthwith the animal experiences a change in his whole system; he has more energy, more activity; he feels more courage; displays more gaiety; he acts, he moves, he thinks, after a different manner; all his faculties are exercised with more ease. This igneous matter, so congenial to generation--so restorative in its effect--so necessary to life, was the JUPITER of the ancients: from all that has preceded, it is clear, that what are called the elements, or primitive parts of matter, variously combined, are, by the agency of motion, continually united to, and assimilated with, the substance of animals--that they visibly modify their being--have an evident influence over their actions, that is to say, upon the motion they undergo, whether visible or concealed. The same elements, which under certain circumstances serve to nourish, to strengthen, to maintain the animal, become, under others, the principles of his weakness, the instruments of his dissolution--of his death: they work his destruction, whenever they are not in that just proportion which renders them proper to maintain his existence: thus, when water becomes too abundant in the body of the animal, it enervates him, it relaxes the fibres, and impedes the necessary action of the other elements: thus, fire admitted in excess, excites in him disorderly motion destructive of his machine: thus, air, charged with principles not analogous to his mechanism, brings upon him dangerous diseases and contagion. In fine, the aliments modified after certain modes, in the room of nourishing, destroy the animal, and conduce to his ruin: the animal is preserved no longer than these substances are analogous to his system. They ruin him when they want that just equilibrium that renders them suitable to maintain his existence. Plants that serve to nourish and restore animals are themselves nourished by earth; they expand on its bosom, enlarge and strengthen at its expense, continually receiving into their texture, by their roots and their pores, water, air, and igneous matter: water visibly reanimates them whenever their vegetation or genus of life languishes; it conveys to them those analogous principles by which they are enabled to reach perfection: air is requisite to their expansion, and furnishes them with water, earth, and the igneous matter with which it is charged. By these means they receive more or less of the inflammable matter; the different proportions of these principles, their numerous combinations, from whence result an infinity of properties, a variety of forms, constitute the various families and classes into which botanists have distributed plants: it is thus we see the cedar and the hyssop develop their growth; the one rises to the clouds, the other creep humbly on the earth. Thus, by degrees, from an acorn springs the majestic oak, accumulating, with time, its numerous branches, and overshadowing us with its foliage. Thus, a grain of corn, after having drawn its own nourishment from the juices of the earth, serves, in its turn, for the nourishment of man, into whose system it conveys the elements or principles by which it has been itself expanded, combined, and modified in such a manner, as to render this vegetable proper to assimilate and unite with the human frame; that is to say, with the fluids and solids of which it is composed. The same elements, the same principles, are found in the formation of minerals, as well as in their decomposition, whether natural or artificial. We find that earth, diversely modified, wrought, and combined, serves to increase their bulk, and give them more or less density and gravity. Air and water contribute to make their particles cohere; the igneous matter, or inflammable principle, tinges them with colour, and sometimes plainly indicates its presence, by the brilliant scintillation which motion elicits from them. These stones and metals, these bodies, so compact and solid, are disunited, are destroyed, by the agency of air, water, and fire; which the most ordinary analysis is sufficient to prove, as well as a multitude of experience, to which our eyes are the daily evidence. Animals, plants, and minerals, after a lapse of time, give back to Nature; that is to say, to the general mass of things, to the universal magazine, the elements, or principles, which they have borrowed: The earth retakes that portion of the body of which it formed the basis and the solidity; the air charges itself with these parts, that are, analogous to it, and with those particles which are light and subtle; water carries off that which is suitable to liquescency; fire, bursting its chains, disengages itself, and rushes into new combinations with other bodies. The elementary particles of the animal, being thus dissolved, disunited, and dispersed; assume new activity, and form new combinations: thus, they serve to nourish, to preserve, or destroy new beings; among others, plants, which arrived at their maturity, nourish and preserve new animals; these in their turn yielding to the same fate as the first. Such is the constant, the invariable course, of Nature; such is the eternal circle of mutation, which all that exists is obliged to describe. It is thus motion generates, preserves for a time, and successively, destroys, one part of the universe by the other; whilst the sum of existence remains eternally the same. Nature, by its combinations, produces suns, which place themselves in the centre of so many systems: she forms planets, which, by their peculiar essence, gravitate and describe their revolutions round these suns: by degrees the motion is changed altogether, and becomes eccentric: perhaps the day may arrive when these wondrous masses will disperse, of which man, in the short space of his existence, can only have a faint and transient glimpse. It is clear, then, that the continual motion inherent in matter, changes and destroys all beings; every instant depriving them of some of their properties, to substitute others: it is motion, which, in thus changing their actual essence, changes also their order, their direction, their tendency, and the laws which regulate their mode of acting and being: from the stone formed in the bowels of the earth, by the intimate combination and close coherence of similar and analogous particles, to the sun, that vast reservoir of igneous particles, which sheds torrents of light over the firmament; from the benumbed oyster, to the thoughtful and active man; we see an uninterrupted progression, a perpetual chain of motion and combination; from which is produced, beings that only differ from each other by the variety of their elementary matter--by the numerous combinations of these elements, from whence springs modes of action and existence, diversified to infinity. In generation, in nutrition, in preservation, we see nothing more than matter, variously combined, of which each has its peculiar motion, regulated by fixed and determinate laws, which oblige them to submit to necessary changes. We shall find, in the formation, in the growth, in the instantaneous life, of animals, vegetables, and minerals, nothing but matter; which combining, accumulating, aggregating, and expanding by degrees, forms beings, who are either feeling, living, vegetating, or else destitute of these faculties; which, having existed some time under one particular form, are obliged to contribute by their ruin to the production of other forms. Thus, to speak strictly, nothing in Nature is either born, or dies, according to the common acceptation of those terms. This truth was felt by many of the ancient philosophers. PLATO says, that according to tradition, "the living were born of the dead, the same as the dead did come of the living; and that this is the constant routine of Nature." He adds from himself, "who knows, if to live, be not to die; and if to die, be not to live?" This was the doctrine of PYTHAGORAS, a man of great talent and no less note. EMPEDOCLES asserts, "there is neither birth nor death, for any mortal; but only a combination, and a separation of that which was combined, and that this is what amongst men they call birth, and death." Again he remarks, "those are infants, or short-sighted persons, with very contracted understandings, who imagine any thing is born, which did not exist before, or that any thing can die or perish totally." CHAP. IV. _Laws of Motion, common to every Being of Nature.--Attraction and Repulsion.--Inert Force.--Necessity._ Man is never surprised at those effects, of which he thinks he knows the cause; he believes he does know the cause, as soon as he sees them act in an uniform and determinate manner, or when the motion excited is simple: the descent of a stone, that falls by its own peculiar weight, is an object of contemplation to the philosopher only; to whom the mode by which the most immediate causes act, and the most simple motion, are no less impenetrable mysteries than the most complex motion, and the manner by which the most complicated causes give impulse. The uninformed are seldom tempted either to examine the effects which are familiar to them, or to recur to first principles. They think they see nothing in the descent of a stone, which ought to elicit their surprise, or become the object of their research: it requires a NEWTON to feel that the descent of heavy bodies is a phenomenon, worthy his whole, his most serious attention; it requires the sagacity of a profound experimental philosopher, to discover the laws by which heavy bodies fall, by which they communicate to others their peculiar motion. In short, the mind that is most practised in philosophical observation, has frequently the chagrin to find, that the most simple and most common effects escape all his researches, and remain inexplicable to him. When any extraordinary, any unusual, effect is produced, to which our eyes have not been accustomed; or when we are ignorant of the energies of the cause, the action of which so forcibly strikes our senses, we are tempted to meditate upon it, and take it into our consideration. The European, accustomed to the use of GUNPOWDER, passes it by, without thinking much of its extraordinary energies; the workman, who labours to manufacture it, finds nothing marvellous in its properties, because he daily handles the matter that forms its composition. The American, to whom this powder was a stranger, who had never beheld its operation, looked upon it as a divine power, and its energies as supernatural. The uninformed, who are ignorant of the true cause of THUNDER, contemplate it as the instrument of divine vengeance. The experimental philosopher considers it as the effect of the electric matter, which, nevertheless, is itself a cause which he is very far from perfectly understanding.--It required the keen, the penetrating mind of a FRANKLIN, to throw light on the nature of this subtle fluid--to develop the means by which its effects might be rendered harmless--to turn to useful purposes, a phenomenon that made the ignorant tremble--that filled their minds with terror, their hearts with dismay, as indicating the anger of the gods: impressed with this idea, they prostrated themselves, they sacrificed to JUPITER, to deprecate his wrath. Be this as it may, whenever we see a cause act, we look upon its effect as natural: when this cause becomes familiar to the sight, when we are accustomed to it, we think we understand it, and its effects surprise us no longer. Whenever any unusual effect is perceived, without our discovering the cause, the mind sets to work, becomes uneasy; this uneasiness increases in proportion to its extent: as soon as it is believed to threaten our preservation, we become completely agitated; we seek after the cause with an earnestness proportioned to our alarm; our perplexity augments in a ratio equivalent to the persuasion we are under: how essentially requisite it is, we should become acquainted with the cause that has affected us in so lively a manner. As it frequently happens that our senses can teach us nothing respecting this cause which so deeply interests us--which we seek with so much ardour, we have recourse to our imagination; this, disturbed with alarm, enervated by fear, becomes a suspicious, a fallacious guide: we create chimeras, fictitious causes, to whom we give the credit, to whom we ascribe the honour of those phenomena by which we have been so much alarmed. It is to this disposition of the human mind that must be attributed, as will be seen in the sequel, the religious errors of man, who, despairing of the capacity to trace the natural causes of those perplexing phenomena to which he was the witness, and sometimes the victim, created in his brain (heated with terror) imaginary causes, which have become to him a source of the most extravagant folly. In Nature, however, there can be only natural causes and effects; all motion excited in this Nature, follows constant and necessary laws: the natural operations, to the knowledge of which we are competent, of which we are in a capacity to judge, are of themselves sufficient to enable us to discover those which elude our sight; we can at least judge of them by analogy. If we study Nature with attention, the modes of action which she displays to our senses will teach us not to be disconcerted by those which she refuses to discover. Those causes which are the most remote from their effects, unquestionably act by intermediate causes; by the aid of these, we can frequently trace out the first. If in the chain of these causes we sometimes meet with obstacles that oppose themselves to our research, we ought to endeavour by patience and diligence to overcome them; when it so happens we cannot surmount the difficulties that occur, we still are never justified in concluding the chain to be broken, or that the cause which acts is SUPER-NATURAL. Let us, then, be content with an honest avowal, that Nature contains resources of which we are ignorant; but never let us substitute phantoms, fictions, or imaginary causes, senseless terms, for those causes which escape our research; because, by such means we only confirm ourselves in ignorance, impede our enquiries, and obstinately remain in error. In spite of our ignorance with respect to the meanderings of Nature, (for of the essence of being, of their properties, their elements, their combinations, their proportions, we yet know the simple and general laws, according to which bodies move;) we see clearly, that some of these laws, common to all beings, never contradict themselves; although, on some occasions, they appear to vary, we are frequently competent to discover that the cause becoming complex, from combination with other causes, either impedes or prevents its mode of action being such as in its primitive state we had a right to expect. We know that active, igneous matter, applied to gunpowder, must necessarily cause it to explode: whenever this effect does not follow the combination of the igneous matter with the gunpowder--whenever our senses do not give us evidence of the fact, we are justified in concluding, either that the powder is damp, or that it is united with some other substance that counteracts its explosion. We know that all the actions of man have a tendency to render him happy: whenever, therefore, we see him labouring to injure or destroy himself, it is just to infer that he is moved by some cause opposed to his natural tendency; that he is deceived by some prejudice; that, for want of experience, he is blind to consequences: that he does not see whither his actions will lead him. If the motion excited in beings was always simple; if their actions did not blend and combine with each other, it would be easy to know, and we should be assured, in the first instance, of the effect a cause would produce. I know that a stone, when descending, ought to describe a perpendicular: I also know, that if it encounters any other body which changes its course, it is obliged to take an oblique direction, but if its fall be interrupted by several contrary powers, which act upon it alternately, I am no longer competent to determine what line it will describe. It may be a parabola, an ellipsis, spiral, circular, &c. this will depend on the impulse, it receives, and the powers by which it is impelled. The most complex motion, however, is never more than the result of simple motion combined: therefore as soon as we know the general laws of beings and their action, we have only to decompose, to analyse them, in order to discover those of which they are combined; experience teaches us the effects we are to expect. Thus it is clear, the simplest motion causes that necessary junction of different matter, of which all bodies are composed: that matter, varied in its essence, in its properties, in its combinations, has each its several modes of action or motion, peculiar to itself; the whole motion of a body is consequently the sum total of each particular motion that is combined. Amongst the matter we behold, some is constantly disposed to unite, whilst other is incapable of union; that which is suitable to unite, forms combinations, more or less intimate, possessing more or less durability: that is to say, with more or less capacity to preserve their union, to resist dissolution. Those bodies which are called SOLIDS, receive into their composition a great number of homogeneous, similar, and analogous particles, disposed to unite themselves with energies conspiring or tending to the same point. The primitive beings, or elements of bodies, have need of supports, of props; that is to say, of the presence of each other, for the purpose of preserving themselves; of acquiring consistence or solidity: a truth, which applies with equal uniformity to what is called _physical_, as to what is termed _moral_. It is upon this disposition in matter and bodies, with relation to each other, that is founded those modes of action which natural philosophers designate by the terms _attraction, repulsion, sympathy, antipathy, affinities, relations_; that moralists describe under the names of _love, hatred, friendship, aversion_. Man, like all the beings in nature, experiences the impulse of attraction and repulsion; the motion excited in him differing from that of other beings, only, because it is more concealed, and frequently so hidden, that neither the causes which excite it, nor their mode of action are known. This system of attraction and repulsion is very ancient, although it required a NEWTON to develop it. That love, to which the ancients attributed the unfolding, or disentanglement of chaos, appears to have been nothing more than a personification of the principle of attraction. All their allegories and fables upon chaos, evidently indicate nothing more than the accord or union that exists between analogous and homogeneous substances; from whence resulted the existence of the universe: whilst discord or repulsion, which they called SOIS, was the cause of dissolution, confusion, and disorder; there can scarcely remain a doubt, but this was the origin of the doctrines of the TWO PRINCIPLES. According to DIOGENES LAERTIUS, the philosopher, EMPEDOCLES, asserted, that "_there is a kind of affection by which the elements unite themselves; and a sort of discord, by which they separate or remove themselves._" However it may be, it is sufficient for us to know that by an invariable law, certain bodies are disposed to unite with more or less facility; whilst others cannot combine or unite themselves: water combines itself readily with salt, but will not blend with oil. Some combinations are very strong, cohering with great force, as metals; others are extremely feeble, their cohesion slight and easily decomposed, as in fugitive colours. Some bodies, incapable of uniting by themselves, become susceptible of union by the agency of other bodies, which serve for common bonds or MEDIUMS. Thus, oil and water, naturally heterogeneous, combine and make soap, by the intervention of alkaline salt. From matter diversely combined, in proportions varied almost to infinity, result all physical and moral bodies; the properties and qualities of which are essentially different, with modes of action more or less complex: which are either understood with facility, or difficult of comprehension, according to the elements or matter that has entered into their composition, and the various modifications this matter has undergone. It is thus, from the reciprocity of their attraction, the primitive imperceptible particles of matter, which constitute bodies, become perceptible, form compound substances, aggregate masses; by the union of similar and analogous matter, whose essences fit them to cohere. The same bodies are dissolved, their union broken, whenever they undergo the action of matter inimical to their junction. Thus by degrees are formed, plants, metals, animals, men; each grows, expands, and increases in its own system or order; sustaining itself in its respective existence, by the continual attraction of analogous matter; to which it becomes united, and by which it is preserved and strengthened. Thus, certain aliments become fit for the sustenance of man, whilst others destroy his existence: some are pleasant to him, strengthen his habit; others are repugnant to him, weaken his system: in short, never to separate physical from moral laws, it is thus that men, mutually attracted to each other by their reciprocal wants, form those unions which we designate by the terms, MARRIAGE, FAMILIES, SOCIETIES, FRIENDSHIPS, CONNEXIONS: it is thus that virtue strengthens and consolidates them; that vice relaxes or totally dissolves them. Of whatever nature may be the combination of beings, their motion has always one direction or tendency: without direction we could not have any idea of motion: this direction is regulated by the properties of each being; as soon as they have any given properties, they necessarily act in obedience to them: that is to say, they follow the law invariably determined by these same properties; which, of themselves, constitute the being such as he is found, and settle his mode of action, which is always the consequence of his manner of existence. But what is the general direction, or common tendency, we see in all beings? What is the visible and known end of all their motion? It is to conserve their actual existence--to preserve themselves--to strengthen their several bodies--to attract that which is favorable to them--to repel that which is injurious them--to avoid that which can harm them--to resist impulsions contrary to their manner of existence, and to their natural tendency. To exist, is to experience the motion peculiar to a determinate essence: to conserve this existence, is to give and receive that motion from which results its maintenance:--it is to attract matter suitable to corroborate its being--to avoid that by which it may be either endangered or enfeebled. Thus, all beings of which we have any knowledge, have a tendency to conserve themselves, each after its peculiar manner: the stone, by the firm adhesion of its particles, opposes resistance to its destruction. Organized beings conserve themselves by more complicated means, but which are, nevertheless, calculated to maintain their existence against that by which it may be injured. Man, both in his physical and in his moral capacity, is a living, feeling, thinking, active being; who, every instant of his duration, strives equally to avoid that which may be injurious, and to procure that which is pleasing to him, or that which is suitable to his mode of existence; all his actions tending solely to conserve himself. ST. AUGUSTINE admits this tendency in all whether organized or not. Conservation, then, is the common point to which all the energies, all the powers, all the faculties of beings, seem continually directed. Natural philosophers call this direction or tendency, SELF-GRAVITATION: NEWTON calls it INERT FORCE: moralists denominate it in man, SELF-LOVE which is nothing more than the tendency he has to preserve himself--a desire of happiness--a love of his own welfare--a wish for pleasure--a promptitude in seizing on every thing that appears favourable to his conservation--a marked aversion to all that either disturbs his happiness, or menaces his existence--primitive sentiments, that are common to all beings of the human species; which all their faculties are continually striving to satisfy; which all their passions, their wills, their actions, have eternally for their object and their end. This self-gravitation, then, is clearly a necessary disposition in man, and in all other beings; which, by a variety means, contribute to the preservation of the existence they have received, as long as nothing deranges the order of their machine, or its primitive tendency. Cause always produces effect; there can be no effect without cause. Impulse is always followed by some motion, more or less sensible; by some change, more or less remarkable in the body which receives it. But motion, and its various modes of displaying itself, is, as has been already shewn, determined by the nature, the essence, the properties, the combinations of the beings acting. It must, then, be concluded that motion, or the modes by which beings act, arises from some cause; that as this cause is not able to move or act, but in conformity with the manner of its being or its essential properties, it must equally be concluded, that all the phenomena we perceive are necessary; that every being in Nature, under the circumstances in which it is placed, and with the given properties it possesses, cannot act otherwise than it does. Necessity is the constant and infallible relation of causes with their effects. Fire consumes, of necessity, combustible matter plated within its circuit of action: man, by fatality, desires either that which really is, or appears to be serviceable to his welfare. Nature, in all the extraordinary appearances she exhibits, necessarily acts after her own peculiar essence: all the beings she contains, necessarily act each after its own a individual nature: it is by motion that the whole has relation with its parts; and these parts with the whole: it is thus that in the general system every thing is connected: it is itself but an immense chain of causes and effects, which flow without ceasing, one from the other. If we reflect, we shall be obliged to acknowledge that every thing we see is necessary; that it cannot be otherwise than it is; that all the beings we behold, as well as those which escape our sight, act by invariable laws. According to these laws, heavy bodies fall--light bodies ascend--analogous substances attract each other--beings tend to preserve themselves--man cherishes himself; loves that which he thinks advantageous--detests that which he has an idea may prove unfavourable to him.--In fine, we are obliged to admit, there can be no perfectly independent energy--no separated cause--no detached action, in a nature where all the beings are in a reciprocity of action--who, without interruption, mutually impel and resist each other--who is herself nothing more than an eternal circle of motion, given and received according to necessary laws; which under the same given incidents, invariably produce the same effect. Two examples will serve to throw the principle here laid down, into light--one shall be taken from physics, the other from morals. In a whirlwind of dust, raised by elemental force, confused as it appears to our eyes, in the most frightful tempest excited by contrary winds, when the waves roll high as mountains, there is not a single particle of dust, or drop of water, that has been placed by CHANCE, that has not a cause for occupying the place where it is found; that does not, in the most rigorous sense of the word, act after the manner in which it ought to act; that is, according to its own peculiar essence, and that of the beings from whom it receives this communicated force. A geometrician exactly knew the different energies acting in each case, with the properties of the particles moved, could demonstrate that after the causes given, each particle acted precisely as it ought to act, and that it could not have acted otherwise than it did. In those terrible convulsions that sometimes agitate political societies, shake their foundations, and frequently produce the overthrow of an empire; there is not a single action, a single word, a single thought, a single will, a single passion in the agents, whether they act as destroyers, or as victims, that is not the necessary result of the causes operating; that does not act, as, of necessity, it must act, from the peculiar essence of the beings who give the impulse, and that of the agents who receive it, according to the situation these agents fill in the moral whirlwind. This could be evidently proved by an understanding capacitated to rate all the action and re-action, of the minds and bodies of those who contributed to the revolution. In fact, if all be connected in Nature, if all motion be produced, the one from the other, notwithstanding their secret communications frequently elude our sight; we ought to feel convinced of this truth, that there is no cause, however minute, however remote, that does not sometimes produce the greatest and most immediate effects on man. It may, perhaps, be in the parched plains of Lybia, that are amassed the first elements of a storm or tempest, which, borne by the winds, approach our climate, render our atmosphere dense, and thus operating on the temperament, may influence the passions of a man, whose circumstances shall have capacitated him to influence many others, who shall decide after his will the fate of many nations. Man, in fact, finds himself in Nature, and makes a part of it: he acts according to laws, which are appropriate to him; he receives in a manner more or less distinct, the action and impulse of the beings who surround him; who themselves act after laws that are peculiar to their essence. Thus he is variously modified; but his actions are always the result of his own energy, and that of the beings who act upon him, and by whom he is modified. This is what gives such variety to his determinations--what generally produces such contradiction in his thoughts, his opinions, his will, his actions; in short, in that motion, whether concealed or visible, by which he is agitated. We shall have occasion, in the sequel, to place this truth, at present so much contested, in a clearer light: it will be sufficient for our purpose at present to prove, generally, that every thing in Nature is necessary--that nothing to be found in it can act otherwise than it does. Motion, alternately communicated and received, establishes the connection or relation between the different orders of beings: when they are in the sphere of reciprocal action, attraction approximates them; repulsion dissolves and separates them; the one strengthens and preserves them; the other enfeebles and destroys them. Once combined, they have a tendency to conserve themselves in that mode of existence, by virtue of their _inert force_; in this they cannot succeed, because they are exposed to the continual influence of all other beings, who perpetually and successively act upon them; their change of form, their dissolution, is requisite to the preservation of Nature herself: this is the sole end we are able to assign her--to which we see her tend without intermission--which she follows without interruption, by the destruction and reproduction of all subordinate beings, who are obliged to submit to her laws--to concur, by their mode of action, to the maintenance of her active existence, so essentially requisite to the GREAT WHOLE. It is thus each being is an individual, who, in the great family, performs his necessary portion of the general labour--who executes the unavoidable task assigned to him. All bodies act according to laws, inherent in their peculiar essence, without the capability to swerve, even for a single instant, from those according to which Nature herself acts. This is the central power, to which all other powers, essences, and energies, are submitted: she regulates the motions of beings, by the necessity of her own peculiar essence: she makes them concur by various modes to the general plan: this appears to be nothing more than the life, action, and maintenance of the whole, by the continual change of its parts. This object she obtains, in removing them, one by the other; by that which establishes, and by that which destroys, the relation subsisting between them; by that which gives them, and that which deprives them of, their forms, combinations, proportions, and qualities, according to which they act for a time, after a given mode; these are afterwards taken from them, to make them act after a different manner. It is thus that Nature makes them expand and change, grow and decline, augment and diminish, approximate and remove, forms and destroys them, according as she finds it requisite to maintain the whole; towards the conservation which this Nature is herself essentially necessitated to have a tendency. This irresistible power, this universal necessity, this general energy, then, is only a consequence of the nature of things; by virtue of which every thing acts, without intermission, after constant and immutable laws: these laws not varying more for the whole than for the beings of which it is composed. Nature is an active living whole, to which all its parts necessarily concur; of which, without their own knowledge, they maintain the activity, the life, and the existence. Nature acts and exists necessarily: all that she contains, necessarily conspires to perpetuate her active existence. This is the decided opinion of PLATO, when he says, "_matter and necessity are the same thing; this necessity is the mother of the world._" In point of fact, we cannot go beyond this aphorism, MATTER ACTS, BECAUSE IT EXISTS; AND EXISTS, TO ACT. If it be enquired how, or for why, matter exists? We answer, we know not: but reasoning by analogy, of what we do not know by that which we do, we should be of opinion it exists necessarily, or because it contains within itself a sufficient reason for its existence. In supposing it to be created or produced by a being distinguished from it, or less known than itself, (which it may be, for any thing we know to the contrary,) we must still admit, that this being is necessary, and includes a sufficient reason for his own existence. We have not then removed any of the difficulty, we have not thrown a clearer light upon the subject, we have not advanced a single step; we have simply laid aside a being, of which we know some few of the properties, but of which we are still extremely ignorant, to have recourse to a power, of which it is utterly impossible we can, as long as we are men, form any distinct idea; of which, notwithstanding it may be a truth, we cannot, by any means we possess, demonstrate the existence. As, therefore, these must be at best but speculative points of belief, which each individual, by reason of its obscurity, may contemplate with different optics, under various aspects, they surely ought to be left free for each to judge after his own fashion: the Hindoo can have no just cause of enmity against the Christian for his faith: this has no moral right to question the Mussulman upon his; the numerous sects of each of the various persuasions spread over the face of the earth, ought to make it a creed to look with an eye of complacency on the deviation of the others; and rest upon that great moral axiom, which is strictly conformable to Nature, which contains the whole of man's happiness--"_Do not unto another, that which do you not wish another should do unto you_;" for it is evident, according to their own doctrines, out of all the variety of systems, one only can be right. We shall see in the sequel, how much man's imagination labours to form an idea, of the energies of that Nature he has personified, and distinguished from herself: in short, we shall examine some of the ridiculous and pernicious inventions, which, for want of understanding Nature, have been imagined to impede her course, to suspend her eternal laws, to place obstacles to the necessity of things. CHAP. V. _Order and Confusion.--Intelligence.--Chance._ The observation of the necessary, regular, and periodical motion in the universe, generated in the mind of man the idea of ORDER; this term, in its original signification, represents nothing more than a mode of considering, a facility of perceiving, together and separately, the different relations of a whole; in which is discovered, by its manner of existing and acting, a certain affinity or conformity with his own. Man, in extending this idea to the universe, carried with him those methods of considering things which are peculiar to himself: he has consequently supposed there really existed in Nature affinities and relations, which he classed under the name of ORDER; and others which appeared to him not to conform to those, which he has ranked under the term of CONFUSION. It is easy to comprehend, that this idea of order and confusion can have no absolute existence in Nature, where every thing is necessary; where the whole follows constant and invariable laws, which oblige each being, in every moment of its duration, to submit to other laws, which flow from its own peculiar mode of existence. Therefore it is in his imagination, only, man finds a model of that which he terms order or confusion; which, like all his abstract, metaphysical ideas, supposes nothing beyond his reach. Order, however, is never more than the faculty of conforming himself with the beings by whom he is environed, or with the whole of which he forms a part. Nevertheless, if the idea of order be applied to Nature, it will be found to be nothing but a series of action or motion, which he judges to conspire to one common end. Thus, in a body that moves, order is the chain of action, the series of motion, proper to constitute it what it is, and to maintain it in its actual state. Order, relatively to the whole of Nature, is the concatenation of causes and effects, necessary to her _active_ existence--to maintaining her constantly together; but, as it has been proved in the chapter preceding, every individual being is obliged to concur to this end, in the different ranks they occupy; from whence it is a necessary deduction, that what is called the ORDER OF NATURE, can never be more than a certain manner of considering the necessity of things, to which all, of which man has any knowledge, is submitted. That which is styled CONFUSION, is only a relative term, used to designate that series of necessary action, that chain of requisite motion, by which an individual being is necessarily changed or disturbed in its mode of existence--by which it is instantaneously obliged to alter its manner of action; but no one of these actions, no part of this motion is capable, even for a single instant, of contradicting or deranging the general order of Nature; from which all beings derive their existence, their properties, the motion appropriate to each. What is termed confusion in a being, is nothing more than its passage into a new class, a new mode of existence; which necessarily carries with it a new series of action, a new chain of motion, different from that of which this being found itself susceptible in the preceding rank it occupied. That which is called order, in Nature, is a mode of existence, or a disposition of its particles, strictly _necessary_. In every other assemblage of causes and effects, of worlds, as well as in that which we inhabit, some sort of arrangement, some kind of order would necessarily be established. Suppose the most incongruous, the most heterogeneous substances were put into activity, and assembled by a concatenation of extraordinary circumstances; they would form amongst themselves, a complete order, a perfect arrangement. This is the true notion of a property, which may be defined, an aptitude to constitute a being, such as it is actually found, such as it is with respect to the whole of which it makes a part. Order, then, is nothing but necessity, considered relatively to the series of actions, or the connected chain of causes and effects, that it produces in the universe. What is the motion in our planetary system; but a series of phenomena, operated upon according to necessary laws, that regulate the bodies of which it is composed? In conformity to these laws, the sun occupies the centre; the planets gravitate towards it, and revolve round it, in regulated periods: the satellites of these planets gravitate towards those which are in the centre of their sphere of action, and describe round them their periodical route. One of these planets, the earth which man inhabits, turns on its own axis; and by the various aspects which its revolution obliges it to present to the sun, experiences those regular variations which are called SEASONS. By a sequence of the sun's action upon different parts of this globe, all its productions undergo vicissitudes: plants, animals, men, are in a sort of morbid drowsiness during _Winter_: in _Spring_, these beings re-animate, to come as it were out of a long lethargy. In short, the mode in which the earth receives the sun's beams, has an influence on all its productions; these rays, when darted obliquely, do not act in the same manner as when they fall perpendicularly; their periodical absence, caused by the revolution of this sphere on itself, produces _night_ and _day_. However, in all this, man never witnesses more than necessary effects, flowing from the nature of things, which, whilst that remains the same, can never be opposed with propriety. These effects are owing to gravitation, attraction, centrifugal power, &c. On the other hand, this _order_, which man admires as a supernatural effect, is sometimes disturbed, or changed into what he calls _confusion_: this confusion is, however, always a necessary consequence of the laws of Nature; in which it is requisite to the support of the whole that some of her parts should be deranged and thrown out of the ordinary course. It is thus, COMETS present themselves so unexpectedly to man's wondering eyes; their eccentric motion disturbs the tranquillity of his planetary system; they excite the terror of the misinstructed to whom every thing unusual is marvellous. The natural philosopher, himself, conjectures that in former ages, these comets have overthrown the surface of this mundane ball, and caused great revolutions on the earth. Independent of this extraordinary _confusion_, he is exposed to others more familiar to him: sometimes, the seasons appear to have usurped each other's place; to have quitted their regular order: sometimes the opposing elements seem to dispute among themselves the dominion of the world; the sea bursts its limits; the solid earth is shaken and rent asunder; mountains are in a state of conflagration; pestilential diseases destroy both men and animals; sterility desolates a country: then affrighted man utters piercing cries, offers up his prayers to recall order; tremblingly raises his hands towards the Being he supposes to be the author of all these calamities; nevertheless, the whole of this afflicting confusion are necessary effects, produced by natural causes; which act according to fixed laws, determined by their own peculiar essence, and the universal essence of Nature: in which every thing must necessarily be changed, moved, and dissolved; where that which is called ORDER, must sometimes be disturbed and altered into a new mode of existence; which to his deluded mind, to his imagination, led astray by ignorance and want of reflection, appears CONFUSION. There cannot possibly exist what is generally termed _a confusion of Nature_: man finds order in every thing that is conformable to his own mode of being; confusion in every thing by which it is opposed: nevertheless, in Nature, all is in order; because none of her parts are ever able to emancipate themselves from those invariable rules which flow from their respective essences: there _is_ not, there _cannot_ be confusion in a whole, to the maintenance of which what is _called_ confusion is absolutely requisite; of which the general course can never be discomposed, although individuals may be, and necessarily are; where all the effects produced are the consequence of natural causes, that under the circumstances in which they are placed, act only as they infallibly are obliged to act. It therefore follows, there can be neither monsters nor prodigies; wonders nor miracles in Nature: those which are designated MONSTERS, are certain combinations, with which the eyes of man are not familiarized; but which, therefore, are not less the necessary effects of natural causes. Those which he terms PRODIGIES, WONDERS, or SUPERNATURAL effects, are phenomena of Nature, with whose mode of action he is unacquainted; of which his ignorance does not permit him to ascertain the principles; whose causes he cannot trace; but which his impatience, his heated imagination, aided by a desire to explain, makes him foolishly attribute to imaginary causes; which, like the idea of order, have no existence but in himself; and which, that he may conceal his own ignorance, that he may obtain more respect with the uninformed, he places beyond Nature, out of which his experience is every instant demonstrably proving that none of these things can have existence. As for those effects which are called MIRACLES, that is to say, contrary to the unalterable laws of Nature, it must be felt such things are impossible; because, nothing can, for an instant, suspend the necessary course of beings, without the whole of Nature was arrested; without she was disturbed in her tendency. There have neither been wonders nor miracles in Nature; except for those, who have not sufficiently studied the laws, who consequently do not feel, that those laws can never be contradicted, even in the most minute parts, without the whole being destroyed, or at least without changing her essence, her mode of action; that it is the height of folly to recur to supernatural causes to explain the phenomena man beholds, before he becomes fully acquainted with natural causes--with the powers and capabilities which Nature herself contains. _Order_ and _Confusion_, then, are only relative terms, by which man designates the state in which particular beings find themselves. He says, a being is in order, when all the motion it undergoes conspires to favor its tendency to its own preservation; when it is conducive to the maintenance of its actual existence: that it is in confusion when the causes which move it disturb the harmony of its existence, or have a tendency to destroy the equilibrium necessary to the conservation of its actual state. Nevertheless, confusion, as we have shown, is nothing but the passage of a being into a new order; the more rapid the progress, the greater the confusion for the being that is submitted to it: that which conducts man to what is called death, is, for him, the greatest of all possible confusion. Yet this death is nothing more than a passage into a new mode of existence: it is the eternal, the invariable, the unconquerable law of Nature, to which the individuals of his order, each in his turn, is obliged to submit. The human body is said to be in order, when its various component parts act in that mode, from which results the conservation of the whole; from which emanates that which is the tendency of his actual existence; in other words, when all the impulse he receives, all the motion he communicates, tends to preserve his health, to render him happy, by promoting the happiness of his fellow men. He is said to be in health when the fluids and solids of his body concur to render him robust, to keep his mind in vigour; when each lends mutual aid towards this end. He is said to be in _confusion_, or in ill health, whenever this tendency is disturbed; when any of the essential parts of his body cease to concur to his preservation, or to fulfil its peculiar functions. This it is that happens in a state of sickness, in which, however, the motion excited in the human machine is as necessary, is regulated by laws as certain, as natural, as invariable, as that which concurs to produce health. Sickness merely produces in him a new order of motion, a new series of action, a new chain of things. Man dies: to him, this appears the greatest confusion he can experience; his body is no longer what it was--its parts no longer concur to the same end--his blood has lost its circulation--he is deprived of feeling--his ideas have vanished--he thinks no more--his desires have fled--death is the epoch, the cessation of his human existence.--His frame becomes an inanimate mass, by the subtraction of those principles by which it was animated; that is, which made it act after a determinate manner: its tendency has received a new direction; its action is changed; the motion excited in its ruins conspires to a new end. To that motion, the harmony of which he calls order, which produced life, sentiment, thought, passions, health, succeeds a series of motion of another species; that, nevertheless, follows laws as necessary as the first; all the parts of the dead man conspire to produce what is called dissolution, fermentation, putrefaction: these new modes of being, of acting, are just as natural to man, reduced to this state, as sensibility, thought, the periodical motion of the blood, &c. were to the living man: his essence having changed, his mode of action can no longer be the same. To that regulated motion, to that necessary action, which conspired to the production of life, succeeds that determinate motion, that series of action which concurs to produce the dissolution of the dead carcass; the dispersion of its parts; the formation of new combinations, from which result new beings; and which, as we have before seen, is the immutable order of active Nature. How then can it be too often repeated, that relatively to the great whole, all the motion of beings, all their modes of action, can never be but in order, that is to say, are always conformable to Nature; that in all the stages through which beings are obliged to pass, they invariably act after a mode necessarily subordinate to the universal whole? To say more, each individual being always acts in order; all its actions, the whole system of its motion, are the necessary consequence of its peculiar mode of existence; whether that be momentary or durable. Order, in political society, is the effect of a necessary series of ideas, of wills, of actions, in those who compose it; whose movements are regulated in a manner, either calculated to maintain its indivisibility, or to hasten its dissolution. Man constituted, or modified, in the manner we term virtuous, acts necessarily in that mode, from whence results the welfare of his associates: the man we stile wicked, acts necessarily in that mode, from whence springs the misery of his fellows: his Nature, being essentially different, he must necessarily act after a different mode: his individual order is at variance, but his relative order is complete: it is equally the essence of the one, to promote happiness, as it is of the other to induce misery. Thus, order and confusion in individual beings, is nothing more than the manner of man's considering the natural and necessary effects, which they produce relatively to himself. He fears the wicked man; he says that he will carry confusion into society, because he disturbs its tendency and places obstacles to its happiness. He avoids a falling stone, because it will derange in him the order necessary to his conservation. Nevertheless, order and confusion, are always, as we have shewn, consequences, equally necessary to either the transient or durable state of beings. It is in order that fire burns, because it is of its essence to burn; on the other hand, it is in order, that an intelligent being should remove himself from whatever can disturb his mode of existence. A being, whose organization renders him sensible, must in virtue of his essence, fly from every thing that can injure his organs, or that can place his existence in danger. Man calls those beings _intelligent_, who are organized after his own manner; in whom he sees faculties proper for their preservation; suitable to maintain their existence in the order that is convenient to them; that can enable them to take the necessary measures towards this end, with a consciousness of the motion they undergo. From hence, it will be perceived, that the faculty called intelligence, consists in a possessing capacity to act comformably to a known end, in the being to which it is attributed. He looks upon these beings as deprived of intelligence, in which he finds no conformity with himself; in whom he discovers neither the same construction, nor the same faculties: of which he knows neither the essence, the end to which they tend, the energies by which they act, nor the order that is necessary to them. The whole cannot have a distinct name, or end, because there is nothing out of itself, to which it can have a tendency. If it be in himself, that he arranges the idea of _order_, it is also in himself, that he draws up that of _intelligence_. He refuses to ascribe it to those beings, who do not act after his own manner: he accords it to all those whom he supposes to act like himself: the latter he calls intelligent agents: the former blind causes; that is to say, intelligent agents who act by _chance_: thus chance is an empty word without sense, but which is always opposed to that of intelligence, without attaching any determinate, or any certain idea. Man, in fact, attributes to _chance_ all those effects, of which the connection they have with their causes is not seen. Thus he uses the word _chance_, to cover his ignorance of those natural causes, which produce visible effects, by means which he cannot form an idea of; or that act by a mode of which he does not perceive the order; or whose system is not followed by actions conformable to his own. As soon as he sees, or believes he sees, the order of action, or the manner of motion, he attributes this order to an _intelligence_; which is nothing more than a quality borrowed from himself--from his own peculiar mode of action--from the manner in which he is himself affected. Thus an _intelligent being_ is one who thinks, who wills, and who acts, to compass an end. If so, he must have organs, an aim conformable to those of man: therefore, to say Nature is governed by an intelligence, is to affirm that she is governed by a being, furnished with organs; seeing that without this organic construction, he can neither have sensations, perceptions, ideas, thought, will, plan, nor action which he understands. Man always makes himself the center of the universe: it is to himself that he relates all he beholds. As soon as he believes he discovers a mode of action that has a conformity with his own, or some phenomenon that interests his feelings, he attributes it to a cause that resembles himself--that acts after his manner--that has faculties similar to those he possesses--whose interests are like his own--whose projects are in unison with and have the same tendency as those he himself indulges: in short, it is from himself, or the properties which actuate him, that he forms the model of this cause. It is thus that man beholds, out of his own species, nothing but beings who act differently from himself; yet believes that he remarks in Nature an order similar to his own ideas--views conformable to those which he himself possesses. He imagines that Nature is governed by a cause whose intelligence is conformable to his own, to whom he ascribes the honor of the order which he believes he witnesses--of those views that fall in with those that are peculiar to himself--of an aim which quadrates with that which is the great end of all his own actions. It is true that man, feeling his incapability of producing the vast, the multiplied effects of which he witnesses the operation, when contemplating the universe, was under the necessity of making a distinction between himself and the cause which he supposed to be the author of such stupendous effects; he believed he removed every difficulty, by amplifying in this cause all those faculties of which he was himself in possession; adding others of which his own self-love made him desirous, or which he thought would render his being more perfect: thus, he gave JUPITER wings, with the faculty of assuming any form he might deem convenient: it was thus, by degrees, he arrived at forming an idea of that intelligent cause, which he has placed above Nature, to preside over action--to give her that motion of which he has chosen to believe she was in herself incapable. He obstinately persists in regarding this Nature as a heap of dead, inert matter, without form, which has not within itself the power of producing any of those great effects, those regular phenomena, from which emanates what he styles _the order of the Universe_. ANAXAGORAS is said to have been the first who supposed the universe created and governed by an intelligence: ARISTOTLE reproaches him with having made an automaton of this intelligence; or in other words, with ascribing to it the production of things, only when he was at a loss to account for their appearance. From whence it may be deduced, that it is for want of being acquainted with the powers of Nature, or the properties of matter, that man has multiplied beings without necessity--that he has supposed the universe under the government of an intelligent cause, which he is, and perhaps always will be, himself the model: in fine, this cause has been personified under such a variety of shapes, sexes, and names, that a list of the deities he has at various times supposed to guide this Nature, or to whom he has submitted her, makes a large volume that occupies some years of his youthful education to understand. He only rendered this cause more inconceivable, when he extended in it his own faculties too much. He either annihilates, or renders it altogether impossible, when he would attach to it incompatible qualities, which he is obliged to do, to enable him to account for the contradictory and disorderly effects he beholds in the world. In fact, he sees confusion in the world; yet, notwithstanding his confusion contradicts the plan, the power, the wisdom, the bounty of this intelligence, and the miraculous order which he ascribes to it; he says, the extreme beautiful arrangement of the whole, obliges him to suppose it to be the work of a sovereign intelligence: unable, however, to reconcile this seeming confusion with the benevolence he attaches to this cause, he had recourse to another effort of his imagination; he made a new cause, to whom he ascribed all the evil, all the misery, resulting from this confusion: still, his own person served for the model; to which he added those deformities which he had learned to hold in disrespect: in multiplying these counter or destroying causes, he peopled Pandemonium. It will no doubt be argued, that as Nature contains and produces intelligent beings, either she must be herself intelligent, or else she must be governed by an intelligent cause. We reply, intelligence is a faculty peculiar to organized beings, that it is to say, to beings constituted and combined after a determinate manner; from whence results certain modes of action, which are designated under various names; according to the different effects which these beings produce: wine has not the properties called _wit_ and _courage_; nevertheless, it is sometimes seen that it communicates those qualities to men, who are supposed to be in themselves entirely devoid of them. It cannot be said Nature is intelligent after the manner of any of the beings she contains; but she can produce intelligent beings by assembling matter suitable to their particular organization, from whose peculiar modes of action will result the faculty called intelligence; who shall be capable of producing certain effects which are the necessary consequence of this property. I therefore repeat, that to have intelligence, designs and views, it is requisite to have ideas; to the production of ideas, organs or senses are necessary: this is what is neither said of Nature nor of the causes he has supposed to preside over her actions. In short experience warrants the assertion, it does more, it proves beyond a doubt, that matter, which is regarded as inert and dead, assumes sensible action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined and organized after particular modes. From what has been said, it must rationally be concluded that _order_ is never more than the necessary or uniform connection of causes with their effects; or that series of action which flows from the peculiar properties of beings, so long as they remain in a given state; that _confusion_ is nothing more than the change of this state; that in the universe, all is necessarily in order, because every thing acts and moves according to the various properties of the different beings it contains; that in Nature there cannot be either confusion or real evil, since every thing follows the laws of its natural existence; that there is neither _chance_ nor any thing fortuitous in this Nature, where no effect is produced without a sufficient, without a substantial cause; where all causes act necessarily according to fixed and certain laws, which are themselves dependant on the essential properties of these causes or beings, as well as on the combination, which constitutes either their transitory or permanent state; that intelligence is a mode of acting, a method of existence natural to some particular beings; that if this intelligence should be attributed to Nature, it would then be nothing more than the faculty of conserving herself in active existence by necessary means. In refusing to Nature the intelligence he himself enjoys--in rejecting the intelligent cause which is supposed to be the contriver of this Nature, or the principle of that _order_ he discovers in her course, nothing is given to _chance_, nothing to a blind cause, nothing to a power which is indistinguishable; but every thing he beholds is attributed to real, to known causes; or to those which by analogy are easy of comprehension. All that exists is acknowledged to be a consequence of the inherent properties of eternal matter, which by contact, by blending, by combination, by change of form, produces order and confusion; with all those varieties which assail his sight, it is himself who is blind, when he imagines blind causes:--man only manifested his ignorance of the powers of motion, of the laws of Nature, when he attributed, any of its effects to _chance_. He did not shew a more enlightened feeling when he ascribed them to an intelligence, the idea of which he borrowed from himself, but which is never in conformity with the effects which he attributes to its intervention--he only imagined words to supply the place of things--he made JUPITER, SATURN, JUNO, and a thousand others, operate that which he found himself inadequate to perform; he distinguished them from Nature, gave them an amplification of his own properties, and believed he understood them by thus obscuring ideas, which he never dared either define or analyze. CHAP. VI. _Moral and Physical Distinctions of Man.--His Origin._ Let us now apply the general laws we have scrutinized, to those beings of Nature who interest us the most. Let us see in what man differs from the other beings by which he is surrounded. Let us examine if he has not certain points in conformity with them, that oblige him, notwithstanding the different properties they respectively possess, to act in certain respects according to the universal laws to which every thing is submitted. Finally, let us enquire if the ideas he has formed of himself in meditating on his own peculiar mode of existence, be chimerical, or founded in reason. Man occupies a place amidst that crowd, that multitude of beings, of which Nature is the assemblage. His essence, that is to say, the peculiar manner of existence, by which he is distinguished from other beings, renders him susceptible of various modes of action, of a variety of motion, some of which are simple and visible, others concealed and complicated. His life itself is nothing more than a long series, a succession of necessary and connected motion; which operates perpetual changes in his machine; which has for its principle either causes contained within himself, such as blood, nerves, fibres, flesh, bones; in short, the matter, as well solid as fluid, of which his body is composed--or those exterior causes, which, by acting upon him, modify him diversely; such as the air with which he is encompassed, the aliments by which he is nourished, and all those objects from which he receives any impulse whatever, by the impression they make on his senses. Man, like all other beings in Nature, tends to his own destruction--he experiences inert force--he gravitates upon himself--he is attracted by objects that are contrary or repugnant to his existence--he seeks after some--he flies, or endeavours to remove himself from others. It is this variety of action, this diversity of modification of which the human being is susceptible, that has been designated under such different names, by such varied nomenclature. It will be necessary, presently, to examine these closely and go more into detail. However marvellous, however hidden, however secret, however complicated may be the modes of action, which the human frame undergoes, whether interiorly or exteriorly; whatever may be, or appear to be the impulse he either receives or communicates, examined closely, it will be found that all his motion, all his operations, all his changes, all his various states, all his revolutions, are constantly regulated by the same laws, which Nature has prescribed to all the beings she brings forth--which she developes--which she enriches with faculties--of which she increases the bulk--which she conserves for a season--which she ends by decomposing, by destroying: obliging them to change their form. Man, in his origin, is an imperceptible point, a speck, of which the parts are without form; of which the mobility, the life, escapes his senses; in short, in which he does not perceive any sign of those qualities, called SENTIMENT, FEELING, THOUGHT, INTELLIGENCE, FORCE, REASON, &c. Placed in the womb suitable to his expansion, this point unfolds, extends, increases, by the continual addition of matter he attracts, that is analogous to his being, which consequently assimilates itself with him. Having quitted this womb, so appropriate to conserve his existence, to unfold his qualities, to strengthen his habits; so competent to give, for a season, consistence to the weak rudiments of his frame; he travels through the stage of infancy; he becomes adult: his body has then acquired a considerable extension of bulk, his motion is marked, his action is visible, he is sensible in all his parts; he is a living, an active mass; that is to say, a combination that feels and thinks; that fulfils the functions peculiar to beings of his species. But how has he become sensible? Because he has been by degrees nourished, enlarged, repaired by the continual attraction that takes place within himself, of that kind of matter which is pronounced inert, insensible, inanimate; which is, nevertheless, continually combining itself with his machine; of which it forms an active whole, that is living, that feels, judges, reasons, wills, deliberates, chooses, elects; that has the capability of labouring, more or less efficaciously, to his own individual preservation; that is to say, to the maintenance of the harmony of his existence. All the motion and changes that man experiences in the course of his life, whether it be from exterior objects or from those substances contained within himself, are either favorable or prejudicial to his existence; either maintain its order, or throw it into confusion; are either in conformity with, or repugnant to, the essential tendency of his peculiar mode of being. He is compelled by Nature to approve of some, to disapprove of others; some of necessity render him happy, others contribute to his misery; some become the objects of his most ardent desire, others of his determined aversion: some elicit his confidence, others make him tremble with fear. In all the phenomena man presents, from the moment he quits the womb of his mother, to that wherein he becomes the inhabitant of the silent tomb, he perceives nothing but a succession of necessary causes and effects, which are strictly conformable to those laws that are common to all the beings in Nature. All his modes of action--all his sensations--all his ideas--all his passions--every act of his will--every impulse which he either gives or receives, are the necessary consequences of his own peculiar properties, and those which he finds in the various beings by whom he is moved. Every thing he does--every thing that passes within himself--his concealed motion--his visible action, are the effects of inert force--of self-gravitation--the attractive or repulsive powers contained in his machine--of the tendency he has, in common with other beings, to his own individual preservation; in short, of that energy which is the common property of every being he beholds. Nature, in man, does nothing more than shew, in a decided manner, what belongs to the peculiar nature by which he is distinguished from the beings of a different system or order. The source of those errors into which man has fallen, when he has contemplated himself, has its rise, as will presently be shown, in the opinion he has entertained, that he moved by himself--that he always acts by his own natural energy--that in his actions, in the will that gave him impulse, he was independent of the general laws of Nature; and of those objects which, frequently, without his knowledge, always in spite of him, in obedience to these laws, are continually acting upon him. If he had examined himself attentively, he must have acknowledged, that none of the motion he underwent was spontaneous--he must have discovered, that even his birth depended on causes, wholly out of the reach of his own powers--that, it was without his own consent he entered into the system in which he occupies a place--that, from the moment in which he is born, until that in which he dies, he is continually impelled by causes, which, in spite of himself, influence his frame, modify his existence, dispose of his conduct. Would not the slightest reflection have sufficed to prove to him, that the fluids, the solids, of which his body is composed, as well as that concealed mechanism, which he believes to be independent of exterior causes, are, in fact, perpetually under the influence of these causes; that without them he finds himself in a total incapacity to act? Would he not have seen, that his temperament, his constitution, did in no wise depend on himself--that his passions are the necessary consequence of this temperament--that his will is influenced, his actions determined by these passions; consequently by opinions, which he has not given to himself, of which he is not the master? His blood, more or less heated or abundant; his nerves more or less braced, his fibres more or less relaxed, give him dispositions either transitory or durable--are not these, at every moment decisive of his ideas; of his thoughts: of his desires: of his fears: of his motion, whether visible or concealed? The state in which he finds himself, does it not necessarily depend on the air which surrounds him diversely modified; on the various properties of the aliments which nourish him; on the secret combinations that form themselves in his machine, which either preserve its order, or throw it into confusion? In short, had man fairly studied himself, every thing must have convinced him, that in every moment of his duration, he was nothing more than a passive instrument in the hands of necessity. Thus it must appear, that where all is connected, where all the causes are linked one to the other, where the whole forms but one immense chain, there cannot be any independent, any isolated energy; any detached power. It follows then, that Nature, always in action, marks out to man each point of the line he is bound to describe; establishes the route, by which he must travel. It is Nature that elaborates, that combines the elements of which he must be composed;--It is Nature that gives him his being, his tendency, his peculiar mode of action. It is Nature that develops him, expands him, strengthens him, increases his bulk--preserves him for a season, during which he is obliged to fulfil the task imposed on him. It is Nature, that in his journey through life, strews on the road those objects, those events; those adventures, that modify him in a variety of ways, that give him impulses which are sometimes agreeable and beneficial, at others prejudicial and disagreeable. It is Nature, that in giving him feeling, in supplying him with sentiment, has endowed him with capacity to choose, the means to elect those objects, to take those methods that are most conducive, most suitable, most natural, to his conservation. It is Nature, who when he has run his race, when he has finished his career, when he has described the circle marked out for him, conducts him in his turn to his destruction; dissolves the union of his elementary particles, and obliges him to undergo the constant, the universal law; from the operation of which nothing is exempted. It is thus, motion places man in the matrix of his mother; brings him forth out of her womb; sustains him for a season; at length destroys him; obliges him to return into the bosom of Nature; who speedily reproduces him, scattered under an infinity of forms; in which each of his particles run over again, in the same manner, the different stages, as necessary as the whole had before run over those of his preceding existence. The beings of the human species, as well as all other beings, are susceptible of two sorts of motion: the one, that of the mass, by which an entire body, or some of its parts, are visibly transferred from one place to another; the other, internal and concealed, of some of which man is sensible, while some takes place without his knowledge, and is not even to be guessed at, but by the effect it outwardly produces. In a machine so extremely complex as man, formed by the combination of such a multiplicity of matter, so diversified in its properties, so different in its proportions, so varied in its modes of action, the motion necessarily becomes of the most complicated kind; its dullness, as well as its rapidity, frequently escapes the observation of those themselves, in whom it takes place. Let us not, then, be surprised, if, when man would account to himself for his existence, for his manner of acting, finding so many obstacles to encounter, he invented such strange hypotheses to explain the concealed spring of his machine--if then this motion appeared to him, to be different from that of other bodies, he conceived an idea, that he moved and acted in a manner altogether distinct from the other beings in Nature. He clearly perceived that his body, as well as different parts of it, did act; but, frequently, he was unable to discover what brought them into action: from whence he received the impulse: he then conjectured he contained within himself a moving principle distinguished from his machine, which secretly gave an impulse to the springs which set this machine in motion; that moved him by its own natural energy; that consequently he acted according to laws totally distinct from those which regulated the motion of other beings: he was conscious of certain internal motion, which he could not help feeling; but how could he conceive, that this invisible motion was so frequently competent to produce such striking effects? How could he comprehend, that a fugitive idea, an imperceptible act of thought, was so frequently capacitated to bring his whole being into trouble and confusion? He fell into the belief, that he perceived within himself a substance distinguished from that self, endowed with a secret force; in which he supposed existed qualities distinctly differing from those, of either the visible causes that acted on his organs, or those organs themselves. He did not sufficiently understand, that the primitive cause which makes a stone fall, or his arm move, are perhaps as difficult of comprehension, as arduous to be explained, as those internal impulses, of which his thought or his will are the effects. Thus, for want of meditating Nature--of considering her under her true point of view--of remarking the conformity--of noticing the simultaneity, the unity of the motion of this fancied motive-power with that of his body--of his material organs--he conjectured he was not only a distinct being, but that he was set apart, with different energies, from all the other beings in Nature; that he was of a more simple essence having nothing in common with any thing by which he was surrounded; nothing that connected him with all that he beheld. It is from thence has successively sprung his notions of SPIRITUALITY, IMMATERIALITY, IMMORTALITY; in short, all those vague unmeaning words he has invented by degrees, in order to subtilize and designate the attributes of the unknown power, which he believes he contains within himself; which he conjectures to be the concealed principle of all his visible actions when man once imbibes an idea that he cannot comprehend, he meditates upon it until he has given it a complete personification: Thus he saw, or fancied he saw, the igneous matter pervade every thing; he conjectured that it was the only principle of life and activity; he proceeded to embody it; he gave it his own form; called it JUPITER, and ended by worshipping this image of his own creation, as the power from whom he derived every good he experienced, every evil he sustained. To crown the bold conjectures he ventured to make on this internal motive-power, he supposed, that different from all other beings, even from the body that served to envelope it, it was not bound to undergo dissolution; that such was its perfect simplicity, that it could not be decomposed, nor even change its form; in short, that it was by its essence exempted from those revolutions to which he saw the body subjected, as well as all the compound beings with which Nature is filled. Thus man, in his own ideas, became double; he looked upon himself as a whole, composed by the inconceivable assemblage of two different, two distinct natures, which have no point of analogy between themselves: he distinguished two substances in himself; one evidently submitted to the influence of gross beings, composed of coarse inert matter: this he called BODY;--the other, which he supposed to be simple, of a purer essence, was contemplated as acting from itself: giving motion to the body, with which it found itself so miraculously united: this he called SOUL, or SPIRIT; the functions of the one, he denominated _physical, corporeal, material_; the functions of the other he styled _spiritual, intellectual._ Man, considered relatively to the first, was termed the PHYSICAL MAN; viewed with relation to the last, he was designated the MORAL MAN. These distinctions, although adopted by the greater number of the philosophers of the present day, are, nevertheless, only founded on gratuitous suppositions. Man has always believed he remedied his ignorance of things, by inventing words to which he could never attach any true sense or meaning. He imagined he understood matter, its properties, its faculties, its resources, its different combinations, because he had a superficial glimpse of some of its qualities: he has, however, in reality, done nothing more than obscure the faint ideas he has been capacitated to form of this matter, by associating it with a substance much less intelligible than itself. It is thus, speculative man, in forming words, in multiplying beings, has only plunged himself into greater difficulties than those he endeavoured to avoid; and thereby placed obstacles to the progress of his knowledge: whenever he has been deficient of facts, he has had recourse to conjecture, which he quickly changed into fancied realities. Thus, his imagination, no longer guided by experience, hurried on by his new ideas, was lost, without hope of return, in the labyrinth of an ideal, of an intellectual world, to which he had himself given birth; it was next to impossible to withdraw him from this delusion, to place him in the right road, of which nothing but experience can furnish him the clue. Nature points out to man, that in himself, as well as in all those objects which act upon him, there is never more than matter endowed with various properties, diversely modified, that acts by reason of these properties: that man is an organized whole, composed of a variety of matter; that like all the other productions of Nature, he follows general and known laws, as well as those laws or modes of action which are peculiar to himself and unknown. Thus, when it shall be inquired, what is man? We say, he is a material being, organized after a peculiar manner; conformed to a certain mode of thinking--of feeling; capable of modification in certain modes peculiar to himself--to his organization--to that particular combination of matter which is found assembled in him. If, again, it be asked, what origin we give to beings of the human species? We reply, that, like all other beings, man is a production of Nature, who resembles them in some respects, and finds himself submitted to the same laws; who differs from them in other respects, and follows particular laws, determined by the diversity of his conformation. If, then, it be demanded, whence came man? We answer, our experience on this head does not capacitate us to resolve the question: but that it cannot interest us, as it suffices for us to know that man exists; that he is so constituted, as to be competent to the effects we witness. But it will be urged, has man always existed? Has the human species existed from all eternity; or is it only an instantaneous production of Nature? Have there been always men like ourselves? Will there always be such? Have there been, in all times, males and females? Was there a first man, from whom all others are descended? Was the animal anterior to the egg, or did the egg precede the animal? Is this species without beginning? Will it also be without end? The species itself, is it indestructible, or does it pass away like its individuals? Has man always been what he now is; or has he, before he arrived at the state in which we see him, been obliged to pass under an infinity of successive developements? Can man at last flatter himself with having arrived at a fixed being, or must the human species again change? If man is the production of Nature, it will perhaps be asked, Is this Nature competent to the production of new beings, to make the old species disappear? Adopting this supposition, it may be inquired, why Nature does not produce under our own eyes new beings--new species? It would appear on reviewing these questions, to be perfectly indifferent, as to the stability of the argument we have used, which side was taken; that, for want of experience, hypothesis must settle a curiosity that always endeavours to spring forward beyond the boundaries prescribed to our mind. This granted, the contemplator of Nature will say, that he sees no contradiction, in supposing the human species, such as it is at the present day, was either produced in the course of time, or from all eternity: he will not perceive any advantage that can arise from supposing that it has arrived by different stages, or successive developements, to that state in which it is actually found. Matter is eternal, it is necessary, but its forms are evanescent and contingent. It may be asked of man, is he any thing more than matter combined, of which the former varies every instant? Notwithstanding, some reflections seem to favor the supposition, to render more probable the hypothesis, that man is a production formed in the course of time; who is peculiar to the globe he inhabits, who is the result of the peculiar laws by which it is directed; who, consequently, can only date his formation as coeval with that of his planet. Existence is essential to the universe, or the total assemblage of matter essentially varied that presents itself to our contemplation; the combinations, the forms, however, are not essential. This granted, although the matter of which the earth is composed has always existed, this earth may not always have had its present form--its actual properties; perhaps it may be a mass detached in the course of time from some other celestial body;--perhaps it is the result of the spots, or those encrustations which astronomers discover in the sun's disk, which have had the faculty to diffuse themselves over our planetary system;--perhaps the sphere we inhabit may be an extinguished or a displaced comet, which heretofore occupied some other place in the regions of space;--which, consequently, was then competent to produce beings very different from those we now behold spread over its surface; seeing that its then position, its nature, must have rendered its productions different from those which at this day it offers to our view. Whatever may be the supposition adopted, plants, animals, men, can only be regarded as productions inherent in and natural to our globe, in the position and in the circumstances in which it is actually found: these productions it would be reasonable to infer would be changed, if this globe by any revolution should happen to shift its situation. What appears to strengthen this hypothesis, is, that on our ball itself, all the productions vary, by reason of its different climates: men, animals, vegetables, minerals, are not the same on every part of it: they vary sometimes in a very sensible manner, at very inconsiderable distances. The elephant is indigenous to, or native of the torrid zone: the rein deer is peculiar to the frozen climates of the North; Indostan is the womb that matures the diamond; we do not find it produced in our own country: the pine-apple grows in the common atmosphere of America; in our climate it is never produced in the open ground, never until art has furnished a sun analogous to that which it requires--the European in his own climate finds not this delicious fruit. Man in different climates varies in his colour, in his size, in his conformation, in his powers, in his industry, in his courage, and in the faculties of his mind. But, what is it that constitutes climate? It is the different position of parts of the same globe, relatively to the sun; positions that suffice to make a sensible variety in its productions. There is, then, sufficient foundation to conjecture that if by any accident our globe should become displaced, all its productions would of necessity be changed; seeing that causes being no longer the same, or no longer acting after the same manner, the effects would necessarily no longer be what they now are, all productions, that they may be able to conserve themselves, or maintain their actual existence, have occasion to co-order themselves with the whole from which they have emanated. Without this they would no longer be in a capacity to subsist: it is this faculty of co-ordering themselves,--this relative adaption, which is called the ORDER OF THE UNIVERSE: the want of it is called CONFUSION. Those productions which are treated as MONSTROUS, are such as are unable to co-order themselves with the general or particular laws of the beings who surround them, or with the whole in which they find themselves placed: they have had the faculty in their formation to accommodate themselves to these laws; but these very laws are opposed to their perfection: for this reason they are unable to subsist. It is thus that by a certain analogy of conformation, which exists between animals of different species, mules are easily produced; but these mules, unable to co-order themselves with the beings that surround them, are not able to reach perfection, consequently cannot propagate their species. Man can live only in air, fish only in water: put the man into the water, the fish into the air, not being able to co-order themselves with the fluids which surround them, these animals will quickly be destroyed. Transport by imagination, a man from our planet into SATURN, his lungs will presently be rent by an atmosphere too rarified for his mode of being, his members will be frozen with the intensity of the cold; he will perish for want of finding elements analogous to his actual existence: transport another into MERCURY, the excess of heat, beyond what his mode of existence can bear, will quickly destroy him. Thus, every thing seems to authorise the conjecture, that the human species is a production peculiar to our sphere, in the position in which it is found: that when this position may happen to change, the human species will, of consequence, either be changed or will be obliged to disappear; seeing that there would not then be that with which man could co-order himself with the whole, or connect himself with that which can enable him to subsist. It is this aptitude in man to co-order himself with the whole, that not only furnishes him with the idea of order, but also makes him exclaim "_whatever is, is right_;" whilst every thing is only that which it can be, as long as the whole is necessarily what it is; whilst it is positively neither good nor bad, as we understand those terms: it is only requisite to displace a man, to make him accuse the universe of confusion. These reflections would appear to contradict the ideas of those, who are willing to conjecture that the other planets, like our own, are inhabited by beings resembling ourselves. But if the LAPLANDER differs in so marked a manner from the HOTTENTOT, what difference ought we not rationally to suppose between an inhabitant of our planet and one of SATURN or of VENUS? However it may be, if we are obliged to recur by imagination to the origin of things, to the infancy of the human species, we may say that it is probable that man was a necessary consequence of the disentangling of our globe; or one of the results of the qualities, of the properties, of the energies, of which it is susceptible in its present position--that he was born male and female--that his existence is co-ordinate with that of the globe, under its present position--that as long as this co-ordination shall subsist, the human specie will conserve himself, will propagate himself, according to the impulse, after the primitive laws, which he has originally received--that if this co-ordination should happen to cease; if the earth, displaced, should cease to receive the same impulse, the same influence, on the part of those causes which actually act upon it, or which give it energy; that then the human species would change, to make place for new beings, suitable to co-order themselves with the state that should succeed to that which we now see subsist. In thus supposing the changes in the position of our globe, the primitive man did, perhaps, differ more from the actual man, than the quadruped differs from the insect. Thus man, the same as every thing else that exists on our planet, as well as in all the others, may be regarded as in a state of continual vicissitude: thus the last term of the existence of man is to us as unknown and as indistinct as the first: there is, therefore, no contradiction in the belief that the species vary incessantly--that to us it is as impossible to know what he will become, as to know what he has been. With respect to those who may ask why Nature does not produce new beings? we may enquire of them in turn, upon what foundation they suppose this fact? What it is that authorizes them to believe this sterility in Nature? Know they if, in the various combinations which she is every instant forming, Nature be not occupied in producing new beings, without the cognizance of these observers? Who has informed them that this Nature is not actually assembling, in her immense elaboratory, the elements suitable to bring to light, generations entirely new, that will have nothing in common with those of the species at present existing? What absurdity then, or what want of just inference would there be, to imagine that the man, the horse, the fish, the bird, will be no more? Are these animals so indispensably requisite to Nature, that without them she cannot continue her eternal course? Does not all change around us? Do we not ourselves change? Is it not evident that the whole universe has not been, in its anterior eternal duration, rigorously the same that it now is? that it is impossible, in its posterior eternal duration, it can be rigidly in the same state that it now is for a single instant? How, then, pretend to divine that, to which the infinite succession of destruction, of reproduction, of combination, of dissolution, of metamorphosis, of change, of transposition, may be able eventually to conduct it by their consequence? Suns encrust themselves, and are extinguished; planets perish and disperse themselves in the vast plains of air; other suns are kindled, and illumine their systems; new planets form themselves, either to make revolutions round these suns, or to describe new routes; and man, an infinitely small portion of the globe, which is itself but an imperceptible point in the immensity of space, vainly believes it is for himself this universe is made; foolishly imagines he ought to be the confident of Nature; confidently flatters himself he is eternal: and calls himself KING OF THE UNIVERSE!!! O man! wilt thou never conceive, that thou art but an ephemeron? All changes in the great macrocosm: nothing remains the same an instant, in the planet thou inhabitest: Nature contains no one constant form, yet thou pretendest thy species can never disappear; that thou shalt be exempted from the universal law, that wills all shall experience change! Alas! In thy actual being, art not thou submitted to continual alterations? Thou, who in thy folly, arrogantly assumest to thyself the title of KING OF NATURE! Thou, who measurest the earth and the heavens! Thou, who in thy vanity imaginest, that the whole was made, because thou art intelligent! There requires but a very slight accident, a single atom to be displaced, to make thee perish; to degrade thee; to ravish from thee this intelligence of which thou appearest so proud. If all the preceding conjectures be refused by those opposed to us; if it be pretended that Nature acts by a certain quantum of immutable and general laws; if it be believed that men, quadrupeds, fish, insects, plants, are from all eternity, and will remain eternally, what they now are: if I say it be contended, that from all eternity the stars have shone, in the immense regions of space, have illuminated the firmament; if it be insisted, we must no more demand why man is such as he appears, then ask why Nature is such as we behold her, or why the world exists? We are no longer opposed to such arguments. Whatever may be the system adopted, it will perhaps reply equally well to the difficulties with which our opponents endeavour to embarrass the way: examined closely, it will be perceived they make nothing against those truths, which we have gathered from experience. It is not given to man to know every thing--it is not given him to know his origin--it is not given him to penetrate into the essence of things, nor to recur to first principles--but it is given him, to have reason, to have honesty, to ingenuously allow he is ignorant of that which he cannot know, and not to substitute unintelligible words, absurd suppositions, for his uncertainty. Thus, we say to those, who to solve difficulties far above their reach, pretend that the human species descended from a first man and a first woman, created diversely according to different creeds;--that we have some ideas of Nature, but that we have none of creation;--that the human mind is incapable of comprehending the period when all was nothing;--that to use words we cannot understand, is only in other terms to acknowledge our ignorance of the powers of Nature;--that we are unable to fathom the means by which she has been capacitated to produce the phenomena we behold. Let us then conclude, that man has no just, no solid reason to believe himself a privileged being in Nature; because he is subject to the same vicissitudes, as all her other productions. His pretended prerogatives have their foundation in error, arising from mistaken opinions concerning his existence. Let him but elevate himself by his thoughts above the globe he inhabits, he will look upon his own species with the same eyes he does all other beings in Nature: He will then clearly perceive that in the same manner that each tree produces its fruit, by reason of its energies, in consequence of its species: so each man acts by reason of his particular energy; that he produces fruit, actions, works, equally necessary: he will feel that the illusion which he anticipates in favour of himself, arises from his being, at one and the same time, a spectator and a part of the universe. He will acknowledge, that the idea of excellence which he attaches to his being, has no other foundation than his own peculiar interest; than the predilection he has in favour of himself--that the doctrine he has broached with such seeming confidence, bottoms itself on a very suspicious foundation, namely IGNORANCE and SELF-LOVE. CHAP. VII. _The Soul and the Spiritual System_. Man, after having gratuitously supposed himself composed of two distinct independent substances, that have no common properties, relatively with each other; has pretended, as we have seen, that that which actuated him interiorly, that motion which is invisible, that impulse which is placed within himself, is essentially different from those which act exteriorly. The first he designated, as we have already said, by the name of a SPIRIT or a SOUL. If however it be asked, what is a spirit? The moderns will reply, that the whole fruit of their metaphysical researches is limited to learning that this motive-power, which they state to be the spring of man's action, is a substance of an unknown nature; so simple, so indivisible, so deprived of extent, so invisible, so impossible to be discovered by the senses, that its parts cannot be separated, even by abstraction or thought. The question then arises, how can we conceive such a substance, which is only the negation of every thing of which we have a knowledge? How form to ourselves an idea of a substance, void of extent, yet acting on our senses; that is to say, on those organs which are material, which have extent? How can a being without extent be moveable; how put matter in action? How can a substance devoid of parts, correspond successively with different parts of space? But a very cogent question presents itself on this occasion: if this distinct substance that is said to form one of the component parts of man, be really what it is reported, and if it be not, it is not what it is described; if it be unknown, if it be not pervious to the senses; if it be invisible, by what means did the metaphysicians themselves become acquainted with it? How did they form ideas of a substance, that taking their own account of it, is not, under any of its circumstances, either directly or by analogy, cognizable to the mind of man? If they could positively achieve this, there would no longer be any mystery in Nature: it would be as easy to conceive the time when all was nothing, when all shall have passed away, to account for the production of every thing we behold, as to dig in a garden or read a lecture.--Doubt would vanish from the human species; there could no longer be any difference of opinion, since all must necessarily be of one mind on a subject so accessible to every enquirer. But it will be replied, the materialist himself admits, the natural philosophers of all ages have admitted, elements and atoms, beings simple and indivisible, of which bodies are composed:--granted; they have no more: they have also admitted that many of these atoms, many of these elements, if not all, are unknown to them: nevertheless, these simple beings, these atoms of the materialist, are not the same thing with the spirit, or the soul of the metaphysician. When the natural philosopher talks of atoms--when he describes them as simple beings, he indicates nothing more than that they are homogeneous, pure, without mixture: but then he allows that they have extent, consequently parts, are separable by thought, although no other natural agent with which he is acquainted is capable of dividing them: that the simple beings of this genus are susceptible of motion--can impart action--receive impulse--are material--are placed in Nature--are indestructible;--that consequently, if he cannot know them from themselves, he can form some idea of them by analogy: thus he has done that intelligibly, which the metaphysician would do unintelligibly: the latter, with a view to render man immortal, finding difficulties to his wish, from seeing that the body decayed--that it has submitted to the great, the universal law--has, to solve the difficulty, to remove the impediment, given him a soul, distinct from the body, which he says is exempted from the action of the general law: to account for this, he has called it a spiritual being, whose properties are the negation of all known properties, consequently inconceivable: had he, however, had recourse to the atoms of the former--had he made this substance the last possible term of the division of matter--it would at least have been intelligible; it would also have been immortal, since, according to the reasonings of all men, whether metaphysicians, theologians, or natural philosophers, an atom is an indestructible element, that must exist to all eternity. All men are agreed in this position, that motion is the successive change of the relations of one body with other bodies, or with the different parts of space. If that which is called _spirit_ be susceptible of communicating or receiving motion--if it acts--if it gives play to the organs of body--to produce these effects, it necessarily follows that this being changes successively its relation, its tendency, its correspondence, the position of its parts, either relatively to the different points of space, or to the different organs of the body which it puts in action: but to change its relation with space, with the organs to which it gives impulse, it follows of necessity that this spirit most have extent, solidity, consequently distinct parts: whenever a substance possesses these qualities, it is what we call MATTER, it can no longer be regarded as a simple pure being, in the sense attached to it by the moderns, or by theologians. Thus it will be seen, that those who, to conquer insurmountable difficulties, have supposed in man an immaterial substance, distinguished from his body, have not thoroughly understood themselves; indeed they have done nothing more than imagined a negative quality, of which they cannot have any correct idea: matter alone is capable of acting on our senses; without this action nothing would be capable of making itself known to us. They have not seen that a being without extent is neither in a capacity to move itself, nor has the capability of communicating motion to the body; since such a being, having no parts, has not the faculty of changing its relation, or its distance, relatively to other bodies, nor of exciting motion in the human body, which is itself material. That which is called our soul moves itself with us; now motion is a property of matter--this soul gives impulse to the arm; the arm, moved by it, makes an impression, a blow, that follows the general law of motion: in this case, the force remaining the same, if the mass was two-fold, the blow should be double. This soul again evinces its materiality in the invincible obstacles it encounters on the part of the body. If the arm be moved by its impulse when nothing opposes it, yet this arm can no longer move, when it is charged with a weight beyond its strength. Here then is a mass of matter that annihilates the impulse given by a spiritual cause, which spiritual cause having no analogy with matter, ought not to find more difficulty in moving the whole world, than in moving a single atom, nor an atom, than the universe. From this, it is fair to conclude, such a substance is a chimera--a being of the imagination. That it required a being differently endowed, differently constituted, to set matter in motion--to create all the phenomena we behold: nevertheless, it is a being the metaphysicians have made the contriver, the Author of Nature. As man, in all his speculations, takes himself for the model, he no sooner imagined a spirit within himself, than giving it extent, he made it universal; then ascribed to it all those causes with which his ignorance prevents him from becoming acquainted, thus he identified himself with the Author of Nature--then availed himself of the supposition to explain the connection of the soul with the body: his self-complacency prevented his perceiving that he was only enlarging the circle of his errors, by pretending to understand that which it is more than possible he will never be permitted to know; his self-love prevented him from feeling, that whenever he punished another for not thinking as he did, that he committed the greatest injustice, unless he was satisfactorily able to prove that other wrong, and himself right: that if he himself was obliged to have recourse to hypothesis--to gratuitous suppositions, whereon to found his doctrine, that from the very fallibility of his nature, these might be erroneous: thus GALLILEO was persecuted, because the metaphysicians, the theologians of his day, chose to make others believe what it was evident they did not themselves understand. As soon as I feel an impulse, or experience motion, I am under the necessity to acknowledge extent, solidity, density, impenetrability in the substance I see move, or from which I receive impulse: thus, when action is attributed to any cause whatever, I am obliged to consider it MATERIAL. I may be ignorant of its individual nature, of its mode of action, or of its generic properties; but I cannot deceive myself in general properties, which are common to all matter: this ignorance will only be increased, when I shall take that for granted of a being, of which from that moment I am precluded by what I admit from forming any idea, which moreover deprives it completely either of the faculty of moving itself, giving an impulse, or acting. Thus, according to the received idea of the term, a spiritual substance that moves itself, that gives motion to matter, and that acts, implies a contradiction, that necessarily infers a total impossibility. The partizans of spirituality believe they answer the difficulties they have accumulated, by asserting that "_the soul is entire--is whole under each point of its extent_." If an absurd answer will solve difficulties, they certainly have done it. But let us examine this reply:--it will be found that this indivisible part which is called soul, however insensible or however minute, must yet remain something: then an infinity of unextended substances, or the same substance having no dimensions, repeated an infinity of times, would constitute a substance that has extent: this cannot be what they mean, because according to this principle, the human soul would then be as infinite as the Author of Nature; seeing that they have stated this to be a being without extent, who is an infinity of times whole in each part of the universe. But when there shall appear as much solidity in the answer as there is a want of it, it must be acknowledged that in whatever manner the spirit or the soul finds itself in its extent, when the body moves forward the soul does not remain behind; if so, it has a quality in common with the body, peculiar to matter; since it is conveyed from place to place jointly with the body. Thus, when even the soul should be admitted to be immaterial, what conclusion must be drawn? Entirely submitted to the motion of the body, without this body it would remain dead and inert. This soul would only be part of a two-fold machine, necessarily impelled forward by a concatenation, or connection with the whole. It would resemble a bird, which a child conducts at its pleasure, by the string with which it is bound. Thus, it is for want of consulting experience, by not attending to reason, that man has darkened his ideas upon the concealed principle of his motion. If, disentangled from prejudice--if, destitute of gratuitous suppositions--if, throwing aside error, he would contemplate his soul, or the moving principle that acts within him, he would be convinced that it forms a part of its body, that it cannot be distinguished from it, but by abstraction; that it is only the body itself, considered relatively with some of its functions, or with those faculties of which its nature, or its peculiar organization, renders it susceptible:--he will perceive that this soul is obliged to undergo the same changes as the body; that it is born with it; that it expands itself with it; that like the body, it passes through a state of infancy, a period of weakness, a season of inexperience; that it enlarges itself, that it strengthens itself, in the same progression; that like the body, it arrives at an adult age or reaches maturity; that it is then, and not till then, it obtains the faculty of fulfilling certain functions; that it is in this stage, and in no other, that it enjoys reason; that it displays more or less wit, judgment, and manly activity; that like the body, it is subject to those vicissitudes which exterior causes obliges it to undergo by their influence; that, conjointly with the body, it suffers, enjoys, partakes of its pleasures, shares its pains, is sound when the body is healthy, and diseased when the body is oppressed with sickness; that like the body, it is continually modified by the different degrees of density in the atmosphere; by the variety of the seasons, and by the various properties of the aliments received into the stomach: in short, he would be obliged to acknowledge that at some periods it manifests visible signs of torpor, stupefaction, decrepitude, and death. In despite of this analogy, or rather this continual identity, of the soul with the body, man has been desirous of distinguishing their essence; he has therefore made the soul an inconceivable being: but in order that he might form to himself some idea of it, he was, notwithstanding, obliged to have recourse to material beings, and to their manner of acting. The word _spirit_, therefore, presents to the mind no other ideas than those of breathing, of respiration, of wind. Thus, when it is said the _soul is a spirit_, it really means nothing more than that its mode of action is like that of breathing: which though invisible in itself, or acting without being seen, nevertheless produces very visible effects. But breath, it is acknowledged, is a material cause; it is allowed to be air modified; it is not, therefore, a simple or pure substance, such as the moderns designate under the name of SPIRIT. It is rather singular that in the Hebrew, the Greek, and the Latin, the synonymy, or corresponding term for spirit should signify _breath_. The metaphysicians themselves can best say why they have adopted such a word, to designate the substance they have distinguished from matter: some of them, fearful they should not have distinct beings enough, have gone farther, and compounded man of three substances, BODY, SOUL, and INTELLECT. Although the word _spirit_ is so very ancient among men, the sense attached to it by the moderns is quite new: the idea of spirituality, as admitted at this day, is a recent production of the imagination. Neither PYTHAGORAS nor PLATO, however heated their brain, however decided their taste for the marvellous, appear to have understood by spirit an immaterial substance, or one without extent, devoid of parts; such as that of which the moderns have formed the human soul, the concealed author of motion. The ancients, by the word spirit, were desirous to define matter of an extreme subtilty, of a purer quality than that which acted grossly on our senses. In consequence, some have regarded the soul as an ethereal substance; others as igneous matter; others again have compared it to light. DEMOCRITUS made it consist in motion, consequently gave it a manner of existence. ARISTOXENES, who was himself a musician, made it harmony. ARISTOTLE regarded the soul as the moving faculty, upon which depended the motion of living bodies. The earliest doctors of Christianity had no other idea of the soul, than that it was material. TERTULLIAN, ARNOBIUS, CLEMENT of ALEXANDRIA, ORIGEN, SAINT JUSTIN, IRENAEUS, have all of them discoursed upon it; but have never spoken of it other than as a corporeal substance--as matter. It was reserved for their successors at a great distance of time, to make the human soul and the soul of the world _pure spirits_; that is to say, immaterial substances, of which it is impossible they could form any accurate idea: by degrees this incomprehensible doctrine of spirituality, conformable without doubt to the views of those who make it a principle to annihilate reason, prevailed over the others: But it might be fairly asked, if the pretended proofs of this doctrine owe themselves to a man, who on a much more comprehensible point has been proved in error; if, on that which time has shewn was accessible to man's reason, the great champion in support of this dogma was deceived; are we not bound to examine, with the most rigorous investigation, the reasonings, the evidence, of one who was the decided, the proven child of enthusiasm and error? Yet DESCARTES, to whose sublime errors the world is indebted for the Newtonian system, although before him the soul had been considered spiritual, was the first who established that, "_that which thinks ought to be distinguished from matter_;" from whence he concludes rather hastily, that the soul, or that which thinks in man, is a spirit; or a simple indivisible substance. Perhaps it would have been more logical, more consistent with reason, to have said, since man, who is matter, who has no idea but of matter, enjoys the faculty of thought, matter can think; that is, it is susceptible of that particular modification called thought. However this may be, this doctrine was believed divine, supernatural, because it was inconceivable to man. Those who dared believe even that which was believed before; namely, _that the soul was material_, were held as rash inconsiderate madmen, or else treated as enemies to the welfare and happiness of the human race. When man had once renounced experience; when he had abjured his reason; when he had joined the banner of this enthusiastic novelty; he did nothing more, day after day, than subtilize the delirium, the ravings of his imagination: he pleased himself by continually sinking deeper into the most unfathomable depths of error: he felicitated himself on his discoveries; on his pretended knowledge; in an exact ratio as his understanding became enveloped in the mists of darkness, environed with the clouds of ignorance. Thus, in consequence of man's reasoning upon false principles; of having relinquished the evidence of his senses; the moving principle within him, the concealed author of motion, has been made a mere chimera, a mere being of the imagination, because he has divested it of all known properties; because he has attached to it nothing but properties which, from the very nature of his existence, he is incapacitated to comprehend. The doctrine of spirituality, such as it now exists, offers nothing but vague ideas; or rather is the absense of all ideas. What does it present to the mind, but a substance which possesses nothing of which our senses enable us to have a knowledge? Can it be truth that a man is able to figure to himself a being not material, having neither extent nor parts, which, nevertheless, acts upon matter without having any point of contact, any kind of analogy with it; and which itself receives the impulse of matter by means of material organs, which announce to it the presence of other beings? Is it possible to conceive the union of the soul with the body; to comprehend how this material body can bind, enclose, constrain, determine a fugitive being which escapes all our senses? Is it honest, is it plain dealing, to solve these difficulties, by saying there is a mystery in them; that they are the effects of a power, more inconceivable than the human soul; than its mode of acting, however concealed from our view? When to resolve these problems, man is obliged to have recourse to miracles or to make the Divinity interfere, does he not avow his own ignorance? When, notwithstanding the ignorance he is thus obliged to avow by availing himself of the divine agency, he tells us, this immaterial substance, this soul, shall experience the action of the element of fire, which he allows to be material; when he confidently says this soul shall be burnt; shall suffer in purgatory; have we not a right to believe, that either he has a design to deceive us, or else that he does not himself understand that which he is so anxious we should take upon his word? Let us not then be surprised at those subtile hypotheses, as ingenious as they are unsatisfactory, to which theological prejudice has obliged the most profound modern speculators to recur; when they have undertaken to reconcile the spirituality of the soul, with the physical action of material beings, on this incorporeal substance; its re-action upon these beings; its union with the body. When the human mind permits itself to be guided by authority without proof, to be led forward by enthusiasm; when it renounces the evidence of its senses; what can it do more than sink into error? Let those who doubt this, read the metaphysical romances of LEIBNITZ, DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, CUDWORTH, and many others: let them coolly examine the ingenious, but fanciful systems entitled _the pre-established harmony of occasional causes; physical pre-motion, &c._ If man wishes to form to himself clear, perspicuous ideas of his soul, let him throw himself back on his experience--let him renounce his prejudices--let him avoid theological conjecture--let him tear the bandages which he has been taught to think necessary, but with which he has been blind-folded, only to confound his reason. If it be wished to draw man to virtue, let the natural philosopher, let the anatomist, let the physician, unite their experience; let them compare their observations, in order to show what ought to be thought of a substance, so disguised, so hidden by absurdities, as not easily to be known. Their discoveries may perhaps teach moralists the true motive-power that ought to influence the actions of man--legislators, the true motives that should actuate him, that should excite him to labour to the welfare of society--sovereigns, the means of rendering their subjects truly happy; of giving solidity to the power of the nations committed to their charge. Physical souls have physical wants, and demand physical happiness. These are real, are preferable objects, to that variety of fanciful chimeras, each in its turn giving place to the other, with which the mind of man has been fed during so many ages. Let us, then, labour to perfect the morality of man; let us make it agreeable to him; let us excite in him an ardent thirst for its purity: we shall presently see his morals become better, himself become happier; his soul become calm and serene; his will determined to virtue, by the natural, by the palpable motives held out to him. By the diligence, by the care which legislators shall bestow on natural philosophy, they will form citizens of sound understandings; robust and well constituted; who, finding themselves happy, will be themselves accessary to that useful impulse so necessary for their soul. When the body is suffering, when nations are unhappy, the soul cannot be in a proper state. _Mens sana in corpore sano_, a sound mind in a sound body, will be always able to make a good citizen. The more man reflects, the more he will be convinced that the soul, very far from being distinguished from the body, is only the body itself, considered relatively to some of its functions, or to some of the modes of existing or acting, of which it is susceptible whilst it enjoys life. Thus, the soul is man, considered relatively to the faculty he has of feeling, of thinking, of acting in a mode resulting from his peculiar nature; that is to say, from his properties, from his particular organization: from the modifications, whether durable or transitory, which the beings who act upon him cause his machine to undergo. Those who have distinguished the soul from the body, appear only to have distinguished their brain from themselves. Indeed, the brain is the common center, where all the nerves, distributed through every part of the body, meet and blend themselves: it is by the aid of this interior organ that all those operations are performed which are attributed to the soul: it is the impulse, or the motion, communicated to the nerve, which modifies the brain: in consequence, it re-acts, or gives play to the bodily organs; or rather it acts upon itself, and becomes capable of producing within itself a great variety of motion, which has been designated _intellectual faculties_. From this it may be seen that some philosophers have been desirous to make a spiritual substance of the brain. It is evidently nothing but ignorance that has given birth to and accredited this system, which embraces so little, either of the natural or the rational. It is from not having studied himself, that man has supposed he was compounded with an agent, essentially different from his body: in examining this body, he will find that it is quite useless to recur to hypothesis for the explanation of the various phenomena it presents to his contemplation; that hypothesis can do nothing more than lead him out of the right road to the information after which he seeks. What obscures this question, arises from this, that man cannot see himself: indeed, for this purpose, that would be requisite which is impossible; namely, that he could he at one and the same moment both within and without himself: he may be compared to an Eolian harp, that issues sounds of itself, and should demand what it is that causes it to give them forth? It does not perceive that the sensitive quality of its chords causes the air to brace them; that being so braced, it is rendered sonorous by every gust of wind with which it happens to come in contact. When a theologian, obstinately bent on admitting into man two substances essentially different, is asked why he multiplies beings without necessity? he will reply, because _"thought cannot be a property of matter."_ If, then, it be enquired of him, _cannot God give to matter the faculty of thought?_ he will answer, _"no! seeing that God cannot do impossible things!"_ According to his principles, it is as impossible that spirit or thought can produce matter, as it is impossible that matter can produce spirit or thought: it might, therefore, be concluded against him, that the world was not made by a spirit, any more than a spirit was made by the world. But in this case, does not the theologian, according to his own assertion, acknowledge himself to be the true atheist? Does he not, in fact, circumscribe the attributes of the Deity, and deny his power, to suit his own purpose? Yet these men demand implicit belief in doctrines, which they are obliged to maintain by the most contradictory assertions. The more experience we collect, the more we shall be convinced that the word _spirit_, in its present received usage, conveys no one sense that is tangible, either to ourselves or to those that invented it; consequently cannot be of the least use, either in physics or morals. What modern metaphysicians believe and understand by the word, is nothing more than an _occult_ power, imagined to explain _occult_ qualities and actions, but which, in fact, explains nothing. Savage nations admit of spirits, to account to themselves for those effects, which to them appear marvellous, as long as their ignorance knows not the cause to which they ought to be attributed. In attributing to spirits the phenomena of Nature, as well as those of the human body, do we, in fact, do any thing more than reason like savages? Man has filled Nature with spirits, because he has almost always been ignorant of the true causes of those effects by which he was astonished. Not being acquainted with the powers of Nature, he has supposed her to be animated by a _great spirit_: not understanding the energy of the human frame, he has in like manner conjectured it to be animated by a _minor spirit_: from this it would appear, that whenever he wished to indicate the unknown cause of a phenomena, he knew not how to explain in a natural manner, he had recourse to the word _spirit_. In short, _spirit_ was a term by which he solved all his doubts, and cleared up his ignorance to himself. It was according to these principles that when the AMERICANS first beheld the terrible effects of gunpowder, they ascribed the cause to wrathful spirits, to their enraged divinities: it was by adopting these principles, that our ancestors believed in a plurality of gods, in ghosts, in genii, &c. Pursuing the same track, we ought to attribute to spirits gravitation, electricity, magnetism, &c. &c. It is somewhat singular, that priests have in all ages so strenuously upheld those systems which time has exploded; that they have appeared to be either the most crafty or the most ignorant of men. Where are now the priests of Apollo, of Juno, of the Sun, and a thousand others? Yet these are the men, who in all times have persecuted those who have been the first to give natural explanations of the phenomena of Nature, as witness ANAXAGORAS, ARISTOTLE, GALLILEO, DESCARTES, &c. &c. CHAP. VIII. _The Intellectual Faculties derived from the Faculty of Feeling_. To convince ourselves that the faculties called _intellectual_, are only certain modes of existence, or determinate manners of acting, which result from the peculiar organization of the body, we have only to analyze them; we shall then see that all the operations which are attributed to the soul, are nothing more than certain modifications of the body; of which a substance that is without extent, that has no parts, that is immaterial, is not susceptible. The first faculty we behold in the living man, and that from which all his others flow, is _feeling_: however inexplicable this faculty may appear, on a first view, if it be examined closely, it will be found to be a consequence of the essence, or a result of the properties of organized beings; the same as _gravity, magnetism, elasticity, electricity_, &c. result from the essence or nature of some others. We shall also find these last phenomena are not less inexplicable than that of feeling. Nevertheless, if we wish to define to ourselves a clear and precise idea of it, we shall find that feeling is a particular manner of being moved--a mode of receiving an impulse peculiar to certain organs of animated bodies, which is occasioned by the presence of a material object that acts upon these organs, and transmit the impulse or shock to the brain. Man only feels by the aid of nerves dispersed through his body; which is itself, to speak correctly, nothing more than a great nerve; or may be said to resemble a large tree, of which the branches experience the action of the root, communicated through the trunk. In man the nerves unite and lose themselves in the brain; that intestine is the true seat of feeling: like the spider in the centre of his web, it is quickly warned of all the changes that happen to the body, even at the extremities to which it sends its filaments and branches. Experience enables us to ascertain, that man ceases to feel in those parts of his body of which the communication with the brain is intercepted; he feels very little, or not at all, whenever this organ is itself deranged or affected in too lively a manner. A proof of this is afforded in the transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris: they inform us of a man who had his scull taken off, in the room of which his brain was recovered with skin; in proportion as a pressure was made by the hand on his brain, the man fell into a kind of insensibility, which deprived him of all feeling. BARTOLIN says, the brain of a man is twice as big as that of an ox. This observation had been already made by ARISTOTLE. In the dead body of an idiot dissected by WILLIS, the brain was found smaller than ordinary: he says the greatest difference he found between the parts of the body of this idiot, and those of wiser men, was, that the plexus of the intercostal nerves, which is the mediator between the brain and the heart, was extremely small, accompanied by a less number of nerves than usual. According to WILLIS, the ape is, of all animals, that which has the largest brain, relatively to his size: he is also, after man, that which has the most intelligence: this is further confirmed, by the name he bears in the soil, to which he is indigenous, which is _ourang outang_, or the man beast. There is, therefore, every reason to believe that it is entirely in the brain, that consists the difference, that is found not only between man and beasts, but also between the man of wit, and the fool: between the thinking man, and he who is ignorant; between the man of sound understanding, and the madman: a multitude of experience, serves to prove, that those persons who are most accustomed to use their intellectual faculties, have their brain more extended than others: the same has been remarked of watermen, that they have arms much longer than other men. However this may be, the sensibility of the brain, and all its parts, is a fact: if it be asked, whence comes this property? We shall reply, it is the result of an arrangement, of a combination, peculiar to the animal: it is thus that milk, bread, wine, change themselves in the substance of man, who is a sensible being: this insensible matter becomes sensible, in combining itself with a sensible whole. Some philosophers think that sensibility is a universal quality of matter: in this case, it would be useless to seek from whence this property is derived, as we know it by its effects. If this hypothesis be admitted, in like manner as two kinds of motion are distinguished in Nature, the one called _live_ force, the other _dead_, or _inert_ force, two sorts of sensibility will be distinguished, the one active or alive, the other inert or dead. Then to animalize a substance, is only to destroy the obstacles that prevent its being active or sensible. In fact, sensibility is either a quality which communicates itself like motion, and which is acquired by combination; or this sensibility is a property inherent in all matter: in both, or either case, an unextended being, without parts, such as the human soul is said to be, can neither be the cause of it nor submitted to its operation; but we may fairly conclude, that all the parts of Nature enjoy the capability to arrive at animation; the obstacle is only in the state, not in the quality. Life is the perfection of Nature: she has no parts which do not tend to it--which do not attain it by the same means. Life in an insect, a dog, a man, has no other difference, than that this act is more perfect, relatively to ourselves in proportion to the structure of the organs: if, therefore, it be asked, what is requisite to animate a body? we reply, it needs no foreign aid; it is sufficient that the power of Nature be joined to its organization. The conformation, the arrangement, the texture, the delicacy of the organs, as well exterior as interior, which compose men and animals, render their parts extremely mobile, or make their machine susceptible of being moved with great facility. In a body, which is only a heap of fibres, a mass of nerves, contiguous one to the other, united in a common center, always ready to act; in a whole, composed of fluids and solids, of which the parts are in equilibrium, the smallest touching each other, are active in their motion, communicating reciprocally, alternately and in succession, the impression, oscillations, and shocks they receive; in such a composition, it is not surprising that the slightest impulse propagates itself with celerity; that the shocks excited in its remotest parts, make themselves quickly felt in the brain, whose delicate texture renders it susceptible of being itself very easily modified. Air, fire, water, agents the most inconstant, possessing the most rapid motion, circulate continually in the fibres, incessantly penetrate the nerves: without doubt these contribute to that incredible celerity with which the brain is acquainted with what passes at the extremities of the body. Notwithstanding the great mobility with which man's organization renders him susceptible, although exterior as well as interior causes are continually acting upon him, he does not always feel in a distinct, in a decided manner, the impulse given to his senses: indeed, he does not feel it, until it has produced some change, or given some shock to his brain. Thus, although completely environed by air, he does not feel its action, until it is so modified, as to strike with a sufficient degree of force on his organs; to penetrate his skin, through which his brain is warned of its presence. Thus, during a profound and tranquil sleep, undisturbed by any dream, man ceases to feel. In short, notwithstanding the continued motion that agitates his frame, man does not appear to feel, when this motion acts in a convenient order; he does not perceive a state of health, but he discovers a state of grief or sickness; because, in the first, his brain does not receive too lively an impulse, whilst in the others, his nerves are contracted, shocked, and agitated, with violent, with disorderly motion: these communicating with his brain, give notice that some cause acts strongly upon them--impels them in a manner that bears no analogy with their natural habit: this constitutes, in him, that peculiar mode of existing which he calls _grief_. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that exterior objects produce very considerable changes on his body, without his perceiving them at the moment. Often, in the heat of battle, the soldier perceives not that he is dangerously wounded, because, at the time, the rapidity, the multiplicity of impetuous motion that assails his brain, does not permit him to distinguish the particular change a part of his body has undergone by the wound. In short, when a great number of causes are simultaneously acting on him with too much vivacity, he sinks under their accumulated pressure,--he swoons--he loses his senses--he is deprived of feeling. In general, feeling only obtains, when the brain can distinguish distinctly, the impressions made on the organs with which it has communication; it is the distinct shock, the decided modification man undergoes, that constitutes _conscience_. Doctor Clarke, says to this effect: "Conscience is the act of reflecting, by means of which I know that I think, and that my thoughts, or my actions belong to me, and not to another." From this it will appear, that _feeling_ is a mode of being, a marked change, produced on our brain, occasioned by the impulse communicated to our organs, whether by interior or exterior agents, by which it is modified either in a durable or transient manner: it is not always requisite that man's organs should be moved by an exterior object, to enable him to feel that he should be conscious of the changes effected in him: he can feel them within himself by means of an interior impulse; his brain is then modified, or rather he renews within himself the anterior modifications. We are not to be astonished that the brain should be necessarily warned of the shocks, of the impediments, of the changes that may happen to so complicated a machine as the human body, in which, notwithstanding all the parts are contiguous to the brain, and concentrate themselves in this brain, and are by their essence in a continual state of action and re-action. When a man experiences the pains of the gout, he is conscious of them; in other words, he feels interiorly, that it has produced very marked, very distinct changes in him, without his perceiving, that he has received an impulse from any exterior cause; nevertheless, if he will recur to the true source of these changes, he will find that they have been wholly produced by exterior agents: they have been the consequence, either of his temperament; of the organization received from his parents; of the aliments with which his frame has been nourished; besides a thousand trivial, inappreciable causes, which congregating themselves by degrees produce in him the gouty humour; the effect of which is to make him feel in an acute and very lively manner. The pain of the gout engenders in his brain an idea, so modifies it that it acquires the faculty of representing to itself, of reiterating as it were, this pain when even he shall be no longer tormented with the gout: his brain, by a series of motion interiorly excited, is again placed in a state analogous to that in which it was when he really experienced this pain: but if he had never felt it, he would never have been in a capacity to form to himself any just idea of its excruciating torments. The visible organs of man's body, by the intervention of which his brain is modified, take the name of _senses_. The various modifications which his brain receives by the aid of these senses, assumes a variety of names. _Sensation_, _perception_, and _idea_, are terms that designate nothing more than the changes produced in this interior organ, in consequence of impressions made on the exterior organs by bodies acting on them: these changes considered by themselves, are called _sensations_; they adopt the term _perception_ when the brain is warned of their presence; _ideas_ is that state of them in which the brain is able to ascribe them to the objects by which they have been produced. Every _sensation_, then, is nothing more than the shock given to the organs, every _perception_ is this shock propagated to the brain; every _idea_ is the image of the object to which the sensation and the perception is to be ascribed. From whence it will be seen, that if the senses be not moved, there can neither be sensations, perceptions, nor ideas: this will be proved to those, who can yet permit themselves to doubt so demonstrable and striking a truth. It is the extreme mobility of which man is capable, owing to his peculiar organization, that distinguishes him from other beings that are called insensible or inanimate; the different degrees of this mobility, of which the individuals of his species are susceptible, discriminate them from each other; make that incredible variety, that infinity of difference which is to be found, as well in their corporeal faculties, as in those which are mental or intellectual. From this mobility, more or less remarkable in each human being, results wit, sensibility, imagination, taste, &c.: for the present, however, let us follow the operation of the senses; let us examine in what manner they are acted upon, and are modified by exterior objects:--we will afterwards scrutinize the re-action of the interior organ or brain. The eyes are very delicate, very movable organs, by means of which the sensation of light or colour is experienced: these give to the brain a distinct perception, in consequence of which, man forms an idea, generated by the action of luminous or coloured bodies: as soon as the eyelids are opened, the retina is affected in a peculiar manner; the fluid, the fibres, the nerves, of which they are composed, are excited by shocks which they communicate to the brain; to which they delineate the images of the bodies from which they have received the impulse; by this means, an idea is acquired of the colour, the size, the form, the distance of these bodies: it is thus that may be explained the mechanism of _sight_. The mobility and the elasticity of which the skin is rendered susceptible, by the fibres and nerves which form its texture, accounts for the rapidity with which this envelope to the human body is affected when applied to any other body; by their agency, the brain has notice of its presence, of its extent, of its roughness, of its smoothness, of its surface, of its pressure of its ponderosity, &c. Qualities from which the brain derives distinct perceptions, which breed in it a diversity of ideas; it is this that constitutes the _touch_ or _feeling_. The delicacy of the membrane by which the interior of the nostrils is covered, renders them easily susceptible of irritation, even by the invisible and impalpable corpuscles that emanate from odorous bodies: by these means sensations are excited, the brain has perceptions, and generates ideas: it is this that forms the sense of _smelling_. The mouth, filled with nervous, sensible, movable, irritable glands, saturated with juices suitable to the dissolution of saline substances, is affected in a very lively manner by the aliments which pass through it for the nourishment of the body; these glands transmit to the brain the impressions received: perceptions are of consequence; ideas follow: it is from this mechanism that results _taste_. The ear, whose conformation fits it to receive the various impulses of air, diversely modified, communicates to the brain the shocks or sensations; these breed the perception of sound, and generate the idea of sonorous bodies: it is this that constitutes _hearing_. Such are the only means by which man receives sensations, perceptions, and ideas. These successive modifications of his brain are effects produced by objects that give impulse to his senses; they become themselves causes, producing in his soul new modifications, which are denominated _thought, reflection, memory, imagination, judgment, will, action_; the basis, however, of all these is _sensation_. To form a precise notion of _thought_, it will be requisite to examine, step by step, what passes in man during the presence of any object whatever. Suppose for a moment this object to be a peach: this fruit makes, at the first view, two different impressions on his eyes; that is to say, it produces two modifications, which are transmitted to the brain, which on this occasion experiences two new perceptions, or has two new ideas or modes of existence, designated by the terms _colour_ and _rotundity_; in consequence, he has an idea of a body possessing roundness and colour: if he places his hand on this fruit, the organ of feeling having been set in action, his hand experiences three new impressions, which are called _softness, coolness, weight_, from whence result three new perceptions in the brain, he has consequently three new ideas: if he approximates this peach to his nose, the organ of _smelling_ receives an impulse, which, communicated to the brain, a new perception arises, by which he acquires a new idea, called _odour_: if he carries this fruit to his mouth, the organ of taste becomes affected in a very lively manner: this impulse communicated to the brain, is followed by a perception that generates in him the idea of _flavour_. In re-uniting all these impressions, or these various modifications of his organs, which it have been consequently transmitted to his brain; that is to say, in combining the different sensations, perceptions, and ideas, that result from the impulse he has received, he has an idea of a whole, which he designates by the name of a peach, with which he can then occupy his thoughts. From this it is sufficiently proved that thought has a commencement, a duration, an end; or rather a generation, a succession, a dissolution, like all the other modifications of matter; like them, thought is excited, is determined, is increased, is divided, is compounded, is simplified, &c. If, therefore, the soul, or the principle that thinks, be indivisible; how does it happen, that this soul has the faculty of memory, or of forgetfulness; is capacitated to think successively, to divide, to abstract, to combine, to extend its ideas, to retain them, or to lose them? How can it cease to think? If forms appear divisible in matter, it is only in considering them by abstraction, after the method, of geometricians; but this divisibility of form exists not in Nature, in which there is neither a point, an atom, nor form perfectly regular; it must therefore be concluded, that the forms of matter are not less indivisible than thought. What has been said is sufficient to show the generation of sensations, of perceptions, of ideas, with their association, or connection in the brain: it will be seen that these various modifications are nothing more than the consequence of successive impulses, which the exterior organs transmit to the interior organ, which enjoys the faculty of thought, that is to say, to feel in itself the different modifications it has received, or to perceive the various ideas which it has generated; to combine them, to separate them, to extend them, to abridge them, to compare them, to renew them, &c. From whence it will be seen, that thought is nothing more than the perception of certain modifications, which the brain either gives to itself, or has received from exterior objects. Indeed, not only the interior organ perceives the modifications it receives from without, but again it has the faculty of modifying itself; of considering the changes which take place in it, the motion by which it is agitated in its peculiar operations, from which it imbibes new perceptions and new ideas. It is the exercise of this power to fall back upon itself, that is called _reflection_. From this it will appear, that for man to think and to reflect, is to feel, or perceive within himself the impressions, the sensations, the ideas, which have been furnished to his brain by those objects which give impulse to his senses, with the various changes which his brain produced on itself in consequence. _Memory_ is the faculty which the brain has of renewing in itself the modifications it has received, or rather, to restore itself to a state similar to that in which it has been placed by the sensations, the perceptions, the ideas, produced by exterior objects, in the exact order it received them, without any new action on the part of these objects, or even when these objects are absent; the brain perceives that these modifications assimilate with those it formerly experienced in the presence of the objects to which it relates, or attributes them. Memory is faithful, when these modifications are precisely the same; it is treacherous, when they differ from those which the organs have exteriorly experienced. _Imagination_ in man is only the faculty which the brain has of modifying itself, or of forming to itself new perceptions, upon the model of those which it has anteriorly received through the action of exterior objects on the senses. The brain, then, does nothing more than combine ideas which it has already formed, which it recalls to itself, from which it forms a whole, or a collection of modifications, which it has not received, which exists no-where but in itself, although the individual ideas, or the parts of which this ideal whole is composed, have been previously communicated to it, in consequence of the impulse given to the senses by exterior objects: it is thus man forms to himself the idea of _centaurs_, or a being composed of a man and a horse, of _hyppogriffs_, or a being composed of a horse with wings and a griffin, besides a thousand other objects, equally ridiculous. By memory, the brain renews in itself the sensations, the perceptions, and the ideas which it has received or generated; represents to itself the objects which have actually moved its organs. By imagination it combines them variously: forms objects in their place which have not moved its organs, although it is perfectly acquainted with the elements or ideas of which it composes them. It is thus that man, by combining a great number of ideas borrowed from himself, such as justice, wisdom, goodness, intelligence, &c. by the aid of imagination, has formed various ideal beings, or imaginary wholes, which he has called JUPITER, JUNO, BRAMAH, SATURN, &c. _Judgment_ is the faculty which the brain possesses of comparing with each other the modifications it receives, the ideas it engenders, or which it has the power of awakening within itself, to the end that it may discover their relations, or their effects. _Will_ is a modification of the brain, by which it is disposed to action, that is to say, to give such an impulse to the organs of the body, as can induce to act in a manner, that will procure for itself what is requisite to modify it in a mode analogous to its own existence, or to enable it to avoid that by which it can be injured. To _will_ is to be disposed to _action_. The exterior objects, or the interior ideas, which give birth to this disposition are called _motives_, because they are the springs or movements which determine it to act, that is to say, which give play to the organs of the body. Thus, _voluntary actions_ are the motion of the body, determined by the modification of the brain. Fruit hanging on a tree, through the agency of the visual organs, modifies the brain in such a manner as to dispose the arm to stretch itself forth to cull it; again, it modifies it in another manner, by which it excites the hand to carry it to the mouth. All the modifications which the interior organ or the brain receives, all the sensations, all the perceptions, all the ideas that are generated by the objects which give impulse to the senses, or which it renews within itself by its own peculiar faculties, are either favourable or prejudicial to man's mode of existence, whether that be transitory or habitual: they dispose the interior organ to action, which it exercises by reason of its own peculiar energy: this action is not, however, the same in all the individuals of the human species, depending much on their respective temperaments. From hence the PASSIONS have their birth: these are more or less violent; they are, however, nothing more than the motion of the will, determined by the objects which give it activity; consequently composed of the analogy or of the discordance which is found between these objects, man's peculiar mode of existence, and the force of his temperament. From this it results, that the passions are modes of existence or modifications of the brain; which either attract or repel those objects by which man is surrounded; that consequently they are submitted in their action to the physical laws of attraction and repulsion. The faculty of perceiving or of being modified, as well by itself as exterior objects which the brain enjoys is sometimes designated by the term _understanding_. To the assemblage of the various faculties of which this interior organ is susceptible, is applied the name of _intelligence_. To a determined mode in which the brain exercises the faculties peculiar to itself, is given the appellation of _reason_. The dispositions or the modifications of the brain, some of them constant, others transitory, which give impulse to the beings of the human species, causing them to act, are styled _wit, wisdom, goodness, prudence, virtue, &c_. In short, as there will be an opportunity presently to prove, all the intellectual faculties--that is to say, all the modes of action attributed to the soul, may be reduced to the modifications, to the qualities, to the modes of existence, to the changes produced by the motion of the brain; which is visibly in man the seat of feeling, the principle of all his actions. These modifications are to be attributed to the objects that strike on his senses; of which the impression is transmitted to the brain, or rather to the ideas, which the perceptions caused by the action of these objects on his senses have there generated, and which it has the faculty to re-produce. This brain moves itself in its turn, re-acts upon itself, gives play to the organs, which concentrate themselves in it, or which are rather nothing more than an extension of its own peculiar substance. It is thus the concealed motion of the interior organ, renders itself sensible by outward and visible signs. The brain, affected by a modification which is called FEAR, diffuses a paleness over the countenance, excites a tremulous motion in the limbs called trembling. The brain, affected by a sensation of GRIEF, causes tears to flow from the eyes, even without being moved by any exterior object; an idea which it retraces with great strength, suffices to give it very little modifications, which visibly have an influence on the whole frame. In all this, nothing more is to be perceived than the same substance which acts diversely on the various parts of the body. If it be objected that this mechanism does not sufficiently explain the principles of the motion or the faculties of the soul; we reply, that it is in the same situation as all the other bodies of Nature, in which the most simple motion, the most ordinary phenomena, the most common modes of action are inexplicable mysteries, of which we shall never be able to fathom the first principles. Indeed, how can we flatter ourselves we shall ever be enabled to compass the true principle of that gravity by which a stone falls? Are we acquainted with the mechanism which produces attraction in some substances, repulsion in others? Are we in a condition to explain the communication of motion from one body to another? But it may be fairly asked,--Are the difficulties that occur, when attempting to explain the manner in which the soul acts, removed by making it a _spiritual being_, a substance of which we have not, nor cannot form one idea, which consequently must bewilder all the notions we are capable of forming to ourselves of this being? Let us then be contented to know that the soul moves itself, modifies itself, in consequence of material causes, which act upon it which give it activity: from whence the conclusion may be said to flow consecutively, that all its operations, all its faculties, prove that it is itself _material_. CHAP. IX. _The Diversity of the Intellectual Faculties: they depend on Physical Causes, as do their Moral Qualities.--The Natural Principles of Society.--Morals.--Politics_. Nature is under the necessity of diversifying all her works. Elementary matter, different in its essence, must necessarily form different beings, various in their combinations, in their properties, in their modes of action, in their manner of existence. There is not, neither can there be, two beings, two combinations, which are mathematically and rigorously the same; because the place, the circumstances, the relations; the proportions, the modifications, never being exactly alike, the beings that result can never bear a perfect resemblance to each other: their modes of action must of necessity vary in something, even when we believe we find between them the greatest conformity. In consequence of this principle, which every thing we see conspires to prove to be a truth, there are not two individuals of the human species who have precisely the same traits--who think exactly in the same manner--who view things under the same identical point of sight--who have decidedly the same ideas; consequently no two of them have uniformly the same system of conduct. The visible organs of man, as well as his concealed organs, have indeed some analogy, some common points of resemblance, some general conformity; which makes them appear, when viewed in the gross, to be affected in the same manner by certain causes: but the difference is infinite in the detail. The human soul may be compared to those instruments, of which the chords, already diversified in themselves, by the manner in which they have been spun, are also strung upon different notes: struck by the same impulse, each chord gives forth the sound that is peculiar to itself; that is to say, that which depends on its texture, its tension, its volume, on the momentary state in which it is placed by the circumambient air. It is this that produces the diversified spectacle, the varied scene, which the moral world offers to our view: it is from this that results the striking contrariety that is to be found in the minds, in the faculties, in the passions, in the energies, in the taste, in the imagination, in the ideas, in the opinions of man. This diversity is as great as that of his physical powers: like them it depends on his temperament, which is as much varied as his physiognomy. This variety gives birth to that continual series of action and reaction, which constitutes the life of the moral world: from this discordance results the harmony which at once maintains and preserves the human race. The diversity found among the individuals of the human species, causes inequalities between man and man: this inequality constitutes the support of society. If all men were equal in their bodily powers, in their mental talents, they would not have any occasion for each other: it is the variation of his faculties, the inequality which this places him in, with regard to his fellows, that renders morals necessary to man: without these, he would live by himself, he would remain an isolated being. From whence it may be perceived, that this inequality of which man so often complains without cause--this impossibility which each man finds when in an isolated state, when left to himself, when unassociated with his fellow men, to labour efficaciously to his own welfare, to make his own security, to ensure his own conservation; places him in the happy situation of associating with his like, of depending on his fellow associates, of meriting their succour, of propitiating them to his views, of attracting their regard, of calling in their aid to chase away, by common and united efforts, that which would have the power to trouble or derange the order of his existence. In consequence of man's diversity, of the inequality that results, the weaker is obliged to seek the protection of the stronger; this, in his turn, recurs to the understanding, to the talents, to the industry of the weaker, whenever his judgment points out he can be useful to him: this natural inequality furnishes the reason why nations distinguish those citizens who have rendered their country eminent services. It is in consequence of his exigencies that man honors and recompenses those whose understanding, good deeds, assistance, or virtues, have procured for him real or supposed advantages, pleasures, or agreeable sensations of any sort: it is by this means that genius gains an ascendancy over the mind of man, and obliges a whole people to acknowledge its powers. Thus, the diversity and inequality of the faculties, as well corporeal as mental or intellectual, renders man necessary to his fellow man, makes him a social being, and incontestibly proves to him the necessity of morals. According to this diversity of faculties, the individuals of the human species are divided into different classes, each in proportion to the effects produced, or the different qualities that may be remarked: all these varieties in man flow from the individual properties of his soul, or from the particular modification of his brain. It is thus, that wit, imagination, sensibility, talents, &c. diversify to infinity the differences that are to be found in man. It is thus, that some are called good, others wicked; some are denominated virtuous, others vicious; some are ranked as learned, others as ignorant; some are considered reasonable, others unreasonable, &c. If all the various faculties attributed to the soul are examined, it will be found that like those of the body they are to be ascribed to physical causes, to which it will be very easy to recur. It will be found that the powers of the soul are the same as those of the body; that they always depend on the organization of this body, on its peculiar properties, on the permanent or transitory modifications that it undergoes; in a word, on its temperament. _Temperament_ is, in each individual, the habitual state in which he finds the fluids and the solids of which his body is composed. This temperament varies, by reason of the elements or matter that predominate in him, in consequence of the different combinations, of the various modifications, which this matter, diversified in itself, undergoes in his machine. Thus, in one, the blood is superabundant; in another, the bile; in a third, phlegm, &c. It is from Nature--from his parents--from causes, which from the first moment of his existence have unceasingly modified him, that man derives his temperament. It is in his mother's womb that he has attracted the matter which, during his whole life, shall have an influence on his intellectual faculties--on his energies--on his passions--on his conduct. The very nourishment he takes, the quality of the air he respires, the climate he inhabits, the education he receives, the ideas that are presented to him, the opinions he imbibes, modify this temperament. As these circumstances can never be rigorously the same in every point for any two men, it is by no means surprising that such an amazing variety, so great a contrariety, should be found in man; or that there should exist as many different temperaments, as there are individuals in the human species. Thus, although man may bear a general resemblance, he differs essentially, as well by the texture of his fibres and the disposition of his nerves, as by the nature, the quality, the quantity of matter that gives them play, that sets his organs in motion. Man, already different from his fellow, by the elasticity of his fibres, the tension of his nerves, becomes still more distinguished by a variety of other circumstances: he is more active, more robust, when he receives nourishing aliments, when he drinks wine, when he takes exercise: whilst another, who drinks nothing but water, who takes less juicy nourishment, who languishes in idleness, shall be sluggish and feeble. All these causes have necessarily an influence on the mind, on the passions, on the will; in a word, on what are called the intellectual faculties. Thus, it may be observed, that a man of a sanguine constitution, is commonly lively, ingenious, full of imagination, passionate, voluptuous, enterprising; whilst the phlegmatic man is dull, of a heavy understanding, slow of conception, inactive, difficult to be moved, pusillanimous, without imagination, or possessing it in a less lively degree, incapable of taking any strong measures, or of willing resolutely. If experience was consulted, in the room of prejudice, the physician would collect from morals, the key to the human heart: in curing the body, he would sometimes be assured of curing the mind. Man, in making a spiritual substance of his soul, has contented himself with administering to it spiritual remedies, which either have no influence over his temperament, or do it an injury. The doctrine of the spirituality of the soul has rendered morals a conjectural science, that does not furnish a knowledge of the true motives which ought to be put in activity, in order to influence man to his welfare. If, calling experience to his assistance, man sought out the elements which form the basis of his temperament, or of the greater number of the individuals composing a nation, he would then discover what would be most proper for him,--that which could be most convenient to his mode of existence--which could most conduce to his true interest--what laws would be necessary to his happiness--what institutions would be most useful for him--what regulations would be most beneficial. In short, morals and politics would be equally enabled to draw from _materialism_, advantages which the dogma of spirituality can never supply, of which it even precludes the idea. Man will ever remain a mystery, to those who shall obstinately persist in viewing him with eyes prepossessed by metaphysics; he will always be an enigma to those who shall pertinaciously attribute his actions to a principle, of which it is impossible to form to themselves any distinct idea. When man shall be seriously inclined to understand himself, let him sedulously endeavour to discover the matter that enters into his combination, which constitutes his temperament; these discoveries will furnish him with the clue to the nature of his desires, to the quality of his passions, to the bent of his inclinations--will enable him to foresee his conduct on given occasions--will indicate the remedies that may be successfully employed to correct the defects of a vicious organization, of a temperament, as injurious to himself as to the society of which he is a member. Indeed, it is not to be doubted that man's temperament is capable of being corrected, of being modified, of being changed, by causes as physical as the matter of which it is constituted. We are all in some measure capable of forming our own temperament: a man of a sanguine constitution, by taking less juicy nourishment, by abating its quantity, by abstaining from strong liquor, &c. may achieve the correction of the nature, the quality, the quantity, the tendency, the motion of the fluids, which predominate in his machine. A bilious man, or one who is melancholy, may, by the aid of certain remedies, diminish the mass of this bilious fluid; he may correct the blemish of his humours, by the assistance of exercise; he may dissipate his gloom, by the gaiety which results from increased motion. An European transplanted into Hindostan, will, by degrees, become quite a different man in his humours, in his ideas, in his temperament, in his character. Although but few experiments have been made with a view to learn what constitutes the temperament of man, there are still enough if he would but deign to make use of them--if he would vouchsafe to apply to useful purposes the little experience he has gleaned. It would appear, speaking generally, that the igneous principle which chemists designate under the name of _phlogiston_, or inflammable matter, is that which in man yields him the most active life, furnishes him with the greatest energy, affords the greatest mobility to his frame, supplies the greatest spring to his organs, gives the greatest elasticity to his fibres, the greatest tension to his nerves, the greatest rapidity to his fluids. From these causes, which are entirely material, commonly result the dispositions or faculties called sensibility, wit, imagination, genius, vivacity, &c. which give the tone to the passions, to the will, to the moral actions of man. In this sense, it is with great justice we apply the expressions, 'warmth of soul,' 'ardency of imagination,' 'fire of genius,' &c. It is this fiery element, diffused unequally, distributed in various proportions through the beings of the human species, that sets man in motion, gives him activity, supplies him with animal heat, and which, if we may be allowed the expression, renders him more or less alive. This igneous matter, so active, so subtle, dissipates itself with great facility, then requires to be reinstated in his system by means of aliments that contain it, which thereby become proper to restore his machine, to lend new warmth to the brain, to furnish it with the elasticity requisite to the performance of those functions which are called intellectual. It is this ardent matter contained in wine, in strong liquor, that gives to the most torpid, to the dullest, to the most sluggish man, a vivacity of which, without it, he would be incapable--which urges even the coward on to battle. When this fiery element is too abundant in man, whilst he is labouring under certain diseases, it plunges him into delirium; when it is in too weak or in too small a quantity, he swoons, he sinks to the earth. This igneous matter diminishes in his old age--it totally dissipates at his death. It would not be unreasonable to suppose, that what physicians call the nervous fluid, which so promptly gives notice to the brain of all that happens to the body, is nothing more than electric matter; that the various proportions of this matter diffused through his system, is the cause of that great diversity to be discovered in the human being, and in the faculties he possesses. If the intellectual faculties of man, or his moral qualities, be examined according to the principles here laid down, the conviction must be complete that they are to be attributed to material causes, which have an influence more or less marked, either transitory or durable, over his peculiar organization. But where does he derive this organization, except it be from the parents from whom he receives the elements of a machine necessarily analogous to their own? From whence does he derive the greater or less quantity of igneous matter, or vivifying heat, that decides upon, that gives the tone to his mental qualities? It is from the mother who bore him in her womb, who has communicated to him a portion of that fire with which she was herself animated, which circulated through her veins with her blood;--it is from the aliments that have nourished him,--it is from the climate he inhabits,--it is from the atmosphere that surrounds: all these causes have an influence over his fluids, over his solids, and decide on his natural dispositions. In examining these dispositions, from whence his faculties depend, it will ever be found, that they are _corporeal_, that they are _material_. The most prominent of these dispositions in man, is that physical sensibility from which flows all his intellectual or moral qualities. To feel, according to what has been said, is to receive an impulse, to be moved, to have a consciousness of the changes operated on his system. To have sensibility is nothing more than to be so constituted as to feel promptly, and in a very lively manner, the impressions of those objects which act upon him. A sensible soul is only man's brain, disposed in a mode to receive the motion communicated to it with facility, to re-act with promptness, by giving an instantaneous impulse to the organs. Thus the man is called sensible, whom the sight of the distressed, the contemplation of the unhappy, the recital of a melancholy tale, the witnessing of an afflicting catastrophe, or the idea of a dreadful spectacle, touches in so lively a manner as to enable the brain to give play to his lachrymal organs, which cause him to shed tears; a sign by which we recognize the effect of great grief, of extreme anguish in the human being. The man in whom musical sounds excite a degree of pleasure, or produce very remarkable effects, is said to have a _sensible_ or a fine ear. In short, when it is perceived that eloquence--the beauty of the arts--the various objects that strike his senses, excite in him very lively emotions, he is said to possess a soul full of sensibility. _Wit_, is a consequence of this physical sensibility; indeed, wit is nothing more than the facility which some beings, of the human species possess, of seizing with promptitude, of developing with quickness, a whole, with its different relations to other objects. _Genius_, is the facility with which some men comprehend this whole, and its various relations when they are difficult to be known, but useful to forward great and mighty projects. Wit may be compared to a piercing eye which perceives things quickly. Genius is an eye that comprehends at one view, all the points of an extended horizon: or what the French term _coup d'oeil_. True wit is that which perceives objects with their relations such as they really are. False wit is that which catches at relations, which do not apply to the object, or which arises from some blemish in the organization. True wit resembles the direction on a hand-post. _Imagination_ is the faculty of combining with promptitude ideas or images; it consists in the power man possesses of re-producing with ease the modifications of his brain: of connecting them, of attaching them to the objects to which they are suitable. When imagination does this, it gives pleasure; its fictions are approved, it embellishes Nature, it is a proof of the soundness of the mind, it aids truth: when on the contrary, it combines ideas, not formed to associate themselves with each other--when it paints nothing but disagreeable phantoms, it disgusts, its fictions are censured, it distorts Nature, it advocates falsehood, it is the proof of a disordered, of a deranged mind: thus poetry, calculated to render Nature more pathetic, more touching, pleases when it creates ideal beings, but which move us agreeably: we, therefore, forgive the illusions it has held forth, on account of the pleasure we have reaped from them. The hideous chimeras of superstition displease, because they are nothing more than the productions of a distempered imagination, that can only awaken the most afflicting sensations, fills us with the most disagreeable ideas. Imagination, when it wanders, produces fanaticism, superstitious terrors, inconsiderate zeal, phrenzy, and the most enormous crimes: when it is well regulated, it gives birth to a strong predilection for useful objects, an energetic passion for virtue, an enthusiastic love of our country, and the most ardent friendship: the man who is divested of imagination, is commonly one in whose torpid constitution phlegm predominates over the igneous fluid, over that sacred fire, which is the great principle of his mobility, of that warmth of sentiment, which vivifies all his intellectual faculties. There must be enthusiasm for transcendent virtues as well as for atrocious crimes; enthusiasm places the soul in a state similar to that of drunkenness; both the one and the other excite in man that rapidity of motion which is approved, when good results, when its effects are beneficial; but which is censured, is called folly, delirium, crime, fury; when it produces nothing but disorder and confusion. The mind is out of order, it is incapable of judging sanely--the imagination is badly regulated, whenever man's organization is not so modified, as to perform its functions with precision. At each moment of his existence, man gathers experience; every sensation he has, furnishes a fact that deposits in his brain an idea which his memory recalls with more or less fidelity: these facts connect themselves, these ideas are associated; their chain constitutes _experience_; this lays the foundation of _science_. Knowledge is that consciousness which arises from reiterated experience--from experiments made with precision of the sensations, of the ideas, of the effects which an object is capable of producing, either in ourselves or in others. All science, to be just, must be founded on truth. Truth itself rests on the constant, the faithful relation of our senses. Thus, _truth_ is that conformity, that perpetual affinity, which man's senses, when well constituted, when aided by experience, discover to him, between the objects of which he has a knowledge, and the qualities with which he clothes them. In short, truth is nothing more than the just, the precise association of his ideas. But how can he, without experience, assure himself of the accuracy, of the justness of this association? How, if he does not reiterate this experience, can he compare it? how prove its truth? If his senses are vitiated, how is it possible they can convey to him with precision, the sensations, the facts, with which they store his brain? It is only by multiplied, by diversified, by repeated experience, that he is enabled to rectify the errors of his first conceptions. Man is in error every time his organs, either originally defective in their nature, or vitiated by the durable or transitory modifications which they undergo, render him incapable of judging soundly of objects. Error consists in the false association of ideas, by which qualities are attributed to objects which they do not possess. Man is in error, when he supposes those beings really to have existence, which have no local habitation but in his own imagination: he is in error, when he associates the idea of happiness with objects capable of injuring him, whether immediately or by remote consequences which he cannot foresee. But how can he foresee effects of which he has not yet any knowledge? It is by the aid of experience: by the assistance which this experience affords, it is known that analogous, that like causes, produce analogous, produce like effects. Memory, by recalling these effects, enables him to form a judgment of those he may expect, whether it be from the same causes, or from causes that bear a relation to those of which he has already experienced the action. From this it will appear, that _prudence_, _foresight_, are faculties that are ascribable to, that grow out of experience. If he has felt that fire excited in his organs painful sensation, this experience suffices him to know, to foresee, that fire so applied, will consequently excite the same sensations. If he has discovered that certain actions, on his part, stirred up the hatred, elicited the contempt of others, this experience sufficiently enables him to foresee, that every time he shall act in a similar manner, he will be either hated or despised. The faculty man has of gathering experience, of recalling it to himself, of foreseeing effects by which he is enabled to avoid whatever may have the power to injure him, to procure that which may be useful to the conservation of his existence, which may contribute to that which is the sole end of all his actions, whether corporeal or mental,--his felicity--constitutes that, which, in one word, is designated under the name of _Reason_. Sentiment, imagination, temperament, may be capable of leading him astray--may have the power to deceive him; but experience and reflection will rectify his errors, point out his mistakes, place him in the right road, teach him what can really conduce to, what can truly conduct him to happiness. From this, it will appear, that _reason_ is man's nature, modified by experience, moulded by judgment, regulated by reflection: it supposes a moderate, sober temperament; a just, a sound mind; a well-regulated, orderly imagination; a knowledge of truth, grounded upon tried, upon reiterated experience; in fact, prudence and foresight: this will serve to prove, that although nothing is more commonly asserted, although the phrase is repeated daily, nay, hourly, that _man is a reasonable being_, yet there are but a very small number of the individuals who compose the human species, of whom it can with truth be said; who really enjoy the faculty of reason, or who combine the dispositions, the experience, by which it is constituted. It ought not, then to excite surprise, that the individuals of the human race, who are in a capacity to make true experience, are so few in number. Man, when he is born, brings with him into the world organs susceptible of receiving impulse, amassing ideas, of collecting experience; but whether it be from the vice of his system, the imperfection of his organization, or from those causes by which it is modified, his experience is false, his ideas are confused, his images are badly associated, his judgment is erroneous, his brain is saturated with vicious, with wicked systems, which necessarily have an influence over his conduct, which are continually disturbing his mind, and confounding his reason. Man's senses, as it has been shewn, are the only means by which he is enabled to ascertain whether his opinions are true or false, whether his conduct is useful to himself and beneficial to others, whether it is advantageous or disadvantageous. But that his senses may be competent to make a faithful relation--that they may be in a capacity to impress true ideas on his brain, it is requisite they should be sound; that is to say, in the state necessary to maintain his existence; in that order which is suitable to his preservation--that condition which is calculated to ensure his permanent felicity. It is also indispensable that his brain itself should be healthy, or in the proper circumstances to enable it to fulfil its functions with precision, to exercise its faculties with vigour. It is necessary that memory should faithfully delineate its anterior sensations, should accurately retrace its former ideas; to the end, that he may be competent to judge, to foresee the effects he may have to hope, the consequences he may have to fear, from those actions to which he may be determined by his will. If his organic system be vicious, if his interior or exterior organs be defective, whether by their natural conformation or from those causes by which they are regulated, he feels but imperfectly--in a manner less distinct than is requisite; his ideas are either false or suspicious, he judges badly, he is in a delusion, in a state of ebriety, in a sort of intoxication that prevents his grasping the true relation of things. In short, if his memory is faulty, if it is treacherous, his reflection is void, his imagination leads him astray, his mind deceives him, whilst the sensibility of his organs, simultaneously assailed by a crowd of impressions, shocked by a variety of impulsions, oppose him to prudence, to foresight, to the exercise of his reason. On the other hand, if the conformation of his organs, as it happens with those of a phlegmatic temperament, of a dull habit, does not permit him to move, except with feebleness, in a sluggish manner, his experience is slow, frequently unprofitable. The tortoise and the butterfly are alike incapable of preventing their destruction. The stupid man, equally with him who is intoxicated, are in that state which renders it impossible for them to arrive at or attain the end they have in view. But what is the end? What is the aim of man in the sphere he occupies? It is to preserve himself; to render his existence happy. It becomes then of the utmost importance, that he should understand the true means which reason points out, which prudence teaches him to use, in order that he may with certainty, that he may constantly arrive at the end which he proposes to himself. These he will find are his natural faculties--his mind--his talents--his industry--his actions, determined by those passions of which his nature renders him susceptible, which give more or less activity to his will. Experience and reason again shew him, that the men with whom he is associated are necessary to him, are capable of contributing to his happiness, are in a capacity to administer to his pleasures, are competent to assist him by those faculties which are peculiar to them; experience teaches him the mode he must adopt to induce them to concur in his designs, to determine them to will and incline them to act in his favour. This points out to him the actions they approve--those which displease them--the conduct which attracts them--that which repels them--the judgment by which they are swayed--the advantages that occur--the prejudicial effects that result to him from their various modes of existence and from their diverse manner of acting. This experience furnishes him with the ideas of virtue and of vice, of justice and of injustice, of goodness and of wickedness, of decency and of indecency, of probity and of knavery: In short, he learns to form a judgment of men--to estimate their actions--to distinguish the various sentiments excited in them, according to the diversity of those effects which they make him experience. It is upon the necessary diversity of these effects that is founded the discrimination between good and evil--between virtue and vice; distinctions which do not rest, as some thinkers have believed, on the conventions made between men; still less, as some metaphysicians have asserted, upon the chimerical will of supernatural beings: but upon the solid, the invariable, the eternal relations that subsist between beings of the human species congregated together, and living in society: which relations will have existence as long as man shall remain, as long as society shall continue to exist. Thus _virtue_ is every thing that is truly beneficial, every thing that is constantly useful to the individuals of the human race, living together in society; _vice_ every thing that is really prejudicial, every thing that is permanently injurious to them. The greatest virtues are those which procure for man the most durable advantages, from which he derives the most solid happiness, which preserves the greatest degree of order in his association: the greatest vices, are those which most disturb his tendency to happiness, which perpetuate error, which most interrupt the necessary order of society. The _virtuous man_, is he whose actions tend uniformly to the welfare, constantly to the happiness, of his fellow creatures. The _vicious man_, is he whose conduct tends to the misery, whose propensities form the unhappiness of those with whom he lives; from whence his own peculiar misery most commonly results. Every thing that procures for a man true and permanent happiness is reasonable; every thing that disturbs his individual felicity, or that of the beings necessary to his happiness, is foolish and unreasonable. The man who injures others, is wicked; the man who injures himself, is an imprudent being, who neither has a knowledge of reason, of his own peculiar interests, nor of truth. Man's _duties_ are the means pointed out to him by experience, the circle which reason describes for him, by which he is to arrive at that goal he proposes to himself; these duties are the necessary consequence of the relations subsisting between mortals, who equally desire happiness, who are equally anxious to preserve their existence. When it is said these duties _compel him_, it signifies nothing more than that, without taking these means, he could not reach the end proposed to him by his nature. Thus, _moral obligation_ is the necessity of employing the natural means to render the beings with whom he lives happy; to the end that he may determine them in turn to contribute to his own individual happiness: his obligation toward himself, is the necessity he is under to take those means, without which he would be incapable to conserve himself, or render his existence solidly and permanently happy. Morals, like the universe, is founded upon necessity, or upon the eternal relation of things. _Happiness_ is a mode of existence of which man naturally wishes the duration, or in which he is willing to continue. It is measured by its duration, by its vivacity. The greatest happiness is that which has the longest continuance: transient happiness, or that which has only a short duration, is called _Pleasure_; the more lively it is, the more fugitive, because man's senses are only susceptible of a certain quantum of motion. When pleasure exceeds this given quantity, it is changed into _anguish_, or into that painful mode of existence, of which he ardently desires the cessation: this is the reason why pleasure and pain frequently so closely approximate each other as scarcely to be discriminated. Immoderate pleasure is the forerunner of regret. It is succeeded by ennui, it is followed by weariness, it ends in disgust: transient happiness frequently converts itself into durable misfortune. According to these principles it will be seen that man, who in each moment of his duration seeks necessarily after happiness, ought, when he is reasonable, to manage, to husband, to regulate his pleasures; to refuse himself to all those of which the indulgence would be succeeded by regret; to avoid those which can convert themselves into pain; in order that he may procure for himself the most permanent felicity. Happiness cannot be the same for all the beings of the human species; the same pleasures cannot equally affect men whose conformation is different, whose modification is diverse. This no doubt, is the true reason why the greater number of moral philosophers are so little in accord upon those objects in which they have made man's happiness consist, as well as on the means by which it may be obtained. Nevertheless, in general, happiness appears to be a state, whether momentary or durable, in which man readily acquiesces, because he finds it conformable to his being. This state results from the accord, springs out of the conformity, which is found between himself and those circumstances in which he has been placed by Nature; or, if it be preferred, _happiness is the co-ordination of man, with the causes that give him impulse_. The ideas which man forms to himself of happiness depend not only on his temperament, on his individual conformation, but also upon the habits he has contracted. _Habit_ is, in man, a mode of existence--of thinking--of acting, which his organs, as well interior as exterior, contract, by the frequent reiteration of the same motion; from whence results the faculty of performing these actions with promptitude, of executing them with facility. If things be attentively considered, it will be found that almost the whole conduct of man--the entire system of his actions--his occupations--his connexions--his studies--his amusements--his manners--his customs--his very garments--even his aliments, are the effect of habit. He owes equally to habit, the facility with which he exercises his mental faculties of thought--of judgment--of wit--of reason--of taste, &c. It is to habit he owes the greater part of his inclinations--of his desires--of his opinions--of his prejudices--of the ideas, true or false, he forms to himself of his welfare. In short, it is to habit, consecrated by time, that he owes those errors into which everything strives to precipitate him; from which every thing is calculated to prevent him emancipating himself. It is habit that attaches him either to virtue or to vice: experience proves this: observation teaches incontrovertibly that the first crime is always accompanied by more pangs of remorse than the second; this again, by more than the third; so on to those that follow. A first action is the commencement of a habit; those which succeed confirm it: by force of combatting the obstacles that prevent the commission of criminal actions, man arrives at the power of vanquishing them with ease; of conquering them with facility. Thus he frequently becomes wicked from habit. Man is so much modified by habit, that it is frequently confounded with his nature: from hence results, as will presently be seen, those opinions or those ideas, which he has called _innate_: because he has been unwilling to recur back to the source from whence they sprung: which has, as it were, identified itself with his brain. However this may be, he adheres with great strength of attachment to all those things to which he is habituated; his mind experiences a sort of violence, an incommodious revulsion, a troublesome distaste, when it is endeavoured to make him change the course of his ideas: a fatal predilection frequently conducts him back to the old track in despite of reason. It is by a pure mechanism that may be explained the phenomena of habit, as well physical as moral; the soul, notwithstanding its spirituality, is modified exactly in the same manner as the body. Habit, in man, causes the organs of voice to learn the mode of expressing quickly the ideas consigned to his brain, by means of certain motion, which, during his infancy, the tongue acquires the power of executing with facility: his tongue, once habituated to move itself in a certain manner, finds much trouble, has great pain, to move itself after another mode; the throat yields with difficulty to those inflections which are exacted by a language different from that to which he has, been accustomed. It is the same with regard to his ideas; his brain, his interior organ, his soul, inured to a given manner of modification, accustomed to attach certain ideas to certain objects, long used to form to itself a system connected with certain opinions, whether true or false, experiences a painful sensation, whenever he undertakes to give it a new impulse, or alter the direction of its habitual motion. It is nearly as difficult to make him change his opinions as his language. Here, then, without doubt, is the cause of that almost invincible attachment which man displays to those customs--those prejudices--those institutions of which it is in vain that reason, experience, good sense prove to him the inutility, or even the danger. Habit opposes itself to the clearest, the most evident demonstrations; these can avail nothing against those passions, those vices, which time has rooted in him--against the most ridiculous systems--against the most absurd notions--against the most extravagant hypotheses--against the strangest customs: above all, when he has learned to attach to them the ideas of utility, of common interest, of the welfare of society. Such is the source of that obstinacy, of that stubbornness, which man evinces for his religion, for ancient usages, for unreasonable customs, for laws so little accordant with justice, for abuses, which so frequently make him suffer, for prejudices of which he sometimes acknowledges the absurdity, yet is unwilling to divest himself of them. Here is the reason why nations contemplate the most useful novelties as mischievous innovations--why they believe they would be lost, if they were to remedy those evils to which they have become habituated; which they have learned to consider as necessary to their repose; which they have been taught to consider dangerous to be cured. _Education_ is only the art of making man contract, in early life, that is to say, when his organs are extremely flexible, the habits, the opinions, the modes of existence, adopted by the society in which he is placed. The first moments of his infancy are employed in collecting experience; those who are charged with the care of rearing him, or who are entrusted to bring him up, teach him how to apply it: it is they who develope reason in him: the first impulse they give him commonly decides upon his condition, upon his passions, upon the ideas he forms to himself of happiness, upon the means he shall employ to procure it, upon his virtues, and upon his vices. Under the eyes of his masters, the infant acquires ideas: under their tuition he learns to associate them,--to think in a certain manner,--to judge well or ill. They point out to him various objects, which they accustom him either to love or to hate, to desire or to avoid, to esteem or to despise. It is thus opinions are transmitted from fathers, mothers, nurses, and masters, to man in his infantine state. It is thus, that his mind by degrees saturates itself with truth, or fills itself with error; after which he regulates his conduct, which renders him either happy or miserable, virtuous or vicious, estimable or hateful. It is thus he becomes either contented or discontented with his destiny, according to the objects towards which they have directed his passions--towards which they have bent the energies of his mind; that is to say, in which they have shewn him his interest, in which they have taught him to place his felicity: in consequence, he loves and searches after that which they have taught him to revere--that which they have made the object of his research; he has those tastes, those inclinations, those phantasms, which, during the whole course of his life, he is forward to indulge, which he is eager to satisfy, in proportion to the activity they have excited in him, and the capacity with which he has been provided by Nature. _Politics_ ought to be the art of regulating the passions of man--of directing them to the welfare of society--of diverting them into a genial current of happiness--of making them flow gently to the general benefit of all: but too frequently it is nothing more than the detestible art of arming the passions of the various members of society against each other,--of making them the engines to accomplish their mutual destruction,--of converting them into agents which embitter their existence, create jealousies among them, and fill with rancorous animosities that association from which, if properly managed, man ought to derive his felicity. Society is commonly so vicious because it is not founded upon Nature, upon experience, and upon general utility; but on the contrary, upon the passions, upon the caprices, and upon the particular interests of those by whom it is governed. In short, it is for the most part the advantage of the few opposed to the prosperity of the many. Politics, to be useful, should found its principles upon Nature; that is to say, should conform itself to the essence of man, should mould itself to the great end of society: but what is society? and what is its end? It is a whole, formed by the union of a great number of families, or by a collection of individuals, assembled from a reciprocity of interest, in order that they may satisfy with greater facility their reciprocal wants--that they may, with more certainty, procure the advantages they desire--that they may obtain mutual succours--above all, that they may gain the faculty of enjoying, in security, those benefits with which Nature and industry may furnish them: it follows, of course, that politics, which are intended to maintain society, and to consolidate the interests of this congregation, ought to enter into its views, to facilitate the means of giving them efficiency, to remove all those obstacles that have a tendency to counteract the intention with which man entered into association. Man, in approximating to his fellow man, to live with him in society, has made, either formally or tacitly, a covenant; by which he engages to render mutual services, to do nothing that can be prejudicial to his neighbour. But as the nature of each individual impels him each instant to seek after his own welfare, which he has mistaken to consist in the gratification of his passions, and the indulgence of his transitory caprices, without any regard to the convenience of his fellows; there needed a power to conduct him back to his duty, to oblige him to conform himself to his obligations, and to recall him to his engagements, which the hurry of his passions frequently make him forget. This power is the _law_; it is, or ought to be, the collection of the will of society, reunited to fix the conduct of its members, to direct their action in such a mode, that it may concur to the great end of his association--the general good. But as society, more especially when very numerous, is incapable of assembling itself, unless with great difficulty, as it cannot with tumult make known its intentions, it is obliged to choose citizens in whom it places a confidence, whom it makes the interpreter of its will, whom it constitutes the depositaries of the power requisite to carry it into execution. Such is the origin of all _government_, which to be legitimate can only be founded on the free consent of society. Those who are charged with the care of governing, call themselves sovereigns, chiefs, legislators: according to the form which society has been willing to give to its government: these sovereigns are styled monarchs, magistrates, representatives, &c. Government only borrows its power from society: being established for no other purpose than its welfare, it is evident society can revoke this power whenever its interest shall exact it; change the form of its government; extend or limit the power which it has confided to its chiefs, over whom, by the immutable laws of Nature, it always conserves a supreme authority: because these laws enjoin, that the part shall always remain subordinate to the whole. Thus sovereigns are the ministers of society, its interpreters, the depositaries of a greater or of a less portion of its power; but they are not its absolute masters, neither are they the proprietors of nations. By a _covenant_, either expressed or implied, they engage themselves to watch over the maintenance, to occupy themselves with the welfare of society; it is only upon these conditions society consents to obey them. The price of obedience is protection. There is or ought to be a reciprocity of interest between the governed and the governor: whenever this reciprocity is wanting, society is in that state of confusion of which we spoke in the fifth chapter: it is verging on destruction. No society upon earth was ever willing or competent to confer irrevocably upon its chiefs the power, the right, of doing it injury. Such a concession, such a compact, would be annulled, would be rendered void by Nature; because she wills that each society, the same as each individual of the human species shall tend to its own conservation; it has not therefore the capacity to consent to its permanent unhappiness. _Laws_, in order that they may be just, ought invariably to have for their end, the general interest of society; that is to say, to assure to the greater number of citizens those advantages for which man originally associated. These advantages are _liberty, property, security_. _Liberty_, to man, is the faculty of doing, for his own peculiar happiness, every thing which does not injure or diminish the happiness of his associates: in associating, each individual renounced the exercise of that portion of his natural liberty which would be able to prejudice or injure the liberty of his fellows. The exercise of that liberty which is injurious to society is called _licentiousness_. _Property_, to man, is the faculty of enjoying those advantages which spring from labour; those benefits which industry or talent has procured to each member of society. _Security_, to man, is the certitude, the assurance, that each individual ought to have, of enjoying in his person, of finding for his property the protection of the laws, as long as he shall faithfully observe, as long as he shall punctually perform, his engagements with society. _Justice_, to man, assures to all the members of society, the possession of these advantages, the enjoyment of those rights, which belong to them. From this, it will appear, that without justice, society is not in a condition to procure the happiness of any man. Justice is also called _equity_, because by the assistance of the laws made to command the whole, she reduces all its members to a state of equality; that is to say, she prevents them from prevailing one over the other, by the inequality which Nature or industry may have made between their respective powers. _Rights_, to man, are every thing which society, by equitable laws, permits each individual to do for his own peculiar felicity. These rights are evidently limited by the invariable end of all association: society has, on its part, rights over all its members, by virtue of the advantages which it procures for them; all its members, in turn, have a right to claim, to exact from society, or secure from its ministers those advantages for the procuring of which they congregated, in favour of which they renounced a portion of their natural liberty. A society, of which the chiefs, aided by the laws, do not procure any good for its members, evidently loses its right over them: those chiefs who injure society lose the right of commanding. It is not our country, without it secures the welfare of its inhabitants; a society without equity contains only enemies; a society oppressed is composed only of tyrants and slaves; slaves are incapable of being citizens; it is liberty, property, and security, that render our country dear to us; it is the true love of his country that forms the citizen. For want of having a proper knowledge of these truths, or for want of applying them when known, some nations have become unhappy--have contained nothing but a vile heap of slaves, separated from each other, detached from society, which neither procures for them any good, nor secures to them any one advantage. In consequence of the imprudence of some nations, or of the craft, cunning, and violence of those to whom they have confided the power of making laws, and carrying them into execution, their sovereigns have rendered themselves absolute masters of society. These, mistaking the true source of their power, pretended to hold it from heaven, to be accountable for their actions to God alone, to owe nothing, not to have any obligation to society, in a word, to be gods upon earth, to possess the right of governing arbitrarily. From thence politics became corrupted: they were only a mockery. Such nations, disgraced and grown contemptible, did not dare resist the will of their chiefs; their laws were nothing more than the expression of the caprice of these chiefs; public welfare was sacrificed to their peculiar interests; the force of society was turned against itself; its members withdrew to attach themselves to its oppressors, to its tyrants; these to seduce them, permitted them to injure it with impunity and to profit by its misfortunes. Thus liberty, justice, security, and virtue, were banished from many nations; politics was no longer any thing more than the art of availing itself of the forces of a people and of the treasure of society; of dividing it on the subject of its interest, in order to subjugate it by itself; at length a stupid, a mechanical habit, made them cherish their oppressors, and love their chains. Man when he has nothing to fear, presently becomes wicked; he who believes he has not occasion for his fellow, persuades himself he may follow the inclinations of his heart without caution or discretion. Thus fear is the only obstacle society can effectually oppose to the passions of its chiefs; without it they will quickly become corrupt, and will not scruple to avail themselves of the means society has placed in their hands, to make them accomplices in their iniquity. To prevent these abuses, it is requisite society should set bounds to its confidence; should limit the power which it delegates to its chiefs; should reserve to itself a sufficient portion of authority to prevent them from injuring it; it must establish prudent checks: it must cautiously divide the power it confers, because re-united, it will by such reunion be infallibly oppressed. The slightest reflection, the most scanty review, will make men feel that the burthen of governing and weight of administration, is too ponderous and overpowering to be borne by an individual; that the scope of his jurisdiction, that the range of his surveillance, and multiplicity of his duties must always render him negligent; that the extent of his power has ever a tendency to render him mischievous. In short, the experience of all ages will convince nations that man is continually tempted to the abuse of power: that as an abundance of strong liquor intoxicates his brain, so unlimited power corrupts his heart; that therefore the sovereign ought to be subject to the law, not the law to the sovereign. _Government_ has necessarily an equal influence over the philosophy, as over the morals of nations. In the same manner that its care produces labour, activity, abundance, salubrity and justice; its negligence induces idleness, sloth, discouragement, penury, contagion, injustice, vices and crimes. It depends upon government either to foster industry, mature genius, give a spring to talents, or stifle them. Indeed government, the disturber of dignities, of riches, of rewards, and punishments; the master of those objects in which man from his infancy has learned to place his felicity, and contemplate as the means of his happiness; acquires a necessary influence over his conduct: it kindles his passions; gives them direction; makes him instrumental to whatever purpose it pleases; it modifies him; determines his manners; which in a whole people, as in the individual, is nothing more than the conduct, the general system of wills, of actions that necessarily result from his education, government, laws, and religious opinions--his institutions, whether rational or irrational. In short, manners are the habits of a people: these are good whenever society draws from them true felicity and solid happiness; they are bad, they are detestable in the eye of reason, when the happiness of society does not spring from them; they are unwholesome when they have nothing more in their favour than the suffrage of time, and the countenance of prejudice which rarely consults experience, which is almost ever at variance with good sense: notwithstanding they may have the sanction of the law, custom, religion, public opinion, or example, they may be unworthy and may be disgraceful, provided society is in disorder; that crime abounds; that virtue shrinks beneath the basilisk eye of triumphant vice; they may then be said to resemble the UPAS, whose luxuriant yet poisonous foliage, the produce of a rank soil, becomes more baneful to those who are submitted to its vortex, in proportion as it extends its branches. If experience he consulted, it will be found there is no action, however abominable, that has not received the applause, that has not obtained the approbation of some people. Parricide, the sacrifice of children, robbery, usurpation, cruelty, intolerance, and prostitution, have all in their turn been licensed actions; have been advocated; have been deemed laudable and meritorious deeds with some nations of the earth. Above all, _superstition_ has consecrated the most unreasonable, the most revolting customs. Man's passions result from and depend on the motion of attraction or repulsion, of which he is rendered susceptible by Nature; who enables him, by his peculiar essence, to be attracted by those objects which appear useful to him, to be repelled by those which he considers prejudicial; it follows that government, by holding the magnet, can put these passions into activity, has the power either of restraining them, or of giving them a favorable or an unfavorable direction. All his passions are constantly limited by either loving or hating, seeking or avoiding, desiring or fearing. These passions, so necessary to the conservation of man, are a consequence of his organization; they display themselves with more or less energy, according to his temperament; education and habit develope them; government gives them play, conducts them towards those objects, which it believes itself interested in making desirable to its subjects. The various names which have been given to these passions, are relative to the different objects by which they are excited, such as pleasure, grandeur, or riches, which produce voluptuousness, ambition, vanity and avarice. If the source of those passions which predominate in nations be attentively examined it will be commonly found in their governments. It is the impulse received from their chiefs that renders them sometimes warlike, sometimes superstitious, sometimes aspiring after glory, sometimes greedy after wealth, sometimes rational, and sometimes unreasonable; if sovereigns, in order to enlighten and render happy their dominions, were to employ only the _tenth_ part of the vast expenditures which they lavish, only a _tythe_ of the pains which they employ to render them brutish, to stupify them, to deceive them, and to afflict them; their subjects would presently be as wise, would quickly be as happy, as they are now remarkable for being blind, ignorant, and miserable. Let the vain project of destroying, the delusive attempt at rooting his passions from the heart of man, he abandoned; let an effort be made to direct them towards objects that may be useful to himself, beneficial to his associates. Let education, let government, let the laws, habituate him to restrain his passions within those just bounds that experience fixes and reason prescribes. Let the ambitious have honours, titles, distinctions, and power, when they shall have usefully served their country; let riches be given to those who covet them, when they shall have rendered themselves necessary to their fellow citizens; let commendations, let eulogies, encourage those who shall be actuated by the love of glory. In short, let the passions of man have a free, an uninterrupted course, whenever there shall result from their exercise, real, substantial, and durable advantages to society. Let education kindle only those, which are truly beneficial to the human species; let it favour those alone which are really necessary to the maintenance of society. The passions of man are dangerous, only because every thing conspires to give them an evil direction. Nature does not make man either good or wicked: she combines machines more or less active, mobile, and energetic; she furnishes him with organs and temperament, of which his passions, more or less impetuous, are the necessary consequence; these passions have always his happiness for their object, his welfare for their end: in consequence they are legitimate, they are natural, they can only be called bad or good, relatively, to the influence they have on the beings of his species. Nature gives man legs proper to sustain his weight, and necessary to transport him from one place to another; the care of those who rear them strengthens them, habituates him to avail himself of him, accustoms him to make either a good or a bad use of them. The arm which he has received from Nature is neither good nor bad; it is necessary to a great number of the actions of life; nevertheless, the use of this arm becomes criminal, if he has contracted the habit of using it to rob, to assassinate, with a view to obtain that money which he has been taught from his infancy to desire, and which the society in which he lives renders necessary to him, but which his industry will enable him to obtain without doing injury to his fellow man. The heart of man is a soil which Nature has made equally suitable to the production of brambles, or of useful grain--of deleterous poison, or of refreshing fruit, by virtue of the seeds which may be sown in it--by the cultivation that may be bestowed upon it, In his infancy, those objects are pointed out to him which he is to estimate or to despise, to seek after or to avoid, to love or to hate. It is his parents, his instructors, who render him either virtuous or wicked, wise or unreasonable, studious or dissipated, steady or trifling, solid or vain. Their example, their discourse, modify him through his whole life, teaching him what are the things he ought either to desire or to avoid; what the objects he ought to fear or to love: he desires them, in consequence; and he imposes on himself the task of obtaining them, according to the energy of his temperament, which ever decides the force of his passions. It is thus that education, by inspiring him with opinions, by infusing into him ideas, whether true or false, gives him those primitive impulsions after which he acts, in a manner either advantageous or prejudicial both to himself and to others. Man, at his birth, brings with him into the world nothing but the necessity of conserving himself, of rendering his existence happy: instruction, example, the customs of the world, present him with the means, either real or imaginary, of achieving it; habit procures for him the facility of employing these means: he attaches himself strongly to those he judges best calculated, most proper to secure to him the possession of those objects which they have taught him, which he has learned to desire as the preferable good attached to his existence. Whenever his education--whenever the examples which have been afforded him--whenever the means with which he has been provided, are approved by reason, are the result of experience, every thing concurs to render him virtuous; habit strengthens these dispositions in him; he becomes, in consequence, a useful member of society; to the interests of which, every thing ought to prove to him his own permanent well-being, his own durable felicity, is necessarily allied. If, on the contrary, his education--his institutions--the examples which are set before him--the opinions which are suggested to him in his infancy, are of a nature to exhibit to his mind virtue as useless and repugnant--vice as useful and congenial to his own individual happiness, he will become vicious; he will believe himself interested in injuring society, in rendering his associates unhappy; he will be carried along by the general current: he will renounce virtue, which to him will no longer be any thing more than a vain idol, without attractions to induce him to follow it; without charms to tempt his adoration; because it will appear to exact, that he should immolate at its shrine, that he should sacrifice at its altar all those objects which he has been constantly taught to consider the most dear to himself; to contemplate as benefits the most desirable. In order that man may become virtuous, it is absolutely requisite that he should have an interest, that he should find advantages in practising virtue. For this end, it is necessary that education should implant in him reasonable ideas; that public opinion should lean towards virtue, as the most desirable good; that example should point it out as the object most worthy esteem; that government should faithfully recompense, should regularly reward it; that honor should always accompany its practice; that vice should constantly be despised; that crime should invariably be punished. Is virtue in this situation amongst men? does the education of man infuse into him just, faithful ideas of happiness--true notions of virtue--dispositions really favourable to the beings with whom he is to live? The examples spread before him, are they suitable to innocence and manners? are they calculated to make him respect decency--to cause him to love probity--to practice honesty--to value good faith--to esteem equity--to revere conjugal fidelity--to observe exactitude in fulfilling his duties? Religion, which alone pretends to regulate his manners, does it render him sociable--does it make him pacific--does it teach him to be humane? The arbiters, the sovereigns of society, are they faithful in recompensing, punctual in rewarding, those who have best served their country? in punishing those who have pillaged, who have robbed, who have plundered, who have divided, who have ruined it? Justice, does she hold her scales with a firm, with an even hand, between all the citizens of the state? The laws, do they never support the strong against the weak--favor the rich against the poor--uphold the happy against the miserable? In short, is it an uncommon spectacle to behold crime frequently justified, often applauded, sometimes crowned with success, insolently triumphing, arrogantly striding over that merit which it disdains, over that virtue which it outrages? Well then, in societies thus constituted, virtue can only be heard by a very small number of peaceable citizens, a few generous souls, who know how to estimate its value, who enjoy it in secret. For the others, it is only a disgusting object; they see in it nothing but the supposed enemy to their happiness, or the censor of their individual conduct. If man, according to his nature, is necessitated to desire his welfare, he is equally obliged to love and cherish the means by which he believes it is to be acquired: it would be useless, it would perhaps be unjust, to demand that a man should be virtuous, if he could not be so without rendering himself miserable. Whenever he thinks vice renders him happy, he must necessarily love vice; whenever he sees inutility recompensed, crime rewarded--whenever he witnesses either or both of them honored,--what interest will he find in occupying himself with the happiness of his fellow-creatures? what advantage will he discover in restraining the fury of his passions? Whenever his mind is saturated with false ideas, filled with dangerous opinions, it follows, of course, that his whole conduct will become nothing more than a long chain of errors, a tissue of mistakes, a series of depraved actions. We are informed, that the savages, in order to flatten the heads of their children, squeeze them between two boards, by that means preventing them from taking the shape designed for them by Nature. It is pretty nearly the same thing with the institutions of man; they commonly conspire to counteract Nature, to constrain and divert, to extinguish the impulse Nature has given him, to substitute others which are the source of all his misfortunes. In almost all the countries of the earth, man is bereft of truth, is fed with falsehoods, and amused with marvellous chimeras: he is treated like those children whose members are, by the imprudent care of their nurses, swathed with little fillets, bound up with rollers, which deprive them of the free use of their limbs, obstruct their growth, prevent their activity, and oppose themselves to their health. Most of the superstitious opinions of man have for their object only to display to him his supreme felicity in those illusions for which they kindle his passions: but as the phantoms which are presented to his imagination are incapable of being considered in the same light by all who contemplate them, he is perpetually in dispute concerning these objects; he hates his fellow, he persecutes his neighbour, his neighbour in turn persecutes him, and he believes that in doing this he is doing well: that in committing the greatest crimes to sustain his opinions he is acting right. It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination, it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel himself, as he is dangerous to his fellow-creatures, as he is incommodious to others: if, on the contrary, he be phlegmatic, and of a slothful habit, he becomes melancholy and useless to society. _Public opinion_ every instant offers to man's contemplation false ideas of honor, and wrong notions of glory: it attaches his esteem not only to frivolous advantages, but also to prejudicial interests and injurious actions; which example authorizes, which prejudice consecrates, which habit precludes him from viewing with the disgust and horror which they merit. Indeed, habit familiarizes his mind with the most absurd ideas, the most unreasonable customs, the most blameable actions; with prejudices the most contrary to his own interests, and detrimental to the society in which he lives. He finds nothing strange, nothing singular, nothing despicable, nothing ridiculous, except those opinions and objects to which he is himself unaccustomed. There are countries in which the most laudable actions appear very blameable and ridiculous--where the foulest and most diabolical actions pass for very honest and perfectly rational conduct. In some nations they kill the old men; in some the children strangle their fathers. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians immolated their children to their gods. Europeans approve duels; he who refuses to cut the throat of another, or to blow out the brains of his neighbour, is contemplated by them as dishonoured. The Spaniards and Portuguese think it meritorious to burn an heretic. In some countries women prostitute themselves without dishonour; in others it is the height of hospitality for a man to present his wife to the embraces of the stranger: the refusal to accept this, excites his scorn and calls forth his resentment. _Authority_ commonly believes itself interested in maintaining the received opinions: those prejudices and errors which it considers requisite to the maintenance of its power and the consolidation of its interests, are sustained by force, which is never rational. Princes themselves, filled with deceptive images of happiness, mistaken notions of power, erroneous opinions of grandeur, and false ideas of glory, are surrounded with flattering courtiers, who are interested in keeping up the delusion of their masters: these contemptible men have acquired ideas of virtue, only that they may outrage it: by degrees they corrupt the people, these become depraved, lend themselves to their debaucheries, pander to the vices of the great, then make a merit of imitating them in their irregularities. A court is too frequently the true focus of the corruption of a people. This is the true source of moral evil. It is thus that every thing conspires to render man vicious, and give a fatal impulse to his soul: from whence results the general confusion of society, which becomes unhappy, from the misery of almost every one of its members. The strongest motive-powers are put in action to inspire man with a passion for futile objects which are indifferent to him; which make him become dangerous to his fellow man, by the means which he is compelled to employ, in order to obtain them. Those who have the charge of guiding his steps, either impostors themselves, or the dupes to their own prejudices, forbid him to hearken to reason; they make truth appear dangerous to him; they exhibit error as requisite to his welfare, not only in this world, but in the next. In short, habit strongly attaches him to his irrational opinions, to his perilous inclinations, and to his blind passion for objects either useless or dangerous. Here, then, is the reason why for the most part man finds himself necessarily determined to evil; the reason why the passions, inherent in his Nature and necessary to his conservation, become the instruments of his destruction, and the bane of that society, which properly conducted, they ought to preserve; the reason why society becomes a state of warfare; why it does nothing but assemble enemies, who are envious of each other, and are always rivals for the prize. If some virtuous beings are to be found in these societies, they must be sought for in the very small number of those, who born with a phlegmatic temperament have moderate passions, who therefore, either do not desire at all, or desire very feebly, those objects with which their associates are continually inebriated. Man's nature, diversely cultivated, decides upon his faculties, as well corporeal as intellectual; upon his qualities, as well moral as physical. The man who is of a sanguine, robust constitution, must necessarily have strong passions; he who is of a bilious, melancholy habit, will as necessarily have fantastical and gloomy passions; the man of a gay turn, of a sprightly imagination, will have cheerful passions; while the man in whom phlegm abounds, will have those which are gentle, or which have a very slight degree of violence. It appears to be upon the equilibrium of the humours, that depends the state of the man who is called _virtuous_; his temperament seems to be the result of a combination, in which the elements or principles are balanced with such precision that no one passion predominates over another, or carries into his machine more disorder than its neighbour. Habit, as we have seen, is man's nature modified: this latter furnishes the matter; education, domestic example, national manners, give it the form: these, acting on his temperament, make him either reasonable, or irrational--enlightened, or stupid--a fanatic, or a hero--an enthusiast for the public good, or an unbridled criminal--a wise man, smitten with the advantages of virtue, or a libertine, plunged into every kind of vice. All the varieties of the moral man, depend on the diversity of his ideas; which are themselves arranged and combined in his brain by the intervention of his senses. His temperament is the produce of physical substances, his habits are the effect of physical modifications; the opinions, whether good or bad, injurious or beneficial, true or false, which form themselves in his mind, are never more than the effect of those physical impulsions which the brain receives by the medium of the senses. CHAP. X. _The Soul does not derive its ideas from itself--It has no innate Ideas._ What has preceded suffices to prove, that the interior organ of man, which is called his _soul_, is purely material. He will be enabled to convince himself of this truth, by the manner in which he acquires his ideas,--from those impressions which material objects successively make on his organs, which are themselves acknowledged to be material. It has been seen, that the faculties which are called intellectual, are to be ascribed to that of feeling; the different qualities of those faculties which are called moral, have been explained after the necessary laws of a very simple mechanism: it now remains, to reply to those who still obstinately persist in making the soul a substance distinguished from the body, or who insist on giving it an essence totally distinct. They seem to found their distinction upon this, that this interior organ has the faculty of drawing its ideas from within itself; they will have it, that man, at his birth, brings with him ideas into the world, which, according to this wonderful notion, they have called _innate_. The Jews have a similar doctrine which they borrowed from the Chaldeans: their rabbins taught, that each soul, before it was united to the seed that must form an infant in the womb of a woman, is confided to the care of an angel, which causes him to behold heaven, earth, and hell: this, they pretend, is done by the assistance of a lamp, which extinguishes itself as soon as the infant comes into the world. Some ancient philosophers have held, that the soul originally contains the principles of several notions or doctrines: the Stoics designated this by the term PROLEPSIS, _anticipated opinions_; the Greek mathematicians, KOINAS ENNOIAS, _universal ideas_. They have believed that the soul, by a special privilege, in a nature where every thing is connected, enjoyed the faculty of moving itself without receiving any impulse; of creating to itself ideas, of thinking on a subject, without being determined to such action, by any exterior object; which by moving its organs should furnish it with an image of the subject of its thoughts. In consequence of these gratuitous suppositions, of these extraordinary pretensions, which it is only requisite to expose, in order to confute some very able speculators, who were prepossessed by their superstitious prejudices; have ventured the length to assert, that without model, without prototype to act on the senses, the soul is competent to delineate to itself, the whole universe with all the beings it contains. DESCARTES and his disciples have assured us, that the body went absolutely for nothing, in the sensations, in the perceptions, in the ideas of the soul; that it can feel, that it can perceive, that it can understand, that it can taste, that it can touch, even when there should exist nothing that is corporeal or material exterior to ourselves. But what shall be said of a BERKELEY, who has endeavoured, who has laboured to prove to man, that every thing in this world is nothing more than a chimerical illusion; that the universe exists nowhere but in himself; that it has no identity but in his imagination; who has rendered the existence of all things problematical by the aid of sophisms, insolvable even to those who maintain the doctrine of the spirituality of the soul. Extravagant as this doctrine of the BISHOP OF CLOYNE may appear, it cannot well be more so than that of MALEBRANCHE, the champion of innate ideas; who makes the divinity the common bond between the soul and the body: or than that of those metaphysicians, who maintain that the soul is a substance heterogeneous to the body; who by ascribing to this soul the thoughts of man, have in fact rendered the body superfluous. They have not perceived they were liable to one solid objection, which is, that if the ideas of man are innate, if he derives them from a superior being, independent of exterior causes, if he sees every thing in God; how comes it that so many false ideas are afloat, that so many errors prevail, with which the human mind is saturated? From whence comes these opinions, which according to the theologians are so displeasing to God? Might it not be a question to the Malebranchists, was it in the Divinity that SPINOZA beheld his system? Nevertheless, to justify such monstrous opinions, they assert that ideas are only the objects of thought. But according to the last analysis, these ideas can only reach man from exterior objects, which in giving impulse to his senses modify his brain; or from the material beings contained within the interior of his machine, who make some parts of his body experience those sensations which he perceives, which furnish him with ideas, which he relates, faithfully or otherwise, to the cause that moves him. Each idea is an effect, but however difficult it may be to recur to the cause, can we possibly suppose it is not ascribable to a cause? If we can only form ideas of material substances, how can we suppose the cause of our ideas can possibly be immaterial? To pretend that man without the aid of exterior objects, without the intervention of his senses, is competent to form ideas of the universe, is to assert, that a blind man is in a capacity to form a true idea of a picture, that represents some fact of which he has never heard any one speak. It is very easy to perceive the source of those errors, into which men, otherwise extremely profound and very enlightened have fallen, when they have been desirous to speak of the soul: to describe its operations. Obliged either by their own prejudices, or by the fear of combatting the opinions of some imperious theologian, they have become the advocates of the principle, that the soul was a pure spirit: an immaterial substance; of an essence directly different from that of the body; from every thing we behold: this granted, they have been incompetent to conceive how material objects could operate, in what manner gross and corporeal organs were enabled to act on a substance, that had no kind of analogy with them; how they were in a capacity to modify it by conveying its ideas; in the impossibility of explaining this phenomenon, at the same time perceiving that the soul had ideas, they concluded that it must draw them from itself, and not from those beings, which according to their own hypothesis, were incapable of acting on it, or rather, of which they could not conceive the manner of action; they therefore imagined that all the modifications, all the actions of this soul, sprung from its own peculiar energy, were imprinted on it from its first formation, by the Author of Nature: that these did not in any manner depend upon the beings of which we have a knowledge, or which act upon it, by the gross means of our senses. There are, however, some phenomena, which, considered superficially, appear to support the opinion of these philosophers; to announce a faculty in the human soul of producing ideas within itself, without any exterior aid; these are _dreams_, in which the interior organ of man, deprived of objects that move it visibly, does not, however, cease to have ideas--to be set in activity--to be modified in a manner that is sufficiently sensible--to have an influence upon his body. But if a little reflection be called in, the solution to this difficulty will be found: it will be perceived that, even during sleep, his brain is supplied with a multitude of ideas, with which the eye or time before has stocked it; these ideas were communicated to it by exterior or corporeal objects, by which they have been modified: it will be found that these modifications renew themselves, not by any spontaneous, not by any voluntary motion on its part, but by a chain of involuntary movements which take place in his machine, which determine, which excite those that give play to the brain; these modifications renew themselves with more or less fidelity, with a greater or lesser degree of conformity to those which it has anteriorly experienced. Sometimes in dreaming, he has memory, then he retraces to himself the objects which have struck him faithfully;--at other times, these modifications renew themselves without order, and without connection, very differently from those, which real objects have before excited in his interior organ. If in a dream he believes he sees a friend, his brain renews in itself the modifications or the ideas which this friend had formerly excited--in the same order that they arranged themselves when his eyes really beheld him--this is nothing more than an effect of memory. If in his dream he fancies he sees a monster which has no model in nature, his brain is then modified in the same manner that it was by the particular, by the detached ideas, with which it then does nothing more than compose an ideal whole; by assembling, and associating, in a ridiculous manner, the scattered ideas that were consigned to its keeping; it is then, that in dreaming he has imagination. Those dreams that are troublesome, extravagant, whimsical, or unconnected, are commonly the effect of some confusion in his machine; such as painful indigestion--an overheated blood--a prejudicial fermentation, &c.--these material causes excite in his body a disorderly motion, which precludes the brain from being modified in the same manner it was on the day before; in consequence of this irregular motion the brain is disturbed, it only represents to itself confused ideas that want connection. When in a dream, he believes he sees a Sphinx, a being supposed by the poets to have a head and face like a woman, a body like a dog, wings like a bird, and claws like a lion, who put forth riddles and killed those who could not expound them; either, he has seen the representation of one when he was awake, or else the disorderly motion of the brain is such that it causes it to combine ideas, to connect parts, from which there results a whole without model, of which the parts were not formed to be united. It is thus, that his brain combines the head of a woman, of which it already has the idea, with the body of a lioness, of which it also has the image. In this his head acts in the same manner, as when by any defect in the interior organ, his disordered imagination paints to him some objects, notwithstanding he is awake. He frequently dreams, without being asleep: his dreams never produce any thing so strange but that they have some resemblance, with the objects which have anteriorly acted on his senses; which have already communicated ideas to his brain. The watchful theologians have composed, at their leisure, in their waking hours, those phantoms, of which they avail themselves, to terrify or frighten man; they have done nothing more than assemble the scattered traits which they have found in the most terrible beings of their own species; by exaggerating the powers, by enlarging the rights claimed by tyrants, they have formed ideal beings, before whom man trembles, and is afraid. Thus, it is seen, that dreams, far from proving that the soul acts by its own peculiar energy, that it draws its ideas from its own recesses; prove, on the contrary, that in sleep it is intirely passive, that it does not even renew its modifications, but according to the involuntary confusion, which physical causes produce in the body, of which every thing tends to shew the identity, the consubstantiality with the soul. What appears to have led those into a mistake, who maintained that the soul drew its ideas from itself, is this, they have contemplated these ideas, as if they were real beings, when, in point of fact, they are nothing more than the modifications produced in the brain of man, by objects to which this brain is a stranger; they are these objects, who are the true models, who are the real archetypes to which it is necessary to recur: here is the source of all their errors. In the individual who dreams, the soul does not act more from itself, than it does in the man who is drunk, that is to say, who is modified by some spirituous liquor: or than it does in the sick man, when he is delirious, that is to say, when he is modified by those physical causes which disturb his machine, which obstruct it in the performance of its functions; or than it, does in him, whose brain is disordered: dreams, like these various states, announce nothing more than a physical confusion in the human machine, under the influence of which the brain ceases to act, after a precise and regular manner: this disorder may be traced to physical causes, such as the aliments--the humours--the combinations--the fermentations, which are but little analogous to the salutary state of man; from hence it will appear, that his brain is necessarily confused, whenever his body is agitated in an extraordinary manner. Do not let him, therefore, believe that his soul acts by itself, or without a cause, in any one moment of his existence; it is, conjointly with the body, submitted to the impulse of beings, who act on him necessarily, according to their various properties. Wine taken in too great a quantity, necessarily disturbs his ideas, causes confusion in his corporeal functions, occasions disorder in his mental faculties. If there really existed a being in Nature, with the capability of moving itself by its own peculiar energies, that is to say, able to produce motion, independent of all other causes, such a being would have the power of arresting itself, or of suspending the motion of the universe; which is nothing more than an immense chain of causes linked one to another, acting and re-acting by necessary immutable laws, and which cannot be changed, which are incapable of being suspended, unless the essences of every thing in it were changed, without the properties of every thing were annihilated. In the general system of the world, nothing more can be perceived than a long series of motion, received and communicated in succession, by beings capacitated to give impulse to each other: it is thus, that each body is moved by the collision of some other body. The invisible motion of some soul is to be attributed to causes concealed within himself; he believes that it is moved by itself, because he does not see the springs which put it in motion, or because he conceives those powers are incapable of producing the effects he so much admires: but, does he more clearly conceive, how a spark in exploding gunpowder, is capable of producing the terrible effects he witnesses? The source of his errors arise from this, that he regards his body as gross and inert, whilst this body is a sensible machine, which has necessarily an instantaneous conscience the moment it receives an impression; which is conscious of its own existence by the recollection of impressions successively experienced; memory by resuscitating an impression anteriorly received, by detaining it, or by causing an impression which it receives to remain, whilst it associates it with another, then with a third, gives all the mechanism of _reasoning_. An idea, which is only an imperceptible modification of the brain, gives play to the organ of speech, which displays itself by the motion it excites in the tongue: this, in its turn, breeds ideas, thoughts, and passions, in those beings who are provided with organs susceptible of receiving analagous motion; in consequence of which, the wills of a great number of men are influenced, who, combining their efforts, produce a revolution in a state, or even have an influence over the entire globe. It is thus, that an ALEXANDER decided the fate of Asia, it is thus, that a MAHOMET changed the face of the earth; it is thus, that imperceptible causes produce the most terrible, the most extended effects, by a series of necessary motion imprinted on the brain of man. The difficulty of comprehending the effects produced on the soul of man, has made him attribute to it those incomprehensible qualities which have been examined. By the aid of imagination, by the power of thought, this soul appears to quit his body, to carry itself with the greatest ease, to transport itself with the utmost facility towards the most distant objects; to run over, to approximate in the twinkling of an eye, all the points of the universe: he has therefore believed, that a being who is susceptible of such rapid motion, must be of a nature very distinguished from all others; he has persuaded himself that this soul in reality does travel, that it actually springs over the immense space necessary to meet these various objects; he did not perceive, that to do it in an instant, it had only to run over itself to approximate the ideas consigned to its keeping, by means of the senses. Indeed, it is never by any other means than by his senses, that beings become known to man, or furnish him with ideas; it is only in consequence of the impulse given to his body, that his brain is modified, or that his soul thinks, wills, and acts. If, as ARISTOTLE asserted more than two thousand years ago,--"_nothing enters the mind of man but through the medium of his senses_,"--it follows as a consequence, that every thing that issues from it must find some sensible object to which it can attach its ideas, whether immediately, as a man, a tree, a bird, &c. or in the last analysis or decomposition, such as pleasure, happiness, vice, virtue, &c. This principle, so true, so luminous, so important in its consequence, has been set forth in all its lustre, by a great number of philosophers; among the rest, by the great LOCKE. Whenever, therefore, a word or its idea does not connect itself with some sensible object to which it can be related, this word or this idea is unmeaning, and void of sense; it were better for man that the idea was banished from his mind, struck out of his language: this principle is only the converse of the axiom of ARISTOTLE,--"_if the direct be evident, the inverse must be so likewise_." How has it happened, that the profound LOCKE, who, to the great mortification of the metaphysicians, has placed this principle of ARISTOTLE in the clearest point of view? how is it, that all those who, like him, have recognized the absurdity of the system of innate ideas, have not drawn the immediate, the necessary consequences? How has it come to pass, that they have not had sufficient courage to apply so clear a principle to all those fanciful chimeras with which the human mind has for such a length of time been so vainly occupied? did they not perceive that their principle sapped the very foundations of those metaphysical speculations, which never occupy man but with those objects of which, as they are inaccessible to his senses, he consequently can never form to himself any accurate idea? But prejudice, when it is generally held sacred, prevents him from seeing the most simple application of the most self-evident principles. In metaphysical researches, the greatest men are frequently nothing more than children, who are incapable of either foreseeing or deducing the consequence of their own data. LOCKE, as well as all those who have adopted his system, which is so demonstrable,--or to the axiom of ARISTOTLE, which is so clear, ought to have concluded from it that all those wonderful things with which metaphysicians have amused themselves, are mere chimeras; mere wanderings of the imagination; that an immaterial spirit or substance, without extent, without parts, is, in fact, nothing more than an absence of ideas; in short, they ought to have felt that the ineffable intelligence which they have supposed to preside at the helm of the world, is after all nothing more than a being of their own imagination, on which man has never been in accord, whom he has pictured under all the variety of forms, to which he has at different periods, in different climes, ascribed every kind of attribute, good or bad; but of which it is impossible his senses can ever prove either the existence or the qualities. For the same reason, moral philosophers ought to have concluded, that what is called moral sentiment, _moral instinct_, that is, innate ideas of virtue, anterior to all experience of the good or bad effects resulting from its practice, are mere chimerical notions, which, like a great many others, have for their guarantee and base only metaphysical speculation. Before man can judge, he must feel; before he can distinguish good from evil, he must compare. _Morals_, is a science of facts: to found them, therefore, on an hypothesis inaccessible to his senses, of which he has no means of proving the reality, is to render them uncertain; it is to cast the log of discord into his lap, to cause him unceasingly to dispute upon that which he can never understand. To assert that the ideas of morals are _innate_, or the effect of _instinct_, is to pretend that man knows how to read before he has learned the letters of the alphabet; that he is acquainted with the laws of society before they are either made or promulgated. To undeceive him, with respect to innate ideas or modifications, imprinted on his soul, at the moment of his birth, it is simply requisite to recur to their source; he will then see that those with which he is familiar, which have, as it were, identified themselves with his existence, have all come to him through the medium of some of his senses; that they are sometimes engraven on his brain with great difficulty,--that they have never been permanent,--that they have perpetually varied in him: he will see that these pretended inherent ideas of his soul, are the effect of education, of example, above all, of habit, which by reiterated motion has taught his brain to associate his ideas either in a confused or a perspicuous manner; to familiarize itself with systems either rational or absurd. In short, he takes those for innate ideas of which he has forgotten the origin; he no longer recals to himself, either the precise epoch, or the successive circumstances when these ideas were first consigned to his brain: arrived at a certain age he believes he has always had the same notions; his memory, crowded with experience, loaded with a multitude of facts, is no longer able to distinguish the particular circumstances which have contributed to give his brain its present modifications; its instantaneous mode of thinking; its actual opinions. For example, not one of his race, perhaps, recollects the first time the word God struck his ears--the first ideas that it formed in him--the first thoughts that it produced in him; nevertheless, it is certain that from thence he has searched for some being with whom to connect the idea which he has either formed to himself, or which has been suggested to him: accustomed to hear God continually spoken of, he has, when in other respects, the most enlightened, regarded this idea as if it were infused into him by Nature; whilst it is visibly to be attributed to those delineations of it, which his parents or his instructors have made to him; which he has, in consequence, modified according to his own particular organization, and the circumstances in which he has been placed; it is thus, that each individual forms to himself a God, of which he is himself the model, or which he modifies after his own fashion. His ideas of morals, although more real than those of metaphysics, are not however innate: the moral sentiments he forms on the will, or the judgment he passes on the actions of man, are founded on experience; which alone can enable him to discriminate those which are either useful or prejudicial, virtuous or vicious, honest or dishonest, worthy his esteem, or deserving his censure. His moral sentiments are the fruit of a multitude of experience that is frequently very long and very complicated. He gathers it with time; it is more or less faithful, by reason of his particular organization and the causes by which he is modified; he ultimately applies this experience with greater or less facility; to this is to be attributed his habit of judging. The celerity with which he applies his experience when he judges of the moral actions of his fellow man, is what has been termed _moral instinct_. That which in natural philosophy is called _instinct_, is only the effect of some want of the body, the consequence of some attraction or some repulsion in man or animals. The child that is newly born, sucks for the first time; the nipple of the breast is put into his mouth: by the natural analogy, that is found between the conglomerate glands, filled with nerves; which line his mouth, and the milk which flows from the bosom of the nurse, through the medium of the nipple, causes the child to press it with his mouth, in order to express the fluid appropriate to nourish his tender age; from all this the infant gathers experience; by degrees the idea of a nipple, of milk, of pleasure, associate themselves in his brain: every time he sees the nipple, he seizes it, promptly conveys it to his mouth, and applies it to the use for which it is designed. What has been said, will enable us to judge of those prompt and sudden sentiments, which have been designated _the force of blood_. Those sentiments of love, which fathers and mothers have for their children--those feelings of affection, which children, with good inclinations, bear towards their parents, are by no means _innate sentiments_; they are nothing more, than the effect of experience, of reflection, of habit, in souls of sensibility. These sentiments do not even exist in a great number of human beings. We but too often witness tyrannical parents, occupied with making enemies of their children, who appear to have been formed, only to be the victims of their irrational caprices or their unreasonable desires. From the instant in which man commences, until that in which he ceases to exist, he feels--he is moved either agreeably or unpleasantly--he collects facts--he gathers experience; these produce ideas in his brain, that are either cheerful or gloomy. Not one individual has all this experience present to his memory at the same time, it does not ever represent to him the whole clew at once: it is, however, this experience that mechanically directs him, without his knowledge, in all his actions; it was to designate the rapidity with, which he applied this experience, of which he so frequently loses the connection--of which he is so often at a loss to render himself an account, that he imagined the word _instinct_: it appears to be the effect of magic, the operation of a supernatural power, to the greater number of individuals: it is a word devoid of sense to many others; but to the philosopher it is the effect of a very lively feeling to him it consists in the faculty of combining, promptly, a multitude of experience--of arranging with facility--of comparing with quickness, a long and numerous train of extremely complicated ideas. It is want that causes the inexplicable instinct we behold in animals which have been denied souls without reason, whilst they are susceptible of an infinity of actions that prove they think--judge--have memory--are capable of experience--can combine ideas--can apply them with more or less facility to satisfy the wants engendered by their particular organization; in short, that prove they have passions that are capable of being modified. Nothing but the height of folly can refuse intellectual faculties to animals; they feel, choose, deliberate, express love, show hatred; in many instances their senses are much keener than those of man. Fish will return periodically to the spot where it is the custom to throw them bread. It is well known the embarrassments which animals have thrown in the way of the partizans of the doctrine of spirituality; they have been fearful, if they allowed them to have a spiritual soul, of elevating them to the condition of human creatures; on the other hand, in not allowing them to have a soul, they have furnished their adversaries with authority to deny it in like manner to man, who thus finds himself debased to the condition of the animal. Metaphysicians have never known how to extricate themselves from this difficulty. DESCARTES fancied he solved it by saying that beasts have no souls, but are mere machines. Nothing can be nearer the surface, than the absurdity of this principle. Whoever contemplates Nature without prejudice, will readily acknowledge that there is no other difference between the man and the beast, than that which is to be attributed to the diversity of his organization. In some beings of the human species, who appear to be endowed with a greater sensibility of organs than others, may be seen an instinct, by the assistance of which they very promptly judge of the concealed dispositions of their fellows, simply by inspecting the lineaments of their face. Those who are denominated _physiognomists_, are only men of very acute feelings; who have gathered an experience of which others, whether from the coarseness of their organs, from the little attention they have paid, or from some defect in their senses, are totally incapable: these last do not believe in the science of physiognomy, which appears to them perfectly ideal. Nevertheless, it is certain, that the action of this soul, which has been made spiritual, makes impressions that are extremely marked upon the exterior of the body; these impressions, continually reiterated, their image remains: thus the habitual passions of man paint themselves on his countenance; by which the attentive observer, who is endowed with acute feeling, is enabled to judge with great rapidity of his mode of existence, and even to foresee his actions, his inclinations, his desires, his predominant passions, &c. Although the science of physiognomy appears chimerical to a great number of persons, yet there are few who have not a clear idea of a tender regard--of a cruel eye--of an austere aspect--of a false, dissimulating look--of an open countenance, &c. Keen practised optics acquire without doubt the faculty of penetrating the concealed motion of the soul, by the visible traces it leaves upon features that it has continually modified. Above all, the eyes of man very quickly undergo changes according to the motion which is excited in him: these delicate organs are visibly altered by the smallest shock communicated to his brain. Serene eyes announce a tranquil soul; wild eyes indicate a restless mind; fiery eyes pourtray a choleric, sanguine temperament; fickle or inconstant eyes give room to suspect a soul either alarmed or dissimulating. It is the study of this variety of shades that renders man practised and acute: upon the spot he combines a multitude of acquired experience, in order to form his judgment of the person he beholds. His judgment, thus rapidly formed, partakes in nothing of the supernatural, in nothing of the wonderful: such a man is only distinguished by the fineness of his organs, and by the celerity with which his brain performs its functions. It is the same with some beings of the human species, in whom may be discovered an extraordinary sagacity, which, to the uninformed, appears miraculous. The most skilful practitioners in medicine, are, no doubt, men endowed with very acute feelings, similar to that of the physiognomists, by the assistance of which they judge with great facility of diseases, and very promptly draw their prognostics. Indeed, we see men who are capable of appreciating in the twinkling of an eye a multitude of circumstances, who have sometimes the faculty of foreseeing the most distant events; yet, this species of prophetic talent has nothing in it of the supernatural; it indicates nothing more than great experience, with an extremely delicate organization, from which they derive the faculty of judging with extreme faculty of causes, of foreseeing their very remote effects. This faculty, however, is also found in animals, who foresee much better than man, the variations of the atmosphere with the various changes of the weather. Birds have long been the prophets, and even the guides of several nations who pretend to be extremely enlightened. It is, then, to their organization, exercised after a particular manner, that must be attributed those wonderous faculties which distinguish some beings, that astonish others. To have _instinct_, only signifies to judge quickly, without requiring to make a long, reasoning on the subject. Man's ideas upon vice and upon virtue, are by no means innate; they are, like all others, acquired: the judgment he forms, is founded upon experience, whether true or false,--this depends upon his conformation, and upon the habits that have modified him. The infant has no ideas either of the Divinity or of virtue; it is from those who instruct him that he receives these ideas; he makes more or less use of them, according to his natural organization, or as his dispositions have been more or less exercised. Nature gives man legs, the nurse teaches him their use, his agility depends upon their natural conformation, and the manner in which he exercises them. What is called _taste_, in the fine arts, is to be attributed, in the same manner, only to the acuteness of man's organs, practised by the habit of seeing, of comparing, of judging certain objects; from whence results, to some of his species, the faculty of judging with great rapidity, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole with its various relations. It is by the force of seeing, of feeling, of experiencing objects, that he attains to a knowledge of them; it is in consequence of reiterating this experience, that he acquires the power, that he gains the habit of judging with celerity. But this experience is by no means innate, he did not possess it before he was born; he is neither able to think, to judge, nor to have ideas, before he has feeling; he is neither in a capacity to love, nor to hate; to approve, nor to blame, before he has been moved, either agreeably or disagreeably. Nevertheless, this is precisely what must be supposed by those who are desirous to make man admit of innate ideas, of opinions; infused by Nature, whether in morals, metaphysics, or any other science. That his mind should have the faculty of thought, that it should occupy itself with an object, it is requisite it should be acquainted with its qualities; that it may have a knowledge of these qualities, it is necessary some of his senses should have been struck by them: those objects, therefore, of which he does not know any of the qualities, are nullities; or at least they do not exist for him. It will be asserted, perhaps, that the universal consent of man, upon certain propositions, such as _the whole is greater than its part_, upon all geometrical demonstrations, appear to warrant the supposition of certain primary notions that are innate, not acquired. It may be replied, that these notions are always acquired; that they are the fruit of an experience more or less prompt; that it is requisite to have compared the whole with its part, before conviction can ensue, that the whole is the greater of the two. Man when he is born, does not bring with him the idea that two and two make four; but he is, nevertheless, speedily convinced of its truth. Before forming any judgment whatever, it is absolutely necessary to have compared facts. It is evident, that those who have gratuitously supposed innate ideas, or notions inherent in man, have confounded his organization, or his natural dispositions, with the habit by which he is modified; with the greater or less aptitude he has of making experience, and of applying it in his judgment. A man who has taste in painting, has, without doubt, brought with him into the world eyes more acute, more penetrating than another; but these eyes would by no means enable him to judge with promptitude, if he had never had occasion to exercise them; much less, in some respects, can those dispositions which are called _natural_, be regarded as innate. Man is not, at twenty years of age, the same as he was when he came into the world; the physical causes that are continually acting upon him, necessarily have an influence upon his organization, and so modify it, that his natural dispositions themselves are not at one period what they are at another. La Motte Le Vayer says, "We think quite otherwise of things at one time than at another; when young than when old--when hungry than when our appetite is satisfied--in the night than in the day--when peevish than when cheerful. Thus, varying every hour, by a thousand other circumstances, which keep us in a state of perpetual inconstancy and instability." Every day may be seen children, who, to a certain age--display a great deal of ingenuity, a strong aptitude for the sciences, who finish by falling into stupidity. Others may be observed, who, during their infancy, have shown dispositions but little favourable to improvement, yet develope themselves in the end, and astonish us by an exhibition of those qualities of which we hardly thought them susceptible: there arrives a moment in which the mind takes a spring, makes use of a multitude of experience which it has amassed, without its having been perceived; and, if I may be allowed the expression, without their own knowledge. Thus, it cannot be too often repeated, all the ideas, all the notions, all the modes of existence, and all the thoughts of man, are acquired. His mind cannot act, cannot exercise itself, but upon that of which it has knowledge; it can understand either well or ill, only those things which it has previously felt. Such of his ideas that do not suppose some exterior material object for their model, or one to which he is able to relate them, which are therefore called _abstract ideas_, are only modes in which his interior organ considers its own peculiar modifications, of which it chooses some without respect to others. The words which he uses to designate these ideas, such as _bounty, beauty, order, intelligence, virtue_, &c. do not offer any one sense, if he does not relate them to, or if he does not explain them by, those objects which his senses have shewn him to be susceptible of those qualities, or of those modes of existence, of that manner of acting, which is known to him. What is it that points out to him the vague idea of _beauty_, if he does not attach it to some object that has struck his senses in a peculiar manner, to which, in consequence, he attributes this quality? What is it that represents the word _intelligence_, if he does not connect it with a certain mode of being and of acting? Does the word _order_ signify any thing, if he does not relate it to a series of actions, to a chain of motion, by which he is affected in a certain manner? Is not the word _virtue_ void of sense, if he does not apply it to those dispositions of his fellows which produce known effects, different from those which result from contrary inclinations? What do the words _pain_ and _pleasure_ offer to his mind in the moment when his organs neither suffer nor enjoy, if it be not the modes in which he has been affected, of which his brain conserves the remembrance, of those impressions, which experience has shewn him to be either useful or prejudicial? But when he bears the words spirituality, immateriality, incorporeality, &c. pronounced, neither his senses nor his memory afford him any assistance; they do not furnish him with any means by which he can form an idea of their qualities, or of the objects to which he ought to apply them; in that which is not matter he can only see vacuum and emptiness, which as long as he remains what he is, cannot, to his mind, be susceptible of any one quality. All the errors, all the disputes of men, have their foundation in this, that they have renounced experience, have surrendered the evidence of their senses, to give themselves up to the guidance of notions which they have believed infused or innate; although in reality they are no more than the effect of a distempered imagination, of prejudices, in which they have been instructed from their infancy, with which habit has familiarized them, which authority has obliged them to conserve. Languages are filled with abstract words, to which are attached confused and vague ideas; of which, when they come to be examined, no model can be found in Nature; no object to which they can be related. When man gives himself the trouble to analyze things, he is quite surprised to find, that those words which are continually in the mouths of men, never present any fixed or determinate idea: he hears them unceasingly speaking of spirits--of the soul and its faculties--of duration--of space--of immensity--of infinity--of perfection--of virtue--of reason--of sentiment--of instinct--of taste, &c. without his being able to tell precisely, what they themselves understand by these words. Nevertheless, they do not appear to have been invented, but for the purpose of representing the images of things; or to paint, by the assistance of the senses, those known objects on which the mind is able to meditate, which it is competent to appreciate, to compare, and to judge. For man to think of that which has not acted on any of his senses, is to think on words; it is for his senses to dream; it is to seek in his own imagination for objects to which he can attach his wandering ideas: to assign qualities to these objects is, unquestionably, to redouble his extravagance, to set no limits to his folly. If a word be destined to represent to him an object that has not the capacity to act on any one of his organs; of which, it is impossible for him to prove either the existence or the qualities; his imagination, by dint of racking itself, will nevertheless, in some measure, supply him with the ideas he wants; he composes some kind of a picture, with the images or colours he is always obliged to borrow, from the objects of which he has a knowledge: thus the Divinity has been represented by some under the character of a venerable old man; by others, under that of a puissant monarch; by others, as an exasperated, irritated being, &c. It is evident, however, that man, with some of his qualities, has served for the model of these pictures: but if he be informed of objects that are represented as pure spirits--that have neither body nor extent--that are not contained in space--that are beyond nature,--here then he is plunged into emptiness; his mind no longer has any ideas--it no longer knows upon what it meditates. This, as will be seen in the sequel, no doubt, is the source of those unformed notions which some men have formed of the Divinity; they themselves frequently annihilate him, by assembling incompatible and contradictory attributes. In giving him morals--in composing him of known qualities,--they make him a man;--in assigning him the negative attributes of every thing they know, they render him inaccessible to their senses--they destroy all antecedent ideas--they make him a mere nothing. From this it will appear, that those sublime sciences which are called _Theology, Psychology, Metaphysics_, have been mere sciences of words: morals and politics, with which they very frequently mix, have, in consequence, become inexplicable enigmas, which there is nothing short of the study of Nature can enable us to expound. Man has occasion for truth; it consists in a knowledge of the true relations he has with those beings competent to have an influence on his welfare; these relations are to be known only by experience: without experience there can be no reason; without reason man is only a blind creature, who conducts himself by chance. But, how is he to acquire experience upon ideal objects, which his senses neither enable him to know nor to examine? How is he to assure himself of the existence, how ascertain the qualities of beings he is not able to feel? How can he judge whether there objects be favorable or prejudicial to him? How is he to know, without the evidence of his senses, what he ought to love, what he should hate, what to seek after, what to shun, what to do, what to leave undone? It is, however, upon this knowledge that his condition in this world rests; it is upon this knowledge that morals is founded. From whence it may be seen, that, by causing him to blend vague metaphysical notions with morals, or the science of the certain and invariable relations which subsist between mankind; or by weakly establishing them upon chimerical ideas, which have no existence but in his imagination; these morals, upon which the welfare of society so much depends, are rendered uncertain, are made arbitrary, are abandoned to the caprices of fancy, are not fixed upon any solid basis. Beings essentially different by their natural organization, by the modifications they experience, by the habits they contract, by the opinions they acquire, must of necessity think differently. His temperament, as we have seen, decides the mental qualities of man: this temperament itself is diversely modified in him: from whence it consecutively follows, his imagination cannot possibly be the same; neither can it create to him the same images. Each individual is a connected whole, of which all the parts have a necessary correspondence. Different eyes must see differently, must give extremely varied ideas of the objects they contemplate, even when these objects are real. What, then, must be the diversity of these ideas, if the objects meditated upon do not act upon the senses? Mankind have pretty nearly the same ideas, in the gross, of those substances that act upon his organs with vivacity; he is sufficiently in unison upon some qualities which he contemplates very nearly in the same manner; I say, very nearly, because the intelligence, the notion, the conviction of any one proposition, however simple, however evident, however clear it may be supposed, is not, nor cannot be, strictly the same, in any two men. Indeed, one man not being another man, the first cannot, for example, have rigorously and mathematically the same notion of unity as the second; seeing that an identical effect cannot be the result of two different causes. Thus, when men are in accord in their ideas, in their modes of thinking, in their judgment, in their passions, in their desires, in, their tastes, their consent does not arise from their seeing or feeling the same objects precisely in the same manner, but pretty nearly; language is not, nor cannot be, sufficiently copious to designate the vast variety of shades, the multiplicity of imperceptible differences, which is to be found in their modes of seeing and thinking. Each man, then, has, to say thus, a language which is peculiar to himself alone, and this language is incommunicable to others. What harmony, what unison, then, can possibly exist between them, when they discourse with each other, upon objects only known to their imagination? Can this imagination in one individual ever be the same as in another? How can they possibly understand each other, when they assign to those objects qualities that can only be attributed to the particular manner in which their brain is affected. For one man to exact from another that he shall think like himself, is to insist that he shall be organized precisely in the same manner--that he shall have been modified exactly the same in every moment of his existence: that he shall have received the same temperament, the same nourishment, the same education: in a word, that he shall require that other to be himself. Wherefore is it not exacted that all men shall have the same features? Is man more the master of his opinions? Are not his opinions the necessary consequence of his Nature, and of those peculiar circumstances which, from his infancy, have necessarily had an influence upon his mode of thinking, and his manner of acting? If man be a connected whole, whenever a single feature differs from his own, ought he not to conclude that it is not possible his brain can either think, associate ideas, imagine, or dream precisely in the same manner with that other. The diversity in the temperament of man, is the natural, the necessary source of the diversity of his passions, of his taste, of his ideas of happiness, of his opinions of every kind. Thus, this same diversity will be the fatal source of his disputes, of his hatreds, of his injustice, every time he shall reason upon unknown objects, but to which he shall attach the greatest importance. He will never understand either himself or others, in speaking of a spiritual soul, or of immaterial substances distinguished from Nature; he will, from that moment, cease to speak the same language, and he will never attach the same ideas to the same words. What, then, shall be, the common standard that shall decide which is the man that thinks with the greatest justice? What the scale by which to measure who has the best regulated imagination? What balance shall be found sufficiently exact to determine whose knowledge is most certain, when he agitates subjects, which experience cannot enable him to examine, that escape all his senses, that have no model, that are above reason? Each individual, each legislator, each speculator, each nation, has ever formed to himself different ideas of these things; each believes, that his own peculiar reveries ought to be preferred to those of his neighbours; which always appear to him an absurd, ridiculous, and false as his own can possibly have appeared to his fellow; each clings to his own opinion, because each retains his own peculiar mode of existence; each believes his happiness depends upon his attachment to his prejudices, which he never adopts but because he believes them beneficial to his welfare. Propose to a man to change his religion for yours, he will believe you a madman; you will only excite his indignation, elicit his contempt; he will propose to you, in his turn, to adopt his own peculiar opinions; after much reasoning, you will treat each other as absurd beings, ridiculously opiniated, pertinaciously stubborn: and he will display the least folly, who shall first yield. But if the adversaries become heated in the dispute, which always happens, when they suppose the matter important, or when they would defend the cause of their own self-love; from thence their passions sharpen, they grow angry, quarrels are provoked, they hate each other, and end by reciprocal injury. It is thus, that for opinions, which no man can demonstrate, we see the Brahmin despised; the Mahommedan hated; the Pagan held in contempt; that they oppress and disdain each with the most rancorous animosity: the Christian burns the Jew at what is called an _auto-de-fe_, because he clings to the faith of his fathers: the Roman Catholic condemns the Protestant to the flames, and makes a conscience of massacring him in cold blood: this re-acts in his turn; sometimes the various sects of Christians league together against the incredulous Turk, and for a moment suspend their own bloody disputes that they may chastise the enemies to the true faith: then, having glutted their revenge, return with redoubled fury, to wreak over again their infuriated vengeance on each other. If the imaginations of men were the same, the chimeras which they bring forth would be every where the same; there would be no disputes among them on this subject, if they all dreamt in the same manner; great numbers of human beings would be spared, if man occupied his mind with objects capable of being known, of which the existence was proved, of which he was competent to discover the true qualities, by sure, by reiterated experience. _Systems of Philosophy_ are not subject to dispute but when their principles are not sufficiently proved; by degrees experience, in pointing out the truth and detecting their errors, terminates these quarrels. There is no variance among _geometricians_ upon the principles of their science; it is only raised, when their suppositions are false, or their objects too much complicated. _Theologians_ find so much difficulty in agreeing among themselves, simply, because, in their contests, they divide without ceasing, not known and examined propositions, but prejudices with which they have been imbued in their youth--in the schools--by each other's books, &c. They are perpetually reasoning, not upon real objects, of which the existence is demonstrated, but upon imaginary systems of which they have never examined the reality; they found these disputes, not upon averred experience, or constant facts, but upon gratuitious suppositions, which each endeavours to convince the other are without solidity. Finding these ideas of long standing, that few people, refuse to admit them, they take them for incontestible truths, that ought to be received merely upon being announced; whenever they attach great importance to them, they irritate themselves against the temerity of those who have the audacity to doubt, or even to examine them. If prejudice had been laid aside, it would perhaps have been discovered that many of those objects, which have given birth to the most shocking, the most sanguinary disputes among men, were mere phantoms; which a little examination would have shown to be unworthy their notice: _the priests of Apollo_ would have been harmless, if man had examined for himself, without prejudice, the tenets they held forth: he would have found, that he was fighting, that he was cutting his neighbour's throat, for words void of sense; or, at the least, he would have learned to doubt his right to act in the manner he did; he would have renounced that dogmatical, that imperious tone he assumed, by which he would oblige his fellow to unite with him in opinion. The most trifling reflection would have shewn him the necessity of this diversity in his notions, of this contrariety in his imagination, which depends upon his Natural conformation diversely modified: which necessarily has an influence over his thoughts, over his will, and over his actions. In short, if he had consulted morals, if he had fallen back upon reason, every thing would have conspired to prove to him, that beings who call themselves rational, were made to think variously; on that account were designed to live peaceable with each other, to love each other, to lend each other mutual succours whatever may be their opinions upon subjects, either impossible to be known, or to be contemplated under the same point of view: every thing would have joined in evidence to convince him of the unreasonable tyranny, of the unjust violence, of the useless cruelty of those men of blood, who persecute, who destroy mankind, in order that they may mould him to their own peculiar opinions; every thing would have conducted mortals to _mildness_, to _indulgence_, to _toleration_; virtues, unquestionably of more real importance, much more necessary to the welfare of society, than the marvellous speculations by which it is divided, by which it is frequently hurried on to sacrifice to a maniacal fury, the pretended enemies to these revered flights of the imagination. From this it must be evident, of what importance it is to _morals_ to examine the ideas, to which it has been agreed to attach so much worth; to which man is continually sacrificing his own peculiar happiness; to which he is immolating the tranquillity of nations, at the irrational command of fanatical cruel guides. Let him fall back on his experience; let him return to Nature; let him occupy himself with reason; let him consult those objects that are real, which are useful to his permanent felicity; let him study Nature's laws; let him study himself; let him consult the bonds which unite him to his fellow mortals; let him examine the fictitious bonds that enchain him to the most baneful prejudices. If his imagination must always feed itself with illusions, if he remains steadfast in his own opinions, if his prejudices are dear to him, let him at least permit others to ramble in their own manner, or seek after truth as best suits their inclination; but let him always recollect, that all the opinions--all the ideas--all the systems--all the wills--all the actions of man, are the necessary consequence of his nature, of his temperament, of his organization, and of those causes, either transitory or constant, which modify hint: in short, that _man is not more a free agent to think than to act:_ a truth that will be again proved in the following chapter. CHAP. XI _Of the System of Man's free agency._ Those who have pretended that the _soul_ is distinguished from the body, is immaterial, draws its ideas from its own peculiar source, acts by its own energies without the aid of any exterior object; by a consequence of their own system, have enfranchised it from those physical laws, according to which all beings of which we have a knowledge are obliged to act. They have believed that the foul is mistress of its own conduct, is able to regulate its own peculiar operations; has the faculty to determine its will by its own natural energy; in a word, they have pretended man is a _free agent_. It has been already sufficiently proved, that the soul is nothing more than the body, considered relatively to some of its functions, more concealed than others: it has been shewn, that this soul, even when it shall be supposed immaterial, is continually modified conjointly with the body; is submitted to all its motion; that without this it would remain inert and dead: that, consequently, it is subjected to the influence of those material, to the operation those physical causes, which give impulse to the body; of which the mode of existence, whether habitual or transitory, depends upon the material elements by which it is surrounded; that form its texture; that constitute its temperament; that enter into it by the means of the aliments; that penetrate it by their subtility; the faculties which are called intellectual, and those qualities which are styled moral, have been explained in a manner purely physical; entirely natural: in the last place, it has been demonstrated, that all the ideas, all the systems, all the affections, all the opinions, whether true or false, which man forms to himself, are to be attributed to his physical powers; are to be ascribed to his material senses. Thus man is a being purely physical; in whatever manner he is considered, he is connected to universal Nature: submitted to the necessary, to the immutable laws that she imposes on all the beings she contains, according to their peculiar essences; conformable to the respective properties with which, without consulting them, she endows each particular species. Man's life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth: without his ever being able to swerve from it even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organizations does in no wise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no controul; give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad--happy or miserable--wise or foolish--reasonable or irrational, without his will going for anything in these various states. Nevertheless, in despite of the shackles by which he is bound, it is pretended he is a free agent, or that independent of the causes by which he is moved, he determines his own will; regulates his own condition. However slender the foundation of this opinion, of which every thing ought to point out to him the error; it is current at this day for an incontestible truth, and believed enlightened; it is the basis or religion, which has been incapable of imagining how man could either merit reward or deserve punishment if he was not a free agent. Society has been believed interested in this system, because an idea has gone abroad, that if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as necessary, the right of punishing those who injure their associates would no longer exist. At length human vanity accommodated itself to an hypothesis which, unquestionable, appears to distinguish man from all other physical beings, by assigning to him the special privilege of a total independence of all other causes; but of which a very little reflection would have shewn him the absurdity or even the impossibility. As a part, subordinate to the great whole, man is obliged to experience its influence. To be a free agent it were needful that each individual was of greater strength than the entire of Nature; or, that he was out of this Nature: who, always in action herself, obliges all the beings she embraces, to act, and to concur to her general motion; or, as it has been said elsewhere, to conserve her active existence, by the motion that all beings produce in consequence of their particular energies, which result from their being submitted to fixed, eternal, and immutable laws. In order that man might be a free agent, it were needful that all beings should lose their essences; it is equally necessary that he himself should no longer enjoy physical sensibility; that he should neither know good nor evil; pleasure nor pain; but if this was the case, from that moment he would no longer be in a state to conserve himself, or render his existence happy; all beings would become indifferent to him; he would no longer have any choice; he would cease to know what he ought to love; what it was right he should fear; he would not have any acquaintance with that which he should seek after; or with that which it is requisite he should avoid. In short, man would be an unnatural being; totally incapable of acting in the manner we behold. It is the actual essence of man to tend to his well-being; to be desirous to conserve his existence; if all the motion of his machine springs as a necessary consequence from this primitive impulse; if pain warns him of that which he ought to avoid; if pleasure announces to him that which he should desire; if it is in his essence to love that which either excites delight, or, that from which he expects agreeable sensations; to hate that which makes him either fear contrary impressions; or, that which afflicts him with uneasiness; it must necessarily be, that he will be attracted by that which he deems advantageous; that his will shall be determined by those objects which he judges useful; that he will be repelled by those beings which he believes prejudicial, either to his habitual, or to his transitory mode of existence; by that which he considers disadvantageous. It is only by the aid of experience, that man acquires the faculty of understanding what he ought to love; of knowing what he ought to fear. Are his organs sound? his experience will be true: are they unsound? it will be false: in the first instance he will have reason, prudence, foresight; he will frequently foresee very remote effects; he will know, that what he sometimes contemplates as a good, may possibly become an evil, by its necessary or probable consequences: that what must be to him a transient evil, may by its result procure him a solid and durable good. It is thus experience enables him to foresee that the amputation of a limb will cause him painful sensation, he consequently is obliged to fear this operation, and he endeavours to avoid the pain; but if experience has also shewn him, that the transitory pain this amputation will cause him may be the means of saving his life; the preservation, of his existence being of necessity dear to him, he is obliged to submit himself to the momentary pain with a view to procuring a permanent good, by which it will be overbalanced. The will, as we have elsewhere said, is a modification of the brain, by which it is disposed to action or prepared to give play to the organs. This will is necessarily determined by the qualities, good or bad, agreeable or painful, of the object or the motive that acts upon his senses; or of which the idea remains with him, and is resuscitated by his memory. In consequence, he acts necessarily; his action is the result of the impulse he receives either from the motive, from the object, or from the idea, which has modified his brain, or disposed his will. When he does not act according to this impulse, it is because there comes some new cause, some new motive, some new idea, which modifies his brain in a different manner, gives him a new impulse, determines his will in another way; by which the action of the former impulse is suspended: thus, the sight of an agreeable object, or its idea, determines his will to set him in action to procure it; but if a new object or a new idea more powerfully attracts him, it gives a new direction to his will, annihilates the effect of the former, and prevents the action by which it was to be procured. This is the mode in which reflection, experience, reason, necessarily arrests or suspends the action of man's will; without this, he would, of necessity, have followed the anterior impulse which carried him towards a then desirable object. In all this he always acts according to necessary laws, from which he has no means of emancipating himself. If, when tormented with violent thirst, he figures to himself an idea, or really perceives a fountain, whose limpid streams might cool his feverish habit, is he sufficient master of himself to desire or not to desire the object competent to satisfy so lively a want? It will no doubt be conceded, that it is impossible he should not be desirous to satisfy it; but it will be said,--If at this moment it is announced to him, the water he so ardently desires is poisoned, he will, notwithstanding his vehement thirst, abstain from drinking it; and it has, therefore, been falsely concluded that he is a free agent. The fact, however, is, that the motive in either case is exactly the same: his own conservation. The same necessity that determined him to drink, before he knew the water was deleterious, upon this new discovery, equally determines him not to drink; the desire of conserving himself, either annihilates or suspends the former impulse; the second motive becomes stronger than the preceding; that is, the fear of death, or the desire of preserving himself, necessarily prevails over the painful sensation caused by his eagerness to drink. But, (it will be said) if the thirst is very parching, an inconsiderate man, without regarding the danger, will risque swallowing the water. Nothing is gained by this remark: in this case, the anterior impulse only regains the ascendency; he is persuaded, that life may possibly be longer preserved, or that he shall derive a greater good by drinking the poisoned water, than by enduring the torment, which, to his mind, threatens instant dissolution: thus, the first becomes the strongest, and necessarily urges him on to action. Nevertheless, in either case, whether he partakes of the water, or whether he does not, the two actions will be equally necessary; they will be the effect of that motive which finds itself most puissant; which consequently acts in a most coercive manner upon his will. This example will serve to explain the whole phaenomena of the human will. This will, or rather the brain, finds itself in the same situation as a bowl, which although it has received an impulse that drives it forward in a straight line, is deranged in its course, whenever a force, superior to the first, obliges it to change its direction. The man who drinks the poisoned water, appears a madman; but the actions of fools are as necessary as those of the most prudent individuals. The motives that determine the voluptuary, that actuate the debauchee to risk their health, are as powerful, their actions are as necessary, as those which decide the wise man to manage his. But, it will be insisted, the debauchee may be prevailed on to change his conduct; this does not imply that he is a free agent; but, that motives may be found sufficiently powerful to annihilate the effect of those that previously acted upon him; then these new motives determine his will to the new mode of conduct he may adopt, as necessarily as the former did to the old mode. Man is said to _deliberate_ when the action of the will is suspended; this happens when two opposite motives act alternately upon him. To deliberate, is to hate and to love in succession; it is to be alternately attracted and repelled; it is to be moved sometimes by one motive, sometimes by another. Man only deliberates when he does not distinctly understand the quality of the objects from which he receives impulse, or when experience has not sufficiently apprised him of the effects, more or less remote, which his actions will produce. He would take the air, but the weather is uncertain; he deliberates in consequence; he weighs the various motives that urge his will to go out or to stay at home; he is at length determined by that motive which is most probable; this removes his indecision, which necessarily settles his will either to remain within or to go abroad: this motive is always either the immediate or ultimate advantage he finds or thinks he finds in the action to which he is persuaded. Man's will frequently fluctuates between two objects, of which either the presence or the ideas move him alternately: he waits until he has contemplated the objects or the ideas they have left in his brain; which solicit him to different actions; he then compares these objects or ideas: but even in the time of deliberation, during the comparison, pending these alternatives of love and hatred, which succeed each other sometimes with the utmost rapidity, he is not a free agent for a single instant; the good or the evil which he believes he finds successively in the objects, are the necessary motives of these momentary wills; of the rapid motion of desire or fear that he experiences as long as his uncertainty continues. From this it will be obvious, that deliberation is necessary; that uncertainty is necessary; that whatever part he takes, in consequence of this deliberation, it will always necessarily be that which he has judged, whether well or ill, is most probable to turn to his advantage. When the soul is assailed by two motives that act alternately upon it, or modify it successively, it deliberates; the brain is in a sort of equilibrium, accompanied with perpetual oscillations, sometimes towards one object, sometimes towards the other, until the most forcible carries the point, and thereby extricates it, from this state of suspense, in which consists the indecision of his will. But when the brain is simultaneously assailed by causes equally strong, that move it in opposite directions; agreeable to the general law of all bodies, when they are struck equally by contrary powers, it stops, it is in _nisu_; it is neither capable to will nor to act; it waits until one of the two causes has obtained sufficient force to overpower the other, to determine its will, to attract it in such a manner that it may prevail over the efforts of the other cause. This mechanism, so simple, so natural, suffices to demonstrate, why uncertainty is painful; why suspense is always a violent state for man. The brain, an organ so delicate, so mobile, experiences such rapid modifications, that it is fatigued; or when it is urged in contrary directions, by causes equally powerful, it suffers a kind of compression, that prevents the activity which is suitable to the preservation of the whole, which is necessary to procure what is advantageous to its existence. This mechanism will also explain the irregularity, the indecision, the inconstancy of man; and account for that conduct, which frequently appears an inexplicable mystery, which indeed it is, under the received systems. In consulting experience, it will be found that the soul is submitted to precisely the same physical laws as the material body. If the will of each individual, during a given time, was only moved by a single cause or passion, nothing would be more easy than to foresee his actions; but his heart is frequently assailed by contrary powers, by adverse motives, which either act on him simultaneously or in succession; then his brain, attracted in opposite directions, is either fatigued, or else tormented by a state of compression, which deprives it of activity. Sometimes it is in a state of incommodious inaction; sometimes it is the sport of the alternate shocks it undergoes. Such, no doubt, is the state in which man finds himself, when a lively passion solicits him to the commission of crime, whilst fear points out to him the danger by which it is attended: such, also, is the condition of him whom remorse, by the continued labour of his distracted soul, prevents from enjoying the objects he has criminally obtained. If the powers or causes, whether exterior or interior, acting on the mind of man, tend towards opposite points, his soul, is well as all other bodies, will take a mean direction between the two; in consequence of the violence with which his soul is urged, his condition becomes sometimes so painful that his existence is troublesome: he has no longer a tendency to his own peculiar conservation; he seeks after death, as a sanctuary against himself--as the only remedy to his despair: it is thus we behold men, miserable and discontented, voluntarily destroy themselves, whenever life becomes insupportable. Man is competent to cherish his existence, no longer than life holds out charms to him; when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged, he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good. In this manner may be explained, the conduct of those melancholy beings, whose vicious temperaments, whose tortured consciences, whose chagrin, whose _ennui_, sometimes determine them to renounce life. The various powers, frequently very complicated, that act either successively or simultaneously upon the brain of man, which modify him so diversely in the different periods of his existence, are the true causes of that obscurity in morals, of that difficulty which is found, when it is desired to unravel the concealed springs of his enigmatical conduct. The heart of man is a labyrinth, only because it very rarely happens that we possess the necessary gift of judging it; from whence it will appear, that his circumstances, his indecision, his conduct, whether ridiculous, or unexpected, are the necessary consequences of the changes operated in him; are nothing but the effect of motives that successively determine his will; which are dependent on the frequent variations experienced by his machine. According to these variations, the same motives have not, always, the same influence over his will, the same objects no longer enjoy the faculty of pleasing him; his temperament has changed, either for the moment, or for ever. It follows as a consequence, that his taste, his desires, his passions, will change; there can be no kind of uniformity in his conduct, nor any certitude in the effects to be expected. Choice by no means proves the free-agency of man; he only deliberates when he does not yet know which to choose of the many objects that move him, he is then in an embarrassment, which does not terminate, until his will as decided by the greater advantage he believes be shall find in the object he chooses, or the action he undertakes. From whence it may be seen that choice is necessary, because he would not determine for an object, or for an action, if he did not believe that he should find in it some direct advantage. That man should have free-agency, it were needful that he should be able to will or choose without motive; or, that he could prevent motives coercing his will. Action always being the effect of his will once determined, as his will cannot be determined but by a motive, which is not in his own power, it follows that he is never the master of the determination of his own peculiar will; that consequently he never acts as a free agent. It has been believed that man was a free agent, because he had a will with the power of choosing; but attention has not been paid to the fact, that even his will is moved by causes independent of himself, is owing to that which is inherent in his own organization, or which belongs to the nature of the beings acting on him. Indeed, man passes a great portion of his life without even willing. His will attends the motive by which it is determined. If he was to render an exact account of every thing he does in the course of each day, from rising in the morning to lying down at night, he would find, that not one of his actions have been in the least voluntary; that they have been mechanical, habitual, determined by causes he was not able to foresee, to which he was either obliged to, yield, or with which he was allured to acquiesce; he would discover, that all the motives of his labours, of his amusements, of his discourses, of his thoughts, have been necessary; that they have evidently either seduced him or drawn him along. Is he the master of willing, not to withdraw his hand from the fire when he fears it will be burnt? Or has he the power to take away from fire the property which makes him fear it? Is he the master of not choosing a dish of meat which he knows to be agreeable, or analogous to his palate; of not preferring it to that which he knows to be disagreeable or dangerous? It is always according to his sensations, to his own peculiar experience, or to his suppositions, that he judges of things either well or ill; but whatever way be his judgment, it depends necessarily on his mode of feeling, whether habitual or accidental, and the qualities he finds in the causes that move him, which exist in despite of himself. All the causes which by his will is actuated, must act upon him in a manner sufficiently marked, to give him some sensation, some perception, some idea, whether complete or incomplete, true or false; as soon as his will is determined, he must have felt, either strongly or feebly; if this was not the case he would have determined without motive: thus, to speak correctly, there are no causes which are truly indifferent to the will: however faint the impulse he receives, whether on the part of the objects themselves, or on the part of their images or ideas, as soon as his will acts, the impulse has been competent to determine him. In consequence of a slight, of a feeble impulse, the will is weak, it is this weakness of the will that is called _indifference_. His brain with difficulty perceives the sensation, it has received; it consequently acts with less vigour, either to obtain or remove the object or the idea that has modified it. If the impulse is powerful, the will is strong, it makes him act vigorously, to obtain or to remove the object which appears to him either very agreeable or very incommodious. It has been believed man was a free agent, because it has been imagined that his soul could at will recall ideas, which sometimes suffice to check his most unruly desires. Thus, the idea of a remote evil frequently prevents him from enjoying a present and actual good: thus, remembrance, which is an almost insensible, a slight modification of his brain, annihilates, at each instant, the real objects that act upon his will. But he is not master of recalling to himself his ideas at pleasure; their association is independent of him; they are arranged in his brain, in despite of him, without his own knowledge, where they have made an impression more or less profound; his memory itself depends upon his organization; its fidelity depends upon the habitual or momentary state in which he finds himself; when his will is vigorously determined to some object or idea that excites a very lively passion in him, those objects or ideas that would be able to arrest his action no longer present themselves to his mind; in those moments his eyes are shut to the dangers that menace him, of which the idea ought to make him forbear; he marches forward headlong towards the object by whose image he is hurried on; reflection cannot operate upon him in any way; he sees nothing but the object of his desires; the salutary ideas which might be able to arrest his progress disappear, or else display themselves either too faintly or too late to prevent his acting. Such is the case with all those who, blinded by some strong passion, are not in a condition to recal to themselves those motives, of which the idea alone, in cooler moments, would be sufficient to deter them from proceeding; the disorder in which they are, prevents their judging soundly; render them incapable of foreseeing the consequence of their actions; precludes them from applying to their experience; from making use of their reason; natural operations, which suppose a justness in the manner of associating their ideas; but to which their brain is then not more competent, in consequence of the momentary delirium it suffers, than their hand is to write whilst they are taking violent exercise. Man's mode of thinking is necessarily determined by his manner of being; it must, therefore, depend on his natural organization, and the modification his system receives independently of his will. From this we are obliged to conclude, that his thoughts, his reflections, his manner of viewing things, of feeling, of judging, of combining ideas, is neither voluntary nor free. In a word, that his soul is neither mistress of the motion excited in it, nor of representing to itself, when wanted, those images or ideas that are capable of counterbalancing the impulse it receives. This is the reason why man, when in a passion, ceases to reason; at that moment reason is as impossible to be heard, as it is during an extacy, or in a fit of drunkenness. The wicked are never more than men who are either drunk or mad: if they reason, it is not until tranquillity is re-established in their machine; then, and not till then, the tardy ideas that present themselves to their mind, enable them to see the consequence of their actions, and give birth to ideas, that bring on them that trouble, which is designated _shame, regret, remorse_. The errors of philosophers on the free-agency of man, have arisen from their regarding his will as the _primum mobile_, the original motive of his actions; for want of recurring back, they have not perceived the multiplied, the complicated causes, which, independently of him, give motion to the will itself, or which dispose and modify his brain, whilst he himself is purely passive in the motion he receives. Is he the master of desiring or not desiring an object that appears desirable to him? Without doubt it will be answered, No: but he is the master of resisting his desire, if he reflects on the consequences. But, I ask, is he capable of reflecting on these consequences when his soul is hurried along by a very lively passion, which entirely depends upon his natural organization, and the causes by which he is modified? Is it in his power to add to these consequences all the weight necessary to counterbalance his desire? Is he the master of preventing the qualities which render an object desirable from residing in it? I shall be told, he ought to have learned to resist his passions; to contract a habit of putting a curb on his desires. I agree to it without any difficulty: but in reply, I again ask, Is his nature susceptible of this modification? Does his boiling blood, his unruly imagination, the igneous fluid that circulates in his veins, permit him to make, enable him to apply true experience in the moment when it is wanted? And, even when his temperament has capacitated him, has his education, the examples set before him, the ideas with which he has been inspired in early life, been suitable to make him contract this habit of repressing his desires? Have not all these things rather contributed to induce him to seek with avidity, to make him actually desire those objects which you say he ought to resist. The _ambitious man_ cries out,--You will have me resist my passion, but have they not unceasingly repeated to me, that rank, honours, power, are the most desirable advantages in life? Have I not seen my fellow-citizens envy them--the nobles of my country sacrifice every thing to obtain them? In the society in which I live, am I not obliged to feel, that if I am deprived of these advantages, I must expect to languish in contempt, to cringe under the rod of oppression? The _miser_ says,--You forbid me to love money, to seek after the means of acquiring it: alas! does not every thing tell me, that in this world money is the greatest blessing; that it is amply sufficient to render me happy? In the country I inhabit, do I not see all my fellow-citizens covetous of riches? but do I not also witness that they are little scrupulous in the means of obtaining wealth? As soon as they are enriched by the means which you censure, are they not cherished, considered, and respected? By what authority, then, do you object to my amassing treasure? what right have you to prevent my using means, which although you call them sordid and criminal, I see approved by the sovereign? Will you have me renounce my happiness? The _voluptuary_ argues,--You pretend that I should resist my desires; but was I the maker of my own temperament, which unceasingly invites me to pleasure? You call my pleasures disgraceful; but in the country in which I live, do I not witness the most dissipated men enjoying the most distinguished rank? Do I not behold, that no one is ashamed of adultery but the husband it has outraged? do not I see men making trophies of their debaucheries, boasting of their libertinism, rewarded, with applause? The _choleric_ man vociferates,--You advise me to put a curb on my passions; to resist the desire of avenging myself: but can I conquer my nature? Can I alter the received opinions of the world? Shall I not be for ever disgraced, infallibly dishonoured in society, if I do not wash out, in the blood of my fellow-creature, the injuries I have received? The _zealous enthusiast_ exclaims,--You recommend to me mildness, you advise me to be tolerant, to be indulgent to the opinions of my fellow-men; but is not my temperament violent? Do I not ardently love my God? Do they not assure me that zeal is pleasing to him; that sanguinary inhuman persecutors have been his friends? That those who do not think as I do are his enemies? I wish to render myself acceptable in his sight, I therefore adopt the means you reprobate. In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness: of his opinions, strengthened by example, forfeited by education, consolidated by daily experience. So many crimes are witnessed on the earth, only because every thing conspires to render man vicious, to make him criminal; very frequently, the superstitions he has adopted, his government, his education, the examples set before him, irresistibly drive him on to evil: under these circumstances morality preaches virtue to him in vain. In those societies where vice is esteemed, where crime is crowned, where venality is constantly recompenced, where the most dreadful disorders are punished, only in those who are too weak to enjoy the privilege of committing them with impunity; the practice of virtue is considered nothing more than a painful sacrifice of fancied happiness. Such societies chastise, in the lower orders, those excesses which they respect in the higher ranks; and frequently have the injustice to condemn those in penalty of death, whom public prejudices, maintained by constant example, have rendered criminal. Man, then, is not a free agent in any one instant of his life; he is necessarily guided in each step by those advantages, whether real or fictitious, that he attaches to the objects by which his passions are roused: these passions themselves are necessary in a being who, unceasingly tends towards his own happiness; their energy is necessary, since that depends on his temperament; his temperament is necessary, because it depends on the physical elements which enter into his composition; the modification of this temperament is necessary, as it is the infallible result, the inevitable consequence of the impulse he receives from the incessant action of moral and physical beings. In despite of these proofs of the want of free-agency in man, so clear to unprejudiced minds, it will, perhaps, be insisted upon with no small feeling of triumph, that if it be proposed to any one to move or not to move his hand, an action in the number of those called _indifferent_, he evidently appears to be the master of choosing; from which it is concluded, evidence has been offered of his free-agency. The reply is, this example is perfectly simple; man in performing some action which he is resolved on doing, does not by any means prove his free-agency: the very desire of displaying this quality, excited by the dispute, becomes a necessary motive which decides his will either for the one or the other of these actions: what deludes him in this instance, or that which persuades him he is a free agent at this moment, is, that he does not discern the true motive which sets him in action; which is neither more nor less than the desire of convincing his opponent: if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, "Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?" I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason, there is not even a probability that the desire of proving his free-agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful, to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt; if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warrantry to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it. There is, in point of fact, no difference between the man who is cast out of the window by another, and the man who throws himself out of it, except that the impulse in the first instance comes immediately from without, whilst that which determines the fall in the second case, springs from within his own peculiar machine, having its more remote cause also exterior. When Mutius Scaevola held his hand in the fire, he was as much acting under the influence of necessity, caused by interior motives, that urged him to this strange action, as if his arm had been held by strong men; pride, despair, the desire of braving his enemy, a wish to astonish him, an anxiety to intimidate him, &c. were the invisible chains that held his hand bound to the fire. The love of glory, enthusiasm for their country, in like manner, caused Codrus and Decius to devote themselves for their fellow citizens. The Indian Calanus and the philosopher Peregrinus were equally obliged to burn themselves, by the desire of exciting the astonishment of the Grecian assembly. It is said that free-agency is the absence of those obstacles competent to oppose themselves to the actions of man, or to the exercise of his faculties: it is pretended that he is a free agent, whenever, making use of these faculties, he produces the effect he has proposed to himself. In reply to this reasoning, it is sufficient to consider that it in no wise depends upon himself to place or remove the obstacles that either determine or resist him; the motive that causes his action is no more in his own power than the obstacle that impedes him, whether this obstacle or motive be within his own machine or exterior of his person: he is not master of the thought presented to his mind which determines his will; this thought is excited by some cause independent of himself. To be undeceived on the system of his free-agency, man has simply to recur to the motive by which his will is determined, he will always find this motive is out of his own controul. It is said, that in consequence of an idea to which the mind gives birth, man acts freely if he encounters no obstacle. But the question is, what gives birth to this idea in his brain? has he the power either to prevent it from presenting itself, or from renewing itself in his brain? Does not this idea depend either upon objects that strike him exteriorly and in despite of himself, or upon causes that without his knowledge act within himself and modify his brain? Can he prevent his eyes, cast without design upon any object whatever, from giving him an idea of this object, from moving his brain? He is not more master of the obstacles; they are the necessary effects of either interior or exterior causes, which always act according to their given properties. A man insults a coward, who is necessarily irritated against his insulter, but his will cannot vanquish the obstacle that cowardice places to the object of his desire, which is, to resent the insult; because his natural conformation, which does not depend upon himself, prevents his having courage. In this case the coward is insulted in despite of himself, and against his will is obliged patiently to brook the insult he has received. The partizans of the system of free-agency appear ever to have confounded constraint with necessity. Man believes he acts as a free agent, every time he does not see any thing that places obstacles to his actions; he does not perceive that the motive which causes him to will is always necessary, is ever independent of himself. A prisoner loaded with chains is compelled to remain in prison, but he is not a free agent, he is not able to resist the desire to emancipate himself; his chains prevent him from acting, but they do not prevent him from willing; he would save himself if they would loose his fetters, but he would not save himself as a free agent, fear or the idea of punishment would be sufficient motives for his action. Man may therefore cease to be restrained, without, for that reason, becoming a free agent: in whatever manner he acts, he will act necessarily; according to motives by which he shall be determined. He may be compared to a heavy body, that finds itself arrested in its descent by any obstacle whatever: take away this obstacle, it will gravitate or continue to fall; but who shall say this dense body is free to fall or not? Is not its descent the necessary effect of its own specific gravity? The virtuous Socrates submitted to the laws of his country, although they were unjust; notwithstanding the doors of his gaol were left open to him he would not save himself; but in this he did not act as a free agent; the invisible chains of opinion, the secret love of decorum, the inward respect for the laws, even when they were iniquitous, the fear of tarnishing his glory, kept him in his prison: they were motives sufficiently powerful, with this enthusiast for virtue, to induce him to wait death with tranquillity; it was not in his power to save himself, because he could find no potential motive to bring him to depart, even for an instant, from those principles to which his mind was accustomed. Man, says he, frequently acts against his inclination, from whence he has falsely concluded he is a free agent; when he appears to act contrary to his inclination, he is determined to it by some motive sufficiently efficacious to vanquish this inclination. A sick man, with a view to his cure, arrives at conquering his repugnance to the most disgusting remedies: the fear of pain, the dread of death, then become necessary and intelligent motives; consequently, this sick man cannot be said, with truth, by any means, to act freely. When it is said, that man is not a free agent, it is not pretended to compare him to a body moved by a simple impulsive cause: he contains within himself causes inherent to his existence; he is moved by an interior organ, which has its own peculiar laws; which is itself necessarily determined, in consequence of ideas formed from perceptions, resulting from sensations, which it receives from exterior objects. As the mechanism of these sensations, of these perceptions, and the manner they engrave ideas on the brain of man, are not known to him, because he is unable to unravel all these motions; because he cannot perceive the chain of operations in his soul, or the motive-principle that acts within him, he supposes himself a free agent; which, literally translated, signifies that he moves himself by himself; that he determines himself without cause; when he rather ought to say, he is ignorant how or for why he acts in the manner he does. It is true the soul enjoys an activity peculiar to itself, but it is equally certain that this activity would never be displayed if some motive or some cause did not put it in a condition to exercise itself, at least it will not be pretended that the soul is able either to love or to hate without being moved, without knowing the objects, without having some idea of their qualities. Gunpowder has unquestionably a particular activity, but this activity will never display itself, unless fire be applied to it; this, however, immediately sets in motion. It is the great complication of motion in man, it is the variety of his action, it is the multiplicity of causes that move him, whether simultaneously or in continual succession, that persuades him he is a free agent: if all his motions were simple, if the causes that move him did not confound themselves with each other, if they were distinct, if his machine was less complicated, he would perceive that all his actions were necessary, because he would be enabled to recur instantly to the cause that made him act. A man who should be always obliged to go towards the west would always go on that side, but he would feel extremely well, that in so going he was not a free agent: if he had another sense, as his actions or his motion augmented by a sixth would be still more varied, much more complicated, he would believe himself still more a free agent than he does with his five senses. It is, then, for want of recurring to the causes that move him, for want of being able to analyse, from not being competent to decompose the complicated motion of his machine, that man believes himself a free agent; it is only upon his own ignorance that he founds the profound yet deceitful notion he has of his free-agency, that he builds those opinions which he brings forward as a striking proof of his pretended freedom of action. If, for a short time, each man was willing to examine his own peculiar actions, to search out their true motives, to discover their concatenation, he would remain convinced that the sentiment he has of his natural free-agency is a chimera that must speedily be destroyed by experience. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the multiplicity, the diversity of the causes which continually act upon man, frequently without even his knowledge, render it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, for him to recur to the true principles of his own peculiar actions, much less the actions of others; they frequently depend upon causes so fugitive, so remote from their effects, and which, superficially examined, appear to have so little analogy, so slender a relation with them, that it requires singular sagacity to bring them into light. This is what renders the study of the moral man a task of such difficulty; this is the reason why his heart is an abyss, of which it is frequently impossible for him to fathom the depth. He is, then, obliged to content himself with a knowledge of the general and necessary laws by which the human heart is regulated; for the individuals of his own species these laws are pretty nearly the same, they vary only in consequence of the organization that is peculiar to each, and of the modification it undergoes; this, however, is not, cannot be rigorously the same in any two. It suffices to know that by his essence man tends to conserve himself, to render his existence happy: this granted, whatever may be his actions, if he recurs back to this first principle, to this general, this necessary tendency of his will, he never can be deceived with regard to his motives. Man, without doubt, for want of cultivating reason, being destitute of experience, frequently deceives himself upon the means of arriving at this end; sometimes the means he employs are unpleasant to his fellows, because they are prejudicial to their interests; or else those of which he avails himself appear irrational, because they remove him from the end to which he would approximate: but whatever may be these means, they have always necessarily and invariably for object, either an existing or imaginary happiness; are directed to preserve himself in a state analogous to his mode of existence, to his manner of feeling, to his way of thinking; whether durable or transitory. It is from having mistaken this truth, that the greater number of moral philosophers have made rather the romance, than the history of the human heart; they have attributed the actions of man to fictitious causes; at least they have not sought out the necessary motives of his conduct. Politicians and legislators have been in the same state of ignorance; or else impostors have found it much shorter to employ imaginary motive-powers, than those which really have existence: they have rather chosen to make man wander out of his way, to make him tremble under incommodious phantoms, than guide him to virtue by the direct road to happiness; notwithstanding the conformity of the latter with the natural desires of his heart. So true it is, that _error can never possibly be useful, to the human species_. However this may be, man either sees or believes he sees, much more distinctly, the necessary relation of effects with their causes in natural philosophy than in the human heart; at least he sees in the former sensible causes constantly produce sensible effects, ever the same, when the circumstances are alike. After this, he hesitates not to look upon physical effects as necessary, whilst he refuses to acknowledge necessity in the acts of the human will; these he has, without any just foundation, attributed to a motive-power that acts independently by its own peculiar energy, that is capable of modifying itself without the concurrence of exterior causes, and which is distinguished from all material or physical beings. _Agriculture_ is founded upon the assurance afforded by experience, that the earth, cultivated and sown in a certain manner, when it has otherwise the requisite qualities, will furnish grain, fruit, and flowers, either necessary for subsistence or pleasing to the senses. If things were considered without prejudice, it would be perceived, that in morals education is nothing more than _the agriculture of the mind_; that like the earth, by reason of its natural disposition, of the culture bestowed upon it, of the seeds with which it is sown, of the seasons, more or less favorable, that conduct it to maturity, we may be assured that the soul will produce either virtue or vice; _moral fruit_ that will be either salubrious for man or baneful to society. _Morals_ is the science of the relations that subsist between the minds, the wills, and the actions of men; in the same manner that _geometry_ is the science of the relations that are found between bodies. Morals would be a chimera, it would have no certain principles, if it was not founded upon the knowledge of the motives which must necessarily have an influence upon the human will, and which must necessarily determine the actions of human beings. If in the moral as well as in the physical world, a cause of which the action is not interrupted be necessarily followed by a given effect, it flows consecutively that a _reasonable education_, grafted upon truth, founded upon wise laws,--that honest principles instilled during youth, virtuous examples continually held forth, esteem attached solely to merit, recompense awarded to none but good actions, contempt regularly visiting vice, shame following falsehood as its shadow, rigorous chastisements applied without distinction to crime, are causes that would necessarily act on the will of man; that would determine the greater number of his species to exhibit virtue, to love it for its own sake, to seek after it as the most desirable good, as the surest road to the happiness he so ardently desires. But if, on the contrary, superstition, politics, example, public opinion, all labour to countenance wickedness, to train man viciously; if, instead of fanning his virtues, they stifle good principles; if, instead of directing his studies to his advantage, they render his education either useless or unprofitable; if this education itself, instead of grounding him in virtue, only inoculates him with vice; if, instead of inculcating reason, it imbues him with prejudice; if, instead of making him enamoured of truth, it furnishes him with false notions; if, instead of storing his mind with just ideas drawn from experience, it fills him with dangerous opinions; if, instead of fostering mildness and forbearance, it kindles in his breast only those passions which are incommodious to himself and hurtful to others; it must be of necessity, that the will of the greater number shall determine them to evil; shall render them unworthy, make them baneful to society. Many authors have acknowledged the importance of a good education, that youth was the season to feed the human heart with wholesome diet; but they have not felt, that a good education is incompatible, nay, impossible, with the superstition of man, since this commences with giving his mind a false bias: that it is equally inconsistent with arbitrary government, because this always dreads lest he should become enlightened, and is ever sedulous to render him servile, mean, contemptible, and cringing; that it is incongruous with laws that are not founded in equity, that are frequently bottomed on injustice; that it cannot obtain with those received customs that are opposed to good sense; that it cannot exist whilst public opinion is unfavourable to virtue; above all, that it is absurd to expect it from incapable instructors, from masters with weak minds, who have only the ability to infuse into their scholars those false ideas with which they are themselves infected. Here, without doubt, is the real source from whence springs that universal corruption, that wide-spreading depravity, of which moralists, with great justice, so loudly complain; without, however, pointing out those causes of the evil, which are true as they are necessary: instead of this, they search for it in human nature, say it is corrupt, blame man for loving himself, and for seeking after his own happiness, insist that he must have supernatural assistance, some marvellous interference, to enable him to become good: this is a very prejudicial doctrine for him, it is directly subversive of his true happiness; by teaching him to hold himself in contempt, it tends necessarily to discourage him; it either makes him sluggish, or drives him to despair whilst waiting for this grace: is it not easy to be perceived, that he would always have it if he was well educated; if he was honestly governed? There cannot well exist a wilder or a stranger system of morals, than that of the theologians who attribute all moral evil to an original sin, and all moral good to the pardon of it. It ought not to excite surprise if such a system is of no efficacy; what can reasonably be the result of such an hypothesis? Yet, notwithstanding the supposed, the boasted free-agency of man, it is insisted that nothing less than the Author of Nature himself is necessary to destroy the wicked desires of his heart: but, alas! no power whatever is found sufficiently efficacious to resist those unhappy propensities, which, under the fatal constitution of things, the most vigorous motives, as before observed, are continually infusing into the will of man; no agency seems competent to turn the course of that unhappy direction these are perpetually giving to the stream of his natural passions. He is, indeed, incessantly exhorted to resist these passions, to stifle them, and to root them out of his heart; but is it not evident they are necessary to his welfare? Can it not be perceived they are inherent in his nature? Does not experience prove them to be useful to his conservation, since they have for object, only to avoid that which may be injurious to him; to procure that which may be advantageous to his mode of existence? In short, is it not easy to be seen, that these passions, well directed, that is to say, carried towards objects that are truly useful, that are really interesting to himself, which embrace the happiness of others, would necessarily contribute to the substantial, to the permanent well-being of society? Theologians themselves have felt, they have acknowledged the necessity of the passions: many of the fathers of the church have broached this doctrine; among the rest Father Senault has written a book expressly on the subject: the passions of man are like fire, at once necessary to the wants of life, suitable to ameliorate the condition of humanity, and equally capable of producing the most terrible ravages, the most frightful devastation. Every thing becomes an impulse to the will; a single word frequently suffices to modify a man for the whole course of his life, to decide for ever his propensities; an infant who has burned his finger by having approached it too near the flame of a lighted taper, is warned from thence, that he ought to abstain from indulging a similar temptation; a man, once punished and despised for having committed a dishonest action, is not often tempted to continue so unfavourable a course. Under whatever point of man is considered, he never acts but after the impulse given to his will, whether it be by the will of others, or by more perceptible physical causes. The particular organization decides the nature of the impulse; souls act upon souls that are analogous; inflamed, fiery imaginations, act with facility upon strong passions; upon imaginations easy to be inflamed, the surprising progress of enthusiasm; the hereditary propagation of superstition; the transmission of religious errors from race to race, the excessive ardour with which man seizes on the marvellous, are effects as necessary as those which result from the action and re-action of bodies. In despite of the gratuitous ideas which man has formed to himself on his pretended free-agency; in defiance of the illusions of this suppose intimate sense, which, contrary to his experience, persuades him that he is master of his will,--all his institutions are really founded upon necessity: on this, as on a variety of other occasions, practice throws aside speculation. Indeed, if it was not believed that certain motives embraced the power requisite to determine the will of man, to arrest the progress of his passions, to direct them towards an end, to modify him; of what use would be the faculty of speech? What benefit could arise from education itself? What does education achieve, save give the first impulse to the human will, make man contract habits, oblige him to persist in them, furnish him with motives, whether true or false, to act after a given manner? When the father either menaces his son with punishment, or promises him a reward, is he not convinced these things will act upon his will? What does legislation attempt, except it be to present to the citizens of a state those motives which are supposed necessary to determine them to perform some actions that are considered worthy; to abstain from committing others that are looked upon as unworthy? What is the object of morals, if it be not to shew man that his interest exacts he should suppress the momentary ebullition of his passions, with a view to promote a more certain happiness, a more lasting well-being, than can possibly result from the gratification of his transitory desires? Does not the religion of all countries suppose the human race, together with the entire of Nature, submitted to the irresistible will of a necessary being, who regulates their condition after the eternal laws of immutable wisdom? Is not God the absolute master of their destiny? Is it not this divine being who chooses and rejects? The anathemas fulminated by religion, the promises it holds forth, are they not founded upon the idea of the effects they will necessarily produce upon mankind? Is not man brought into existence without his own knowledge? Is he not obliged to play a part against his will? Does not either his happiness or his misery depend on the part he plays? All religion has been evidently founded upon _Fatalism_. Among the Greeks they supposed men were punished for their necessary faults, as may be seen in Orestes, in Oedipus, &c. who only committed crimes predicted by the oracles. It is rather singular that the theological defenders of the doctrine of _free-agency_, which they endeavour to oppose to that of _predestination_,--which according to them is irreconcileable with _Christianity_, inasmuch as it is a false and dangerous system,--should not have been aware that the doctrines of _the fall of angels, original sin, the small number of the elect, the system of grace, &c._ were most incontestibly supporting, by the most cogent arguments, a _true system of fatalism_. _Education_, then, is only necessity shewn to children: _legislation_ is necessity shewn to the members of the body politic: _morals_ is the necessity of the relations subsisting between men, shewn to reasonable beings: in short, man grants _necessity_ in every thing for which he believes he has certain, unerring experience: that of which he does not comprehend the necessary connection of causes with their effects he styles _probability_: he would not act as he does, if he was not convinced, or, at least, if he did not presume he was, that certain effects will necessarily follow his actions. The _moralist_ preaches reason, because he believes it necessary to man: the _philosopher_ writes, because he believes truth must, sooner or later, prevail over falsehood: _tyrants_ and _fanatical priests_ necessarily hate truth, despise reason, because they believe them prejudicial to their interests: the _sovereign_, who strives to terrify crime by the severity of his laws, but who nevertheless, from motives of state policy sometimes renders it useful and even necessary to his purposes, presumes the motives he employs will be sufficient to keep his subjects within bounds. All reckon equally upon the power or upon the necessity of the motives they make use of; each individual flatters himself, either with or without reason, that these motives will have an influence on the conduct of mankind. The education of man is commonly so defective, so inefficacious, so little calculated to promote the end he has in view, because it is regulated by prejudice: even when this education is good, it is but too often speedily counteracted, by almost every thing that takes place in society. Legislation and politics are very frequently iniquitous, and serve no better purpose than to kindle passions in the bosom of man, which once set afloat, they are no longer competent to restrain. The great art of the moralist should be, to point out to man, to convince those who are entrusted with the sacred office of regulating his will, that their interests are identified; that their reciprocal happiness depends upon the harmony of their passions; that the safety, the power, the duration of empires, necessarily depend on the good sense diffused among the individual members; on the truth of the notions inculcated in the mind of the citizens, on the moral goodness that is sown in their hearts, on the virtues that are cultivated in their breasts; religion should not be admissible, unless it truly fortified, unless it really strengthened these motives. But in the miserable state into which error has plunged a considerable portion of the human species, man, for the most part, is seduced to be wicked: he injures his fellow-creature as a matter of conscience, because the strongest motives are held out to him to be persecuting; because his institutions invite him to the commission of evil, under the lure of promoting his own immediate happiness. In most countries superstition renders him a useless being, makes him an abject slave, causes him to tremble under its terrors, or else turns him into a furious fanatic, who is at once cruel, intolerant, and inhuman: in a great number of states arbitrary power crushes him, obliges him to become a cringing sycophant, renders him completely vicious: in those despotic states the law rarely visits crime with punishment, except in those who are too feeble to oppose its course? or when it has become incapable of restraining the violent excesses to which a bad government gives birth. In short, rational education is neglected; a prudent culture of the human mind is despised; it depends, but too frequently, upon bigotted, superstitious priests, who are interested in deceiving man, and who are sometimes impostors; or else upon parents or masters without understanding, who are devoid of morals, who impress on the ductile mind of their scholars those vices with which they are themselves tormented; who transmit to them the false opinions, which they believe they have an interest in making them adopt. All this proves the necessity of falling back to man's original errors, and recurring to the primitive source of his wanderings, if it be seriously intended to furnish him with suitable remedies for such enormous maladies: it is useless to dream of correcting his mistakes, of curing him of his depravity, until the true causes that move his will are unravelled; until more real, more beneficial, more certain motives are substituted for those which are found so inefficacious; which prove so dangerous both to society and to himself. It is for those who guide the human will, who regulate the condition of nations, who hold the real happiness of man in their grasp, to seek after these motives,--with which reason will readily furnish them--which experience will enable them to apply with success: even a good book, by touching the heart of a great prince, may become a very powerful cause that shall necessarily have an influence over the conduct of a whole people, and decide upon the felicity of a portion of the human race. From all that has been advanced in this chapter, it results, that in no one moment of his existence man is a free agent: he is not the architect of his own conformation; this he holds from Nature, he has no controul over his own ideas, or over the modification of his brain; these are due to causes, that, in despite of him, very frequently without his own knowledge, unceasingly act upon him; he is not the master of not loving that which he finds amiable; of not coveting that which appears to him desirable; he is not capable of refusing to deliberate, when he is uncertain of the effects certain objects will produce upon him; he cannot avoid choosing that which he believes will be most advantageous to him: in the moment when his will is determined by his choice, he is not competent to act otherwise than he does: in what instance, then, is he the master of his own actions? In what moment is he a free agent? That which a man is about to do is always a consequence of that which he has been--of that which he is--of that which he has done up to the moment of the action: his total and actual existence, considered under all its possible circumstances, contains the sum of all the motives to the action he is about to commit; this is a principle, the truth of which no thinking, being will be able to refuse accrediting: his life is a series of necessary moments; his conduct, whether good or bad, virtuous or vicious, useful or prejudicial, either to himself or to others, is a concatenation of action, a chain of causes and effects, as necessary as all the moments of his existence. To _live_, is to exist in a necessary mode during the points of its duration, which succeed each other necessarily: to _will_, is to acquiesce or not in remaining such as he is: to be _free_, is to yield to the necessary motives that he carries within himself. If he understood the play of his organs, if he was able to recal to himself all the impulsions they have received, all the modifications they have undergone, all the effects they have produced, he would perceive, that all his actions are submitted to that _fatality_ which regulates his own particular system, as it does the entire system of the universe: no one effect in him, any more than in Nature, produce itself by _chance_; this, as has been before proved, is a word void of sense. All that passes in him, all that is done by him, as well as all that happens in Nature, or that is attributed to her, is derived from necessary laws, which produce necessary effects; from whence necessarily flow others. _Fatality_ is the eternal, the immutable, the necessary order established in Nature, or the indispensible connection of causes that act with the effects they operate. Conforming to this order, heavy bodies fall, light bodies rise; that which is analogous in matter, reciprocally attracts; that which is heterogeneous, mutually repels; man congregates himself in society, modifies each his fellow, becomes either virtuous or wicked; either contributes to his mutual happiness, or reciprocates his misery; either loves his neighbour, or hates his companion necessarily; according to the manner in which the one acts upon the other. From whence it may be seen, that the same necessity which regulates the physical, also regulates the moral world: in which every thing is in consequence submitted to fatality. Man, in running over, frequently without his own knowledge, often in despite of himself, the route which Nature has marked out for him, resembles a swimmer who is obliged to follow the current that carries him along; he believes himself a free agent, because he sometimes consents, sometimes does not consent, to glide with the stream; which, notwithstanding, always hurries him forward; he believes himself the master of his condition, because he is obliged to use his arms under the fear of sinking. The false ideas he has formed to himself upon free-agency, are in general thus founded: there are certain events which he judges _necessary_; either because he sees they are effects that are constantly, are invariably linked to certain causes, which nothing seems to prevent; or because he believes he has discovered the chain of causes and effects that is put in play to produce those events: whilst he contemplates as _contingent_, other events, of whose causes he is ignorant; the concatenation of which he does not perceive; with whose mode of acting he is unacquainted: but in Nature, where every thing is connected by one common bond, there exists no effect without a cause. In the moral as well as in the physical world, every thing that happens is a necessary consequence of causes, either visible or concealed; which are, of necessity, obliged to act after their peculiar essences. _In man, free-agency is nothing more than necessity contained within himself_. CHAP. XII. _An examination of the Opinion which pretends that the System of Fatalism is dangerous._ For a being whose essence obliges him to have a constant tendency to his own conservation, to continually seek to render himself happy, experience is indispensible: without it he cannot discover truth, which is nothing more, as has been already said, than a knowledge of the constant relations which subsist between man, and those objects that act upon him; according to his experience he denominates those that contribute to his permanent welfare useful and salutary; those that procure him pleasure, more or less durable, he calls agreeable. Truth itself becomes the object of his desires, only when he believes it is useful; he dreads it, whenever he presumes it will injure him. But has truth the power to injure him? Is it possible that evil can result to man from a correct understanding of the relations he has with other beings? Can it be true, that he can be harmed by becoming acquainted with those things, of which, for his own happiness, he is interested in having a knowledge? No: unquestionably not. It is upon its utility that truth founds its worth; upon this that it builds its rights; sometimes it may be disagreeable to individuals--it may even appear contrary to their interests--but it will ever be beneficial to them in the end; it will always be useful to the whole human species; it will eternally benefit the great bulk of mankind; whose interests must for ever remain distinct from those of men, who, duped by their own peculiar passions, believe their advantage consists in plunging others into error. _Utility_, then, is the touchstone of his systems, the test of his opinions, the criterion of the actions of man; it is the standard of the esteem, the measure of the love he owes to truth itself: the most useful truths are the most estimable: those truths which are most interesting for his species, he styles _eminent_; those of which the utility limits itself to the amusement of some individuals who have not correspondent ideas, similar modes of feeling, wants analogous to his own, he either disdains, or else calls them _barren_. It is according to this standard, that the principles laid down in this work, ought to be judged. Those who are acquainted with the immense chain of mischief produced on the earth by erroneous systems of superstition, will acknowledge the importance of opposing to them systems more accordant with truth, schemes drawn from Nature, sciences founded on experience. Those who are, or believe they are, interested in maintaining the established errors, will contemplate, with horror, the truths here presented to them: in short, those infatuated mortals, who do not feel, or who only feel very faintly, the enormous load of misery brought upon mankind by metaphysical speculation; the heavy yoke of slavery under which prejudice makes him groan, will regard all our principles as useless; or, at most, as sterile truths, calculated to amuse the idle hours of a few speculators. No astonishment, therefore, need be excited at the various judgments formed by man: his interests never being the same, any more than his notions of utility, he condemns or disdains every thing that does not accord with his own peculiar ideas. This granted, let us examine, if in the eyes of the disinterested man, who is not entangled by prejudice--who is sensible to the happiness of his species--who delights in truth--the _doctrine of fatalism_ be useful or dangerous? Let us see if it is a barren speculation, that his not any influence upon the felicity of the human race? At has been already shewn, that it will furnish morals with efficacious arguments, with real motives to determine the will, supply politics with the true lever to raise the proper activity in the mind of man. It will also be seen that it serves to explain in a simple manner the mechanism of man's actions; to develope in an easy way the arcana of the most striking phenomena of the human heart: on the other hand, if his ideas are only the result of unfruitful speculations, they cannot interest the happiness of the human species. Whether he believes himself a free agent, or whether he acknowledges the necessity of things, he always equally follows the desires imprinted on his soul; which are to preserve his existence and render himself happy. A rational education, honest habits, wise systems, equitable laws, rewards uprightly distributed, punishments justly inflicted, will conduct man to happiness by making him virtuous; while thorny speculations, filled with difficulties, can at most only have an influence over persons unaccustomed to think. After these reflections, it will be very easy to remove the difficulties that are unceasingly opposed to the system of fatalism, which so many persons, blinded by their superstitious prejudices, are desirous to have considered as dangerous--as deserving of punishment--as calculated to disturb public tranquility--as tending to unchain the passions--to undermine the opinions man ought to have; and to confound his ideas of vice and of virtue. The opposers of necessity, say, that if all the actions of man are necessary, no right whatever exists to punish bad ones, or even to he angry with those who commit them: that nothing ought to be imputed to them; that the laws would be unjust if they should decree punishment for necessary actions; in short, that under this system man could neither have merit nor demerit. In reply, it may be argued, that, to impute an action to any one, is to attribute that action to him; to acknowledge him for the author: thus, when even an action was supposed to be the effect of an agent, and that agent _necessity_, the imputation would lie: the merit or demerit, that is ascribed to an action are ideas originating in the effects, whether favourable or pernicious, that result to those who experience its operation; when, therefore, it should be conceded, that the agent was necessity, it is not less certain, that the action would be either good or bad; estimable or contemptible, to those who must feel its influence; in short that it would be capable of either eliciting their love, or exciting their anger. Love and anger are modes of existence, suitable to modify, beings of the human species: when, therefore, man irritates himself against his fellow, he intends to excite his fear, or even to punish him, in order to deter him from committing that which is displeasing to him. Moreover his anger is necessary; it is the result of his Nature; the consequence of his temperament. The painful sensation produced by a stone that falls on the arm, does not displease the less, because it comes from a cause deprived of will; which acts by the necessity of its Nature. In contemplating man as acting necessarily, it is impossible to avoid distinguishing that mode of action or being which is agreeable, which elicits approbation, from that which is afflicting, which irritates, which Nature obliges him to blame and to prevent. From this it will be seen, that the system of fatalism, does not in any manner change the actual state of things, and is by no means calculated to confound man's ideas of virtue and vice. Man's Nature always revolts against that which opposes it: there are men so choleric, that they infuriate themselves even against insensible and inanimate objects; reflection on their own impotence to modify these objects ought to conduct them back to reason. Parents are frequently very much to be blamed for correcting their children with anger: they should be contemplated as beings who are not yet modified; or who have, perhaps, been very badly modified by themselves: nothing is more common in life, than to see men punish faults of which they are themselves the cause. Laws are made with a view to maintain society; to uphold its existence; to prevent man associated, from injuring his neighbour; they are therefore competent to punish those who disturb its harmony, or those who commit actions that are injurious to their fellows; whether these associates may be the agents of necessity, or whether they are free agents, it suffices to know they are susceptible of modification, and are therefore submitted to the operation of the law. Penal laws are, or ought to be, those motives which experience has shewn capable of restraining the inordinate passions of man, or of annihilating the impulse these passions give to his will; from whatever necessary cause man may derive these passions, the legislator proposes to arrest their effect, when he takes suitable means, when he adopts proper methods, he is certain of success. The Judge, in decreeing to crime, gibbets, tortures, or any other chastisement whatever, does nothing more than is done by the architect, who in building a house, places gutters to carry off the rain, and prevent it from sapping the foundation. Whatever may be the cause that obliges man to act, society possesses the right to crush the effects, as much as the man whose land would be ruined by a river, has to restrain its waters by a bank: or even, if he is able, to turn its course. It is by virtue of this right that society has the power to intimidate, the faculty to punish, with a view to its own conservation, those who may be tempted to injure it; or those who commit actions which are acknowledged really to interrupt its repose; to be inimical to its security; repugnant to its happiness. It will, perhaps, be argued, that society does not, usually, punish those faults in which the will has no share; that, in fact, it punishes the will alone; that this it is which decides the nature of the crime, and the degree of its atrocity; that if this will be not free, it ought not to be punished. I reply, that society is an assemblage of sensible beings, susceptible of reason, who desire their own welfare; who fear evil, and seek after good. These dispositions enable their will to be so modified or determined, that they are capable of holding such a conduct as will conduce to the end they have in view. Education, the laws, public opinion, example, habit, fear, are the causes that must modify associated man, influence his will, regulate his passions, restrain the actions of him who is capable of injuring the end of his association, and thereby make him concur to the general happiness. These causes are of a nature to make impressions on every man, whose organization, whose essence, whose sanity, places him in a capacity to contract the habits, to imbibe the modes of thinking, to adopt the manner of acting, with which society is willing to inspire him. All the individuals of the human species are susceptible of fear, from whence it flows as a natural consequence, that the fear of punishment, or the privation of the happiness he desires, are motives that must necessarily more or less influence his will, and regulate his actions. If the man is to be found who is so badly constituted as to resist, whose organization is so vicious as to be insensible to those motives which operate upon all his fellows, he is not fit to live in society; he would contradict the very end of his association: he would be its enemy; he would place obstacles to its natural tendency; his rebellious disposition, his unsociable will, not being susceptible of that modification which is convenient to his own true interests and to the interests of his fellow-citizens; these would unite themselves against such an enemy; and the law which is, or ought to be the expression of the general will, would visit with condign punishment that refractory individual upon whom the motives presented to him by society, had not the effect which it had been induced to expect: in consequence, such an unsociable man would be chastised; he would be rendered miserable, and according to the nature of his crime he would be excluded from society as a being but little calculated to concur in its views. If society has the right to conserve itself, it has also the right to take the means: these means are the laws which present or ought to present to the will of man those motives which are most suitable to deter him from committing injurious actions. If these motives fail of the proper effect, if they are unable to influence him, society, for its own peculiar good, is obliged to wrest from him the power of doing it further injury. From whatever source his actions may arise, therefore, whether they are the result of free-agency, or whether they are the offspring of necessity, society coerces him if, after having furnished him with motives, sufficiently powerful to act upon reasonable beings, it perceives that these motives have not been competent to vanquish his depraved nature. It punishes him with justice, when the actions from which it dissuades him are truly injurious to society; it has an unquestionable right to punish, when it only commands those things that are conformable to the end proposed by man in his association; or defends the commission of those acts, which are contrary to this end; which are hostile to the nature of beings associated for their reciprocal advantage. But, on the other hand, the law has not acquired the right to punish him: if it has failed to present to him the motives necessary to have an influence over his will, it has not the right to coerce him if the negligence of society has deprived him of the means of subsisting; of exercising his talents; of exerting his industry; of labouring for its welfare. It is unjust, when it punishes those to whom it has, neither given an education, nor honest principles; whom it has not enabled to contract habits necessary to the maintenance of society: it is unjust when it punishes them for faults which the wants of their nature, or the constitution of society has rendered necessary to them: it is unjust, it is irrational, whenever it chastises them for having followed those propensities, which example, which public opinion, which the institutions, which society itself conspires to give them. In short, the law is defective when it does not proportion the punishment to the real evil which society has sustained. The last degree of injustice, the acme of folly is, when society is so blinded as to inflict punishment on those citizens who have served it usefully. The _penal_ laws, in exhibiting terrifying objects to man, who must be supposed susceptible of fear, presents him with motives calculated to have an influence over his will. The idea of pain, the privation of liberty, the fear of death, are, to a being well constituted, in the full enjoyment of his faculties, very puissant obstacles, that strongly oppose themselves to the impulse of his unruly desires: when these do not coerce his will, when they fail to arrest his progress, he is an irrational being; a madman; a being badly organized; against whom society has the right to guarantee itself; against whom it has a right to take measures for its own security. Madness is, without doubt, an involuntary, a necessary state; nevertheless, no one feels it unjust to deprive the insane of their liberty, although their actions can only be imputed to the derangement of their brain. The wicked are men whose brain is either constantly or transitorily disturbed; still they must be punished by reason of the evil they commit; they must always be placed in the impossibility of injuring society: if no hope remains of bringing them back to a reasonable conduct--if every prospect of recalling them to their duty has vanished--if they cannot be made to adopt a mode of action conformable to the great end of association--they must be for ever excluded its benefits. It will not be requisite to examine here, how far the punishments which society inflicts upon those who offend against it, may be reasonably carried. Reason should seem to indicate that the law ought to shew to the necessary crimes of man, all the indulgence that is compatible with the conservation of society. The system of fatalism, as we have seen, does not leave crime unpunished; but it is, at least, calculated to moderate the barbarity with which a number of nations punish the victims to their anger. This cruelty becomes still more absurd, when experience has shewn its inutility: the habit of witnessing ferocious punishments familiarizes criminals with the idea. If it be true that society possesses the right of taking away the life of its members--if it be really a fact, that the death of a criminal, thenceforth useless, can be advantageous for society, which it will be necessary to examine, humanity, at least, exacts that this death should not be accompanied with useless tortures; with which laws, perhaps in this instance too rigorous, frequently seem to delight in overwhelming their victim. This cruelty seems to defeat its own end, it only serves to make the culprit, who is immolated to the public vengeance, suffer without any advantage to society; it moves the compassion of the spectator, interests him in favor of the miserable offender who groans under its weight; it impresses nothing upon the wicked, but the sight of those cruelties destined for himself; which but too frequently renders him more ferocious, more cruel, more the enemy of his associates: if the example of death was less frequent, even without being accompanied with tortures, it would be more efficacious. If experience was consulted, it would be found that the greater number of criminals only look upon death as a _bad quarter of an hour_. It is an unquestionable fact, that a thief seeing one of his comrades, display a want of firmness under the punishment, said to him: _"Is not this what I have often told you, that in our business, we have one evil more than the rest of mankind?"_ Robberies are daily committed, even at the foot of the scaffolds where criminals are punished. In those nations, where the penalty of death is so lightly inflicted, has sufficient attention been paid to the fact, that society is yearly deprived of a great number of individuals who would be able to render it very useful service, if made to work, and thus indemnify the community for the injuries they have committed? The facility with which the lives of men are taken away, proves the incapacity of counsellors; is an evidence of the negligence of legislators: they find it a much shorter road, that it gives them less trouble to destroy the citizens than to seek after the means to render them better. What shall be said for the unjust cruelty of some nations, in which the law, that ought to have for its object the advantage of the whole, appears to be made only for the security of the most powerful? How shall we account for the inhumanity of those societies, in which punishments the most disproportionate to the crime, unmercifully take away the lives of men, whom the most urgent necessity, the dreadful alternative of famishing in a land of plenty, has obliged to become criminal? It is thus that in a great number of civilized nations, the life of the citizen is placed in the same scales with money; that the unhappy wretch who is perishing from hunger, who is writhing under the most abject misery, is put to death for having taken a pitiful portion of the superfluity of another whom he beholds rolling in abundance! It is this that, in many otherwise very enlightened societies, is called _justice_, or making the punishment commensurate with the crime. Let the man of humanity, whose tender feelings are alive to the welfare of his species--let the moralist, who preaches virtue, who holds out forbearance to man--let the philosopher, who dives into the secrets of Nature--let the theologian himself say, if this dreadful iniquity, this heinous sin, does not become yet more crying, when the laws decree the most cruel tortures for crimes to which the most irrational customs gave birth--which bad institutions engender--which evil examples multiply? Is not this something like building a sorry, inconvenient hovel, and then punishing the inhabitant, because he does not find all the conveniences of the most complete mansion, of the most finished structure? Man, as at cannot be too frequently repeated, is so prone to evil, only because every thing appears to urge him on to the commission of it, by too frequently shewing him vice triumphant: his education is void in a great number of states, perhaps defective in nearly all; in many places he receives from society no other principles, save those of an unintelligible superstition; which make but a feeble barrier against those propensities that are excited by dissolute manners; which are encouraged by corrupt examples: in vain the law cries out to him: "abstain from the goods of thy neighbour;" his wants, more powerful, loudly declare to him that he must live: unaccustomed to reason, having never been submitted to a wholesome discipline, he conceives he must do it at the expence of a society who has done nothing for him: who condemns him to groan in misery, to languish in indigence: frequently deprived of the common necessaries requisite to support his existence, which his essence, of which he is not the master, compels him to conserve. He compensates himself by theft, he revenges himself by assassination, he becomes a plunderer by profession, a murderer by trade; he plunges into crime, and seeks at the risque of his life, to satisfy those wants, whether real or imaginary, to which every thing around him conspires to give birth. Deprived of education, he has not been taught to restrain the fury of his temperament--to guide his passions with discretion--to curb his inclinations. Without ideas of decency, destitute of the true principles of honour, he engages in criminal pursuits that injure his country: which at the same time has been to him nothing more than a step-mother. In the paroxysm of his rage, in the exacerbation of his mind, he loses sight of his neighbour's rights, he overlooks the gibbet, he forgets the torture; his unruly desires have become too potent--they have completely absorbed his mind; by a criminal indulgence they have given an inveteracy to his habits which preclude him from changing them; laziness has made him torpid: remorse has gnawed his peace; despair has rendered him blind; he rushes on to death; and society is compelled to punish him rigorously, for those fatal, those necessary dispositions, which it has perhaps itself engendered in his heart by evil example: or which at least, it has not taken the pains seasonably to root out; which it has neglected to oppose by suitable motives--by those calculated to give him honest principles--to excite him to industrious habits, to imbue him with virtuous inclinations. Thus, society frequently punishes those propensities of which it is itself the author, or which its negligence has suffered to spring up in the mind of man: it acts like those unjust fathers, who chastise their children for vices which they have themselves made them contract. However unjust, however unreasonable this conduct may be, or appear to be, it is not the less necessary: society, such as it is, whatever may be its corruption, whatever vices may pervade its institutions, like every thing else in Nature, is willing to subsist; tends to conserve itself: in consequence, it is obliged to punish those excesses which its own vicious constitution has produced: in despite of its peculiar prejudices, notwithstanding its vices, it feels cogently that its own immediate security demands that it should destroy the conspiracies of those who make war against its tranquillity: if these, hurried on by the foul current of their necessary propensities, disturb its repose--if, borne on the stream of their ill-directed desires, they injure its interests, this following the natural law, which obliges it to labour to its own peculiar conservation, removes them out of its road; punishes them with more or less rigor, according to the objects to which it attaches the greatest importance, or which it supposes best suited to further its own peculiar welfare: without doubt, it deceives itself frequently, both upon these objects and the means; but it deceives itself necessarily, for want of the knowledge calculated to enlighten it, with regard to its true interests; for want of those, who regulate its movements possessing proper vigilance--suitable talents--the requisite virtue. From this it will appear, that the injustice of a society badly constituted, and blinded by its prejudices, is as necessary, as the crimes of those by whom it is hostilely attacked--by whose vices it is distracted. The body politic, when in a state of insanity, cannot act more consistently with reason, than one of its members whose brain is disturbed by madness. It will still be said that these maxims, by submitting every thing to necessity, must confound, or even destroy the notions man forms of justice and injustice; of good and evil; of merit and demerit: I deny it. Although man, in every thing he does, acts necessarily, his actions are good, they are just, they are meritorious, every time they tend to the real utility of his fellows; of the society of which he makes a part: they are, of necessity, distinguished from those which are really prejudicial to the welfare of his associates. Society is just, it is good, it is worthy our reverence, when it procures for all its members, their physical wants, when it affords them protection, when it secures their liberty, when it puts them in possession of their natural rights. It is ill this that consists all the happiness of which the social compact is susceptible: society is unjust, it is bad, it is unworthy our esteem, when it is partial to a few, when it is cruel to the greater number: it is then that it multiplies its enemies, obliges them to revenge themselves by criminal actions which it is under the necessity to punish. It is not upon the caprices of political society that depend the true notions of justice and injustice--the right ideas of moral good and evil--a just appreciation of merit and demerit; it is upon _utility_, upon the necessity of things, which always forces man to feel that there exists a mode of acting on which he implicitly relies, which he is obliged to venerate, which he cannot help approving either in his fellows, in himself, or in society: whilst there is another mode to which he cannot lend his confidence, which his nature makes him to hate, which his feelings compel him to condemn. It is upon his own peculiar essence that man founds his ideas of pleasure and of pain--of right and of wrong--of vice and of virtue: the only difference between these is, that pleasure and pain make them instantaneously felt in his brain; he becomes conscious of their existence upon the spot; in the place of which, the advantages that accrue to him from justice, the benefit that he derives from virtue, frequently do not display themselves but after a long train of reflections--after multiplied experience and complicated attention; which many, either from a defect in their conformation, or from the peculiarity of the circumstances under which they are placed, are prevented from making, or at least from making correctly. By a necessary consequence of this truism, the system of fatalism, although it has frequently been so accused, does not tend to encourage man in crime, to make remorse vanish from his mind. His propensities are to be ascribed to his nature; the use he makes of his passions depends upon his habits, upon his opinions, upon the ideas he has received in his education; upon the examples held forth by the society in which he lives. These things are what necessarily decide his conduct. Thus, when his temperament renders him susceptible of strong passions, he is violent in his desires, whatever may be his speculations. _Remorse_ is the painful sentiment excited in him by grief, caused either by the immediate or probable future effect of his indulged passions: if these effects were always useful to him, he would not experience remorse; but, as soon as he is assured that his actions render him hateful, that his passions make him contemptible; or, as soon as he fears he shall be punished in some mode or other, he becomes restless, discontented with himself--he reproaches himself with his own conduct--he feels ashamed--he fears the judgement of those beings whose affection he has learned to esteem--in whose good-will he finds his own comfort deeply interested. His experience proves to him that the wicked man is odious to all those upon whom his actions have any influence: if these actions are concealed at the moment of commission, he knows it very rarely happens they remain so for ever. The smallest reflection convinces him that there is no wicked man who is not ashamed of his own conduct--who is truly contented with himself--who does not envy the condition of the good man--who is not obliged to acknowledge that he has paid very dearly for those advantages he is never able to enjoy, without experiencing the most troublesome sensations, without making the most bitter reproaches against himself; then he feels ashamed, despises himself, hates himself, his conscience becomes alarmed, remorse follows in it train. To be convinced of the truth of this principle it is only requisite to cast our eyes on the extreme precautions that tyrants and villains, who are otherwise sufficiently powerful not to dread the punishment of man, take to prevent exposure;--to what lengths they push their cruelties against some, to what meannesses they stoop to others of those who are able to hold them up to public scorn. Have they not, then, a consciousness of their own iniquities? Do they not know that they are hateful and contemptible? Have they not remorse? Is their condition happy? Persons well brought up acquire these sentiments in their education; which are either strengthened or enfeebled by public opinion, by habit, or by the examples set before them. In a depraved society, remorse either does not exist, or presently disappears; because, in all his actions, it is ever the judgment of his fellow-man that man is obliged necessarily to regard. He never feels either shame or remorse for actions he sees approved, that are practised by the world. Under corrupt governments, venal souls, avaricious being, mercenary individuals, do not blush either at meanness, robbery, or rapine, when it is authorized by example; in licentious nations, no one blushes at adultery except the husband, at whose expence it is committed; in superstitious countries, man does not blush to assassinate his fellow for his opinions. It will be obvious, therefore, that his remorse, as well as the ideas, whether right or wrong, which man has of decency, virtue, justice, &c. are the necessary consequence of his temperament, modified by the society in which he lives: assassins and thieves, when they live only among themselves, have neither shame nor remorse. Thus, I repeat, all the actions of man are necessary those which are always useful, which constantly contribute to the real, tend to the permanent happiness of his species, are called _virtues_, and are necessarily pleasing to all who experience their influence; at least, if their passions or false opinions do not oblige them to judge in that manner which is but little accordant with the nature of things: each man acts, each individual judges, necessarily, according to his own peculiar mode of existence--after the ideas, whether true or false, which he has formed with regard to his happiness. There are necessary actions which man is obliged to approve; there are others, that, in despite of himself, he is compelled to censure; of which the idea generates shame when his reflection permits him to contemplate them under the same point of view that they are regarded by his associates. The virtuous man and the wicked man act from motives equally necessary: they differ simply in their organization--in the ideas they form to themselves of happiness: we love the one necessarily--we detest the other from the same necessity. The law of his nature, which wills that a sensible being shall constantly labour to preserve himself, has not left to man the power to choose, or the free-agency to prefer pain to pleasure--vice to utility--crime to virtue. It is, then, the essence of man himself that obliges him to discriminate those actions which are advantageous to him, form those which are prejudicial to his interest, from those which are baneful to his felicity. This distinction subsists even in the most corrupt societies, in which the ideas of virtue, although completely effaced from their conduct, remain the same in their mind. Let us suppose a matt, who had decidedly determined for villainy, who should say to himself--"It is folly to be virtuous in a society that is depraved, in a community that is debauched." Let us suppose also, that he has sufficient address, the unlooked-for good fortune to escape censure or punishment, during a long series of years; I say, that in despite of all these circumstances, apparently so advantageous for himself, such a man has neither been happy nor contented with his own conduct, He has been in continual agonies--ever at war with his own actions--in a state of constant agitation. How much pain, how much anxiety, has he not endured in this perpetual conflict with himself? How many precautions, what excessive labour, what endless solicitude, has he not been compelled to employ in this continued struggle; how many embarrassments, how many cares, has he not experienced in this eternal wrestling with his associates, whose penetration he dreads, whose scorn he fears will follow a true knowledge of his pursuits. Demand of him what he thinks of himself, he will shrink from the question. Approach the bedside of this villain at the moment he is dying; ask him if he would be willing to recommence, at the same price, a life of similar agitation? If he is ingenuous, he will avow that he has tasted neither repose nor happiness; that each crime filled him with inquietude--that reflection prevented him from sleeping--that the world has been to him only one continued scene of alarm--an uninterrupted concatenation of terror--an everlasting, anxiety of mind;--that to live peaceably upon bread and water, appears to him to be a much happier, a more easy condition, than to possess riches, credit, reputation, honours, on the same terms that he has himself acquired them. If this villain, notwithstanding all his success, finds his condition so deplorable, what must be thought of the feelings of those who have neither the same resources nor the same advantages to succeed in their criminal projects. Thus, the system of necessity is a truth not only founded upon certain experience, but, again, it establishes morals upon an immoveable basis. Far from sapping the foundations of virtue, it points out its necessity; it clearly shows the invariable sentiments it must excite--sentiments so necessary, so strong, so congenial to his existence, that all the prejudices of man--all the vices of his institutions--all the effect of evil example, have never been able entirely to eradicate them from his mind. When he mistakes the advantages of virtue, it ought to be ascribed to the errors that are infused into him--to the irrationality of his institutions: all his wanderings are the fatal consequences of error,--the necessary result of prejudices which have identified themselves with his existence. Let it not, therefore, any longer be imputed to his nature that he has become wicked, but to those baneful opinions which he has imbibed with his mother's milk,--that have rendered him ambitious, avaricious, envious, haughty, arrogant, debauched, intolerant, obstinate, prejudiced, incommodious to his fellows, mischievous to himself. It is education that carries into his system the germ of those vices which necessarily torment him during the whole course of his life. _Fatalism_ is reproached with discouraging man--with damping the ardour of his soul--with plunging him into apathy--with destroying the bonds that should connect him with society. Its opponents say, "If every thing is necessary, we must let things go on, and not be disturbed by any thing." But does it depend on man to be sensible or not? Is he master of feeling or not feeling pain? If Nature has endowed him with a humane, with a tender soul, is it possible he should not interest himself in a very lively manner, in the welfare of beings whom he knows are necessary to his own peculiar happiness? His feelings are necessary: they depend on his own peculiar nature, cultivated by education. His imagination, prompt to concern itself with the felicity of his race, causes his heart to be oppressed at the sight of those evils his fellow-creature is obliged to endure,--makes his soul tremble in the contemplation of the misery arising from the despotism that crushes him--from the superstition that leads him astray--from the passions that distract him in a state of warfare against his neighbour. Although he knows that death is the fatal, the necessary period to the form of all beings, his soul is not affected in a less lively manner at the loss of a beloved wife,--at the demise of a child calculated to console his old age,--at the final separation from an esteemed friend who had become dear to his heart. Although he is not ignorant that it is the essence of fire to burn, he does not believe he is dispensed from using his utmost efforts to arrest the progress of a conflagration. Although he is intimately convinced that the evils to which he is a witness, are the necessary consequence of primitive errors with which his fellow-citizens are imbued, he feels he ought to display truth to them, if Nature has given him the necessary courage; under the conviction, that if they listen to it, it will, by degrees, become a certain remedy for their sufferings, that it will produce those necessary effects which it is of its essence to operate. If the speculations of man modify his conduct, if they change his temperament, he ought not to doubt that the system of necessity would have the most advantageous influence over him; not only is it suitable to calm the greater part of his inquietude, but it will also contribute to inspire him with a useful submission, a rational resignation, to the decrees of a destiny with which his too great sensibility frequently causes him to be overwhelmed. This happy apathy, without doubt, would be, desirable to those whose souls, too tender to brook the inequalities of life, frequently render them the deplorable sport of their fate; or whose organs, too weak to make resistance to the buffettings of fortune, incessantly expose them to be dashed in pieces under the rude blows of adversity. But, of all the important advantages the human race would be enabled to derive from the doctrine of fatalism, if man was to apply it to his conduct, none would be of greater magnitude, none of more happy consequence, none that would more efficaciously corroborate his happiness, than that general indulgence, that universal toleration, that must necessarily spring from the opinion, that _all is necessary_. In consequence, of the adoption of this principle, the fatalist, if he had a sensible soul, would commisserate the prejudices of his fellow-man--would lament over his wanderings--would seek to undeceive him--would try by gentleness to lead him into the right path, without ever irritating himself against his weakness, without ever insulting his misery. Indeed, what right have we to hate or despise man for his opinions? His ignorance, his prejudices, his imbecility, his vices, his passions, his weakness, are they not the inevitable consequence of vicious institutions? Is he not sufficiently punished by the multitude of evils that afflict him on every side? Those despots who crush him with an iron sceptre, are they not continual victims to their own peculiar restlessness--mancipated to their perpetual diffidence--eternal slaves to their suspicions? Is there one wicked individual who enjoys a pure, an unmixed, a real happiness? Do not nations unceasingly suffer from their follies? Are they not the incessant dupes to their prejudices? Is not the ignorance of chiefs, the ill-will they bear to reason, the hatred they have for truth, punished by the imbecility of their citizens, by the ruin of the states they govern? In short, the fatalist would grieve to witness necessity each moment exercising its severe decrees upon mortals who are ignorant of its power, or who feel its castigation, without being willing to acknowledge the hand from whence it proceeds; he will perceive that ignorance is necessary, that credulity is the necessary result of ignorance--that slavery and bondage are necessary consequences of ignorant credulity--that corruption of manners springs necessarily from slavery--that the miseries of society, the unhappiness of its members, are the necessary offspring of this corruption. The fatalist, in consequence, of these ideas, will neither be a gloomy misanthrope, nor a dangerous citizen; he will pardon in his brethren those wanderings, he will forgive them those errors--which their vitiated nature, by a thousand causes, has rendered necessary--he will offer them consolation--he will endeavour to inspire them with courage--he will be sedulous to undeceive them in their idle notions, in their chimerical ideas; but he will never display against them bitterness of soul--he will never show them that rancorous animosity which is more suitable, to make them revolt from his doctrines, than to attract them to reason;--he will not disturb the repose of society--he will not raise the people to insurrection against the sovereign authority; on the contrary, he will feel that the miserable blindness of the great, and the wretched perverseness, the fatal obstinacy of so many conductors of the people, are the necessary consequence of that flattery that is administered to them in their infancy--that feeds their hopes with allusive falsehoods--of the depraved malice of those who surround them--who wickedly corrupt them, that they may profit by their folly--that they may take advantage of their weakness: in short, that these things are the inevitable effect of that profound ignorance of their true interest, in which every thing strives to keep them. The fatalist has no right to be vain of his peculiar talents; no privilege to be proud of his virtues; he knows that these qualities are only the consequence of his natural organization, modified by circumstances that have in no wise depended upon himself. He will neither have hatred nor feel contempt for those whom Nature and circumstances have not favoured in a similar manner. It is the fatalist who ought to be humble, who should be modest from principle: is he not obliged to acknowledge, that he possesses nothing that he has not previously received? In fact, will not every thing conduct to indulgence the fatalist whom experience has convinced of the necessity of things? Will he not see with pain, that it is the essence of a society badly constituted, unwisely governed, enslaved to prejudice, attached to unreasonable customs, submitted to irrational laws, degraded under despotism, corrupted by luxury, inebriated by false opinions, to be filled with trifling members; to be composed of vicious citizens; to be made up of cringing slaves, who are proud of their chains; of ambitious men, without idea of true glory; of misers and prodigals; of fanatics and libertines! Convinced of the necessary connection of things, he will not be surprised to see that the supineness of their chiefs carries discouragement into their country, or that the influence of their governors stirs up bloody wars by which it is depopulated, and causes useless expenditures that impoverish it; that all these excesses united, is the reason why so many nations contain only men wanting happiness, without understanding to attain it; who are devoid of morals, destitute of virtue. In all this he will contemplate nothing more than the necessary action and re-action of physics upon morals, of morals upon physics. In short, all who acknowledge fatality, will remain persuaded that a nation badly governed is a soil very fruitful in venomous reptiles--very abundant in poisonous plants; that these have such a plentiful growth as to crowd each other and choak themselves. It is in a country cultivated by the hands of a Lycurgus, that he will witness the production of intrepid citizens, of noble-minded individuals, of disinterested men, who are strangers to irregular pleasures. In a country cultivated by a Tiberius, he will find nothing but villains with depraved hearts, men with mean contemptible souls, despicable informers, execrable traitors. It is the soil, it is the circumstances in which man finds himself placed, that renders him either a useful object or a prejudicial being: the wise man avoids the one, as he would those dangerous reptiles whose nature it is to sting and communicate their deadly venom; he attaches himself to the other, esteems him, loves him, as he does those delicious fruits with whose rich maturity his palate is pleasantly gratified, with whose cooling juices he finds himself agreeably refreshed: he sees the wicked without anger--he cherishes the good with pleasure--he delights in the bountiful: he knows full well that the tree which is languishing without culture in the arid, sandy desert, that is stunted for want of attention, leafless for want of moisture, that has grown crooked from neglect, become barren from want of loam, whose tender bark is gnawed by rapacious beasts of prey, pierced by innumerable insects, would perhaps have expanded far and wide its verdant boughs from a straight and stately stem, have brought forth delectable fruit, have afforded from its luxuriant foliage under its lambent leaves an umbrageous refreshing retreat from the scorching rays of a meridian sun, have offered beneath its swelling branches, under its matted tufts a shelter from the pitiless storm, it its seed had been fortunately sown in a more fertile soil, placed in a more congenial climate, had experienced the fostering cares of a skilful cultivator. Let it not then be said, that it is degrading man reduce his functions to a pure mechanism; that it is shamefully to undervalue him, scandalously to abuse him, to compare him to a tree; to an abject vegetation. The philosopher devoid of prejudice does not understand this language, invented by those who are ignorant of what constitutes the true dignity of man. A tree is an object which, in its station, joins the useful with the agreeable; it merits our approbation when it produces sweet and pleasant fruit; when it affords a favourable shade. All machines are precious, when they are truly useful, when they faithfully perform the functions for which they are designed. Yes, I speak it with courage, reiterate it with pleasure, the honest man, when he has talents, when he possesses virtue, is, for the beings of his species, a tree that furnishes them with delicious fruit, that affords them refreshing shelter: the honest man is a machine of which the springs are adapted to fulfil its functions in a manner that must gratify the expectation of all his fellows. No, I should not blush, I should not feel degraded, to be a machine of this sort; and my heart would leap with joy, if I could foresee that the fruit of my reflections would one day be useful to my race, consoling to my fellow-man. Is not Nature herself a vast machine, of which the human species is but a very feeble spring? I see nothing contemptible either in her or her productions; all the beings who come out of her hands are good, are noble, are sublime, whenever they co-operate to the production of another, to the maintenance of harmony in the sphere where they must act. Of whatever nature the soul may be, whether it is made mortal, or whether it be supposed immortal; whether it is regarded as a spirit, or whether it be looked upon as a portion of the body; it will be found noble, it will be estimated great, it will be ranked good, it will be considered sublime, in a Socrates, in an Aristides, in a Cato: it will be thought abject, it will be viewed as despicable, it will be called corrupt, in a Claudius, in a Sejanus, in a Nero: its energies will be admired, we shall be delighted with its manner, fascinated with its efforts, in a Shakespeare, in a Corneille, in a Newton, in a Montesquieu: its baseness will be lamented, when we behold mean, contemptible men, who flatter tyranny, or who servilely cringe at the foot of superstition. All that has been said in the course of this work, proves clearly that every thing is necessary; that every thing is always in order, relatively to Nature; where all beings do nothing more than follow the laws that are imposed on their respective classes. It is part of her plan, that certain portions of the earth shall bring forth delicious fruits, shall blossom beauteous flowers; whilst others shall only furnish brambles, shall yield nothing but noxious vegetables: she has been willing that some societies should produce wise men, great heroes; that others should only give birth to abject souls, contemptible men, without energy, destitute of virtue. Passions, winds, tempests, hurricanes, volcanoes, wars, plagues, famines, diseases, death, are as necessary to her eternal march as the beneficent heat of the sun, the serenity of the atmosphere, the gentle showers of spring, plentiful years, peace, health, harmony, life: vice and virtue, darkness and light, and science are equally necessary; the one are not benefits, the other are not evils, except for those beings whose happiness they influence by either favouring or deranging their peculiar mode of existence. _The whole cannot be miserable, but it may contain unhappy individuals._ Nature, then, distributes with the same hand that which is called _order_, and that which is called _disorder_; that which is called _pleasure_, and that which is called _pain_: in short, she diffuses by the necessity of her existence, good and evil in the world we inhabit. Let not man, therefore, either arraign her bounty, or tax her with malice; let him not imagine that his feeble cries, his weak supplications, can never arrest her colossal power, always acting after immutable laws; let him submit silently to his condition; and when he suffers, let him not seek a remedy by recurring to chimeras that his own distempered imagination has created; let him draw from the stores of Nature herself, the remedies which she offers for the evil she brings upon him: if she sends him diseases, let him search in her bosom for those salutary productions to which she has given birth, which will cure them: if she gives him errors, she also furnishes him with experience to counteract them; in truth, she supplies him with an antidote suitable to destroy their fatal effects. If she permits man to groan under the pressure of his vices, beneath the load of his follies, she also shews him in virtue, a sure remedy for his infirmities: if the evils that some societies experience are necessary, when they shall have become too incommodious they will be irresistibly obliged to search for those remedies which Nature will always point out to them. If this Nature has rendered existence insupportable, to some unfortunate beings, whom she appears to have selected for her victims, still death, is a door that will surely be opened to them--that will deliver them from their misfortunes, although in their puny, imbecile, wayward judgment, they may be deemed impossible of cure. Let not man, then, accuse Nature with being inexorable to him, since there does not exist in her whole circle an evil for which she has not furnished the remedy, to those who have the courage to seek it, who have the fortitude to apply it. Nature follows general and necessary laws in all her operations; physical calamity and moral evil are not to be ascribed to her want of kindness, but to the necessity of things. Physical calamity is the derangement produced in man's organs by physical causes which he sees act: moral evil is the derangement produced in him by physical causes of which the action is to him a secret. These causes always terminate by producing sensible effects, which are capable of striking his senses; neither the thoughts nor the will of man ever shew themselves, but by the marked effects they produce either in himself or upon those beings whom Nature has rendered susceptible of feeling their impulse. He suffers, because it is of the essence of some beings to derange the economy of his machine; he enjoys, because the properties of some beings are analogous to his own mode of existence; he is born, because it is of the nature of some matter to combine itself under a determinate form; he lives, he acts, he thinks, because it is of the essence of certain combinations to maintain themselves in existence by given means for a season; at length he dies, because a necessary law prescribes that all the combinations which are formed, shall either be destroyed or dissolve themselves. From all this it results, that Nature is impartial to all its productions; she submits man, like all other beings, to those eternal laws from which she has not even exempted herself; if she was to suspend these laws, even for an instant, from that moment disorder would reign in her, system; her harmony would be disturbed. Those who wish to study Nature, must take experience for their guide; this, and this only, can enable them to dive into her secrets, to unravel by degrees, the frequently imperceptible woof of those slender causes, of which she avails herself to operate the greatest phenomena: by the aid of experience, man often discovers in her properties, perceives modes of action entirely unknown to the ages which have preceded him; those effects which his grandfathers contemplated as marvellous, which they regarded as supernatural efforts, looked upon as miracles, have become familiar to him in the present day, and are at this moment contemplated as simple and natural consequences, of which he comprehends the mechanism--of which he understands the cause--of which he can unfold the manner of action. Man, in fathoming Nature, has arrived at discovering the true causes of earthquakes; of the periodical motion of the sea; of subterraneous conflagrations; of meteors; of the electrical fluid, the whole of which were considered by his ancestors, and are still so by the ignorant, by the uninformed, as indubitable signs of heaven's wrath. His posterity, in following up, in rectifying the experience already made, will perhaps go further, and discover those causes which are totally veiled from present eyes. The united efforts of the human species will one day perhaps penetrate even into the sanctuary of Nature, and throw into light many of those mysteries which up to the present time she seems to have refused to all his researches. In contemplating man under his true aspect; in quitting authority to follow experience; in laying aside error to consult reason; in submitting every thing to physical laws, from which his imagination has vainly exerted its utmost power to withdraw them; it will be found that the phenomena of the moral world follow exactly the same general rules as those of the physical; that the greater part of those astonishing effects, which ignorance, aided by his prejudices, make him consider as inexplicable, and regard as wonderful, are natural consequences flowing from simple causes. He will find that the eruption of a volcano and the birth of a Tamerlane are to Nature the same thing; in recurring to the primitive causes of those striking events which he beholds with consternation, which he contemplates with fearful alarm, in falling back to the sources of those terrible revolutions, those frightful convulsions, those dreadful explosions that distract mankind, lay waste the fairest works of Nature, ravage nations, and tear up society by the roots; he will find the wills that compassed the most surprising changes, that operated the most extensive alterations in the state of things, that brought about the most unlooked-for events, were moved by physical causes, whose exility made him treat them as contemptible; whose want of consequence in his own purblind eyes led him to believe them utterly incapable to give birth to the phenomena whose magnitude strikes him with such awe, whose stupendous range fills him with such amazement. If man was to judge of causes by their effects, there would be no small causes in the universe. In a Nature where every thing is connected, where every thing acts and re-acts, moves and changes, composes and decomposes, forms and destroys, there is not an atom which does not play an important part--that does not occupy a necessary station; there is not an imperceptible particle, however minute, which, placed in convenient circumstances, does not operate the most prodigious effects. If man was in a capacity to follow the eternal chain, to pursue the concatenated links, that connect with their causes all the effects he witnesses, without losing sight of any one of its rings,--if he could unravel the ends of those insensible threads that give impulse to the thoughts, decision to the will, direction to the passions of those men who are called mighty, according to their actions, he would find, they are true atoms which Nature employs to move the moral world; that it is the unexpected but necessary function of these indiscernible particles of matter, it is their aggregation, their combination, their proportion, their fermentation, which modifying the individual by degrees, in despite of himself, frequently without his own knowledge, make him think, will, and act, in a determinate, but necessary mode. If, then, the will and the actions of this individual have an influence over a great number of other men, here is the moral world in a state of the greatest combustion, and those consequences ensue which man contemplates with fearful wonder. Too much acrimony in the bile of a fanatic--blood too much inflamed in the heart of a conqueror--a painful indigestion in the stomach of a monarch--a whim that passes in the mind of a woman--are sometimes causes sufficient to bring on war--to send millions of men to the slaughter--to root out an entire people--to overthrow walls--to reduce cities into ashes--to plunge nations into slavery--to put a whole people into mourning--to breed famine in a land--to engender pestilence--to propagate calamity--to extend misery--to spread desolation far and wide upon the surface of our globe, through a long series of ages. The dominant passion of an individual of the human species, when it disposes of the passions of many others, arrives at combining their will, at uniting their efforts, and thus decides the condition of man. It is after this manner that an ambitious, crafty, and voluptuous Arab, gave to his countrymen an impulse of which the effect was the subjugation and desolation of vast countries in Asia, in Africa, and in Europe; whose consequences were sufficiently potential to erect a new, extensive, but slavish empire; to give a novel system of religion to millions of human beings; to overturn the altars of their former gods; in short, to alter the opinions, to change the customs of a considerable portion of the population of the earth. But in examining the primitive sources of this strange revolution, what were the concealed causes that had an influence over this man--that excited his peculiar passions, and modified his temperament? What was the matter from the combination of which resulted a crafty, ambitious, enthusiastic, and eloquent man; in short, a personage competent to impose on his fellow-creatures--capable of making them concur in his most extravagant views. They were, undoubtedly, the insensible particles of his blood; the imperceptible texture of his fibres; the salts, more or less acrid, that stimulated his nerves; the proportion of igneous fluid that circulated in his system. From whence came these elements? It was from the womb of his mother; from the aliments which nourished him; from the climate in which he had his birth; from the ideas he received; from the air which he respired; without reckoning a thousand inappreciable, a thousand transitory causes, that in the instance given had modified, had determined the passions of this importent being, who had thereby acquired the capacity to change the face of this mundane sphere. To causes so weak in their principles, if in the origin the slightest obstacle had been opposed, these wonderful events, which have astounded man, would never have been produced. The fit of an ague, the consequence of bile a little too much inflamed, had sufficed, perhaps, to have rendered abortive all the vast projects, of the legislator of the Mussulmen. Spare diet, a glass of water, a sanguinary evacuation, would sometimes have been sufficient to have saved kingdoms. It will be seen, then, that the condition of the human species, as well as that of each of its individuals, every instant depends on insensible causes, to which circumstances, frequently fugitive, give birth; that opportunity developes, that convenience puts in action: man attributes their effects to chance, whilst these causes operate necessarily, act according to fixed rules: he has frequently neither the sagacity nor the honesty to recur to their true principles; he regards such feeble motives with contempt, because he has been taught to consider them as incapable of producing such stupendous events. They are, however, these motives, weak as they may appear to be, these springs, so pitiful in his eyes, is which according to her necessary laws, suffice in the hands of Nature to move the universe. The conquests of a Gengis-Khan have nothing in them that is more strange to the eye of a philosopher than the explosion of a mine, caused in its principle by a feeble spark, which commences with setting fire to a single grain of powder; this presently communicates itself to many millions of other contiguous grains, of which the united force, the multiplied powers, terminate by blowing up mountains, overthrowing fortifications, or converting populous, well-built cities, into heaps of ruins. Thus, imperceptible causes, concealed in the bosom of Nature, until the moment their action is displayed, frequently decide the fate of man. The happiness or the wretchedness, the prosperity or the misery of each individual, as well as that of whole nations, are attached to powers which it is impossible for him to foresee, which he cannot appreciate, of which he is incapable to arrest the action. Perhaps at this moment atoms are amassing, insensible particles are combining, of which the assemblage shall form a sovereign, who will be either the scourge or the saviour of a mighty empire. Man cannot answer for his own destiny one single instant; he has no cognizance of what is passing within himself; he is ignorant of the causes which act in the interior of his machine; he knows nothing of the circumstances that will give them activity: he is unacquainted with what may develope their energy; it is, nevertheless, on these causes, impossible to be unravelled by him, that depends his condition in life. Frequently, an unforeseen rencontre gives birth to a passion in his soul, of which the consequences shall, necessarily, have an influence over his felicity. It is thus that the most virtuous man, by a whimsical combination of unlooked-for circumstances, may become in an instant the most criminal of his species. This truth, without doubt, will be found frightful--this fact will unquestionably appear terrible: but at bottom, what has it more revolting than that which teaches him that an infinity of accidents, as irremediable as they are unforeseen, may every instant wrest from him that life to which he is so strongly attached? Fatalism reconciles the good man easily to death: it makes him contemplate it as a certain means of withdrawing himself from wickedness; this system shews death, even to the happy man himself, as a medium between him and those misfortunes which frequently terminate by poisoning his happiness; that end with embittering the most fortunate existence. Let man, then, submit to necessity: in despite of himself it will always hurry him forward: let him resign himself to Nature, let him accept the good with which she presents him: let him oppose to the necessary evil which she makes him experience, those necessary remedies which she consents to afford him; let him not disturb his mind with useless inquietude; let him enjoy with moderation, because he will find that pain is the necessary companion of excess: let him follow the paths of virtue, because every thing will prove to him, even in this world of perverseness, that it is absolutely necessary to render him estimable in the eyes of others, to make him contented with himself. Feeble, vain mortal, thou pretendest to be a free agent. Alas! dost thou not see all the threads which enchain thee? Dost thou not perceive that they are atoms which form thee; that they are atoms which move thee; that they are circumstances independent of thyself, that modify thy being; that they are circumstances over which thou hast not any controul, that rule thy destiny? In the puissant Nature that environs thee, shalt thou pretend to be the only being who is able to resist her power? Dost thou really believe that thy weak prayers will induce her to stop in her eternal march; that thy sickly desires can oblige her to change her everlasting course? CHAP. XIII. _Of the Immortality of the Soul;--of the Doctrine of a future State;--of the Fear of Death._ The reflections presented to the reader in this work, tend to shew what ought to be thought of the human soul, as well as of its operations and faculties: every thing proves, in the most convincing manner, that it acts, that it moves according to laws similar to those prescribed to the other beings of Nature; that it cannot be distinguished from the body; that it is born with it; that it grows up with it; that it is modified in the same progression; in short, every thing ought to make man conclude that it perishes with it. This soul, as well as the body, passes through a state of weakness and infancy; it is in this stage of its existence, that it is assailed by a multitude of modifications; that it is stored with an infinity of ideas, which it receives from exterior objects through the medium of the organs; that it amasses facts, that it collects experience, whether true or false, that it forms to itself a system of conduct, according to which it thinks, in conformity with which it acts, from whence results either its happiness or its misery, its reason or its delirium, its virtues or its vices; arrived with the body at its full powers, having in conjunction with it reached maturity, it does not cease for a single instant to partake in common of its sensations, whether these are agreeable or disagreeable; it participates in all its pleasures; it shares in all its pains; in consequence it conjointly approves or disapproves its state; like it, it is either sound or diseased; active or languishing; awake or asleep. In old age man extinguishes entirely, his fibres become rigid, his nerves loose their elasticity, his senses are obtunded, his sight grows dim, his ears lose their quickness, his ideas become unconnected, his memory fails, his imagination cools: what then becomes of his soul? Alas! it sinks down with the body; it gets benumbed as this loses its feeling; becomes sluggish as this decays in activity; like it, when enfeebled by years it fulfils its functions with pain; this substance, which is deemed spiritual, which is considered immaterial, which it is endeavoured to distinguish from matter, undergoes the same revolutions, experiences the same vicissitudes, submits to the same modifications, as does the body itself. In despite of this proof of the materiality of the soul, of its identity with the body, so convincing to the unprejudiced, some thinkers have supposed, that although the latter is perishable, the former does not perish: that this portion of man enjoys the especial privilege of _immortality_; that it is exempt from dissolution: free from those changes of form all the beings in Nature undergo: in consequence of this, man has persuaded himself, that this privileged soul does not die: its immortality, above all, appears indubitable to those who suppose it spiritual: after having made it a simple being, without extent, devoid of parts, totally different from any thing of which he has a knowledge, he pretended that it was not subjected to the laws of decomposition common to all beings, of which experience shews him the continual operation. Man, feeling within himself a concealed force, that insensibly produced action, that imperceptibly gave direction to the motion of his machine, believed that the entire of Nature, of whose energies he is ignorant, with whose modes of acting he is unacquainted, owed its motion to an agent analogous to his own soul; who acted upon the great macrocosm, in the same manner that this soul acted upon his body. Man, having supposed himself double, made Nature double also: he distinguished her from her own peculiar energy; he separated her from her mover, which by degrees he made spiritual. Thus Nature, distinguished from herself, was regarded as the soul of the world; and the soul of man was considered as opinions emanating from this universal soul. This notion upon the origin of the soul is of very remote antiquity. It was that of the Egyptians, of the Chaldeans, of the Hebrews, of the greater number of the _wise men of the east._ It should appear that Moses believed with the Egyptians the divine emanation of souls: according to him, _"God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul:"_ nevertheless, the Catholic, at this day, rejects this system of _divine emanation,_ seeing that it supposes the Divinity divisible: which would have, been inconvenient to the Romish idea of purgatory, or to the system of everlasting punishment. Although Moses, in the above quotation, seems to indicate that the soul was a portion of the Divinity, it does not appear that the doctrine of the _immortality of the soul_ was established in any one of the books attributed to him. It was during the Babylonish captivity, that the Jews learned the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, taught by Zoroaster to the Persians, but which the Hebrew legislator did not understand, or, at least, he left his people ignorant on the subject. It was in those schools, that Pherecydes, Pythagoras, and Plato, drew up a doctrine so flattering to the vanity of human nature--so gratifying to the imagination of mortals. Man thus believed himself a portion of the Divinity; immortal, like the Godhead, in one part of himself: nevertheless, subsequent religions have renounced these advantages, which they judged incompatible with the other parts of their systems; they held forth that the Sovereign of Nature, or her contriver was not the soul of man, but, that, in virtue of his omnipotence, he created human souls, in proportion as he produced the bodies which they must animate; and they taught, that these souls once produced, by an effect of the same omnipotence, enjoyed immortality. However it may be with these variations upon the origin of souls, those who supposed them emanating from the Divinity, believed that after the death of the body, which served them for an envelope, they returned, by refunding to their first source. Those who, without adopting the opinion of divine emanation, admired the spirituality, believed the immortality of the soul, were under the necessity to suppose a region, to find out an abode for these souls, which their imagination painted to them, each according to his fears, his hopes, his desires, and his prejudices. Nothing is more popular than the doctrine of the _immortality of the soul;_ nothing is more universally diffused than the expectation of another life. Nature having inspired man with the most ardent love for his existence, the desire of preserving himself for ever was a necessary consequence; this desire was presently converted into certainty: from that desire of existing eternally which Nature has implanted in him, he made an argument, to prove that man would never cease to exist. Abady says, "our soul has no useless desires, it naturally desires an eternal life;" and by a very strange logic, he concludes that this desire could not fail to be fulfilled. Cicero, before Abady, had declared the immortality of the soul to be an innate idea in man; yet, strange to tell, in another part of his works he considers Pherecydes as the inventor of the doctrine. However this may be, man, thus disposed, listened with avidity to those who announced to him systems so conformable to his wishes. Nevertheless, he ought not to regard as supernatural the desire of existing, which always was, and always will be, of the essence man; it ought not to excite surprise, if he received with eagerness an hypothesis that flattered his hopes, by promising that his desire would one day be gratified; but let him beware how he concludes that this desire itself is an indubitable proof of the reality of this future life, with which at present he seems to be so much occupied. The passion for existence is in man only a natural consequence of the tendency of a sensible being, whose essence it is to be willing to conserve himself: in the human being it follows the energy of his soul--keeps pace with the force of his imagination--always ready to realize that which he strongly desires. He desires the life of the body, nevertheless this desire is frustrated; wherefore should not the desire for the life of the soul be frustrated like the other? The partizans of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul reason thus: "All men desire to live for ever, therefore they will live for ever." Suppose the argument retorted on them; would it be believed? If it was asserted, "All men naturally desire to be rich; therefore all men will one day be rich," how many partizans would this doctrine find? The most simple reflection upon the nature of his soul, ought to convince man that the idea of its immortality is only an illusion of the brain. Indeed what is his soul, save the principle of sensibility? What is it, to think, to enjoy, to suffer; is it not to feel? What is life, except it be the assemblage of modifications, the congregation of motion, peculiar to an organized being? Thus, as soon as the body ceases to live, its sensibility can no longer exercise itself; when its sensibility is no more, it can no longer have ideas, nor in consequence thoughts. Ideas, as we have proved, can only reach man through his senses; now, how will they have it, that once deprived of his senses, he is yet capable of receiving sensations, of having perceptions, of forming ideas? As they have made the soul of man a being separated from the animated body, wherefore have they not made life a being distinguished from the living body? Life in a body is the totality of this motion; feeling and thought make a part of this motion: thus it is reasonable to suppose, that in the dead man these motions will cease, like all the others. Indeed, by what reasoning will it be proved, that this soul, which cannot feel, think, will, or act, but by aid of man's organs, can suffer pain, be susceptible of pleasure, or even have a consciousness of its own existence, when the organs which should warn it of their presence are decomposed or destroyed? Is it not evident, that the soul depends on the arrangement of the various parts of the body; on the order with which these parts conspire to perform their functions; on the combined motion of the whole? Thus the organic structure once destroyed, can it be reasonably doubted the soul will be destroyed also? Is it not seen, that during the whole course of human life this soul is stimulated, changed, deranged, disturbed, by all the changes man's organs experience? And yet it will be insisted, that this soul acts, thinks, subsists, when these same organs have entirely disappeared! An organized being may be compared to a clock, which once broken, is no longer suitable to the use for which it was designed. To say, that the soul shall feel, shall think, shall enjoy, shall suffer after the death of the body; is to pretend that a clock, shivered into a thousand pieces, will continue to strike the hour; shall yet have the faculty of marking the progress of time. Those who say, that the soul of man is able to subsist, notwithstanding the destruction of the body, evidently support the position, that the modification of a body will be enabled to conserve itself after the subject is destroyed: this on any other occasion would be considered as completely absurd. It will be said that the conservation of the soul after the death of the body, is an effect of the Divine Omnipotence: but this is supporting an absurdity by a gratuitous hypothesis. It surely is not meant by Divine Omnipotence, of whatever nature it may be supposed, that a thing shall exist and not exist at the same time: unless this be granted, it will be rather difficult to prove, that a soul shall feel and think without the intermediates necessary to thought. Let them then, at least, forbear asserting, that reason is not wounded by the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; or by the expectation of a future life. These notions, formed to flatter man, to disturb the imagination of the uninformed, who do not reason, cannot appear either convincing or probable to enlightened minds. Reason, exempted from the illusions of prejudice, is, without doubt, wounded by the supposition of a soul, that feels, that thinks, that is afflicted, that rejoices, that has ideas, without having organs; that is to say, destitute of the only known medium, wanting all the natural means, by which, according to what we can understand, it is possible for it to feel sensations, have perceptions, or form ideas. If it be replied, other means are able to exist, which are _supernatural_ or _unknown_, it may be answered, that these means of transmitting ideas to the soul, separated from the body, are not better known to, or more within the reach of, those who suppose it, that they are of other men. It is, at least, very certain, it cannot admit even of a controversy, that all those who reject the system of innate ideas, cannot, without contradicting their own principles, admit the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In defiance of the consolation that so many persons pretend to find in the notion of an eternal existence; in despite of that firm persuasion which such numbers of men assure us they have, that their souls will survive their bodies, they seem so very much alarmed at the dissolution of this body, that they do not contemplate their end, which they ought to desire as the period of so many miseries, but with the greatest inquietude; so true it is, that the real, the present, even accompanied with pain, has much more influence over mankind, than the most beautiful chimeras of the future; which he never views but through the clouds of uncertainty. Indeed the most religious men, notwithstanding the conviction they express of a blessed eternity, do not find these flattering hopes sufficiently consoling to repress their fears; to prevent their trembling, when they think on the necessary dissolution of their bodies. Death was always, for mortals, the most frightful point of view; they regard it as a strange phenomenon, contrary to the order of things, opposed to Nature; in a word, as an effect of the celestial vengeance, as the _wages of sin_. Although every thing proves to man that death is inevitable, he is never able to familiarize himself with its idea; he never thinks on it without shuddering; the assurance of possessing an immortal soul but feebly indemnifies him for the grief he feels in the deprivation of his perishable body. Two causes contribute to strengthen his fears, to nourish his alarm; the one is, that this death, commonly accompanied with pain, wrests from him an existence that pleases him--with which he is acquainted--to which he is accustomed; the other is the uncertainty of the state that must succeed his actual existence. The illustrious Bacon has said, that "men fear death for the same reason that children dread being alone in darkness." Man naturally challenges every thing with which he is unacquainted; he is desirous to see clearly to the end, that he may guarantee himself against those objects which may menace his safety; that he may also be enabled to procure for himself those which may be useful to him; the man who exists cannot form to himself any idea of non-existence; as this circumstance disturbs him, for want of experience, his imagination sets to work; this points out to him, either well or ill, this uncertain state: accustomed to think, to feel, to be stimulated into activity, to enjoy society, he contemplates as the greatest misfortune, a dissolution that will strip him of these objects, that will deprive him of those sensations which his present nature has rendered necessary to him; he views with dismay a situation that will prevent his being warned of his own existence--that shall bereave him of his pleasures--to plunge him into nothing. In supposing it even exempt from pain, he always looks upon this nothing as an afflicting solitude--as an heap of profound darkness; he sees himself in a state of general desolation; destitute of all assistance; and he feels keenly all the rigour of this frightful situation. But does not a profound sleep help to give him a true idea of this nothing? Does not that deprive him of every thing? Does it not appear to annihilate the universe to him, and him to the universe? Is death any thing more than a profound, a permanent steep? It is for want of being able to form an idea of death that man dreads it; if he could figure to himself a true image of this state of annihilation, he would from thence cease to fear it; but he is not able to conceive a state in which there is no feeling; he therefore believes, that when he shall no longer exist, he will have the same feelings, the same consciousness of things, which, during his existence, appear so sad to his mind; which his fancy paints in such gloomy colours. Imagination pictures to him his funeral pomp--the grave they are digging for him--the lamentations that will accompany him to his last abode-the epicedium that surviving friendship may dictate; he persuades himself that these melancholy objects will affect him as painfully even after his decease, as they do in his present condition, in which he is in full possession of his senses. Mortal, led astray by fear! after thy death thine eyes will see no more; thine ears will hear no longer; in the depth of thy grave thou wilt no more be witness to this scene, which thine imagination, at present, represents to thee under such dismal colours; thou wilt no longer take part in what shall be done in the world; thou wilt no more be occupied with what may befal thine inanimate remains, than thou wast able to be the day previous to that which ranked thee among the beings of thy species. To die is to cease to think; to lack feeling; no longer to enjoy; to find a period to suffering; thine ideas will perish with thee; thy sorrows will not follow thee to the silent tomb. Think of death, not to feed thy fears--not to nourish thy melancholy--but to accustom thyself to look upon it with a peaceable eye; to cheer thee up against those false terrors with which the enemies to thy repose labour to inspire thee! The fears of death are vain illusions, that must disappear as soon as we learn to contemplate this necessary event under its true point of view. A great man has defined philosophy to be _a meditation on death;_ he is not desirous by that to have it understood that man ought to occupy himself sorrowfully with his end, with a view to nourish his fears; on the contrary, he wishes to invite him to familiarize himself with an object that Nature has rendered necessary to him; to accustom himself to expect it with a serene countenance. If life is a benefit, if it be necessary to love it, it is no less necessary to quit it; reason ought to teach him a calm resignation to the decrees of fate: his welfare exacts that he should contract the habit of contemplating with placidity, of viewing without alarm, an event that his essence has rendered inevitable: his interest demands that he should not brood gloomily over his misfortune; that he should not, by continual dread, embitter his life; the charms of which he must inevitably destroy, if he can never view its termination but with trepidation. Reason and his interest then, concur to assure him against those vague terrors with which his imagination inspires him, in this respect. If he was to call them to his assistance, they would reconcile him to an object that only startles him, because he has no knowledge of it; because it is only shewn to him with those hideous accompaniments with which it is clothed by superstition. Let him then, endeavour to despoil death of these vain illusions, and he will perceive that it is only the sleep of life; that this sleep will not be disturbed with disagreeable dreams; that an unpleasant awakening is never likely to follow it. To die is to sleep; it is to enter into that state of insensibility in which he was previous to his birth; before he had senses; before he was conscious of his actual existence. Laws, as necessary as those which gave him birth, will make him return into the bosom of Nature, from whence he was drawn, in order to reproduce him afterwards under some new form, which it would be useless for him to know: without consulting him, Nature places him for a season in the order of organized beings; without his consent, she will oblige him to quit it, to occupy some other order. Let him not complain then, that Nature is callous; she only makes him undergo a law from which she does not exempt any one being she contains. Man complains of the short duration of life--of the rapidity with which time flies away; yet the greater number of men do not know how to employ either time or life. If all are born and perish--if every thing is changed and destroyed--if the birth of a being is never more than the first step towards its end; how is it possible to expect that man, whose machine is so frail, of which the parts are so complicated, the whole of which possesses such extreme mobility, should be exempted from the common law; which decrees, that even the solid earth he inhabits shall experience change--shall undergo alteration--perhaps be destroyed! Feeble, frail mortal! Thou pretendest to exist for ever; whit thou, then, that for thee alone eternal Nature shall change her undeviating course? Dost thou not behold in those eccentric comets with which thine eyes are sometimes astonished, that the planets themselves are subject to death? Live then in peace for the season that Nature permits thee; if thy mind be enlightened by reason thou wilt die without terror! Notwithstanding the simplicity of these reflections; nothing is more rare than the sight of men truly fortified against the fears of death: the wise man himself turns pale at its approach; he has occasion to collect the whole force of his mind, to expect it with serenity. It cannot then, furnish matter for surprise, if the idea of death is so revolting to the generality of mortals; it terrifies the young--it redoubles the chagrin of the middle-aged--it even augments the sorrow of the old, who are worn down with infirmity: indeed the aged, although enfeebled by time, dread it much more than the young, who are in the full vigour of life; the man of many lustres is more accustomed to live years as they roll over his head, confirm his attachment to existence; nevertheless, long unwearied exertions weaken the powers of his mind; labour, sickness, and pain, waste his animal strength; he has less energy; his volition becomes faint, superstitious terrors easily appal him; at length disease consumes him; sometimes with excruciating tortures: the unhappy wretch, thus plunged into misfortune, has, notwithstanding, scarcely ever dared to contemplate death; which he ought to consider as the period to all his anguish. If the source of this pusillanimity be sought, it will be found in his nature, which attaches him to life; in that deficiency of energy in his soul, which hardly any thing tends to corroborate, but which every thing strives to enfeeble: which superstition, instead of strengthening, contributes to bruise. Almost all human institutions, nearly all the opinions of man, conspire to augment his fears; to render his ideas of death more terrible; to make them more revolting to his feelings. Indeed, superstition pleases itself with exhibiting death under the most frightful traits: it represents it to man under the most disgusting colours; as a dreadful moment, which not only puts an end to his pleasures, but gives him up without defence to the strange rigour of a pitiless decree, which nothing can soften. According to this superstition, the most virtuous man has reason to tremble for the severity of his fate; is never certain of being happy; the most dreadful torments, endless punishments, await the victim to involuntary weakness; to the necessary faults of a short-lived existence; his infirmities, his momentary offences, the propensities that have been planted in his heart, the errors of his mind, the opinions he has imbibed, even in the society in which he was born without his own consent, the ideas he has formed, the passions he has indulged above all, his not being able to comprehend all the extravagant dogmas offered to his acceptance, are to be implacably avenged with the most severe and never-ending penalties. Ixion is for ever fastened to his wheel; Sisyphus must to all eternity roll his stone without ever being able to reach the apex of his mountain; the vulture must perpetually prey on the liver of the unfortunate Prometheus: those who dare to think for themselves--those who have refused to listen to their enthusiastic guides--those who have not reverenced the oracles--those who have had the audacity to consult their reason--those who have boldly ventured to detect impostors--those who have doubted the divine mission of the Phythonissa--those who believe that Jupiter violated decency in his visit to Danae--those who look upon Apollo as no better than a strolling musician--those who think that Mahomet was an arch knave--are to smart everlastingly in flaming oceans of burning sulpher; are to float to all eternity in the most excruciating agonies on seas of liquid brimstone, wailing and gnashing their teeth: what wonder, then, if man dreads to be cast into these hideous gulfs; if his mind loathes the horrific picture; if he wishes to defer for a season these dreadful punishments; if he clings to an existence, painful as it may be, rather than encounter such revolting cruelties. Such, then, are the afflicting objects with which superstition occupies its unhappy, its credulous disciples; such are the fears which the tyrant of human thoughts points out to them as salutary. In defiance Of the exility of the effect which these notions produce oil the greater number, even of those who say they are, or who believe themselves persuaded, they are held forth as the most powerful rampart that can be opposed to the irregularities of man. Nevertheless, as will be seen presently, it will be found that these systems, or rather these chimeras, so terrible to behold, operate little or nothing on the larger portion of mankind, who dream of them but seldom, never in the moment that passion, interest, pleasure, or example, hurries them along. If these fears act, it is commonly on those, who have but little occasion to abstain from evil; they make honest hearts tremble, but fail of effect on the perverse. They torment sensible souls, but leave those that are hardened in repose; they disturb tractable, gentle minds, but cause no trouble to rebellious spirits: thus they alarm none but those who are already sufficiently alarmed; they coerce only those who are already restrained. These notions, then, impress nothing on the wicked; when by accident they do act on them, it is only to redouble the wickedness of their natural character--to justify them in their own eyes--to furnish them with pretexts to exercise it without fear--to follow it without scruple. Indeed, the experience of a great number of ages has shewn to what excess of wickedness, to what lengths, the passions of man have carried him, when they have been authorized by the priesthood--when they have been unchained by superstition--or, at least, when he has been enabled to cover himself with its mantle. Man has never been more ambitious, never more covetous, never more crafty, never more cruel, never more seditious, than when he has persuaded himself that superstition permitted or commanded him to be so: thus, superstition did nothing more than lend an invincible force to his natural passions, which under its sacred auspices he could exercise with impunity, indulge without remorse; still more, the greatest villains, in giving free vent to the detestable propensities of their natural wickedness, have under its influence believed, that, by displaying an over-heated zeal, they merited well of heaven; that they exempted themselves by new crimes, from that chastisement which they thought their anterior conduct had richly merited. These, then, are the effects which what are called the _salutary_ notions of superstition, produce on mortals. These reflections will furnish an answer to those who say that, "If heaven was promised equally to the wicked as to the righteous, there would be found none incredulous of another life." We reply, that, in point of fact, superstition does accord heaven to the wicked, since it frequently places in this happy abode the most useless, the most depraved of men. Is not Mahomet himself enthroned in the empyrean by this superstition? If the calendar of the Romish saints was examined, would it be found to contain none but righteous, none but good men? Does not Mahometanism cut off from all chance of future existence, consequently from all hope of reaching heaven, the female part of mankind? Have the Jews exalted no one to the celestial regions, save the virtuous? When the Jew is condemned to the devouring flames, do not the men who thus torture an unhappy wretch, whose only crime is adherence to the religion of his forefathers, expect to be rewarded for the deed with everlasting happiness? Are they not promised eternal salvation for their orthodoxy? Was Constantine, was St. Cyril, was St. Athanasius, was St. Dominic, worthy beatification? Were Jupiter, Thor, Mercury, Woden, and a thousand others, deserving of celestial diadems? Is erring, feeble man, with all his imbecilities, competent to form a judgment of the heavenly deserts of his fellows? Can be, with his dim optics, with his limited vision, fathom the human heart? Can he sound its depths, trace its meanderings, dive into its recesses, with sufficient precision, to determine who amongst his race is or is not possessed of the requisite merit to enjoy a blessed eternity? Thus wicked men are held up as models by superstition, which as we shall see, sharpens the passions of evil-disposed men, by legitimating those crimes, at which, without this sanction, they would shudder; which they would fear to commit; or for which, at least, they would feel shame; for which they would experience remorse. In short, the ministers of superstition furnish to the most profligate men the power of indulging their inflamed passions, and then hold forth to them means of diverting from their own heads the thunderbolt that should strike their crimes, by spreading before them fresh incentives to intolerant persecution, with the promise of a never-fading happiness. With respect to the incredulous, without doubt, there may be amongst them wicked men, as well as amongst the most credulous; but incredulity no more supposes wickedness, than credulity supposes righteousness. On the contrary, the man who thinks, who meditates, knows far better the true motives to goodness, than he who suffers himself to be blindly guided by uncertain motives, or by the interest of others. Sensible men have the greatest advantage in examining opinions, which it is pretended must have an influence over their eternal happiness: if these are found false, if they appear injurious to their present life, they will not therefore conclude, that they have not another life either to fear or to hope; that they are permitted to deliver themselves up with impunity to vice, which would do an injury to themselves, that would draw upon them the contempt of their neighbour, which would subject them to the anger of society: the man who does not expect another life, is only more interested in prolonging his existence in this; in rendering himself dear to his fellows, by cultivating virtue; by performing all his duties with more strictness, in the only life of which he has any knowledge: he has made a great stride towards felicity, in disengaging himself from those terrors which afflict others, which frequently prevent their acting. Such a man has nothing to fear, but every thing to hope; if, contrary to what he is able to judge, there should be an hereafter existence, will not his actions have been so regulated by virtue, will he not have so comported himself in his present existence, as to stand a fair chance of enjoying in their fullest extent those felicities prepared for his species? _Superstition_, in fact, takes a pride in rendering man slothful, in moulding him to credulity, in making him pusillanimous. It is its principle to afflict him without intermission; to redouble in him the horrors of death: ever ingenious in tormenting him, it has extended his inquietudes beyond even his own existence; its ministers, the more securely to dispose of him in this world, invented, in future regions, a variety of rewards and punishments, reserving to themselves the privilege of awarding these heavenly recompences to those who yielded most implicitly to their arbitrary laws; of decreeing punishment to those refractory beings who rebelled against their power: thus, according to them, Tantalus for divulging their secrets, must eternally fear, engulphed in burning sulphur, the stone ready to fall on his devoted head; whilst Romulus was beatified and worshipped as a god under the name of Quirinus. The same system of superstition caused the philosopher Callisthenes to be put to death, for opposing the worship of Alexander; and elevated the monk Athanasius to be a saint in heaven. Far from holding forth consolation to mortals, far from cultivating man's reason, far from teaching him to yield under the hands of necessity, superstition, in a great many countries, strives to render death still more bitter to him; to make its yoke sit heavy; to fill up its retinue with a multitude of hideous phantoms; to paint it in the most frightful colours; to render its approach terrible: by this means it has crowded the world with enthusiasts, whom it seduces by vague promises; with contemptible slaves, whom it coerces with the fear of imaginary evils: it has at length persuaded man, that his actual existence is only a journey, by which he will arrive at a more important life: this doctrine, whether it be rational or irrational, prevents him from occupying himself with his true happiness; from even dreaming of ameliorating his institutions, of improving his laws, of advancing the progress of science, of perfectioning his morals. Vain and gloomy ideas have absorbed his attention: he consents to groan under fanatical tyranny--to writhe under political inflictions--to live in error--to languish in misfortune--in the hope, when he shall be no more, of being one day happier; in the firm confidence, that after he has disappeared, his calamities, his patience, will conduct him to a never-ending felicity: he has believed himself submitted to cruel priests, who are willing to make him purchase his future welfare at the expence of every thing most dear to his peace, most valuable to his existence here below: they have pictured heaven as irritated against him, as disposed to appease itself by punishing him eternally, for any efforts he should make to withdraw himself from, their power. It is thus the doctrine of a future life has been made fatal to the human species: it plunged whole nations into sloth, made them languid, filled them with indifference to their present welfare, or else precipitated them, into the most furious enthusiasm, which hurried them on to such lengths that they tore each other in pieces in order to merit the promised heaven. It will be asked, perhaps, by what road has man been conducted to form to himself these gratuitous ideas of another world? I reply, that it is a truth man has no idea of a future life, they are the ideas of the past and the present that furnish his imagination with the materials of which he constructs the edifice of the regions of futurity. Hobbes says, "We believe that, that which is will always be, and that the same causes will have the same effects." Man in his actual state, has two modes of feeling, one that he approves, another that he disapproves: thus, persuaded that these two modes of feeling must accompany him, even beyond his present existence, he placed in the regions of eternity two distinguished abodes, one destined to felicity, the other to misery: the one must contain those who obey the calls of superstition, who believe in its dogmas; the other is a prison, destined to avenge the cause of heaven, on all those who shall not faithfully believe the doctrines promulgated by the ministers of a vast variety of superstitions. Has sufficient attention been paid to the fact that results as a necessary consequence from this reasoning; which on examination will be found to have rendered the first place entirely useless, seeing, that by the number and contradiction of these various systems, let man believe which ever he may, let him follow it in the most faithful manner, still he must be ranked as an infidel, as a rebel to the Divinity, because he cannot believe in all; and those from which he dissents, by a consequence of their own creed, condemn him to the prison-house? Such is the origin of the ideas upon a future life, so diffused among mankind. Every where may be seen an Elysium and a Tartarus; a Paradise and a Hell; in a word, two distinguished abodes, constructed according to the imagination of the enthusiasts who have invented them, who have accommodated them to their own peculiar prejudices, to the hopes, to the fears, of the people who believe in them. The Indian figures the first of these abodes as one of in-action, of permanent repose, because, being the inhabitant of a hot climate, he has learned to contemplate rest as the extreme of felicity: the Mussulman promises himself corporeal pleasures, similar to those that actually constitute the object of his research in this life: each figures to himself, that on which he has learned to set the greatest value. Of whatever nature these pleasures may be, man apprehended that a body was needful, in order that his soul might be enabled to enjoy the pleasures, or to experience the pains in reserve for him: from hence the doctrine of the _resurrection_; but as he beheld this body putrify, as he saw it dissolve, as he witnessed its decomposition, after death, he was at a loss how to form anew what he conceived so necessary to his system he therefore had recourse to the Divine Omnipotence, by whose interposition he now believes it will be effected. This opinion, so incomprehensible, is said to have originated in Persia, among the Magi, and finds a great number of adherents, who have never given it a serious examination: but the doctrine of the resurrection appears perfectly useless to all those, who believe in the existence of a soul that feels, thinks, suffers, and enjoys, after a separation from the body: indeed, there are already sects who begin to maintain, that the body is not necessary; that therefore it will not be resurrected. Like Berkeley, they conceive that "the soul has need neither of body nor any exterior being, either to experience sensations, or to have ideas:" the Malebranchists, in particular, must suppose that the rejected souls will see every thing in the Divinity; will feel themselves burn, without having occasion for bodies for that purpose. Others, incapable of elevating themselves to these sublime notions, believed, that under divers forms, man animated successively different animals of various species; that he never ceased to be an inhabitant of the earth; such was the opinion of those who adopted the doctrine of Metempsychosis. As for the miserable abode of souls, the imagination of fanatics, who were desirous of governing the people, strove to assemble the most frightful images, to render it still more terrible: fire is of all beings that which produces in man the most pungent sensation; not finding any thing more cruel, the enemies to the several dogmas were to be everlastingly punished with this torturing element: fire, therefore, was the point at which their imagination was obliged to stop. The ministers of the various systems agreed pretty generally, that fire would one day avenge their offended divinities: thus they painted the victims to the anger of the gods, or rather those who questioned their own creeds, as confined in fiery dungeons, as perpetually rolling in a vortex of bituminous flames, as plunged in unfathomable gulphs of liquid sulphur, making the infernal caverns resound with their useless groanings, with their unavailing gnashing of teeth. But it will, perhaps, be enquired, how could man reconcile himself to the belief of an existence accompanied with eternal torments; above all, as many according to their own superstitions had reason to fear it for themselves? Many causes have concurred to make him adopt so revolting an opinion: in the first place, very few thinking men have ever believed such an absurdity, when they have deigned to make use of their reason; or, when they have accredited it, this notion was always counterbalanced by the idea of the goodness, by a reliance on the mercy, which they attributed to their respective divinities: in the second place, those who were blinded by their fears, never rendered to themselves any account of these strange doctrines, which they either received with awe from their legislators, or which were transmitted to them by their fathers: in the third place, each sees the object of his terrors only at a favourable distance: moreover, superstition promises him the means of escaping the tortures he believes he has merited. At length, like those sick people whom we see cling with fondness, even to the most painful life, man preferred the idea of an unhappy, though unknown existence, to that of non-existence, which he looked upon as the most frightful evil that could befal him; either because he could form no idea of it, or because his imagination painted to him this non-existence this nothing, as the confused assemblage of all evils. A known evil, of whatever magnitude, alarmed him less (above all, when there remained the hope of being able to avoid it), than an evil of which he knew nothing, upon which, consequently, his imagination was painfully employed, but to which he knew not how to oppose a remedy. It will be seen, then, that _superstition_, far from consoling man upon the necessity of death, only redoubles his terrors, by the evils with which it pretends his decease will be followed; these terrors are so strong, that the miserable wretches who believe strictly in these formidable doctrines, pass their days in affliction, bathed in the most bitter tears. What shall be said of an opinion so destructive to society, yet adopted by so many nations, which announces to them, that a severe fate may at each instant take them unprovided; that at each moment they are liable to pass under the most rigorous judgment? What idea can be better suited to terrify man--what more likely to discourage him--what more calculated to damp the desire of ameliorating his condition--than the afflicting prospect of a world always on the brink of dissolution; of a Divinity seated upon the ruins of Nature, ready to pass judgment on the human species? Such are, nevertheless, the fatal opinions with which the mind of nations has been fed for thousands of years: they are so dangerous, that if by a happy want of just inference, he did not derogate in his conduct from these afflicting ideas, he would fall into the most abject stupidity. How could man occupy himself with a perishable world, ready every moment to crumble into atoms? How dream of rendering himself happy on earth, when it is only the porch to an eternal kingdom? Is it then, surprising, that the superstitions to which similar doctrines serve for a basis, have prescribed to their disciples a total detachment from things below--an entire renunciation of the most innocent pleasures; have given birth to a sluggishness, to a pusillanimity, to an abjection of soul, to an insociability, that renders him useless to himself, dangerous to others? If necessity did not oblige man to depart in his practice from these irrational systems--if his wants did not bring him back to reason, in despite of these superstitious doctrines--the whole world would presently become a vast desert, inhabited by some few isolated savages, who would not even have courage to multiply themselves. What are these, but notions which he must necessarily put aside, in order that human association may subsist? Nevertheless, the doctrine of a future life, accompanied with rewards and punishments, has been regarded for a great number of ages as the most powerful, or even as the only motive capable of coercing the passions of man; as the sole means that can oblige him to be virtuous: by degrees, this doctrine has become the basis of almost all religions and political systems, so much so, that at this day it is said, this prejudice cannot be attacked without absolutely rending asunder the bonds of society. The founders of superstition have made use of it to attach their credulous disciples; legislators have looked upon it as the curb best calculated to keep mankind under discipline; religion considers it necessary to his happiness; many philosophers themselves have believed with sincerity, that this doctrine was requisite to terrify man, was the only means to divert him from crime: notwithstanding, when the doctrine of the immortality of the soul first came out of the school of Plato; when it first diffused itself among the Greeks, it caused the greatest ravages; it determined a multitude of men, who were discontented with their condition, to terminate their existence: Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, seeing the effect this doctrine, which at the present day is looked upon as so salutary, produced on the brains of his subjects, prohibited the teaching of it under the penalty of death. It must, indeed, be allowed that this doctrine has been of the greatest utility to those who have given superstitions to nations, who at the same time made themselves its ministers; it was the foundation of their power, the source of their wealth, the permanent cause of that blindness, the solid basis of those terrors, which it was their interest to nourish in the human race. It was by this doctrine the priest became first the rival, then the master of kings: it is by this dogma that nations are filled with enthusiasts inebriated with superstition, always more disposed to listen to its menaces, than to the counsels of reasons, to the orders of the sovereign, to the cries of Nature, or to the laws of society. Politics itself was enslaved to the caprice of the priest; the temporal monarch was obliged to bend under the yoke of the monarch of superstition; the one only disposed of this perishable world, the other extended his power into the world to come; much more important for man than the earth, on which he is only a pilgrim, a mere passenger. Thus the doctrine of another life placed the government itself in a state of dependance upon the priest; the monarch was nothing more than his first subject; he was never obeyed, but when the two were in accord. Nature in vain cried out to man, to be careful of his present happiness; the priest ordered him to be unhappy, in the expectation of future felicity; reason in vain exhorted him to be peaceable; the priest breathed forth fanaticism, fulminated fury, obliged him to disturb the public tranquillity, every time there was a question of the supposed interests of the invisible monarch of another life, and the real interests of his ministers in this. Such is the fruit that politics has gathered from the doctrine of a future life; the regions of the world to come have enabled the priesthood to conquer the present world. The expectation of celestial happiness, and the dread of future tortures, only served to prevent man from seeking after the means to render himself happy here below. Thus error, under whatever aspect it is considered, will never be more than a source of evil for mankind. The doctrine of another life, in presenting to mortals an ideal happiness, will render them enthusiasts; in overwhelming them with fears, it will make useless beings; generate cowards; form atrabilarious or furious men; who will lose sight of their present abode, to occupy themselves with the pictured regions of a world to come, with those dreadful evils which they must fear after their death. If it be insisted that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments is the most powerful curb to restrain the passions of man, we shall reply by calling in daily experience. If we only cast our eyes around, if for a moment we examine what passes in review before us, we shall see this assertion contradicted; we shall find that these marvellous speculations do not in any manner diminish the number of the wicked, because they are incapable of changing the temperament of man, of annihilating those passions which the vices of society engender in his heart. In those nations who appear the most thoroughly convinced of this future punishment, may be seen assassins, thieves, crafty knaves, oppressors, adulterers, voluptuaries; all these pretend they are firmly persuaded of the reality of an hereafter; yet in the whirlwind of dissipation, in the vortex of pleasure, in the fury of their passions, they no longer behold this formidable future existence, which in those moments has no kind of influence over their earthly conduct. In short, in many of those countries where the doctrine of another life is so firmly established, that each individual irritates himself against whoever may have the temerity to combat the opinion, or even to doubt it, we see that it is utterly incapable of impressing any thing on rulers who are unjust, who are negligent of the welfare of their people, who are, debauched, on courtezans who are lewd in their habits, on covetous misers, on flinty extortioners who fatten on the substance of a nation, on women without modesty, on a vast multitude of drunken, intemperate, vicious men, on great numbers even amongst those priests, whose function it is to preach this future state, who are paid to announce the vengeance of heaven, against vices which they themselves encourage by their example. If it be enquired of them, how they dare to give themselves up to such scandalous actions, which they ought to know are certain to draw upon them eternal punishment? They will reply, that the madness of their passions, the force of their habits, the contagion of example, or even the power of circumstances, have hurried them along; have made them forget the dreadful consequences in which their conduct is likely to involve them; besides, they will say, that the treasures of the divine mercy are infinite; that repentance suffices to efface the foulest transgressions; to cleanse the blackest guilt; to blot out the most enormous crimes: in this multitude of wretched beings, who each after his own manner desolates society with his criminal pursuits, you will find only a small number who are sufficiently intimidated by the fears of the miserable hereafter, to resist their evil propensities. What did I say? These propensities are in themselves too weak to carry them forward without the aid of the doctrine of another life; without this, the law and the fear of censure would have been motives sufficient to prevent them from rendering themselves criminal. It is indeed, fearful, timorous souls, upon whom the terrors of another life make a profound impression; human beings of this sort come into the world with moderate passions, are of a weakly organization, possess a cool imagination; it is not therefore surprising, that in such men, who are already restrained by their nature, the fear of future punishment counterbalances the weak efforts of their feeble passions; but it is by no means the same with those determined sinners, with those hardened criminals, with those men who are habitually vicious, whose unseemly excesses nothing can arrest, who in their violence shut their eyes to the fear of the laws of this world, despising still more those of the other. Nevertheless, how many persons say they are, and even believe themselves, restrained by the fears of the life to come? But, either they deceive us, or they impose upon themselves, by attributing to these fears, that which is only the effect of motives much nearer at hand; such as the feebleness of their machine, the mildness of their temperament, the slender energy of their souls, their natural timidity, the ideas imbibed in their education, the fear of consequences immediately resulting from criminal actions, the physical evils attendant on unbridled irregularities: these are the true motives that restrain them; not the notions of a future life: which men, who say they are most firmly persuaded of its existence, forget whenever a powerful interest solicits them to sin. If for a time man would pay attention to what passes before his eyes, he would perceive that he ascribes to the fear of the gods that which is in reality only the effect of peculiar weakness, of pusillanimity, of the small interest found to commit evil: these men would not act otherwise than they do, if they had not this fear before them; if, therefore he reflected, he would feel that it is always necessity that makes men act as they do. Man cannot be restrained, when he does not find within himself motives sufficiently powerful to conduct him back to reason. There is nothing, either in this world or in the other, that can render him virtuous, when an untoward organization--a mind badly cultivated--a violent imagination--inveterate habits--fatal examples--powerful interests--invite him from every quarter to the commission of crime. No speculations are capable of restraining the man who braves public opinion, who despises the law, who is careless of its censure, who turns a deaf ear to the cries of conscience, whose power in this world places him out of the reach of punishment; in the violence of his transports, he will fear still less a distant futurity, of which the idea always recedes before that which he believes necessary to his immediate interests, consistent with his present happiness. All lively passions blind man to every thing that is not its immediate object; the terrors of a future life, of which his passions always possess the secret to diminish to him the probability, can effect nothing upon the wicked man, who does not fear even the much nearer punishment of the law; who sets at nought the assured hatred of those by whom he is surrounded. Man, when he delivers himself up to crime, sees nothing certain except the supposed advantage which attends it; the rest always appear to him either false or problematical. If man would but open his eyes, even for a moment, he would clearly perceive, that to effect any thing upon hearts hardened by crime, he must not reckon upon the chastisement of an avenging Divinity, which the self-love natural to man always shews him as pacified in the long run. He who has arrived at persuading himself he cannot be happy without crime, will always readily deliver himself up to it, notwithstanding the menaces of religion. Whoever is sufficiently blind not to read his infamy in his own heart, to see his own vileness in the countenances of his associates, his own condemnation in the anger of his fellow-men, his own unworthiness in the indignation of the judges established to punish the offences he may commit: such a man, I say, will never feel the impression his crimes shall make on the features of a judge, that is either hidden from his view, or that he only contemplates at a distance. The tyrant who with dry eyes can hear the cries of the distressed, who with callous heart can behold the tears of a whole people, of whose misery he is the cause, will not see the angry countenance of a more powerful master: like another Menippus, he may indeed destroy himself from desperation, to avoid reiterated reproach; which only proves, that when a haughty, arrogant despot pretends to be accountable for his actions to the Divinity alone, it is because he fears his nation more than he does his God. On the other hand, does not superstition itself, does not even religion, annihilate the effects of those fears which it announces as salutary? Does it not furnish its disciples with the means of extricating themselves from the punishments with which it has so frequently menaced them? Does it not tell them, that a steril repentance will, even at the moment of death, disarm the celestial wrath; that it will purify the filthy souls of sinners? Do not even the priests, in some superstitions, arrogate to themselves the right of remitting to the dying the punishment due to the crimes committed during the course of a disorderly life? In short, do not the most perverse men, encouraged in iniquity, countenanced in debauchery, upheld in crime, reckon, even to the last moment, either upon the assistance of superstition, or upon the aid of religion, that promises them the infallible means of reconciling themselves to the Divinity, whom they have irritated; of avoiding the rigorous punishments pronounced against their enormities? In consequence of these notions, so favourable to the wicked, so suitable to tranquillize their fears, we see that the hope of an easy expiation, far from correcting man, engages him to persist, until death, in the most crying disorders. Indeed, in despite of the numberless advantages which he is assured flows from the doctrine of a life to come, in defiance of its pretended efficacy to repress the passions of men, do not the priests themselves, although so interested in the maintenance of this system, every day complain of its insufficiency? They acknowledge, that mortals, who from their infancy they have imbued with these ideas, are not less hurried forward by their evil propensities--less sunk in the vortex of dissipation--less the slaves to their pleasures--less captivated by bad habits--less driven along by the torrent of the world--less seduced by their present interest--which make them forget equally the recompense and the chastisement of a future existence. In a word, the interpreters of superstition, the ministers of religion themselves, allow that their disciples, for the greater part, conduct themselves in this world as if they had nothing either to hope or fear in another. In short, let it be supposed for a moment, that the doctrine of eternal punishments was of some utility; that it really restrained a small number of individuals; what are these feeble advantages compared to the numberless evils that flow from it? Against one timid man whom this idea restrains, there are thousands upon whom it operates nothing; there are thousands whom it makes irrational; whom it renders savage persecutors; whom it converts into fanatics; there are thousands whose mind it disturbs; whom it diverts from their duties towards society; there are an infinity whom it grievously afflicts, whom it troubles without producing any real good for their associates. Notwithstanding so many are inclined to consider those who do not fall in with this doctrine as the enemies of society; it will be found on examination that the wisest the most enlightened men of antiquity, as well as many of the moderns, have believed not only that the soul is material and perishes with the body, but also that they have attacked without subterfuge the opinion of future everlasting punishments; it will also be found that many of the systems, set up to establish the immortality of the soul, are in themselves the best evidence that can be adduced of the futility of this doctrine; if for a moment we only follow up the natural the just inferences that are to be drawn from them. This sentiment was far from being, as some have supposed, peculiar to the Epicureans, it has been adopted by philosophers of all sects, by Pythagoreans, by Stoics, by Peripatetics, by Academics; in short by the most godly the most virtuous men of Greece and of Rome. Pythagoras, according to Ovid, speaks strongly to the fact. Timaeus of Locris, who was a Pythagorean, admits that the doctrine of future punishments was fabulous, solely destined for the imbecility of the uninformed; but little calculated for those who cultivate their reason. Aristotle expressly says, that "man has neither good to hope nor evil to fear after death." Zeno, according to Cicero, supposed the soul to be an igneous substance, from whence he concluded it destroyed itself. Cicero, the philosophical orator, who was of the sect of Academics, although he is not on all occasions, in accord with himself, treats openly as fables the torments of Hell; and looks upon death as the end of every thing for man. Seneca, the philosopher, is filled with passages which contemplate death as a state of total annihilation, particularly in speaking of it to his brother: and nothing can be more decisive of his holding this opinion, than what he writes to Marcia, to console him. Seneca, the tragedian, explains himself in the same manner as the philosopher. The Platonists, who made the soul immortal, could not have an idea of future punishments, because the soul according to them was a portion of the divinity which after the dissolution of the body it returned to rejoin. Epictetus has the same idea. In a passage reported by Arrian, he says, "but where are you going? It cannot be to a place of suffering: you will only return to the place from whence you came; you are about to be again peaceably associated with the elements from which you are derived. That which in your composition, is of the nature of fire, will return to the element of fire; that which is of the nature of earth, will rejoin itself to the earth; that which is air, will re-unite itself with air; that which is water, will resolve itself into water; there is no Hell, no Acheron, no Cocytus, no Phlegethon." In another place he says, "the hour of death approaches; but do not aggravate your evil, nor render things worse than they are: represent them to yourself under their true point of view. The time is come when the materials of which you are composed, go to resolve themselves into the elements from whence they were originally borrowed. What is there that is terrible or grievous in that? Is there any thing in the world that perishes totally?" The sage and pious Antoninus says, "he who fears death, either fears to be deprived of all feeling, or dreads to experience different sensations. If you lose all feeling, you will no longer be subject either to pain or to misery. If you are provided with other senses of a different nature, you will become a creature of a different species." This great emperor further says, "that we must expect death with tranquillity, seeing, that it is only a dissolution of the elements of which each animal is composed." To the evidence of so many great men of _Pagan antiquity_, may be joined, that of the author of Ecclesiastes, who speaks of death, and of the condition of the human soul, like an _epicurean_; he says, "for that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath: so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." And further, "wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him." In short, how can the utility or the necessity of this doctrine be reconciled with the fact, that the great _legislator of the Jews_; who is supposed to have been inspired by the Divinity, should have remained silent on a subject, that is said to be of so much importance? In the third chapter of Genesis it, is said, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." CHAP. XIV. _Education, Morals, and the Laws suffice to restrain Man.--Of the desire of Immortality.--Of Suicide._ It is not then in an ideal world, existing no where perhaps, but in the imagination of man, that he must seek to collect motives calculated to make him act properly in this; it is in the visible world that will be found incitements to divert him from crime; to rouse him to virtue. It is in Nature,--in experience,--in truth, that he must search out remedies for the evils of his species; for motives suitable to infuse into the human heart, propensities truely useful to society; calculated to promote its advantage; to conduce to the end for which it was designed. If attention has been paid to what has been said In the course of this work, it will be seen that above all it is _education_ that will best furnish the true means of rectifying the errors, of recalling the wanderings of mankind. It is this that should scatter the Seeds in his heart; cultivate the tender shoots; make a profitable use of his dispositions; turn to account those faculties, which depend on his organization: which should cherish the fire of his imagination, kindle it for useful objects; damp it, or extinguish it for others; in short, it is this which should make sensible souls contract habits which are advantageous for society and beneficial to the individual. Brought up in this manner, man would not have occasion for celestial punishments, to teach him the value of virtue; he would not need to behold burning gulphs of brimstone under his feet, to induce him to feel horror for crime; Nature without these fables, would teach much better what he owes to himself; the law would point out what he owes to the body politic, of which he is a member. It is thus, that education grounded upon utility, would form valuable citizens to the state; the depositaries of power would distinguish those whom education should have thus formed, by reason of the advantages which they would procure for their country; they would punish those who should be found injurious to it; it would make the citizens see, that the promises of reward which education held forth, the punishments denounced by morals, are by no means vain; that in a state well constituted, _virtue_ is the true, the only road to happiness; _talents_ the way to gain respect; that _inutility_ conducts to misfortune: that _crime_ leads to contempt. A just, enlightened, virtuous, and vigilant government, who should honestly propose the public good, would have no occasion either for fables or for falsehoods, to govern reasonable subjects; it would blush to make use of imposture, to deceive its citizens; who, instructed in their duties, would find their interest in submitting to equitable laws; who would be capable of feeling the benefit these have the power of conferring on them; it would feel, that habit is sufficient to inspire them with horror, even for those concealed crimes that escape the eyes of society; it would understand that the visible punishments of this world impose much more on the generality of men, than those of an uncertain and distant futurity: in short, it would ascertain that the sensible benefits within the compass of the sovereign power to distribute, touch the imagination of mortals more keenly, than those vague recompences which are held forth to them in a future existence: above all, it would discover that those on whom these distant advantages do operate, would be still more attached to virtue by receiving their reward both here and hereafter. Man is almost every where so wicked, so corrupt, so rebellious to reason, only because he is not governed according to his Nature, nor properly instructed in her necessary laws: he is almost in every climate fed with superstitious chimeras; submitted to masters who neglect his instruction or who seek to deceive him. On the face of this globe, may be frequently witnessed unjust sovereigns, who, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved by licentiousness, made wicked by impunity, devoid of talents, without morals, destitute of virtue, are incapable of exerting any energy for the benefit of the states they govern; they are consequently but little occupied with the welfare of their people; indifferent to their duties; of which indeed they are often ignorant. Such governors suffer their whole attention to be absorbed by frivolous amusement; stimulated by the desire of continually finding means to feed their insatiable ambition they engage in useless depopulating wars; and never occupy their mind with those objects which are the most important to the happiness of their nation: yet these weak men feel interested in maintaining the received prejudices, and visit with severity those who consider the means of curing them: in short themselves deprived of that understanding, which teaches man that it is his interest to be kind, just, and virtuous; they ordinarily reward only those crimes which their imbecility makes them imagine as useful to them; they generally punish those virtues which are opposed to their own imprudent passions, but which reason would point out as truly beneficial to their interests. Under such masters is it surprising that society should be ravaged; that weak beings should be willing to imitate them; that perverse men should emulate each other in oppressing its members; in sacrificing its dearest interests; in despoiling its happiness? The state of society in such countries, is a state of hostility of the sovereign against the whole, of each of its members the one against the other. Man is wicked, not because he is born so, but because he is rendered so; the great, the powerful, crush with impunity the indigent and the unhappy; these, at the risk of their lives seek to retaliate, to render back the evil they have received: they attack either openly or in secret a country, who to them is a step-mother, who gives all to some of her children, and deprives the others of every thing: they punish it for its partiality, and clearly shew that the motives borrowed from a life hereafter are impotent against the fury of those passions to which a corrupt administration has given birth; that the terror of the punishments in this world are too feeble against necessity; against criminal habits; against dangerous organization uncorrected by education. In many countries the morals of the people are neglected; the government is occupied only with rendering them timid; with making them miserable. Man is almost every where a slave; it must then follow of necessity, that he is base, interested, dissimulating, without honour, in a word that he has the vices of the state of which he is a citizen. Almost every where he is deceived; encouraged in ignorance; prevented from cultivating his reason; of course he must be stupid, irrational, and wicked almost every where he sees vice applauded, and crime honoured; thence he concludes vice to be a good; virtue, only a useless sacrifice of himself: almost every where he is miserable, therefore he injures his fellow-men in a fruitless attempt to relieve his own anguish: it is in vain to shew him heaven in order to restrain him; his views presently descend again to earth; he is willing to be happy at any price; therefore, the laws which have neither provided for his instruction, for his morals, nor his happiness, menace him uselessly; he plunges on in his pursuits, and these ultimately punish him, for the unjust negligence of his legislators. If politics more enlightened, did seriously occupy itself with the instruction, with the welfare of the people; if laws were more equitable; if each society, less partial, bestowed on its members the care, the education, and the assistance which they have a right to expect; if governments less covetous, and more vigilant, were sedulous to render their subjects more happy, there would not be seen such numbers of malefactors, of robbers, of murderers, who every where infest society; they would not be obliged to destroy life, in order to punish wickedness; which is commonly ascribable to the vices of their own institutions: it would be unnecessary to seek in another life for fanciful chimeras, which always prove abortive against the infuriate passions; against the real wants of man. In short, if the people were instructed, they would be more happy; politics would no longer be reduced to the exigency of deceiving them, in order to restrain them; nor to destroy so many unfortunates, for having procured necessaries, at the expence of their hard-hearted fellow-citizens. When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those punishments that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced--let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour--let not his substance be ravished from him by cruel imposts--let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence; let him not be driven into that idleness, that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death; let his industry be excited--let his talents be rewarded--let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shewn to him, that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow-men. Let him not be menaced with the tortures of a future existence when he shall be no more; let him behold society armed against those who disturb its repose; let him see the consequence of the hatred of his associates; let him learn to feel the value of their affection; let him be taught to esteem himself; let him understand, that to obtain it, he must have virtue; above all, that the virtuous man in society has nothing to fear, but every thing to hope. If it be desired to form honest, courageous, industrious citizens, who may be useful to their country, let them beware of inspiring man from his infancy with an ill-founded dread of death; of amusing his imagination with marvellous fables; of occupying his mind with his destiny in a future life, quite useless to be known, which has nothing in common with his real felicity. Let them speak of immortality to intrepid, noble souls; let them shew it as the price of their labours to energetic minds, who are solely occupied with virtue; who springing forward beyond the boundaries of their actual existence--who, little satisfied with eliciting the admiration, with gaining the love of their contemporaries, are will also to wrest the homage, to secure the affection of future races. Indeed, this is an immortality to which genius, talents, above all virtue, has a just right to pretend; do not therefore let them censure--do not let them endeavour to stifle so noble a passion in man; which is founded upon his nature; which is so calculated to render him happy; from which society gather the most advantageous fruits. The idea of being buried in total oblivion, of having nothing in common after his death with the beings of his species; of losing all possibility of again having any influence over them, is a thought extremely painful to man; it is above all afflicting to those who possess an ardent imagination. The _desire of immortality_, or of living in the memory of his fellow men, was always the passion of great souls; it was the motive to the actions of all those who have played a great part on the earth. _Heroes_ whether virtuous or criminal, _philosophers_ as well as _conquerors, men of genius_ and _men of talents_, those sublime personages who have done honor to their species, as well as those illustrious villains who have debased and ravaged it, have had an eye to posterity in all their enterprises; have flattered themselves with the hope of acting upon the souls of men, even when they themselves should no longer exist. If man in general does not carry his views so far, he is at least sensible to the idea of seeing himself regenerated in his children; whom he knows are destined to survive him; to transmit his name; to preserve his memory; to represent him in society; it is for them that he rebuilds his cottage; it is for them that he plants the tree which his eyes will never behold in its vigour; it is that they may be happy that he labours. The sorrow which embitters the life of those rich men, frequently so useless to the world, when they have lost the hope of continuing their race, has its source in the fear of being entirely forgotten: they feel that the useless man dies entirely. The idea that his name will be in the mouths of men, the thought that it will be pronounced with tenderness, that it will be recollected with kindness, that it will excite in their hearts favourable sentiments, is an illusion that is useful; is a vision suitable to flatter even those who know that nothing will result from it. Man pleases himself with dreaming that he shall have power, that he shall pass for something in the universe, even after the term of his human existence; he partakes by imagination in the projects, in the actions, in the discussions of future ages, and would be extremely unhappy if he believed himself entirely excluded from their society. The laws in all countries have entered into these views; they have so far been willing to console their citizens for the necessity of dying, by giving them the means of exercising their will, even for a long time after their death: this condescension goes to that length, that the dead frequently regulate the condition of the living during a long series of years. Every thing serves to prove the desire in man of surviving himself. _Pyramids, mausoleums, monuments, epitaphs,_ all shew that he is willing to prolong his existence even beyond his decease. He, is not insensible to the judgment of posterity; it is for him the philosopher writes; it is to astonish him that the monarch erects sumptuous edifices, gorgeous palaces; it is his praises, it is his commendations, that the great man already hears echo in his ears; it is to him that the virtuous citizen appeals from unjust laws; from prejudiced contemporaries--happy chimera! generous illusion! mild vision! its power is so consoling, so bland, that it realizes itself to ardent imaginations; it is calculated to give birth, to sustain, to nurture, to mature enthusiasm of genius, constancy of courage, grandeur of soul, transcendency of talent; its force is so gentle, its influence so pleasing, that it is sometimes able to repress the vices, to restrain the excesses of the most powerful men; who are, as experience has shewn, frequently very much disquieted for the judgment of their posterity; from a conviction that this will sooner or later avenge the living of the foul injustice which they may be inclined to make them suffer. No man, therefore, can consent to be entirely effaced from the remembrance of his fellows; some men have not the temerity to place themselves above the judgment of the future human species, to degrade themselves in his eyes. Where is the being who is insensible to the pleasure of exciting the tears of those who shall survive him; of again acting upon their souls; of once more occupying their thoughts; of exercising upon them his power even from the bottom of his grave? Let then eternal silence be imposed upon those superstitious beings, upon those melancholy men, upon those furious bigots, who censure a sentiment from which society derives so many real advantages; let not mankind listen to those passionless philosophers who are willing to smother this great, this noble spring of his soul; let him not be seduced by the sarcasms of those voluptuaries, who pretend to despise an immortality, towards which they lack the power to set forward; the desire of pleasing posterity, of rendering his name agreeable to generations yet to come, is a respectable, a laudable motive, when it causes him to undertake those things, of which the utility may be felt, of which the advantages may have an influence not only over his contemporaries, but also over nations who have not yet an existence. Let him not treat as irrational, the enthusiasm of those beneficent beings, of those mighty geniuses, of those stupendous talents, whose keen, whose penetrating regards, have foreseen him even in their day; who have occupied themselves for him; for his welfare; for his happiness; who have desired his suffrage; who have written for him; who have enriched him by their discoveries; who have cured him of some of his errors. Let him render them the homage which they have expected at his hands; let him, at least, reverence their memory for the benefits he has derived from them; let him treat their mouldering remains with respect, for the pleasure he receives from their labours; let him pay to their ashes a tribute of grateful recollection, for the happiness they have been sedulous to procure for him. Let him sprinkle with his tears, let him hallow with his remembrance, let him consecrate with his finest sensibilities, the urns of Socrates, of Phocion; of Archimedes; of Anaxarchus; let him wash out the stain that their punishment has made on the human species; let him expiate by his regret the Athenian ingratitude, the savage barbarity of Nicocreon; let him learn by their example to dread superstitious fanaticism; to hold political intolerance in abhorrence; let him fear to harrass merit; let him be cautious how he insults virtue, in persecuting those who may happen to differ from him in his prejudices. Let him strew flowers over the tombs of an Homer--of a Tasso--of a Shakespeare--of a Milton--of a Goldsmith; let him revere the immortal shades of those happy geniuses, whose songs yet vibrate on his ears; whose harmonious lays excite in his soul the most tender sentiments; let him bless the memory of all those benefactors to the people, who were the delight of the human race; let him adore the virtues Of a Titus--of a Trajan--of an Antoninus--of a Julian: let him merit in his sphere, the eulogies of future ages; let him always remember, that to carry with him to the grave the regret of his fellow man, he must display talents; evince integrity; practice virtue. The funeral ceremonies of the most powerful monarchs, have rarely been wetted with the tears of the people, they have commonly drained them while living. The names of tyrants excite the horror of those who bear them pronounced. Tremble then cruel kings! ye who plunge your subjects into misery; who bathe them with bitter tears--who ravage nations--who deluge the land with the vital stream--who change the fruitful earth into a barren cemetery; tremble for the sanguinary traits under which the future historian will paint you, to generations yet unborn: neither your splendid monuments--your imposing victories--your innumerable armies, nor your sycophant courtiers, can prevent posterity from avenging their grandfathers; from insulting your odious manes; from treating your execrable memories with scorn; from showering their contempt on your transcendant crimes. Not only man sees his dissolution with pain, but again, he wishes his death may be an interesting event for others. But, as we have already said, he must have talents--he must have beneficence--he must have virtue, in order, that those who surround him, may interest themselves in his condition; that those who survive him, may give regret to his ashes. Is it, then, surprising if the greater number of men, occupied entirely with themselves, completely absorbed by their own vanity, devoted to their own puerile objects, for ever busied with the care of gratifying their vile passions, at the expence, perhaps, of their family happiness, unheedful of the wants of a wife, unmindful of the necessity of their children, careless of the calls of friendship, regardless of their duty to society, do not by their death excite the sensibilities of their survivors; or that they should be presently forgotten? There is an infinity of monarchs of which history does not tell us any thing, save that they have lived. In despite of the inutility in which men for the most part pass their existence, maugre the little care they bestow, to render themselves dear to the beings who environ them; notwithstanding the numerous actions they commit to displease their associates; the self love of each individual, persuades him, that his death must be an interesting occurrence: few men but think themselves an Euryalus in friendship, all expect to find a Nisus, thus man's over-weening philauty shews him to say thus the order of things are overturned at his decease. O mortal! feeble and vain! Dost thou not know the Sesostris's, the Alexanders, the Caesars are dead? Yet the course of the universe is not arrested; the demise of those famous conquerors, afflicting to some few favoured slaves, was a subject of delight for the whole human race. Dost thou then foolishly believe that thy talents ought to interest thy species, that they are of sufficient extent to put it into mourning at thy decease? Alas! The Corneilles, the Lockes, the Newtons, the Boyles, the Harveys, the Montesquieus, the Sheridans are no more! Regretted by a small number of friends, who have presently consoled themselves by their necessary avocations, their death was indifferent to the greater number of their fellow citizens. Darest thou then flatter thyself, that thy reputation, thy titles, thy riches, thy sumptuous repasts, thy diversified pleasures, will make thy funeral a melancholy event! It will be spoken of by some few for two days, and do not be at all surprised: learn that there have died in former ages, in Babylon, in Sardis, in Carthage, in Athens, in Rome, millions of citizens more illustrious, more powerful, more opulent, more voluptuous, than thou art; of whom, however, no one has taken care to transmit to thee even the names. Be then virtuous, O man! in whatever station thy destiny assigns thee, and thou shalt be happy in thy life time; do thou good and thou shalt be cherished; acquire talents and thou shalt be respected; posterity shall admire thee, if those talents, by becoming beneficial to their interests, shall bring them acquainted with the name under which they formerly designated thy annihilated being. But the universe will not be disturbed by thy loss; and when thou comest to die, whilst thy wife, thy children, thy friends, fondly leaning over thy sickly couch, shall be occupied with the melancholy task of closing thine eyes, thy nearest neighbour shall perhaps be exulting with joy! Let not then man occupy himself with his condition that may be to come, but let him sedulously endeavour to make himself useful, to those with whom he lives; let him for his own peculiar happiness render himself dutiful to his parents--faithful to his wife--attentive to his children--kind to his relations---true to his friends--lenient to his servants; let him strive to become estimable in the eyes of his fellow citizens; let him faithfully serve a country which assures to him his welfare; let the desire of pleasing posterity, of meriting its applause, excite him to those labours that shall elicit their eulogies: let a legitimate self-love, when he shall be worthy of it, make him taste in advance those commendations which he is willing to deserve; let him learn to love himself--to esteem himself; but never let him consent that concealed vices, that sacred crimes, shall degrade him in his own eyes; shall oblige him to be ashamed of his own conduct. Thus disposed, let him contemplate his own decease with the same indifference, that it will be looked upon by the greater number of his fellows; let him expect death with constancy; wait for it with calm resignation; let him learn to shake off those vain terrors with which superstition, would overwhelm him; let him leave to the enthusiast his vague hopes; to the fanatic his mad-brained speculations; to the bigot those fears with which he ministers to his own melancholy; but let his heart, fortified by reason, corroborated by a love of virtue, no longer dread a dissolution that will destroy all feeling. Whatever may be the attachment man has to life, whatever may be his fear of death, it is every day witnessed, that habit, that opinion, that prejudice, are motives sufficiently powerful to annihilate these passions in his breast; to make him brave danger; to cause him to hazard his existence. Ambition, pride, jealousy, love, vanity, avarice, the desire of glory, that deference of opinion which is decorated with the sounding title of _a point of honour_, have the efficacy to make him shut his eyes to danger; to laugh at peril; to push him on to death: vexation, anxiety of mind, disgrace, want of success, softens to him its hard features; makes him regard it as a door that will afford him shelter from the injustice of mankind: indigence, trouble, adversity, familiarizes him with this death, so terrible to the happy. The poor man, condemned to labour, inured to privations, deprived of the comforts of life, views its approach with indifference: the unfortunate, when he is unhappy, when he is without resource, embraces it in despair; the wretched accelerates its march as soon as he sees that happiness is no longer within his grasp. Man in different ages, in different countries, has formed opinions extremely various upon the conduct of those, who have had the temerity to put an end to their own existence. His ideas upon this subject, as upon all others, have taken their tone from his religion, have been governed by his superstitious systems, have been modified by his political institutions. The Greeks, the Romans, and other nations, which every thing conspired to make intrepid, to render courageous, to lead to magnanimity, regarded as heroes, contemplated as Gods, those who voluntarily cut the thread of life. In Hindoostan, the Brahmin yet knows how to inspire even women with sufficient fortitude to burn themselves upon the dead bodies of their husbands. The Japanese, upon the most trifling occasion, takes no kind of difficulty in plunging a dagger into his bosom. Among the people of our own country, religion renders man less prodigal of life; it teaches that it is offensive to the Deity that he should destroy himself. Some moralists, abstracting the height of religious ideas, have held that it is never permitted to man to break the conditions of the covenant that he has made with society. Others have looked upon suicide as cowardice; they have thought that it was weakness, that it displayed pusillanimity, to suffer, himself to be overwhelmed with the shafts of his destiny; and have held that there would be much more courage, more elevation of soul, in supporting his afflictions, in resisting the blows of fate. If nature be consulted upon this point, it will be found that all the actions of man, that feeble plaything in the hands of necessity, are indispensable; that they depend on causes which move him in despite of himself--that without his knowledge, make him accomplish at each moment of his existence some one of its decrees. If the same power that obliges all intelligent beings to cherish their existence, renders that of man so painful, so cruel, that he finds it insupportable he quits his species; order is destroyed for him, he accomplishes a decree of Nature, that wills he shall no longer exist. This Nature has laboured during thousands of years, to form in the bowels of the earth the iron that must number his days. If the relation of man with Nature be examined, it will be found that his engagement was neither voluntary on his part, nor reciprocal on the part of Nature. The volition of his will had no share in his birth; it is commonly against his will that he is obliged to finish life; his actions are, as we have proved, only the necessary effects of unknown causes which determine his will. He is, in the hands of Nature, that which a sword is in his own hands; he can fall upon it without its being able to accuse him with breaking his engagements; or of stamping with ingratitude the hand that holds it: man can only love his existence on condition of being happy; as soon as the entire of nature refuses him this happiness; as soon as all that surrounds him becomes incommodious to him, as soon as his melancholy ideas offer nothing but afflicting pictures to his imagination; he already exists no longer; he is suspended in the void; he quits a rank which no longer suits him; in which he finds no one interest; which offers him no protection; which overwhelms him with calamity; in which he can no more be useful either to himself or to others. If the covenant which unites man to society be considered, it will be obvious that every contract is conditional, must be reciprocal; that is to say, supposes mutual advantages between the contracting parties. The citizen cannot be bound to his country, to his associates, but by the bonds of happiness. Are these bonds cut asunder? He is restored to liberty. Society, or those who represent it, do they use him with harshness, do they treat him with injustice, do they render his existence painful? Does disgrace hold him out to the finger of scorn; does indigence menace him in an obdurate world? Perfidious friends, do they forsake him in adversity? An unfaithful wife, does she outrage his heart? Rebellious, ungrateful children, do they afflict his old age? Has he placed his happiness exclusively on some object which it is impossible for him to procure? Chagrin, remorse, melancholy, and despair, have they disfigured to him the spectacle of the universe? In short, for whatever cause it may be: if he is not able to support his evils, he quits a world, which from henceforth, is for him only a frightful desert he removes himself for ever from a country he thinks no longer willing to reckon him amongst the number of her children--he quits a house that to his mind is ready to bury him under its ruins--he renounces a society, to the happiness of which he can no longer contribute; which his own peculiar felicity alone can render dear to him: and could the man be blamed, who, finding himself useless; who being without resources, in the town where destiny gave him birth, should quit it in chagrin, to plunge himself in solitude? Death appears to the wretched the only remedy for despair; it is then the sword seems the only friend, the only comfort that is left to the unhappy: as long as hope remains the tenant of his bosom--as long as his evils appear to him at all supportable--as long as he flatters himself with seeing them brought to a termination--as long as he finds some comfort in existence, however slender, he will not consent to deprive himself of life: but when nothing any longer sustains in him the love of this existence, then to live, is to him the greatest of evils; to die, the only mode by which he can avoid the excess of despair. This has been the opinion of many great men: Seneca, the moralist, whom Lactantius calls the divine Pagan, who has been praised equally by St. Austin and St. Augustine, endeavours by every kind of argument to make death a matter of indifference to man. Cato has always been commended, because he would not survive the cause of liberty; for that he would not live a slave. Curtius, who rode voluntarily into the gap, to save his country, has always been held forth as a model of heroic virtue. Is it not evident, that those martyrs who have delivered themselves up to punishment, have preferred quitting the world to living in it contrary to their own ideals of happiness? When Samson wished to be revenged on the Philistines, did he not consent to die with them as the only means? If our country is attacked, do we not voluntarily sacrifice our lives in its defence? That society who has not the ability, or who is not willing to procure man any one benefit, loses all its rights over him; Nature, when it has rendered his existence completely miserable, has in fact, ordered him to quit it: in dying he does no more than fulfil one of her decrees, as he did when he first drew his breath. To him who is fearless of death, there is no evil without a remedy; for him who refuses to die, there yet exists benefits which attach him to the world; in this case let him rally his powers--let him oppose courage to a destiny that oppresses him--let him call forth those resources with which Nature yet furnishes him; she cannot have totally abandoned him, while she yet leaves him the sensation of pleasure; the hopes of seeing a period to his pains. Man regulates his judgment on his fellows, only by his own peculiar mode of feeling; he deems as folly, he calls delirium all those violent actions which he believes but little commensurate with their causes; or which appear to him calculated to deprive him of that happiness, towards which he supposes a being in the enjoyment of his senses, cannot cease to have a tendency: he treats his associate as a weak creature, when he sees him affected with that which touches him but lightly; or when he is incapable of supporting those evils, which his self-love flatters him, he would himself be able to endure with more fortitude. He accuses with madness whoever deprives himself of life, for objects that he thinks unworthy so dear a sacrifice; he taxes him with phrenzy, because he has himself learned to regard this life as the greatest blessing. It is thus that he always erects himself into a judge of the happiness of others--of their mode of seeing--of their manner of feeling: a miser who destroys himself after the loss of his treasure, appears a fool in the eyes of him who is less attached to riches; he does not feel, that without money, life to this miser is only a continued torture; that nothing in the world is capable of diverting him from his painful sensations: he will proudly tell you, that in his place he had not done so much; but to be exactly in the place of another man, it is needful to have his organization--his temperament--his passions--his ideas; it is in fact needful to be that other; to be placed exactly in the same circumstances; to be moved by the same causes; and in this case all men, like the miser, would sacrifice their life, after being deprived of the only source of their happiness. He who deprives himself of his existence, does not adopt this extremity, so repugnant to his natural tendency; but when nothing in this world has the faculty of rejoicing him; when no means are left of diverting his affliction; when reason no longer acts; his misfortune whatever it may be, for him is real; his organization, be it strong, or be it weak, is his own, not that of another: a man who is sick only in imagination, really suffers considerably; even troublesome dreams place him in a very uncomfortable situation. Thus when a man kills himself, it ought to be concluded, that life, in the room of being a benefit, had become a very great evil to him; that existence had lost all its charms in his eyes; that the entire of nature was to him destitute of attraction; that it no longer contained any thing that could seduce him; that after the comparison which his disturbed imagination had made of existence with non-existence, the latter appeared to him preferable to the first. Many will consider these maxims as dangerous; they certainly account why the unhappy cut the thread of life, in a manner not corresponding with the received prejudices; but, nevertheless, it is a temperament soured by chagrin, a bilious constitution, a melancholy habit, a defect in the organization, a derangement in the mind; it is in fact necessity and not reasonable speculations, that breed in man the design of destroying himself. Nothing invites him to this step so long as reason remains with him; or whilst he yet possesses hope, that sovereign balm for every evil: as for the unfortunate, who cannot lose sight of his sorrows--who cannot forget his pains--who has his evils always present to his mind; he is obliged to take counsel from these alone: besides, what assistance, what advantage can society promise to himself, from a miserable wretch reduced to despair; from a misanthrope overwhelmed with grief; from a wretch tormented with remorse, who has no longer any motive to render himself useful to others--who has abandoned himself--who finds no more interest in preserving his life? Frequently, those who destroy themselves are such, that had they lived, the offended laws must have ultimately been obliged to remove them from a society which they disgraced; from a country which they had injured. As life is commonly the greatest blessing for man, it is to be presumed that he who deprives himself of it, is compelled to it by an invincible force. It is the excess of misery, the height of despair, the derangement of his brain, caused by melancholy, that urges man on to destroy himself. Agitated by contrary impulsions, he is, as we have before said, obliged to follow a middle course that conducts him to his death; if man be not a free-agent, in any one instant of his life, he is again much less so in the act by which it is terminated. It will be seen then, that he who kills himself, does not, as it is pretended, commit an outrage on nature. He follows an impulse which has deprived him of reason; adopts the only means left him to quit his anguish; he goes out of a door which she leaves open to him; he cannot offend in accomplishing a law of necessity: the iron hand of this having broken the spring that renders life desirable to him; which urged him to self-conservation, shews him he ought to quit a rank or system where he finds himself too miserable to have the desire of remaining. His country or his family have no right to complain of a member, whom it has no means of rendering happy; from whom consequently they have nothing more to hope: to be useful to either, it is necessary he should cherish his own peculiar existence; that he should have an interest in conserving himself--that he should love the bonds by which he is united to others--that he should be capable of occupying himself with their felicity--that he should have a sound mind. That the suicide should repent of his precipitancy, he should outlive himself, he should carry with him into his future residence, his organs, his senses, his memory, his ideas, his actual mode of existing, his determinate manner of thinking. In short, nothing is more useful for society, than to inspire man with a contempt for death; to banish from his mind the false ideas he has of its consequences. The fear of death can never do more than make cowards; the fear of its consequences will make nothing but fanatics or melancholy beings, who are useless to themselves, unprofitable to others. Death is a resource that ought not by any means to be taken away from oppressed virtue; which the injustice of man frequently reduces to despair. If man feared death less, he would neither be a slave nor superstitious; truth would find defenders more zealous; the rights of mankind would be more hardily sustained; virtue would be intrepidly upheld: error would be more powerfully opposed; tyranny would be banished from nations: cowardice nourishes it, fear perpetuates it. In fact, _man can neither be contented nor happy whilst his opinions shall oblige him to tremble_. CHAP. XV. _Of Man's true Interest, or of the Ideas he forms to himself of Happiness.--Man cannot be happy without Virtue._ Utility, as has been before observed, ought to be the only standard of the judgment of man. To be useful, is to contribute to the happiness of his fellow creatures; to be prejudicial, is to further their misery. This granted, let us examine if the principles we have hitherto established be prejudicial or advantageous, useful or useless, to the human race. If man unceasingly seeks after his happiness, he can only approve of that which procures for him his object, or furnishes him the means by which it is to be obtained. What has been already said will serve in fixing our ideas upon what constitutes this happiness: it has been already shewn that it is only continued pleasure: but in order that an object may please, it is necessary that the impressions it makes, the perceptions it gives, the ideas which it leaves, in short, that the motion it excites in man should be analogous to his organization; conformable to his temperament; assimilated to his individual nature:--modified as it is by habit, determined as it is by an infinity of circumstances, it is necessary that the action of the object by which he is moved, or of which the idea remains with him, far from enfeebling him, far from annihilating his feelings, should tend to strengthen him; it is necessary, that without fatiguing his mind, exhausting his faculties, or deranging his organs, this object should impart to his machine that degree of activity for which it continually has occasion. What is the object that unites all these qualities? Where is the man whose organs are susceptible of continual agitation without being fatigued; without experiencing a painful sensation; without sinking? Man is always willing to be warned of his existence in the most lively manner, as long as he can be so without pain. What do I say? He consents frequently to suffer, rather than not feel. He accustoms himself to a thousand things which at first must have affected him in a disagreeable manner; but which frequently end either by converting themselves into wants, or by no longer affecting him any way: of this truth tobacco, coffee, and above all brandy furnish examples: this is the reason he runs to see tragedies; that he witnesses the execution of criminals. In short, the desire of feeling, of being powerfully moved, appears to be the principle of curiosity; of that avidity with which man seizes on the marvellous; of that earnestness with which he clings to the supernatural; of the disposition he evinces for the incomprehensible. Where, indeed, can he always find objects in nature capable of continually supplying the stimulus requisite to keep him in activity, that shall be ever proportioned to the state of his own organization; which his extreme mobility renders subject to perpetual variation? The most lively pleasures are always the least durable, seeing they are those which exhaust him most. That man should be uninterruptedly happy, it would be requisite that his powers were infinite; it would require that to his mobility he joined a vigor, attached a solidity, which nothing could change; or else it is necessary that the objects from which he receives impulse, should either acquire or lose properties, according to the different states through which his machine is successively obliged to pass; it would need that the essences of beings should be changed in the same proportion as his dispositions; should be submitted to the continual influence of a thousand causes, which modify him without his knowledge, and in despite of himself. If, at each moment, his machine undergoes changes more or less marked, which are ascribable to the different degrees of elasticity, of density, of serenity of the atmosphere; to the portion of igneous fluid circulating through his blood; to the harmony of his organs; to the order that exists between the various parts of his body; if, at every period of his existence, his nerves have not the same tensions, his fibres the same elasticity, his mind the same activity, his imagination the same ardour, &c. it is evident that the same causes in preserving to him only the same qualities, cannot always affect him in the same manner. Here is the reason why those objects that please him in one season displease him in another: these objects have not themselves sensibly changed; but his organs, his dispositions, his ideas, his mode of seeing, his manner of feeling, have changed:--such is the source of man's inconstancy. If the same objects are not constantly in that state competent to form the happiness of the same individual, it is easy to perceive that they are yet less in a capacity to please all men; or that the same happiness cannot be suitable to all. Beings already various by their temperament, unlike in their faculties, diversified in their organization, different in their imagination, dissimilar in their ideas, of distinct opinions, of contrary habits, which an infinity of circumstances, whether physical or moral, have variously modified, must necessarily form very different notions of happiness. Those of a MISER cannot be the same as those of a PRODIGAL; those of a VOLUPTUARY, the same as those of one who is PHLEGMATIC; those of an intemperate, the same as those of a rational man, who husbands his health. The happiness of each, is in consequence composed of his natural organization, and of those circumstances, of those habits, of those ideas, whether true or false, that have modified him: this organization and these circumstances, never being the same in any two men, it follows, that what is the object of one man's views, must be indifferent, or even displeasing to another; thus, as we have before said, no one can be capable of judging of that which may contribute to the felicity of his fellow man. _Interest_ is the object to which each individual according to his temperament and his own peculiar ideas, attaches his welfare; from which it will be perceived that this interest is never more than that which each contemplates as necessary to his happiness. It must, therefore, be concluded, that no man is totally without interest. That of the miser to amass wealth; that of the prodigal to dissipate it: the interest of the ambitious is to obtain power; that of the modest philosopher to enjoy tranquillity; the interest of the debauchee is to give himself up, without reserve, to all sorts of pleasure; that of the prudent man, to abstain from those which may injure him: the interest of the wicked is to gratify his passions at any price: that of the virtuous to merit by his conduct the love, to elicit by his actions the approbation of others; to do nothing that can degrade himself in his own eyes. Thus, when it is said that _Interest is the only motive of human actions;_ it is meant to indicate that each man labours after his own manner, to his own peculiar happiness; that he places it in some object either visible or concealed; either real or imaginary; that the whole system of his conduct is directed to its attainment. This granted, no man can be called disinterested; this appellation is only applied to those of whose motives we are ignorant; or whose interest we approve. Thus the man who finds a greater pleasure in assisting his friends in misfortune than preserving in his coffers useless treasure, is called generous, faithful, and disinterested; in like manner all men are denominated disinterested, who feel their glory far more precious than their fortune. In short, all men are designated disinterested who place their happiness in making sacrifices which man considers costly, because he does not attach the same value to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Man frequently judges very erroneously of the interest of others, either because the motives that animate them are too complicated for him to unravel; or because to be enabled to judge of them fairly, it is needful to have the same eyes, the same organs the same passions, the same opinions: nevertheless, obliged to form his judgment of the actions of mankind, by their effect on himself, he approves the interest that actuates them whenever the result is advantageous for his species: thus, he admires valour, generosity, the love of liberty, great talents, virtue, &c. he then only approves of the objects in which the beings he applauds have placed their happiness; he approves these dispositions even when he is not in a capacity to feel their effects; but in this judgment he is not himself disinterested; experience, reflection, habit, reason, have given him a taste for morals, and he finds as much pleasure in being witness to a great and generous action, as the man of _virtu_ finds in the sight of a fine picture of which he is not the proprietor. He who has formed to himself a habit of practising virtue, is a man who has unceasingly before his eyes the interest that he has in meriting the affection, in deserving the esteem, in securing the assistance of others, as well as to love and esteem himself: impressed with these ideas which have become habitual to him, he abstains even from concealed crimes, since these would degrade him in his own eyes: he resembles a man who having from his infancy contracted the habit of cleanliness, would be painfully affected at seeing himself dirty, even when no one should witness it. The honest man is he to whom truth has shewn his interest or his happiness in a mode of acting that others are obliged to love, are under the necessity to approve for their own peculiar interest. These principles, duly developed, are the true basis of morals; nothing is more chimerical than those which are founded upon imaginary motives placed out of nature; or upon innate sentiments; which some speculators have regarded as anterior to man's experience; as wholly independant of those advantages which result to him from its use: it is the essence of man to love himself; to tend to his own conservation; to seek to render his existence happy: thus interest, or the desire of happiness, is the only real motive of all his actions; this interest depends upon his natural organization, rests itself upon his wants, is bottomed upon his acquired ideas, springs from the habits he has contracted: he is without doubt in error, when either a vitiated organization or false opinions shew him his welfare in objects either useless or injurious to himself, as well as to others; he marches steadily in the paths of virtue when true ideas have made him rest his happiness on a conduct useful to his species; in that which is approved by others; which renders him an interesting object to his associates. _Morals_ would be a vain science if it did not incontestibly prove to man that _his interest consists in being virtuous._ Obligation of whatever kind, can only be founded upon the probability or the certitude of either obtaining a good or avoiding an evil. Indeed, in no one instant of his duration, can a sensible, an intelligent being, either lose sight of his own preservation or forget his own welfare; he owes happiness to himself; but experience quickly proves to him, that bereaved of assistance, quite alone, left entirely to himself, he cannot procure all those objects which are requisite to his felicity: he lives with sensible, with intelligent beings, occupied like himself with their own peculiar happiness; but capable of assisting him, in obtaining those objects he most desires; he discovers that these beings will not be favorable to his views, but when they find their interest involved; from which he concludes, that his own happiness demands, that his own wants render it necessary he should conduct himself at all times in a manner suitable to conciliate the attachment, to obtain the approbation, to elicit the esteem, to secure the assistance of those beings who are most capacitated to further his designs. He perceives, that it is man who is most necessary to the welfare of man: that to induce him to join in his interests, he ought to make him find real advantages in recording his projects: but to procure real advantages to the beings of the human species, is to have virtue; the reasonable man, therefore, is obliged to feel that it is his interest to be virtuous. _Virtue is only the art of rendering himself happy, by the felicity of others_. The virtuous man is he who communicates happiness to those beings who are capable of rendering his own condition happy; who are necessary to his conservation; who have the ability to procure him a felicitous existence. Such, then, is the true foundation of all morals; merit and virtue are founded upon the nature of man; have their dependance upon his wants. It is virtue alone that can render him truly happy: without virtue society can neither be useful nor indeed subsist; it can only have real utility when it assembles beings animated with the desire of pleasing each other, and disposed to labour to their reciprocal advantage: there exists no comfort in those families whose members are not in the happy disposition to lend each other mutual succours; who have not a reciprocity of feeling that stimulates them to assist one another; that induces them to cling to each other, to support the sorrows of life; to unite their efforts, to put away those evils to which nature has subjected them; the conjugal bonds, are sweet only in proportion as they identify the interest of two beings, united by the want of legitimate pleasure; from whence results the maintenance of political society, and the means of furnishing it with citizens. Friendship has charms only when it more particularly associates two virtuous beings; that is to say, animated with the sincere desire of conspiring to their reciprocal happiness. In short, it is only by displaying virtue, that man can merit the benevolence, can win the confidence, can gain the esteem, of all those with whom he has relation; in a word, no man can be independently happy. Indeed, the happiness of each human individual depends on those sentiments to which he gives birth, on those feelings which he nourishes in the beings amongst whom his destiny has placed him; grandeur may dazzle them; power may wrest from them an involuntary homage; force may compel an unwilling obedience; opulence may seduce mean, may attract venal souls; but it is humanity, it is benevolence, it is compassion, it is equity, that unassisted by these, can without efforts obtain for him, from those by whom he is surrounded, those delicious sentiments of attachments, those soothing feelings of tenderness, those sweet ideas of esteem, of which all reasonable men feel the necessity. To be virtuous then, is to place his interest in that which accords with the interest of others; it is to enjoy those benefits, to partake of that pleasure which he himself diffuses over his fellows. He whom, his nature, his education, his reflections, his habits, have rendered susceptible of these dispositions, and to whom his circumstances have given him the faculty of gratifying them, becomes an interesting object to all those who approach him: he enjoys every instant, he reads with satisfaction the contentment, he contemplates with pleasure the joy which he has diffused over all countenances: his wife, his children, his friends, his servants greet him with gay, serene faces, indicative of that content, harbingers of that peace, which he recognizes for his own work: every thing that environs him is ready to partake his pleasures; to share his pains; cherished, respected, looked up to by others, every thing conducts him to agreeable reflections; he knows the rights he has acquired over their hearts; he applauds himself for being the source of a felicity that captivates all the world; his own condition, his sentiments of self-love, become an hundred times more delicious when he sees them participated by all those with whom his destiny has connected him. The habit of virtue creates for him no wants but those which virtue itself suffices to satisfy; it is thus that _virtue is always its own peculiar reward_, that it remunerates itself with all the advantages which it incessantly procures for others. It will be said, and perhaps even proved, that under the present constitution of things, virtue far from procuring the welfare of those who practice it frequently plunges man into misfortune; often places continual obstacles to his felicity; that almost every where it is without recompence. What do I say? A thousand examples could be adduced as evidence, that in almost every country it is hated, persecuted, obliged to lament the ingratitude of human nature. I reply with avowing, that by a necessary consequence of the errors of his race, virtue rarely conducts man to those objects in which the uninformed make their happiness consist. The greater number of societies, too frequently ruled by those whose ignorance makes them abuse their power,--whose prejudices render them enemies of virtue,--who flattered by sycophants, secure in the impunity their actions enjoy, commonly lavish their esteem, bestow their kindness, on none but the most unworthy objects; reward only the most frivolous, recompence none but the most prejudicial qualities; and hardly ever accord that justice to merit which is unquestionably its due. But the truly honest man, is neither ambitious of renumeration, nor sedulous of the suffrages of a society thus badly constituted: contented with domestic happiness, he seeks not to augment relations, which would do no more than increase his danger; he knows that a vitiated community is a whirlwind, with which an honest man cannot co-order himself: he therefore steps aside; quits the beaten path, by continuing in which he would infallibly be crushed. He does all the good of which he is capable in his sphere; he leaves the road free to the wicked, who are willing to wade through its mire; he laments the heavy strokes they inflict on themselves; he applauds mediocrity that affords him security: he pities those nations made miserable by their errors,--rendered unhappy by those passions which are the fatal but necessary consequence; he sees they contain nothing but wretched citizens, who far from cultivating their true interest, far from labouring to their mutual felicity, far from feeling the real value of virtue, unconscious how dear it ought to be to them, do nothing but either openly attack, or secretly injure it; in short, who detests a quality which would restrain their disorderly propensities. In saying that virtue is its own peculiar reward, it is simply meant to announce, that in a society whose views were guided by truth, trained by experience, conducted by reason, each individual would be acquainted with his real interests; would understand the true end of association; would have sound motives to perform his duties; find real advantages in fulfilling them; in fact, it would be convinced, that to render himself solidly happy, he should occupy his actions with the welfare of his fellows; by their utility merit their esteem, elicit their kindness, and secure their assistance. In a well-constituted society, the government, the laws, education, example, would all conspire to prove to the citizen, that the nation of which he forms a part, is a whole that cannot be happy, that cannot subsist without virtue; experience would, at each step, convince him that the welfare of its parts can only result from that of the whole body corporate; justice would make him feel, that no society, can be advantageous to its members, where the volition of wills in those who act, is not so conformable to the interests of the whole, as to produce an advantageous re-action. But, alas! by the confusion which the errors of man have carried into his ideas: virtue disgraced, banished, and persecuted, finds not one of those advantages it has a right to expect: man is indeed shewn those rewards for it in a future life, of which he is almost always deprived in his actual existence. It is thought necessary to deceive, considered proper to seduce, right to intimidate him, in order to induce him to follow that virtue which every thing renders incommodious to him; he is fed with distant hopes, in order to solicit him to practice virtue, while contemplation of the world makes it hateful to him; he is alarmed by remote terrors, to deter him from committing evil, which his associates paint as amiable; which all conspires to render necessary. It is thus that politics, thus that superstition, by the formation of chimeras, by the creation of fictitious interests pretend to supply those true, those real motives which nature furnishes,--which experience would point out,--which an enlightened government should hold forth,--which the law ought to enforce,--which instruction should sanction,--which example should encourage,-which rational opinions would render pleasant. Man, blinded by his passions, not less dangerous than necessary, led away by precedent, authorised by custom, enslaved by habit, pays no attention to these uncertain promises, is regardless of the menaces held out; the actual interests of his immediate pleasures, the force of his passions, the inveteracy of his habits, always rise superior to the distant interests pointed out in his future welfare, or the remote evils with which he is threatened; which always appear doubtful, whenever he compares them with present advantages. Thus _superstition, far from making man virtuous by principle, does nothing more than impose upon him a yoke as severe as it is useless_; it is borne by none but enthusiasts, or by the pusillanimous; who, without becoming better, tremblingly champ the feeble bit put into their mouth; who are either rendered unhappy by their opinions, or dangerous by their tenets; indeed, experience, that faithful monitor, incontestibly proves, that superstition is a dyke inadequate to resist the torrent of corruption, to which so many accumulated causes give an irresistible force: nay more, does not this superstition itself augment the public disorder, by the dangerous passions which it lets loose, by the conduct which it sanctions, by the actions which it consecrates? Virtue, in almost every climate, is confined to some few rational souls, who have sufficient strength of mind to resist the stream of prejudice; who are contented by remunerating themselves with the benefits they difuse over society: whose temperate dispositions are gratified with the suffrages of a small number of virtuous approvers; in short, who are detached from those frivolous advantages which the injustice of society but too commonly accords only to baseness, which it rarely bestows, except to intrigue, with which in general it rewards nothing but crime. In despite of the injustice that reigns in the world, there are, however, some virtuous men in the bosom even of the most degenerate nations; notwithstanding the general depravity, there are some benevolent beings, still enamoured of virtue; who are fully acquainted with its true value; who are sufficiently enlightened to know that it exacts homage even from its enemies; who to use the language of ECCLESIASTES, "_rejoice in their own works_;" who are, at least, happy in possessing contented minds, who are satisfied with concealed pleasures, those internal recompences of which no earthly power is competent to deprive them. The honest man acquires a right to the esteem, has a just claim to the veneration, wins the confidence, gains the love, even of those whose conduct is exposed by a contrast with his own. In short, vice is obliged to cede to virtue; of which it blushingly, though unwillingly, acknowledges the superiority. Independent of this ascendancy so gentle, of this superiority so grand, of this pre-eminence so infallible, when even the whole universe should be unjust to him, when even every tongue should cover him with venom, when even every arm should menace him with hostility, there yet remains to the honest man the sublime advantage of loving his own conduct; the ineffable pleasure of esteeming himself; the unalloyed gratification of diving with satisfaction into the recesses of his own heart; the tranquil delight of contemplating his own actions with that delicious complacency that others ought to do, if they were not hood-winked, No power is adequate to ravish from him the merited esteem of himself; no authority is sufficiently potent to give it to him when he deserves it not; the mightiest monarch cannot lend stability to this esteem, when it is not well founded; it is then a ridiculous sentiment: it ought to be considered, it really is "_vanity and vexation of spirit_," it is not wisdom, but folly in the extreme; it ought to be censured when it displays itself in a mode that is mortifying to its neighbour, in a manner that is troublesome to others; it is then called ARROGANCE; it is called VANITY; but when it cannot be condemned, when it is known for legitimate when it is discovered to have a solid foundation, when it bottoms itself upon talents, when it rises upon great actions that are useful to the community, when it erects its edifice upon virtue; even though society should not set these merits at their just price, it is NOBLE PRIDE, ELEVATION OF MIND, and GRANDEUR OF SOUL. Of what consequence then, is it to listen to those superstitious beings, those enemies to man's happiness, who have been desirous of destroying it, even in the inmost recesses of his heart; who have prescribed to him hatred of his follower; who have filled him with contempt for himself; who pretend to wrest from the honest man that self-respect which is frequently the only reward that remains to virtue, in a perverse world. To annihilate in him this sentiment, so full in justice, this love of himself, is to break the most powerful spring, to weaken the most efficacious stimulus, that urges him to act right; that spurs him on to do good to his fellow mortals. What motive, indeed, except it be this, remains for him in the greater part of human societies? Is not virtue discouraged? Is not honesty contemned? Is not audacious crime encouraged? Is not subtle intrigue eulogized? Is not cunning vice rewarded? Is not love of the public weal taxed as folly; exactitude in fulfilling duties looked upon as a bubble? Is not compassion laughed to scorn? ARE NOT TRAITORS DISTINGUISHED BY PUBLIC HONORS? Is not negligence of morals applauded,--sensibility derided,--tenderness scoffed,--conjugal fidelity jeered,--sincerity despised,--enviolable friendship treated with ridicule: while seduction, adultery, hard-heartedness, punic faith, avarice, and fraud, stalk forth unabashed, decked in gorgeous array, lauded by the world? Man must have motives for action: he neither acts well nor ill, but with a view to his own happiness: that which he judges will conduce to this "_consummation so devoutly to be wished_," he thinks his interest; he does nothing gratuitously; when reward for useful actions is withheld from him, he is reduced either to become as abandoned as others, or else to remunerate himself with his own applause. This granted; the honest man can never be completely unhappy; he can never be entirely deprived of the recompence which is his due; virtue is competent to repay him for all the benefits he may bestow on others; can amply make up to him all the happiness denied him by public opinion; _but nothing can compensate to him the want of virtue_. It does not follow that the honest man will be exempted from afflictions: like, the wicked, he is subject to physical evils; he may pine in indigence; he may be deprived of friendship; he may be worn down with disease; he may frequently be the subject of calumny; he may be the victim to injustice; he may be treated with ingratitude; he may be exposed to hatred; but in the midst of all his misfortunes, in the very bosom of his sorrows, in the extremity of his vexation, he finds support in himself; he is contented with his own conduct; he respects himself; he feels his own dignity; he knows the equity of his rights; he consoles himself with the confidence inspired by the justness of his cause; he cheers himself amidst the most sullen circumstances. These supports are not calculated for the wicked; they avail him nothing: equally liable with the honest man to infirmities, equally submitted to the caprices of his destiny, equally the sport of a fluctuating world, he finds the recesses of his own heart filled with dreadful alarms; diseased with care; cankered with solitude; corroded with regret; gnawed by remorse; he dies within himself; his conscience sustains him not but loads him with reproach; his mind, overwhelmed, sinks beneath its own turpitude; his reflection is the bitter dregs of hemlock; maddening anguish holds him to the mirror that shews him his own deformity; that recalls unhallowed deeds; gloomy thoughts rush on his too faithful memory; despondence benumbs him; his body, simultaneously assailed on all sides, bends under the storm of--his own unruly passions; at last despair grapples him to her filthy bosom, he flies from himself. The honest man is not an insensible Stoic; virtue does not procure impassibility; honesty gives no exemption from misfortune, but it enables him to bear cheerly up against it; to cast off despair, to keep his own company: if he is infirm, if he is worn with disease, he has less to complain of than the vicious being who is oppressed with sickness, who is enfeebled by years; if he is indigent, he is less unhappy in his poverty; if he is in disgrace, he can endure it with fortitude, he is not overwhelmed by its pressure, like the wretched slave to crime. Thus the happiness of each individual depends on the cultivation of his temperament; nature makes both the happy and the unhappy; it is culture that gives value to the soil nature has formed; it is instruction that makes the fruit it produces palatable; It is reflection that makes it useful. For man to be happily born, is to have received from nature a sound body, organs that act with precision--a just mind, a heart whose passions are analogous, whose desires are conformable to the circumstances in which his destiny has placed him: nature, then, has done every thing for him, when she has joined to these faculties the quantum of vigour, the portion of energy, sufficient to enable him to obtain those Proper things, which his station, his mode of thinking, his temperament, have rendered desirable. Nature has made him a fatal present, when she has filled his sanguinary vessels with an over-heated fluid; when she has given him an imagination too active; when she has infused into him desires too impetuous; when he has a hankering after objects either impossible or improper to be obtained under his circumstances; or which at least he cannot procure without those incredible efforts, that either place his own welfare in danger or disturb the repose of society. The most happy man, is commonly he who possesses a peaceful soul; who only desires those things which he can procure by labour, suitable to maintain his activity; which he can obtain without causing those shocks, that are either too violent for society, or troublesome to his associates. A philosopher whose wants are easily satisfied, who is a stranger, to ambition, who is contented with the limited circle of a small number of friends, is, without doubt a being much more happily constituted than an ambitious conqueror, whose greedy imagination is reduced to despair by having only one world to ravage. He who is happily born, or whom nature has rendered susceptible of being conveniently modified, is not a being injurious to society: it is generally disturbed by men who are unhappily born, whose organization renders them turbulent; who are discontented with their destiny; who are inebriated with their own licentious passions; who are infatuated with their own vile schemes; who are smitten with difficult enterprises; who set the world in combustion, to gather imaginary benefits in order to attain which they must inflict he heaviest curses on mankind, but in which they make their own happiness consist. An ALEXANDER requires the destruction of empires, nations to be deluged with blood, cities to be laid in ashes, its inhabitants to be exterminated, to content that passion for glory, of which he has formed to himself a false idea; but which his too ardent imagination, his too vehement mind anxiously thirsts after: for a DIOGENES there needs only a tub with the liberty of appearing whimsical; a SOCRATES wants nothing but the pleasure of forming disciples to virtue. Man by his organization is a being to whom motion is always necessary; he must therefore always desire it: this is the reason why too much facility In procuring the objects of his search, renders them quickly insipid. To feel happiness, it is necessary to make efforts to obtain it; to find charms in its enjoyment, it is necessary that the desire should be whetted by obstacles; he is presently disgusted with those benefits which have cost him but little pains. The expectation of happiness, the labour requisite to procure it, the varied prospects it holds forth, the multiplied pictures which his imagination forms to him, supply his brain with that motion for which it has occasion; this gives impulse to his organs, puts his whole machine into activity, exercises his faculties, sets all his springs in play, in a word, puts him into that agreeable activity, for the want of which the enjoyment of happiness itself cannot compensate him. Action is the true element of the human mind; as soon as it ceases to act, it falls into disgust, sinks into lassitude. His soul has the same occasion for ideas, his stomach has for aliment. Thus the impulse given him by desire, is itself a great benefit; it is to the mind what exercise is to the body; without it he would not derive any pleasure in the aliments presented to him; it is thirst that renders the pleasure of drinking so agreeable; life is a perpetual circle of regenerated desires and wants satisfied: repose is only a pleasure to him who labours; it is a source of weariness, the cause of sorrow, the spring of vice to him who has nothing to do. To enjoy without interruption is not to enjoy any thing: the man who has nothing to desire is certainly more unhappy than he who suffers. These reflections, grounded upon experience, drawn from the fountain of truth, ought to prove to man, that good as well as evil depends on the essence of things. Happiness to be felt cannot be continued. Labour is necessary, to make intervals between his pleasures; his body has occasion for exercise, to co-order him with the beings who surround him; his heart must have desires; trouble alone can give him the right relish of his welfare; it is this which puts in the shadows, this which furnishes the true perspective to the picture of human life. By an irrevocable law of his destiny, man is obliged to be discontented with his present condition; to make efforts to change it; to reciprocally envy that felicity which no individual enjoys perfectly. Thus the poor man envies the opulence of his richer neighbour, although this is frequently more unhappy than his needy maligner; thus the rich man views with pain the advantages of a poverty, which he sees active, healthy, and frequently jocund, even in the bosom of penury. If man was perfectly contented, there would no longer be any activity in the world; it is necessary that he should desire; it is requisite that he should act; it is incumbent he should labour, in order that he may be happy: such is the course of nature of which the life consists in action. Human societies can only subsist, by the continual exchange of those things in which man places his happiness. The poor man is obliged to desire, he is necessitated to labour, that he may procure what he knows is requisite to the preservation of his existence; the primary wants given to him by nature, are to nourish himself, clothe himself, lodge himself, and propagate his species; has he satisfied these? He is quickly obliged to create others entirely new; or rather, his imagination only refines upon the first; he seeks to diversify them; he is willing to give them fresh zest; arrived at opulence, when he has run over the whole circle of wants, when he has completely exhausted their combinations, he falls into disgust. Dispensed from labour, his body amasses humours; destitute of desires, his heart feels a languor; deprived of activity, he is obliged to participate his riches, with beings more active, more laborious than himself: these, following their own peculiar interests, take upon themselves the task of labouring for his advantage; of procuring for him means to satisfy his want; of ministering to his caprices, in order to remove the languor that oppresses him. It is thus the great, the rich excite the energies, give play to the activity, rouse the faculties, spur on the industry of the indigent; these labour to their own peculiar welfare by working for others: thus the desire of ameliorating his condition, renders man necessary to his fellow man; thus wants, always regenerating, never satisfied, are the principles of life,--the soul of activity,--the source of health,--the basis of society. If each individual was competent to the supply of his own exigencies, there would be no occasion for him to congregate in society; but it is his wants, his desires, his whims, that place him in a state of dependence on others: these are the causes that each individual, in order to further his own peculiar interest, is obliged to be useful to those, who have the capability of procuring for him the objects which he himself has not. A nation is nothing more than the union of a great number of individuals, connected with each other by the reciprocity of their wants; by their mutual desire of pleasure. The most happy man is he who has the fewest wants, and who has the most numerous means of satisfying them. The man who would be truly rich, has no need to increase his fortune, it suffices he should diminish his wants. In the individuals of the human species, as well as in political society, the progression of wants, is a thing absolutely necessary; it is founded upon the essence of man, it is requisite that the natural wants once satisfied, should be replaced by those which he calls _Imaginary, or wants of the Fancy:_ these become as necessary to his happiness as the first. Custom, which permits the native American to go quite naked, obliges the more civilized inhabitant of Europe to clothe himself; the poor man contents himself with very simple attire, which equally serve him for winter and for summer, for autumn and for spring; the rich man desires to have garments suitable to each mutation of these seasons; he would experience pain if he had not the convenience of changing his raiment with every variation of his climate; he would be wretched if he was obliged to wear the same habiliments in the heat of summer, which he uses in the winter; in short, he would be unhappy if the expence and variety of his costume did not display to the surrounding multitude his opulence, mark his rank, announce his superiority. It is thus habit multiplies, the wants of the wealthy; it is thus that vanity itself becomes a want which sets a thousand hands in, motion, a thousand heads to work, who are all eager to gratify its cravings; in short, this very vanity procures for the necessitous man, the means of subsisting at the expense of his opulent neighbours He who is accustomed to pomp, who is used to ostentatious splendour, whose habits are luxurious, whenever he is deprived of these insignia of opulence, to which he has attached the idea of happiness, finds himself just as unhappy as the needy wretch who has not wherewith to cover his nakedness. The civilized nations of the present day were in their origin savages composed of erratic tribes,--mere wanderers who were occupied with war; employed in, the chace; painfully obliged to seek precarious subsistence by hunting in those woods which the industry of their successors has cleared; which their labour has covered with yellow waving ears of nutritious corn; in time they have become stationary: they first applied themselves to Agriculture, afterwards to commerce: by degrees they have refined on their primitive wants, extended their sphere of action, given birth to a thousand new wants, imagined a thousand new means to satisfy them; this is the natural course, the necessary progression, the regular march of active beings, who cannot live without feeling; who to be happy, must of necessity diversify their sensations. In proportion as man's wants multiply the means to satisfy them becomes more difficult, he is obliged to depend on a greater number of his fellow creatures; his interest obliges him to rouse their activity; to engage them to concur with his views; consequently he is obliged to procure for them those objects by which they can be excited; he is under the necessity of contenting their desires, which increase like his own, by the very food that satisfies them. The savage needs only put forth his hand to gather the fruit that offers itself spontaneously to his reach: this he finds sufficient for his nourishment. The opulent citizen of a flourishing society is obliged to set innumerable hands to work to produce the sumptuous repast; the four quarters of the globe are ransacked to procure the far-fetched viands become necessary to revive his languid appetite; the merchant, the sailor, the mechanic, leave nothing unattempted to flatter his inordinate vanity. From this it will appear, that in the same proportion the wants of man are multiplied, he is obliged to augment the means to satisfy them. Riches are nothing more than the measure of a convention, by the assistance of which man is enabled to make a great number of his fellows concur in the gratification of his desires; by which he is capacitated to invite them, for their own peculiar interests, to contribute to his pleasures. What, in fact, does the rich man do, except announce to the needy, that he can furnish him with the means of subsistence if he consents to lend himself to his will? What does the man in power, except shew to others, that he is in a state to supply the requisites to render them happy? Sovereigns, nobles, men of wealth, appear to be happy, only because they possess the ability, are masters of the motives sufficient to determine a great number of individuals to occupy themselves with their respective felicity. The more things are considered the more man will be convinced that his false opinion are the true source of his misery; the clearer it will appear to him that happiness is so rare, only because he attaches it to objects either indifferent or useless to his welfare; which, when enjoyed, convert themselves into real evils; which afflict him; which become the cause of his misfortune. _Riches_ are indifferent in themselves, it is only by their application, by the purposes they compass, that they either become objects of utility to man, or are rendered prejudicial to his welfare. _Money_, useless to the savage who understands not its value, is amassed by the miser, for fear it should be employed uselessly; lest it should be squandered by the prodigal; or dissipated by the voluptuary; who make no other use of it than to purchase infirmities; to buy regret. Pleasures are nothing for the man who is incapable of feeling them; they become real evils when they are too freely indulged, when they are destructive to his health,--when they derange the economy of his machine,--when they entail diseases on himself and on his posterity,--when they make him neglect his duties,--when they render him despicable in the eyes of others. Power is nothing in itself, it is useless to man if he does not avail himself of it to promote his own peculiar felicity, by augmenting the happiness of his species; it becomes fatal to him as soon as he abuses it; it becomes odious whenever he employs it to render others miserable; it is always the cause of his own misery whenever he stretches it beyond the due bounds prescribed by nature. For want of being enlightened on his true interest, the man who enjoys all the means of rendering himself completely happy, scarcely ever discovers the secret of making those means truly subservient to his own peculiar felicity: the art of enjoying, is that which of all others is least understood; man should learn this art before he begins to desire; the earth is covered with individuals who only occupy themselves with the care of procuring the means without ever being acquainted with the end. All the world desire fortune, solicit power, seek after pleasure, yet very few, indeed, are those whom objects render truly happy. It is quite natural in man, it is extremely reasonable, it is absolutely necessary, to desire those things which can contribute to augment the sum of his felicity. _Pleasure, riches, power,_ are objects worthy his ambition, deserving his most strenuous efforts, when he has learned how to employ them; when he has acquired the faculty of making them render his existence really more agreeable. It is impossible to censure him who desires them, to despise him who commands them, but when to obtain them he employs odious means; or when after he has obtained them he makes a pernicious use of them, injurious to himself, prejudicial to others; let him wish for power, let him seek after grandeur, let him be ambitious of reputation, when he can shew just pretensions to them; when he can obtain them, without making the purchase at the expence of his own repose, or that of the beings with whom he lives: let him desire riches, when he knows how to make a use of them that is truly advantageous for himself, really beneficial for others; but never let him employ those means to procure them of which he may be ashamed; with which he may be obliged to reproach himself; which may draw upon him the hatred of his associates; or which may render him obnoxious to the castigation of society: let him always recollect, that his solid happiness should rest its foundations upon its own esteem,--upon the advantages he procures for others; above all, never let him for a moment forget, that of all the objects to which his ambition may point, the most impracticable for a being who lives in society, is that of _attempting to render himself exclusively happy_. CHAP. XVI _The Errors of Man,--upon what constitutes Happiness.--the true Source of his Evil.--Remedies that may be applied._ Reason by no means forbids man from forming capacious desires; ambition is a passion useful to his species when it has for, its object the happiness of his race. Great minds, elevated souls, are desirous of acting on an extended sphere; geniuses who are powerful, beings who are enlightened, men who are beneficent, distribute very widely their benign influence; they must necessarily, in order to promote their own peculiar felicity, render great numbers happy. So many princes fail to enjoy true happiness only, because their feeble, narrow souls, are obliged to act in a sphere too extensive for their energies: it is thus that by the supineness, the indolence, the incapacity of their chiefs, nations frequently pine in misery; are often submitted to masters, whose exility of mind is as little calculated to promote their own immediate happiness, as it is to further that of their miserable subjects. On the other hand, souls too vehement, too much inflamed, too active, are themselves tormented by the narrow sphere that confines them; their ardour misplaced, becomes the scourge of the human race. Alexander was a monarch who was equally injurious to the earth, equally discontented with his condition, as the indolent despot whom he dethroned. The souls of neither were by any means commensurate with their sphere of action. The happiness of man will never be more than the result of the harmony that subsists between his desires and his circumstances. The sovereign power to him who knows not how to apply it to the advantage of his citizens, is as nothing; it cannot even conduce to his own peculiar happiness. If it renders him miserable, it is a real evil; if it produces the misfortune of a portion of the human race, it is a detestable abuse. The most powerful princes are ordinarily such strangers to happiness, their subjects are commonly so unfortunate, only because the first possess all the means of rendering themselves happy without ever giving them activity; or because the only knowledge they have of them, is their abuse. A wise man seated on a throne, would be the most happy of mortals. A monarch is a man for whom his power, let it be of whatever extent, cannot procure other organs, other modes of feeling, than the meanest of his subjects; if he has an advantage over them, it is by the grandeur, the variety, the multiplicity of the objects with which he can occupy himself; which by giving perpetual activity to his mind, can prevent it from decay; from falling into sloth. If his soul is virtuous, if his mind is expansive, his ambition finds continual food in the contemplation of the power he possesses, to unite by gentleness, to consolidate by kindness, the will of his subjects with his own; to interest them in his own conservation, to merit their affections,--to draw forth the respect of strangers,--to render luminous the page of history--to elicit the eulogies of all nations--to clothe the orphan,--to dry the widow's tears. Such are the conquests that reason proposes to all those whose destiny it is to govern the fate of empires; they are sufficiently grand to satisfy the most ardent imagination, of a sublimity to gratify the most capacious ambition: for a monarch they are paramount duties.--KINGS are the most happy of men, only because they have the power of making others happy; because they possess the means of multiplying the causes of legitimate content with themselves. The advantages of the sovereign power are participated by all those who contribute to the government of states. Thus grandeur, rank, reputation, are desirable, are legitimate objects for all who are acquainted with the means of rendering them subservient to their own peculiar felicity; they are useless, they are illegitimate to those ordinary men who have neither the energy nor the capacity to employ them in a mode advantageous to themselves; they are detestable whenever to obtain them man compromises his own happiness, when he implicates the welfare of society: this society itself is in an error every time it respects men who only employ to its destruction, a power, the exercise of which it ought never to approve but when it reaps from it substantial benefits. Riches, useless to the miser, who is no more than their miserable gaoler; prejudicial to the debauchee, for whom they only procure infirmities; injurious to the voluptuary, to whom they only bring disgust--whom they oppress with satiety; can in the hands of the honest man produce unnumbered means of augmenting the sum of his happiness; but before man covets wealth it is proper he should know how to employ it; money is only a token, a representative of happiness; to enjoy it is so to use it as to make others happy: this is the great secret, this is the talisman, this is the reality. Money, according to the compact of man, procures for him all those benefits he can desire; there is only one, which it will not procure, that is, _the knowledge how to apply it properly_. For man to have money, without the true secret how to enjoy it, is to possess the key of a commodious palace to which he is interdicted entrance; to lavish it, prodigally, is to throw the key into the river; to make a bad use of it, is only to make it the means of wounding himself. Give the most ample treasures to the enlightened man, he will not be overwhelmed with them; if he has a capacious mind, if he has a noble soul, he will only extend more widely his benevolence; he will deserve the affection of a greater number of his fellow men; he will attract the love, he will secure the homage, of all those who surround him; he will restrain himself in his pleasures, in order that he may be enabled truly to enjoy them; he will know that money cannot re-establish a soul worn out with enjoyment; cannot give fresh elasticity to organs enfeebled by excess; cannot give fresh tension to nerves grown flaccid by abuse; cannot invigorate a body enervated by debauchery; cannot corroborate a machine, from thenceforth become incapable of sustaining him, except by the necessity of privations; he will know that the licentiousness of the voluptuary stifles pleasure in its source; that all the treasure in the world cannot renew his senses. From this, it will be obvious, that nothing is more frivolous than the declamations of a gloomy philosophy against the desire of power; nothing more absurd than the rant of superstition against the pursuit of grandeur; nothing more inconsistent than homilies against the acquisition of riches; nothing more unreasonable than dogmas that forbid the enjoyment of pleasure. These objects are desirable for man, whenever his situation allows him to make pretensions to them; they are useful to society, conducive to public happiness, whenever he has acquired the knowledge of making them turn to his own real advantage; reason cannot censure him, virtue cannot despise him, when in order to obtain them, he never travels out of the road of truth; when in their acquisition, he wounds no one's interest; when he pursues only legitimate means: his associates will applaud him; his contemporaries will esteem him: he will respect himself, when he only employs their agency to secure his own happiness, and that of his fellows. Pleasure is a benefit, it is of the essence of man to love, it is even rational when it renders his existence really valuable to himself--when it does not injure him in his own esteem; when its consequences are not grievous to others. _Riches_ are the symbols of the great majority of the benefits of this life; they become a reality in the hands of the man who has the clew to their just application. _Power_ is the most sterling of all benefits, when he who is its depositary has received from nature a soul sufficiently noble, a mind sufficiently elevated, a heart sufficiently benevolent, faculties sufficiently energetic, above all, when he has derived from education a true regard for virtue, that sacred love for truth which enables him to extend his happy influence over whole nations; which by this means he places in, a state of legitimate dependence on his will; _man only acquires the right of commanding men, when he renders them happy._ The right of man over his fellow man can only be founded either upon the actual happiness he secures to him, or that which he gives him reason to hope he will procure for him; without this, the power he exercises would be violence, usurpation, manifest tyranny; it is only upon the faculty of rendering him happy, that legitimate authority builds its structure; without this it is the "_baseless fabric of a vision." No man derives from nature the right of commanding another_; but it is voluntarily accorded to those, from whom he expects his welfare. _Government_ is the right of commanding, conferred on the sovereign only for the advantage of those who are governed. Sovereigns are the defenders of the persons, the guardians of the property, the protectors of the liberty of their subjects: this is the price of their obedience; it is only on this condition these consent to obey; government would not be better than a robbery whenever it availed itself of the powers confided to it, to render society unhappy. _The empire of religion_ is founded on the opinion man entertains of its having power to render nations happy; government and religion are reasonable institutions; but only so, inasmuch as they equally contribute to the felicity of man: it would be folly in him to submit himself to a yoke from which there resulted nothing but evil. It would be folly to expect that man should bind himself to misery; it would be rank injustice to oblige him to renounce his rights without some corresponding advantage! The authority which a father exercises over his family is only founded on the advantages which he is supposed to procure for it. Rank, in political society, has only for its basis the real or imaginary utility of some citizens for which the others are willing to distinguish them--agree to respect them--consent to obey them. The rich acquire rights over the indigent, the wealthy claim the homage of the needy, only by virtue of the welfare they are conditioned to procure them. Genius, talents, science, arts, have rights over man, only in consequence of their utility; of the delight they confer; of the advantages they procure for society. In a word, it is happiness, it is the expectation of happiness, it is its image that man cherishes--that he esteems--that he unceasingly adores. Monarchs, the rich, the great, may easily impose on him, may dazzle him, may intimidate him, but they will never be able to obtain the voluntary submission of his heart, which alone can confer upon them legitimate rights, without they make him experience real benefits--without they display virtue. Utility is nothing more than true happiness; to be useful is to be virtuous; to be virtuous is to make others happy. The happiness which man derives from them is the invariable, the necessary standard of his sentiments, for the beings of his species; for the objects he desires; for the opinions he embrases; for those actions on which he decides. He is the dupe of his prejudices every time he ceases to avail himself of this standard to regulate his judgment. He will never run the risk of deceiving himself, when he shall examine strictly what is the real utility resulting to his species from the religion, from the superstition, from the laws, from the institutions, from the inventions, from the various actions of all mankind. A superficial view may sometimes seduce him; but experience, aided by reflection, will reconduct him to reason, which is incapable of deceiving him. This teaches him that pleasure is a momentary happiness, which frequently becomes an evil; that evil is a fleeting trouble that frequently becomes a good: it makes him understand the true nature of objects, enables him to foresee the effects he may expect; it makes him distinguish those desires to which his welfare permits him to lend himself, from those to whose seduction he ought to make resistance. In short, it will always convince him that the true interest of intelligent beings, who love happiness, who desire to render their own existence felicitous, demands that they should root out all those phantoms, abolish all those chimerical ideas, destroy all those prejudices, which by traducing virtue, obstruct their felicity in this world. If he consults experience, he will perceive that it is in illusions, in false opinions, rendered sacred by time, that he ought to search out the source of that multitude of evils which almost every where overwhelms mankind. From ignorance of natural causes, man has created imaginary causes; not knowing to what cause to attribute thunder, he ascribed it to an imaginary being whom he called JUPITER; imposture availing itself of this disposition, rendered these causes terrible to him; these fatal ideas haunted him without rendering him better; made him tremble without either benefit to himself or to others; filled his mind with chimeras that opposed themselves to the progress of his reason; that prevented him from really seeking after his happiness. His vain fears rendered him the slave of those who deceived him, under pretence of consulting his welfare; he committed evil, because they persuaded him his gods demanded sacrifices; he lived in misfortune, because they made him believe these gods condemned him to be miserable; the slave of beings, to which his own imagination had given birth, he never dared to disentangle himself from his chains; the artful ministers of these divinities gave him to understand that stupidity, the renunciation of reason, sloth of mind, abjection of soul, were the sure means of obtaining eternal felicity. Prejudices, not less dangerous, have blinded man upon the true nature of government. Nations in general are ignorant of the true foundations of authority; they dare not demand happiness from those kings who are charged with the care of procuring it for them: some have believed their sovereigns were gods disguised, who received with their birth the right of commanding the rest of mankind; that they could at their pleasure dispose of the felicity of the people; that they were not accountable for the misery they engendered. By a necessary consequence of these erroneous opinions, politics have almost every where degenerated into the fatal art of sacrificing the interests of the many, either to the caprice of an individual, or to some few privileged irrational beings. In despite of the evils which assailed them, nations fell down in adoration before the idols they themselves had made: foolishly respected the instruments of their misery; had a stupid veneration for those who possessed the sovereign power of injuring them; obeyed their unjust will; lavished their blood; exhausted their treasure; sacrificed their lives, to glut the ambition, to feed the cupidity to minister to the regenerated phantasms, to gratify the never-ending caprices of these men; they bend the knee to established opinion, bowed to rank, yielded to title, to opulence, to pageantry, to ostentation: at length victims to their prejudices, they in vain expected their welfare at the hands of men who were themselves unhappy from their own vices; whose neglect of virtue, had rendered them incapable of enjoying true felicity; who are but little disposed to occupy themselves with their prosperity: under such chiefs their physical and moral happiness were equally neglected or even annihilated. The same blindness may be perceived in the science of morals. Superstition, which never had any thing but ignorance for its basis, which never had more than a disordered imagination for its guide, did not found ethics upon man's nature; upon his relations with his fellows; upon those duties which necessarily flow from these relations; it preferred, as more in unison with itself, founding them upon imaginary relations which it pretended subsisted between him and those invisible powers it had so gratuitously imagined; that were delivered by oracles which their priests had the address to make him believe spoke the will of the Divinity: thus, TROPHONIUS, from his cave made affrightened mortals tremble; shook the stoutest nerves; made them turn pale with fear; his miserable, deluded supplicants, who were obliged to sacrifice to him, anointed their bodies with oil, bathed in certain rivers, and after they had offered their cake of honey and received their destiny, became so dejected, so wretchedly forlorn, that to this day their descendants, when they behold a malencholy man, exclaim, "_He has consulted the oracle of Trophonius_." It was these invisible gods, which superstition always paints as furious tyrants, who were declared the arbiters of man's destiny; the models of his conduct: when he was willing to imitate them, when he was willing to conform himself to the lessons of their interpreters, he became wicked, was an unsociable creature, an useless being or else a turbulent maniac--a zealous fanatic. It was these alone who profited by superstition, who advantaged themselves by the darkness in which they contrived to involve the human mind; nations were ignorant of nature; they knew nothing of reason; they understood not truth; they had only a gloomy superstition, without one certain idea of either morals or virtue. When man committed evil against his fellow creature, he believed he had offended these gods; but he also believed himself forgiven, as soon as he had prostrated himself before them; as soon as he had by costly presents gained over the priest to his interest. Thus superstition, far from giving a sure, far from affording a natural, far from introducing a known basis to morals, only rested it on an unsteady foundation; made it consist in ideal duties impossible to be accurately understood. What did I say? It first corrupted him, and his expiations finished by ruining him. Thus when superstition was desirous to combat the unruly passions of man it attempted it in vain; always enthusiastic, ever deprived of experience, it knew nothing of the true remedies: those which it applied were disgusting, only suitable to make the sick revolt against them; it made them pass for divine, because they were not made of man; they were inefficacious, because chimeras could effectuate nothing against those substantive passions to which motives more real, impulsions more powerful, concurred to give birth, which every thing conspired, to flourish in his heart. The voice of superstition or of the gods, could not make itself heard amidst the tumult of society--where all was in confusion--where the priest cried out to man, that he could not render himself happy without injuring his fellow creatures, who happened to differ from him in opinion: these vain clamours only made virtue hateful to him, because they always represented it as the enemy to his happiness; as the bane of human pleasures: he consequently failed in the observation of his duties, because real motives were never held forth to induce him to make the requisite sacrifice; the present prevailed over the future; the visible over the invisible; the known over the unknown: man became wicked because every thing informed him he must be so, in order to obtain the happiness after which he sighed. Thus the sum of human misery was never diminished; on the contrary, it was accumulating either by his superstition, by his government, by his education, by his opinions or by the institutions he adopted under the idea of rendering his condition more pleasant: it not unfrequently happened that the whole of these acted upon him simultaneously; he was then completely wretched. It cannot be too often repeated, _it is in error that man will find the true spring of those evils with which the human race is afflicted;_ it is not nature that renders him miserable; it is not nature that makes him unhappy; it is not an irritated Divinity who is desirous he should live in tears; it is not hereditary depravation that has caused him to be wicked; it is to error, to long cherished, consecrated error, to error identified with his very existence, that these deplorable effects are to be ascribed. The sovereign good, so much sought after by some philosophers, announced with so much emphasis by others, may be considered as a chimera, like unto that marvellous panacea which some adepts have been willing to pass upon mankind for an universal remedy. All men are diseased; the moment of their birth delivers them over to the contagion of error; but individuals are variously affected by it by a consequence of their natural organization; of their peculiar circumstances. If there is a sovereign remedy, which can be indiscriminately applied to the diseases of man, there is without doubt only ONE, this catholic balsam is TRUTH, Which he must draw from nature. At the afflicting sight of those errors which blind the greater number of mortals--of those delusions which man is doomed to suck in with his mother's milk; viewing with painful sensations those irregular desires, those disgusting propensities, by which he is perpetually agitated; seeing the terrible effect of those licentious passions which torment him; of those lasting inquietudes which gnaw his repose; of those stupendous evils, as well physical as moral, which assail him on every side: the contemplator of humanity would be tempted to believe that happiness was not made for this world; that any effort to cure those minds which every thing unites to poison, would be a vain enterprize; that it was an Augean stable, requiring the strength of another Hercules. When he considers those numerous superstitions by which man is kept in a continual state of alarm--that divide him from his fellow--that render him vindictive, persecuting, and irrational; when he beholds the many despotic governments that oppress him; when he examines those multitudinous, unintelligible, contradictory laws that torture him; the manifold injustice under which he groans; when he turns his mind to the barbarous ignorance in which he is steeped, almost over the whole surface of the earth; when he witnesses those enormous crimes that debase society; when he unmasks those rooted vices that render it so hateful to almost every individual; he has great difficulty to prevent his mind from embracing the idea that misfortune is the only appendage of the human species; that this world is made solely to assemble the unhappy; that human felicity is a chimera, or at least a point so fugitive, that it is impossible it can be fixed. Thus superstitious mortals, atrabilious men, beings nourished in melancholy, unceasingly see either nature or its author exasperated against the human race; they suppose that man is the constant object of heaven's wrath; that he irritates it even by his desires: that he renders himself criminal by seeking a felicity which is not made for him: struck with beholding that those objects which he covets in the most lively manner, are never competent to content his heart, they have decried them as abominations, as things prejudicial to his interest, as odious to his gods; they prescribe him abstinence from all search after them; that he should entirely shun them; they have endeavoured to put to the rout all his passions, without any distinction even of those which are the most useful to himself, the most beneficial to those beings with whom he lives: they have been willing that man should render himself insensible; should become his own enemy; that he should separate himself from his fellow creatures; that he should renounce all pleasure; that he should refuse happiness; in short, _that he should cease to be a man, that he should become unnatural_. "Mortals!" have they said, "ye were born to be unhappy; the author of your existence has destined ye for misfortune; enter then into his views, and render yourselves miserable. Combat those rebellious desires which have felicity for their object; renounce those pleasures which it is your essence to love; attach yourselves to nothing in this world; by a society that only serves to inflame your imagination, to make you sigh after benefits you ought not to enjoy; break up the spring of your souls; repress that activity that seeks to put a period to your sufferings; suffer, afflict yourselves, groan, be wretched; such is for you the true road to happiness." Blind physicians! who have mistaken for a disease the natural state of man! they have not seen that his desires were necessary; that his passions were essential to him; that to defend him from loving legitimate pleasures; to interdict him from desiring them, is to deprive him of that activity which is the vital principle of society; that to tell him to hate, to desire him to despise himself, is to take from him the most substantive motive, that can conduct him to virtue. It is thus, by its supernatural remedies, by its wretched panacea, superstition, far from curing those evils which render man decrepid, which bend him almost to the earth, has only increased them; made them more desperate; in the room of calming his passions, it gives them inveteracy; makes them more dangerous; renders them more venomous; turns that into a curse which nature has given him for his preservation; to be the means of his own happiness. It is not by extinguishing the passions of man that he is to be rendered happier; it is by turning them into proper channels, by directing them towards useful objects, which by being truly advantageous to himself, must of necessity be beneficial to others. In despite of the errors which blind the human race, in despite of the extravagance of man's superstition, maugre the imbecility of his political institutions, notwithstanding the complaints, in defiance of the murmurs he is continually breathing forth against his destiny, there are yet happy individuals on the earth. Man has sometimes the felicity to behold sovereigns animated by the noble passion to render nations flourishing; full of the laudable ambition to make their people happy; now and then he encounters an ANTONINUS, a TRAJAN, a JULIAN, an ALFRED, a WASHINGTON; he meets with elevated minds who place their glory in encouraging merit--who rest their happiness in succouring indigence--who think it honourable to lend a helping hand to oppressed virtue: he sees genius occupied with the desire of meriting the eulogies of posterity; of eliciting the admiration of his fellow-citizens by serving them usefully, satisfied with enjoying that happiness he procures for others. Let it not be believed that the man of poverty himself is excluded from happiness: mediocrity and indigence frequently procure for him advantages that opulence and grandeur are obliged to acknowledge; which title and wealth are constrained to envy: the soul of the needy man, always in action, never ceases to form desires which his activity places within his reach; whilst the rich, the powerful, are frequently in the afflicting embarrassment, of either not knowing what to wish for, or else of desiring those objects which their listlessness renders it impossible for them to obtain. The poor man's body, habituated to labour, knows the sweets of repose; this repose of the body, is the most troublesome fatigue to him who is wearied with his idleness; exercise, and frugality, procure for the one vigour, health, and contentment; the intemperance and sloth of the other, furnish him only with disgust--load him with infirmities. Indigence sets all the springs of the soul to work; it is the mother of industry; from its bosom arises genius; it is the parent of talents, the hot-bed of that merit to which opulence is obliged to pay tribute; to which grandeur bows its homage. In short the blows of fate find in the poor man a flexible reed, who bends without breaking, whilst the storms of adversity tear the rich man like the sturdy oak in the forest, up by the very roots. Thus Nature is not a step-mother to the greater number of her children. He whom fortune has placed in an obscure station is ignorant of that ambition which devours the courtier; knows nothing of the inquietude which deprives the intriguer of his rest; is a stranger to the remorse, an alien to the disgust, is unconscious of the weariness of the man, who, enriched with the spoils of a nation, does not know how to turn them to his profit. The more the body labours, the more the imagination reposes itself; it is the diversity of the objects man runs over that kindles it; it is the satiety of those objects that causes him disgust; the imagination of the indigent is circumscribed by necessity: he receives but few ideas: he is acquainted with but few objects: in consequence, he has but little to desire; he contents himself with that little: whilst the entire of nature with difficulty suffices to satisfy the insatiable desires, to gratify the imaginary wants of the man, plunged in luxury, who has run over and exhausted all common objects. Those, whom prejudice contemplates; as the most unhappy of men, frequently enjoy advantages more real, happiness much greater, than those who oppress them--who despise them--but who are nevertheless often reduced to the misery of envying them. Limited desires are a real benefit: the man of meaner condition, in his humble fortune, desires only bread: he obtains it by the sweat of his brow; he would eat it with pleasure if injustice did not sometimes render it bitter to him. By the delirium of some governments, those who roll in abundance, without for that reason being more happy, dispute with the cultivator even the fruits which the earth yields to the labour of his hands. _Princes_ sometimes sacrifice their true happiness, as well as that of their states, to these passions--to those caprices which discourage the people; which plunge their provinces in misery: which make millions unhappy, without any advantage to themselves. _Tyrants_ oblige the subjects to curse their existence; to abandon labour; take from them the courage of propagating a progeny who would be as unhappy as their fathers: the excess of oppression sometimes obliges them to revolt; makes them avenge themselves by wicked outrages of the injustice it has heaped on their devoted heads: injustice, by reducing indigence to despair, obliges it to seek in crime, resources, against its misery. An unjust government, produces discouragement in the soul: its vexations depopulate a country; under its influence, the earth remains without culture; from thence is bred frightful famine, which gives birth to contagion and plague. The misery of a people produce revolutions; soured by misfortunes, their minds get into a state of fermentation; the overthrow of an empire, is the necessary effect. It is thus that _physics_ and _morals_ are always connected, or rather are the _same thing_. If the bad morals of chiefs do not always produce such marked effects, at least they generate slothfulness, of which their effect is to fill society with mendicants; to crowd it with malefactors; whose vicious course neither superstition nor the terror of the laws can arrest; which nothing can induce to remain the unhappy spectators of a welfare they are not permitted to participate. They seek a fleeting happiness at the expence even of their lives, when injustice has shut up to them the road of labour, those paths of industry which would have rendered them both useful and honest. Let it not then be said that no government can render all its subjects happy; without doubt it cannot flatter itself with contenting the capricious humours of some idle citizens who are obliged to rack their imagination, to appease the disgust arising from lassitude: but it can, and it ought to occupy itself with ministering to the real wants of the multitude, with giving a useful activity to the whole body politic. A society enjoys all the happiness of which it is susceptible whenever the greater number of its members are wholesomely fed, decently cloathed, comfortably lodged--in short when they can without an excess of toil beyond their strength, procure wherewith to satisfy those wants which nature has made necessary to their existence. Their mind rests contented as soon as they are convinced no power can ravish from them the fruits of their industry; that they labour for themselves; that the sweat of their brow is for the immediate comfort of their own families. By a consequence of human folly in some regions, whole nations are obliged to toil incessantly, to waste their strength, to sweat under their burdens to undulate the air with their sighs, to drench the earth with their tears, in order to maintain the luxury, to gratify the whims, to support the corruption of a small number of irrational beings; of some few useless men to whom happiness has become impossible, because their bewildered imaginations no longer know any bounds. It is thus that superstitious, thus that political errors have changed the fair face of nature into a valley of tears. For want of consulting reason, for want of knowing the value of virtue, for want of being instructed in their true interest, for want of being acquainted with what constitutes solid happiness, in what consists real felicity, the prince and the people, the rich and the poor, the great and the little, are unquestionably, frequently very far removed from content; nevertheless if an impartial eye be glanced over the human race, it will be found to comprise a greater number of benefits than of evils. No man is entirely happy, but he is so in detail; those who make the most bitter complaints of the rigour of their fate, are however, held in existence by threads frequently imperceptible; are prevented from the desire of quitting it by circumstances of which they are not aware. In short, habit lightens to man the burden of his troubles; grief suspended becomes true enjoyment; every want is a pleasure in the moment when it is satisfied; freedom from chagrin, the absence of disease, is a happy state which he enjoys secretly, without even perceiving it; hope, which rarely abandons him entirely, helps him to support the most cruel disasters. The PRISONER laughs in his irons. The wearied VILLAGER returns singing to his cottage. In short, the man who calls himself the most unfortunate, never sees death approach without dismay, at least, if despair has not totally disfigured nature in his eyes. As long as man desires the continuation of his being, he has no right to call himself completely unhappy; whilst hope sustains him, he still enjoys a great benefit. If man was more just, in rendering to himself an account of his pleasures, in estimating his pains, he would acknowledge that the sum of the first exceeds by much the amount of the last; he would perceive that he keeps a very exact ledger of the evil, but a very unfaithful journal of the good: indeed he would avow, that there are but few days entirely unhappy during the whole course of his existence. His periodical wants procure for him the pleasure of satisfying them; his soul is perpetually moved by a thousand objects, of which, the variety, the multiplicity, the novelty, rejoices him, suspends his sorrows, diverts his chagrin. His physical evils, are they violent? They are not of long duration; they conduct him quickly to his end: the sorrows of his mind, when too powerful, conduct him to it equally. At the same time nature refuses him every happiness, she opens to him a door by which he quits life; does he refuse to enter it? It is that he yet finds pleasure in existence. Are nations reduced to despair? Are they completely miserable? They have recourse to arms; at the risque of perishing, they make the most violent efforts to terminate there sufferings. Thus because he sees so many of his fellows cling to life, man ought to conclude they are not so unhappy as he thinks. Then let him not exaggerate the evils of the human race, but let him impose silence on that gloomy humour that persuades him these evils are without remedy; let him only diminish by degrees the number of his errors, his calamities will vanish in the same proportion; he is not to conclude himself infelicitous because his heart never ceases to form new desires, which he finds it difficult, sometimes impossible to gratify. Since his body daily requires nourishment, let him infer that it is sound, that it fulfils its functions. As long as he has desires, the proper deduction ought to be, that his mind is kept in the necessary activity; he should gather from all this that passions are essential to him, that they constitute the happiness of a being who feels; are indispensable to a man who thinks; are requisite to furnish him with ideas; that they are a vital principle with a creature who must necessarily love that which procures him comfort, who must equally desire that which promises him a mode of existence analogous to his natural energies. As long as he exists, as long as the spring of his soul maintains its elasticity, this soul desires; as long as it desires, he experiences the activity which is necessary to him; as long as he acts, so long he lives. Human life may be compared to a river, of which the waters succeed each other, drive each other forward, and flow on without interruption; these waters, obliged to roll over an unequal bed, encounter at intervals those obstacles which prevent their stagnation; they never cease to undulate; sometimes they recoil, then again rush forward, thus continuing to run with more or less velocity, until they are restored to _the ocean of nature_. CHAP. XVII. _Those Ideas which are true, or founded upon Nature, are the only Remedies for the Evils of Man.--Recapitulation.--Conclusion of the first Part._ Whenever man ceases to take experience for his guide, he falls into error. His errors become yet more dangerous, assume a more determined inveteracy, when they are clothed with the sanction of superstition; it is then that he hardly ever consents to return into the paths of truth; he believes himself deeply interested in no longer seeing clearly that which lies before him; he fancies he has an essential advantage in no longer understanding himself; he supposes his happiness exacts that he should shut his eyes to truth. If the majority of moral philosophers have mistaken the human heart--if they have deceived themselves upon its diseases--if they have miscalculated the remedies that are suitable--if the remedies they have administered have been inefficacious or even dangerous--it is because they have abandoned nature--because they have resisted experience--because they have not had sufficient steadiness to consult their reason--because they have renounced the evidence of their senses--because they have only followed the caprices of an imagination either dazzled by enthusiasm or disturbed by fear; because they have preferred the illusions it has held forth to the realities of nature, _who never deceives_. It is for want of having felt that an intelligent being cannot for an instant lose sight of his own peculiar conservation--of his particular interests, either real or fictitious--of his own welfare, whether permanent or transitory; in short, of his happiness, either true or false. It is for want of having considered that desires are natural, that passions are essential, that both the one and the other are motions necessary to the soul of man,--that the physicians of the, human mind have supposed supernatural causes for his wanderings; have only applied to his evils topical remedies, either useless or dangerous. Indeed, in desiring him to stifle his desires, to combat his propensities, to annihilate his passions, they have done no more than give him sterile precepts, at once vague and impracticable; these vain lessons have influenced no one; they have at most restrained some few mortals whom a quiet imagination but feebly solicited to evil; the terrors with which they have accompanied them have disturbed the tranquillity of those persons who were moderate by their nature, without ever arresting the ungovernable temperament of those who were inebriated by their passions, or hurried along; by the torrent of habit. In short, the promises of superstition, as well as the menaces it holds forth, have only formed fanatics, given birth to enthusiasts, who are either dangerous or useless to society, without ever making man truly virtuous; that is to say, useful to his fellow creatures. These, empirics guided by a blind routine have, not seen that man as long as he exists, is obliged to feel, to desire, to have passions, to satisfy them in proportion to the energy which his organization has given him; they have not perceived that education planted these desires in his heart--that habit rooted them--that his government, frequently vicious, corroborated their growth--that public opinion stamped them with its approbation--that--experience render them necessary--that to tell men thus constituted to destroy their passions, was either to plunge them into despair or else to order them remedies too revolting for their temperament. In the actual state of opulent societies, to say to a man who knows by experience that riches procure every pleasure, that he must not desire them; that he must not make any efforts to obtain them; that he ought to detach himself from them: is to persuade him to render himself miserable. To tell an ambitious man not to desire grandeur, not to covet power, which every thing conspires to point out to him as the height of felicity, is to order him to overturn at one blow the habitual system of his ideas; it is to speak, to a deaf man. To tell a lover of an impetuous temperament to stifle his passions for the object that enchants him, is to make him understand, that he ought to renounce his happiness. To oppose superstition to such substantive, such puissant interests is to combat realities by chimerical speculations. Indeed, if things were examined without prepossession, it would be found that the greater part of the precepts inculcated by superstition, which fanatical dogmas hold forth, which, supernatural mortals give to man, are as ridiculous as they are impossible to be put into practice. To interdict passion to man, is to desire of him not to be a human creature; to counsel an individual of a violent imagination to moderate his desires, is to advise him to change his temperament--is to request his blood to flow more sluggishly. To tell a man to renounce his habits, is to be willing that a citizen, accustomed to clothe himself, should consent to walk quite naked; it would avail as much, to desire him to change the lineament of his face, to destroy his configuration, to extinguish his imagination, to alter the course of his fluids, as to command him not to have passions which excite an activity analogous with his natural energy; or to lay aside those which confirmed habit has made him contract; which his circumstances, by a long succession of causes and effects, have converted into wants. Such are, however, the so much boasted remedies which the greater number of moral philosophers apply to human depravity. Is it, then surprising they do not produce the desired effect, or that they only reduce man to a state of despair by the effervescence that results from the continual conflict which they excite between the passions of his heart and these fanciful doctrines; between his vices and his virtues; between his habits and those chimerical fears with which superstition is at all times ready to overwhelm him? The vices of society, aided by the objects of which it avails itself to what the desires of man, the pleasures, the riches, the grandeur which his government holds forth to him as so many seductive magnets, the advantage which education, the benefits which example, the interests which public opinion render dear to him, attract him on one side; whilst a gloomy morality, founded upon superstitious illusions, vainly solicit him on the other; thus, superstition plunges him into misery; holds a violent struggle with his heart, without scarcely ever gaining the victory; when by accident it does prevail against so many united forces, it renders him unhappy; it completely destroys the spring of his soul. Passions are the true counterpoise to passions; then let him not seek to destroy them; but let him endeavour to direct them; let him balance those which are prejudicial, by those which are useful to society. _Reason_, the fruit of experience, is only the art of choosing those passions to which for his own peculiar happiness he ought to listen. _Education_ is the true art of disseminating the proper method of cultivating advantageous passions in the heart of man. _Legislation_ is the art of restraining dangerous passions; of exciting those which may be conducive to the public welfare. _Superstition_ is only the miserable art of planting the unproductive labour--of nourishing in the soul of man those chimeras, those illusions, those impostures, those incertitudes from whence spring passions fatal to himself as well as to others: it is only by bearing up with fortitude against these that he can securely place himself on the road to happiness. _True religion_ is the art of advocating truth--of renouncing error--of contemplating reality--of drawing wisdom from experience--of cultivating man's nature to his own felicity, by teaching him to contribute to that of his associates; in short it is _reason, education_, and _legislation_, united to further the great end of human existence, by causing the passions of man to flow in a current genial to his own happiness. _Reason_ and _morals_ cannot effect any thing on mankind if they do not point out to each individual that his true interest is attached to a conduct that is either useful to others or beneficial to himself; this conduct to be useful must conciliate for him the benevolence, gain for him the favor of these beings who are necessary to his happiness: it is then for the interest of mankind, for the happiness of the human race, it is for the esteem of himself, for the love of his fellows, for the advantages which ensue, that education in early life should kindle the imagination of the citizen; this is the true means of obtaining those happy results with which habit should familiarize him; which public opinion should render dear to his heart; for which example ought continually to rouse his faculties; after which he should be taught to search with unceasing attention. _Government_ by the aid of recompences, ought to encourage him to follow this plan; by visiting crime with punishment it ought to deter those who are willing to interrupt it. Thus the hope of a true welfare, the fear of real evil, will be passions suitable to countervail those which by their impetuosity would injure society; these last will at least become very rare, if instead of feeding man's mind with unintelligible speculations, in lieu of vibrating on his ears words void of sense, he is only spoken to of realities, only shewn those interests which are in unison with truth. Man is frequently so wicked, only, because he almost always feels himself interested in being so; let him be more enlightened, more familiarized with truth, more accustomed to virtue, he will be made more happy; he will necessarily become better. An equitable government, a vigilant administration, will presently fill the state with honest citizens; it will hold forth to them present reasons for benevolence; real advantages in truth; palpable motives to be virtuous; it will instruct them in their duties; it will foster them with its cares; it will allure them by the assurance of their own peculiar happiness; its promises faithfully fulfilled--its menaces regularly executed, will unquestionably have much more weight than those of a gloomy superstition, which never exhibits to their view other than illusory benefits, fallacious punishments, which the man hardened in wickedness will doubt every time he finds an interest in questioning them: present motives will tell more home to his heart than those which are distant and at best uncertain. The vicious and the wicked are so common upon the earth, so pertinacious in their evil courses, so attached to their irregularities, only because there are but few governments that make man feel the advantage of being just, the pleasure of being honest, the happiness of being benevolent on the contrary, there is hardly any place where the most powerful interests do not solicit him to crime, by favouring the propensities of a vicious organization; by countenancing those appetencies which nothing has attempted to rectify or lead towards virtue. A savage, who in his horde knows not the value of money, certainly would not commit a crime, if when transplanted into civilized society, he should presently learn to desire it, should make efforts to obtain it, and if he could without danger finish by stealing it; above all, if he had not been taught to respect the property of the beings who environ him. The savages and the child are precisely in the same state; it is the negligence of society, of those entrusted with their education, that renders both the one and the other wicked. The son of a noble, from his infancy learns to desire power, at a riper age he becomes ambitious; if he has the address to insinuate himself into favor, he perhaps becomes wicked, because in some societies he has been taught to know he may be so with impunity when he can command the ear of his sovereign. It is not therefore nature that makes man wicked, they are his institutions which determine him to vice. The infant brought up amongst robbers, can generally become nothing but a malefactor; if he had been reared with honest people, the chance is he would have been a virtuous man. If the source be traced of that profound ignorance in which man is with respect to his morals, to the motives that can give volition to his will, it will be found in those false ideas which the greater number of speculators have formed to themselves, of human nature. The science of morals has become an enigma which it is impossible to unrevel; because man has made himself double; has distinguished his soul from his body; supposed it of a nature different from all known beings, with modes of action, with properties distinct from all other bodies, because he has emancipated this soul from physical laws, in order to submit it to capricious laws emanating from men who have pretended they are derived from imaginary regions, placed at very remote distances: metaphysicians seized upon these gratuitous suppositions, and by dint of subtilizing them, have rendered them completely unintelligible. These moralists have not perceived that motion is essential to the soul as well as to the living body; that both the one and the other are never moved but by material, by physical objects; that the want of each regenerate themselves unceasingly; that the wants of the soul, as well as those of the body are purely physical; that the most intimate, the most constant connection subsists between the soul and the body; or rather they have been unwilling to allow that they ate only the same thing considered under different points of view. Obstinate in their supernatural, unintelligible opinions, they have refused to open their eyes, which would have convinced them that the body in suffering rendered the soul miserable; that the soul afflicted undermined the body and brought it to decay; that both the pleasures and agonies of the mind have an influence over the body, either plunge it into sloth or give it activity: they have rather chosen to believe, that the soul draws its thoughts, whether pleasant or gloomy, from its own peculiar sources, while the fact is, that it derives its ideas only from material objects that strike on the physical organs; that it is neither determined to gaiety nor led on to sorrow, but by the actual state, whether permanent or transitory, in which the fluids and solids of the body are found. In short, they have been loath to acknowledge that the soul, purely passive, undergoes the same changes which the body experiences; is only moved by its intervention; acts only by its assistance, receives its sensations, its perceptions, forms its ideas, derives either its happiness or its misery from physical objects, through the medium of the organs of which the body is composed; frequently without its own cognizance, often in despite of itself. By a consequence of these opinions, connected with marvellous systems, or systems invented to justify them, they have supposed the human soul to be a free agent; that is to say, that it has the faculty of moving itself; that it enjoys the privilege of acting independent of the impulse received from exterior objects, through the organs of the body; that regardless of these impulsions it can even resist them, and follow its own directions by its own energies; that it is not only different in its nature from all other beings, but has a separate mode of action; in other words, that it is an insolated point which is, not submitted to that uninterrupted chain of motion which bodies communicate to each other in a nature, whose parts are always in action. Smitten with their sublime notions, these speculators were not aware that in thus distinguishing the soul from the body and from all known beings, they rendered it an impossibility to form any true ideas of it, either to themselves or to others: they were unwilling to perceive the perfect analogy which is found between the manner of the soul's action and that by which the body is afflicted; they shut their eyes to the necessary and continual correspondence which is found between the soul and the body; they perhaps did not perceive that like the body it is subjected to the motion of attraction and repulsion; has an aptitude to be attracted, a disposition to repel, which is ascribable to qualities inherent in those physical subsistances, which give play to the organs of the body; that the volition of its will, the activity of its passions, the continual regeneration of its desires, are never more than consequences of that activity which is produced in the body by material objects which are not under its controul; that these objects render it either happy or miserable, active or languishing, contented or discontented, in despite of itself,--in defiance of all the efforts it is capable of making to render it otherwise; they have rather chosen to seek in the heavens for unknown powers to set it in motion; they have held forth to man distant, imaginary interests: under the pretext of procuring for him future happiness, he has been prevented from labouring to his present felicity, which has been studiously withheld from his knowledge: his regards have been fixed upon the heavens, that he might lose sight of the earth: truth has been concealed from him; and it has been pretended he would be rendered happy by dint of terrors, always at an immense distance; by means of shadows, with whose substances he could never come in contact; of chimeras formed by his own bewildered imagination, which changed nearly as often as the governments to which he was submitted. In short, hoodwinked by his fears, blinded by his own credulity, _he was only guided through the flexuous paths of life, by men blind as himself, where both the one and the other were frequently lost in the maze_. CONCLUSION. From every thing which has been hitherto said, it evidently results that all the errors of mankind, of whatever nature they may be, arise from man's having renounced reason, quitted experience, and refused the evidence of his senses that he might be guided by imagination, frequently deceitful; by authority, always suspicious. Man will ever mistake his true happiness as long as he neglects to study nature, to investigate her laws, to seek in her alone the remedies for those evils which are the consequence of his errors: he will be an enigma to himself, as long as he shall believe himself double; that he is moved by an inconceivable spiritual power, of the laws and nature of which he is ignorant; his intellectual, as well as his moral faculties, will remain unintelligible to him if he does not contemplate them with the same eyes as he does his corporeal qualities; if he does not view them as submitted in every thing to the same impulse, as governed by the same regulations. The system of his pretended free agency is without support; experience contradicts it every instant, and proves that he never ceases to be under the influence of necessity in all his actions; this truth, far from being dangerous to man, far from being destructive of his morals, furnishes him with their true basis by making him feel the necessity of those relations which subsists between sensible beings united in society: who have congregated with a view of uniting their common efforts for their reciprocal felicity. From the necessity of these relations, spring the necessity of his duties; these point out to him the sentiments of love, which he should accord to virtuous conduct; that aversion he should have for what is vicious; the horror he should feel for every thing criminal. From hence the true foundation of _Moral Obligation_ will be obvious, which is only the necessity of talking means to obtain the end man proposes to himself by uniting in society; in which each individual for his own peculiar interest, his own particular happiness, his own personal security, is obliged to display dispositions requisite to conciliate the affections of his associates; to hold a conduct suitable to the preservation of the community; to contribute by his actions to the happiness of the whole. In a word, it is upon the necessary action and re-action of the human will upon the necessary attraction and repulsion of man's soul, that all his morals are bottomed: it is the unison of his will, the concert of his actions, that maintains society; it is rendered miserable by his discordance; it is dissolved by his want of union. From what has been said, it may be concluded that the names under which man has designated the concealed causes acting in nature, and their various effects, are never more than _necessity_ considered under different points of view, with the original cause of which--the great _cause of causes_--he must ever remain ignorant. It will be found that what he calls _order_, is a necessary consequence of causes and effects, of which he sees, or believes he sees, the entire connection, the complete routine, which pleases him as a whole, when he finds it conformable to his existence. In like manner it will be seen that what he calls _confusion_, is a consequence of like necessary causes and effects, of which he loses the concatenation, which he therefore thinks unfavourable to himself, or but little suitable to his being. That he has designated by the names of-- _Intelligence_, those necessary causes that necessarily operate the chain of events which he comprises under the term _order_: _Divinity_, those necessary but invisible causes which give play to nature, in which every thing acts according to immutable and necessary laws: _Destiny_ or _fatality_, the necessary connection of those unknown causes and, effects which he beholds in the world: _Chance_, those effects which he is not able to foresee, or of which he is ignorant of the necessary connection, with their causes: _Intellectual_ and _moral faculties_, those effects and those modifications necessary to an organized being, whom he has supposed to be moved by an inconceivable agent; who he has believed distinguished from his body, of a nature totally different from it, and which he has designated by the word SOUL. In consequence, he has believed this agent immortal; not dissoluble like the body. It has been shewn that the marvellous doctrine of another life, is founded upon gratuitous suppositions, contradicted by reflections, unsupported by experience, that may or may not be, without man's knowing any thing on the subject. It has been proved, that the hypothesis is not only useless to man's morals, but again, that it is calculated to palsy his exertions; to divert him from actively pursuing the true road to his own happiness; to fill him with romantic caprices; to inebriate him with opinions prejudicial to his tranquillity; in short, to lull to slumber the vigilance of legislators; by dispensing them from giving to education, to the institutions, to the laws of society, all that attention, which it is the duty and for his interest they should bestow. It must have been felt, that _politics_ has unaccountably rested itself upon wrong opinions; upon ideas little capable of satisfying those passions, which every thing conspires to kindle in the heart of man; who ceases to view the future, while the present seduces and hurries him along. It has been shewn, that contempt of death is an advantageous sentiment, calculated to inspire man's mind with courage; to render him intrepid; to induce him to undertake that which may be truly useful to society; in short, from what has preceded, it will be obvious, what is competent to conduct man to happiness, and also what are the obstacles that error opposes to his felicity. Let us not then, be accused of demolishing prejudice, without edifying the mind; with combating error without substituting truth; with underrating the power of the great _cause of causes_; with sapping at one and the same time the foundations of superstition and of sound morals. The last is necessary to man; it is founded upon his nature; its duties are certain, they must last as long as the human race remains; it imposes obligations on him, because, without it, neither individuals nor society could be able to subsist, either obtain or enjoy those advantages which nature obliges them to desire. Listen then, O man! to those morals which are established upon, experience; which are grounded upon the necessity of things; do not lend thine ear to those superstitions founded upon reveries; rested upon imposture; built upon the capricious whims of a disordered imagination. Follow the lessons of those humane, those gentle morals, which conduct man to virtue, by the voice of happiness: turn a deaf ear to the inefficacious cries of superstition, which renders man really unhappy; which can never make him reverence VIRTUE; which renders truth hateful; which paints veracity in hideous colours; in short, let him see if REASON, without the assistance of a rival, who prohibits its use, will not more surely conduct him towards that great end, which is the object of his research, which is the natural tendency of all his views. Indeed, what benefit has the human race hitherto drawn from those sublime, those supernatural notions with which superstition has fed mortals during so many ages? All those phantoms conjured--up by ignorance--brooded by imagination; all those hypothesis, subtile as they are irrational; from which experience is banished, all those words devoid of meaning with which languages are crowded; all those fantastical hopes; those panic terrors which have been brought to operate on the will of man; what have they done? Has any or the whole of them rendered him better, more enlightened to his duties, more faithful in their performance? Have those marvellous systems, or those sophistical inventions, by which they have been supported, carried conviction to his mind, reason into his conduct, virtue into his heart? Have they led him to the least acquaintance with the great _Cause of Causes?_ Alas! it is a lamentable fact, that cannot be too often exposed, that all these things have done nothing more than plunge the human understanding into that darkness from which it is difficult to be withdrawn; sown in man's heart the most dangerous errors; of which it is scarcely possible to divest him; given birth to those fatal passions, in which may be found the true source of those evils, with which his species is afflicted: but have never enlightened his mind with truth, nor led him to that right healthy worship, which man best pays by a rational enjoyment of the faculties with which he is gifted. Cease then, O mortal! to let thyself he disturbed with chimeras, to let thy mind be troubled with phantoms which thine own imagination has created, or to which arch imposture has given birth. Renounce thy vague hopes, disengage thyself from thine overwhelming fears, follow without inquietude the necessary routine which nature has marked out for thee; strew the road with flowers if thy destiny permits; remove, if thou art able, the thorns scattered over it. Do not attempt to plunge thy views into an impenetrable futurity; its obscurity ought to be sufficient to prove to thee, that it is either useless or dangerous to fathom. Think of making thyself happy in that existence which is known to thee: if thou wouldst preserve thyself, be temperate, be moderate, be reasonable: if thou seekest to render thy existence durable, be not prodigal of pleasure; abstain from every thing that can be hurtful to thyself, injurious to others: be truly intelligent; that is to say, learn to esteem thyself, to preserve thy being, to fulfil that end which at each moment thou proposest to thyself. Be virtuous, to the end that thou mayest render thyself solidly happy, that thou mayest enjoy the affections, secure the esteem, partake of the assistance of those by whom thou art surrounded; of those beings whom nature has made necessary to thine own peculiar felicity. Even when they should be unjust, render thyself worthy of their applause, of thine own love, and thou shalt live content, thy serenity shall not be disturbed, the end of thy career shall not slander thy life; which will be exempted from remorse: death will be to thee the door to a new existence, a new order, in which thou wilt be submitted, as thou art at present, to the eternal laws of nature, which ordains, that to LIVE HAPPY HERE BELOW, THOU MUST MAKE OTHERS HAPPY. Suffer thyself then, to be drawn gently along thy journey, until thou shalt sleep peaceable on that bosom which has given thee birth: if contrary to thine expectation, there should be another life of eternal felicity, thou canst not fail being a partaker. For thou, wicked unfortunate! who art found in continual contradiction with thyself; thou whose disorderly machine can neither accord with thine own peculiar nature, nor with that of thine associates, whatever may be thy crimes, whatever may be thy fears of punishment in another life, thou art at least already cruelly punished in this? Do not thy follies, thy shameful habits, thy debaucheries, damage thine health? Dost thou not linger out life in disgust, fatigued with thine own excesses? Does not listlessness punish thee for thy satiated passions? Has not thy vigour, thy gaiety, thy content, already yielded to feebleness, crouched under infirmities, given place to regret? Do not thy vices every day dig thy grave? Every time thou hast stained thyself with crime, hast thou dared without horror to return into thyself, to examine thine own conscience? Hast thou not found remorse, error, shame, established in thine heart? Hast thou not dreaded the scrutiny of thy fellow man? Hast thou not trembled when alone; unceasingly feared, that truth, so terrible for thee, should unveil thy dark transgressions, throw into light thine enormous iniquities? Do not then any longer fear to part with thine existence, it will at least put an end to those richly merited torments thou hast inflicted on thyself; _Death, in delivering the earth from an incommodious burthen, will also deliver thee from thy most cruel enemy, thyself_. END OF PART I. 
45041	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). MENTAL PHILOSOPHY: INCLUDING THE INTELLECT, SENSIBILITIES, AND WILL. by JOSEPH HAVEN, D. D., L. L. D., Late Prof. of Systematic Theology in the Theological Seminary, Chicago, Ill., and Late Prof. of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy in Amherst College. Improved Edition. New York: Sheldon and Company, 8 Murray Street. 1881 * * * * * Dr. Haven's Valuable Series of School and College Text-Books. MENTAL PHILOSOPHY $2.00 MORAL PHILOSOPHY 1.75 HISTORY OF ANCIENT AND MODERN PHILOSOPHY. (In press). * * * * * Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by Gould and Lincoln, In the Clerk's office of the District Court Of the District of Massachusetts. PREFACE If any apology were necessary for adding yet another to the numerous works on Mental Philosophy which have recently appeared, the circumstances that led to the preparation of the present volume may, perhaps, constitute that apology. When called, several years since, to the chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy, in this Institution, the text-books, then in use, seemed to me not well adapted to the wants of College students. Nor was it easy to make a change for the better. Of the works in this department, then generally in use in our Colleges, some presumed on a more extensive acquaintance with the science than most young men at this stage of education are likely to possess; others, again, erring on the opposite extreme, were deficient in thorough and scientific treatment; while most, if not all, were, at the best, incomplete, presenting but a partial survey of the entire field. In none of them was the science of mind presented in its completeness and symmetry, in a manner at once simple, yet scientific; in none of them, moreover, was it brought down to the present time. Something more complete, more simple, more thorough, seemed desirable. Every year of subsequent experience as a teacher has but confirmed this impression, and made the want of a book better adapted to the purposes of instruction, in our American Colleges, more deeply felt. The works on mental science, which have recently appeared in this country, while they are certainly a valuable contribution to the department of philosophy, seem to meet this deficiency in part, but _only_ in part. They traverse usually but a portion of the ground which Psychology legitimately occupies, confining their attention, for the most part, to the _Intellectual_ Faculties, to the exclusion of the _Sensibilities_, and the _Will_. Feeling deeply the want which has been spoken of, it seemed to me, early in my course, that something might be done toward remedying the deficiency, by preparing with care, and delivering to the classes, lectures upon the topics presented in the books, as they passed along. This course was adopted--a method devolving much labor upon the instructor, but rewarding him by the increased interest and more rapid progress of the pupils. Little by little the present work thus grew up, as the result of my studies, in connection with my classes, and of my experience in the daily routine of the recitation and lecture room. Gradually the lectures, thus prepared, came to take the place more and more of a textbook, until there seemed to be no longer any reason why they should not be put into the hands of the student as such. It is much easier to decide what a work on mental science ought to be, than to produce such a work. It should be comprehensive and complete, treating of all that properly pertains to Psychology, giving to every part its due proportion and development. It should treat the various topics presented, in a thorough and scientific manner. It should be conversant with the literature of the department, placing the student in possession, not only of the true doctrines, but, to some extent also, of the _history_ of those doctrines, showing him what has been held and taught by others upon the points in question. In style it should be clear, perspicuous, concise, yet not so barren of ornament as to be destitute of interest to the reader. At these qualities the writer has aimed in the present treatise; with what success, others must determine. All science, in proportion as it is complete and true, becomes simple. In proportion as this result is attained, the labor bestowed upon it disappears from view, and the writer seems, perhaps, to others, to have said but a very plain and common thing. This is peculiarly the case with mental science. The difficulty of discussing with clearness and simplicity, and, at the same time, in a complete and thorough manner, the difficult problems of Psychology, will be understood only by those who make the attempt. J. H. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. PAGE ON THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL SCIENCE 15 SECTION I.--NATURE OF THE SCIENCE 15 SECTION II.--IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL SCIENCE 20 CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE MENTAL POWERS 29 SECTION I.--GENERAL ANALYSIS 29 SECTION II.--ANALYSIS OF INTELLECTUAL POWERS 31 SECTION III.--HISTORICAL SKETCH--VARIOUS DIVISIONS OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES 35 DIVISION FIRST. THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. PRELIMINARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. CONSCIOUSNESS 39 CHAPTER II. ATTENTION 46 CHAPTER III. CONCEPTION 53 PART FIRST. THE PRESENTATIVE POWER. SENSE, OR PERCEPTION BY THE SENSES 58 SECTION I.--GENERAL OBSERVATIONS 59 SECTION II.--ANALYSIS OF THE PERCEPTIVE PROCESS 61 SECTION III.--ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE QUALITIES OF BODIES 65 SECTION IV.--ORGANS OF SENSE--ANALYSIS OF THEIR SEVERAL FUNCTIONS 68 SECTION V.--AMOUNT OF INFORMATION DERIVED FROM THE RESPECTIVE SENSES 72 SECTION VI.--CREDIBILITY OF OUR SENSATIONS AND PERCEPTIONS 81 SECTION VII.--HISTORICAL SKETCH 84 I. OF DIFFERENT DIVISIONS OF THE QUALITIES OF BODIES 84 II. OF DIFFERENT THEORIES OF PERCEPTION 87 PART SECOND. THE REPRESENTATIVE POWER. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS 94 CHAPTER I. MEMORY 96 SECTION I.--MENTAL REPRODUCTION 96 I. NATURE 96 II. LAWS 101 SECTION. II.--MENTAL RECOGNITION, AS DISTINGUISHED FROM MENTAL REPRODUCTION 113 I. GENERAL CHARACTER 113 II. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN AN ACT OF MEMORY 118 III. QUALITIES OF MEMORY 118 IV. MEMORY AS RELATED TO INTELLECTUAL STRENGTH 121 V. CULTIVATION OF MEMORY 125 VI. EFFECTS OF DISEASE ON MEMORY 128 VII. INFLUENCE OF MEMORY ON THE HAPPINESS OF LIFE 131 VIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH--DIFFERENT THEORIES OF MEMORY 133 CHAPTER II. IMAGINATION 137 SECTION I.--GENERAL CHARACTER OF THIS FACULTY 137 SECTION II.--RELATION TO OTHER FACULTIES 138 SECTION III.--ACTIVE AND PASSIVE IMAGINATION 140 SECTION IV.--IMAGINATION A SIMPLE FACULTY 142 SECTION V.--NOT MERELY THE POWER OF COMBINATION 144 SECTION VI.--LIMITED TO SENSIBLE OBJECTS 147 SECTION VII.--LIMITED TO NEW RESULTS 148 SECTION VIII.--A VOLUNTARY POWER 149 SECTION IX.--USE AND ABUSE OF IMAGINATION 152 SECTION X.--CULTURE OF IMAGINATION 154 SECTION XI.--HISTORIC SKETCH--VARIOUS DEFINITIONS AND THEORIES OF IMAGINATION BY DIFFERENT WRITERS 158 PART THIRD. THE REFLECTIVE POWER. GENERAL OSERVATIONS 162 CHAPTER I. THE SYNTHETIC PROCESS.--GENERALIZATION 165 SECTION I.--NATURE OF THE SYNTHETIC PROCESS 165 SECTION II.--PROVINCE AND RELATION OF SEVERAL TERMS EMPLOYED TO DENOTE, IN PART, OR AS A WHOLE, THIS POWER OF THE MIND 177 SECTION III.--HISTORICAL SKETCH--THE REALIST AND NOMINALIST CONTROVERSY 177 CHAPTER II. THE ANALYTIC PROCESS--REASONING 180 SECTION I.--THE NATURE OF THE PROCESS 181 SECTION II.--RELATION OF JUDGMENT AND REASONING 187 SECTION III.--DIFFERENT KINDS OF REASONING 189 I. DEMONSTRATIVE 189 II. PROBABLE--(1.) FROM TESTIMONY; (2.) FROM EXPERIENCE; (3.) FROM ANALOGY 192 SECTION IV.--USE OF HYPOTHESES AND THEORIES IN REASONING 199 SECTION V.--DIFFERENT FORMS OF REASONING 203 I. ANALYSIS OF THE PROPOSITION 203 II. ANALYSIS OF THE SYLLOGISM 205 III. LAWS OF SYLLOGISM 207 IV. DIFFERENT KINDS OF SYLLOGISM 209 V. DIFFERENT FORMS OF SYLLOGISM 210 VI. LAWS OF THOUGHT ON WHICH THE SYLLOGISM DEPENDS 212 VII. USE AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM 213 VIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC 219 PART FOURTH. INTUITIVE POWER. CHAPTER I. EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF THIS FACULTY 229 CHAPTER II. TRUTHS AND CONCEPTIONS FURNISHED BY THIS FACULTY 238 SECTION I.--PRIMARY TRUTHS 238 SECTION II.--INTUITIVE CONCEPTIONS 241 I. SPACE 241 II. TIME 244 III. IDENTITY 249 IV. CAUSE 257 V. IDEA OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE RIGHT 262 CHAPTER III. THE CONCEPTION AND COGNIZANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL 263 SECTION I.--CONCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL 263 SECTION II.--COGNIZANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL 286 CHAPTER IV. IDEA AND COGNIZANCE OF THE RIGHT 303 SECTION I.--IDEA OF RIGHT--WHENCE COMES THE IDEA 303 SECTION II.--COGNIZANCE OF THE RIGHT--1. NATURE OF CONSCIENCE; 2. AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE 314 SUPPLEMENTARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. INTELLIGENCE IN MAN AS DISTINGUISHED FROM INTELLIGENCE IN THE BRUTE 329 CHAPTER II. MIND AS AFFECTED BY CERTAIN STATES OF THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 342 SECTION I.--SLEEP 343 SECTION II.--DREAMS 351 SECTION III.--SOMNAMBULISM 360 SECTION IV.--INSANITY 368 DIVISION SECOND. THE SENSIBILITIES. PRELIMINARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. NATURE, DIFFICULTY, AND IMPORTANCE OF THIS DEPARTMENT OF THE SCIENCE 377 CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE SENSIBILITIES 382 PART FIRST. SIMPLE EMOTIONS. CHAPTER I. INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONS 395 SECTION I.--OF THAT GENERAL STATE OF MIND KNOWN AS CHEERFULNESS, AND ITS OPPOSITE, MELANCHOLY 396 SECTION II.--SORROW AT LOSS OF FRIENDS 399 SECTION III.--SYMPATHY WITH THE HAPPINESS AND SORROW OF OTHERS 402 CHAPTER II. RATIONAL EMOTIONS 409 SECTION I.--EMOTIONS OF JOY OR SADNESS, ARISING FROM THE CONTEMPLATION OF OUR OWN EXCELLENCE, OR THE REVERSE 409 SECTION II.--ENJOYMENT OF THE LUDICROUS 413 SECTION III.--ENJOYMENT OF THE NEW AND WONDERFUL 424 SECTION IV.--ENJOYMENT OF THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE SUBLIME 427 SECTION V.--SATISFACTION IN VIEW OF RIGHT CONDUCT, AND REMORSE IN VIEW OF WRONG 434 PART SECOND. THE AFFECTIONS. CHAPTER I. BENEVOLENT AFFECTIONS 441 SECTION I.--LOVE OF KINDRED 442 SECTION II.--LOVE OF FRIENDS 447 SECTION III.--LOVE OF BENEFACTORS 451 SECTION IV.--LOVE OF HOME AND COUNTRY 454 CHAPTER II. MALEVOLENT AFFECTIONS 458 RESENTMENT, WITH ITS MODIFICATIONS, ENVY, JEALOUSY, REVENGE 458-469 PART THIRD. THE DESIRES. CHAPTER I. NATURE AND CLASSIFICATION OF DESIRES 473 CHAPTER II. DESIRES ARISING FROM THE PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION. 477 CHAPTER III. DESIRES ARISING FROM THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MIND 481 SECTION I.--DESIRE OF HAPPINESS 481 SECTION II.--DESIRE OF KNOWLEDGE 487 SECTION III.--DESIRE OF POWER 490 SECTION IV.--CERTAIN MODIFICATIONS OF THE DESIRE OF POWER, AS DESIRE OF SUPERIORITY AND DESIRE OF POSSESSION 493 SECTION V.--DESIRE OF SOCIETY 501 SECTION VI.--DESIRE OF ESTEEM 505 CHAPTER IV. HOPE AND FEAR 510 DIVISION THIRD. THE WILL. PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. CHAPTER I. NATURE OF THE WILL 520 SECTION I.--ELEMENTS INVOLVED IN AN ACT OF WILL 521 SECTION II.--INVESTIGATION OF THESE ELEMENTS 523 I. MOTIVE 523 II. CHOICE 526 III. EXECUTIVE VOLITION 530 CHAPTER II. RELATION OF THE WILL TO OTHER FACULTIES 531 CHAPTER III. FREEDOM OF THE WILL 538 SECTION I.--PRESUMPTIONS IN FAVOR OF FREEDOM 539 SECTION II.--DIRECT ARGUMENT 544 CHAPTER IV. CERTAIN QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE PRECEDING 549 SECTION I.--CONTRARY CHOICE 549 SECTION II.--POWER TO DO WHAT WE WERE NOT DISPOSED TO DO 551 SECTION III.--INFLUENCE OF MOTIVES 554 I. IS THE WILL ALWAYS AS THE GREATEST APPARENT GOOD 554 II. IS THE WILL DETERMINED BY THE STRONGEST MOTIVE 555 III. ARE MOTIVES THE CAUSE AND VOLITIONS THE EFFECT 556 CHAPTER V. THE DOCTRINE OF THE WILL VIEWED IN CONNECTION WITH CERTAIN TRUTHS OF RELIGION 560 SECTION I.--THE POWER WHICH GOD EXERTS OVER THE HUMAN MIND AND WILL 561 SECTION II.--MAN'S POWER OVER HIMSELF 566 CHAPTER VI. STRENGTH OF WILL 569 CHAPTER VII. HISTORICAL SKETCH--OUTLINE OF THE CONTROVERSY RESPECTING FREEDOM OF THE WILL 573 REFERENCES 584 INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I. ON THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL SCIENCE. § I.--NATURE OF THE SCIENCE. _Mental Philosophy, what._--What is Mental Philosophy, as distinguished from other branches of science? Philosophy, in the wide sense usually given it, denotes the investigation and explanation of the causes of things; it seeks to discover, and scientifically to state, the general laws both of matter and mind; its object is to ascertain facts, and their relation to each other. Mental Philosophy has for its object to ascertain the facts and laws of mental operation. _Metaphysics, what._--Of the two grand departments of human knowledge--the science of matter and the science of mind--the former, comprising whatever relates to material phenomena, the science of nature, is known under the general name of _Physics_; the latter, the science of mind, is often designated by the corresponding term, neither very correct nor very fortunate, _Metaphysics_. This term is often used to include whatever does not properly fall under the class of Physics. In its strict sense, it does not include so much, but denotes properly the science of abstract truth; the science of being, in itself considered--apart from its particular accidents and properties--that which we now call Ontology. The term is commonly ascribed to Aristotle, but incorrectly. It originated with his followers. Several treatises of his relating to natural science having been collected and published, under the title [Greek: ta physika], other treatises on philosophical subjects were afterward arranged under the title [Greek: ta metaphysika], indicating their relation to the former, as proper to be read after the perusal of those. Hence the term came into use in the general sense, already spoken of, to denote whatever is not included under physics although originally employed with a much more limited meaning. _Mental Philosophy not properly Metaphysics._--Neither in its wider nor in its stricter sense does this term properly designate the science of mind. Mental Philosophy neither embraces every thing not included under physics, nor is it the science of abstract being. As one of the intellectual, in distinction from the physical sciences, it holds a place along with Logic--the science of the laws of human thought and reasoning; Ethics--the science of morals; Politics--the science of human organization and government; to which should be added Ontology--the science of pure being; all which are properly embraced under the term Metaphysics in its wider and popular sense. To designate the science of mind in distinction from these other sciences, some more definite term is required. The word _Psychology_ is now coming into use as such a term. _Mental Philosophy a Natural Science._--The science of mind, indeed, deserves in one aspect to be ranked among the _natural_ sciences. It is a science resting on experience, observation, and induction--a science of facts, phenomena and laws which regulate the same. That which is specifically its object of investigation--the human mind--is strictly a part, and most important part of _nature_, unless we exclude man himself from the world to which he belongs, and of which he is lord. _Possibility of such a Science._--The possibility of the science of the human mind has been denied by some; but without good reason. If we can observe and classify the phenomena of nature, in her varied forms, animate and inanimate, and ascertain in this way the laws to which she is subject; if it is possible thus to construct a science of plants, of animals, of the elements that compose the substance of the earth, of the strata that lie arranged beneath its surface, of the forces and agencies that at any time, recent or remote, have been at work to produce the changes which have taken place upon and within our globe--nay, more, if leaving our own planet we may, by careful observation of the heavenly bodies, learn their places, movements, distances, estimate their magnitude and density, measure their speed, and thus construct a science of the stars, surely the phenomena of our own minds, the data of our own consciousness, must be at least equally within our reach, and equally capable of observation, classification, and scientific statement. If we can observe the habits of animals and plants, we can observe also the habits of men, and the phenomena of human thought and passion. If the careful induction of general truths and principles from observed facts form the basis and method of true science in the one case, so in the other. _Science of Matter and of Mind analogous._--The science of matter, and the science of mind agree perfectly in this, that all we know of either is simply the phenomena which they exhibit. We know not matter as it is in itself, but only as it affects our senses. We perceive certain qualities or properties of it, and these we embody in our definition, and beyond these we say nothing, because we know nothing. Equally relative is our knowledge of mind. What it is in itself we know not, but only its phenomena as presented to our observation and consciousness. It thinks and feels, it perceives, remembers, reasons, it loves, hates, desires, determines; these exercises are matter of experience and observation; they constitute our knowledge and our definition of mind, and beyond we cannot go. _Modes and Sources of Information the same in both._--This being the case, it is evident that both our sources of information, and our mode of investigation, must be essentially the same in the two departments of science. In either case our knowledge must be limited to phenomena merely, and these must be learned by observation and experience. A careful induction of particulars will place us in possession of general principles, or laws, and these, correctly ascertained and stated, will constitute our science, whether of matter or mind. _They differ in one Respect._--In one respect, indeed, our means of information with regard to the two branches of science differ. While both matter and mind can be known only by the observation of the phenomena which they present, in mental science the field of such observation lies in great part within ourselves--the phenomena are those of our own present or former consciousness--the mind is at once both the observer and the object observed. This circumstance, which at first seems to present a difficulty, is in reality a great advantage which this science possesses over all others. _Apparent Difficulty._--The difficulty which it seems to present is this: How can the eye perceive itself? How can the mind, as employed, for example, in remembering, or judging, or willing, inspect its own operations, since the moment its attention is turned to itself it is no longer engaged in that operation which it seeks to inspect--is no longer remembering, or judging, or willing, but is employed only in self-observation? We admit that the mind, in the very instant of its exercising any given faculty, cannot make itself, as thus engaged, the object of attention. But the operations of the mind, as given in consciousness, at any moment, may be retained or replaced by memory the next moment, and as thus replaced and attested, may stand before us the proper objects of our investigation, so long as we please. This puts it in the power of the mind to observe and to know itself. _Real Advantage._--The advantage accruing from the circumstance that the phenomena to be observed are those of our own present or former consciousness, is this: that those phenomena are fully within our reach, and also are capable of being known with greater certainty. In physical science the facts may be scattered over the globe, and over centuries of time, not personally accessible to any one observer in their completeness, and yet that completeness of observation may be essential to correct science. In psychology, the observer has within himself the essential elements of the science which he explores; the data which he seeks, are the data of his own consciousness; the science which he constructs is the science of himself. _Comparative Value of this kind of Knowledge._--The knowledge thus given in conscious experience is more correct and reliable than any other. It has this peculiarity that it cannot be disputed. I may be mistaken in regard to the properties of a piece of matter which I hold in my hand, and which seems to me to be square or round, of such or such a color, and of such or such figure, size, and density; but I cannot be mistaken as to the fact, that it _seems_ to me to be of such color, figure, etc. The former are results of perception and judgment; the latter is an immediate datum of consciousness, and cannot be called in question. To doubt our own consciousness is to call in question our very doubt, since the only evidence of our doubting is the consciousness that we doubt. As to the phenomena of the external world--the things that are passing without--I may be mistaken; as to what is passing in my own mind--the thoughts, feelings, volitions of my own conscious self--there is no room for doubt or mistake. _Not limited to Consciousness._--I do not mean, by what has been said, to imply that in our own observation of mental phenomena we are limited to the experience of our own minds, but only that this is the principal source of our information. The mental operations of others, so far as we have access to their minds, are also legitimate data. These we may observe for ourselves in the daily intercourse of life, may notice how, under given circumstances, men will think, feel, and act, and the knowledge thus acquired will constitute a valuable addition to our self-knowledge. We may receive also, in this science, as in any other, the testimony of others as to their own mental states and operations. In so far as psychology relies upon these sources, it stands on a footing with other sciences. § II.--IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL SCIENCE. _Comparative Neglect._--That the science of the mind has not hitherto held that high place in the public regard and estimation, at least in our own country, to which it is justly entitled, as compared with other branches of knowledge, can hardly be denied. The cause of this comparative neglect is to be found partly in the nature of the science itself, partly in the exclusively practical tendencies of the age. _The first Cause considered._--The _nature of the science_ is such that its benefits are not immediately apparent. The dullest mind can perceive some use in chemistry, or botany, or natural philosophy. They are of service in the analysis of soils, the rotation of crops, the comprehension of the laws of mechanical and chemical forces. But mental science has no such application, no such practical results patent and obvious to the careless eye. Its dwelling-place and sphere of action lie removed somewhat from the observations of men. It has no splendid cabinets or museums to throw open to the gaze of the multitude. It cannot arrange in magnificent collection all the varieties of mental action, all the complications of thought and feeling as yet observed, nor illustrate by curious instruments, and nice experiments, the wonderful laws of association, the subtle changes and swift flashes of wit and fancy, and quick strong emotion, the impulses of desire, the curious play of volition, the unexplained mystery of thought, the lights and shadows that come and go upon the field of consciousness. For these curious and wonderful phenomena of the inner life there are no philosophic instruments or experiments, no charts or diagrams. Nor are there yet brilliant discoveries to be made, nor splendid rewards to be gained by the votaries of this science. "Four or five new metals," says Sydney Smith, "have been discovered within as many years, of the existence of which no human being could have had any suspicion; but no man that I know of pretends to discover four or five new passions." _The second Cause._--But the chief obstacle, as I suppose, to the more general cultivation of mental science is to be found in the exclusively practical tendencies of the age. We are a people given more to action than to thought, to enterprise than to speculation. This is perhaps inseparable from the condition of a new state. An age of action is seldom an age of reflection. External life demands the energies of a new people. The elements are to be subdued, mountains levelled, graded, tunnelled, roads constructed, cities built, and many useful, necessary works to be wrought with toil and cost, before that period comes of golden affluence, and leisure, and genial taste, and elegant culture, that can at once appreciate and reward the higher efforts of philosophic investigation. _Relation to other Sciences._--The _importance_ of mental science appears from its relation to other sciences. We find in nature a gradually ascending series. As we pass from the observation and study of the mineral to the forms of vegetable life, from the plant to the insect--and thence to the animal, and from the animal, in his various orders and classes, to man, the highest type of animated existence on the earth, we are conscious of a progression in the rank and dignity of that which we contemplate. But it is only when we turn our attention from all these to the intelligence that dwells within the man, and makes him master and lord of this lower world, that we stand upon the summit of elevation and overlook the wide field of previous inquiry. Toward this all other sciences lead, as paths along the mountain side, starting from different points, and running in different directions, converge toward a common terminus at the summit. As the mineral, the plant, the insect, the animal, in all their curious and wonderful organizations, are necessarily inferior to man, so is the science of them, however important and useful, subordinate to the science of man himself; and as the human body, curious and wonderful in its organism and its laws, is nevertheless inferior in dignity and worth to the spirit that dwells within, and is the true lord of this fair castle and this wide and beautiful domain, so is the science of the body, its mechanism, its chemistry, its anatomy, its laws, inferior to the science of the mind, the divinity within. _Other Sciences Creations of the Mind._--Many of the sciences justly regarded as the most noble, are themselves the creations of the mind. Such, for example, is the science of number and quantity--a science leading to the most sublime results, as in the calculations of the astronomer, yet a pure product of the human intellect. Indeed what is all science but the work of mind? The creations of art are wonderful, but the mind that can conceive and execute those creations is still more to be admired. Language is wonderful, but chiefly as a production and expression of mind. The richness, the affluence, the eloquence, the exactness, the beauty, for example, of the Greek tongue, of what are these the qualities, and where did they dwell--in the Greek language, or in the Greek mind? Which is really the more noble and wonderful then, the language itself, or the mind that called into being such a language, and employed it as an instrument of expression; and of which is the science most noble and worthy of regard? We admire the genius of a Kepler and a Copernicus, we sympathize with their enthusiasm as they observe the movements and develop the laws of the heavenly bodies; we look through the telescope, not without a feeling of awe, as it seems to lift us up, and bear us away into the unknown and the infinite, revealing to us what it would almost seem had never been intended for the human eye to see; but one thing is even more wonderful than the telescope--that is the mind that contrived it. One thing is more awe-inspiring than the stars, and that is the mind that discovers their hidden laws, and unlocks their complicated movements; and when we would observe the most curious and wonderful thing of all, we must leave the tubes and the tables, the calculations and the diagrams with which the man works, and study the man himself, the workman. _Relation of this Science to the practical Arts and Sciences._--But aside from the view now presented, the connection of mental science with other and practical arts and sciences is much more intimate than is usually supposed. Take for example the very noblest of all sciences--theology; we find it, in an important sense, based upon and receiving its shape and character from the views which we entertain, and the philosophy which we adopt of the human mind. Our philosophy underlies our theology, even as the solid strata that lie unseen beneath the surface give shape and contour and direction to the lofty mountain range. _Psychology as related to Theology._--Not to speak of the very idea which we form of the divine Being, borrowed as it must be, in a sense, from our previous conception of the human mind, and our own spiritual existence, not to speak of the arguments by which we seek to establish the existence of the divine Being, involving as they do some of the nicest and most important of the laws of human thought, what problems, we may ask, go deeper into the groundwork of any theological system than those pertaining to human ability, and the freedom of the will--the government of the affections and desires--the power of a man over himself, to be other and better than he is, and to do what God requires. But these are questions purely psychological. You cannot stir a step in the application of theology to practical life, till you have settled in some way these questions, and that view, whatever it be, crude or profound, intelligible or absurd, is, for the time, your science, your philosophy of the mind. _Psychology as related to the healing Art._--Scarcely less intimate is the connection of psychology with the science of life. The physician finds in the practice of his profession, that in order to success, the laws of the human mind must constitute an important part of his study--how to avoid, and how to touch, the secret springs of human action. A word rightly spoken is often better than a medicine. In order to comprehend the nature of disease he must understand the effect on the bodily organization of the due, and also of the undue, exertion of each of the mental faculties; in fine, the whole relation of the mind to the bodily functions, and its influence over them--a field of inquiry as yet but imperfectly understood, if indeed adequately appreciated by the medical profession. _As related to Oratory._--To the public speaker, whether at the bar, in the public assembly, in the halls of legislation, or in the pulpit, it need hardly be said that a knowledge of this science, and the ability to make practical use of it, is indispensable. Success in oratory depends, doubtless, in a measure, upon other things; but he who best understands the laws and operations of the human mind, how to touch the sensibilities, how to awaken the passions, how to excite the fears and the hopes, how to rouse the resentment of his hearers, how to soothe the troubled spirits, and allay the excitement of feeling, and disarm prejudice, and call into play the sober reason and calm judgment of man, will best be able to accomplish his purpose. He will be able to turn to his own account the circumstances of the occasion, and like a skillful organist, touch with ease, yet with precision and effect, what key he will. No man can do this who does not well understand the instrument. _As related to the Art of Education._--Especially is this science of use to the _teacher_ in the knowledge which it gives him of the mind of his pupil, and the skill in dealing with that mind. The mind of the pupil is to him the instrument on which he is required to play--a curious instrument of many and strange keys and stops--capable of being touched to wonderful harmony, and to fearful discord;--and to handle this instrument well is no ordinary acquirement. What shall we say of the man who knows nothing of the instrument, but only the music to be performed, nothing of the mind to be taught, but only the knowledge to be communicated? To know the mind that is to be taught, how to stimulate, how to control, how to encourage, how to restrain, how to guide and direct its every movement and impulse, is not this the very first and chief thing to be known? _Connection of this Science with our own personal Interests._--The importance of mental science is evident not only from its relation to other sciences, but from the relation it sustains to man and his higher interests. Some sciences interest us as abstractions--merely speculative systems of truth; others as realities, but of such a nature, and so remote from the personal interests and wants of the race to which we belong, that they make little appeal to our sensibilities. Thus it is with mathematical and astronomical truth. The heavenly bodies, whose movements we observe, hold on their swift silent way, in the calmness of their own eternity, regardless of man and his destiny, even as they rolled ages ago, and as they will ages hence. What have we to do with them or they with us? We watch them as they hold their course through the deep firmament, as children, standing on the sea-side, watch the distant snowy sail that glides silently along the horizon, afar off, beautiful, unknown. So sail those swift ships of the firmament, and only he who made them knows their history. _Psychology in contrast with other Sciences in this respect._--But when we come to the study of ourselves, and the laws of our own intelligence, our inquiries assume a practical importance which attaches to no other departments of truth. It is no longer the sail dimly visible on the far horizon, but our own conscious being that is the object of thought. The question no longer is, Whence comes that swift ship, and whither goes it, but, What am I, and whither going; what my history, and my destiny? This mysterious soul which animates me, and is the presiding divinity over all my actions, what is it, with all its wondrous faculties--sense, imagination, reason, will--those powers of my being? What is that change which passes upon me, which men call sleep, and that more mysterious and fearful change that must soon pass upon me, and that men call death? How is it that events of former years come back to mind, with all the freshness and reality of passing scenes? What is that principle of my nature that ever assumes to itself the right of command, saying to all my inclinations and passions, thou shalt, and thou shalt not, and when I disobey that mandate, filling my whole soul with misery, my whole future existence with remorse? And what and whence that word _ought_, that has so much to do with me and my pursuits: ought what, and why ought, and to whom?--Am I free, or am I subject to inevitable necessity; if free, then how are all my actions controlled, and predetermined by a divine Providence? If not free, then how am I responsible? Who shall solve this problem; who shall read me this strange inexplicable riddle of human life? Such are the questions and themes which mental philosophy discusses, and we perceive at a glance their intimate connection with the highest interests and personal wants of man as an individual. _Connection of this Science with mental Discipline._--The importance of mental science may be further apparent in its effect on the culture and discipline of the mind. It is the peculiar effect of this science to sharpen and quicken the mental powers, to teach precision and exactness of thought and expression, to train the mind to habits of close attention and concentration of thought, to lead it to inquire into the causes and relations of things; in a word, to render it familiar with the great art of distinguishing things that differ. It would hardly be possible to name another branch of study that tends so directly to produce these results in the cultivation of the mind. CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE MENTAL POWERS. _Importance of such a preliminary Investigation._--It is of the highest importance, as we approach a science like the one before us, to obtain, if possible, at the outset, a clear and comprehensive view of the field about to be explored. It is desirable that the traveller, before entering a new country, should learn something respecting its extent, its political and geographical divisions, its manners, its laws, its history. Even more necessary is it, in entering upon a new science, to know its boundaries and divisions, to obtain a clear idea, at the very commencement of our inquiries, of the number, nature, extent, and arrangement of the subject we are about to investigate. Otherwise we shall be liable to confusion and error, shall not know where, at any moment, in the wide field of investigation, we may chance to be, or what relation the topic of our immediate inquiry holds to the whole science before us; as a ship on the ocean, without observation and reckoning, loses her latitude and longitude. We shall be liable to confound those distinctions which are of less, with those which are of more importance, and to mistake the relation which the several topics of inquiry bear to each other. Especially is this previous survey and comprehension of the subject essential in a science like this, where so much depends on the clearness and accuracy with which we distinguish differences often minute, and on the definiteness with which we mark off and lay out the several divisions of our work. A thorough analysis and classification of the various faculties of the mind is necessary, in the first place, before we enter upon the special investigation of any one of them. Such a classification must serve as our guide-book and chart in all further inquiries. _Difficulty of such an Investigation._--The importance of such a preliminary investigation is scarcely greater than its difficulty. It would be easy, indeed, to mention, almost at random, a considerable number of mental operations, with whose names we are familiar; and a little thought would enable us to enlarge the list almost indefinitely. But such a list, even though it might chance to be complete, would be neither an analysis nor a classification of these several powers. It would neither teach us their relations to each other and to the whole, nor enable us to understand the precise nature and office of each faculty. We could not be sure that we had not included under a common name operations essentially different, or assigned distinct places and offices to powers essentially the same. Much depends, moreover, on the order in which we take up the several faculties. It is evident at a glance that to form a clear, correct, and comprehensive arrangement of the powers of the mind, is no slight undertaking. A complete understanding of the whole science of the mind is requisite. It is one of the last things which the student is prepared to undertake, yet one of the first which he requires to know. Unfortunately for the science, perhaps no topic in the whole circle of intellectual investigation has been more generally neglected, by those who have undertaken to unfold the philosophy of the mind, than the one now under consideration. § I.--GENERAL ANALYSIS. _A mental Faculty, what._--In making out any scheme of classification, the question at once arises, how are we to know what are, and what are not distinct faculties? In order to this, we must first determine what constitutes a mental faculty. What, then, is a faculty of the mind? I understand by this term simply the mind's power of acting, of doing something, of putting forth some energy, and performing some operation. The mind has as many distinct faculties, as it has distinct powers of action, distinct functions, distinct modes and spheres of activity. As its capabilities of action and operation differ, so its faculties differ. _The Mind not complex._--Now mental activity is, strictly speaking, one and indivisible. The mind is not a complex substance, composed of parts, but single and one. Its activity may, however, be exercised in various ways, and upon widely different classes of objects; and as these modes of action vary, we may assign them different names, and treat of them in distinction from each other. So distinguished and named, they present themselves to us as so many distinct powers or faculties of the mind. But when this is done, and we make out, for purposes of science, our complete list and classification of these powers, we are not to forget that it is, after all, one and the same indivisible spiritual principle that is putting forth its activity under these diverse forms, one and the same force exerting itself--whether as thinking, feeling, or acting--whether as remembering, imagining, judging, perceiving, reasoning, loving, fearing, hating, desiring, choosing. And while we may designate these as so many faculties of the mind, we are not to conceive of them as so many constituent parts of a complex whole, which, taken together, compose this mysterious entity called the mind, as the different limbs and organs of the physical frame compose the structure called the body. Such is not the nature of the mind, nor of its faculties. _The Question before us._--In inquiring, then, what are the faculties of the mind, we have simply to inquire what are the distinct modes of its activity, what states and operations of the mind so far resemble each other as to admit of being classed together under the same general description and name. Our work, thus understood, becomes in reality a very simple one. _The more important Distinctions to be first ascertained._--What, then, are the clearly distinct modes of mental activity? And first let us endeavor to ascertain the wider and more important distinctions. We shall find that, innumerable as the forms of mental activity may at first sight appear, they are all capable of being reduced to a few general and comprehensive classes. _The first Form of mental Activity._--I sit at my table. Books are before me. I open a volume, and peruse its pages. My mind is occupied, its activity is awakened; the thoughts of the author are transferred to my mind, and engage my thoughts. Here, then, is one form of mental activity. This one thing I can do; this one power I have--the faculty of thought. _The second Form._--But not this alone: I am presently conscious of something beside simple thought. The writer, whose pages I peruse, interests me, excites me; I am amused by his wit, moved by his eloquence, affected by his pathos; I become indignant at the scenes and characters which he portrays, or, on the contrary, they command my admiration. All this by turns passes over me as the fitful shadows play upon the waters, coming and going with the changing cloud. This is not pure thought. It is thought accompanied with another and quite distinct element, that is, _feeling_. This power also I have;--I can feel. _A third Form._--And not this alone. The process does not end here. Thought and feeling lead to action. I resolve what to do. I lay down my book, and go forth to perform some act prompted by the emotion awakened within me. This power also I have;--the faculty of voluntary action, or volition. _These three Forms comprehensive._--Here, then, are three grand divisions or forms of mental activity--thought, feeling, volition. These powers we are constantly exerting. Every moment of my intelligent existence I am exercising one or another, or all of these faculties. And, what is more, of all the forms of mental activity, there is not one which does not fall under one or another of these three divisions--thought--feeling--volition. Every possible mental operation may be reduced to one of these three things. * * * * * We have, then, these grand departments or modes of mental activity, comprehensive of all others: Intellect, or the faculty of simple thought; Sensibility, or the faculty of feeling; Will, or the faculty of voluntary action. Under these leading powers are comprehended subordinate modes of mental activity, known as faculties of the Intellect, or of the Sensibility, or of the Will. We have at present to do only with those of the Intellect. § II.--ANALYSIS OF INTELLECTUAL POWERS. _Sense-perception._--Observing closely the intellectual operations of the mind, we find a large class of them relating to objects within the sphere of sense, external objects, as perceived by the senses. The mind, through the medium of sense, takes direct cognizance of these objects. This class of operations we may call Sense-perception, and the faculty thus employed, in distinction from other leading divisions of the intellectual powers, we may call _Sense_, or the _Presentative_ faculty. Its distinctive office is to _present_ to the mind, through the senses, objects external, sensible, as now and here present. _The Representative Power._--But the mind not only receives impressions of external objects, as present, and acting on the organs of sense; it has also the faculty of _conceiving_ of them in their _absence_, and _representing_ them to itself. This faculty, as distinguished from the receptive power, or sense, we may call the _Representative_ Power. _Mental Reproduction, and mental Recognition as distinguished._--This power operates in various forms. There may be the simple representation of the absent object, without reference to the act of former perception, as when I think of the Strasburg tower, without recalling any particular instance of its perception. Or there may be such recalling of the former act and instance of perception. The thought of the tower, as it presents itself to my mind, may stand connected definitely with the idea of the time, and place, and attending circumstances in which, on some occasion, I saw that object. It is then _recognized_ as the object which was seen at such or such a time. The former is an instance of _mental reproduction_ simply--the latter, of _mental recognition_. We have in common language but one name for the two--although the term mare strictly belongs only to the latter--and that is, _Memory_. _Representation of the Ideal in distinction from the Actual._--Again, unlike either of these, there may be a conception and representation of the object, not at all as it is in reality, and as it was perceived, but varied in essential particulars, to suit our own taste and fancy--a tower not of ordinary stone, but of some rare and costly marble--not of ordinary height, but reaching to the skies, etc., etc. In the former cases we conceived only of the _actual_, now of the _ideal_. This faculty is called _Imagination_. Both are forms of the representative power, not _presenting_, but only _representing_ objects. _Conception of the Abstract._--_The Discursive or Reflective Power._--In the cases thus far described we have conceived of some sensible object, considered in and by itself, capable of being represented to thought. We may, however, conceive not of an object in itself considered, but of the properties and relations of objects in the abstract. Thus we compare and class together those objects which we perceive to possess certain properties in common; as books bound in cloth, or in leather, octavos, or duodecimos. In so doing we exercise the faculty of _generalization_, which involves comparison, and also what is usually termed abstraction. Or we may reverse the process, and instead of classing together objects possessing certain elements in common, we may analyze a complex idea, or a comprehensive term, in order to derive from it whatever is specifically included in it. Thus from the general proposition, "All men are mortal," inasmuch as the term "all men" includes Socrates, I infer that Socrates is mortal. The process last named is called _reasoning_. In either case, both in the synthetic and the analytic process now described, we are dealing not with the _concrete_ but the _abstract_. The properties and relations of things, rather than things themselves, are the objects of our thoughts. Still they are the properties and relations primarily of _sensible objects_, and of these objects as _conceived_, and not as presented to sense. To distinguish this class of conceptions from those previously considered, and also from that presently to be noticed, we may designate this power of the mind as the _Discursive_ or _Reflective_ Power. Its results are notions of the _understanding_ rather than impressions of sense, or ideas of reason. _Conceptions not furnished by Sense._--_The Intuitive Power._--We have considered thus far those intellectual operations which fall within three leading departments of mental activity;--the Presentative, Representative, and Discursive Powers. These operations all have reference directly or indirectly to _sensible_ objects. The first regards them as _present_; the second represents them as _absent_; the third considers their properties and relations in the _abstract_. But the mind has also the faculty of forming ideas and conceptions not furnished by the senses. It departs from the sphere of sense, and deals with the _super_-sensible, with those primary ideas and first principles presupposed in all knowledge of the sensible. Such are the ideas of time, space, cause, the right, the beautiful. These are suggested by the objects of sense, but not directly derived from nor given by those objects. They are _ideas_ of _reason_, rather than notions of understanding. They are awakened in the mind on occasions of sensible perception, but not conveyed to the mind through the senses, as in perception, nor directly derived from the object as in the case of the representative and discursive powers. This faculty we may call the _Originative_ or _Intuitive_ Power, in distinction from those previously considered. _Summary of leading Divisions._--We have then four grand divisions of intellectual operations, under which the several specific faculties arrange themselves; viz., the Presentative, the Representative, the Discursive, and the Originative or Intuitive faculty. The first has to do with sensible objects, as present; the second has to do with the same class of objects as absent; the third deals with their abstract properties and relations; and the fourth has to do not with the sensible, in any form, but with the super-sensible. I believe the faculties of the intellect, in pure thinking, may all be reduced to those forms now specified, under these four leading divisions. RESULTS OF THE PRECEDING ANALYSIS IN A TABULAR FORM: POWERS OF THE INTELLECT. I. PRESENTATIVE, _Perception_. II. REPRESENTATIVE, {1. Of the Actual, _Memory_. {2. Of the Ideal, _Imagination_. III. REFLECTIVE, {1. Synthetic, _Generalization_. {2. Analytic, _Reasoning_. IV. INTUITIVE, _Original Conception_. § III.--HISTORICAL SKETCH--VARIOUS DIVISIONS OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES. _The earlier Division._--The general division of the powers of the mind, for a long time prevalent among the earlier modern philosophers, was into _two_ chief departments, known under different names, but including under the one what we now term the intellect, under the other what we designate as the sensibilities and the will, which were not then, as now, distinguished from each other in the general division, but thrown into one department. Under the first of these departments, they included the thinking and reasoning powers, the strictly intellectual part of our nature; under the second, whatever brings the mind into action--the impelling and controlling power or principle--the affections, emotions, desires, volitions, etc. The names given to these two divisions varied with different writers, but the difference was chiefly in the name, the principle of division being the same. By some authors they were designated as the _contemplative_ and the _active_ powers, by others _cognitive_ and _motive_. The latter was the nomenclature proposed by Hobbes. Others again adopted the terms understanding and will, by which to mark the two divisions; Locke, Reid, some of the French philosophers, and, in our own country, Edwards, followed this division. Stewart designates them, the one class as the _intellectual_, and the other as the _active_ and _moral_ powers. Brown objects to this phraseology on the ground that the intellectual powers are no less active than the other. He divides the mental powers or states primarily into what he calls _external_ and _internal_ affections of the mind, comprehending under the former all those mental states which are immediately preceded by and connected with the presence of some external object; under the latter, those states which are not thus immediately preceded. The latter class he divides into intellectual states and emotions, a division corresponding essentially to those of the authors previously mentioned, the emotions of Brown comprehending essentially the powers which others had termed motive, or active and moral. _Prevalence of this Method._--This twofold division of the mental powers, under different names, as now stated, has been the one generally prevalent until a comparatively recent date. It may doubtless be traced, as Sir William Hamilton suggests, to a distinction made by Aristotle, into _cognitive_ and _appetent_ powers. _The more recent Method._--The threefold division of the mental faculties very early came into use among philosophical and theological writers in this country, and is now very generally adopted by the more recent European writers of note, especially in France and Germany. According to this division the various affections and emotions constitute a department by themselves, distinct from the will or the voluntary principle. There are many reasons for such a distinction; they have been well stated by Professor Upham Cousin adopts and defends the threefold division, and previously still, Kant, in Germany, had distinguished the mental powers under the leading divisions of intelligence, sensibility, and desire. MENTAL PHILOSOPHY. DIVISION FIRST. THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. PRELIMINARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. CONSCIOUSNESS. _General Statement._--Before proceeding to investigate the several specific faculties of the intellect, as already classified, there are certain preliminary topics to be considered, certain mental phenomena, or mental states, involved more or less fully in all mental activity, and on that account hardly to be classed as specific faculties, yet requiring distinct consideration. Such are the mental states which we denominate as _consciousness_ and _attention_. _Definitions._--Consciousness is defined by Webster as the knowledge of sensations and mental operations, or of what passes in our own minds; by Wayland, as that condition of the mind in which it is cognizant of its own operations; by Cousin, as that function of the intelligence which gives us information of every thing which takes place in the interior of our minds; by Dr. Henry, translator of Cousin, as the being aware of the phenomena of the mind--of that which is present to the mind; by Professor Tappan, as the necessary knowledge which the mind has of its own operations. These general definitions substantially agree. The mind is aware of its own operations, its sensations, perceptions, emotions, choices, etc., and the state or act of being thus cognizant of its own phenomena we designate by the general term _Consciousness_. _Reasons for regarding Consciousness as not a distinct Faculty._--Is this, however, a distinct faculty of the mind? The mind, it is said, is always cognizant of its own operations: when it perceives, it is conscious of perceiving; when it reasons, it is conscious of reasoning; when it feels, it is conscious of feeling; and not to be conscious of any particular mental act, is not to perform that act. To have a sensation, and to be conscious of that sensation, it is said, are not two things, but one and the same, the difference being only in name. A perception is indivisible, cannot be analyzed into a fact, and the consciousness of the fact, for the perception is an act of knowing, and does not take place if it be not known to take place. This is the view taken by Sir William Hamilton, Professor Bowen, and others of high authority. It was maintained by Dr. Brown with much force as an objection to the doctrine of Reid, who had recognized consciousness as a distinct faculty. _Reasons for the opposite View._--On the other hand, the claims of this form of mental activity to be regarded as a faculty of the mind, distinct from and coördinate with the other mental powers, are admitted and maintained by writers of authority, among whom are Dr. Wayland and President Mahan. They maintain that the office of consciousness being to give us knowledge of our own mental states, and this function being quite distinct from that of any other mental faculty, the capacity or power of performing this function deserves to be regarded as itself a faculty of the mind. It is maintained also by Dr. Wayland that consciousness does not necessarily invariably accompany all mental action, but that there may be, and are, acts of which we are not at the time conscious. _Instances in proof of this Position._--In support of this position he refers to certain cases as instances of unconscious perception; as when, for example, a clock strikes within a few feet of us, while we are busily engaged, and we do not notice it, or know that it has struck, yet if questioned afterward, are conscious of an impression that we have heard it; as when also while reading aloud to another person, some thought arrests our attention, and yet by a sort of mechanical process, we continue the reading, our mind, meanwhile, wholly occupied with another subject, until presently we are startled to find that we have not the remotest conception of what we have just been reading; yet we read every word correctly, and must, it would seem, have perceived every word and letter. He refers also to the case of the short-hand writer to the House of Lords in England, who, on a certain occasion, while engaged in taking the depositions of witnesses in an important case, after many hours of continued exertion and fatigue, fell, for a few moments, into a state of entire unconsciousness, yet kept on writing down, and that with perfect accuracy, the depositions of the witness. Of the last few lines, when he came to read them, he had no recollection whatever, yet they were written as legibly and accurately as the rest. From these and similar cases it is inferred that there may be mental activity of which we have at the time no consciousness. _The Evidence examined._--With regard to the cases now cited, it seems to me that they do not fully establish the point in question. For in the first place, it may be doubted whether they really involve any mental activity--whether they are properly mental acts, and not merely mechanical or automatic. It is well known that many processes which ordinarily require more or less attention may, when they have become perfectly familiar, be carried on for a time almost without thought. The senses, so far as they are required to act at all, seem in such cases to act mechanically or automatically, somewhat as a wheel when once set in motion continues for a time to revolve by its own momentum, after the propelling force is withdrawn. The mental activity exerted in such cases, if there be any, is so very slight as to escape attention, and we are unconscious of it simply because there was little or nothing to be conscious of. We have an illustration of this in the act of walking, while busily engaged in conversation with a friend, or in our own meditations. We are not conscious of any mental act preceding or directing each step and movement of the limbs, but having at the outset decided what direction to take, the mind gives itself to other matters, while the process of walking goes on by a sort of mechanical impulse, until presently something occurs to arrest our attention and direct it to the physical movement in which we are engaged. The muscular contractions tend to follow each other in a certain regular succession; a certain law of association seems to govern their movements, as is seen in the rapid motions of the pianist, the flute player, the type distributor, and in many similar cases; and so long as the regular succession, and accustomed order of movement, is undisturbed, the process goes on with little or no interference of the intellectual principle. In such cases the act can hardly be said to involve mental activity. _A further Question._--But aside from this, even admitting that the acts under consideration are such as to involve mental activity, what evidence is there, it may still be asked, that there was at the moment no consciousness of that activity? That there was _subsequently_ no consciousness of it, does not make it certain that there was none at the time. The subsequent consciousness of an act is neither more nor less than memory, and is not properly consciousness at all. Consciousness takes cognizance, properly speaking, only of the present, not of the past. The absence of subsequent consciousness is simply absence of memory, and this may be accounted for in other ways than by supposing a total absence of consciousness in the first instance. Whatever mental activity was really exerted by the short-hand reporter in the case referred to, he was, doubtless, conscious of exerting at the time, but it may have been so slight, and the mind so little impressed by it, in the state of physical weariness and prostration, that it was not remembered a moment afterward. We remember not every thing that occurs, but only that to which we attend, and which makes some impression upon us. _The true Explanation._--In the other cases referred to, the explanation now given is still more evidently the true one. What is called an absence of consciousness is simply an absence of attention at the time, and consequently of memory afterward. The person who is reading aloud, in the case supposed, is mentally occupied with something else than the sentiments of the author, is not attending, in a word, to what he is reading, and hence does not, a moment after, remember what it was that he read. So of the striking of the clock. The sound fell upon the ear, the auditory nerve performed its office, the usual change, whatever it may be, was produced in the brain, but the process of hearing went no further; either no mental activity was awakened by that sound, or, if any, but the slightest, for the mind was otherwise occupied, in a word, did not attend to the summons of the messenger that waited at the portal, and hence there was no subsequent remembrance of the message, or at most a vague impression that something of the kind was heard. On the whole, it does not appear from the cases cited, that mental activity is ever, at the moment of its exertion, unaccompanied with consciousness. _Summary of the Argument._--I hesitate then to assign consciousness a place among the faculties of the mind, as distinct from and coördinate with them, for the following reasons: 1. It seems to me to be involved in all mental acts. We cannot, as it has been already said, suppose an act of perception, for example, or of sensation, without the consciousness of that perception or sensation. Whatever the mind does, it knows that it does, and the knowing is involved in and given along with the doing. Not to know that I see a book, or hear a sound, is in reality not to see and not to hear it. Not to know that I have a sensation is not to have it. But what is involved in all mental action cannot be set down by itself as a specific mental act. This were much the same as to reckon the whole among the parts. 2. Consciousness, while involved in, cannot be, either psychologically or chronologically, distinguished from the mental acts which it accompanies. The act and the consciousness of the act are inseparable in time, and they are incapable of being distinguished as distinct states of mind. We cannot break up the sensation or perception into a fact, and the consciousness of that fact. Logically we may distinguish them as different objects of thought and attention, but not psychologically as distinct acts of mind. 3. Consciousness is not under the control of the will, and is not therefore a faculty of the mind. It is not a power of doing something, but an inseparable concomitant of all doing. What has been termed by some writers voluntary consciousness, or _reflection_, is simply attention directed to our own mental acts. _Distinction of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness._--Others again distinguish between consciousness and self-consciousness; but all consciousness, properly so called, involves the idea of self or the subjective element. To know that I have a sensation is virtually to know myself as having it. _Cases of abnormal or suspended Consciousness._--In certain disordered and abnormal states of the nervous organism, the knowledge of what has transpired previously to that state seems to be lost; and then again, on passing out of that condition into the normal one, all knowledge of what took place while in the abnormal state is wanting. Instances are on record where persons have alternated in this manner from one to the other condition, carrying on, as it were, by turns, two separate and independent lines of mental activity. An instance of this nature is related by Dr. Wayland. It has been usual to speak of these as instances of disordered or suspended consciousness. Strictly speaking, however, it is not consciousness but memory that is in such cases disordered. It is not the knowledge of the present, but of the _past_, that is disturbed and deficient. While the abnormal state continues, the individual is conscious of what transpires in that state. When it ceases, the patient wakes as from a reverie or dream, and retains no _recollection_ of any thing that took place during its continuance. It is the _memory_ that fails, and not the consciousness. We are never _conscious_ of the _past_. _Objects of Consciousness._--1. Consciousness deals only with reality. We are conscious only of that which is, not of that which may be. The poet is conscious indeed of his fiction, the builder of air-castles is conscious of his reverie, but the fiction and the reverie, regarded as mental acts, are _realities_, and it is only as mental acts that they are objects of consciousness. 2. Not every thing real is an object of consciousness, but only that which is _present_ and in _immediate relation_ to us. The destruction of Pompeii, and the existence of an Antarctic continent are realities, but not objects of my consciousness. 3. Primarily and directly we are conscious of our own mental states and operations; of whatever passes over the field of our mental vision, our thoughts, feelings, actions, physical sensations, moral sentiments and purposes: mediately and indirectly we are conscious of whatever, through the medium of sense, comes into direct relation to us. For instance, when I put forth my hand and it strikes this table, I am conscious not only of the movement, and the effort to move, but of the sensation of resistance also, and indirectly I may be said to be conscious not of the resistance only, but of something--to wit, the table--as resisting. This something I know, as really as I know the sensation and the fact of resistance. To this immediate perception of the external world in direct relation to our physical organism, Sir W. Hamilton would extend the sphere of consciousness. Usually, however, the term has been employed in a more restricted sense--to denote the knowledge of what passes within, rather than of what lies without the mind itself. CHAPTER II. ATTENTION. _General Character of this Power._--It has not been usual to treat of Attention as one of the distinct faculties of the mind. It is doubtless a power which the mind possesses, but like the power of conception, or more generally the power of thought and mental apprehension, it is involved in and underlies the exercise of all the specific mental faculties. Nor is it, like consciousness, confined to a distinct department of knowledge, viz., the knowledge of our own mental states. It is subsidiary to the other mental powers, rather than a faculty of original and independent knowledge. It originates nothing--teaches nothing--puts us in possession of no new truth--has no distinct field and province of its own. And yet without it other faculties would be of little avail. _Definitions._--If it were necessary to define a term so well understood, we might describe it as the power which the mind has of directing its thoughts, purposely and voluntarily, to some one object, to the exclusion of others. It is described by Dr. Wayland as a sort of voluntary consciousness, a condition of mind in which our consciousness is excited and directed by an act of the will. He speaks also of an involuntary attention, a state of mind in which our thoughts, without effort or purpose of our own, are engrossed by objects of an exciting nature. It may be questioned, perhaps, whether this is properly attention. Only in so far as attention is a voluntary act is it properly a power of the mind, and only in so far does it differ from the simple activity of thought, or of consciousness. The latter is always involuntary, and in this it differs from attention. _Instances in Illustration._--It can hardly be necessary to illustrate by example the nature of a faculty so constantly in exercise. Every one perceives, for instance, the difference between the careless perusal of an author--the eye passing listlessly over the pages, and the mind receiving little or no impression from its statements--and the reading of the same volume with fixed and careful attention, every word observed, every sentiment weighed, and the whole mental energy directed to the subject in hand. We pass, in the streets of a crowded and busy city, many persons whom we do not stop to observe, and of whose appearance we could afterward give no account whatever. Presently, some one in the crowd attracts our notice. We observe his appearance, we watch his movements, we notice his peculiarities of dress, gait, manners, etc., and are able afterward to describe them with some degree of minuteness. In the former case we perceive, but do not attend. In the latter, we attend, in order to perceive. _Sometimes the sole Occupation._--Attention seems to be at times the sole occupation of the mind for the moment, as when we have heard some sound that attracts our notice, and are listening for its repetition. In this case the other faculties are for the time held in suspense, and we are, as we say, all attention. The posture naturally assumed in such a case is that indicated by the etymology of the word, and may have suggested its use to designate this faculty, viz., attention--ad-tendo--a _bending to_, a _stretching toward_, the object of interest. _Analysis of the mental Process in Attention._--If we closely analyze the process of our minds in the exercise of this power, we shall find, I think, that it consists chiefly in this--the arresting and detaining the thoughts, excluding thus the exercise of other forms of mental activity, in consequence of which the mind is left free to direct its whole energy to the one object in view. The process may be compared to the operation of the detent in machinery, which checks the wheels that are in rapid motion, and gives opportunity for any desired change; while it may be compared, as regards the result of its action, to the helm that directs the motion of the ship, now this way, now that, as the helmsman wills. _Objects of Attention._--The objects of attention are of course as various as the objects of thought. Like consciousness, it may confine itself to our own mental states; and, unlike consciousness, it may comprehend also the entire range of objective reality. In the former case it is more commonly designated by the term reflection, in the latter, observation. _Importance of Habits of Attention._--The importance of habits of attention, of the due exercise and development of this faculty of the mind, is too obvious to require special comment. The power of controlling one's own mental activity, of directing it at will into whatever channels the occasion may demand, of excluding for this purpose all other and irrelevant ideas, and concentrating the energies of the mind on the one object of thought before it, is a power of the highest value, an attainment worth any effort, and which, in the different degrees in which it is possessed, goes far to make the difference between one mind and another in the realm of thought and intellectual greatness. While the attention is divided and the mind distracted among a variety of objects, it can apprehend nothing clearly and definitely; the rays are not brought to a focus, and the mental eye, instead of a clear and well-defined image, perceives nothing but a shadowy and confused outline. The mind while in this state acts to little purpose. It is shorn of its strength. The power of commanding the attention and concentrating the mental energy upon a given object, is, however, a power not easily acquired nor always possessed. The difficulty of the attainment is hardly less than its importance. It can be made only by earnest effort, resolute purpose, diligent culture and training. There must be strength of will to take command of the mental faculties, and make them subservient to its purpose. There must be determination to succeed, and a wise discipline and exercise of the mind with reference to the end in view. This faculty, like every other, requires education in order to its due development. _Whether certain Acts are performed without any Degree of Attention._--It is a question somewhat discussed among philosophers, whether those acts which from habit we have learned to perform with great facility, and, as we say, almost without thinking, are strictly voluntary; whether they do or do not involve an exercise of attention. Every one is aware of the facility acquired by practice in many manual and mechanical operations, as well as in those more properly intellectual. A musician sits at his instrument, scarcely conscious of what he is doing, his attention absorbed, it may be, with some engrossing topic of thought or conversation, while his fingers wander _ad libitum_ among the keys and strike the notes of some familiar tune. Is there in such a case a special act of volition and attention preceding each movement of the fingers as they glide over the keys? And in more rapid playing, even when the attention is in general directed to the act performed, _i. e._, the execution of the piece, is there still a special act of attention to the production of each note as they follow each other with almost inconceivable rapidity? Dr. Stahl, Dr. Reid and others, especially many able physiologists, have answered this question in the negative, pronouncing the acts in question to be merely automatic and mechanical, and not properly involving any activity of mind. The mind, they would say, forms the general purpose to execute the given piece, but the particular movements and muscular contractions requisite to produce the individual notes, are, for the most part, involuntary, the result of habit, not of special attention or volition. _The opposite View._--On the other hand, Mr. Stewart maintains that all such acts, however easily and rapidly performed, do involve mental activity, some degree of attention, some special volition to produce them, although we may not be able to recollect those volitions afterward. The different steps of the process are, by the association of ideas, so connected, that they present themselves successively to the mind without any effort to recall them, without any hesitation or reflection on our part, and with a rapidity proportioned to our experience. The attention and the volition are instantaneous, and therefore not subsequently recollected. Still, he would say, the fact that we do not recollect them is no proof that we did not exercise them. The musician can, at will, perform the piece so slowly, as to be able to observe and recall the special act of attention to each note, and of volition to produce it. The difference in the two cases lies in the rapidity of the movement, not in the nature of the operation. _Objection to this View._--The only objection to this view, of much weight, is the extreme rapidity of mental action, which this view supposes. An accomplished speaker will pronounce, it is said, from two to four hundred words, or from one to two thousand letters in a minute, and each letter requires a distinct contraction of the muscles, many of them, indeed, several contractions. Shall we suppose then so many thousand acts of attention and volition in a minute? _Reply to this Objection._--To this it may be replied that the very objection carries with it its own answer, since if it be true that the muscles of the body move with such wonderful rapidity, it is surely not incredible that the mind should be at least equally rapid in its movements with the body. To show that both mind and body often do act with great rapidity, Mr. Stewart cites the case of the equilibrist, who balances himself on the slack rope, and at the same time balances a number of rods or balls upon his chin, his position every instant changing, according to the accidental and ever varying motions of the several objects whose equilibrium he is to preserve, which motions he must therefore constantly and closely watch. Now to do this, the closest attention, both of the eye and of the mind, to each of these instantaneous movements, is absolutely necessary, since the movements do not follow each other in any regular order, as do the notes of the musician, and cannot, therefore, by any association of ideas, be linked together, or laid up in the mind. _The Question undecided._--The question is a curious one, and with the arguments on either side, as now presented, I leave it to the reader's individual judgment and decision. Mr. Stewart is doubtless correct as to the rapidity of mental and muscular action. At the same time it seems to me _there are_ actions, whatever may be true in the cases supposed, that are purely _automatic_ and _mechanical_. _Whether we attend to more than one thing at once._--Analogous to the question already discussed, is the inquiry whether the mind ever attends or can attend to more than one thing at one and the same time; as when I read an author, my attention meanwhile being directed to some other object than the train of thought presented by the page before me, so that at the end of a paragraph or a chapter I find that I have no idea of what I have been reading, and yet I have followed with the eye, and perhaps pronounced aloud, every word and line of the entire passage. To do this must have required some attention. Have I then the power of attending to two things at once? So, when the musician carelessly strikes up a familiar air while engaged in animated conversation, and when the equilibrist balances both his own body upon the rope, and also a number of bodies upon different parts of his body, each movement of each requiring constant and instant attention, the same question arises. _Opinion of Mr. Stewart._--Mr. Stewart, in accordance with the view already expressed of the rapidity of the mind's action, maintains that we do not under any circumstances attend at one and the same time to two objects of thought, but that the mind passes with such rapidity from one to another object in the cases supposed, that we are unconscious of the transition, and seem to ourselves to be attending to both objects at once. _Illustration of this View._--An illustration of this we find in the case of vision. Only one point of the surface of any external object is at any one instant in the direct line of vision, yet so rapidly does the eye pass from point to point, that we seem to perceive at a glance the whole surface. _How it is possible to compare different Objects._--It may be asked, How is it that we are able to compare one object with another, if we are unable to bring both before the mind at once? If, while I am thinking of A, I have no longer any thought whatever of B, how is it possible ever to bring together A and B before the mind so as to compare them? The answer I conceive to be this, that the mind passes with such rapidity from the one to the other object, as to produce the same effect that would be produced were both objects actually before it at the same instant. The transition is not usually a matter of consciousness; yet if any one will observe closely the action of his own mind in the exercise of comparison, he will detect the passing of his thoughts back and forth from one object to the other many times before the conclusion is reached, and the comparison is complete. CHAPTER III. CONCEPTION. _Character of this Power._--This term has been employed in various senses by different writers. It does not denote properly a distinct faculty of the mind. I conceive of a thing when I make it a distinct object of thought, when I apprehend it, when I construe it to myself as a possible thing, and as being thus and thus. This form of mental activity enters more or less into all our mental operations; it is involved in perception, memory, imagination, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, etc. For this reason it is not to be ranked as one of, and correlate with, these several specific faculties. Like the power of thought, and hardly even more limited than that, it underlies all the special faculties, and is essential to them all. Such at least is the ordinary acceptation of the term; and when we employ it to denote some specific form of mental activity, we employ it in a sense aside from its usual and established meaning. _Objects of Conception._--I conceive of an absent object of sight, as, _e. g._, the appearance of an absent friend, or of a foreign city, of the march of an army, or the eruption of a volcano. I conceive also of a mathematical truth, or a problem in astronomy. My conceptions are not limited to former perceptions or sensations, nor even to objects of sensible perception. They are not limited to material and sensible objects. They embrace the past and the future, the actual and the ideal, the sensible and the super-sensible. _Conceptions neither true nor false._--Our conceptions are neither true nor false, in themselves considered; they become so only when attended with some exercise of judgment or of belief. We conceive of a mountain of gold or of glass, and this simple conception has nothing to do with truth or error. When we conceive of it, however, as actually existing, and in this or that place, or when we simply judge that such a mountain is somewhere to be found, then such judgment or belief is either true or false; but it is no longer simple conception. _Not always Possibilities; nor possible Things always conceivable._--Our conceptions are not always possibilities. We can conceive of some things not within the limits of possibility. On the other hand, not every thing possible even is conceivable. Existence without beginning or end is possible, but it is not in the power of the human mind, strictly speaking, to conceive of such a thing. I know that Deity thus exists. I understand what is meant by such a proposition, and I believe it. But I cannot construe it to myself as a definite intellection, an apprehension, as I can conceive of the existence of a city or a continent, or of the truth of a mathematical proposition. The same may be said of the ideas of the infinite and the absolute. They are not properly within the limits of thought, of apprehension, to the human mind. Thought in its very nature imposes a limitation on the object which is thought of--fathoms it--passes around it with its measuring line--apprehends it: only so far as this is done is the thing actually thought; only so far as it can be done is the thing really thinkable. But the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute, in their very nature unlimited, cannot be shut up thus within the narrow lines of human thought. They are inconceivable. They are not, however, contradictory to thought. They may be true; they are true and real, though we cannot properly conceive them. _The Inconceivable becomes Impossible, when._--Not every thing then which is inconceivable is impossible, nor, on the other hand, is every thing which is impossible inconceivable. The inconceivable is impossible, at least it can be known to be so, only when it is either self-contradictory--as that a thing should be and not be at the same time--that a part is equal to the whole, etc.; or when it is contradictory of the laws of thought, as that two straight lines should enclose a space--that an event may occur without a cause--that space is not necessary to the existence of matter, or time to the succession of events. These things are unthinkable but they are more than that, contradictory of the established laws of thought; and they are impossible, because thus contradictory, and not merely because inconceivable. It is hardly true, as is sometimes affirmed, and as Dr. Wayland has stated, that our conceptions are the limits of possibility. _Mr. Stewart's use of the term Conception._--Mr. Stewart has employed the term Conception in a somewhat peculiar manner, and has assigned it a definite place among the faculties of the mind. He uses it to denote "that power of the mind which enables it to form a notion of an absent object of perception, or of a sensation which we have formerly felt." It is the office of this faculty "to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived." In this respect it differs from imagination, which gives not an exact transcript, but one more or less altered or modified, combining our conceptions so as to form new results. It differs from memory in that it involves no idea of time, no recognition of the thing conceived, as a thing formerly perceived. _Objection to this use._--This use of the term is, on some accounts, objectionable. It is certainly not the ordinary sense of the word, but a departure from established usage. It is an arbitrary limitation of a word to denote a part only instead of the whole of that which it properly signifies There is no reason, in the nature of the case, why the notion we form of an absent object of perception, or of a sensation, should be called a conception, rather than our notion of an abstract truth, a proposition in morals, or a mathematical problem. I am not aware that any special importance attaches to the former more than to the latter class of conceptions. Indeed, Sir W. Hamilton limits the term to the latter. But this again is not in accordance with established usage. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES PART FIRST THE PRESENTATIVE POWER SENSE OR PERCEPTION BY THE SENSES. § I.--GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. _This Faculty the Foundation of our Knowledge._--Of the cognitive powers of the mind, the first to be noticed, according to the analysis and distribution already given, is the Presentative Power--the power of cognizing external objects through the senses. This claims our first attention, inasmuch as it lies, chronologically at least, at the foundation of all our cognitive powers, and in truth, of our entire mental activity. We can, perhaps, conceive of a being so constituted as to be independent of sense, and yet possess mental activity; and we can even conceive such a mind as taking cognizance, in some mysterious way, of objects external to itself. But not such a being is man--not such the nature of the human mind. Its activity is first awakened through sense; from sense it derives its knowledge of the external world, of whatever lies without and beyond the charmed circle of self; and whether _all_ our knowledge is, strictly speaking, derived from sense, or not--a question so much disputed, and which we will not here stay to discuss--there can be no doubt that the activity of sense, and the knowledge thus acquired, is at least the beginning and foundation of all our mental acquisitions. We are constantly receiving impressions from without through the senses. In this way the mind is first awakened to activity, and from this source we derive our knowledge of the external world. _General Character of this Faculty._--In its general character the faculty now under consideration, as the name indicates, is _presentative_ and _intuitive_. It presents rather than represents objects, and what the mind thus perceives it perceives intuitively, rather than as the result of reflection. The knowledge which it gives is _immediate_ knowledge, the knowledge of that which is now and here present, in time and space. _Involves a twofold Element._--Looking more closely at the character of this faculty, we find it to involve a twofold element, which we cannot better indicate than by the terms _subjective_ and _objective_. There is, in the first place, the knowledge or consciousness of our own sentient organism as affected, and there is also the knowledge of something external to, and independent of the mind itself, or the me, as the producing cause of this affection of the organism. We know, by one and the same act, ourselves as affected, and the existence and presence of an external something affecting us. This presupposes, of course, the distinct independent existence of the _me_ and the _not-me_--of ourselves as thinking and sentient beings, and of objects external to ourselves, and material,--a distinction which lies at the foundation of all sense-perception. All perception by the senses involves, and presupposes, the existence of a sentient being capable of perceiving, and of an object capable of being perceived. It supposes, also, such a relation between the two, that the former is affected by the presence of the latter. From this results perception in its twofold aspect, or the knowledge, on the part of the sentient mind, at once of itself as affected, and of the object as affecting it. According as one or the other of these elements is more directly the object of attention, so the subjective and the objective character predominate in the act of perception. If the former, then we think chiefly of the me as affected, and are scarcely conscious of the external object as the source or the producing cause; if the latter, the reverse is true. § II--ANALYSIS OF THE PERCEPTIVE PROCESS. _Simple Sensation._--The nature of the presentative power may be better understood by observing closely the different steps of the process. As we come into contact with the external world, the first thing of which we are conscious, the first step in the process of cognition, is doubtless simple sensation. Something touches me, my bodily organism is thereby affected, and I am conscious, at once, of a certain feeling or sensation. I do not know as yet what has produced the sensation, or whether any thing produced it. I do not as yet recognize it as the result of an affection of the bodily organism, or even as pertaining to that organism in distinction from the spiritual principle. I am conscious only of a certain feeling. This is simple _sensation_--a purely subjective process. _Recognition of it as such._--We do not, however, stop here. The mind is at once aroused by the occurrence of the phenomenon supposed, the attention is directed to it. I cognize it as sensation, as feeling. If it be not the first instance of the kind in my experience, I distinguish it from other sensations which I have felt. _Distribution of it to the Parts affected._--More than this; I am conscious not only of the given sensation, but of its being an affection of my bodily organism, and of this or that part of the organism; I distinguish the body as the seat of the sensation, and this or that part of the body as the part affected. The organism as thus affected becomes itself an object of thought as distinct from the thinking mind that animates and pervades it. It becomes to me an externality, having extension and parts out of and distinct from each other. As thus viewed, and brought now for the first time under the eye of consciousness, it becomes known to me as the _non-ego_, still connected, however, by sensation with the ego, the sentient principle and as thus viewed, I become aware that the sensation which I feel is an affection of that organism, and of a certain portion of it, as the hand, or the foot. This cognizance of the sensation as such, as pertaining to the organism, and to this or that part of the same, and the consequent cognizance of the organism as such, as distinct from the sentient mind, and as thus and thus affected, is no longer simple _sensation_, it is _perception_. _Cognition of something external to the Organism itself._--This is the most simple form of immediate perception. The process does not, however, necessarily stop here. I am conscious not only of this or that part of my organism as affected, but of something external to the organism itself, in contact with and affecting it. This organism with which I find myself connected, the seat of sensation, the object of perception, is capable of self-movement in obedience to my volitions. I am conscious of the effort to move my person, and conscious also of being resisted in those movements by something external in contact with my organism. This yet unknown something becomes now the object of attention and perception--this new phenomenon--resistance, something resisting. To perceive that I am resisted, is to perceive that something resists, and to perceive this is to perceive the object itself which offers such resistance. I may not know every thing pertaining to it, what sort of thing it may be, but I know this respecting it, that it exists, that it is external to my organism, that it resists my movements. Thus the outer world becomes directly an object of perception--passes under the immediate eye of consciousness. _In what Sense these several Steps distinct._--In the preceding analysis, in order more clearly to illustrate the nature of the process, we have regarded the act of perception as broken into several distinct parts, or steps of progress. This, however, is not strictly correct as regards the psychology of the matter. Logically, we may distinguish the simple sensation as mere feeling, from the reference of the same to this or that part of the bodily organism as affected, and each of these again, from the cognizance of the external object, which by contact or resistance produces the sensation. Chronologically, the act is one and indivisible. The sensation and the perception are synchronous. We cannot separate the act of sense-perception into the consciousness of a sensation, the consciousness of the bodily organism as affected by that sensation, and the consciousness of an external something as the proximate cause of that affection. To experience a sensation, is to experience it as here or there in the sentient organism, and to perceive contact or resistance, is to perceive something in contact or resisting. There may, however, be sensation without cognizance of the external producing cause. _Restricted Sense of the term Perception._--According to the view now advanced, perception is _immediate_; not a matter of inference, not a roundabout reflective process. It is a cognizance direct and intuitive of the bodily organization as thus and thus affected, and of an external something in correlation with it, affecting and limiting that organism in its movements. Usually, however, a wider range has been given to the term, and the faculty thereby denoted. It has been made to comprehend any mental process by which we refer a specific sensation to something external as its producing cause. It is thus employed by Reid and Stewart, and such has been in fact the prevalent use of the term. According to this, when we experience the sensation of fragrance, and refer that sensation to the presence of a rose, or the sensation of sound, and refer it to the stroke of a bell, or a passing carriage, we exercise the faculty of perception. Evidently, however, our knowledge in these cases is merely a matter of inference, of judgment, not of immediate direct perception, not in fact of perception at all. All that we properly perceive in such a case, all that we are directly conscious of is the fragrance or the sound. That these are produced by the rose and the bell is not perceived, but only _conceived_, inferred--known, if at all, only by the aid of previous experience. _Sensation as distinguished from Perception._--According to the view now presented, _sensation_, as distinguished from _perception_, is the _simple feeling_ which results from a certain affection of the organism. It is known to us merely as feeling. Perception takes cognizance of the feeling _as an affection of the organism_, and also of the organism as thus affected, and consequently as external to the me, extended, having parts, etc. It apprehends also objects external to the organism itself limiting and affecting its movements. Sensation is the indispensable condition of perception. If there were no sensation, there would be no perception. The one does not precede, however, and the other follow in order of time, but the one being given, the other is given along with it. The two do not, however, coexist in equal strength, but in the relation, as stated by Hamilton, of _inverse ratio_; that is, beyond a certain point, the stronger the sensation, the weaker the perception, and _vice versâ_. _Sensation as an Affection of the Mind._--It has been common to speak of sensation as lying wholly in the mind. Primarily, however, it is an affection of the nervous organism, and through that organism, as thus affected, an impression is made on the mind. If it were not for the mind present with the organism, and susceptible of impression from it, and thus cognizant of changes in it, the same changes might be produced in the organism as now, but we should be entirely unconscious of and insensible to them. In certain states of the system this actually happens, as in sound sleep, the magnetic state, the state produced by certain medicinal agents as ether, chloroform, opium, and the intoxicating drugs of the East. In those cases, the connection between the mind and the nervous organism seems to be in some manner interrupted or suspended, and consequently there is for the time no sensation. The nerves may be irritated, divided even, and still no pain is felt. It is not true, however, that the sensation is wholly in the mind. It is in the living animated organism, as pervaded by the mind or spiritual principle, mysteriously present in every part of that organism, and cognizant of its changes; and neither the body alone, nor the mind alone, can be said to possess this faculty, but the two united in that complex mysterious unity which constitutes our present being. § III.--ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE QUALITIES OF BODIES. _Difference of Qualities._--The qualities of bodies as known to us through sensation and perception are many and various. On examination, a difference strikes us as existing among these qualities, which admits of being made the basis of classification. Some of them are qualities which strike us at once as essential to the very existence of matter, at least in our notion of it, so that we cannot in thought divest it of these qualities, and still retain our conception of matter. Others are not of this nature. Extension, divisibility, size, figure, situation, and some others, are of the former class. If matter exists at all, it must, according to our own conceptions, possess these qualities. We cannot think them away from it, and leave matter still existing. But we can conceive of matter as destitute of color, flavor, savor, heat, cold, weight, sound, hardness, etc. These are contingent and accidental properties not necessary to its existence. _How named and distinguished._--Philosophers have called the former class _primary_, the latter _secondary_ qualities. The former are known _à priori_, the latter by experience. The former are known as qualities, in themselves, the latter only through the affections of our senses. The primary qualities then have these characteristics: 1. They are essential to the very existence of matter, at least in our conception. 2. They are to be known _à priori_. 3. They are known as such, or in themselves. The secondary, on the contrary, are: 1. Accidental, not essential to the notion of matter. 2. To be known only by experience. 3. To be learned only through the affection of the senses. _Further Division of secondary Qualities._--A further division, however, is capable of being made. The secondary qualities, as now defined, comprise, in reality, two classes. There are some, which, while known to us only through the senses, have still an existence as qualities of external objects, independent of our senses. As such they are objects of direct perception. Others, again, are known, not as qualities of bodies, but only as affections of sense, not as objective, but only as subjective, not as perceptions, but only as sensations. Thus I distinguish the smell, the taste, and the color of an orange. What I distinguish, however, is after all only certain sensations, certain affections of my own organism. What may be the peculiar properties or qualities in the object itself which are the exciting cause of these sensations in me, I know not. My perception does not extend to them at all. It is quite otherwise with the qualities of weight, hardness, compressibility, fluidity, elasticity, and others of that class. They are objects of perception, and not of sensation merely. _These Classes, how distinguished._--The class first named, are qualities of bodies as related to other bodies. The other class are qualities of bodies as related only to our nervous organization. The former all relate to bodies as occupying and moving in _space_, and come under the category of _resistance_. The latter relate to bodies only as capable of producing certain sensations in us. We may call the former _mechanical_, the latter _physiological_. _Connection of Sensation with the external Object._--From long habit of connecting the sensation with the external body which produces it, we find it difficult to persuade ourselves that taste and smell are mere affections of our senses, or that color is really and simply an affection of the optic nerve of the beholder, and that what is actually perceived in these instances is not properly a quality of the external object. A little reflection, however, will convince us that all which comes to our knowledge in these cases, all that we are properly cognizant of, is the affection of our own nervous organism, and that whatever may be the nature of the qualities in the object which are the producing cause of these sensations in us, they are to us occult and wholly unknown. _Power of producing these Sensations._--It is not to be denied, of course, that there is in external objects the power of producing these sensations in us, under given circumstances; but to what that power is owing, in what peculiarity of constitution or condition it consists, we know not. We have but one name, moreover, for the power of producing, and the effect produced. Thus the color, taste, smell, etc., of an object may denote either the sensation in us, or the unknown property of matter by virtue of which the sensation is awakened. It is only in the sense last mentioned, that the qualities under consideration may properly be called qualities of bodies. _Enumeration of the several Qualities as now classed._--According to the classification now made, the qualities of bodies may be thus enumerated. I. _Primary._--Extension, divisibility, size, density, figure, absolute incompressibility, mobility, situation. II. _Secondary._--A. _Objective_, or _mechanical_--as heavy or light, hard or soft, firm or fluid, rough or smooth, compressible or incompressible, resilient or irresilient, and any other qualities of this general nature resulting from attraction, repulsion, etc. B. _Subjective_ or _physiological_--as color, sound, flavor, savor, temperature, tactual sensation, and certain other affections of the senses of this nature. § IV.--ORGANS OF SENSE.--ANALYSIS OF THEIR SEVERAL FUNCTIONS _Number of the Senses._--The different senses are usually reckoned as five in number. They may all be regarded, however, as modifications of one general sense, that of touch--or, in other words, the susceptibility of the nervous system to be excited by foreign substances brought into contact with it. This is the essential condition of sensation in any case, and the several senses, so called, are but so many variations in the mode of manifesting this excitability. There is a reason, nevertheless, for assigning five of these modifications and no more, and that is, that the anatomical structure indicates either a distinct organ, as the ear, the eye, etc., or at least a distinct branch of the nervous apparatus, as in the case of smell and taste, while the whole nervous expansion as spread out over the surface of the body contributes to the general sense of touch. _The Senses related to each other.--Distinct Office of each._--It is evident enough that these several senses sustain a certain relation to each other. They are so many and no more, not merely by accident; not merely because so many could find room in the bodily organization; not merely because it might be convenient to have so many. Let us look at the office performed by each, and we shall see that while each has its distinct function, not interchangeable with that of any other, it is a function more or less necessary to the animal economy. Remembering that the design and use of the several senses is to put us in possession of data, by means of which, directly or indirectly, we may gain correct knowledge of the external world, let us suppose the inquiry to be raised, What senses ought man to have for this purpose? What does he need, the material universe remaining what it is? _Function of the Sense of Touch._--Things exist about us in space, having certain properties and relations. We need a sense then, first and chiefly, that shall acquaint us with objects thus existing, taking cognizance of what lies immediately about us in space. This we have in the general sense of touch, making us acquainted with certain objective or mechanical qualities of external objects. _This Sense, how limited._--This, however, avails only for objects within a short distance, and capable of being brought into contact. It operates also synthetically and slowly, part after part of the object being given as we are brought into contact with different portions of it successively until the process is so far complete that, from the ensemble of these different parts, our understanding can construct the whole. _Possibility of a Sense that shall meet these Limitations._--We can conceive of a sense that should differ in both these respects--that should take cognizance of distant objects, not capable perhaps of being brought into contact--and that should also operate analytically, or work from a given whole to the parts, and not from the parts to a whole, thus giving us possession at once of a complete object or series of objects. Such a sense, it is easy to see, would possess decided advantages, and in connection with the one already considered, would seem to bring within the sphere of our cognizance almost the complete range of external nature. This we have, and this exactly, in the sense of _vision_. It takes in objects at a distance, and takes in the whole at a glance. _This new Sense still limited._--This new sense, however convenient and useful as it is, has evidently its limitations. It is available only through a given medium, the light. Strictly speaking, it is the light only that we see, and not the distant object; that is known indirectly by means of the light that variously modified, travels from it to the eye. When this fails, as it does during several hours of the twenty-four, or when it is intercepted by objects coming between and shutting out the forms on which the eye seeks in vain to rest, then our knowledge from this source is cut off. _Still another Sense desirable._--Under these circumstances, might it not be well, were there given an additional sense, of the same general nature and design, but operating through a different medium, sure to be present wherever animal life exists, so that even in the darkness of the night, or the gloom of the dungeon, we might still have means of knowing something of the surrounding objects. And what of this medium, or avenue of sense, were of such a nature as to be capable of modification, and control, to some extent, on our part, and at our pleasure, so as to form a means of voluntary communication with our fellow-beings. Would not such an arrangement be of great service? Exactly these things are wanted; exactly these wants are met, and these objects accomplished, by a new sense answering to these conditions--the sense of _hearing_--the cognizance of sound. This we produce when we please by the spoken word, the vocal utterance, whether of speech, or musical note, or inarticulate cry, varied as we please, high, low, loud, soft--a complete alphabet of expression, conveying thus by signals, at once rapid and significant, the varying moods and phases of our inner life to other beings that had else been strangers, for the most part, to the thoughts and feelings which agitate our bosoms. _Senses for another Class of Qualities._--The senses, as thus far analyzed, have reference primarily to the number magnitude, and distance of objects as occupying space--to quantities rather than qualities. Were it possible now to add to these a sense, or senses that should take cognizance of quality, as well as existence and quantity--that should detect, to some extent at least, the _chemical_ properties of bodies as connected especially with the functions of respiration and nutrition--the list of senses would seem to be complete. This addition is made, this knowledge given, in the senses of _smell_ and _taste_. _Possibility of additional Senses._--To those already named, other senses might doubtless have been added by the Creator, which would have revealed, it may be, properties of matter of which we have now no conception. It is not to be supposed that we know every thing respecting the nature and qualities of even the most familiar and common objects. Many things there may be, actual, real, in the world about us, of which we know nothing, because they come not within the range of any of our senses. But all that is essential to life, and happiness, and highest welfare is doubtless imparted by the present arrangement; and when closely studied, no one of these senses will be found superfluous, no one overlapping the province of another, but working each its specific end, and all in harmony. _The proper Office of Psychology in respect to the Senses._--It is the province of the anatomist and the physiologist to explain the mechanical structure of the several organs of sense, and their value as parts of the physical system. The psychologist has to do with them only as instruments of the mind, and it is for him to show their connection and proper office as such. This has been attempted in the preceding analysis. _The kind of Knowledge afforded by the Senses._--It is to be noticed, in addition, that with the exception of the tactual sense, and possibly of sight, these senses give us no direct, immediate knowledge of external things. They simply furnish data, signs, intimations, by the help of which the understanding forms its conclusions of the world with out. They are the _receiving_ agents of the mind. This is, in fact, the chief office of sense, to receive through its various avenues the materials from which the understanding shall frame conceptions of things without; to convey, as it were, a series of telegraphic despatches along those curious and slender filaments that compose the nervous organization, by means of which the soul, keeping her hidden seat and chamber within, may receive communication from the distant provinces of her empire. These signs the understanding interprets; and in so far as this is the true nature of the process, it is not a process of immediate and proper perception. I hear, for example, a noise. All that I really perceive in this case is the sensation of sound. I refer it, however, to an external cause, to a carriage passing in the street. I specify, moreover, the kind of carriage, perhaps a coach, or a wagon with iron axles. I have observed, have learned by experience, that sounds of this nature are produced in this way, that is, by carriages passing, and by such carriages. Hence I judge that the sound which I now hear is produced in the same way. It is an _inference_, a conception merely. All that sense does is to receive and transmit the sign, which the understanding interprets by the aid of former experience. And the same is true of the other senses, with the exceptions named. _Not therefore of little Value._--We are not to infer, however, that these senses are on this account of no special value or importance to us. They do precisely what is needed. They put us in possession of just the data wanted in order to the necessary information concerning external things. It is only the theorist who undervalues the senses, and he only in his closet. No man, in the full possession of his reason, and his right mind, can go forth into this fair and goodly world, and not thank God for every one of those senses--sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Their true and full value, however, we never learn till we come to be deprived of their use; till with Milton we exclaim, "Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn." § V.--AMOUNT OF INFORMATION DERIVED FROM THE RESPECTIVE SENSES _A further Question as to one Class of the Senses._--The relations and specific functions of the several senses have been already described. Some further questions arise, however, respecting the precise amount and kind of information afforded by that class of the senses which; as we have seen, relates to the spatial properties of bodies, in distinction from the chemical, viz.: hearing, sight, and touch. _What is given in Hearing._--And first, as to the sense of _hearing_. What is it precisely that we hear? When we listen to a sound, we speak of hearing the object that produces the sound; we say, I hear a bell, a bird, a gun, etc. Strictly speaking, we do not hear the object, but only the sound. It is not the bell or the bird that we hear, but the vibration of the air produced by bell and bird. This has been already illustrated by reference to a carriage passing in the street. It is only by experience, aided by other senses, that we learn to refer the sound to its producing cause. _Hearing not properly Perception._--Is hearing then a sensation merely, or is it a perception? If by perception we mean a direct knowledge of the external object--which is the proper sense of the word--hearing certainly is not perception. It gives us no such immediate knowledge. What we perceive in hearing is merely the sensation of sound. It may be doubted whether by this sense alone we should ever get the idea that what we hear is any thing external to ourselves. _Affords the means of Judging._--As it is, however, we judge, not only of the existence and nature, but of the distance and direction of the external object whence the sound proceeds. We learn to do this with great correctness, and with great facility. No sooner do we hear a sound, in most instances, than we form an opinion at once, from what direction it comes, and what produces it; nor are we often mistaken in our judgment. The faculty of judging by the ear as to the direction of the sound, and the nature of the object producing it, may be cultivated by care and practice to a remarkable degree of accuracy. Napoleon was seldom mistaken as to the direction and distance of a cannonade. It is said that the Indian of the north-western prairies by applying his ear to the ground, will detect the approach of a body of cavalry at a distance beyond the reach of vision, and distinguish their tread from that of a herd of buffaloes. _Number of Sounds._--The number of sounds which the ear can distinguish is almost without limit. There are, it is said, five hundred distinct tones which an ear of usual accuracy can recognize, and each of these tones admits of five hundred variations of loudness, giving, in all, two hundred and fifty thousand different sounds. _Power of Sound over the Mind._--The power of sound to affect the mind, and especially the feelings, is too well known to require specific statement. The note of an instrument, the tone of a human voice, the wild warbling of a bird, the tinkling of a bell, the variations of speech and of song, from the high and shrill to the low and heavy intonation, from the quick and impetuous to the slow and plaintive movement, these simple varieties of tone affect powerfully the heart, and find their way at once and irresistibly to the feelings. Hence the power of music over even the uncultivated mind; hence too in no small degree the power of the skilful orator over the feelings of his audience. It is not merely, nor so much, the thing said, in many cases, as the way of saying it, that touches and sways the assembled multitude. Tones and sounds have a natural meaning. They are the natural language of the heart. They express emotion, and hence awaken emotions in others. _The Question as to Sight._--Turning now from the sense of _hearing_ to that of _sight_, the question arises, What is it precisely that we perceive by the eye? When we fix the eye upon any object, more or less remote, what is it, strictly speaking, that we see, extension and figure, or only color? Is it by vision that we learn primarily the distance of objects and their locality? These are points requiring investigation. _Does Sight give Extension and Figure._--As to the first of these questions, whether extension and figure are objects of direct visual perception. No doubt they are associated in our minds with the act of vision, so that the moment we see an object we obtain an idea of it as extended, and of such and such dimensions and figure. The question is, whether it is really through the sense of sight that we obtain this idea, or in some other way. Had we no other means of information, would sight alone give us this? When we first open our eyes on external objects, do we receive the idea of extension and figure, or only of color? The fact that as matters are, we cannot in our experience separate the notion of some surface extension from the sensation of color, is not decisive of these questions. We cannot, as Dr. Brown observes, separate the color from the convexity and magnitude of an oak before us, but this does not prove that convexity and magnitude are objects of immediate and original perception. If every surface in nature had been convex, suggests the same writer, we should probably have found the same difficulty in attempting to conceive of color as separate from convexity, that we now find in attempting to conceive of it as separate from length and breadth. As it is, however, our sensation of color has not always been associated with convexity, while it has been always associated with surface extension. Hence it is, he maintains, that we seem to perceive, by the eye, the length, and breadth, and objects along with their color. _Argument from the Affection of a Portion of the Retina._--The fact that in vision a certain portion of the retina in length and breadth is actually affected by the light falling on it, has been supposed by some to be conclusive of the fact that we perceive the length and breadth of the external object by the eye. This does not necessarily follow. As Dr. Brown contends, it is equally true that a certain part of the organ of smell is affected by odors, and a certain part of the auditory nerve is affected by sounds, yet we are not conscious of any perception of extension by either of these organs; we neither smell nor hear the length, and breadth, and magnitude of objects; nor is there any reason to suppose that the particular portion of the retina affected has any thing to do with the original sensation of sight. _Amount of the preceding Arguments._--These arguments however, do not strike me as conclusive. They merely show the _possibility_ that extension and figure _may be_ acquired rather than original perceptions. They do not amount to positive evidence that they _are_ so. _An Argument to the Contrary._--On the other hand, there is one consideration of a positive character, which to most minds will be likely to outweigh the merely negative arguments already adduced. Color is a property of light, and light comes to us reflected from objects occupying space; we perceive it only as we perceive it spread over and reflected from some surface. Extension, then, surface expansion of the reflecting object, is the indispensable condition of the visibility of light itself, and so of color, as reflected from the object. Now it is difficult to persuade ourselves that what we know to be an essential condition of the perception of color, and what we seem to perceive along with the color, and cannot, even in thought, wholly separate from it, is not, after all, really perceived by the eye. _Argument from recent Discoveries._--Indeed, recent discoveries in science seem to vindicate that not only surface extension, but trinal extension, or _solidity_, may be an object of direct perception by the eye. I refer to the researches of Wheatstone, in binocular vision, which go to show, that in consequence of the difference of the images formed upon the right and the left eye, as occupying different positions with reference to the object seen, we are enabled by the eye to cognize the solidity as well as the extension of objects. The difference of figure in the two images gives us this. That such is the case is shown by an instrument, the stereoscope, so constructed as to present separately the image as formed on each eye, which, when separately viewed, appear as mere plane surfaces, but when viewed together, the right image with the right eye, and the left one with the left eye, at the same time, present no longer the appearance of plane surfaces, but the two images combine to form one distinct figure, and that a solid, having length, breadth, thickness, and standing out with all the semblance of the real object. It is hardly necessary to say that if extension is an object of perception by the eye, so also is figure, which is merely the _limitation_ of extension in different directions. _Second Question--Does Sight give Distance?_--Is it also by vision that we obtain the idea of the _distance_ of objects and their externality? Does vision alone give the idea that what we see is numerically distinct from ourselves, and that it occupies this or that particular locality? So it would seem, judging from the impression left upon the mind in the act of vision. We seem to see the object as here or there, external, more or less distant in space. We distinguish it from ourselves. _The negative View._--This is denied by some. All that we see, they contend, is merely the light coming from the object, and from the variations and modifications which this exhibits we learn to judge by experience of the distance and locality of the object. It is a matter of judgment and not of perception. We have learned to associate the two things, the visual appearance and the distance. _Argument in the Negative._--In proof of this they adduce the fact that we are frequently mistaken in our estimate of the distance of objects. If there be more or fewer intervening objects than usual, if the atmosphere be more or less clear than usual, or any like circumstance affords a variation from our ordinary experience, we are misled as to the distance of the object. Hence we mistake the distance of ships at sea, or of objects on a prairie or a desert, the width of rivers, the height of steeples, towers, etc. _Further Argument in the Negative._--It is further contended that facts show that the impressions of sight alone, uncorrected by experience, do not convey the idea of distance at all, but that what we see seems to be in connection with the eye itself, until we learn the contrary by the aid of other senses. This, it is said, is the experience of persons who have been operated upon for cataract, particularly of a patient whose case is described by Cheselden, and who thought every thing which he saw, touched his eyes. It is said also to have been the same with Caspar Hauser, when first liberated from the long confinement of his dungeon, and permitted to look out upon the external world. The goodly landscape seemed to him to be a group of figures, drawn upon the window. _Force of this Argument._--This, however, is not inconsistent with the perception of externality by vision, since even what seems to be in contact with the eye, nay, what is known to be so, may still be known as external. Contact implies externality. It is very much to be doubted, moreover, whether the cases now referred to, coincide with the usual experience of those who are learning to see. The little child seems to recognize the externality and remoteness from his own person of the objects which attract his attention, as soon as he learns to observe surrounding objects at all, and, though he may not judge correctly of their relative distance from himself, never seems by his movements to suppose that they are in contact with his eye or with any part of his person. The young of animals, also, as soon as they are born, seem to perceive by the eye, the externality, the direction, and the distance of objects, and govern their movements accordingly. It is not, in these cases, a matter of experience, but of direct perception. These facts render it doubtful, to say the least, whether the common impression--that which in spite of all arguments to the contrary, is, and always will be made upon the mind in the act of vision, viz., that we see objects as external, as having locality, and as more or less remote from us--is not, after all, the correct impression. _Learning to judge of Distance not inconsistent with this View._--- Nor does it conflict with this view that we learn to judge of the true distance of objects, and are often deceived in regard to it. The _measurement_ of distance, the more or less of it, is of course a matter of experience, a thing to be learned by practice. It does not follow, however, that we may not by the eye directly, and at first, perceive an object to be external, and removed from us, in other words distant, though we may not know at first _how_ distant. The rays of light that come to us from this external object, may give us direct perception of the object as external, as extended, and as occupying apparently a given locality in space more or less remote, while at the same time it may be left to other senses and to experience to determine how great that distance is. _Questions as to Touch._--Passing now from the sense of sight to that of _touch_, we find similar questions discussed among philosophers respecting the precise information afforded by this sense. Does touch give us immediate perception of externality, extension, form, hardness, softness, etc., including the various mechanical properties of bodies? To this sense it has been common to ascribe these faculties of perception. They are so attributed by Reid, Upham, Wayland, and, I believe, by modern writers generally, with the exception of Brown and Hamilton. _Probability of another Source of Information._--It may be questioned, I think, whether, as regards some of these qualities at least, it is not rather the consciousness of resistance to muscular effort, than the sense of touch, properly speaking, that is the informing source. So, for example, as to hardness; the application of an external body lightly to the hand awakens the sense of touch, but conveys no idea of hardness. Let the same object be allowed to rest with gradually increasing weight upon the hand until it becomes painful, and we get the idea of weight, gravitation, but not of the hardness or impenetrability of the object. It is only when our muscular effort to move or penetrate the external body is met and resisted by the same, that we learn the impenetrability of the opposing body. _Other Perceptions attributable to the same Source._--So with regard to externality, extension, and form. When an external object, a cube, for example, or an ivory ball, is placed on the palm of the hand, sensation is awakened, but is that sensation necessarily accompanied with the perception of the external object as such? Does the mere tactual sensation, in the first instance, and of itself, inform us that there is something external to ourselves, that what we feel is not a part of our own organism? We are conscious of a change in the sensation of the part affected, but are we immediately conscious that this change is produced by something external? Let there be given, however, the consciousness of resistance to our muscular movements, as when the cube or ball, for instance, prevents the effort to close the hand, or when our locomotion is impeded by the presence of some obstacle, and will not the same resistance inform us of the extension of the resisting body, and so of its form and figure? We learn whereabout in space this resistance occurs, and where it ceases. The tactual sensation would indeed very soon come to our aid in this cognition, and serve as a guiding sense, even in the absence of the former. The question is, whether this alone would, in the first instance, give us such cognitions? _Our first Ideas of Extension, how derived._--We have had reference in this discussion only to the qualities of _external_ bodies. There can be little question that our _first_ ideas of extension are derived from our own sentient organism, the consciousness of sensations in different parts of the body, distinct from, and out of each other, thus affording the knowledge of an extended sentient organization. The idea of externality, or outness, and extension, thus acquired, the transition is easy from the perception of our own bodies as possessing these qualities, to the cognizance of the same qualities in external objects. § VI.--CREDIBILITY OF OUR SENSATIONS AND PERCEPTIONS. _Denied by some._--There have always been those who were disposed to call in question the testimony of the senses. Such were the Eleatics and the Skeptics among the Greek philosophers, and there have not been wanting among the moderns minds of acuteness and ingenuity that have followed in the same path. While admitting the _phenomena_ of sense, the _appearance_ of things as being so and so, they have called in question the corresponding objective reality. Things appear to me to be thus and thus--such and such impressions are made on my senses--that I cannot deny; but how do I know that the reality corresponds to my impressions, or, in fact, that there is any reality? How know we our senses to be reliable? What evidence have we that they do not habitually deceive us? _Evidence demanded._--It were perhaps a sufficient answer to this question to reply, What _evidence_ have we, or can we have, that they _do_ deceive us? In the absence of all evidence to the contrary, is it not more reasonable to suppose that our perceptions correspond to realities, than that they are without foundation, uncaused, or caused by something not at all answering to the apparent object of perception; more reasonable to suppose that there is a real table or book answering to my perception of one, than that I have the perception while there is no such reality? It remains with those, then, who question and deny the validity of sense-perception, to show reasons for such denial. And this becomes the more imperative on them, inasmuch as they contradict the common belief and universal opinion of mankind--nay, what, in spite of all their arguments, is still, by their own confession, their own practical conviction and belief. _Evidence impossible._--But whence is this evidence to come? Where is it to be sought? How are we to prove that sense deceives us, except by arguments drawn from sense? And if sense is not reliable in the first instance, why rely upon it in the second, to prove that it is not reliable? If the senses do habitually deceive us, manifestly it can never be shown that they do. And, even if this could be shown, it would be impossible to find any thing better to rely upon in their stead. We have these guides or none. We have these instruments of observation provided for the voyage of life. We may pronounce them worthless and throw them into the sea, but we cannot replace them. _Inconsistent and contradictory Testimony of Sense._--But it may be replied that the testimony of sense is often inconsistent with itself, and contradictory of itself. What is sweet to one is sour and bitter to another. What seems a round tower in the distance becomes a square one as you approach; and the straight stick that you hold in your hand appears crooked when thrust into the water. There is in reality, however, no contradiction or inconsistency in the cases supposed. The change of circumstances accounts in every instance for the change of appearance. In the case of the stick, for example, the different density of the water accounts for the refraction of the rays of light that pass through it, and this accounts for the crooked appearance of the stick that is only partially submerged. So in the other cases; it is no contradiction that an object which appears round at a distance of ten miles, should appear square at the distance of so many rods--or that the taste of two persons should not agree as to the savor of a given object. _Deceptions of Sense._--It may be further objected that in certain states of the physical organism, sensations are experienced which seem to be of external origin, but are really produced by internal changes; and that in such cases we have the same perceptions, see the same objects, hear the same things, that we should if there were a corresponding external reality, while nevertheless there is no such reality, and it can be proved that there is none. If this may happen in some cases, why not in others, or in all? _Reply._--I reply, the simple fact, that in the case supposed the deception can be detected and proved, shows the difference between that and ordinary perception. If the senses were not habitually reliable, we could not detect the mistake in this particular instance. If all coin were counterfeit, how could we detect a counterfeit coin? We know, moreover, how to account for the mistake in the case before us. It occurs, by the supposition, only in a certain state of the organism, that is, only in a diseased, abnormal condition of the system. The exception proves the rule. _Distinction of direct and indirect Testimony._--A distinction is to be made, in the discussion of this subject, between the direct and indirect testimony of the senses, between that which is strictly and properly perception, and that which is only conception, judgment, inference. What I really perceive, for example, in the case of the distant tower, or the stick partially under water, is only a given appearance; I _infer_ from that appearance that the tower is round and the stick crooked, and in that inference I am mistaken. My judgment is at fault here, and not my senses. They testified truly and correctly. They gave the real appearance, and this was all they could give, all they ever give. This has been well stated by Dr. Reid, and, long before him, the same ground was taken, in reply to the same objection, by Aristotle and also by Epicurus. _Direct Perception gives what._--In regard to direct and immediate perception, the case is different. Here the testimony is positive to the existence of the object. When something resists my voluntary movement, I am conscious of that resistance, conscious of something external and resisting. I cannot deny the fact of that consciousness. I may, however, deny the correctness, the truthfulness of what consciousness affirms. To do this, however, is to put an end to all reasoning on the subject, for, when we give up consciousness as no longer reliable, there is nothing left to fall back upon. If any one chooses to leap from this precipice, we can only say _finis_. § VII.--HISTORICAL SKETCH. I. OF DIFFERENT DIVISIONS OF THE QUALITIES OF BODIES. _The Greek Philosophers._--The distinction of the qualities of bodies into two classes, differing in important respects, is by no means a modern one. It was recognized by some of the earlier Greek philosophers, who held that the sweet, bitter, hot, cold, etc., are rather affections of our own senses than proper qualities of matter, having independent existence. Subsequently the view was adopted by Protagoras, and by the Cyrenean and Epicurean schools. Plato held it, and especially and very fully, Aristotle, who calls the qualities to which we have referred, and which are usually denominated secondary, _affective_ qualities, because they have the power of affecting the senses, while the qualities now usually termed primary, as extension, figure, motion, number, etc., he regards as not properly objects of sense. The former class he calls proper sensibles, the latter, common. _The Schoolmen._--The _schoolmen_ made much of this distinction, and held, with Aristotle, that the qualities now called primary, require, for their cognition, other faculties than those of sense. _Doctrine of Galileo._--_Galileo_ points out the true ground and philosophy of this distinction, and also gives the name _primary_ to the class referred to, viz., _those qualities which are necessary to our conception of body_, as for example, figure, size, place, etc., while, on the contrary, colors, tastes, etc., are not inherent in bodies, but only in us, and we can conceive of body without them. The former are real qualities of bodies, while the latter are only conceptions which give us no real knowledge of any thing external, but only of the affections of our own minds. _The Moderns._--_Descartes_ and _Locke_ merely adopted these distinctions as they found them, without essential modification. So also did _Reid_ and _Stewart_, although both included among the primary qualities some which are properly secondary, as roughness, smoothness, hardness, softness. Indeed Stewart restricted the primary qualities to those and such as those just named. _Hamilton._--No writer has so fully elaborated this matter as Sir William Hamilton, to whom we are indebted mainly for the historical facts now stated, and whose dissertations are and must ever remain an invaluable thesaurus on the philosophy of perception. So complete and elaborate is his classification of the qualities of matter, that I shall be pardoned for giving a synopsis of its principal points in this connection. _Hamilton's Scheme--General Divisions._--He divides the qualities of bodies into three classes, which he calls primary, secundo-primary, and secondary. The primary are thought as essential to the very notion of matter, and may be deduced _à priori_, the bare notion of matter being given; while the secundo-primary and the secondary, being accidental and contingent, must be deduced _à posteriori_, learned by experience. His deduction of the primary qualities is as follows: _Primary Qualities._--We can conceive of body only as, I. Occupying space; II. Contained in space. Space is a necessary form of thought, but we are not obliged to conceive of space as occupied, that is, to conceive of matter. When conceived it must be under the conditions now named. I. The property of occupying space is _Simple Solidity_, which implies, _a._ Trinal extension, or length, breadth, and thickness; _b._ Impenetrability, or the property of not being reduced to non-extension. Trinal extension involves, 1. Number, or Divisibility; 2. Size, including Density; 3. Shape. II. The attribute of being contained in space, affords the notion, 1. Of Mobility; 2. Of Position. The essential and necessary constituents then of our notion of matter are, 1. Extension (comprising under it, 2. Divisibility; 3. Size; 4. Density; 5. Figure); 6. Ultimate Incompressibility; 7. Mobility; 8. Situation. These are the primary qualities, products, in a sort, of the understanding, developing themselves with rigid necessity out of the given notion of substance occupying space. _Secundo-Primary Qualities._--The secundo-primary are contingent modifications of the primary, all have relation to space, and motion in space, _all are contained under the category of resistance_, or _pressure_, all are learned or included as results of experience, all have both an objective and subjective phase, being at once qualities of matter, and also affections of our senses. Considered as to the _sources_ of resistance, there is, I. That of _Co-attraction_, under the forms of _a_, Gravity, _b_, Cohesion; II. That of Repulsion; III. Inertia; all which are capable of minute subdivision. Thus from cohesion follow the hard and soft, firm and fluid, tough and brittle, rigid and flexible, rough and smooth, etc., etc. From repulsion are derived compressible and incompressible, resilient and irresilient. _Secondary Qualities._--The secondary qualities are, as apprehended by us, not properly attributes of body at all, but only affections of our nervous organism. They belong to bodies only so far as these are furnished with the power of exciting our nervous organism to the specific action thus designated. To this class belong color, sound, flavor, savor, tactile sensation, feeling of heat, electricity, etc. Such also are titillation, sneezing, shuddering, and the various sensations, pleasurable or painful, resulting from the action of external stimuli. _These Classes further distinguished._--Of the qualities thus derived, the primary are known immediately in themselves, the secondary only mediately in their effects on us, the secundo-primary both immediately in themselves, and mediately in their effects on us. The primary are qualities of body in relation to body simply, and to our organism as such; the secundo-primary are qualities of body in relation to our organism, not as body in general, but as body of a particular sort, viz.: propelling, resisting, cohesive; the secondary are qualities of body in relation to our organism as excitable and sentient. The primary may be roundly characterized as mathematical, the secundo-primary as mechanical, the secondary as physiological. _Reasons for retaining the twofold Division._--Such, in brief outline, are the principal points of Hamilton's classification. While following in the main the distinctions here indicated, I have preferred to retain the old division into primary and secondary, as at once more simple, and sufficiently accurate, merely dividing the secondary into two classes, the mechanical (secundo-primary of Hamilton), and physiological. We are thus enabled, not merely to retain a division and nomenclature which have antiquity and authority in their favor, and are well-nigh universally received, but we avoid the almost barbarous terminology of Sir William's classification--while, at the same time, we indicate with sufficient precision the important distinction between the so-called secundo-primary and secondary qualities. II. OF DIFFERENT THEORIES OF PERCEPTION. _Realists and Idealists._--There are two leading theories, quite distinct from each other, which have widely prevailed, and divided the thinking world, as to the philosophy of perception. The one maintains that in perception we have _direct cognizance_ of a real external world. This is the view taken in the preceding pages, and now generally held by psychologists in this country, and to some extent in Europe But for a long period, the prevalent, and in fact, until the time of Reid in Scotland, and Kant in Germany, the almost universally-received opinion was the reverse of this--that in perception, as in any and all other mental acts, the mind is conscious only of its own ideas, cognizant of itself and its own states only, incapable, in fact, of knowing any thing external to itself. Those who hold the former view are termed _Realists_, the latter _Idealists_. _Further division of the latter._--The latter, however, are of two classes. The _Absolute Idealists_ hold that the notion we have of external things is purely subjective, having no external counterpart, no corresponding outward reality. In distinction from this the greater part maintain that while we are cognizant, directly and strictly, of nothing beyond our own minds, nevertheless there is an external reality corresponding to the idea in our minds, and which that idea represents. Hence they have been designated _Representative Idealists_, or, as Sir William Hamilton terms them, Cosmothetic Idealists. _Further Distinction._--Of these latter, again, some hold the idea which we have of an external world to be merely a state or modification of the mind itself; others regard it as a sort of intermediate connecting link between mind and matter. The former may be called egoistic, and the latter non-egoistic. _Summary of Classes._--We have then these three great classes--the _Natural Realists_, the _Absolute Idealists_, and the _Representative Idealists_ comprising the Egoistic and Non-Egoistic divisions. _Distinguished Writers of the different Classes._--On the roll of absolute idealism are names of no small distinction: Berkley and Hume, in England, Fichte and Hegel, in Germany, are of the number; while among the representative idealists one finds Descartes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Locke, in fine, the greater number of philosophic writers from Descartes onward to the time of Reid. Subsequently even, we find a writer of no less repute than Dr. Brown assuming, as the basis of his philosophy of perception, the exploded theory of representative idealism, under the egoistic form. Of natural realists since the time of Reid, Sir W. Hamilton is the most distinguished. _Origin of Representative Idealism._--The doctrine of representative perception doubtless originated in the difficulty of conceiving how a purely spiritual existence, the human mind, can, by any possibility, take cognizance of, or be affected by, a purely material substance, the external world. The soul seated in its presence-chamber, the brain, can cognize nothing beyond and without, for nothing can get except where it is present. It must be, then, said the philosophers, that in order to the mind's perceiving any thing of that which lies beyond and without its own immediate locality, there must come to the mind from that outer world certain little images bearing some resemblance to the things without, and _representing_ to the soul that external world. These images--more refined than matter, less spiritual than mind itself, of an intermediate nature between the two--they termed ideas. _Tendency of Representative to Absolute Idealism._--It is easy to see how such a doctrine would lead almost inevitably to _absolute idealism_. If we do not in perception take cognizance directly of matter external, but only of certain images or ideas in our own minds, then how do we know that these images _correctly represent_ the external reality, which we have never cognized, and never shall? How do we know, in fact, that there _is_ any such external reality? What evidence have we, in a word, of the existence of any thing beyond and without our own minds? This was the actual result to which Berkley and Hume drove the then prevalent philosophy of Europe, as to a legitimate and inevitable result. _Relation of Dr. Reid to this Controversy._--To Dr. Reid belongs the credit of rescuing philosophy from this dangerous extreme, by showing the utter falsity of the ideal theory. He took the ground that the existence of any such representative images in the mind is wholly without proof, nay more, is inconceivable; that while we can conceive of an image of form or figure, we cannot conceive of an image of sound, or of taste or smell. The hypothesis is wholly without foundation. But even if it were conceivable and established by sufficient evidence, still it would explain nothing as to the manner in which the mind perceives external objects. It relieves no difficulty. If the representative image be itself material, how can the mind take cognizance of it? If not material, how can it represent matter, and how can the mind know that it does represent correctly the external object? _State of the Matter since Reid._--Since the time of Dr. Reid, this theory of representative perception, at least in this non-egoistic form, has been for the most part abandoned, and philosophers have been content to take the ground indicated by consciousness, and the common sense of mankind, that in perception we take direct cognizance of the external object. _Position of Hamilton._--It remained for Sir W. Hamilton to complete the work which Dr. Reid began, by showing that the representative theory, in its finer or egoistic form, as held by Dr. Brown and others, is equally untenable or unsound; that it makes little difference whether we regard the image or idea, which we take to represent the external object, as something distinct from the mind itself, or whether we view it as a mere modification or state of the mind, so long as we make any thing of the sort the direct object of perception instead of the real external thing. Idealism is the result in either case, and philosophical skepticism the goal. In place of any and all such views, Hamilton maintains, with great power and earnestness, the doctrine of natural realism--that in perception we are cognizant immediately and directly of the external object. As no other writer has so fully elaborated this department of science, it may be of service to present in this connection the chief points of his theory. _Chief Points of Hamilton's Theory of Perception._--All perception is immediate cognition; we perceive only what we apprehend as now and here existent; and hence what we perceive is either in our own organism, viewed as material, extended, etc., or else is in immediate correlation to it. The organism is, in perception, viewed as not-me; in sensation, as of the me. _What is given in Perception proper._--What we apprehend in perception proper is: 1. The primary qualities of body as pertaining to our own organism; 2. The secundo-primary qualities of bodies in correlation to it. (See Hamilton's division of qualities of bodies, as above.) _Primary Qualities of external Objects, how known._--The primary qualities of things external to our organism we do not perceive immediately, but only infer, from the effects produced on us by them. Neither in perception nor sensation do we apprehend immediately, or in itself, the external cause of our affection or sensation. That is always unknown to consciousness, known only by inference or conjecture. _External Existence, how learned._--The existence of the world without is apprehended not in a perception of the primary qualities of things external, but of the secundo-primary--_i. e._, in the consciousness that our movements are resisted by something external to our organism. This involves the consciousness of something external, resisting. The two things are conjunctly apprehended. _This presupposes what._--This experience presupposes the notion of space, and motion in space. These are inherent, instinctive native elements of thought, and it is idle to inquire how we come by them. Every perception of sensations _out of_, and distinct from, other sensations gives occasion for conceiving the idea of space. _Outness_ involves it. _Points of Difference between this Theory and Reid's._--The system, as thus stated, differs in some respects materially from the doctrine of perception advanced by Dr. Reid, and generally adopted since his time by the English and Scotch philosophers. According to Hamilton, perception is not, as held by Reid and others, the _conception_ of an object _suggested_ by sensation, but the direct cognition of something. We do not merely _conceive_ of the object as existing, and _believe_ it to exist, we _know_ it and _perceive_ it to exist. Nor does sensation precede, and perception follow, as generally stated, but the two are, in time, conjunct, coëxistent. Nor do we perceive the secondary qualities of bodies, as such, but only _infer_ them from our sensations. Neither do we perceive distant objects through a medium, as usually held, but what we perceive is either the organism itself, as affected thus and thus, or what is directly in contact with it, as affecting and resisting it. Extension and externality, again, are not first learned by _touch_, as Reid holds, and most subsequent writers, both English and American, but in other ways; the former, by the perception of the primary qualities of our own organism, as the seat of sensations distinct from other sensations elsewhere localized; the latter, by the resistance which we experience to our own locomotive force. Finally, sensation proper is not, as with Reid and others, an affection purely of the mind, but of mind and body as complex. Its subject is as much one as the other. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. PART SECOND THE REPRESENTATIVE POWER GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. _Nature of this Power--Its various Forms._--It is in the mind's power to conceive or represent to itself an object not at the time present to the senses. This may take place in several forms. There may be the simple reproduction in thought of the absent object of sense. There may be, along with the reproduction or recurrence of the object, the _recognition_ of it as a former object of sensation or perception. There may be the reproduction of the object not as it is, or was, when formerly perceived, but with variations, the different elements arranged and combined not according to the actual and original, but according to the mind's own ideals, and at its will. This latter form of conception is what is usually termed imagination--while the general term memory, as ordinarily employed, is made to include the two former. While using the term in this general sense, we may properly distinguish, however, between mental reproduction, and mental recognition, the latter being strictly the office of memory. All these are but so many forms of the representative power. We may designate them respectively as the _reproductive_, _recognitive_, and _creative_ faculties. The mind's activity is essentially the same under each of these forms. The object is not _given_ but _thought_, not presented to sense, but _represented_ to the mind. The process is reflective rather than intuitive. It is a matter of _understanding_ rather than of _sense_ or of _reason_. It is a conception, not a perception or an intuition, and it is a simple conception of the object as it is or is conceived to be, in itself considered, and not in relation to other objects. CHAPTER I. MEMORY. § I.--MENTAL REPRODUCTION. I. NATURE OF THE PROCESS. _General Character._--As now defined, this is that form of mental activity in which the mind's former perceptions and sensations are reproduced in thought. The external objects are no longer present--the original sensations and perceptions have vanished--but by the mind's own power are reproduced to thought, giving, as it were, a representation or image of the original. _Example._--Suppose, for instance, that I have seen Strasburg minster, or the cathedral of Milan. Months, perhaps years pass away. By-and-by, in some other and remote part of the world, something reminds me of that splendid structure; I see again its imposing front, its lofty towers, its airy pinnacles and turrets. The solemn pile rises complete, as by magic, to the mind's eye, and, regardless of time or distance, the faculty of simple conception reproduces the object as it is. _Conceptions of Sound._--In like manner I form a conception, more or less distinct, of sounds once heard. The chanting of the evening service in the Church of the Madeleine at Paris, and the prolonged note of a shepherd's horn among the Alps, are instances of musical sound that frequently recur with startling distinctness to the mind. The same is to some extent true of the sensations and perceptions derived from the other senses. With more or less vividness the objects of all such sensations and perceptions are capable of being reproduced in conception. _The Conceptions not of Necessity connected with the Recollection of Self as the Percipient._--In these cases there may or may not be a connection of the object, as it lies before our minds, with our own personal history as the former percipients of that object. The time, place, circumstance, of that perception may not be distinctly before us; even the fact that we have ourselves seen, heard, felt, what we now conceive, may not, at the moment, be an object of thought. These are the elements of memory or mental recognition, and are certainly very likely to stand associated in our minds with the conception of the object itself. But not always nor of necessity is it so. There may be simple conception of the object, mental reproduction, where there is, for the time being, no recognition of any thing further. The Strasburg minster, the chanting of the choir, the note of the mountain horn, the snowy peak of Jungfrau, may stand out by themselves before the mind, abstracted from all thought of the time, the place, the circumstances in which they were originally perceived, or even from all thought of the fact that we have at some former time actually perceived these very objects. They may present themselves as pure conceptions. _Conceptions vary in some Respects._--Our conceptions vary in respect to definiteness and clearness. The objects of some of the senses are more readily and also more distinctly conceived than those of others. The sense of sight is peculiar in this respect. A visible object is more easily and more distinctly conceived than a particular sound or taste. The sense of hearing is, perhaps, next to that of sight in this respect; while the sensations of taste and smell are so seldom the objects of distinct conception, that some have even denied the power of conceiving them. Dr. Wayland maintains this view. That we do form conceptions more or less distinct of the objects both of taste and smell, as, _e. g._ of the taste of a melon, or the smell of an orange, hardly admits of question; while, at the same time, it is doubtless true that we have less occasion to reproduce in thought the objects now referred to than those of sight and hearing, that they are recalled with less facility, and also with less distinctness. _Stewart's Theory._--Dugald Stewart has ingeniously suggested that the reason why a sound or a taste is less readily conceived than an object of sight, may be that the former are single detached sensations, while visible objects are complex, presenting a series of connected points of observation, and our conception of them as a whole is the result of many single conceptions, a result to which the association of ideas largely contributes. We more readily conceive two things in connection than either of them separately. On the same principle a series of sounds in a strain of music is more readily conceived than a single detached note. _Importance of this Power._--The value of this power to the mind is inestimable. Without it, the passing moment, the impression or sensation of the instant, would be the sum total of our intellectual life, of our conscious being. The horizon of our mental vision would extend no further than our immediate present perceptions. The past would be a blank as dark and uncertain even as the future. Conception lights up the otherwise dreary waste of past existence, and reproducing the former scenes and objects, gives us mental possession of all that we have been, as well as of the present moment, and lays at our feet the objects of all former knowledge. The mind thus becomes in a measure independent of sense and the external world. What it has once seen, heard, felt, becomes its permanent acquisition, even when the original object of perception is for ever removed. I may have seen the grand and stately minster, or the snowy Alp but once in all my life, but ever after it dwells among my conceptions, and in after years, on other continents, and amid far other scenes, that vision of beauty and grandeur passes before me as an angelic vision; that succession of sweet sounds traverses again the silent chambers of the brain, with all the freshness of first reality. It is only a conception now, but who shall estimate the worth of that simple power of conception? _The Talent for Description as affected by this Power._--The following remarks of Mr. Stewart illustrate happily one of the many uses to which this power is subservient: "A talent for lively description, at least in the case of sensible objects, depends chiefly on the degree in which the describer possesses the power of conception. We may remark, even in common conversation, a striking difference among individuals in this respect. One man, in attempting to convey a notion of any object he has seen, seems to place it before him, and to paint from actual perception; another, although not deficient in a ready elocution, finds himself, in such a situation, confused and embarrassed among a number of particulars imperfectly apprehended, which crowd into his mind without any just order and connection. Nor is it merely to the accuracy of our descriptions that this power is subservient; it contributes, more than any thing else, to render them striking and expressive to others, by guiding us to a selection of such circumstances as are most prominent and characteristic; insomuch that I think it may reasonably be doubted if a person would not write a happier description of an object from the conception than from the perception of it. It has often been remarked, that the perfection of description does not consist in a minute specification of circumstances, but in a judicious selection of them and that the best rule for making the selection is to attend to the particulars that make the deepest impression on our own minds. When the object is actually before us, it is extremely difficult to compare the impressions which different circumstances produce; and the very thought of writing a description, would prevent the impressions which would otherwise take place. When we afterward conceive the object, the representation of it we form to ourselves, however lively, is merely an outline, and is made up of those circumstances which really struck us most at the moment, while others of less importance are obliterated." _Conceptions often Complex._--It is to be further remarked respecting the power now under consideration, that the notion, or conception which we form of an object, by means of this faculty, is frequently complex. The particular perceptions and sensations formerly experienced, and now represented, are combined, forming thus a notion of the object as a whole. The figure, magnitude, color, and various other properties, of any object, as, _e. g._, a table, are objects each of distinct and separate cognition, and as such are mentally reproduced, distinctly, and separately; but when thus reproduced, are combined to form the complete conception of the table, as it lies in my mind. The notion or conception of the object as a whole being thus once formed, any single perception as, _e. g._, of color, figure, etc., is afterward sufficient to recall and represent the whole. _Often passes for Perception._--It was remarked, in treating of perception, that very much which passes under that name is in reality only conception. I hear, for example, a carriage passing in the street. All that I really perceive is the sound; but that single perception recalls at once the various perceptions that have formerly been associated with it, and so there is at once reproduced in my mind the _conception_ of the passing carriage. Our conviction of the existence and reality of the object thus conceived, is hardly inferior to that produced by actual and complete perception. _Correctness of our Conceptions._--In general it may be remarked, that our conceptions are more or less adequate and correct representations of the objects to which they relate, according as they combine the reports of more or fewer different senses, respecting more or fewer different qualities, and as these reports are more or less clear and distinct. II. LAWS OF MENTAL REPRODUCTION. _Conceptions not uncaused._--It is evident that our conceptions arise not uncaused and at hap-hazard, but according to some law. There is a method about the phenomena of mental reproduction. There is a reason why any particular scene or event of former experience, any perception or sensation, is brought again to mind, when it is, and as it is, rather than some other in its place. A careful observation and study of the laws which regulate in general the succession of thought, will furnish the explanation and true philosophy of mental reproduction. _Principle of Suggestion._--Every thought which passes through the mind is directly or indirectly connected with, and suggested by something which preceded; and that something may be either a sensation, a perception, a conception, or an emotion. The precedence may be either immediate or remote. Some connection there always is between any given thought or feeling at any moment before the mind, and some preceding thought or feeling, which gives rise to, occasions, suggests, the latter. These suggestions follow certain general rules or laws, which are usually called the _laws of association_. These laws, so called, are only the different circumstances under which the suggestions take place, and are termed laws only to indicate the regularity and uniformity with which, under given circumstances given thoughts and feelings are awakened in the mind. _This the Basis of mental Reproduction._--It is to this general principle of suggestion or association that we are indebted for all mental reproduction. It is only as one idea or feeling is suggested by some other which has gone before, and with which it is in some way, and for some reason, associated in our minds, that any former thought or sensation is recalled, that any object which we have perceived or any scene through which we have passed, is mentally reproduced. It is thus that the sight of an object brings to mind occurrences connected with it in our history, that the same recalls the thing, that the words of a language bring to mind the ideas which they denote, or the characters on the musical staff, the tones which they represent. _Not a distinct Faculty._--It has been customary to speak of association of ideas as a distinct faculty of the mind. It is not properly so ranked. It is a law of the mind rather than a faculty of it--a rule or method of its action in certain cases; and the particular power of mind to which this rule applies is that form of simple conception which we term mental reproduction. _The Term Suggestion preferred by Brown._--In place of the term association, Dr. Brown would prefer the term suggestion as more correct. To speak of the association of ideas implies that they have previously coëxisted in the mind, and that the one now recalls the other in consequence of that previous coëxistence. That this is often the case is doubtless true, but it is also true that in many cases one idea suggests another with which it has not previously been associated in our minds. It is not necessary to the suggestion that there should be any prior association. An object seen _for the first time_ suggests many relative conceptions. The sight of a giant suggests the idea of a friend of diminutive stature, not because the two ideas have previously been associated, or the two objects have coëxisted, either in perception or conception, but because it is a law of the mind that one conception shall suggest another, either as similar, or as opposite, or in some other way related to it. This may be as truly a law of the mind, independent of association, as that light falling on the retina shall produce vision. It may seem mysterious that this should be so. Is it not equally mysterious that ideas which have formerly coëxisted should recall each other? The real mystery is the recurrence in any mode, and from any source, of the idea, without the recurrence of the external producing cause. For these reasons, Dr. Brown prefers the term _suggestion_ to _association_. _The Term Conception preferable to either._--As regards the activity of _the mind itself_, in the process of mental reproduction, the term conception seems to me to express more nearly the exact state of the case than either association or suggestion. An idea is _suggested to_ the mind by some external object; the mind _conceives_ the idea thus suggested. The flute which I perceive lying on the table in the room of my friend suggests at once to my mind the idea of that friend. The action of the mind in this case is simply an act of conception. All that the flute does--all that we mean when we say the flute suggests the idea of the friend--is simply to place the mind in such a state that the conception follows. Whether we speak then of the laws of _association_, laws of _suggestion_, or laws of mental _conception_, is immaterial, provided we bear in mind the real nature of the process as now defined. _Question stated._--But what are the laws of association, or suggestion, so-called--in other words, of mental conception? Under what circumstances is a given conception awakened in the mind by some preceding conception or perception? This is an important subject of inquiry, and one which has not escaped the attention of philosophers. _Primary Laws._--It has been usual to enumerate as primary laws of suggestion, the following: _resemblance_, _contrast_, _contiguity in time or place_; to which has sometimes been added _cause and effect_. There can be little doubt that these are important laws of suggestion; that given object of thought is likely to suggest to the mind that which is like itself, that which is unlike, that which is connected with itself in time and place, that of which it is the cause or the effect. Whether these principles are exhaustive, and whether they may not be reduced to some one general principle comprehensive of them all, may admit of question. _Law of Similars._--To begin with _resemblance_. It seems to be a law of our nature, that like shall remind us of like. The mountain, the forest, the river, that I see in my morning walk to-day, remind me of similar objects that were familiar to my childhood. Nor is it necessary that the resemblance should be complete. A single point of similarity is sufficient to awaken the conception of objects the most remote, and, in other respects, dissimilar. I pass in the street a person with blue eyes, or dark hair, or having some peculiarity of expression in the countenance, and am at once reminded of a very different person whom I knew years ago, or whom I met perhaps in another land; yet the two may be as unlike, except in the one point which attracts my attention, as any two persons in the world. An article of dress peculiar to the Elizabethan age, or to the court of Louis XIV. reminds us of the lordly dames and courtiers, or gallant warriors of those periods. A single feature in the landscape, perhaps a single tree, or projecting crag, on the mountain side, brings before us the picture of a scene widely different in most respects, but presenting only this one point of resemblance to the scene before us. _Not confined to Objects of Sight._--Nor is it the objects of sight alone that are suggestive of similar objects. The other senses follow the same law. Sounds suggest similar sounds; tastes, similar tastes; and along with the sounds, tastes, etc., thus recalled, are awakened conceptions of many things having no resemblance to the suggesting object, but associated in our previous perceptions with the object suggested. A certain succession of musical sounds, for example, recalls to the Swiss his native valley, and the mountains that shut it in, and brings back to his mind the scene of his childhood, and the peculiar customs of his father-land where he heard in former years that simple melody. With what a train of associations is a single name often fraught; what power of magic lies often in a single word! _Illustrations of other Laws._--Of the other principles of suggestion or association which have been named, it is not necessary to speak minutely. Their operation is obvious and indisputable. Illustrations will occur to every one. The palace of the king reminds us by contrast of the hovel of the peasant. The splendor of wealth and luxury suggests the wretchedness of poverty and want. The giant reminds us of the dwarf, and the dwarf of the giant. On the principle of contiguity in time and place, the sight of an object reminds us of events that have occurred in connection with it; the name Napoleon suggests Waterloo, and Wellington, and the marshals of the empire; St. Peter's and the Vatican suggest Raphael and his Transfiguration; a book, casually lying on my table, reminds me of the volume that formerly stood by its side on the shelf, and so carries me back to other scenes, and other days. In like manner, if it be not indeed the operation of the same principle, cause suggests the effect, and effect its cause. The wound reminds me of the instrument, and the instrument awakens the unpleasant conception of the wound which it once inflicted. _Why one Conception rather than another._--Inasmuch as any one conception may awaken in the mind a great variety of other conceptions--since a picture, for example, may recall the person whose likeness it is, or the artist who painted it, or the friend who possesses it, or the time and place in which it was sketched, or the room in which it formerly hung, or any circumstance or event connected with it--the question arises, why, in any given instance, is _one_ of these conceptions awakened in the mind rather than any _other_ in its stead? It is evident that the action of the associating principle is not uniform, sometimes one conception being awakened, sometimes another. _Secondary Laws._--In answer to this, Dr. Brown has shown that the action of these general and primary laws of suggestion, now named, is modified by a variety of circumstances, which may be called _secondary_ laws of suggestion, and which will account for the variety in question. These modifying circumstances are: 1. Continuance of attention. 2. Vividness of feeling. 3. Frequency of repetition. 4. Lapse of time. 5. Exclusiveness of association. 6. Original constitutional differences. 7. State of mind at the time. 8. State of body. 9. Professional habits. Any one of these circumstances may so modify the action of the primary laws of suggestion, that one conception shall be awakened in the mind rather than another, by that which has preceded. _Correctness of this View._--There can be little doubt as to the correctness of this view. The attention, for example, which a given object or event excites at the time of its occurrence, and the strength and liveliness of feeling which it awakened in us, have very much to do, as every one knows, with our subsequent remembrance of that object or event. So also has the frequency with which the train of thought has been repeated--a fact illustrated in the process of committing to memory. The more frequently two things come together before the mind, the more likely will it be, when one is again presented, to think of the other. In the process of learning a thing by rote, we repeat the lines over and over, until they become so associated, and linked together, that the suggestion of one recalls the whole. Frequently, however, we find it difficult to pass from one sentence to another, or from one stanza or paragraph to another, while we find no difficulty in completing the sentence or paragraph once commenced. The reason is, we have repeated each sentence or stanza by itself in the process of learning, and have not connected one with another. The last words of one sentence, and the first words of another, have not been repeatedly conjoined in the mind--have not frequently _coëxisted_. Sometimes, however, a more than usual vividness of conception will make up for the want of this frequent coëxistence. When, for any reason, as excited feeling, or extraordinary interest in what we perceive, we grasp with peculiar clearness and force the idea presented, this vividness of mental conception will, of itself, insure the remembrance of the object contemplated. A man, on trial for his life, will be likely to recollect the faces and tones of each of the different witnesses on the stand, and the different judges and advocates, even if he never sees them afterward. We all know, also, that the lapse of time weakens the impression of any object or event upon the mind, and so lessens the probability of its recurrence to the thoughts. We more readily recall places and objects seen in a recent tour, than those seen a year ago. The exclusiveness of the connection is also an important circumstance. An air of music, which I have heard played or sung only on one occasion, and by one musician only, is much more likely, when heard again, to bring to mind the former player, than if it had also been associated with other occasions and other performers. Much depends, moreover, on native differences of temperament, on the habitual joyousness, or habitual gloom, which may pervade the spirits, on the lights and shadows which passing events may cast, in quick succession, on the mind, as good or bad news, the arrival of a friend, the failure of an enterprise, a slight derangement of any of the bodily functions, or even the state of the atmosphere. All these circumstances have much to do with the question, whether one conception or another shall be awakened in the mind by any object presented to its thoughts. _These Laws distinguished as Objective and Subjective._--It will be observed that the primary laws of suggestion, so called, are such as arise from the relations which our thoughts sustain to each other, while the secondary are such as arise from the relations which they sustain to ourselves, the thinking subjects. Hence the former have been called _objective_, the latter, _subjective_ laws. _Possibility of reducing the primary Laws to one comprehensive Principle._--I have already suggested that possibly the primary laws admit of being reduced to some one general and comprehensive principle. This is a point deserving attention. Were we required to name some one principle which should comprehend these several specific laws of association, it would be that of the prior existence in the mind of the suggesting and the suggested idea. The two conceptions have, for some reason, and at some time, stood together before the mind, and hence the one recalls the other. _It seems to be a general law of thought_, _that whatever has been perceived or conceived in connection with some other object of perception or thought, is afterward suggestive of that other._ The relation may be that of part to whole, of resemblance, of contiguity, or contrast, or cause; it may be a natural or an artificial relation; whatever it is that serves as the connecting link between one thought and another, as they come before the mind at first, that will also serve as the ground of subsequent connection, when either of these thoughts shall present itself again to the mind. The one will suggest the other. _Application of this Principle to the several Laws of Suggestion._--Why is it, for example, that things contiguous in time and place suggest each other? In consequence of that contiguity they were viewed by the mind in connection with each other; as, _e. g._, the handle, and the door to which it belongs, the book, and its neighbor on the shelf. It is because Napoleon and his marshals, Wellington and Waterloo, have been presented together to the thoughts, that one now recalls the other. For the same reason the light hair and blue eyes of the person passing in the street recall the friend of former years; that peculiarity of hair and of eyes has been, in my mind, previously connected with the conception of my friend. So also a part suggests the whole with which it has been ordinarily connected, as, for example, the crystal and the watch. _Further Application of the same Principle._--On the same principle cause and effect are naturally suggestive. We have been accustomed to observe the elision of a spark in connection with the forcible collision of flint and steel and whenever we have observed the application of fire to gunpowder, certain consequences have uniformly attracted our attention; hence the one of these things awakens immediately in our minds the conception of the other, with which it has previously coëxisted. For the same reason the instrument suggests the idea of the wound, and the wound of the instrument. The sight of a rose, and the sensation of fragrance, have usually coëxisted; hence either recalls the other. The connection in this case is natural. Let us suppose a case in which it shall be arbitrary, or artificial. Suppose I happen to hold a rose in my hand, at the same moment a certain unusual noise is heard in the street, or at the moment when an eclipse of the sun becomes visible; on seeing the rose the next day I am instantly reminded of the noise, or of the eclipse, that was connected with it in my previous perception. _Application to the Law of Opposites._--On the same principle opposites also suggest each other. They sustain a certain relation to each other in our thoughts, and are in a sense necessary to each other in thought, as, _e. g._, white and black, crooked and straight, tall and short; which are _relative_ ideas, neither of which is complete by itself without the other; the one the complement of the other; each, so to speak, the extreme term of a comparison. As such they stand together before the mind, in its ordinary perceptions, and hence the one almost of necessity recalls the other. _The same Principle suggested by Dr. Brown._--The possibility of reducing the laws of association to one common principle, as now attempted, namely that of prior coëxistence in the mind, has not altogether escaped the notice of philosophers. Dr. Brown, in more than one passage, advances the idea, that on a sufficiently minute analysis "all suggestion may be found to depend on prior coëxistence, or, at least, on such immediate proximity, as is itself, very probably, a modification of coëxistence." In order to this nice reduction, however, he adds, we must take into account "the influence of emotions, and other feelings that are very different from ideas; as when an analogous object suggests an analogous object by the influence of an emotion or sentiment, which each separately may have produced before, and which is therefore common to both." As illustrative of this, he refers, among others, to cases of remote resemblance; as when, "for example, the whiteness of untrodden snow brings to our mind the innocence of an unpolluted heart; or a fine morning of spring, the cheerful freshness of youth." In such cases, he says, "though there may never have been in the mind any proximity of the very images compared, there may have been a proximity of each to an emotion of some sort, which, as common to both, might render each capable, indirectly, of suggesting the other." The same principle he applies to suggestion by contrast, as when the sight of a person with a remarkably long nose brings to mind some one whom we have seen with a nose as remarkable for brevity; the common feeling in the two cases being that of surprise or wonder at the peculiarity of this feature of the countenance. _Theory of Mahan._--Mahan, in his Intellectual Philosophy, carries out the suggestion of Dr. Brown, and makes the emotion awakened in common by two or more objects, the sole law, or ground of association. One object recalls an other only by means of the feeling or state of mind common to both. _This View questionable._--That this is the philosophy of the suggesting principle in those cases in which two objects have not previously coëxisted in the mind--that is, in cases of suggestion, and not of _association_ properly--I am disposed to admit, but that it is the philosophy of _association_, strictly speaking, that it is the reason why objects which have been viewed together by the mind should afterward recall each other, is to be questioned. It seems to be an established law of mental action that objects once viewed in connection by the mind, afterward retain that connection. This is a grand and simple law of thought. I doubt whether any explanation can make it more simple, whether any thing is gained by calling in the influence of emotion to account for it. The emotion may, or may not, be the cause why objects, once coëxistent in the mind, recall each other. It is enough that the simple law of previous coëxistence, as now stated, covers the whole ground, and accounts for all the phenomena of mental association. _The same Rule given by Aristotle._--Long before the days of Brown and his successors, this same law had suggested itself to one of the closest thinkers, and most acute observers of mental phenomena, whom the world has ever seen, as a principle comprehensive of all the specific laws of association. _Aristotle_--as quoted by Hamilton--expresses the rule in the following terms: _Thoughts, which have at any time, recent or remote, stood to each other in the relation of coëxistence, or immediate consecution, do, when severally reproduced, tend to reproduce each other._ Under this general law he includes the specific ones of similars, contraries, and coädjacents, as comprehending all the possible relations of things to each other. _Further Question.--View of Rosenkranz._--It may still be questioned whether the specific laws of association, as usually given, viz., resemblance, contrast, contiguity, and cause, are a complete and exhaustive list. Are there not relations of things to each other, and so relations of thought, which do not fall under any of the categories now named? A distinguished psychologist of the Hegelian school, Rosenkranz, denies even that there are any laws of association. Law is found, he says, where the manifoldness still evinces unity, to which the manifold and accidental are subject. But association is not subject to any such unity. It is a free process. There are indeed certain limitations or categories of thought, but these so-called laws of association are not to be confounded with those categories; they are not exhaustive of them. Why not also introduce the law by which we pass from quality to quantity, being to appearance, the universal to the particular, the end to the means, etc., etc.? In short, all metaphysical and logical categories lay claim to be included in the list of such laws. No one can calculate the possible connections of one conception with another. Each is, for us, the middle point of a universe from which we can go forth on all sides. What diverse trains of thought, for example, may the Strasburg minster awaken in my mind: the material of which it is built, the architect, the middle ages, the gothic style, etc., etc. There is, in a word, no law of association. _Objections to this View._--Such, in substance, is the view maintained by this able writer. We cannot altogether coincide with it. That the specific laws of Aristotle, Hume, and Brown, are not exhaustive, may very likely be true; that there is no law, no unity to which this manifoldness of conception is subject, is yet to be shown. Take the very case supposed. The gothic minster of Strasburg reminds me of the gothic style of architecture. What is that but an instance under the law of similarity? It reminds me of the middle ages. What is that but the operation of the law of contiguity in time? It brings to mind the architect. What is that but the relation of cause to effect? Or, if I think of the material of which the building is composed, the marble of this minster reminding me of the class, marble, does not that again fall under the relation of a part to the whole, which is comprehended under the general law of coadjacence, or contiguity in space? So quality and quantity, matter and form, being and appearance, as parts of a comprehensive whole, recall each other. The instances given, then, so far from proving that there is no law of association actually fall under the specific laws enumerated. _The Law of Contiguity includes what._--It is contended that this gives a wider extension to the law of contiguity in time and space than properly belongs to it. I reply, not wider than is intended by those who make use of this expression. Aristotle, the earliest writer who attempts any classification of the laws of suggestion, distinctly includes under the law of _coadjacence_ whatever stand as parts of the same whole, as, _e. g._, parts of the same building, traits of the same character, species of the same genus, the sign and the thing signified, different wholes of the same part, correlate terms, as the abstract and concrete, etc., etc. _Reference to the subjective Laws._--If it still is asked why does the minster of Strasburg, or any given object, suggest one of these several conceptions, and not some other in its place? the reason for this must doubtless be sought in the state of the mind at the time; in other words, in those subjective or secondary laws of suggestion, of which we have already spoken, as given by Brown and others. Aristotle has more concisely answered the question in the important rule which he adds as supplementary of his general law; viz., that, of two thoughts, one tends to suggest the other, in proportion, 1. To its comparative importance; 2. Its comparative interest. For the first reason, the foot is more likely to suggest the head than the head the foot. For the second reason, the dog is more likely to suggest the master than the master the dog. § II--MENTAL RECOGNITION, AS DISTINGUISHED FROM MENTAL REPRODUCTION. I. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THIS PROCESS. _The Faculty as thus far considered._--Thus far we have considered the faculty of mental representation only under one of its forms, viz., as _reproductive_. By the operation of this power, the intuitions of sense are replaced before the mind, in the absence of the original objects; images, so to speak, of the former objects of perception are brought out from the dark background of the past, and thrown in relief upon the mental canvas. Picture after picture thus comes up, and passes away. The mind has the power of thus reproducing for itself, according to laws of suggestion already considered, the objects of its former perception. This it is constantly doing. No small part of our thinking is the simple reproduction of what has been already, in some form, before the mind. _An additional Element._--The intuitions of sense, thus replaced in the absence of the external objects, present themselves to the mind as mere conceptions, involving no reference to ourselves as the perceiving subject, nor to the time, place, and circumstances of the original perception. But suppose now this latter element to be superadded to the former; that along with the conception or recalling of the object, there is also the conception of ourselves as perceiving, and of the circumstances under which it was perceived; in a word, the recalling of the _subjective_ along with the _objective_ element of the original perception, and we have now that form of mental representation which we term _recognitive_, or mental recognition. _The two Forms compared and distinguished._--The two taken together, the reproduction, and the recognition, constitute what is ordinarily called memory, which involves, when closely considered, not only the reproduction, in thought, of the former object of perception, but also the consciousness of having ourselves perceived the same. The conception is given as before, but it is no longer mere conception in the abstract, standing by itself; it is connected now by links of time, place, and circumstance, with our own personal history. It is this _subjective_ element that constitutes the essential characteristic of memory proper, or mental recognition, as distinguished from mere conception, or mental reproduction. _Specification of Time and Place._--It is not necessary that the _specific time_ and _place_ when and where we previously perceived the object, or received the impression, should be recalled along with the object or impression; this may or may not be. More frequently, perhaps, these do recur to the mind, and the object itself is recalled or suggested by means of these specific momenta; but this is not essential to the act of memory. It is enough that we recognize the representation or conception, now before the mind, as, in general, an object of former cognition, a previous possession of the mind, and not a new acquisition. _Not of necessity voluntary._--Nor is it necessary to the fact of memory, that this recurrence and recognition of former perceptions and sensations, as objects of thought, should be the result of special volition on our part. It may be quite involuntary. It may take place unbidden and unsought, the result of casual suggestion. _Distinction of Terms._--Memory is usually distinguished from _remembrance_, and also from _recollection_. Memory is, more properly, the power or faculty, remembrance the exercise of that power in respect to particular objects and events. When this exercise is voluntary--when we set ourselves to recall what has nearly or quite escaped us, to _re-collect_, as it were, the scattered materials of our former consciousness--we designate this voluntary process by the term _recollection_. We recollect only what is at the moment out of mind, and what we _wish_ to recall. _Possibility of recalling._--But here the question arises how it is possible, by a voluntary effort, to recall what is once gone from the mind. Does not the very fact of a volition imply that we have already in mind the thing willed and wished for? How else could we will to recall it? This is a philosophical puzzle with which any one, who chooses, may amuse himself. I have forgotten, for instance, the name of a person: I seek to recall it; to recall what? you may ask. That name. _What_ name? Now I do not know what name; if I did, I should have no occasion to recall it. And yet, in another sense, I do know what it is that I have forgotten. I know that it is a name, and I know whose name it is; the name, viz., of this particular person. And this is all I need to know in order to have a distinct, definite object of volition before my mind. _The Mode of Operation._--The process through which the mind passes in such a case, is, to dwell upon some circumstances not forgotten, that are intimately connected with the missing idea, and through these, as so many connecting links, to pass over, if possible, to the thing sought. I cannot, for example, recall the name, but I remember the names of other persons of the same family, class, or profession, or I remember that it begins with the letter B, and then think over all the names I know that begin with that letter; and, in this way, seek to recall, by association, the name that has escaped. _Memory not an immediate Knowledge._--It has been held by some that memory gives us an _immediate_ knowledge of the past. This is the view of Dr. Reid. If, by immediate knowledge, we mean knowledge of a thing as existing, and as it is in itself--nothing intervening between it as a present reality, and our direct cognizance of it--then not in this sense is memory an immediate knowledge; for a past event is no longer existent, and cannot be known as such, or as it is in itself; it no longer _is_, but only _was_. Hence an immediate knowledge of it, is, as Sir William Hamilton affirms, a contradiction. Still, we may know the past _as it was_, not less really and positively than we know the present as it is. I as really know that I sat at this table yesterday as I know that I sit here now. I am conscious of being here now. I was conscious of being here then. That consciousness is not to be impeached in either case. If the senses deceived me yesterday, they may deceive me to-day. If consciousness testified falsely then, it may now. But if I was indeed here yesterday, and if I knew then that I was here, and that knowledge was certain and positive, then I know _now_ that I was here yesterday, for memory recognizes what would otherwise be the mere conception of to-day, as identical with the positive knowledge of yesterday. Memory may possibly be mistaken as to the so-called positive knowledge of yesterday; and so sense may be mistaken as to the so-called positive knowledge of the present moment. _Belief attending Memory._--The remarks of Dr. Reid on this point are worthy of note. "Memory is always accompanied with the belief of that which we remember, as perception is accompanied with the belief of that which we perceive, and consciousness with the belief of that whereof we are conscious. Perhaps in infancy, or in disorder of mind, things remembered may be confounded with those which are merely imagined; but in mature years, and in a sound state of mind, every man feels that he must believe what he distinctly remembers, though he can give no other reason for his belief, but that he remembers the thing distinctly; whereas, when he merely imagines a thing ever so distinctly he has no belief of it upon that account. "This belief, which we have from distinct memory, we account real knowledge, no less certain than if it was grounded on demonstration; no man, in his wits, calls it in question, or will hear any argument against it. The testimony of witnesses in causes of life and death depends upon it, and all the knowledge of mankind of past events is built on this foundation. There are cases in which a man's memory is less distinct and determinate, and where he is ready to allow that it may have failed him; but this does not in the least weaken its credit, when it is perfectly distinct." _Importance of this Faculty._--The importance of memory as a power of the mind, is shown by the simple fact, that, but for it, there could be no consciousness of _continued existence_, none of _personal identity_, for memory is our only voucher for the fact that we existed at all at any previous moment. Without this faculty, each separate instant of life would be a new existence, isolated, disconnected with aught before or after; nay, there would, in that case, scarcely be any consciousness of even the present existence, for we are conscious only as we are _cognizant of change_, says Hamilton, and there is involved in it the idea of the _latest past_ along with the present. Memory, then, is essential to all intelligent mental action, whether intellectual, sensational, or voluntary. The ancients seem to have been aware of this, when they gave it the name [Greek: mnêmê] (from [Greek: mnêmos], [Greek: mnaomai]), appellations of the _mind itself_, as being, in fact, the chief characteristic faculty of the mind. II. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN AN ACT OF MEMORY. _Several Conditions._--Every act of memory involves these several conditions: 1. Present existence. 2. Past existence. 3. Mental activity at some moment of that past existence. 4. The recurrence to the mind of something thus thought, perceived, or felt. 5. Its recognition as a past or former thought or impression, and that our own. These last, the recurrence and the recognition, are strictly the essential elements of memory, yet the others are implied in it. In order to my remembering, for example, an occurrence of yesterday, I must exist at the present time, else I cannot remember at the present time; I must have existed yesterday, else there can be no memory of yesterday; my mind must have been active then, else there will be nothing to remember; the thoughts, perceptions, sensations, then occupying the mind, must now recur, else it is the same as if they had never been; they must recur, not as new thoughts and impressions, but as old ones, else I no longer remember, but only conceive or perceive. III. QUALITIES OF MEMORY. _Distinctions of Stewart and Wayland._--It has been customary to designate certain qualities as essential to a good memory. Susceptibility, retentiveness, and readiness, are thus distinguished by Mr. Stewart; the first denoting the facility with which the mind acquires; the second, the permanence with which it retains; and the third, the quickness with which it recalls and applies its original acquisitions. And these qualities are rarely united, he adds, in the same person. The memory which is susceptible and ready, is not commonly very retentive. Dr. Wayland makes the same distinction. Some men, he says, retain their knowledge more perfectly than they recall it. Others have their knowledge always at command. Some men acquire with great rapidity, but soon forget what they have learned. Others acquire with difficulty, but retain tenaciously. _Objections to this View._--Although supported by such authority, it admits of question whether this distinction is strictly valid. Facility of acquisition, the readiness with which the mind perceives truth, is hardly to be reckoned as an attribute of memory. It is a quality of mind, a quality possessed in diverse degrees by different persons, doubtless, but not a quality of mind in its distinctive capacity and office of _remembering_. It is no part, psychologically considered, of the function of _mental reproduction_. It is essential, indeed, to the act of memory that there should be something to remember, but the acquisition of the thing remembered, and the remembering, are two distinct and different mental acts; nor is it of any consequence to the mind, in remembering, whether the original acquisition was made with more or less facility. Indeed, so far as that bears upon the case at all, facility of acquisition, as even these writers admit, is likely to be rather a hindrance than a help to subsequent remembrance, since what is most readily acquired is not most readily recalled. _The Mind retentive in what Sense._--Nor is it altogether proper to speak of retentiveness as a _quality_ of memory--a quality which may pertain to it in a greater or less degree in different cases. The truth is, _all_ memory is retentive, or, more properly, retentiveness _is itself_ memory. It is a quality of mind; a power or faculty possessed in different degrees by different persons; and the power which the mind possesses of retaining thus, wholly, or in part, what passes before it, is the faculty of memory. But in what sense does the mind retain anything which has once occupied its thoughts? Not, of course, in the sense in which a hook retains the hat and coat that are hung upon it, ready to be taken down when wanted. We are not to conceive of the mind as a convenient receptacle, in which may be stowed away all manner of old thoughts, sensations, impressions, as old clothes are put by in a press, or guns in an armory. Not in any such sense is the mind retentive. What we mean, when we say the mind is retentive, is simply this, that it is in its power to repossess itself of what has once passed before it, to regain a thought or impression it has once had. And this is done by the operation of those laws of suggestion already considered. That, and that only is _retained_ by the mind, which under the appropriate circumstances is by the principle of suggestion _recalled_ to the mind. We are not to distinguish, then, the power to retain and the power to recall, as two separate things; nor, for the same reason, can we conceive of a memory that is other than retentive, or that is retentive but not ready. So far as these expressions denote any real distinction, it amounts simply to this, that some minds are more retentive than others; in other words, more susceptible of the influence of the suggesting principle in recalling ideas that have once been before them. Such a difference undoubtedly exists. Some remember much more readily and extensively than others. This may be owing, partly, to some difference of mental constitution and endowment; but more frequently to differences of mental habit and culture. It is not necessary to refer again to the laws of mental reproduction which have been already discussed. It is sufficient to say, that _the more clearly any fact or truth is originally apprehended, and the more deeply it interests the mind_, the more readily will it subsequently recur and the longer will it be retained. IV. MEMORY IN RELATION TO INTELLECTUAL STRENGTH _The common Opinion._--The question has arisen, how far the power of memory may be regarded as a test of intellectual ability. The opinion has been somewhat prevalent, that a more than usual development of this faculty is likely to be attended with a corresponding deficiency in some other mental power, and especially that it is incompatible with a sound judgment. To this opinion I cannot subscribe. Doubtless it is true that many persons, deficient in the power of accurate discrimination, have possessed wonderful power of memory. The mind, in such cases, undisciplined, uncultivated, with little inventive and self-moving power, lies passive and open to the influence of every chance suggestion from without, as the lyre is put in vibration by the stray winds that sweep across its strings. Facts and incidents of no value, without number, and without order, are thrown into relief upon the confused background of the past, as sea-weed, sand, and shells are heaped by the unmeaning waves upon the shore. But if a weak mind may possess a good memory, it is equally true, that a strong and well disciplined mind is seldom deficient in it. Men of most active and commanding intellect have been men also of tenacious and accurate memory. Napoleon was a remarkable instance of this. So also was the philosopher Leibnitz. While, then, we cannot regard the memory as a test of intellectual capacity, neither can it be considered incompatible with, or unfavorable to, mental strength. On the contrary, we can hardly look for any considerable degree of mental vigor and power where this faculty is essentially deficient. _Memory as affected by the Art of Printing._--It is remarked by Miss Edgeworth, and the remark is noticed with approval by Dugald Stewart, that the invention of printing, by placing books within the reach of all classes of people, has lowered the value of those extraordinary powers of memory which some of the learned were accustomed to display in former times. A man who had read, and who could repeat, a few manuscripts, was then not merely a remarkable, but a very useful man. It is quite otherwise now. There is no occasion now for any such exercise of memory. Hence instances of extraordinary memory are of unfrequent occurrence. _Failure of Memory accompanies failure of mental Power._--A decline of mental vigor, whether produced by disease or age, is usually attended with loss of memory to some extent. The first symptoms of this failure are usually forgetfulness of proper names and dates, and sometimes of words in general. A stroke of palsy frequently produces this result, and in such cases the name sometimes suggests the object, while the object no longer recalls the name. This is probably owing to the fact that the sign, being of less consequence than the thing signified, and making less impression on the mind, is more readily forgotten; hence the name, if suggested, recalls the thing, while, at the same time, the thing may not recall the name. In general, we pass more readily from the sign to the thing signified, than the reverse, and for the reason now given. Mr. Steward remarks, that this loss of proper names incident to old men, is chiefly observable in men of science, or those much occupied with important affairs--a fact resulting, he thinks, partly from their habits of general thought, and partly from their want of constant practice in that trivial conversation which is every moment recalling particulars to the mind. _The Memory of the Aged._--In the principles which have been advanced, we find an explanation, I think, of some facts respecting memory, which every one has noticed, but of which the philosophy may not be at first sight apparent, Why is it that aged people forget? that, as we grow old, while perhaps other powers of the mind are still vigorous, the memory begins to lose its tenacity? Not, I suspect, from any special change which the brain undergoes, for why should such changes affect _this_ faculty more than any other? I should seek the explanation in a failure of one or other of the conditions already mentioned as essential to a good memory; either in the want of a sufficiently frequent coëxistence of associated ideas, or else in the want of a sufficiently vivid conception of them when presented; or, more likely, in both. And so the facts would indicate. Age involves usually the gradual failure and decay of the powers of perception; the ear fails to report what is said, the eye what is passing in space; and as memory is dependent on prior perception, of course a diminished activity of the one brings about a diminished activity of the other. In proportion as this ensues, the mind's interest in passing events is likely to fail, for what is no longer clearly apprehended no longer awakens the same interest and attention as formerly. This directly affects the vividness of conception, and indirectly also reacts upon the frequency of coëxistence, for what we do not clearly apprehend, nor feel much interest in, will not be likely often to recur to mind, nor shall we dwell upon it when presented. There is thus brought about, by the mutual action and reaction of the causes now specified, a failure more or less complete of the essential conditions of a retentive memory. The old man dwells accordingly much in the _past_. His life is behind him, and not in advance. He is unobservant of passing events, because he neither clearly apprehends them, now that his connection with the outer world is in a measure interrupted by the decay of sense, nor does he much care about them, for the same reason. His attention and interest, withdrawn in a manner from these, revert to the past. Those things he remembers, the sports and companions of his youth, and the stirring events of his best and most active years, for those things _have_ been frequently associated in his mind, linked with each other, and with all the past of his life, and they _have_ deeply interested him. Hence they are remembered while yesterday is forgotten. _Varieties of Memory._--Why is it, you ask, that memory seems to select for itself now one and now another field of operation, one man remembering dates, another events or facts in history, another words or pages of a book, while in each case the memory of other things, of every thing that lies beyond or without the favorite range of topics, is defective? Manifestly for much the same reason already given. The mind has its favorite subjects of investigation and thought; to these it frequently recurs, and dwells on them with interest; there is, consequently, frequency of coëxistence, and vividness of conception--the very conditions of retentiveness--while, at the same time, the mind being preöccupied with the given subjects, and the attention and interest withdrawn from other things, the memory of other things is proportionably deficient. We remember, in other words, just those things best, in which we are most interested, and with which we have most to do. This explains why we forget names so readily. We have more _to do with_, and are more interested in, _persons_, than their names; the latter we have occasion to think of much less often than the former. The _sign_ occurs less frequently than the _thing signified_. V. CULTIVATION OF MEMORY. The principles already advanced furnish a clue to the proper and successful cultivation of the memory. Like all other powers, this may be cultivated, and to a wonderful degree; and, like all other powers, it gains strength by _use_, by exercise. The first and chief direction, then, if you would cultivate and strengthen this faculty of the mind, is, _exercise_ it; train it to do its work--to do it quickly, easily, accurately, and well--as you train yourself to handle the keys of an instrument, or to add up a column of figures with promptness and accuracy. To be more specific.--As regards any particular thing which you wish to remember: 1. Grasp it fully, clearly, definitely in the mind; be sure you have it exactly--_it_, and not something like it or something about it. 2. Connect it with other things that are known; suffer it to link itself with other ideas and impressions already in the mind, that you may have something to recall it by. 3. Frequently revert to it, until you are sure that it has become a permanent possession, and one which you can at any time recall by any one of numerous connecting links. In this way you secure the two conditions already specified as essential, viz., frequency of coëxistence, and vividness of conception. _Systems of artificial Memory._--A thing is recalled by the suggestion of any _coëxisting_ thought or feeling. Observing this, ingenious men have availed themselves of the principle of association to construct various mechanical or artificial systems of memory, usually termed _mnemonics_. The principle of the construction is this: should you see an elm or an oak-tree, or hear a particular tune whistled, at the same time that you were going through a demonstration in Euclid, you would be likely to think of the tree or the tune whenever next you had occasion to repeat that demonstration. The sight of the diagram would recall the associated object. They _stand together_ in your mind afterward. This we have already found to be the groundwork and chief element of all association of ideas and feelings, viz., _prior coëxistence_ in the mind. Suppose, now, you wish to fix in the mind the list of English kings. Make out a corresponding list of simple figures, or images of objects, giving each its invariable place in relation to the series: No. 1. a pump; No. 2. a goose, etc., till you reach a sufficient number, say a hundred. These are committed to memory, fixed indelibly in the mind. You then associate with those figures your English kings; Charles I. stands by the pump; Charles II. pursues the goose; James hugs the bear, and so on. These things thus once firmly linked together, remain afterward associated, and the figure serves at once to recall the associate monarch and to fix his place in the series. The same series of figures, of course, will serve for any number of different series of events, personages, etc., which are to be remembered. _Utility questioned._--It may be seriously questioned, I think, whether such systems are of real value; whether they do not really weaken the memory and throw it into disuse, by departing from the ordinary laws and methods of suggestion, and substituting a purely artificial, arbitrary and mechanical process; whether, moreover, they really accomplish what they propose; whether, since the signs or figures have no natural relation to each other, and none to the things signified, but only the arbitrary relation imposed by the system, it is not really as difficult to fix the connection of the two things in your mind, _e. g._, to remember that Charles the Second is represented by a dog or by a goose, as it would be simply, and in the natural way, to remember the things themselves without any _such_ association. _Extent to which the Memory may be cultivated._--The extent to which the cultivation of the memory may be carried by due training and care, is a topic worthy of some attention. Men of reflection and thought, and generally men of studious habits, literary men and authors, do not, for the most part, rely so much upon the memory as men of a more practical cast and of business pursuits; for this reason, viz., the want of due exercise, this faculty of their minds is not in the most favorable circumstances for development. Some striking exceptions, however, we shall have occasion presently to mention. It has been already remarked, that prior to the art of printing, the cultivation of the memory was an object of far greater importance, to those who were destined for public life, than it is in modern times, and consequently instances of remarkable memory are much more frequently to be met with among the ancients than among the men of our times. The same remark will apply to men of different pursuits in any age: the more one has occasion to employ the memory, the more striking will be its development. _Instances of extraordinary Memory._--Cyrus, it is said, knew the name of every officer, Pliny has it of every soldier, that served under him. Themistocles could call by name each one of the twenty thousand citizens of Athens. Hortensius could sit all day at an auction, and at evening give an account from memory of every thing sold, the purchaser, and the price. Muretus saw at Padua a young Corsican, says Mr. Stewart, who could repeat, without hesitation, thirty-six thousand names in the order in which he heard them, and then reverse the order and proceed backward to the first. Dr. Wallis of Oxford, on one occasion, at night, in bed, proposed to himself a number of fifty-three places, and found its square root to twenty-seven places, and, without writing down numbers at all, dictated the result from memory twenty days afterward. It was not unusual with him to perform arithmetical operations in the dark, as the extraction of roots, _e. g._, _to_ forty _decimal_ places. The distinguished Euler, blind from early life, had always in his memory a table of the first six powers of all numbers, from one to one hundred. On one occasion two of his pupils, calculating a converging series, on reaching the seventeenth term, found their results differing by one unit at the fiftieth figure, and in order to decide which was correct, Euler went over the whole in his head, and his decision was found afterward to be correct. Pascal forgot nothing of what he had read, or heard, or seen. Menage, at seventy-seven, commemorates, in Latin verses, the favor of the gods, in restoring to him, after partial eclipse, the full powers of memory which had adorned his earlier life. The instances now given are mentioned by Mr. Stewart but perhaps the most remarkable instance of great memory in modern times, is the case of the celebrated _Magliabechi_, librarian of the Duke of Tuscany. He would inform any one who consulted him, not only who had directly treated of any particular subject, but who had indirectly touched upon it in treating of other subjects, to the number of perhaps one hundred different authors, giving the name of the author, the name of the book, the words, often the page, where they were to be found, and with the greatest exactness. To test his memory, a gentleman of Florence lent him at one time a manuscript he had prepared for the press, and, some time afterward, went to him with a sorrowful face, and pretended to have lost his manuscript by accident. The poor author seemed inconsolable, and begged Magliabechi to recollect what he could, and write it down. He assured the unfortunate man that he would, and setting about it, wrote out the entire manuscript without missing a word. He had a _local_ memory also, knew where every book stood. One day the Grand Duke sent for him to inquire if he could procure a book which was very scarce. "No, sir," answered Magliabechi; "it is impossible: there is but _one_ in the world; that is in the Grand Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the _seventh book, on the seventh shelf, on the right hand as you go in_." VI. EFFECTS OF DISEASE ON THE MEMORY. _Forgetfulness of certain Objects._--Of the effect of certain forms of disease, and also of age, in weakening the power of remembering names, I have already spoken. There are other effects, occasionally produced by disease upon this faculty of the mind, which are not so readily explained. In some cases, a certain class of objects, or the knowledge of certain persons, or of a particular language or some part of a language, as substantives, _e. g._, seems to be lost to the mind; in other cases, a certain portion of life is obliterated from the recollection. In cases of severe injury to the head, persons have forgotten some particular language; others have been unable to recall afterward the names of the most common objects, while the memory was at no loss for adjectives. A surgeon mentioned by Dr. Abercrombie, so far recovered from a fall as to give special directions respecting his own treatment, yet, for several days, lost all idea of having either a wife or children. The case of Mr. Tennent, who on recovering from apparent death, lost all knowledge of his past life, and was obliged to commence again the study of the alphabet, until after considerable time his knowledge suddenly returned to him, is too well known to require minute description. _Former Objects recalled._--In other instances, precisely the reverse occurs. Disease brings back to mind what has been long forgotten. Thus, persons in extreme sickness, or at the point of death, not unfrequently converse in languages which they have known only in youth. The case cited by Coleridge, and so frequently quoted, of the German servant girl, who in sickness was heard repeating passages of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, which she had formerly heard her master repeat, as he walked in his study, but of whose meaning she had no idea, is in point in this connection. So also is the case of the Italian mentioned by Dr. Rush, who died in New York, and who, in the beginning of his sickness, spoke English, in the middle of it, French, but on the day of his death, nothing but Italian. A Lutheran clergyman of Philadelphia told Dr. Rush that it was not uncommon for the Germans and Swedes of his congregation, when near death, to speak and pray in their native languages, which some of them had probably not spoken for fifty years. These facts are sufficiently numerous to constitute a class by themselves; they seem to fall under some law of the physical system not yet clearly understood, and are, therefore, in the present state of our knowledge, incapable of explanation. _Inference often drawn from these Facts._--Certain writers have inferred, from the recurrence of things long forgotten, as in the cases now cited, that all knowledge is indestructible and that all which is necessary to the entire reproduction of the past life is the quickened activity of the mental powers an effect which is produced in the delirium of disease. From this they have derived an argument for future retribution Coleridge has made such use of it, and has been followed by Upham, and in part, at least, though with more caution, by Wayland. _The true Inference._--It may be doubted, perhaps, whether the absolute indestructibility of all human knowledge is a legitimate inference from these facts. The most that can with certainty be concluded from them, is, not that all our past thoughts and consciousness _must_ or _will_ return, but that much of it _may_--perhaps all of it; and this is all we need to know in order to perceive the _possibility_ of a future retribution. It is enough to know, that in the constitution of the mind _means exist_ for recalling, in some way to us mysterious, and under certain conditions not by us fully understood, the objects of our former consciousness, in all the freshness and vividness of their past cognizance, long after they seem to have passed finally from the memory. _Importance of a well-spent Life._--This simple fact, together with the well-known tendency of the mind in advancing age to revert to the scenes and incidents of early life, certainly presents in the clearest light the importance of a well-spent life, of a mind stored with such recollections as shall cast a cheerful radiance over the past, and brighten the uncertain future in those hours of gloom and despondency when the shadows lengthen upon the path of earthly pilgrimage, and life is drawing to a close. If the thoughts and impressions of the passing moment are liable, by some casual association, by some mysterious law of our being, under conditions which may at any moment be fulfilled, to recur at any time to subsequent consciousness, with all the minuteness and power of present reality, it becomes us, as we regard our own highest interests, to guard well the avenues of thought and feeling against the first approach of that which we shall not be pleased to meet again, when it will not be in our power to escape its _presence_, or avoid its recognition. VII. INFLUENCE OF MEMORY ON THE HAPPINESS OF LIFE. _The Pleasures of the Past thus retained._--Of the importance of this faculty as related to other intellectual powers, I have already spoken. I refer now to its value as connected with human happiness, as the source of some of the purest pleasures of life. The present, however joyous, is fleeting and evanescent. Memory seizes the passing moment, fixes it upon the canvas, and hangs the picture on the soul's inner chambers for her to look upon when she will. Thus, in an important sense, the former years are past, but not gone. We live them over again in memory. _Instance of Niebuhr._--It is related of Carsten Niebuhr, the Oriental traveller, that "when old and blind, and so feeble that he had barely strength to be borne from his bed to his chair, the dim remembrance of his early adventures thronged before his memory with such vividness that they presented themselves as pictures upon his sightless eye-balls. As he lay upon his bed, pictures of the gorgeous Orient flashed upon his darkness as distinctly as though he had just closed his eyes to shut them out for an instant. The cloudless blue of the eastern heavens bending by day over the broad deserts, and studded by night with southern constellations, shone as vividly before him, after the lapse of half a century, as they did upon the first Chaldean shepherds whom they won to the worship of the host of heaven; and he discoursed with strange and thrilling eloquence upon those scenes which thus, in the hours of stillness and darkness, were reflected upon his inmost soul." _The same Thing occurs often in old Age._--Something of this kind not unfrequently occurs in advanced life. Picture to yourself an old man of many winters. The world in which his young life began has grown old with him and around him, and its brightest colors have faded from his vision. The life and stir, the whirl and tumult of the busy world, the world of to-day and yesterday, move him not. He heeds but slightly the events of the passing hour. He lives in a past world. The scenes of his childhood, the sports and companions of his youth, the hills and streams, the bright eyes and laughing faces on which his young eyes rested, in which his young heart delighted--these visit him again in his solitude, as he sits in his chair by the quiet fireside. He lives over again the past. He wanders again by the old hills, and over the old meadows. He feels again the vigor of youth. He leads again his bride to the altar. He brings home toys for his children, and enters again into their sports. And so the extremes of life meet. Age completes the circuit, and brings us back to the starting-point. We close where we began. Life is a magic ring. _The recollection of past Sorrow not always painful._--But life is not all joyous. Mingled with the brighter hues of every life are also much sadness and sorrow, and these, too, are to be remembered. It might be supposed that, while memory, by recalling the pleasing incidents of the past, might contribute much to our happiness, she would add, in perhaps an equal degree, to our sorrow, by recalling much that is painful to the thoughts. Such, however, I am convinced, is not the fact. The benevolence of the Creator has ordered it otherwise. To no one, perhaps, is memory the source of greater pleasure, strange as it may seem, than to the mourner. The very circumstances that tend to renew our grief, and keep alive our sorrow, in case of some severe calamity or bereavement, are still cherished with a melancholy satisfaction of which we would not be deprived. There is a luxury in our very grief, and in the remembrance of that for which we grieve. We would not forget what we have lost. Every recollection and association connected with it are sacred. Time assuages our grief, but impairs not the strength and sacredness of those associations, nor diminishes the pleasure with which we recall the forms we shall see no more, and the scenes that are gone forever. Every memento of the departed one is sacred; the books, the flowers, the favorite walks, the tree in whose shadow he was wont to recline, all have a significance and a value which the stricken heart only can interpret, and which memory only can afford. _We recollect the Past as it was._--It is to be noticed, also, that, in such cases, the picture which memory furnishes is a transcript of the past as it was; the image is stereotyped and unchangeable. Other things change, we change; that changes not. It has a fixed value. A mother, for instance, loses a child of three years. It ever remains to her a child of three years. She remembers it as it was. She grows old; twenty summers and winters pass; yet as often as she visits the little mound, now scarce to be distinguished from the level surface, there comes to her recollection that little child as he was, when she hung, for the last time, over that pale, sweet face that she should see no more. She still thinks of him, dreams of him, as a child, for it is as such only that she remembers him. Blessed boon, that gives us just the past; when all things change, fortunes vary, friends depart, the world grows unkind, and we grow old, the former things remain treasured in our memory, and we can stand as mourners at the grave of what we once were. VIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH.--DIFFERENT THEORIES OF MEMORY. _Ancient Theory._--The idea formerly, and almost universally entertained respecting the _modus operandi_ of the faculty we call memory, was, that in perception and the various operations of the senses, certain impressions are made on the sensorium--certain forms and types of things without, certain _images_ of them--which remain when the external object is no longer present, and become imprinted thus on the mind. Such, certainly, was the doctrine of the earliest Greek commentators on Aristotle. Such, I must think, is substantially the doctrine of Aristotle himself. _Theory of Aristotle._--His idea is, that memory, as well as imagination, primarily and directly, relates only to sensible objects, and gives us only _images_ of these objects, and even when it gives us strictly intellectual objects, gives us these only by images. One cannot _think_, he says, without images. Its source and origin, then, he concludes, is the sensibility, and so it pertains to _animals_, as well as men; only to those, however, which have the perception of time, since memory is a modification of sensation or intellectual conception, under the condition of _time past_. Such being, in his view, the nature and source of memory, he goes on to ask how it is that only a modification (or state) of the mind being present, and the object itself absent, one recalls that absent object? "Manifestly," he replies, "we must believe that the impression which is produced, in consequence of the sensation, in the soul, and in that part of the body which perceives the sensation, is analogous to a species of painting, and that the perception of that impression constitutes precisely what we call memory. The movement which then takes place in the mind _imprints there a sort of type of the sensation_ analogous to the _seal which one imprints on wax with a ring_. Hence it is that those who by the violence of the impression, or by the ardor of age are in a great excitement (movement) have not the memory of things, as if the movement and seal had been applied to running water. In the case of others, however, who are in a sort cold, as the plaster of old edifices, the very _hardness_ of the part which receives the impression prevents the image from leaving the least trace. Hence it is that young children and old men have so little memory. It is the same with those who are too lively, and those who are too slow. Neither remember well. The one class are too _humid_, the other too hard. The image dwells not in the soul of the one, makes no impression whatever on that of the other. "How is it now," he goes on to ask, "that this stamp, impression, image, or painting, in us, a mere mode of the mind, can recall the absent object?" His answer is, that the impression or image is a _copy_ of that object, while, at the same time, it is, in itself considered, only a modification of our mind, just as a painting is a mere picture, and yet a _copy_ from nature. (Parva Naturalia: Memory, ch. 1.) _Defence of Aristotle._--Sir W. Hamilton defends Aristotle against the strictures of Dr. Reid, upon this subject, by the supposition that he used these expressions not in a literal, but in a figurative or analogical sense. The figure, however, if it be one, is very clearly and boldly sustained, and constitutes, in fact, the whole explanation given of the process of memory--the entire theory. Take away these expressions, and you take away the whole substance of his argument, the whole solution of the problem. Sensation, or intellectual conception, produces an _impression_ on the soul, and _imprints there a type_ of itself, not unlike a painting or the stamp of a seal on wax, and the _perception_ of this is _memory_. Such is in brief his theory. _Theory of Hobbes._--Not far remote from this was the theory of Hobbes, who regarded memory as a decaying or vanishing sense; that of Hume, who represents it as merely a somewhat weaker impression than that which we designate as perception; and that of the celebrated Malebranche, who accounted for memory by making it to depend entirely on the changes which take place in the fibres of the brain. "For even as the branches of a tree which have continued some time bent in a certain form, still preserve an aptitude to be bent anew after the same manner, so the fibres of the brain having once received certain impressions by the course of the animal spirits, and by the action of objects, retain a long time some facility to receive these same dispositions. Now the memory consists only in this faculty, since we think on the same things when the brain receives the same impressions." He goes on to explain how, as the brain undergoes a change in different periods of life, the mind is affected accordingly. "The fibres of the brain in children are soft, flexible, and delicate; a riper age dries, hardens, and strengthens them; but in old age they become wholly inflexible." ... "For as we see the fibres which compose the flesh harden by time, and that the flesh of a young partridge is, without dispute, more tender than that of an old one, so the fibres of the brain of a child or youth will be much more soft and delicate than those of persons more advanced in years." _Strictures upon this Theory._--Without disputing what is here stated as to the difference in the fibres of the brain at different periods of life, it remains to be proved that all this has any thing to do with the differences of memory in different persons, or with the phenomena of memory in general. These theories, it will be observed, all assume that in perception and sensation some physical effect is produced on the system, which remains after the original sensation or perception has ceased to act, and that memory is the _result_ of that remaining effect, the perception, or conscious cognizance of it by the mind. The process is a purely physiological one. Without insisting on the expressions made use of to represent this process, all which convey the idea strongly of a mechanical effect--type imprinted on the soul, impression made on it as of a seal on wax, image, picture, copy, etc.; allowing these to be mere metaphors; allowing, moreover, that the essential fact all along assumed, is a fact, viz., that in sensation, perception, etc., some physical effect is produced on the sensorium; there are still two essential propositions to be established before we can admit any of these theories: 1. That this physical effect _remains_ any time after the cause ceases to operate; 2. That if so, it is in any way concerned in the production of memory; and even if these points could be made out, it would still be an open question, in WHAT way, possible or conceivable, this effect or impression on the sensorium gives rise to the phenomenon of memory; for this is, after all, the chief thing to be explained. CHAPTER II. IMAGINATION. § I.--GENERAL CHARACTER OF THIS FACULTY. _The Point at which we have arrived._--We have thus far treated of those forms of mental representation which are concerned in the reproduction of what has once been perceived or felt, and in the recognition of it as such. It remains still to investigate that form of the representative power, which has for its office something quite distinct from either of these, and which we may term the _creative_ faculty. _Office of this Faculty._--By the operation of this power, the former perceptions and sensations are replaced in thought, and combined as in mental reproduction, but not, as in mental reproduction, according to the _original_ and _actual_, so that the past is simply repeated, but rather according to the mind's own _ideal_, and at its own will and fancy; so that while the groundwork of the representation is something which has been, at some time, an object of perception, the picture itself, as it stands before the mind in its completeness, is not the copy of any thing actually perceived, but a creation of the mind's own. This power the mind has, and it is a power distinct from either of those already mentioned, and not less wonderful than either. The details of the original perception are omitted; time, place, circumstance fall out, or are varied to suit the fancy; the scene is laid when and where we like; the incidents follow each other no longer in their actual order; the original, in a word, is no longer faithfully transcribed, but the picture is conformed to the taste and pleasure of the artist. The conception becomes IDEAL. This is imagination in its true and proper sphere--the creative power of the mind. § II.--RELATION OF THIS TO OTHER FACULTIES. The true province of imagination may be more definitely distinguished by comparing it with other powers of the mind. _Imagination as related to Memory._--How, then, does imagination differ from _memory_? In this, first and chiefly, that memory gives us the actual, imagination, the ideal; in this also, that memory deals only with the past, while imagination, not confined to such limits, sweeps on bolder wing, and without bound, alike through the future and the past. In one respect they agree. Both give the _absent_--that which is not now and here present to sense. Both are representative rather than presentative. Both also are forms of conception. _To Perception._--In what respect does it differ from _perception_? In perception the object is given, presented; in imagination it is thought, conceived; in the former case it is given as _actual_, in the latter, conceived not as actual but as ideal. _To Judgment._--Imagination differs from _judgment_, in that the latter deals, not like the former, with things in themselves considered, but rather with the relations of things--is, in other words, a form not of _simple_, but of _relative_ conception; and also in that it deals with these relations as _actual_, not as ideal. It has always specific reference to truth, and is concerned in the formation of opinion and belief, as resting on the evidence of truth, and the perception of the actual relations of things. _To Reasoning._--In like manner it differs from _reasoning_, which also has to do with truths, facts--has for its object to ascertain and state those facts or principles; its sole and simple inquiry being, what is _true_? Imagination concerns itself with no such inquiry, admits of no such limitation. Its thought is not what _did_ actually occur, but what in given circumstances _might_ occur. Its question is not what really _was_, or _is_, or _will be_, but what _may_ be; what may be _conceived_ as possible or probable under such or such contingencies. Reasoning, moreover, reaches only such truths as are involved in its premises, and may fairly be deduced as conclusions from those premises. It furnishes no new material, but merely evolves and unfolds what lies wrapped up in the admitted premises. Imagination lies under no such restriction. There is no necessary connection between the wrath of Achilles, and the consequences that are made to result from it in the unfolding of the epic. _To Taste._--Imagination and _taste_ are by no means identical. The former may exist in a high degree where the latter is essentially defective. In such a case the conceptions of the imagination are, it may be, too bold, passing the limits of probability, or, it may be, offensive to delicacy, wanting in refinement and beauty, or in some way deficient in the qualities that please a cultivated mind. This is not unfrequently the case with the productions of the poet, the painter, the orator. There is no lack of imagination in their works, while, at the same time, they strike us as deficient in taste. Taste is the regulating principle, whose office is to guide and direct the imagination, sustaining to it much the same relation that conscience does to free moral action. It is a lawgiver and a judge. _To Knowledge._--Still more widely does imagination differ from simple knowledge. There may be great learning and no imagination, and the reverse is equally true. We know that which is--the actual; we imagine that which is not--the ideal. Learning enlarges and quickens the mind, extends the field of its vision, augments its resources, expands its sphere of thought and action; in this way its powers are strengthened, its conceptions multiplied and vivified. There is furnished, consequently, both more and better material for the creative faculty to work upon. Further than this, the imagination is little indebted to learning. _Illustration of these Differences._--To illustrate the differences already indicated: I stand at my window and look out on the landscape. My eye rests on the form and dark outline of a mountain, pictured against the sky. Perception, this. I go back to my desk, I shut my eyes. That form and figure, pencilled darkly against the blue sky, are still in my mind. I seem to see them still. That heavy mass, that undulating outline, that bold rugged summit--the whole stands before me as distinctly as when my eye rested upon it. Conception, this, replacing the absent object. I not only in my thoughts seem to see the mountain thus reproduced, but I _know_ it when seen; I recognize it as the mountain which a moment before I saw from my window. Memory, this, connecting the conception with something in my past experience. The picture fades perhaps from my view, and I begin to estimate the probable distance of the mountain, or its relative height, as compared with other mountains. Judgment, this, or the conception of relations. I proceed to calculate the number of square miles of surface on a mountain of that height and extent. Reasoning, this. And now I sweep away, in thought, the actual mountain, and replace it with one vastly more imposing and grand. Eternal snows rest upon its summits; glaciers hold their slow and stately march down its sides; the avalanche thunders from its precipices. _Imagination_ now has the field to herself. § III.--ACTIVE AND PASSIVE IMAGINATION. _View of Dr. Wayland._--"If we regard the several act of this faculty," says Dr. Wayland, "we may, I think, observe a difference between them. We have the power to originate images or pictures for ourselves, and we have the power to form them as they are presented in language. The former may be called active, and the latter passive imagination. The active, I believe, always includes the passive power, but the passive does not always include the active. Thus we frequently observe persons who delight in poetry and romance, who are utterly incapable of creating a scene or composing a stanza. They can form the pictures dictated by language, but are destitute of the power of original combination." _Correctness of this View questioned._--That many who enjoy the creations of the poet and the splendid fictions of the dramatist and novelist, are themselves incapable of producing like creations, is doubtless true. The same is true in other departments of the creative art. Many persons enjoy a fine painting or statue, good music, or a noble architectural design, who cannot themselves produce these works of art. This does not prove them deficient, however, in imagination, for the inability may be owing to other causes, as want of training; nor, on the other hand, does the simple enjoyment of ideal creations involve a different kind of imagination from that exercised in creating. Imagination is, as it seems to me, always active, never passive. Where it exists, and whenever it is called into exercise, it acts, and its action is, in some sense, creative. It conceives the ideal, that which, as conceived, does not exist, or at least is not known to the senses as existing. It matters not in what way these ideal conceptions are suggested, whether by the signs of language written or spoken, or by those characters which the painter, the sculptor, or the architect presents, each in his own way, and with his own material, or by one's own previous conceptions. _Every_ ideal conception is suggested by _something_ antecedent to itself. All active imagination is, in other words, passive, in the sense here intended, and all passive imagination, so called, is in reality active, so far as it is, properly speaking, imagination at all. The difference between the faculty that produces and that which merely enjoys, is a difference of _degree_ rather than of kind. The one is an imagination peculiarly active; the other slightly so; or, more properly, the one mind has _much_, the other _little_ imagination. _Philosophic Imagination._--The term _philosophic_ imagination, in distinction from _poetic_, is employed by the same distinguished writer to denote the faculty, possessed by some minds of a high order, of discovering new truths in science; of so classifying and arranging known facts as to bring to light the laws which govern them, or, by a happy conjecture, assigning to phenomena hitherto unexplained, a theory which will account for them. Whether the faculty now intended is properly imagination, admits of question. Its field is that of conjecture, supposition, theory, invention. It involves the exercise of judgment and reason. It seeks after truth. It is a process of discovering what is. Imagination deals with the ideal only--inquires not for the true. § IV.--IMAGINATION A SIMPLE FACULTY. _Common Theory._--The view which has been very generally entertained of the faculty now under consideration, both in this country, and by the Scotch philosophers, resolves it partially or wholly into other powers of the mind, as abstraction, association, judgment, taste. In this view, it is no longer a simple faculty, if indeed it can with propriety be called a faculty at all, inasmuch as the effects ascribed to it can be accounted for by the agency of the other powers now named. _A different View._--It seems to me that imagination, while doubtless it presupposes and involves the exercise of the suggestive and associative principle, of the analytic or divisive principle by which compounds are broken up into their distinct elements, and also, to some extent, of judgment, or the principle which perceives relations, is, nevertheless, itself a power distinct from each of these, and from all of them in combination. Memory _presupposes_ perception, or something to be reproduced and remembered. It is not, therefore, to be regarded as a complex faculty, comprising the perceptive power as one of its factors. The power to combine, in like manner, _presupposes_ the previous separation of elements capable of being reunited, but is not to be resolved into that power which produces such separation. It _involves_ some exercise of judgment along with its own proper and distinctive activity, but is not to be confounded with, or resolved into the power of perceiving relations. The faculty of ideal conception is really a power of the mind, and it is a simple power, a thing of itself, although it may involve and presuppose the activity of other faculties along with its own. Abstraction, association, judgment, taste--none of them singly, nor all of them combined, are what we mean by it. _Theory of Brown._--Dr. Brown resolves the faculty now in question into simple suggestion, accompanied, in the case of _voluntary_ imagination, with desire, and with judgment. There is nothing in the process different from what occurs in any case of the suggestion of one thought by another, he would say. We think of a mountain, we think of gold, and some analogy, or common property of the two, serves to suggest the complex conception, mountain of gold. Even where the process is not purely spontaneous, but accompanied with desire on our part, it is still essentially the same process. We think of something, and this suggests other related conceptions, some of which we approve as fit for our purpose, others we reject as unfit. Here is simple suggestion accompanied with desire and judgment; and these are all the factors that enter into the process. "We may term this state, or series of states, imagination or fancy, and the term may be convenient for its brevity. But in using it we must not forget that the term, however brief and simple, is still the name of a state that is complex, or of a succession of states, that the phenomena comprehended under it being the same in nature, are not rendered, by the use of a mere word, different from those to which we have already given peculiar names expressive of them as they exist separately, and that it is to the classes of these elementary phenomena, therefore, that we must refer the whole process of imagination in our philosophic analysis." _Strictures on this Theory._--This view, it will be perceived, in reality sweeps the faculty of imagination entirely from the field. To this I cannot yield my assent. Is not this state, or affection of the mind, as Dr. Brown calls it, quite a distinct thing from other mental states and affections? Has it not a character _sui generis_? Is not the operation, the thing done, a _different_ thing from what is done in other cases, and by other faculties; and has not the mind the _power_ of doing this new and different thing; and is not that power of doing a given thing what we mean in any case by a _faculty_ of the mind? Is there not an element in this process under consideration which is _not_ involved in other mental processes, viz.: the _ideal_ element; the conception, not of the actual and the real, as in the case of the other faculties, but of the purely ideal? And if the mind has the faculty of forming a class of conceptions so entirely distinct from the others, why not give that faculty a name, and its own proper name, and allow it a place, its own proper place, among the mental powers? § V.--IMAGINATION NOT MERELY THE POWER OF COMBINATION. _The prevalent View._--This question is closely connected with that just discussed. The usual definitions make the faculty under consideration a mere process of combining and arranging ideas previously in the mind, so as to form new compounds. You have certain conceptions. These you combine one with another, as a child puts together blocks that lie before him, to suit himself, now this uppermost, now that, and the result is a world of imagination. It is the mere arrangement of previous conceptions, and not itself a power of producing or connecting any thing. And even this arrangement of former conceptions is itself a _spontaneous_ casual process, according to Dr. Brown, not properly a _power_ of the mind. _Makes Imagination little else than Invention._--According to this view, imagination is hardly to be distinguished from mere _invention_ in the mechanic arts, which is the result of some new combination of previously existing materials. The construction of a steam-pump with a new kind of valve, is as really a work of imagination, as Paradise Lost. The man who contrives a carding-machine, and the man who conceives the Transfiguration, the Apollo Belvidere, or the Iliad, are exercising both the same faculty--merely combining in new forms the previous possessions of the mind. _This View inadequate._--This is a very meagre and inadequate view, as it seems to me, of the faculty of imagination. It fixes the attention upon, and elevates into the importance of a definition, a circumstance in itself unimportant, while it overlooks the essential characteristic of the faculty to be defined. The _creative activity_ of the mind is lost sight of in attending to the _materials_ on which it works. _The Distinctive Element of Imagination overlooked._--Imagination I take to be the power of conceiving the ideal. The elements which enter into and compose that ideal conception, are, indeed, elements previously existing, not themselves the mind's creations; but the conception itself is the mind's own creation, and this creative activity, this power of conceiving the purely ideal, is the very essence of that which we are seeking to define. True, the separate conceptions which enter into the composition of Paradise Lost--trees, flowers, rivers, mountains, angels, deities--were already in the poet's mind before he began to meditate the sublime epic. They were but the material on which he wrought. Has he then created nothing, conceived nothing? Have we truly and adequately described that immortal poem when we say that it is a mere combination of trees, rivers, hills, and angels, in certain proportions and relations not previously attempted? _Illustration drawn from the Arts._--The artist makes use of colors previously existing when he would produce a painting, and of marble already in the block, when he would chisel a statue or a temple. In reality he only combines. Yet it would be but a poor definition of any one of these sublime arts to say that painting, sculpture, architecture, is merely the putting together of previous materials to form new wholes. We object to such a definition, not because it affirms what is not true, but because it does not affirm the chief and most important truth; not because of what it states, but because of what it omits to state. These are creative arts. They give us indeed not new substances, but new forms, new products, new ideas. So is imagination a creative faculty. The individual elements may not be new, but the grand product and result is new, a creation of the mind's own. And this is of more consequence than the fact that the elementary conceptions were already in the mind. The one is the essential characteristic, the other a comparatively unimportant circumstance; the one describes the thing itself, the other the mere _modus operandi_ of the thing. _Illustration drawn from the Creation of the material World._--What is _creation_ in its higher and more proper sense, as applied to the formation, by divine power, of the world in which we dwell? There was a moment, in the eternity of the past, when the omnipotent builder divided the light from the darkness, and the evening and the morning were the first day. The elements may have existed before--heat, air, earth, water, the various material and diffused substance of the world about to be--but latent, confused, chaotic those elements, not called forth and appointed each to its own proper sphere. Light slumbers amid the chaotic elements unseen. He speaks the word, and it comes forth from its hiding-place, and stands revealed in its own beauty and splendor. Has God made nothing, in so doing? Has he conceived nothing, _created_ nothing? And when the work goes on, and is at length complete, and the fair new world hangs poised and trembling on its axis, perfect in every part, and rejoicing the heart of the builder, is there no new power displayed in all this, no creation here? And do we well and adequately express the sublime mystery when we say that the deity has merely arranged and combined materials previously existing, to form a new whole? _Art essentially creative._--So when the poet, the painter, the skillful architect, the mighty orator, call forth from the slumbering elements new forms of beauty and power, are not they, too, in their humble way, creators? True, they have in so doing combined conceptions previously existing in the mind. The writer combines in new forms the existing letters of the alphabet, the painter combines existing colors, the architect puts together previously-existing stones. But is this all he does? Is it the chief thing? Is this the soul and spirit of his divine art? No; there is a new power, a new element, not thus expressed--the power of conceiving, and calling into existence, in the realm of thought, that which has no actual existence in the world of sober reality. He who has this power is a _maker_--[Greek: poiêtês]. It is a power conferred, in some degree, on all, in its highest degree, on few. The poet, painter, orator, the gifted creative man, whoever he is, belongs to this class. § VI.--IMAGINATION LIMITED TO SENSIBLE OBJECTS. _Law of the Imagination._--It is a law of the imagination, that whatever it represents, it realizes, clothes in sensible forms, conceives as visible, audible, tangible, or in some way within the sphere and cognizance of sense. Whatever it has to do with, whatever object it seizes and presents, it brings within this sphere, invests with sensible drapery. Now, strictly speaking, there are no objects, save those of sense, which admit of this process, which can be, even in conception, thus invested with sensible forms, pictured to the eye, or represented to the other senses as objects of their cognizance. If I conceive of objects strictly immaterial as thus presented, I make them, by the very conception, to depart from their proper nature and to become sensible. Imagination has nothing to do, then, strictly speaking, with abstract truths and conceptions, with spiritual and immaterial existences, with ideas and feelings as such, for none of these can be represented under sensible forms, or brought within the sphere and cognizance of the senses. Sensible objects are the groundwork, therefore, of its operation--the materials of its art. _But not to visible Objects._--It is not limited, however, to _visible_ objects merely--is not a mere picture-forming, image-making power. It more frequently, indeed, fashions its creations after the conceptions which sight affords than those of the other senses; but it deals also with conceptions of sound, as in music, and the play of storm and tempest, and with other objects of sense, as the taste, the touch, pressure, etc. Thus the _gelidi fontes_ of Virgil is an appeal to the sense of delicious coolness not less than to that of sparkling beauty. A careful analysis of every act of the imagination will show, I think, a _sensible basis_ as the groundwork of the fabric--something seen, or heard, or felt--something said or done--some sensible reality--something which, however ideal and transcendental in itself and in reality, yet admits of expression in and through the senses; otherwise it were a mere conception or _abstraction_--a mere idea--not an imagination. § VII.--IMAGINATION LIMITED TO NEW RESULTS. The simple reproduction of the _past_, whether an object or perception, or sensation, or conception merely, the simple reproduction or bringing back of that to the mind, we have assigned as the office of another faculty. Imagination, we have said, departs from the reality, and gives you not what you have had before, but something new, other, different. It is not the simple image-making power, then, for mental reproduction gives you an image or picture of any former object of perception, _as_ you have seen it--a portrait of the past, true and faithful to the original. Some writers would differ from the view now expressed. Some of the Germans assign to imagination the double office of producing the new and reproducing the old; the latter they call imaginative reproduction. In what respect this latter differs from the faculty of mental reproduction in general, it is difficult to perceive. When I remember a word spoken, or a song, I have the conception of a _sound_, or a series of sounds. When I remember an object in nature, as a mountain, a house, etc., I have the conception of a material object, having some definite form, and figure, outline, proportion, magnitude, etc. The conception of the absent object presents itself in such a case, of course, as an image or picture of the object to the mental eye. It is as really the work of conception reproductive, however, to replace, in this case, the absent object as once perceived, as it is to bring back to mind any thing else that has once been before it; _e. g._, a spoken word or a date in history. We may, if we please, term this faculty, as employed on objects of sight, conception _imaginative_ and distinguish it from the same faculty as employed in reproducing other objects; but it were certainly better to appropriate the term imagination to the single and far higher province of creation--the office of conceiving the ideal under the form of the sensible. § VIII.--IMAGINATION A VOLUNTARY POWER, OR PROCESS. Is it an act which the mind puts forth when it will, and withholds when it will? Or is it a mere passive susceptibility of the mind to be impressed in this particular way? As the harp lies passive to the wind, which comes and goes we know not how or whither, so does the mind lie open to such thoughts and fancies as flit over it and call forth its hidden harmonies as they pass by? Those who, with Dr. Brown, resolve imagination into mere suggestion, of course take the latter view. _Often spontaneous._--Undoubtedly, the greater part of our ideal conceptions are spontaneous--the thoughts that rise at the instant, unpremeditated, uncalled, the suggestions of the passing moment or event. This is true of our daily reveries, and all the little romances we construct, when we give the reins to fancy, and a "varied scene of thought"--to use the beautiful expression of Cudworth--passes before us, peopled with forms unreal and illusive. There is no special volition to call up these conceptions, or _such_ as these. They take their rise and hue from the complexion of the mind at the time, and the character of the preceding conceptions, in the ever moving, ever varying series and procession of thought. They are like the shifting figures on the curtain in a darkened room, shadows coming and going, as the forms of those without move hither and thither. So far, all is spontaneous. Nay, more: It is, doubtless, impossible, by direct volition, to call up any conception, ideal or otherwise; since this, as Dr. Brown has well argued, would be "either to will without knowing what we will, which is absurd," or else to have already the conception which we wished to have, which is not less absurd. _If no intentional Activity, then Imagination not a Faculty._--Is there then no intentional creation of new and ideal conceptions, of images, similes, metaphors, and other like material of a lively and awakened fancy, but merely a _casual_ suggestion of such and such thoughts, quite beyond any control and volition or even purpose of ours? If so, then, after all, is it proper to speak of a faculty of imagination, since we have not, in this case, the _power_ of _doing_ the thing under consideration? We merely sit still in the darkened room, and watch the figures as they come and go, with some desire that the thing may go on, some appreciation of it, some critical judgment of the different forms and movements. _The Mind not wholly passive in the Process._--I reply this is not altogether so. The mind is not altogether _passive_ in this thing; there is an _activity_ involved in the process, and that of the mind's own. There is a power, either original or acquired, of conceiving such thoughts as are now under consideration, a readiness for them, a proneness to them, a bias, propensity, inclination, more powerful in some than in others, by virtue of which this process occurs. We may call this a faculty, though, more strictly, perhaps, _a susceptibility_, but it is, in truth, one of the endowments of the mind, part of its furniture, one form of its activity. _A more direct voluntary Element._--But there is, further than this, and more directly, a voluntary element in the process. It is in our power to yield, or not, to this propensity, this inclination to the ideal; to put forth the mental activity in this direction, or to withhold it; to say whether or not the imagination shall have its free, full play, and with liberated wing soar aloft through her native skies; whether our speech shall be simple argument, unadorned stout logic, or logic not less stout, clothed with the pleasing, rustling drapery which a lively imagination is able to throw, like a splendid robe, over the naked form of truth. There is, then, really a mental activity, and an activity in some degree under control of the will, in the process we are considering. _Same Difficulty lies elsewhere._--The same difficulty which meets us here, meets us elsewhere, and lies equally against other mental powers. We cannot, by direct volition, remember a past event, for this implies, as in the case of the volition to imagine a given scene, either that the thing is already in view, or else that we will we know not what. Yet, as every one knows, there is a way of recalling past events; a faculty or power of doing this thing; a faculty which we exercise when we please. The same may be said of the power of thought in general. We cannot, by direct volition, _think_ of any given thing, for to will to think of it is already to have thought of it, yet there is mental activity involved in every process of thought a mental power exercised, a faculty of some sort exercised. Nor is it a power altogether beyond our own control. We can direct our thoughts, can govern them, can turn them, as we do a water course, that _will_ flow somewhere, but whose channel we may lead this way or that. § IX.--USE AND ABUSE OF IMAGINATION. _Influence upon the Mind._--As to the benefits arising from the due use and exercise of this faculty, not much, perhaps, is requisite to be said. It gives vividness to our conceptions, it raises the tone of our entire mental activity, it adds force to our reasoning, casts the light of fancy over the sombre plodding steps of judgment, gilds the recollections of the past, and the anticipations of the future, with a coloring not their own. It lights up the whole horizon of thought, as the sunrise flashes along the mountain tops, and lights up the world. It would be but a dreary world without that light. _Influence on the Orator._--By its aid the orator presents his clear, strong argument in its own simple strength and beauty, or commands those skillful touches, that, by a magic spell, thrill all hearts in unison. There floats before his mind, ever as he proceeds, the _beau ideal_ of what his argument should be; toward this he aspires, and those aspirations make him what he is. No man is eloquent who has not the imagination requisite to form and keep vividly before him such an ideal. _On the Artist._--By its aid the artist breathes into the inanimate marble the breath of life, and it becomes a living soul. By its aid, deaf old Beethoven, at his stringless instrument, calls up the richest harmony of sound, and blind old Milton, in his darkness and desolateness, takes his magician's wand, and lo! there rises before him the vision of that Paradise where man, in his primeval innocence, walked with God. _On other Minds._--Nor is it the poet, the orator, the artist, alone, that derive benefit from the exercise of this faculty, or have occasion to make use of it. It is of inestimable value to us all. It opens for us new worlds, enlarges the sphere of our mental vision, releases us from the bonds and bounds of the actual, and gives us, as a bird let loose, the wide firmament of thought for our domain. It gilds the bald, sullen actualities, and stern realities of life, as the morning reddens the chill, snowy summits of the Alps, till they glow in resplendent beauty. _On the Spectator and Observer._--It is of service, not to him who writes alone, but to him who reads; not to him who speaks alone, but to him who hears; not to the artist alone, but to the _observer_ of art; for neither poet, nor orator, nor artist, can convey the full meaning, the _soul_, the inspiration of his work, to one who has not the imagination to appreciate and feel the beauty, and the power, that lie hidden there. There is just as much meaning in their works, to us, as there is soul in us to receive that meaning. The man of no imagination sees no meaning, no beauty, no power, in the Paradise Lost, the symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart, the Transfiguration of Raphael, the Aurora of Guido, or the master-pieces of Canova and Thorwalsden. _Errors of Imagination._--Undoubtedly there are errors, mistakes, prejudices, illusions of the imagination; mistakes in judgment, in reasoning, in the affairs of practical life, the source of which is to be found in some undue influence, some wrong use, of the imagination. We mistake its conceptions for realities. We dwell upon its pleasing visions till we forget the sober face of truth. We fancy pleasures, benefits, results which will never be realized, or we look upon the dark and dreary side of things till all nature wears the sombre hue of our disordered fancy. _Not, therefore, to set aside its due Culture._--All this we are liable to do. All these abuses of the imagination are possible, likely enough to occur. Against them we must guard. But to cry out against the culture and due exercise of the imagination, because of these abuses to which it is liable, is not the part of wisdom or highest benevolence. To hinder its fair and full development, and to preclude its use, is to cut ourselves off, and shut ourselves out, from the source of some of the highest, purest, noblest, pleasures of this our mortal life. _No Faculty perhaps of more Value._--It is not too much to say, that there is, perhaps, no faculty of the mind which, under due cultivation, and within proper bounds, is of more real service to man, or is more worthy of his regard, than this. Especially, is it of value in forming and holding before the mind an ideal of excellence in whatever we pursue, a standard of attainment, practicable and desirable, but loftier far than any thing we have yet reached. To present such an ideal, is the work of the imagination, which looks not upon the actual, but the possible, and conceives that which is more perfect than the human eye hath seen, or the human hand wrought. No man ever yet attained excellence, in any art or profession, who had not floating before his mind, by day and by night, such an ideal and vision of what he might and ought to be and to do. It hovers before him, and hangs over him, like the bow of promise and of hope, advancing with his progress, ever rising as he rises, and moving onward as he moves; he will never reach it, but without it he would never be what he is. § X.--CULTURE OF THE IMAGINATION. _Strengthened by Use._--In what way, it is sometimes asked, may the faculty under consideration be improved and strengthened? To this it may be replied, in general, that the ideal faculty, like every other, is developed and strengthened by exercise, weakened and impaired by neglect. There is no surer way to secure its growth than to call its present powers, whatever they may be, into frequent exercise. The mental faculties, like the thews and muscles of the physical frame, develop by use. Imagination follows the same general law. _Study of the Works of others._--I do not mean by this exclusively the direct exercise of the imagination in ideal creations of our own, although its frequent employment in this way, is of course necessary to its full development. But the imagination is also exercised by the study of the ideal creations of others, especially of those highly gifted minds which have adorned and enriched their age with productions of rarest value, which bear the stamp and seal of immortality. With these, in whatever department of letters or art, in poetry, oratory, music, painting, sculpture, architecture--whatever is grand, and lofty, and full of inspiration, whatever is beautiful and pleasing, whatever is of choicest worth and excellence in its own proper sphere; with these let him become familiar who seeks to cultivate in himself the faculty of the ideal. Every work of the imagination appeals to the imagination of the observer, and thus develops the faculty which it calls into exercise. No one can be familiar with the creations of Shakspeare and Milton, of Mozart and Beethoven, of Raphael and Michael Angelo, and not catch something of their inspiration. _Study of Nature._--Even more indispensable is the study of nature; and it has this advantage, that it is open to those who may not have access to the sublime works of the highest masters of art. Nature, in all her moods and phases--in her wonderful variety of elements--the grand and the lowly, the sublime and the beautiful, the terrible and the pleasing--nature in her mildest and most fearful displays of power, and also in her softest and sweetest attractions, is open to every man's observation, and he must be a close observer and a diligent student of her who would cultivate in himself the ideal element. The most gifted sons of genius, the minds most richly endowed with the power of ideal creation, have been remarkable for their love and careful study of nature. _Mistake on this Point._--I must notice in this connection, however, a mistake into which some have fallen in regard to this matter. The simple description of a scene in nature, just as it is, is not properly a work of the imagination. It is simply perception or memory that is thus exercised, along with judgment and artistic power of expression. Imagination gives not the actual, but the ideal. She never satisfies herself with an exact copy. The mere portrait painter, however skillful, is not in the highest sense an artist. The painter, mentioned by Wayland, who copied the wing of the butterfly for the wing of the Sylph, was not, in so doing, exercising his imagination, but only his power of imitation. So, too, when Walter Scott gives us, in the cave of Denzel, a precise description of some spot which he has seen, even to the very plants and flowers that grow among the rocks, that scene, however pleasing and life-like, is not properly a creation of his own imagination; it is a description of the actual, and not a conception of the ideal. Much that is included under the general title of works of the imagination is not properly the production of that faculty. Coleridge has made essentially the same remark, that in what is called a work of imagination, much is simple narration, much the filling up of the outline, and not to be attributed to that faculty. _The Student of Nature not a mere Copyist._--The true study of nature, is not to observe simply that we may copy what she presents, but rather to gather materials on which our own conceptive power may work, and which it may fashion after its own designs into new combinations and results of beauty. Nature, too, is full of hints and suggestions which a discerning mind, and an eye practised to the beautiful, will not fail to catch and improve. It is only when we do this, when we begin, in fact, to depart from, and go beyond the actual, that we exercise the imagination. _Difference illustrated by an Example._--The difference between simple description, and the creations of the conceptive faculty, may be shown by reference to a single example: "The twilight hours, like birds, flew by, As lightly and as free; Ten thousand stars were in the sky, Ten thousand in the sea; For every wave, with dimpled cheek That leaped upon the air, Had caught a star in its embrace, And held it trembling there." The quiet stillness of the evening, the reflection of the stars in the sea, are the two simple ideas which enter into this beautiful stanza. They would have been faithfully and fully expressed, so far as regards all the perfections of exact description, by the simple propositions which follow: "The evening hours passed swiftly and silently; many stars appeared in the sky, and each was reflected in the sea." The poet is not content with this description. The swiftness and silentness of those passing hours remind him of the flight of birds along the sky. The resemblance strikes him as beautiful. He embodies it in his description. It is an ideal conception. He goes further. He sees in the water, not the reflection merely of the stars, but the stars themselves, as many in the sea as in the sky. Here is a departure from the truth, from the actual, an advance into the region of the ideal. Imagination, thus set free, takes still further liberties: attributes to the inanimate wave the _dimpled cheek_ of beauty, ascribes its restlessness not to the laws of gravitation, but to the force of a strictly human passion, under the influence of which it leaps into the air toward the object of its affection, seizes it, and holds it, trembling, in its embrace. § XI.--HISTORICAL SKETCH. VARIOUS DEFINITIONS, AND THEORIES OF IMAGINATION BY DIFFERENT WRITERS. _Definition of Dr. Reid._--_Reid_ makes it nearly synonymous with simple apprehension. "I take imagination, in its most proper sense, to signify a lively conception of _objects of sight_," the conception of things as they appear to the eye. _Addison_ employs the term with the same limitation, that is, as confined to objects of sight. _Of Stewart._--_Stewart_ regards this as incorrect, holds that imagination is not confined to _visible_ or even _sensible_ objects. He regards it as a complex, not a simple power, including simple apprehension, abstraction, judgment, or taste, and association of ideas; its province being to select, from different objects, a variety of qualities and circumstances, and combine and arrange them so as to form a new creation of its own. _Of Brown._--_Brown_ differs not essentially from the view of Stewart. He also makes imagination a complex operation, involving conception, abstraction, judgment, association. He distinguishes between the _spontaneous_ and the _voluntary_ operation of the imaginative power; in the former case, there is no voluntary effort of selection, combination, etc., but images arise independently of any desire or choice of ours, by the laws of suggestion; and this he holds to be the most frequent operation of the faculty. In the case of voluntary imagination, which is attended with desire, this desire is the prominent thing, and serves to keep the conception of the subject before the mind, in consequence of which, a variety of associated conceptions follow, by the laws of suggestion, in regular train. Of these suggested conceptions and images, some, we approve, others, we do not; the former, by virtue of our approval, become more lively and permanent, while the latter pass away. Thus, without any direct effort or power of the will to combine and separate these various conceptions, they shape themselves according to our approval and desire, in obedience to the ordinary laws of suggestion. _Of Smith._--_Sydney Smith_ regards imagination in much the same light--a faculty in which association plays the principal part, assisted by judgment, taste, etc., amounting, in fact, to much the same thing that we call invention; the process by which a poet constructs a drama, or a machinist a steam-engine, being essentially the same. _Of Wayland and Upham._--_Wayland_, in common with most of the authors already cited, makes imagination a complex faculty, involving abstraction, and association; "the power by which, from simple conceptions already existing in the mind, we form complex wholes or images." Some form of abstraction necessarily precedes the exercise of this power. The different elements of a conception must be first mentally severed before we can reunite them in a new conception. "It is this power of reuniting the several elements of a conception at will, that is, properly, imagination. Imagination may then be designated the power of combination." _Upham_ takes the same view. The same view, essentially, is also given by _Amandè Jacques_, a French writer of distinction. _View of Tissot._--_Tissot_, as also many of the German philosophers, gives imagination the double province of recalling sensible intuitions, objects of sight, such as we have known them, and also of conceiving objects altogether differently disposed from our original perceptions of them, varied from the reality. The former they call imagination _reproductive_, the latter, _creative_. That form of the imagination which is purely spontaneous, in distinction from the voluntary, they term fancy. _Of Coleridge and Mahan._--_Coleridge_, followed by _Mahan_, regards imagination as the power which recombines the several elements of thought into conceptions, which conform not to _mere existences_, but to _certain fundamental ideas in the mind itself_, ideas of the beautiful, sublime, etc. _These Definitions agree in what._--These definitions, it will be perceived, with scarcely an exception make imagination to be a complex faculty, and regard it as merely _the power of combining_, in new forms, the various elements of thought already in the mind. The correctness of each of these ideas has been already discussed. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. PART THIRD. THE REFLECTIVE POWER. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS. _Office of this Power._--We have thus far treated of that power of the mind by which it takes cognizance of objects as directly presented to sense, and also of that by which it represents to itself former objects of cognition in their absence. But a large portion of our knowledge and of our mental activity does not fall under either of these divisions. There is a class of mental operations which differs from the former, in that they do not give us directly sensations or perceptions of things, do not present objects themselves; and from the latter, in that they do not represent to the thought absent objects of perception; which differ from both, in that they deal not with the things themselves, but with the properties and relations of things--not with the concrete, but with the abstract and general. This class of operations, to distinguish it from the preceding classes, we have named, in our analysis, the _reflective power_ of the mind. It comprises a large part of our mental activity. _Specific Character._--The form of mental activity which is characteristic of this faculty, is the perception of relations, that which Dr. Brown calls _relative suggestion_, but which we should prefer to term _relative conception_. The mind is so constituted that when distinct objects of thought are presented, it conceives at once the notion of certain relations existing between those objects. One is larger, one smaller, one is here, the other there, one is a part in relation to a whole, some are like, others unlike each other. The several relations that may exist and fall under the notice of this power of the mind are too many to be easily enumerated. The more important are, position, resemblance, proportion, degree, comprehension. All these may, perhaps, by a sufficiently minute analysis, be resolved into one--that of comprehension, or the relation of a whole to its parts. _Comprehensive of several Processes._--The faculty now under consideration will, on careful investigation, be found to underlie and comprehend several mental processes usually ranked as distinct operations and faculties of the mind, but which are at most only so many forms of the general power of relative conception. Such are the mental operations usually known as _judgment_, _abstraction_, _generalization_, and _reasoning_. Of these, and their relation to the general faculty comprehensive of all, we shall have occasion to speak further as we proceed. _Two Modes of Operation._--As the relations of object to object may all be comprised under the general category of comprehension, or the whole and its parts, there are manifestly two modes or processes in which the reflective faculty may put forth its activity. It may combine the several parts or elements to form a complex whole, or it may divide the complex whole into its several parts and elements. In the one case, it works from the parts, as already resolved, to the whole; in the other, from the whole, as already combined, to the parts. The one is the compositive or synthetic, the other, the analytic or divisive process. Each will claim our attention. CHAPTER I. THE SYNTHETIC PROCESS--GENERALIZATION. § I.--NATURE OF THE SYNTHETIC PROCESS. _Our Conceptions often Complex._--If we examine attentively the various notions or conceptions of the mind, we find that a large part of them are in a sense complex--comprising, in a word, a certain aggregate of properties, which, taken together, constitute our conception of the object. Thus, my notion of table, or chair, or desk, is made up of several conceptions, of form, size, material, color, hardness, weight, use, etc., etc., all which, taken together, constitute my notion of the object thus designated. _Originally given as discrete._--These several elements that enter into the composition of our conceptions of objects, it is further to be noticed, are, in the first instance, given us in perception, not as a complex whole, but as discrete elements. Thus, sight gives us form and color; touch gives us extension, hardness, smoothness, etc.; muscular resistance gives us weight, and so, by the various senses, we gather the several properties which make up our cognizance of the object, and which, taken together, constitute our conception of it. _Conceptions of Classes._--But a large part of our conceptions, if we carefully observe the operations of our own minds, are not particular, but general, not of individual objects, but of classes of objects. Of this, any one may satisfy himself on a little reflection. How are these conceptions formed? _Such Conceptions, how formed._--The process of forming a general conception, I take to be this: The several elements that compose our conception of an individual object, being originally presented, as we have already said, one by one, in the discrete, and not in the concrete, it is of course in our power to conceive of any one of these elements by itself. No new power or faculty is needed for this. By the usual laws of suggestion any one of these elements may be presented to the mind, distinct from those with which, in perception, it is associated, and as such it may be the object of attention and thought. I may thus conceive of the color, the form, the size, or the fragrance of a flower. _Extension of the Process to other Objects._--It is of the form, color, etc., of some particular flower, as yet, however, and not of form and color in general, that I conceive. Suppose, now, that other flowers are presented to my notice, possessing the same form and color, for example, red. Presently I observe other objects, besides flowers, that are of the same color--horses, cows, tables, books, cloths. As the field of observation enlarges, still other objects are added to the list, until that which I first conceived of as the peculiar property of a single flower, the rose, and of a single specimen, no longer is appropriated in my thoughts to any individual object or class of objects, but becomes a general conception. It is an abstraction and also a generalization; an abstraction because it no longer denotes or connotes any individual object, but stands before the mind as simple, pure quality, red, or redness; a generalization inasmuch as it is a quality pertaining equally to a great variety of objects. _The Process carried still further._--Having thus obtained the general conception of red, and, in like manner, of blue, violet, yellow, indigo, orange, etc., etc., I may carry the process still further, and form a conception more general than either, and which shall include all these. These are all varieties denoting the certain peculiarity of appearance which external objects present to the eye. Fixing my thought upon this, their common characteristic, I no longer conceive of red, or blue, or violet, as such, but of color in general. In like manner, I observe the properties of different triangles--right-angled, obtuse-angled, acute-angled, equilateral, isosceles. I leave out of view whatever is peculiar to each of these varieties, retaining only what is common to them all--the property of three-sidedness; and my conception is now a general one--triangle. It is in this manner that we form the conceptions expressed by such terms as animal, man, virtue, form, beauty, and the like. A large proportion of the words in ordinary use, are of this sort. They are the names or expressions of abstract, general, conceptions: abstract, in that they do not relate to any individual object; general, in that they comprehend, and are equally applicable to a great variety of objects. _Process of Classification._--The process of _classification_ is essentially the same with that by which we form general abstract conceptions. Observing different objects, I find that they resemble each other in certain respects, while in others they differ. Objects A, B, and C, differ, for instance, in form, and size, and weight, and fragrance, but agree in some other respect, as in color. On the ground of this resemblance, I class them together in my conceptions. In so doing, I leave out of view all other peculiarities, the points in which they differ, and take into account only the one circumstance in which they agree. In the very act of forming a class, I have formed a general conception, which lies at the basis of that classification. _Tendency of the Mind._--The tendency of the mind to group individual objects together on the ground of perceived resemblances, is very strong, and must be regarded as one of the universal and instinctive propensities of our nature, one of the laws of mental action. As we have already remarked, respecting general abstract terms, a large portion of the language of ordinary life is the language of classification. The words which constitute by far the greater part of the names of things, are common nouns, that is, names of classes. The names of individual objects are comparatively few. Adjectives, specifying the qualities of objects, denote groups or classes possessing that common quality. Adverbs qualifying verbs or adjectives, designate varieties or classes of action and of quality. Indeed, the very existence of language as a medium of communication, and means of expression, involves and depends upon this tendency of the mind to class together, and then to designate by a common noun, objects diverse in reality, but agreeing in some prominent points of resemblance. In no other way would language be possible to man, since, to designate each individual object by a name peculiar to itself, would be an undertaking altogether impracticable. _Rudeness of the earlier Attempts._--The first efforts of the mind at the process of classification are, doubtless, rude and imperfect. The infancy of the individual, and the infancy of nations and races, are, in this respect, alike; objects are grouped roughly and in the mass, specific differences are overlooked, and individuals differing widely and essentially are thrown into the same class, on the ground of some observed and striking resemblance. As observation becomes more minute, and the mind advances in culture and power of discrimination, these ruder generalizations are either abandoned or subdivided into genera and species, and the process assumes a scientific form. What was at first mere classification, becomes now, in the strictest sense, _generalization_. _Scientific Classification._--Classification, however scientific, is still essentially the process already described. We observe a number of individuals, for example, of our own species. Certain resemblances and differences strike us. Some have straight hair, and copper complexion, others, woolly hair, and black complexion, others, again, differ from the preceding in both these respects. Neglecting minor and specific differences, we fix our attention on the grand points of resemblance, and thus form a general conception, which embraces whatever characteristics belong, in common, to the several individuals which thus resemble each other. To this general conception we appropriate the name Indian, Negro, Caucasian, etc., which henceforth represent to us so many classes or varieties of the human race. Bringing these classes again into comparison with each other, we observe certain points of resemblance between them, and form a conception still more general, that of man. _Further Illustration of the same Process._--In this way the genera and species of science are formed. On grounds of observed resemblance, we class together, for example, certain animals. They differ from each other in color, size, and many other respects, but agree in certain characteristics which we find invariable, as, for example, the form of the skeleton, number of vertebræ, number and form of teeth, arrangement of organs of digestion. We give a name to the class thus formed--carnivora, rodentia, etc. The class thus formed and named, we term the genus, while the minor differences mark the subordinate varieties or species included under the genus. In the same way, comparing other animals, we form other genera. Bringing the several genera also into comparison, we find them likewise agreeing in certain broad resemblances. These points of agreement, in turn, constitute the elements of a conception and classification still wider and more comprehensive than the former. Under this new conception I unite the previous genera, and term them all mammalia. And so on to the highest and widest generalizations of science. Having formed our classification we refer any new specimen to some one of the classes already formed, and the more complete our original survey, the more correct is this process of individual arrangement. It is remarked by Mr. Stewart, that the islanders of the Pacific, who had never seen any species of quadruped, except the hog and the goat, naturally inferred, when they saw a cow, that she must belong to one or the other of these classes. The limitations of human knowledge may lead the wisest philosopher into essentially the same error. It is in the way now described that we form genera, and species, and the various classes into which, for purposes of science, we divide the multitude of objects which are presented in nature, and which, but for this faculty, would appear to us but a confused and chaotic assemblage without number, order, or arrangement. The individuals exist in nature--not the classes, and orders, and species: these are the creations of the human mind, conceptions of the brain, results of that process of thought now described as the reflective faculty in its synthetic form. _Importance of this Process._--It is evident at a glance that this process lies at the foundation of all science. Had we no power of generalization--had we no power of separating, in our thoughts, the quality from the substance to which it pertains, of going beyond the concrete to the abstract, beyond the particular to the general--could we deal only with individual existences, neither comparison nor classification would be possible; each particular individual object would be a study to us by itself, nor would any amount of diligence ever carry us beyond the very alphabet of knowledge. _Existence of general Conceptions questioned._--Important as this faculty may seem when thus regarded, it has been questioned by some whether, after all, we have, in fact, or can have, any general abstract ideas; whether triangle, man, animal, etc., suggest in reality any thing more to the mind than simply some particular man, or triangle, or animal, which we take to represent the whole class to which the individual belongs. There can be no question, however, that we do distinguish in our minds the thought of some particular man, as Mr. A, or some particular sort of man, as black man, white man, from the thought suggested by the term man; and the thought of an isosceles or right-angled triangle, from the thought suggested by the unqualified term triangle. They do not mean the same thing; they have not the same value to our minds. Now there are a great multitude of such general terms in every language, they have a definite meaning and value, and we know _what_ they mean. It must be then that we have general abstract ideas, or general conceptions. _Argument of the Nominalist._--But the nominalist replies. The term man, or triangle, awakens in your mind, in reality and directly, only the idea of some particular individual or triangle, and this stands as a sort of _type_ or _representation_ of other like individuals of whom you do not definitely think as such and so many. I reply, this cannot be shown; but even if it were so, the very language of the objection implies the power of having general conceptions. If the individual man or triangle thought of stands as a type or representation, as it is said, of a great number of similar men and triangles, then is there not already in my mind, prior to this act of representation, the _idea of a class of objects_, arranged according to the law of resemblance, in other words, a _general abstract idea_ or _conception_? If I had not already formed such an idea, the particular object presented to my thoughts could not stand as type or representation of any such thing, or of any thing beyond itself, for the simple reason that there would be nothing of the sort to represent. _Further Reply._--Besides, there is a large class of general terms to which this reasoning of the nominalist would not at all apply--such terms as virtue, vice, knowledge, wisdom, truth, time, space--which manifestly do not awaken in the mind the thought of any particular virtue or vice, any particular truth, any definite time, any definite space, but a general notion under which all particular instances may be included. To this the nominalist will perhaps reply, that in such cases we are really thinking, after all, of mere _names_ or _signs_, as when we use the algebraic formula _x-y_, a mere term of convenience, having indeed some value, we do not know precisely what, _itself_ the terminus and object of our thought for the time being. In such cases the mind stops, he would say, with the term itself, and does not go beyond it to conjure up a general conception for it. So it is with the terms virtue, vice; so with the general terms, class, species, genus, man, animal, triangle; they are mere collective terms, _signs_, formulas of convenience, to which you attach no more meaning than to the expression _x-y_. If you would find their meaning and attach any definite idea to them, you must resolve them into the _particular_ objects, the particular vices, virtues, etc., which go to make up the class. I reply to all this, you are still classifying, still forming a general conception, the expression of which is your so called formula, _x-y_, alias virtue, man, and the like. § II.--PROVINCE AND RELATION OF SEVERAL TERMS EMPLOYED TO DENOTE, IN PART, OR AS A WHOLE, THIS POWER OF THE MIND. We are now prepared to consider the proper province and relation of several terms frequently employed, with considerable latitude and diversity of meaning, to denote, in part, or as a whole, the process now described. Such are the terms _abstraction_, _generalization_, _classification_, and _judgment_. I. ABSTRACTION. _Term often used in a Wide Sense._--This term is frequently employed to denote the entire synthetic process as now described--the power of forming abstract general conceptions, and of classifying objects according to those conceptions. It is thus employed by Stewart, Wayland, Mahan, and others. There is, perhaps, no objection to this use of the word, except that it is manifestly a departure from the strict and proper sense of the term. _More limited Sense._--There is another and more common use of the term abstraction, which gives it a more limited sense. As thus employed, it denotes that act of the mind by which we fix our attention on some one of the several parts, properties, or qualities of an object, to the exclusion of all the other parts or properties which go to make up the complex whole. In consequence of this exclusive direction of the thoughts to that one element, the other elements or properties are lost sight of, drop out of the account, and there remains in our present conception only that one item which we have singled out from the rest. This is denominated, in common language, _abstraction_. Such is the common idea and definition of that term. It is Mr. Upham's definition. _This not really Abstraction._--Whether this, again, is the true idea of abstraction, is, to say the least, questionable. When I think of the cover of a book, the handle of a door, the spring of a watch, in distinction from the other parts which make up a complex whole, I am hardly exercising the power of abstract thought; certainly no new, distinct faculty is requisite for this, but simply attention to one among several items or objects of perception. Hardly ever can it be called analysis, with Wayland. It is the simple direction of the thought to some one out of several objects presented. A red rose is before me. I may think of its color exclusively, in distinction from its form and fragrance; that is, of the redness of this particular rose, this given surface before me. The object of my thought is purely a sensible object. I have not abstracted it from the sensible individual object to which it belongs. It is in no sense an abstract idea, a pure conception. There has been nothing done which is not done in any case where one thing, rather than another of a group or assemblage of objects, is made the object of attention. _The true Nature of Abstraction._--But suppose now that instead of thinking of the redness of this rose in particular, I think of the color red in general, without reference to the rose or any other substance; or, to carry the process further, of color in general, without specifying in my thought any particular color, evidently I am dealing now with abstractions. I have in my thought _drawn away_ (abstraho) the color from the substance to which it belongs, from all substance, and it stands forth by itself a pure conception, an _abstraction_, having, as such, no existence save in my mind, but there it does exist a definite object of contemplation. The form of mental activity now described, I should call _abstraction_. It is not necessary, perhaps, to assign it a place as a distinct faculty of the mind. It is, in reality, a part, and an important part, of the synthetic process already described. But it is not the whole of that process, and the term abstraction should not, therefore, in strict propriety, at least as now defined, be applied as a general term to designate that class of mental operations. The synthetic process involves something more than mere abstraction; viz.: II. CLASSIFICATION AS DISTINGUISHED FROM GENERALIZATION. _Classification._--When the general idea or conception has been formed in the mind, we proceed to bring together and arrange, on the basis of that general conception, whatever individual objects seem to us to fall under that general rule. This we call classification. Thus, forming first the abstract, or general conception red, we bring together in our thought a variety of objects to which this conception is applicable, as red horses, red flowers, red books, red tables, etc., etc., thus forming classes of objects on the ground of this common property. The difference between _classification_ and _generalization_, in so far as they are not synonymous, I take to be simply this, that in the former we group and arrange objects according to no general law, but mere appearance or resemblance, often, therefore, on fanciful or arbitrary grounds while in the latter case, we proceed according to some general and scientific principle or law of classification, making only those distinctions the basis of our arrangement which are founded in nature, and are at once invariable and essential. III. JUDGMENT AS RELATED TO CLASSIFICATION. _Judgment._--We have already spoken of that specific process by which, having formed a given conception, or a given rule, we bring the individual objects of perception and thought under that rule, or reject them from it, according as they agree or disagree with the conception we have formed. The process itself we have called classification. The mental activity thus employed is technically termed _judgment_--the power of subsuming, under a given notion or conception, the particular objects which properly belong there. Thus, the botanist, as he meets with new plants, and the ornithologist, as he discovers new varieties of birds, refers them at once to the family, the genus, the species to which they belong. His mind runs over the generic types of the several classes and orders into which all plants and birds are divided, he perceives that his new specimen answers to the characteristic features of one of these families, or classes, and not to those of the others, and he accordingly assigns it a place under one, and excludes it from the rest. So doing, he exercises judgment. All classification involves and depends upon this power; closely viewed, the action of the mind, in the exercise of this power, amounts simply to this, the perception of agreement or disagreement between two objects of thought. In the case supposed, the genus or species, as described by those who have treated of the particular science, is one of the objects contemplated; the next specimen of plant or bird, as carefully observed and studied, is the other. These two objects of thought are compared; the one is perceived to agree or not to agree with the other; and on the ground of this agreement or disagreement, the classification is made. This perception of agreement in such a case is an act of judgment, so called. _Not a distinct Faculty._--The form of mental activity now described, is hardly to be ranked as a distinct faculty of the mind, although it has been not unfrequently so treated by writers on mental science. It enters more or less fully into all mental operations; like consciousness and attention, it is, to some extent, involved in the exercise of all the faculties, and cannot, therefore, be ranked, with propriety, as coördinate with them. It is not confined to the investigations of science, but is an activity constantly exercised by all men. We have in our minds a multitude of general conceptions, the result of previous observation and thought. Every moment some new object presents itself. With the quickness of thought, we find its place among the conceptions already in the mind: it agrees with this, it is incompatible with that, it belongs with the one, it is excluded from the other. This is the form of most of our thinking; indeed, no small part of our mental activity consists in this perception of agreements and disagreements, and in the referring of some particular object of experience, some individual conception, to the class or general conception under which it properly belongs. The expression of such a judgment is a proposition. We think in propositions, which are only judgments mentally expressed. We discourse in propositions, which are judgments orally expressed. We cannot frame a proposition which does not affirm, or deny, or call in question, something of something. _Judgment in relation to Knowledge._--Are judgment and knowledge identical? Is all knowledge only some form of judgment? So Kant, Tissot, and other writers of that school, would affirm. "Judgment is the principal operation of the mind, since it is concerned in all knowledge properly so called." "All our knowledges are judgments. To know, is to distinguish, and to distinguish, is at once to affirm, and to deny." Such was also Dr. Reid's doctrine, in opposition to Locke, who distinguished between knowledge and judgment. Reid, on the contrary, regards knowledge as only one class of judgments, namely, those about which we are most positive and certain. According to this view, judgment seems to cover the whole field of mental activity. Sir William Hamilton thus regards it. We cannot even experience a sensation, he maintains, without the mental affirmation or judgment that we are thus and thus affected. _Common Speech distinguishes them._--It must be admitted, however, that in common use there is a distinction between knowing and judging, the one implying the comparative certainty of the thing known, the other implying some room and ground for doubt, the existence of opinion and belief, rather than of positive knowledge. The word itself, both in its primitive signification, and its derivation, indicating, as it does, the decision by legal tribunal of doubtful cases, favors this usage. That an exercise of judgment is, strictly speaking, involved in all knowledge, is, nevertheless true, since, to know that a thing is thus and thus, and not otherwise, is to distinguish it from other things, and that is to judge. § III.--HISTORICAL SKETCH. _The Realist and Nominalist Controversy._ _The Question at Issue._--No question has been more earnestly and even more bitterly discussed, in the whole history of philosophical inquiry, than the point at issue between the Realist and Nominalist, as to what is the precise object of thought when we form an abstract general conception. When I use the term _man_, for example, is it a mere _name_, and nothing more, or is there a _real existence_ corresponding to that name, or is it neither a mere name on the one hand, nor, on the other, a real existence, but a conception of my own mind, which is the object of thought? These three answers can be made, these three doctrines held, and essentially only these three. Each has been actually maintained with great ability and acuteness. The names by which the three doctrines are respectively designated are, Realism, Nominalism, and Conceptualism. _Early History of Realism._--Of these doctrines, the former, Realism, was the first to develop itself. To say nothing of the ancients, we find traces of it in modern philosophy, as early as the ninth century. Indeed, it would seem to have been the prevalent doctrine, though not clearly and sharply defined; a belief, as Tissot has well expressed it, "spontaneous, blind, and without self-consciousness." John Scotus Erigena, and St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, both philosophers of note, together with many others of less distinction, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, were prominent Realists. The Platonic view may, in fact, be said to have prevailed down to that period. The early fathers of the Christian Church were strongly tinged with Platonism, and the Realistic theory accordingly very naturally engrafted itself upon the philosophy of the middle ages. The logical and the ontological, existence as mere thought of the mind, and existence as reality, were not distinguished by the leading minds of those centuries. The reality of the thought as thought, and the reality of an actual existence, corresponding to that thought, were confounded the one with the other. As the rose of which I conceive has existence apart from my conception, so man, plant, tree, animal, are realities, and not mere conceptions of the mind. _Rise of Nominalism._--It was not till nearly the close of the eleventh century, that the announcement of the opposite doctrine was distinctly made, in opposition to the prevalent views. This was done by Roscelinus, who maintained that universal and general ideas have no objective reality; that the only reality is that of the individuals comprised under these genera; that there are no such existences as man, animal, beauty, virtue, etc.; that generality is only a pure form given by the mind to the matter of its ideas, a pure abstraction, a mere name. In this we have the opposite extreme of Realism. If the Realist went too far in affirming the objective reality of his conception, the Nominalist erred on the other in overlooking its subjective reality as a mode or state of the mind, and reducing it to a mere name. _Dispute becomes theological._--The dispute now, unfortunately, but almost inevitably, became theological. The Realist accused the Nominalist of virtually denying the doctrine of the Trinity, inasmuch as, according to him, the idea of Trinity is only an abstraction, and there is no Being corresponding to that idea. To this, Roscelinus replied, with at least equal force and truth, that on the same ground the Realist denied the doctrine of divine unity, by holding a doctrine utterly incompatible with it. Roscelinus, however was defeated, if not in argument, at least by numbers and authority, and was condemned by council at the close of the eleventh century. _Rise of Conceptualism._--It was about this time, that Abelard, pupil of Roscelinus, proposed a modified view of the matter, avoiding the extreme position both of the Realist and the Nominalist party, and allowing the _subjective_, but not the _objective_ reality, of general ideas. This is substantially the doctrine of Conceptualism. The general abstract idea of man, rose, mountain, etc., has indeed no existence or reality as an external object, nor is there among external objects any thing corresponding to this idea; but it has, nevertheless, a reality and existence as a thought, a conception of my mind. _Prevalence of Realism during the twelfth and thirteenth Centuries._--The doctrine, as thus modified, gained some prevalence, but was condemned by successive councils and by the Pope. Sustained by such authority, as well as by the names of men greatly distinguished for learning and philosophy, Realism prevailed over its antagonists during the latter part of the twelfth and the whole of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth witnessed again the rise and spread of the Conceptualist theory, under the leadership of Occam. The dispute was bitter, leading to strife and even blood. _Later History of the Discussion._--In the seventeenth century we find Hobbes, Hume, and Berkley advocating the doctrine of the Nominalists, while Price maintains the side of Realism. Locke and Reid were Conceptualists, Stewart a Nominalist. CHAPTER II. THE ANALYTIC PROCESS--REASONING. _Relation to the Synthetic Process._--We have thus far considered that form or process of the reflective faculty, by which we combine the elements of individual complex conceptions, to form general conceptions and classes, on the basis of perceived agreements and differences. This we have termed the synthetic process. The divisive or analytic process remains to be considered. This, as the name denotes, is, so far as regards the method of procedure, the opposite of the former. We no longer put together, but take apart, no longer combine the many to form one, but from the general complex whole, as already formed and announced, we evolve the particular which lies included in it. This process comprehends what is generally called analysis, and also reasoning. In discussing this most important mental process, we shall have occasion to treat more particularly of its _nature_, its _forms_, and its _modes_. § I.--THE NATURE OF THE PROCESS. _Conceptions often Complex._--It was remarked, in speaking of our conceptions, that many of them are complex. My notion of a table, for example, is that of an object possessing certain qualities, as form, size, weight, color, hardness, each of which qualities is known to me by a distinct act of perception, if not by a distinct sense, and each of which is capable, accordingly, of being distinctly, and by itself, an object of thought or conception. The understanding combines these several conceptions, and thus forms the complex notion of a table. The notion thus formed, is neither more nor less than the aggregate, or combination of the several elementary conceptions already indicated. When I am called on to define my complex conception, I can only specify these several elementary notions which go to make up my idea of the table. I can say it is an object round, or square, of such or such magnitude, that it is of such or such material, of this or that color, and designed for such and such uses. _Virtual Analysis of complex Conceptions._--Now when I affirm that the table is round, I state one of the several qualities of the object so called, one of the several parts of the complex notion. It is a partial analysis of that complex conception. I separate from the whole, one of its component parts, and then affirm that it sustains the relation of a part to the comprehensive whole. The separation is a virtual analysis. The affirmation is an act of judgment expressed in the form of a proposition. Every proposition is, in fact, a species of synthesis, and implies the previous analysis of the conception, or comprehensive whole, whose component parts are thus brought together. Thus, when I say snow is white, man is mortal, the earth is round, I simply affirm of the object designated, one of the qualities which go to make up my conception of that object. Every such statement or proposition involves an analysis of the complex conception which forms the subject of the proposition, while the thing predicated or affirmed is, that the quality designated--the result of such analysis--is one of the parts constituting that complex whole. _Reasoning, what._--Reasoning is simply a series of such propositions following in consecutive order, in which this analysis is carried out more or less minutely. Thus, when I affirm that man is mortal, I resolve my complex notion of man into its component parts, among which I find the attribute of mortality, and this attribute I then proceed to affirm of the subject, man. I simply evolve, and distinctly announce, what was involved in the term man. But this term expresses not merely a complex, but a general notion. Resolving it as such into its individual elements, I find it to comprehend among the rest, a certain person, Socrates, _e. g._, and the result of this analysis I state in the proposition, Socrates is a man. But on the principle that what is true of a class must be true of the individuals composing it, it follows that the mortality already predicated of the class, man, is an attribute of the individual, Socrates. When I affirm, then, that Socrates is mortal, I announce, in reality, only what was virtually implied in the first proposition--man is mortal. I have analyzed the complex general conception, man, have found involved in it the particular conception, mortal, and the individual conception, Socrates, and by a subsequent synthesis have brought together these results in the proposition, Socrates is mortal, a proposition which sustains to the affirmation, man is mortal, the simple relation of a part to the whole. _Reasoning and Analysis, how related._--This analytic process, as applied to propositions, for the purpose of evolving from a complex general statement, whatever is involved or virtually contained in it, is called reasoning; as applied not to propositions, but to simple conceptions merely, it is known as simple analysis. The psychological process is, in either case, one and the same. _Illustration by Dr. Brown._--Dr. Brown has well illustrated the nature of the reasoning process in its relation to the general proposition with which we set out, by reference to the germ enclosed in the bulb of the plant. "The truths at which we arrive, by repeated intellectual analysis, may be said to resemble the premature plant which is to be found enclosed in that which is itself enclosed in the bulb, or seed which we dissect. We must carry on our dissection more and more minutely to arrive at each new germ; but we do arrive at one after the other, and when our dissection is obliged to stop, we have reason to suppose that still finer instruments, and still finer eyes, might prosecute the discovery almost to infinity. It is the same in the discovery of the truths of reasoning. The stage at which one inquirer stops is not the limit of analysis in reference to the object, but the limit of the analytic power of the individual. Inquirer after inquirer discovers truths which were involved in truths formerly admitted by us, without our being able to perceive what was comprehended in our admission.... There may be races of beings, at least we can conceive of races of beings, whose senses would enable them to perceive the ultimate embryo plant enclosed in its innumerable series of preceding germs; and there may, perhaps, be created powers of some higher order, as we know that there is one Eternal Power, able to feel, in a single comprehensive thought, all those truths, of which the generations of mankind are able, by successive analyses, to discover only a few, that are, perhaps, to the great truths which they contain, only as the flower, which is blossoming before us, is to that infinity of future blossoms enveloped in it, with which, in ever renovated beauty, it is to adorn the summers of other ages." _Inquiry suggested._--But here the inquiry may arise. How happens it that, if the reasonings which conduct to the profoundest and most important truths, are but successive and continued analyses of our previous conceptions, we should have admitted those preceding truths and conceptions without a suspicion of the results involved in them? The reason is probably to be found, as Dr. Brown suggests, in the fact that in the process of generalizing we form classes and orders before distinguishing the minuter varieties; we are struck with some obvious points of agreement which lead us to give a common place and a common term to the objects of such resemblance, and this very circumstance of agreement which we perceive, may involve other circumstances which we do not at the time perceive, but which are disclosed on minute and subsequent attention. "It is as if we knew the situations and bearings of all the great cities in Europe, and could lay down, with most accurate precision, their longitude and latitude. To know thus much, is to know that a certain space must intervene between them, but it is not to know what that space contains. The process of reasoning, in the discoveries which it gives, is like that topographic inquiry which fills up the intervals of our map, placing here a forest, there a long extent of plains, and beyond them a still longer range of mountains, till we see, at last, innumerable objects connected with each other in that space which before presented to us only a few points of mutual bearing." _The Position further argued from the Nature of the Syllogism._--That all deductive reasoning, at least, is essentially what has now been described, an analytic process, is evident from the fact that the syllogism to which all such argument may be reduced, is based upon the admitted principle that whatever is true of the class, is true of all the individuals comprehended under it. Something is affirmed of a given class; an individual or individuals are then affirmed to belong to that class; and on the strength of the principle just stated, it is thereupon affirmed that what was predicated of the class is also true of the individual. Nothing can be plainer than that in this process we are working from the given whole to the comprehended parts, from the complex conception stated at the outset, to the truths that lie hidden and involved in it. In other words, it is a process of analysis which we thus perform, and as all reasoning, when scientifically stated, is brought under this form, it follows that all reasoning is essentially analytic in its nature. _Inductive Reasoning no Exception._--It may be supposed that the inductive method of reasoning is an exception to this rule, inasmuch as we proceed, in that case, not from the general to the particular, but the reverse. Whatever may be true of deduction, is not induction essentially a synthetic process? So it might, at first, appear. I have observed, for example, that several animals of a particular species, sheep, for instance, chew the cud. Having observed this in several instances, I presently conclude that the same is true of the whole class to which these several individuals belong, in other words, that all sheep are ruminant. Extending my observation further, I find other species of animals likewise chewing the cud. I observe, moreover, that every animal, possessing this characteristic, is distinguished by the circumstance of having horns and cloven hoofs; I find, so far as my observation goes, the two things always associated, and hence am led, on observing the one, immediately to infer the other. The proposition that was at the outset particular, now becomes general, viz., all animals that have horns and cloven hoofs are ruminant. Is the conclusion at which I thus arrive, involved in the premiss with which I start? Is the fact that all horned and cloven-footed animals are ruminant, implied and contained in the fact that _some_ horned and cloven-footed animals, that is, so many as I have observed, are so? _Even here the Evidence of the Conclusion lies in the Premiss._--A little reflection will convince us that these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. If the conclusion be itself correct and true, then it is a truth involved in the previous proposition; for whatever evidence I have of the truth of my conclusion, that all animals of this sort are ruminant, is manifestly derived from, and therefore contained in, the fact that such as I have observed are so. I have no other evidence in the case supposed. If this evidence is insufficient, then the conclusion is not established. If it be sufficient, then the conclusion which it establishes, is derived from and involved in it. The argument fully and scientifically stated, runs thus: A, B, C, animals observed, are ruminant. But A, B, C, represent the class Z to which they belong. Therefore, class Z is ruminant. Admitting now the correctness of my observation in respect to A, B, C, that they are ruminant, the argument turns entirely upon the second proposition that A, B, C, represent the class Z, so that what is true of them in this respect, is true of the whole class. If A, B, C, _do_ represent the class Z, then to say that A, B, C, are ruminant, is to say that Z is so. The one is contained in the other. If they do _not_, then the conclusion is itself groundless, and there is no occasion to inquire in what it is contained, or whether it is contained in any thing. It is no longer a valid argument and therefore cannot be brought in evidence that some reasoning is not analytic. _What sort of Propositions constitute Reasoning._--It is hardly necessary to state that not any and every series of propositions constitute reasoning. The propositions must be consecutive, following in a certain order, and not only so, but must be in such a manner connected with and related to each other, that the truth of the final proposition shall be manifest from the propositions which precede. To affirm that snow is white, that gold is more valuable than silver, and that virtue is the only sure road to happiness, is to state a series of propositions, each one of which is true, but which have no such relation to each other as to constitute an argument. The truth of the last proposition does not follow from the truth of the preceding ones. § II.--RELATION OF JUDGMENT AND REASONING. _Judgment Synthetic, Reasoning Analytic._--The relation of judgment and reasoning to each other becomes evident from what has been said of the nature of the reasoning process. Judgment is essentially synthetic. Reasoning, essentially analytic. The former combines, affirms one thing to be true of another; the latter divides, declares one truth to be contained in another. All reasoning involves judgment, but all judgment is not reasoning. The several propositions that constitute a chain of reasoning, are so many distinct judgments. Reasoning is the evolution or derivation of one of these judgments, viz., the conclusion, from another, viz., the premiss. It is the process by which we arrive at some of our judgments. _Mr. Stewart's View._--Reasoning is frequently defined as a combination of judgments, in order to reach a result not otherwise obvious. Mr. Stewart compares our several judgments to the separate blocks of stone which the builder has prepared, and which lie upon the ground, upon any one of which a person may elevate himself a slight distance from the ground; while these same judgments, combined in a process of reasoning, he likens to those same blocks converted now, by the builder's art, into a grand staircase leading to the summit of some lofty tower. It is a simple combination of separate judgments, nor is there any thing in the last step of the series differing at all in its nature, says Mr. Stewart, from the first step. Each step is precisely like every other, and the process of reaching the top is simply a repetition of the act by which the first step is reached. _This View called in Question._--It is evident that this position is not in accordance with the general view which we have maintained of the nature of the reasoning process. According to this view, reasoning is not so much a combination as an analysis of judgments; nor is the last of the several propositions in a chain of argument of the same nature precisely as the first. It is, like the first, a judgment, but unlike the first, it is a particular sort of judgment, viz., an inference or conclusion, a judgment involved in and derived from the former. In the series of propositions, A is B, B is C, therefore A is C, the act of mind by which I perceive that A is B, or that B is C, is not of the same nature with that by which I perceive the consequent truth that A is C; no mere repetition of the former act would amount to the latter. There is a new sort of judgment in the latter case, a deduction from the former. In order to reach it, I must not merely perceive that A is B, and that B is C, but must also perceive the connection of the two propositions, and what is involved in them. It is only by bringing together in the mind these two propositions, that I perceive the new truth, not otherwise obvious, that A is C, and the state or act of mind involved in this latter step seems to me a different one from that by which I reach the former judgments. § III.--DIFFERENT KINDS OF REASONING. _Two Kinds of Truth._--The most natural division is that according to the subject-matter, or the materials of the work. The truths which constitute the material of our reasoning process are of two kinds, _necessary_, and _contingent_. That two straight lines cannot enclose a space, that the whole is greater than any one of its parts, are examples of the former. That the earth is an oblate spheroid, moves in an elliptical orbit, and is attended by one satellite, are examples of the latter. _The Difference lies in what._--The difference is not that one is any _less certain_ than the other, but of the one you cannot conceive the opposite, of the other you can. That three times three are nine, is no more true and certain, than that Cæsar invaded Britain, or that the sun will rise to-morrow a few minutes earlier or later than to-day. But the one admits of the contrary supposition without absurdity, the other does not; the one is contingent, the other necessary. Now these two classes of truths, differing as they do, in this important particular, admit of, and require, very different methods of reasoning. The one class is susceptible of _demonstration_, the other admits only that species of reasoning called _probable_ or _moral_. It must be remembered, however that when we thus speak we do not mean that this latter class of truths is deficient in proof; the word probable is not, as thus used, opposed to _certainty_, but only to _demonstration_. That there is such a city as Rome, or London, is just as _certain_ as that the several angles of a triangle are equal to two right-angles; but the evidence which substantiates the one is of a very different nature from that of the other. The one can be demonstrated, the other cannot. The one is an eternal and necessary truth, subject to no contingence, no possibility of the opposite. The other is of the nature of an event taking place in time, and dependent on the will of man, and might, without any absurdity, be supposed not to be as it is. I. DEMONSTRATIVE REASONING. _Field of Demonstrative Reasoning._--Its field, as we have seen, is necessary truth. It is limited, therefore, in its range, takes in only things abstract, conceptions rather than realities, the relations of things rather than things themselves, as existences. It is confined principally, if not entirely, to mathematical truths. _No degrees of Evidence._--There are no _degrees_ of evidence or certainty in truths of this nature. Every step follows irresistibly from the preceding. Every conclusion is inevitable. One demonstration is as good as another, so far as regards the certainty of the conclusion, and one is as good as a thousand. It is quite otherwise in probable reasoning. _Two Modes of Procedure._--In demonstration, we may proceed directly, or indirectly; as, _e. g._, in case of two triangles to be proved equal. I may, by super-position, prove this directly; or I may suppose them unequal, and proceed to show the absurdity of such a supposition; or I may make a number of suppositions, one or the other of which _must_ be true, and then show that all but the one which I wish to establish are false. _Force of Mathematical reasoning._--The question arises whence the peculiar force of mathematical, in distinction from other reasoning?--a fact observed by every one, but not easily explained: how happens this, and on what does it depend, this irresistible cogency which compels our assent? Is it owing to the pains taken to define the terms employed, and the strict adherence to those definitions? I think not; for other sciences approximate to mathematics in this, but not to the cogency of its reasoning. The explanation given by Stewart is certainly plausible. He ascribes the peculiar force of demonstrative reasoning to the fact, that the first principles from which it sets out, _i. e._, its definitions, are _purely hypothetical_, involving no basis or admixture of facts, and that by simply reasoning strictly upon these assumed hypotheses the conclusions follow irresistibly. The same thing would happen in any other science, could we (as we cannot) construct our definitions to suit ourselves, instead of proceeding upon _facts_ as our data. The same view is ably maintained by other writers. If this be so, the superior certainty of mathematical, over all other modes of reasoning, if it does not quite vanish, becomes of much less consequence than is generally supposed. Its truths are necessary in no other sense than that certain definitions being assumed, certain _suppositions_ made, then the certain other things follow, which is no more than may be said of any science. _Confirmation of this View._--It may be argued, as a confirmation of this view, that whenever mathematical reasoning comes to be applied to sciences involving facts either as the data, or as objects of investigation, where it is no longer possible to proceed entirely upon hypothesis, as, _e. g._, when you apply it to mechanics, physics, astronomy, practical geometry, etc., then it ceases to be demonstrative, and becomes merely probable reasoning. _Mathematical reasoning supposed by some to be identical._--It has been much discussed whether all mathematical reasoning is merely identical, asserting, in fact, nothing more than that _a=a_; that a given thing is equivalent to itself, capable of being resolved at last into merely this. This view has been maintained by Leibnitz, himself one of the greatest mathematicians, and by many others. It was for a long time the prevalent doctrine on the Continent. Condillac applies the same to all reasoning, and Hobbes seems to have had a similar view, _i. e._, that all reasoning is only so much addition or subtraction. Against this view Stewart contends that even if the propositions themselves might be represented by the formula _a=a_, it does not follow that the various steps of reasoning leading to the conclusion amount merely to that. A paper written in cipher may be said to be identical with the same paper as interpreted; but the evidence on which the act of deciphering proceeds, amounts to something more than the perception of identity. And further, he denies that the propositions are identical, _e. g._, even the simple proposition 2×2=4. 2×2 express one set of quantities, and 4 expresses another, and the proposition that asserts their equivalence is not identical; it is not saying that the same quantity is equal to itself, but that two different quantities are equivalent. II. PROBABLE REASONING. _Not opposed to Certainty._--It must be borne in mind, as already stated, that the probability now intended is not opposed to certainty. That Cæsar invaded Britain is _certain_, but the reasoning which goes to establish it, is only probable reasoning, because the thing to be proved is an event in history, contingent therefore, and not capable of demonstration. _Sources of Evidence._--Evidence of this kind of truths is derived from three sources: 1. Testimony; 2. Experience; 3. Analogy. 1. _Evidence of Testimony._ _In itself probable._--This is, à priori, _probable_. We are so constituted as to be inclined to believe testimony, and it is only when the incredibility of the witness has been ascertained by sufficient evidence, that we refuse our assent. The child believes whatever is told him. The man, long conversant with human affairs, becomes wary, cautious, suspicious, incredulous. It is remarked by Reid that the evidence of testimony does not depend altogether on the character of the witness. If there be no _motive_ for deception, especially if there be weighty reasons why he should speak truth, or if the narrative be in itself probable and consistent, and tallies with circumstances, it is in such cases to be received even from those not of unimpeachable integrity. _Limits of Belief._--What are the limits of belief in testimony? Suppose the character of witnesses to be good, the narrative self-consistent, the testimony concurrent of various witnesses, explicit, positive, full, no motive for deception; are we to believe in that case whatever may be testified? One thing is certain, we do in fact believe in such cases; we are so constituted. Such is the law of our nature. Nor can it be shown irrational to yield such assent. It has been shown by an eminent mathematician that it is always possible to assign a number of independent witnesses, so great that the falsity of their concurrent testimony shall be mathematically more improbable, and so more incredible, than the truth of their statement, _be it what it may_. _Case supposed._--Suppose a considerable number of men of undoubted veracity, should, without concert, and agreeing in the main as to particulars, all testify, one by one, that they witnessed, on a given day and hour, some very strange occurrence, as, _e. g._, a ball of fire, or a form of angelic brightness, hovering in the air, over this building, or any like unwonted and inexplicable phenomenon. Are we to withhold or yield our assent? I reply, if the number of witnesses is large, and the testimony concurrent, and without concert, and no motive exists for deception, and they are men of known integrity, especially if they are sane and sober men, not easily imposed upon, I see not how we can reasonably withhold assent. Their testimony is to be taken as true testimony, _i. e._, they did really witness the phenomenon described. The proof becomes stronger or weaker in proportion as the circumstances now mentioned coexist to a greater or less extent, _i. e.._, in proportion as there are more or fewer of these concurring and corroborating circumstances. If there was but a single witness, or if a number of the witnesses were not of the best character, or if there were some possible motive for deception, or if they were not altogether agreed as to important features of the case, so far the testimony would of course be weakened. But we may always suppose a case so strong that the falsity of the witnesses would be a greater miracle than the truth of the story. This is the case with the testimony of the witnesses to our Saviour's miracles. _Distinction to be made._--An important distinction is here to be noticed between the falsity, and the incorrectness, of the witness, between his intention to deceive, and his being himself deceived. He may have seen precisely what he describes; he may be mistaken in thinking it to have been an angel, or a spirit, or a ball of fire. Just as in the case of certain illusions of sense--an oar in the water--the eye correctly reports what it sees, but the judgment is in error, in thinking the oar to be crooked. So the witness may be true, and the testimony true in the case of a supposed miracle or other strange phenomenon; the _appearance_ may have been just as stated, but the question may still be raised, were the witnesses correct, in their inference, or judgment, as to what was the cause of the said appearance, as to _what it was_ that they saw or heard? This must be decided by the rules that govern the proceedings of sensible men in common affairs of life. 2. _Reasoning from Experience._ _Induction as distinguished from Deduction._--This is called _induction_, the peculiar characteristic of which, in distinction from deductive reasoning, is that it begins with individual cases, and from them infers a general conclusion, whereas, the deductive method starts with a general proposition, and infers a particular one. From the proposition all men are mortal, the syllogism infers that Socrates is mortal. From the fact that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Cæsar, Cicero, and any number of other individuals, are mortal, induction leads you to conclude that all men are so. The premises here are facts occurring within the range of observation and experience, and the reasoning proceeds on the principle of the general uniformity of nature and her laws. Induction, then, is, in other words, the process of inferring that what we know to be true in certain observed cases is also true, and will be found to be true, in other like cases which have not fallen under our observation. _Basis of this Mode of reasoning._--The groundwork of induction, as I have already said, is the axiom or universal proposition of the uniformity of nature. Take this away, and all reasoning from induction or experience fails at once. This is a truth which the human mind is, by its nature and constitution, always disposed to proceed upon. It may not be embodied in the shape of a definite proposition, but it is tacitly assumed and acted upon by all men. How came we by this general truth. Is it _intuitive_? So say the disciples of certain schools, so says Cousin, and so say the Scotch metaphysicians, and the German. Others, however, contend that it is itself an induction, as truly as any other, a truth learned from experience and observation, and by no means the first, but rather among the latest of our inductions. Without stopping to discuss this question, it is sufficient for our purpose to notice the fact, that this simple truth is universally admitted, and constitutes the basis of all reasoning from experience. _Incorrect Mode of Statement._--The proposition is sometimes incorrectly stated, as, _e. g._, that the future will resemble the past. This is not an adequate expression of the great truth to which we refer. It is not that the future merely will resemble the past merely, but that the unknown will resemble the known. The idea of time is not properly connected with the subject. That which is unknown may lie in the future, it may lie in the present or the past. _Limits of this Belief._--An important question here arises. What are the limits, if limits there are, to this belief of the uniformity of nature, and to the reasoning based on that belief? Are we warranted, in all cases, in inferring that the unknown will be, in similar circumstances, like the known--that what we have found to be true in five, ten, or fifty cases, and without exception, will be universally true? We do reason thus very generally. Such is the tendency of the mind, its nature. Is it correct procedure? Is it certain that our experience, though it be uniform and unvaried, is the universal experience? If not, if limits there are to this method of reasoning, what are they? _Erroneous Induction._--The inhabitants of Siam have never seen water in any other than a liquid or gaseous form. They conclude that water is never solid. The inhabitants of central Africa may be supposed never to have seen or heard of a white man. They infer that all men are black. Are these correct inductions? No; for they lead to false conclusions. They are built on insufficient foundations. There was not a sufficiently wide observation of facts to justify so wide a conclusion. Evidently, we cannot infer from our own non-observation of exceptions, that exceptions do not exist. We must first know that if there were exceptions we should have known them. In both the cases now supposed, this was overlooked. The African has only seen men who were natives of Africa. There may be in other countries, races that he has not seen, and has had no opportunity to see. The world may be full of exceptions to this general rule, and yet he not know it. Correct induction in his case would be this: I have seen many men, natives of central Africa, and they have all been black men, without exception. I conclude, therefore, that _all_ the natives of central Africa are black. In a word, it is only _under like circumstances_ that we can infer the uniformity of nature, and so reason inductively from the known to the unknown. _Superstitious Belief of the Ancients._--The tendency of men to believe in the universal permanence of nature, and, on that ground, to generalize from insufficient data, is illustrated in the superstitious and widely prevalent idea among the ancients, and some of the moderns also, of grand cycles of events extending both to the natural and the _moral_ world. According to this idea, the changes of the atmosphere, and all other natural phenomena, as observed at any time, would, after a period, return again in the same order of succession as before; storms, and seasons, and times, being subject to some regular law. It was supposed, in fact, "that all the events"--to use the language of one of these theorists--"within the immeasurable circuit of the universe, are the successive evolutions of an extended series, which, at the return of some vast period, repeats its eternal round during the endless flux of time." This is a sufficiently grand induction, startling in its sweep and range of thought, but requiring for its data a somewhat wider observation of facts than can fall to the lot of short-lived and short-sighted man, during the few years of his narrow sojourn, and pilgrimage, in a world like this. 3. _Reasoning from Analogy._ _Meaning of the term Analogy._--This word, analogy, is used with great variety of meaning, and with much vagueness, therefore. It properly denotes any sort of resemblance, whether of relation or otherwise; and the argument from analogy is an argument from resemblance, an argument of an inductive nature, but not amounting to complete induction. A resembles B in certain respects; therefore it probably resembles it, also, in a certain other respect: such is the argument from _analogy_. A resembles B in such and such properties, but these are always found connected with a certain other property; therefore A resembles B also in regard to that property: such is the argument from _induction_. Every resemblance which can be pointed out between A and B creates a further and increased probability that the resemblance holds also in respect to the property which is the object of inquiry. If the two resembled each other in all their properties, there would be no longer any doubt as to this one, but a positive certainty, and the more resemblances in other respects so much the nearer we come to certainty respecting the one that happens to be in question. _Illustration of this Principle._--It was observed by Newton, that the diamond possessed a very high refractive power compared with its density. The same thing he knew to be true of combustible substances. Hence, he conjectured that the diamond was combustible. He conjectured the same thing, and for the same reason, of water, _i. e._, that it contains a combustible ingredient. In both instances, he guessed right--reasoning from analogy. _Further Illustration of Reasoning from Analogy._--Reasoning from analogy, I might infer that the moon is inhabited, thus: The earth is inhabited--land, sea, and air, are all occupied with life. But the moon resembles the earth in figure, relation to the sun, movement, opacity, etc.; moreover, it has volcanoes as the earth has; therefore, it is _probably_ like the earth in this other respect, that of being inhabited. To make this out by induction, I must show that the moon not only resembles the earth in these several respects, but that these circumstances are in other cases observed to be connected with the one in question; thus, in other cases, bodies that are opaque, spherical, and moving in elliptical orbits, are known to be inhabited. The same thing is probably true then in all cases, and inasmuch as the moon has these marks, it is therefore inhabited. _Counter Probability._--On the other hand, the points of dissimilarity create a counter probability, as, _e. g._, the moon has no atmosphere, no clouds, and therefore no water; but air and water are, on our planet, essential to life; the presumption is, then, looking at these circumstances merely, that the moon is uninhabited. Nay, more: if life exists, then it must be under very different conditions from those under which it exists here. Evidently, then, the greater the resemblance in other respects between the two planets, the less probability that they differ in this respect (_i. e._, the mode of sustaining life), so that the resemblances already proved, become, themselves, presumptions _against_ the supposition that the moon is inhabited. _Amount of Probability._--The analogy and diversity, when they come thus into competition and the arguments from the one conflict with those of the other, must be weighed against each other. The extent of the resemblance, compared with the extent of the difference, gives the amount of probability on one side or the other, so _far as these elements are known_. If any region lies unexplored, we can infer nothing with certainty or probability as to that. Suppose then, that so far as we have had the means of observing, the resemblances are to the differences as four to one; we conclude with a probability of four to one, that any given property of the one will be found to belong to the other. The chances are four out of five. _Value of Analogical Reasoning._--The chief value of analogy, as regards science, however, is as a guide to conjecture and to experiment; and even a faint degree of analogical evidence may be of great service in this way, by directing further inquiries into that channel, and so conducting to eventual probability, or even certainty. It is well remarked by Stewart, that the tendency of our nature is so to reason from analogy, that we naturally confide in it, as we do in the evidence of testimony. _Liable to mislead._--It must be confessed, however, that it is a species of reasoning likely to mislead in many cases. Its chief value lies not in proving a position, but in rebutting objections; it is good, not for assault, but defence. As thus used it is a powerful weapon in the hands of a skilful master. Such it was in Butler's hands. § IV.--USE OF HYPOTHESES AND THEORIES IN REASONING. _Theory, what._--The terms hypothesis and theory are often used interchangeably and loosely. Confusion is the result. It is difficult to define them accurately. _Theory_ (from the Greek, [Greek: Theôria]; Latin, theoria; French, théorie; Italian, teoria; from [Greek: Theôreô], to perceive, see, contemplate) denotes properly any philosophical explanation of phenomena, any connected arrangement and statement of facts according to their bearing on some real or imaginary law. The facts, the phenomena, once known, proved, rest on independent evidence. Theory takes survey of them as such, with special reference to the law which governs and connects them, whether that law be also known or merely conjectured. _Hypothesis, what._--_Hypothesis_ ([Greek: hypo-tithêmi]) denotes a gratuitous supposition or conjecture, in _the absence_ of all positive knowledge as to what the law is that governs and connects the observed phenomena, or as to the cause which will account for them. _Theory may or may not be Hypothesis._--Hypothesis is, in its nature, conjectural, and therefore uncertain; has its degrees of probability--no certainty. The moment the thing supposed is proved true, or verified, if it ever is, it ceases to be hypothesis. Theory, however, is not necessarily a matter of uncertainty. After the law or the cause is ascertained, fully known, and no longer a hypothesis at all, there may be still a theory about it; a survey of the facts and phenomena, as they stand affected by that law, or as accounted for by that cause. The motion of the planets in elliptical orbits, was originally matter of conjecture, of hypothesis. It is still matter of theory. _Probability of Hypothesis._--The probability of a hypothesis is in proportion to the number of facts or phenomena, in the given case, which it will satisfactorily explain, in other words, account for. Of several hypotheses, that is the most probable which will account for the greatest number of the given phenomena--those which, if the hypothesis be true, ought to fall under it as their law. If it accounts for all the phenomena in the case, it is generally regarded as having established its claim to certainty. So Whewell maintains. This, however, is not exactly the case. The hypothesis can be verified only by showing that the facts or phenomena in the case cannot possibly be accounted for on any _other_ supposition, or result from any _other_ cause; not simply that they can be accounted for, or can result from this. This is well stated by Mill in his System of Philosophy. The hypothesis of the undulating movement of a subtle and all-pervading ether will account for many of the known phenomena of light; but it has never been shown, and in the nature of the case never can be, probably, that no _other_ hypothesis possible or supposable will also account for them. _Use of Hypotheses._--As to the _use_ of hypotheses in science, Reid's remarks are altogether too sweeping, and quite incorrect. It is not true that hypotheses lead to no valuable result in philosophy. Almost all discoveries were at first hypotheses, suppositions, lucky guesses, if you please to call them so. The Copernican theory that the earth revolves on its axis was a mere hypothesis at the outset. Kepler's theory of the elliptical orbits of the planets was such; he made and abandoned nineteen false ones before he hit the right. This discovery led to another--that planets describe equal areas in equal times. Newton never framed hypotheses, if we may believe him. But his own grand discovery of the law of gravity as the central force of the system, depends for one of its steps of evidence on his previous discovery that the force of attraction varies as the inverse square of the distance, and this was suggested by him at first as a mere hypothesis; he was able to verify it only by calling in the aid of Kepler's discovery of equal areas in equal times, which latter, as already stated, was itself the result of hypothesis. Had it not been for one hypothesis of Newton, verified by the results of another hypothesis of Kepler Newton could never have made his own discovery. A hypothesis, it must be remembered, is any supposition, with or without evidence, made in order to deduce from it conclusions agreeable to known facts. If we succeed in doing this, we verify our hypothesis (unless, indeed, it can be shown that some other hypothesis will equally well suit these facts), and our hypothesis, when verified, ceases to be longer a hypothesis, takes its place as known truth, and in turn serves to explain those facts which would, on the supposition of its truth, follow from it as a cause. It is simply a short-hand process of arriving at conclusions in science. Suppose the problem to be the one already named--to prove that the central force of the solar system is one and the same with _gravity_. Now it may not be easy, or even possible in some cases, to establish the first step or premiss in such a chain of reasoning. The inductions leading to it may not be forthcoming. Hypothesis steps in and supplies the deficiency, by substituting in place of the induction a supposition. Assuming that distant bodies attract each other with a power inversely as the square of the distance, it proceeds on that supposition, and arrives at the desired conclusion. _In what Cases admissible._--Now this method is always allowable, and strictly scientific, whenever it is possible to verify our hypothesis, _i. e._, in every case in which it is possible to show that no law but the one assumed can lead to these same results; that no _other_ hypothesis can accord with the facts. In the case supposed, it would not be possible to prove that the same movements might not follow from some other law than the one supposed. It is not certain, therefore, that the moving force of the solar system is identical with gravitation, _merely because_ the latter would, if extended so far, produce the same results. In many other cases it _is_ practicable; indeed, _in all cases where the inquiry is not to ascertain the cause, but, the cause being already known, to ascertain the law of its action_. Even in cases where the inquiry is not of this nature, hypothesis is of use in the suggestion of future investigations, and, as such, is frequently indispensable. _View of Mr. Mill._--Nearly every thing which is now theory, was once hypothesis, says Mill. "The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and, at first sight, confused set of appearances, is necessarily tentative: we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. The simplest supposition which accords with any of the most obvious facts, is the best to begin with, because its consequences are the most easily traced. This rude hypothesis is then rudely corrected, and the operation repeated, until the deductive results are at last made to tally with the phenomena. Let any one watch the manner in which he himself unravels any complicated mass of evidence; let him observe how, for instance, he elicits the true history of any occurrence from the involved statements of one or of many witnesses. He will find that he does not take all the items of evidence into his mind at once, and attempt to weave them together; the human faculties are not equal to such an undertaking; he extemporizes, from a few of the particulars, a first rude theory of the mode in which the facts took place, and then looks at the other statements, one by one, to try whether they can be reconciled with the provisional theory, or what corrections or additions it requires to make it square with them. In this way, which, as M. Comte remarks, has some resemblance to the methods of approximation of mathematicians, we arrive by means of hypothesis at conclusions not hypothetical." § V.--DIFFERENT FORMS OF REASONING. It remains to treat briefly of the _different forms_ of reasoning, as founded in the laws of thought. _How far these Forms fall within the Province of Psychology._--As there are different kinds or modes of reasoning, according to the difference of the subject-matter or material about which our reasoning is employed, so there are certain general forms into which all reasoning may be cast, and which, according to the laws of thought, it naturally assumes. To treat specifically of these forms, their nature, use, and value, is the business of _logic_; but, in so far as they depend upon the laws of thought, and are merely modes of mental activity as exercised in reasoning, they are to be considered, in connection with other phenomena of the mind, by the psychologist. Briefly to describe these forms, and then to consider their value, is all that I now propose. I begin with the proposition, as the starting point in every process of reasoning. I. ANALYSIS OF THE PROPOSITION. _What constitutes a Proposition._--All reasoning deals with propositions, which are judgments expressed. Every proposition involves two distinct conceptions, and expresses the relation between them; affirms the agreement or disagreement of the one with the other. As when I say, Snow is white, the conception of snow is before my mind, and also of whiteness; I perceive that the latter element enters into my notion of snow, and constitutes one of the qualities of the substance so called; I affirm the relation of the two, accordingly, and this gives the proposition enunciated. Every proposition then consists of these several parts, a word or words expressing some conception, a word or words expressing some other conception, a word or words expressing the relation of the two. The words which designate these two conceptions are called the _terms_ of the proposition, and, according to the above analysis, there are, in every proposition, always two terms. That term or conception of which something is affirmed, is called the _subject_, that which is affirmed of the same, the _predicate_, and the word which expresses the relation of the two, the _copula_. In the above proposition, snow is the subject, white, the predicate, and is, the copula. _Quality and Quantity._--Propositions are distinguished as to _quality_ and _quantity_. The former has reference to the affirmative or negative character of the proposition, the latter to its comprehensiveness. Every proposition is either affirmative or negative, which is called its quality. As to quantity, every proposition is either _universal_, affirming something of the whole of the subject--as, All men are mortal; or else _particular_, affirming something of only a part of the subject--as, Some tyrants are miserable. _Four kinds of categorical Propositions._--We have, then, four kinds of categorical propositions, viz., universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative, particular negative. That is, with the same subject and predicate, it is always possible to state four distinct propositions; as, every A is B, no A is B, some A is B, some A is not B. For the sake of convenience, logicians designate these different kinds of propositions severally by the letters A, E, I, O. Propositions that thus differ in quantity and quality are said to be opposed to each other. Of these, the two universals, A and E, are called contraries; the two particulars, I and O, sub-contraries; the universal affirmative, and the particular affirmative, A and I, also the universal negative and the particular negative, E and O, are respectively subalterns; while the universal affirmative and the particular negative, A and O, as also the universal negative and particular affirmative, E and I, are contradictories. _Rules of Opposition._--The following rules will be found universally applicable to propositions as opposed to each other. If the universal is true, so is the particular. If the particular is false, so is the universal. Contraries are never both true, but may be both false. Sub-contraries are never both false, but may be both true. Contradictories are never both true, or both false, but always one is true, the other false. The truth of these maxims will be evident on applying them to any proposition and its opposites, as for example, to the affirmation, Every man is mortal. _Categorical and hypothetical Propositions._--Propositions may be further distinguished as categorical or hypothetical; the one asserting or denying directly, as, _e. g._, The earth is round; the other conditionally,--as, If the earth is round, it is not oblong. _Pure, and Modal._--The proposition, moreover, may be either pure or modal, the former asserting or denying without qualification,--as, Man is liable to err; the latter qualifying the statement,--as, Man is extremely or unquestionably liable to err. II. ANALYSIS OF THE SYLLOGISM. _Proposition the Link, Syllogism the Chain._--All reasoning admits of being reduced to the form of a syllogism. Having discussed the proposition which forms the material or groundwork of every connected chain of argument, we are prepared now to examine the syllogism, or chain itself, into which the several propositions, as so many links, are wrought. _Syllogism defined._--A syllogism is an argument so expressed that the conclusiveness of it is manifest from the mere form of expression. When, for example, I affirm that all A is B, that all B is C, and that, consequently, all A is C, it is impossible that any one who is able to reason at all, and who comprehends the force of these several propositions taken singly, should fail to perceive that the conclusion follows inevitably from the premises. That which is affirmed, may or may not be _true_, but it is _conclusive_. If the premises are true, so is the conclusion; but whether they are true or not, the argument, as such, is conclusive; nay, even if they are false, the conclusion may possibly be true. For example, Every tyrant is a good man; Washington was a tyrant; therefore, Washington was a good man, Both the premises are false, but the argument, as regards the form, is valid, and the conclusion is not only correctly drawn, but is, moreover, a true proposition. In a word, the syllogism concerns itself not at all with the truth or falsity of the thing stated, but only with the form of stating, and that form must be such, that the premises being conceded, the conclusion shall be obvious and inevitable. All valid reasoning admits of such statement. _Composition of a Syllogism._--Every syllogism contains three propositions, of which two state the grounds or reasons, and are called the premises, the other states the inference from those positions, and is called the conclusion. These three propositions contain three, and only three, distinct terms, of which one is common to both premises, and is called the _middle_ term; the others are the extremes, one of which is the subject of the conclusion, and is called the _minor_ term; the other the predicate of the conclusion, and is called the _major_ term, from the fact that it denotes the class to which the subject or minor term belongs. In the syllogism,--Every man is mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal,--the three terms are, man, mortal, and Socrates: of these, Socrates, or the subject of the conclusion, is the minor; mortal, or the predicate of the conclusion, is the major; and man, with which both the others are compared, is the middle term. _Major and minor Premiss._--The premiss which contains the _major_ term, and compares it with the middle, is called the _major premiss_; that which, in like manner, compares the _minor_ term with the middle, is called the _minor premiss_. In the syllogism already given, 'Every man is mortal' is the major premiss; 'Socrates is a man' is the minor premiss. _The Order variable._--The order of the terms in the respective propositions, and even the order of the propositions themselves, is not invariable, but depends on circumstances. In the above proposition, it is immaterial whether I say, Every man is mortal, or, Mortal is every man; it is immaterial whether I state first the major or the minor premiss; nay, it is allowable even to state the conclusion first, and then the grounds and reasons for the same. III. LAWS OF SYLLOGISM. The following rules or maxims will be found applicable to all cases, and may be regarded as laws of the syllogism. _Middle Term unequivocal._--_The middle term must not be equivocal._--This rule is violated in the following syllogism. Nothing is heavier than lead; feathers are heavier than nothing; therefore, feathers are heavier than lead. The middle term, nothing, is here used in different senses in the two premises. _Middle Term to be distributed._--Essentially the same thing occurs when the middle term is not, at least once, in the premises, used in its most complete and comprehensive sense, or, as the logicians express it, _distributed_. As, for example, when I say, White is a color, the term color is not here distributed, for it properly includes many things besides white. If now I introduce into another proposition the same term in a similar manner, as Black is a color, I evidently include under the term, as now used, some part of the class of things denoted by the general word color, which was not included under the same term as first used. The color which is affirmed to agree with black, is not the same color which is affirmed to agree with white. The term, in fact, denotes one thing in the one proposition, and another in the other. A syllogism thus constructed, is invalid. Hence the rule, that the _middle term must be distributed_, or taken in its completeness, to include the whole class which it properly denotes, _at least once in the premises_. This is done either by making it the _subject of an affirmative_, or the _predicate of a negative proposition_; as, All men are mortal, or, No vice is useful. Here the term man in the one case, and the term useful in the other, are each distributed or taken in their completeness. There is no individual to whom the term man can properly be applied, who is not included in the expression, all men, nor is there any useful thing which is not here denied of vice. _What distributed in the Conclusion._--On the same principle, _no term must be distributed in the conclusion which was not distributed in one of the premises_. This rule is violated in the following syllogism, All birds are bipeds; no man is a bird; therefore, no man is a biped. Here the term biped, in the major premiss, is not taken in its completeness, since many creatures besides birds are bipeds. Birds are only one sort of bipeds. In the conclusion, however, the term biped, being the predicate of a negative proposition, is distributed, the whole class of bipeds is spoken of, and man is excluded from the whole class. The syllogism is, of course, invalid. _Law of negative Premiss._--It is further a law of the syllogism, that _from negative premises nothing can be inferred_. Also, that _if one premiss is negative, the conclusion will be negative_. _Law of particular Premiss._--_From two particular premises nothing follows, but if one premiss is particular, the conclusion will be so._ These rules are too obvious, and too easily verified, to require illustration. IV. DIFFERENT KINDS OF SYLLOGISM. _Syllogisms differ._--We have mentioned as yet only those properties of the syllogism which universally belong to it. There are differences, however, which require to be noticed, and which constitute a distinction of some importance, presenting, in fact, two distinct kinds of syllogism. _Two Modes of procedure._--There are manifestly two entirely distinct modes of procedure in reasoning. We may infer from the whole to the parts, or from the parts to the whole. The former is called deductive, the latter inductive reasoning. The one is precisely the reverse of the other in method of procedure. Each is a perfectly valid method of reasoning, and each is, in itself, a distinct and valid kind of syllogism. Each requires the other. The deductive is wholly dependent on the inductive for its major premiss, which is only the conclusion of a previous induction, while, on the other hand, the induction is valuable chiefly as preparing the way for subsequent deduction. Each has equal claims with the other to be regarded as a distinct and independent form of syllogism. They have not, however, been so treated by logicians, but, on the contrary, the inductive method has been regarded, almost universally, as a mere appendage of the deductive, an imperfect form of one or another of the several figures of the syllogism deductive. Of this we shall have occasion to speak more fully in the historical sketch. _The two Modes compared._--The precise relation of the two modes will best appear by the comparison of the following syllogisms. The inductive syllogism runs thus: _x, y, z_, are A; _x, y, z_, constitute B; therefore, B is A. The deductive runs thus: B is A; _x, y, z_, constitute B; therefore, _x, y, z_, are A. The latter, it will be seen at a glance, is the precise counterpart of the other, beginning where the former ends, and exactly reversing the several steps in their order. _The Law of each._--The general law or rule which governs the former, is, What belongs (or does not belong) to all the constituent parts, belongs (or does not belong) to the constituted whole. The law of the latter is, What belongs (or not) to the containing whole, belongs (or not) to all the contained parts. _Application of the inductive Method._--Applying the inductive method to a particular case, we reason thus: Magnets _x, y, z_, etc., including so many as I have observed, attract iron. But it is fair to presume that what I have observed as true of _x, y, z_, is equally true of _e, f, g_, and all other magnets; in other words, _x, y, z_, do represent, and may fairly be taken as constituting the whole class of magnets; consequently, I conclude that all magnets attract iron. Thus stated, the truth which was at first observed and affirmed only of particular instances, becomes a general proposition, and may, in turn, become the premiss of a process of deduction. Thus, from the general proposition, obtained as now explained by the inductive mode, that all horned animals ruminate, I may proceed, by the deductive mode, to infer that this is true of deer or goats, or any particular species or individual whose habits I have not as yet observed. V. DIFFERENT FORMS OF SYLLOGISM. _The Form of Statement not invariable._--As there are different kinds of syllogism, so also there are different forms in which any kind of syllogism may be stated. These forms are not essential, pertaining to the nature of the syllogism itself, but accidental, pertaining merely to the order of announcing the several propositions. It has already been remarked, in speaking of the general structure of the syllogism, that the order of propositions is not essential. Either premiss may precede, either follow. Nay, we may state _first the conclusion_, and _then the reasons_, _or grounds_. This latter method, as Hamilton has shown in his _New Analytic of Logical forms_, is perfectly valid, though usually neglected by writers on logic. It is not only valid, but the more natural of the two methods. When asked if Socrates is mortal, it is more natural to say, He is mortal, for he is a man, and all men are mortal, than to say, All men are mortal, he is a man, and therefore, he is mortal. In fact, most of our reasoning takes the first of these forms. The two are designated by Hamilton, respectively, as the _analytic_ and _synthetic_ syllogism. _Order of Premises may vary._--As to the order of the premises, which shall precede the other, this, too, is quite unessential and accidental. The earlier method, practised by Greek, Arabian, Jewish and Latin schools, was to state first the minor premiss, precisely the reverse of our modern custom. _Order of Terms not essential._--The order of the _terms_, in the several propositions, is also accidental rather than essential. There are several possible and allowable arrangements of these terms with reference to the order of precedence and succession, giving rise to what are called _figures_ of the syllogism. These arrangements and figures have usually been reckoned as four; three only are admitted by Hamilton, the fourth being abolished. The first figure occurs when the middle term is the subject of one premiss and the predicate of the other. The second figure gives the middle term the place of predicate in both premises. The third makes it the subject of both. _A further Variation._--There is still another form of statement, in which the terms compared are not, as above, severally subject and predicate, but, in the same proposition, are both subject, or both predicate, as when we say, A and B are equal; B and C are equal; therefore, A and C are equal. This is a valid synthetic syllogism, though not recognized by logicians previously to the _New Analytic_ of Hamilton. It is termed by him the unfigured syllogism. _Hypothetical reasoning not syllogistic._--It has been customary to treat of _hypothetical_ reasoning, in its two forms of conditional and disjunctive, as forms or kinds of syllogism. As when we say, if A is B, C is D; but A is B, therefore C is D; or, disjunctively, either A is B, or C is D; but A is not B, therefore C is D. These, however, are not properly syllogisms. The inference is not mediate, through comparison with a common or middle term, but _immediate_, whereas the syllogism is, in all its forms, a process of mediate inference. _Summary of Distinctions._--To sum up the distinctions now pointed out. All inference is either immediate, as in the case of hypothetical reasoning, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, or else mediate, as in the syllogism. The latter may be inductive or deductive; and, as to form, analytic or synthetic, figured or unfigured. VI. LAWS OF THOUGHT ON WHICH THE SYLLOGISM DEPENDS. _Statement._--There are certain universal laws of thought on which all reasoning, and, of course, all syllogisms, depend. These laws, according to Hamilton, are the principles of _identity_, of _contradiction_, and of _excluded middle_; from which primary laws results a fourth, that of _reason and consequent_. _Law of Identity, what._--The principle of _identity_ compels us to recognize the equivalence of a whole and its several parts taken together, as applied to any conception and its distinctive characters. As, for example, the sameness or equivalence of the notion man with the aggregate of qualities or characters that constitute that notion. _Law of Contradiction, what_.--The law of contradiction is the principle that what is contradictory is unthinkable: as, for example, that A has, and yet has not, a given quality, B. _Law of excluded Middle._--The principle of _excluded middle_ is this, that of two contradictory notions, we must think one or the other to be true; as, that A either has or has not the quality B. _Law of Reason and Consequent._--From these primary principles results the law of _reason and consequent_. All logical inference is based on that law of our nature, that one notion shall always depend on another. This inference is of two kinds, from the whole to the parts, or from the parts to the whole, respectively called deductive and inductive, as already explained. _Certain Points not included in the preceding Synopsis._--I have presented, as was proposed, in brief outline, a synopsis of the forms of reasoning. For a full treatment of these forms, and the laws which govern them, the treatises on logic must be consulted. Some things usually considered essential to logical forms, as the _modality_ of propositions and syllogisms, and the _conversion_ of the other figures of the syllogism into the first, I have not included in the above outline, for the reason that the former does not properly fall within the province of logic, which has to do only with the _form_ and not with the _matter_ of a proposition or an argument, while, as to the latter, it is only an accidental, and not an essential circumstance, what may be the figure of a syllogism, and it is, therefore, of no importance to reduce the second and third figures to the first. VII. USE AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. Having considered the various forms which the syllogism may assume, as also the laws or canons which govern it, we proceed to inquire, finally, as to its _use_ and _value_ in reasoning. _All mediate reasoning syllogistic._--It must be conceded, I think, that all _mediate_ reasoning, all inference, which is not immediate and direct, but which, in order to reach its conclusion, compares one thing with another, is essentially syllogistic. The greater part of our reasoning processes are of this sort. When fully and explicitly stated, such reasoning resolves itself into some form of syllogism. It is not, as sometimes stated, _a_ mode of reasoning, but _the_ mode which all reasoning, except such as is direct and immediate, tends to assume. Not always, indeed, is this reasoning fully drawn out and explicitly stated, but all valid reasoning admits of being thus stated; nay, it is not, as to form at least, complete until it is so expressed. _Not always syllogistically expressed._--In ordinary conversation, and even in public address, we omit many intermediate steps in the trains and processes of our arguments, for the reason that their statement is not essential to our being understood, the hearer's mind supplying, for itself, the connecting links as we proceed; just as in speaking or writing, we make many abbreviations, drop out some letters and syllables here and there, in our hasty utterance, and yet all such short-hand processes imply and are based upon the full form; and it would be as correct and as reasonable to say that the fully written or fully spoken word is merely _a_ mode of speaking and writing, which, when the grammarian and rhetorician come into contact with common people, they lay aside for the ordinary forms of speech, as to say that syllogism is merely _a_ mode of reasoning, which the logician lays aside when he comes out of his study, and reasons with other men. _Chief Value of the Syllogism._--The chief use of the syllogism, I apprehend, however, to be, not in presenting a train of argument for the purpose of convincing and persuading others; for the laws of thought do not require us in such a case to state every thing that is even essential to the argument, but only so much as shall clearly indicate our meaning, and enable the hearer or reader to follow us; but rather in testing the soundness or detecting the unsoundness of an argument, whether our own, or that of an opponent. For this purpose, an acquaintance with the forms and laws of syllogism may be of great service to the writer and to the orator. _Objection to the Syllogism._--But it is objected to the syllogism that it is of no value in the discovery and establishment of truth, inasmuch as, by the very laws of the syllogism, there can be nothing more in the conclusion than was assumed in the premises. There is, and can be, in this way, no progress from the known to the unknown. The very construction of the syllogism, it is said, involves a _petitio principii_. When I say, All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal; the major premiss, it is said, affirms the very thing to be proved; that Socrates is mortal is virtually affirmed in the proposition that _all_ men are so. Either, then, the syllogism proves nothing which was not known before, or else the general proposition, with which it sets out, is unwarranted, as asserting more than we know to be true, and, in that case, the conclusion is equally unreliable; in either case nothing is gained by the process; the syllogism is worthless. _Lies equally against all reasoning._--This objection, if valid against the syllogism, is valid against and overthrows not the syllogism merely, but all reasoning of whatever kind, and in whatever form. It is an objection which really applies, not to the form which an argument may happen to assume, but to the essential nature of reasoning itself. As was shown in discussing the nature of the reasoning process, all reasoning is, in its nature, essentially analytic. It is the evolution of a truth that lies involved in some already admitted truth. It simply develops, draws out, what was therein contained. Its starting-point must always be some admitted position, its conclusions must always be some inevitable necessary consequence of that admission. The mortality of Socrates is, indeed, involved and contained in the general proposition which affirms the mortality of all men, and so, also, is every inferred truth contained in that from which it is inferred. _Conclusion not affirmed in the Premiss._--But while _contained_, it is not _affirmed_, in the premiss. To say that all men are mortal, is not to say that Socrates is so, but only to say what implies that. The conclusion which draws out and affirms what was involved, but not affirmed, in the premiss, is an advance in the order of thought, a step of progress, and not merely an idle repetition, and the syllogism, as a whole, moves the mind onward from the starting-point to a position not otherwise explicitly and positively reached. It is a movement onward, and not merely a rotation of the wheel about its own axis. _The Form accidental._--In so far as the objection of _petitio principii_ relates, not to the _nature_ of reasoning, but only to its _form_, this is entirely a matter of accident, and does not pertain to the syllogism as such. As was shown in treating of the different forms of syllogism, the order of the propositions is not essential. We may, if we like, state the conclusion first, and then the reasons, as, All A is C, for all A is B, and all B is C; or we may state the same thing in a different form, as, A and B are equal; B and C are equal; therefore, A and C are equal. Both are syllogisms, the former _analytic_, the latter _unfigured_, but to neither does the objection of _petitio principii_ apply so far as regards the mere form of statement. Nor does it apply to that form of syllogism in which the major premiss is a singular proposition, as, _e. g._, Cæsar was fortunate; Cæsar was a tyrant; therefore, a tyrant may be fortunate. Here the subject of the conclusion is not formally contained in that of the major premiss, as Socrates is contained in the expression, all men, a part of the whole. _Objection inapplicable to the inductive Syllogism._--Nor does the objection apply again to the _inductive_ syllogism, in which the conclusion is more comprehensive than the premiss. The objection applies, in fact, only to the deductive syllogism, and to that only in its synthetic form, and to that only as figured, and as presenting, in its major premiss, other than a singular proposition. _Major Premiss, whence derived._--But whence, it may still be asked, comes the general proposition which every deductive syllogism contains, whether analytic or synthetic, the proposition _e. g._, that all men are mortal? Whether this be stated before or after the conclusion is a mere matter of form; but what is our authority for stating such a proposition at all? How do we know that which is here affirmed? I reply, it is a truth reached by previous induction. Every deduction implies previous induction. I observe the mortality of individuals, _x_, _y_, _z_. I find no exceptions. My observation extends to a great number of cases, insomuch that I am authorized to take those cases as fairly representing the whole class to which they belong. I conclude, therefore, that what I have observed of the many is true of the whole. So comes the general proposition, All men are mortal. _Authority for this Belief._--But what reason have I to believe that what is true of the many is true of the whole, and how do I know this? I reply, I do not know it by observation, nor by demonstration; my belief of it rests upon, and resolves itself into, that general law or constitution of the mind according to which I am led to expect, under like circumstances, like results, in other words, that nature acts uniformly. This is my warrant, and my only warrant, for the inference, that what I have observed in many cases is true in others that I have not observed. _A Difficulty suggested._--But in what manner, now, shall this mere belief of mine, for it is nothing more, come to take its place as a general proposition, as positive categorical affirmation in the syllogism whose major premiss reads, All men are mortal? A law of the mind may be a sufficient explanation of my belief; but the science of syllogisms cannot take cognizance of laws of the mind, as such, and has nothing to do with beliefs, but is concerned only with the _forms_ in which an argument shall be presented. Those forms must be conclusive. How shall I convert, then, my conjecture, my plausible belief, in the present case, into that general positive affirmation which alone will answer the demands of the syllogism? _The Process explained._--The process is this: The precise result of my observation stands thus--_x_, _y_, _z_, are mortal. But I know that _x_, _y_, _z_, are so numerous as fairly to represent the class to which they belong. On the strength of this position, the inductive syllogism takes its stand, and overlooking the fact that there are some cases which have not fallen under my observation, _positively affirms_ what I only _believe_ and _presume_ to be true, and the argument then reads, _x_, _y_, _z_, are mortal. But _x_, _y_, _z_, are all men, therefore, all men are mortal. The general proposition thus reached by induction becomes, in turn, the major premiss of the deductive syllogism, which concludes, from the mortality of all men, that of Socrates in particular. _Position of Mill._--An able and ingenious writer, Mr. Mill, in his treatise on logic, takes the ground that we have no need to embody the result of our observations in the form of a general proposition, from which again to descend to the particular conclusion, but that, dispensing with the general proposition altogether, and with the syllogism of every kind and form, we may, and virtually do, reason directly from one particular instance to another, as, _e. g._, _x_, _y_, _z_, are mortal; therefore, _f_, _g_, _h_, are so. "If from our experience of John, Thomas, etc., who were once living, but are now dead, we are entitled to conclude that all human beings are mortal, we might surely, without any logical inconsequence, have concluded at once, from those instances, that the Duke of Wellington is mortal. The mortality of John, Thomas, and company, is, after all, the whole evidence we have of the mortality of the Duke of Wellington. Not one iota is added to the proof by interpolating a general proposition." Our earliest inferences, he contends, are precisely of this sort. The child burning his fingers, reasons thus: "That fire burnt me, therefore this will." He does not generalize, "All fire burns; this is fire; therefore, this will burn." The only use of a general proposition, Mill contends, is simply to furnish collateral security for the correctness of our inference. _Remarks upon this View._--This view sweeps away at once, and forever, all mediate reasoning, and shuts us up to the narrow limits of such inference alone as proceeds from a given instance directly to a conclusion therefrom. No doubt we do sometimes reason thus. But it is a reasoning, the conclusiveness of which is not, and cannot be made, apparent by any form of statement. If called in question, we can only say, I think so, or, I believe so. The mortality of John does not prove the mortality of Thomas. It may not even render it probable; it is only when I have observed such and so many cases as to leave no reasonable doubt that the property in question _is a law of the class as such_, and _not a mere accident of the individual_, that I am really warranted in the belief that any individual, not as yet observed, will come under the same law, because belonging to the same class. To reason in this way is to generalize; whatever process stops short of this, stops so far short of any and all conclusive evidence of the truth of what it affirms. VIII. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. _Indian Logic earlier than that of Aristotle._--It is of the Greek logic, that of Aristotle, that we usually speak when we have occasion to refer to this science. It is usually attributed to Aristotle, indeed, as his peculiar glory, that he should at once have originated, and brought to perfection, a science which, for more than two thousand years, has received few alterations, found few minds capable of suggesting improvements. Recent labors of Orientalists have, however, brought to light the fact that in India, long before the palmy days of Grecian philosophy, logic was pursued with vigor as a study and science. The Nyàya of Gotama holds, in the Indian systems of philosophy, much the same place that the Organon of Aristotle holds with us. The two, however, are quite independent of each other. Aristotle was no disciple of Gotama. _Aristotle's Logic not perfect._--Nor, on the other hand, was the logic of Aristotle by any means perfect, as it is often represented. Its imperfections are many, and have been, for the most part, faithfully copied by his disciples. _Aristotle the first Greek Logician._--Previous to Aristotle there had been nothing worthy the name of science in this department of philosophy. The Sophists had made some attempts at logic, but of no great value. Plato had not devoted much attention to it. Aristotle himself says, in the close of his Organon, that he had worked without models or predecessors to guide him. _Subsequent Writers._--The work of Aristotle is in six parts, the first four treating of logic pure, the remaining two of its application. The school of Aristotle carried the cultivation and study of logic to a high degree. Theophrastus and Eudemus labored assiduously as commentators on their master, but made no change in the essential principles of the system. The Stoics, however, gave logic more attention and honor, more time and care, than did any other of the rival schools of philosophy. They sought to enlarge its boundaries and make it an instrument for the discovery of truth. It held the first place in their system, ethics and physics ranking after it. St. Hilaire is wrong in saying that with Epicurus logic was of little consideration, that sensation was the source and criterion of thought with that school. The Epicurean logic was a peculiar system, differing from the Aristotelian, and very little known in the subsequent centuries. In Alexandria the logic of Aristotle was in great honor, and had numerous commentators in the first centuries of the Christian era. _Introduced into Rome._--For a time the original works of Aristotle were lost. They lay buried in an obscure retreat whither they had been carried for safe preservation, and no one knew what they were. Sylla, capturing the city, brought them to Rome, where they were discovered to be the works of the great master, and Cicero gives them, with some labor and learning, to the public. But the Roman mind never mastered the logic of Aristotle. In all Roman philosophy, says St. Hilaire, there is scarcely a logician worthy of the name. For several centuries, if not in Rome, yet in Alexandria and Athens, in Greece and in Egypt, the logic of Aristotle continued to be assiduously cultivated. _Logic in the Middle Ages._--It was in the middle ages, however, that logic received its chief cultivation and its highest honors. Aristotle was for some six centuries almost the only teacher of the human mind, and the Organon was the foundation of his knowledge. Nor during the irruption of the northern hordes, and the revolutions of society, and empire, and human manners, which followed, did the philosophy and logic of Aristotle pass out of sight or out of mind. It seemed impossible for any revolution of empire or of time to shake its foundations or break its sceptre over the human mind. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, and Bede the Venerable, gave it their labors and renown. In the eighth, Alcuin introduced it into the court of Charlemagne. In the twelfth, Abelard, and the controversy between the Realists and Nominalists, gave this science still more importance. _Logic in the Arabian Schools._--Meanwhile, the Mohammedans had been in advance of the Christians in the study of this science. The Arabs had inherited the learning of antiquity, and had carried the cultivation of the peripatetic philosophy to a high degree of perfection more than a century before it had received the homage of the West. From Arabia it passed, with the march of conquest, into Spain, and some of the ablest commentators Europe has produced, on the works of Aristotle, have been the Moors of Spain. _Continuance of Aristotle's Dominion._--The Crusades tended only to enlarge the sphere of this influence. Such men as Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, became, in the thirteenth century, expounders of Aristotle. Not till the sixteenth century did this long dominion over the human mind show symptoms of decadence. _The Reformers._--Luther, among the Protestant reformers, sought to banish logic from the schools; but it was retained, and in the Protestant universities was still professed. _Attacks upon Aristotle._--It now became the fashion, however, in certain quarters, especially among the mystics in the Catholic communion, to decry Aristotle, and each original genius took this way to show his independence. Ramus is noted among these. Bacon followed in this track, and did little more than repeat the invectives of his predecessors. He attempted to set aside the syllogism, and put in its place induction. Induction, however, in some form, is as old as the syllogism. From Plato and Aristotle downward, a thousand philosophers had availed themselves of this method of reasoning and had also stated and defended it. _The Moderns._--From Bacon and Descartes till our day logic has been in process of decadence. Locke condemns it. Reid and the Scotch school ridicule its pretensions. Kant and Hegel, on the other hand, give it a due place in their systems--the latter especially; while in France, it has admirers in St. Hilaire, Cousin, and others of like genius; and in Edinburgh, the great Hamilton devoted to it the powers of his unrivalled intellect. _Logic of Hamilton._--As no writer, since the days of Aristotle, has done more to complete and perfect the science of reasoning, than Sir William Hamilton, it seems due that even so brief a sketch of the history of logic as the present, should indicate, at least, the more important changes which his system introduces. Whatever may be thought of some of his views and proposed reforms in this ancient science and sanctuary of past learning, it is not too much to say, that no writer on logic can henceforth present a claim to be considered, who has not, at least, thoroughly mastered and carefully weighed these views and proposed changes, even if he do not adopt them. They are, moreover, for the most part, changes so obviously demanded in order to the completeness of the science, and so thorough-going withal, that they are destined, it would seem, to be sooner or later adopted, and if adopted, to work a radical change in the whole structure of this ancient and time-honored science. I shall attempt nothing more, in this connection, than, in the briefest manner, to enumerate some of the more important of these improvements. _Assigns Induction its true Place._--Hamilton is the first, so far as I know, to elevate to its true place the inductive method of reasoning, making it coördinate with the deductive, and assigning its true character and value as a form of syllogism. _Recognizes the analytic Syllogism._--He is the first to bring to notice the claims of the _analytic_ syllogism to a distinctive place and recognition in logic; a form of reasoning, which, however natural and necessary, and in use almost universal, had been strangely overlooked by logicians from Aristotle down. _Rejects Modality._--He strenuously and consistently rejects the modality of the proposition and the syllogism, on the ground that logic is not concerned with the character of the matter, whether it be true or false, necessary or contingent, but only with the form of statement, and consequently, all distinctions founded on the truth or falsity, the necessity or contingence of the matter, are utterly irrelevant to the science--a principle admitted by others, but not previously carried out to its true results. _Doctrine of Figure._--He shows that the figure of the syllogism is a matter accidental, rather than essential, that it may be even entirely _unfigured_; abolishes the fourth figure as superfluous; and sets aside, as quite useless and unnecessary, the old laborious processes of reducing and connecting the several figures to the first. _Rejects hypothetical Syllogism._--He throws out of the syllogism entirely, the so-called _hypothetical_ forms, both conjunctive and disjunctive, as reducible to _immediate_ inference, and not, therefore, to be included under syllogistic reasoning, which is always mediate. _The single Canon._--He reduces the several laws and canons of the figured syllogism to a single comprehensive canon. _Quantification of the Predicate._--But the most important discovery made by Hamilton in this science, is the quantification of the predicate. The predicate is always a given quantity in relation to the subject, and that quantity should be stated. This, logicians have always overlooked, quantifying only the subject, as, All men, Some men, etc., but never the predicate. Fully quantified, the proposition reads, All man is _some_ animal, no animal, etc., _i. e._, some sort or species of animal. This doubles the number of possible propositions, giving eight in place of four, and gives a corresponding increase in the number of words. These eight propositions are shown to be, not only possible, but admissible and valid. They are thus enumerated and named: AFFIRMATIVE. NEGATIVE. I. _Toto-total_: All A is all B. Any A is not any B. II. _Toto-partial_: All A is some B. Any A is not some B. III. _Parti-total_: Some A is all B. Some A is not any B. IV. _Parti-partial_: Some A is some B. Some A is not some B. _Reference._--For a more full and exact account of Hamilton's system, the reader is referred to the article on logic in the volume of _Discussions on Philosophy and Literature_, by Sir W. Hamilton; also, to "_An Essay on the New Analytic of Logical Forms_," by Thomas Spencer Baynes, L. L. B. On the history of logic in general, see _Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques_--Article _Logique_, by Barthèleme St. Hilaire, Professor of Philosophy to the College of France, member of the Institute, etc., etc.; also, Blakey's _History of Logic_. The _Memoir_ of St. Hilaire, on the logic of Aristotle, is one of the best works of modern times on the subject of which it treats. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES PART FOURTH. INTUITIVE POWER. CHAPTER I. EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF THE INTUITIVE FACULTY. _Office of this Power._--In our analysis of the powers of the mind, one was described as having for its office the conception of truths that lie apart from the region and domain of sense--first principles and primary ideas, fundamental to, and presupposed in, the operations of the understanding, yet not directly furnished by sense. They are awakened in the mind on occasion of sensible experience, but it is not sensible experience which produces them. On the contrary, they spring up in the mind as by intuition, whenever the fitting occasion is presented. We must attribute their origin to a special power of the mind by virtue of which, under appropriate circumstances, it conceives the truths and ideas to which we refer. This power we have termed the _originative_ or _intuitive_ faculty. _Specific Character._--In its specific character and function it is quite distinct from any of the faculties as yet considered. It does not, like the presentative power, bring before us, in direct cognizance, sensible objects; nor does it, like the representative faculty, replace those objects to thought, in their absence. It neither presents, nor represents, any object whatever. It forms no picture of any thing to the mind's eye. It is a power of simple conception; and yet it differs in an important sense from the other conceptive powers and that is, that it is not _reflective_ but intuitive in its action. Its data are conceptions, but conceptions necessary and intuitive, seen at a glance, not the results of the reflective and discursive process. These data are ideas of reason, rather than notions of the understanding, or processes of reflection. There is no sensible object corresponding to these ideas. We do not see, or hear, or feel, or by any means cognize, any thing of the sort; nor can we form a picture, or represent to ourselves any such thing as, _e. g._, time, or space, or substance, or cause, and the like. They are conceptions of the mind, and yet we conceive of them as _realities_. We cannot think them the mere creations and figments of the brain. And in this respect, again, they differ from the notions of the understanding--those classes and genera which we know to be the mere creations of the mind. _Existence of such a Faculty._--If any are disposed to doubt the existence of the faculty under consideration, as a distinct power of the mind, we have only to ask, whence come these ideas? They are given, not by perception, evidently, nor by memory, nor by imagination, for they fall not within the sphere of any of these faculties, that is the sphere of sense. They relate not to the sensible, but to the super-sensible. Nor are they the result of abstraction, as might at first appear. Particular instances being given, certain times, certain spaces, certain substances, certain instances of right and wrong conduct--it is the province of the faculty now named, to form, from these concrete ideas, the abstract notions of time, space, etc. But whence comes, in the first instance, the concrete idea? Whence comes the notion of a time, a space, a substance, a cause, a right or wrong act? Abstraction cannot give these. Manifestly, however, we have a faculty of forming such conceptions, of perceiving such truths and realities; and as manifestly, it is a faculty distinct from any hitherto considered. There are such realities as time, space, substance, cause, right and wrong, etc., The mind takes cognizance of them as such, knows them, and knows them to be realities; has, therefore, the faculty of knowing such truths. We may call it, if we please, the faculty of original and intuitive conception. _Generally admitted._--The existence of ideas not directly furnished by sense or experience, and not given by the faculties whose office it is to deal with objects of sense, is a doctrine now generally admitted by the most eminent philosophers. Nor is it a doctrine peculiar to any one school. Under different names it is the doctrine substantially of Reid, Stewart, Brown, Price, among English metaphysicians; Kant and his disciples in Germany; Cousin, Jouffroy and others in France. It is denied by Hobbes, Condillac, Gassendi, and others of that class who trace all our ideas to sense as their ultimate source and parentage. _Opinion of Locke._--The position of Locke respecting this matter, has been the subject of much controversy. By a certain class of writers he has been regarded as denying the existence of any and all ideas not derived from sense, and has been classed with the school of Hobbes, Condillac, etc. His philosophy has been regarded by many as of doubtful and dangerous tendency, as leading to the denial of all truth and knowledge not within the narrow domain of sense, and so conducting to materialism and skepticism. This can by no means be fairly charged upon him, nor upon his philosophy. He held no such views, nor are they implied or contained in his doctrine. Locke, indeed, takes the ground that all our ideas may be traced ultimately to one of two sources, sensation or reflection; the one taking cognizance of external objects, the other of our own mental operations: and that, whatever other knowledge we have not given directly by these faculties, is produced by adding, repeating, and variously combining, in our own minds, the simple ideas derived from these sources. In this process, however, of adding, combining, etc., he really includes what we prefer to designate as a separate faculty of the mind, and by another name. He distinctly recognizes the existence of the ideas which we attribute to this faculty--ideas of space, power, etc.--and gives a clear, and for the most part correct account of their origin. The mind, he says, observes what passes without--the changes there occurring; it reflects also on what passes within--the changes of its own ideas and purposes; it concludes that like changes will be produced in the same things, under the same circumstances, in future; it considers the possibility of effecting such changes, and so comes by the idea of _power_. In this Locke really includes essentially what we mean by suggestion or original conception. Experience, it is universally admitted, furnishes the occasion, suggests the idea, must precede as the indispensable condition of the mind's having that idea, and is, at least in this sense, the source of it, that it suggests the idea to the mind. All this, Locke fully admits, while, at the same time, he fails to draw the dividing line clearly between the ideas of sense and those in question. _Objections to the term Suggestion._--The name original suggestion has been commonly applied, of late, especially in this country, to designate the faculty now under consideration. It is so used by Professor Upham, and by Dr. Wayland. It is liable, however, to serious objections. The term suggestion does not seem to me to express the peculiar characteristic, the distinctive element and office of this faculty. It is not peculiar to the ideas now in question, that they are _suggested_ to the mind; many other ideas, all ideas, in fact, are suggested by something. This class of our thoughts, therefore, is no more entitled to that name than any other class. Nor is it peculiar to this class that they are _original_ suggestions. The mind has many other equally original ideas that are likewise suggestions from things without, or from its own operations--mere fancies many of them, imaginations. We need to distinguish, in this case, the merely fanciful, the ideal, from the real. The terms intuitive and intuition, while they imply the reality of the thing perceived, indicate, also, the immediateness of the process. _More serious Objection._--But there is a still further and more serious objection to the term suggestion as thus employed. The word does not, and cannot, with propriety, be made to denote what is now intended. It has a transitive significance, and cannot be made to denote a purely subjective process. Objects external suggest certain ideas to my mind. I suggest ideas to other minds. The faculty of suggestion lies, properly, not with the mind that receives the suggestion, but with the mind or object that gives it. But when we say the mind has the faculty of original suggestion, we do not mean that it has the power of suggesting original ideas to other minds; we refer to that power of the mind by which, in virtue of its constitution, certain ideas, not strictly derived from sense, are awakened in it when the occasion presents itself. We intend not a power of suggesting, but rather of receiving suggestions, a power of _conceiving_ ideas, a power of original and intuitive conceptions. To say that the mind suggests to itself ideas of space, time, etc., is a singular use of terms. I understand what is meant by suggesting ideas to others, and what it is to receive suggestions from others, and to have ideas suggested by events, occurrences and objects without, and how one thought may, by some law of association, suggest another. But how the mind suggests ideas to _itself_, is not so clear. A man, in a fit of abstraction, talks to himself, but whether he suggests ideas to himself in that way, so that he finds his own conversation instructive and profitable, may admit of question. The truth is, the idea is suggested, not _by_ the mind, but _to_ the mind--suggested from without. The mind has the power of conceiving certain ideas, which are awakened or excited in it by the occasion which presents itself. To call this faculty a faculty of suggestion, is simply a misnomer. _The true Doctrine._--All we can truly say, is, that the idea is awakened or called up in the mind when the occasion presents, is suggested _to_ it, not by it, suggested by the occasion, and not by the mind itself. The mind has the idea within, has, moreover, the faculty of _conceiving_ the idea, is so constituted, that, under certain circumstances, in view of what it observes without, or is conscious of within, the given idea is naturally and universally awakened in it; but the _source_ of the suggestion lies not within the mind itself, and is not to be confounded with the mind's faculty of conception. _Use of the term by Reid and others._--Dr. Reid has been referred to as authority for the use of the word suggestion to denote the faculty in question. Dr. Reid makes use of the word, but not in the sense now intended, not to denote a specific faculty of the mind, coördinate with perception, memory, imagination, etc., not, in fact, as a faculty at all. He refers to the well known fact, that ideas are suggested to the mind by objects and events without, and by the sensations thus awakened; as, _e. g._, a certain sound suggests the passing of a coach in the street. So, also, one idea or sensation will suggest another. He uses the term to denote the suggestion of one thing _to_ the mind _by_ another thing, and not to denote a power in the mind of suggesting things to itself. This is the correct use, and was not original with Reid. Berkley had used the term in the same way before him. Locke had used the word _excited_ in the same sense. The idea expressed by these terms, and the use of the same or similar terms by which to express it, may be traced back as far, at least, as to the Christian Fathers. St. Augustine so uses it. Reid expressly applies the term to the perception of external objects, as, _e. g._, certain sensations suggest the notion of extension and space. This is correct use. _The Facts in the Case._--The truth is, things exist thus and thus, and we are constituted with reference to them as thus existing. Sense and experience inform us of these existences and realities. Some of them are objects of direct perception by the senses, as matter and its qualities. Some of them are not directly objects of perception, but are suggested to the mind by the operations of sense, and are intuitively perceived by the mind, and recognized as truths and realities when thus suggested, as time, space, substance, cause, the right, the wrong, the beautiful, etc. The mind has the faculty of receiving and recognizing such truths and realities as thus suggested; and this faculty we call the power of _original and intuitive conception_. _These Ideas of internal Origin, in what Sense._--It has been customary of late, especially in our country, to speak of the class of ideas now referred to as of _internal origin_, in distinction from other ideas, derived more directly from sense, and which are consequently designated as of external origin. As it is desirable to be exact in our use of terms, it may be well to inquire in what sense any of our ideas are of external, and in what sense of internal origin, and wherein the ideas, now under consideration, differ from any others in respect to their source. _Ideas of external Origin._--A large class of our ideas evidently relate to objects of sense, objects external and material, of which we take cognizance through the senses. Such ideas may be said to be of external origin, inasmuch as they relate to things without, and are dependent on the external object as the indispensable condition of their development. Were it not for the external object producing the sensation of color or of hardness, I should not have the idea of redness or of hardness; were it not for the external object resisting my movements, I should not get the idea of externality. The idea is, in these cases, dependent on, and limited by, the sensation or the perception. They correspond as shadow and substance. The idea of resistance, and the perception of it, the idea of sound or color, and the sensation of it, are coëxtensive, synchronous, and, as to contents, identical. _These, in a Sense, internal._--In another sense, however, even these ideas are of internal origin, that is, they are the mind's own ideas; they spring up in the mind, and not out of it; they are, as ideas, strictly internal states, affections, acts of the mind itself. Take away intelligence, reason, the light divine, from the soul of man, and the external objects may exist as before, and produce the same effect on the organs of sense, but the ideas no longer follow. The physical organs of the idiot are affected in the same way by external objects as those of any other person, but he gets not the same ideas. These, it is the office of the mind to produce and fashion for itself out of the occasion and material furnished by sense. And this is as true of ideas relating to external objects as to any other. _Sensation an internal Affection._--It may even be said of this class of ideas, that their _suggestion_ is of internal origin. The immediate occasion of the mind's having the idea of extension, weight, hardness, color, etc., is not the existence of the object itself, possessing such and such qualities, but the impression produced by the object and its qualities on the sense; in other words, the sensation awakened in us. This it is which awakens and calls forth in the mind the idea of the external object. Were there, for any reason, no sensation, then the objects might exist as now, but we should have no idea of them. But sensation is an internal affection, revealed by consciousness, and the ideas awakened by it and dependent on it, are immediately of internal origin, though mediately dependent on some preceding external condition and occasion. _Ideas of internal Origin._--If we examine, now, the ideas of internal origin, so called, furnished by the faculty of original and intuitive conception, we find that, while they do not directly relate to objects of sense external and material, they nevertheless depend, in like manner, on some preceding operation of sense as the occasion of their development. Observation of what goes on without, or consciousness of what goes on within furnishes the occasion, as all admit, on which these ideas are awakened in the mind. The idea of time, _e. g._, is connected with the succession of events, external or internal--things without and thought and feeling within following each other--which succession is matter of observation or of consciousness. The idea of space is connected with the observation or sensation of body as extended. The idea of beauty and deformity is awakened by the perception of external objects as possessing certain qualities which we thus designate. The idea of right and wrong in like manner connects with something observed in human conduct. So of all ideas of this class. They are not disconnected with, nor independent of, the appropriate objects of observation and consciousness. These objects must exist, these occasions must be furnished, as the _indispensable condition_ of the existence of the idea in the mind. Dispense with the succession of events or the observation of it, and you dispense with the idea of time in the human mind. _Conclusion._--So far as regards the origin of the ideas in question, it is not easy to draw a dividing line, then, between the two classes, marking the one as _external_, the other as _internal_. Both are of external origin, and equally so, in this sense--that they both depend, and equally depend, on some previous exercise of sense as the occasion and condition of their development. Both are of internal origin, in another sense--that they are both awakened in the mind--are both the product of its own activity. _Difference lies in what._--The difference is not so much that of externality or internality of origin, as it is a difference of character. The one relates to objects of sense, which can be seen, heard, felt; the other to matters not less real, not less obvious, but of which sense does not take direct cognizance. In either case they spring from the constitution and laws of the mind. Such is my constitution that external and material objects, affecting my senses, furnish me ideas relating to such objects. And such is my constitution that certain relations and qualities of things not directly cognizable by sense, and certain realities and facts of an æsthetic and moral nature, likewise impress my mind, and thus awaken in me the idea of such relations and realities. The objects, the relations, the realities, exist, they are perceived by the mind, and thus the first idea of them is obtained. Color exists, and the eye is so constituted as to be able to perceive it, and thus the idea of color is awakened in the mind. So right and wrong exist, and the mind is so constituted as to be able to perceive and recognize their existence, and thus the idea of right is awakened in the mind. The faculty we call perception in the one case, original conception in the other. CHAPTER II. TRUTHS AND CONCEPTIONS FURNISHED BY THIS FACULTY § I.--PRIMARY TRUTHS. _Primary Truths and Primary Ideas as distinguished._--The faculty in question may be regarded as the source of primary beliefs, truths, cognitions, intuitively _perceived_, and also of primary and original conceptions, notions, ideas, also intuitively _conceived_. The difference between a conception or idea, and a belief or truth, is obvious. The notion of existence, and the knowledge or belief that I, myself, exist, are clearly distinguishable. The idea of cause, and the conviction that every event has a cause, are distinct mental states. The one is a primitive and intuitive conception, the other a primitive and intuitive truth. Every primary truth involves a primitive and original conception. _Existence of first Truths._--All science and all reasoning depend ultimately on certain first truths or principles, not learned by experience, but prior to it, the evidence and certainty of which lie back of all reasoning and all experience. Take away these elementary truths, and neither science nor reasoning are longer possible, for want of a beginning and foundation. Every proposition which carries evidence with it, either contains that evidence in itself, or derives it from some other proposition on which it depends. And the same is true of this other proposition, and so on forever, until we come, at last, to some proposition which depends on no other, but is self-evident, a first truth or principle. Whence come these first principles? Not of course from experience, for they are involved in and essential to all experience. They are native or _à priori_ convictions of the mind, instinctive and intuitive judgments. _Existence of first Truths admitted._--The existence of first truths or principles, as the basis of all acquired knowledge, has been very generally admitted by philosophers. They have designated these elementary principles, however, by widely different appellations. By some, they have been termed _instinctive_ beliefs, cognitions, judgments, etc., an appellation mentioned by Hamilton as employed by a very great number of writers from Cicero downward, including, among the rest, Scaliger, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Leibnitz, Hume, Reid, Stewart, Jacobi. Others, again, have termed them _à priori_ or _transcendental_ principles, cognitions, judgments, etc., as being prior to experience, and transcending the knowledge derived from sense. So Kant and his school termed them. By the Scotch writers they have been termed, also, principles of _common sense_, in place of which expression Stewart prefers the title, _fundamental laws of human belief_. _Criteria of primary Truths._--It becomes an important inquiry, in what manner we may recognize and distinguish first truths from all others. Besides common consent, or universality of belief on the part of those who have arrived at years of discretion, _Buffier_ relies, also, upon the following, as criteria of first principles; that they are such truths as can neither be defended nor attacked by any propositions, either more manifest or more certain than themselves; and that their practical influence extends even to those who would deny them. Reid gives, among other criteria, the following: consent of ages and nations; the absurdity of the opposite; early appearance in the mind, prior to education and reasoning; practical necessity to the conduct and concerns of life. _Hamilton_ gives the following as tests or criteria of first truths: 1. _Incomprehensibilty._--We comprehend that the thing is, but not _how_ or _why_ it is. 2. _Simplicity._--If the cognition or belief can be resolved into several cognitions or beliefs, it is complex, and so, no longer original. 3. _Necessity, and consequent universality._--If necessary, it is universal, and if absolutely universal, then it must be necessary. 4. _Comparative evidence and certainty._ _Summary of Criteria._--The following may be regarded as a summary of the more important criteria by which to distinguish primary truths from all others. _a._ As first truths, or primary data of intelligence, they are, of course, not derived from observation or experience, but are prior and necessary to such experience. _b._ They are _simple_ truths, not resolvable into some prior and comprehending truth from which they may be deduced. _c._ As simple truths, they _do not admit of proof_, there being nothing more certain which can be brought in evidence of them. _d._ While they do not admit of proof, _the denial of them involves us in absurdity_. _e._ Accordingly, as simple, and as self-evident, they are universally admitted. _Enumeration of some of the Truths usually regarded as primary._--Different writers have included some more, some fewer, of these first principles in their list; while no one has professed, so far as I am aware, to give a complete enumeration of them. Such an enumeration, if it were possible, would be of great service in philosophy. The following have been generally included among primary truths by those who have attempted any specification, viz.; our personal existence, our personal identity, the existence of efficient causes, the existence of the material world, the uniformity of nature; to which would be added, by others, the reliability of memory, and of our natural faculties generally, and personal freedom or power over our own actions and volitions. _Correctness of this Enumeration._--That the truths now specified are in some sense primary, that they are generally admitted and acted upon, among men, without process of reasoning, and that, when stated, they command the universal and instant assent of even the untaught and unreflecting mind, there can be little doubt. Whether, in all cases, however, they come strictly under the rules and criteria now given; whether, for example, our own existence and identity are primary data of consciousness; or whether, on the contrary, they are not _inferred_ from the existence of those thoughts and feelings of which we are directly conscious, as, for example, in the famous argument of Descartes, _Cogito, ergo sum_, may admit of question. § II.--INTUITIVE CONCEPTIONS. Of the results or operations of the faculty under consideration, we have considered, as yet, only that class which may be designated as primary _truths_, in distinction from primitive or intuitive _conceptions_. To this latter class let us now direct our attention. _Proposed consideration of some of the more important._--Without undertaking to give a complete list of our original or intuitive conceptions, there are certain of the more important, which seem to require specific consideration. Such are the ideas of space, time, identity, cause, the beautiful, the right--ideas difficult to define and explain, but, on that account, requiring the more careful investigation. Let us, then, take up these conceptions one by one, and inquire more particularly into their nature. I. _Space._ _Subjective View._--What is space? Is it a mere idea, a mere conception of the mind, or has it reality? This is a question which has much perplexed philosophers. Kant and his school regard both time and space as merely subjective, mere conceptions or forms which the mind imposes upon outward things, having no reality, save as conceptions, or laws of thought. _Opposite View._--On the other hand, if we make space a reality, and not a mere conception, what is it, and where is it? Not matter, and yet real, a something which exists, distinct from matter, and yet not mind. Pressed with these difficulties, some distinguished and acute writers have resolved time and space into qualities of the one infinite and absolute Being, the divine mind. Such was the view of Clarke and Newton, a view favored also by a recent French writer of some note--C. H. Bernard, Professor of Philosophy in the Lycée Bonaparte. _A middle Ground._--These must be regarded as, on either hand, extreme views. But is there a middle ground possible or conceivable? Let us see. What, then, is the simple idea of space? What mean we by that word? _Idea of Space._--When we contemplate any material object, any existence of which the senses can take cognizance, we are cognizant of it as _extended_, _i. e._, _occupying space_, nor can we possibly conceive of it as otherwise. The idea of space, then, is involved in the very idea of extended substance, or material existence, given along with it, impossible to be separated from it. We may regard it, therefore, as _the condition or postulate of being, considered as material existence, possessing extension_, etc. The idea of it is essential to the idea of matter, the reality of it to the reality of matter; for if there were no space, there could be no extension in space, and, without extension, no matter. _Not a mere Conception._--Is space, then, a mere conception of the mind, merely subjective? Unquestionably not. It is not, indeed, a _substance_ or _entity_, it has no _being_. It is not matter, for it is, itself, the _condition_ of matter; it is not spirit, for then it were intelligent. It is not an _existence_, then, strictly speaking, not a thing created, nor is it in the power of deity either to create or to annihilate it, for creation and annihilation relate only to _existence_. And yet space is a _reality_, and not a _mere conception_ of the mind. For, if so, then were there no longer any mind to conceive it, there would be no longer any space; if no mind to think, then no thought. Were the whole race of intelligent beings, then, to be blotted out of existence, and all things else to remain as now, space would be gone, while, yet, matter would exist, extension--worlds moving on as before. Extension in what, motion in what? Not in space, for that is no longer extant; defunct, rather, with the last mind whose expiring torch went out in the gloom of night. Unless we make _matter_, then, to be also a mere conception of the mind, space is not so. If the one is real, the other is. If one is a mere conception, so is the other; and to this result the school of Kant actually come. Matter, itself, is a subjective phenomenon, a mode of mind, or, rather, if it be any thing more, we have no means of knowing it to be so. If, on the contrary, as we hold, matter _exists_, and is an object of immediate perception by the senses, then there is such a thing as space also, the _condition_ of its existence, a _reality_, though not an _entity_, the idea of it given along with that of matter, the reality of it implied in the reality of matter. Matter _presupposes_ it, depends on it as its _sine quâ non_. It depends on nothing. Were there no matter, there would be none the less space, but only space unoccupied. In that case, the idea of space might never occur to any mind, but the reality would exist just as now. Were all matter and all mind to be blotted out of being, space would still be what it is now. _The Idea, how awakened_--_How come we by our Idea of Space?_--Sense gives us our first knowledge of matter, as extended, etc., and so furnishes the _occasion_ on which the idea of space is first awakened in the mind. In this sense, and no other, does it originate in sensation or experience. It is a simple idea, _logically_ prior to experience, because the very notion of matter _presupposes_ space; yet, _chronologically_, as regards the matter of development in the mind, subsequent to experience and cognizance of matter. II. TIME. _Idea and Definition._--What we have said of space will enable us better to understand what is the nature of that analogous and kindred conception of the mind, in itself so simple, yet so difficult of definition and explanation--_Time._ The remarks already made, respecting space, will almost equally apply to this subject also. Space, we defined as the _condition of being, regarded as extended, material_. Time is the _condition of being, regarded as in action, movement, change_. Sense informs us not only of magnitudes, extensions, material objects, and existences, as around us in nature, but of movements and changes continually taking place among these various existences; as _extension_ is essential to those material forms, so _succession_ is essential to these movements and changes; they cannot take place, nor be conceived to take place, without it; and as space is involved in, and given along with, the very idea of _extension_, so time is involved in, and given along with, the very idea of _succession_. Time, then, is the condition of action, movement, change, event, as space is of extended and material existence. It is that which is required in order that something should _take place_ or occur, just as space is that which is required in order that something should exist as material and having form. As space gives us the question _where_, time gives us the question _when_. It is the place of events, as space is of forms. _Brown's View._--Dr. Brown defines time to be the mere relation of one event to another, as prior and subsequent. It follows, from this view, that if there were no _events_, then no _time_, since the latter is a mere relation subsisting among the former. Is this so? No doubt we derive our _idea_ of time from the succession of events; but is time merely an idea, merely a conception, merely a relation, or has it reality out of and aside from our mind's conceiving it, and independent of the series of events that take place in it? _Not a mere Conception._--Like space, it is a law of thought, a conception, and like space it is not a _mere_ law of thought, not a mere conception of the mind, not altogether subjective. Nor is it a mere relation of one event to another in succession. It is, on the contrary, _necessary to_, and prior to, all succession and all events. It does not depend on the occurrence of events, but the occurrence of events depends on _it_. As space would still exist were matter annihilated, so time would continue were events to cease. But were time blotted out there could be no succession, no occurrence or event. Time is essential, not to the mere thought or _conception_ of events, but to the _possibility_ of the thing itself. It is not, then, a mere idea, or conception of the mind, nor a mere relation. It has, in a sense, objectivity and reality, since it is the ground and condition of all continuous active existence, as space is of all extended formal existence, the _sine quâ non_, without which not merely our idea and conception of such existence would vanish, but the thing itself. There could be no such thing as active continuous existence, either of mind or matter, since mind and spirit, as continuous and persistent in any of its moods and phases, much more as passing from one to another of those moods, implies succession. Time is to mind what space is to matter. _Matter_ protends in _space_, _mind_ in _time_. Time is even less purely subjective than space, for should we say that both matter and space are mere subjective phenomena, mere conceptions, yet even to those very conceptions, to those subjective phenomena, as states of mind, time is essential. _Whence our Idea of Time._--It is with the idea of time as with that of space. _Logically_, time is the condition, à priori, of all experience, because of all continuous existence and all consciousness; but _chronologically_ it is à posteriori, _i. e._, it is, to us, a matter of sensible experience. Sense is the occasion on which the idea of time is first awakened in our minds. We first exist, continue to exist, are conscious of that existence, conscious of succession, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so we get the idea of time. Time is necessary to _succession_; yet had there been no succession known to us, we should have had no _idea_ of time. We are to distinguish, of course, between our _idea_ of time and the thing itself. Locke is incorrect in making the idea of succession prior to that of duration, _in itself considered_, and not merely as regards our knowledge. In this respect, Cousin has ably and justly criticised the philosophy of Locke. _Time a relative Idea._--Looking at time merely as an idea or conception of our own minds, it is simply the perception of _relation_; the relation of passing events to each other, the relation of our various modes and states of being, our thoughts, feelings, etc., to each other, as successive, or to external objects and events, as also successive; the whereabouts, in a word, of one's self, one's present consciousness, in relation to what passes, or has passed, within or without, the relation of the present me to the former me, as regards both the succession of internal or external events. Hence the mind has only to withdraw itself completely from the consciousness of its former states and of events passing without, and it _loses_ altogether its idea of time. _Thus in Sleep._--This we find to be the case in sleep. The thinking goes on; the idea of present self is kept up, but not of self in relation to the objects that are really about us, or to the actual part of its own existence. Whatever relation seems to exist, is imaginary and untrue. We no longer know where we are, nor exactly who we are. The avenues of communication with the external world are shut up, the eye, the ear, etc., are inactive, the spirit withdraws from the outward into itself, as far as this is possible, while the connection of body and mind still continues; its relations to former things and to present things are forgotten and unknown. What is the consequence? We lose all idea of _time_; the moment of falling asleep and of our beginning to awake, if the sleep have been sound, is apparently one and the same moment. The first effect of returning consciousness is to resume the broken thread of time, to find your place again in the series of things, whether it is morning or night, what morning or what night it is; to find yourself, in fact. You had _forgotten yourself_, to use a familiar phrase exactly descriptive of the present case. What of yourself had you forgotten? Simply your _relation_ to the order and succession of things without, and of thoughts and feelings within--your place in the series. In sleep, your existence, so far as it is an object of consciousness at all, is simply that of each passing moment by itself. _Thus in absorbing Pursuits._--You have only, in your waking moments, to lose sight as completely of that relation and succession of the present self to the past self, of the me to the not me, and you lose as completely all idea of time. Does this ever occur? Partially, whenever the attention is absorbed in any intensely interesting pursuit or study. Time passes insensibly then. We are abstracted from the series, our attention is withdrawn from surrounding objects and events, and even from our own thoughts, _as such_. We lose sight of the me, and, of course, of the relation of the me, to passing events, and therefore lose the sense of time. When the spell is at last broken we must go to seek ourselves again, as we would seek a child, that, in its play, had wandered from our side. _Also in Disease._--Something of the same sort occurs in severe and protracted sickness. The mind loses its reckoning, so to speak, as a ship in a storm loses latitude and longitude, and wanders from its course, unable longer to take its daily observations. _Idea of Time in Children._--You have doubtless noticed that children have little idea of time. It is much the same to them, one day with another, one week with another; it is morning, or afternoon, or night indifferently. The distinction and recognition of time, and of one time as different from another, is slowly acquired, and with difficulty. They have not that self-consciousness, that apprehension of the present and of the past, as related to each other in the series of events, which is involved in the idea of time. They are more like one in sleep, like one dreaming, like one in reverie, wholly absorbed with the present moment, the present consciousness. _Time longer to a Child than an Adult._--What has been said explains, also, the well-known fact, that time seems longer to a child than to an adult person. It is, as we have seen, the relation of the present self, as affected by changes internal and external, to the past self as thus affected, that gives us the idea and the standard of time. Of course, the shorter the line that represents the past, the longer, in comparison, that present duration which is measured by it. Now the child has fewer past thoughts and events with which to compare the present ones; hence, they hold a greater comparative magnitude to him than to us, who have a greater range of past existence and past consciousness with which to connect the passing moments. Hence, the longer we live, the more quickly pass our years, the shorter appears any given period of duration. _Applied to eternal Duration._--You have but to apply this thought to Him whose going forth is from of old, who _inhabiteth eternity_, and you have a new meaning in the beautiful thought of the Hebrew poet, that with Him a thousand years are but as a day. To that eternal mind, the remoteness of the period when the first star lighted up the vault of night at his bidding, may be recent as an event of yesterday. III. IDENTITY. _Difficult of Explanation._--Perhaps no subject, in the whole range of intellectual philosophy, has been the occasion of more perplexity and embarrassment than this. It is, in itself, a difficult subject to comprehend and explain. We know what we mean by identity, but to tell what that meaning is, to state the thing lucidly, and explain it philosophically, is another matter. It becomes necessary to examine the subject, therefore, with some care, in order to avoid confusion of ideas, and positively erroneous opinions. The subject is one of some importance in its theological, as well as its strictly philosophical bearings. _Not Similarity._--Identity is _not similarity_, not mere resemblance--_similar_ things are not the _same_ thing. We may suppose two globes or spheres precisely alike in every respect--of the same size, color, form, of the same material, of the same chemical composition and substance, presenting to the eye and the touch, and every other sense, the very same appearance and qualities, so that, if viewed successively, we should not recognize the difference; yet they are not identical; they are, by the very supposition, _two_ distinct globes, two entities, two substances, and to say that they are identical, is to say that two things are only one. _Similarity_ is not identity, so far from it, as Archbishop Whately has well remarked, it is not even implied of necessity in identity. A person may so far change as to be quite unlike his former self in appearance, size, etc., and yet be the same person. Not only are the two ideas quite distinct, but the one may be, and in fact is, in most cases, the virtual _negation_ of the other. Resemblance, in most cases, implies difference of objects, the opposite of identity. To say that A and B resemble each other, is to say that, as known to us, they are _not_ one and the same, not identical. It is only when one and the same object falls under cognizance at diverse times, so that we compare the object, as now known, with the same object as previously known, that resemblance and identity can possibly be predicated of the same thing. Identity is only another term for _sameness_ (_idem_); any one who knows what that means, knows what identity means, and that it does not mean mere similarity or resemblance. _Not sameness of chemical Composition._--Nor does sameness of chemical composition constitute identity. This is merely similarity. Two bodies may be composed of the same chemical elements, in the same proportion, and possessing the same general form and structure, yet they are not the same body. A given piece of wood or iron may be divided into a number of parts, each closely resembling the others, of the same appearance, size, figure, color, weight, and of the same chemical components; yet no one of these is identical with any other. When we say, in such a case, that the different pieces are of the same material, we use the word _same_ with some latitude, to denote, not that they are composed of strictly the same particles, that the substance of the one is the very identical substance of the other, but only that they consist of the same _sort_ or _kind_ of substance, that they are, _e. g._, both wood, or both iron. But this does not constitute identity. There is no limit to the number of identical bodies which it is possible to conceive on this theory of identity. The same power that constructs one body of given chemical elements, and of given form and structure, may make two such, or ten, and if the first two are identical, the ten are, and they may exist at one and the same time, beside each other, identical with each other, yet ten, every one of which is itself, and yet every one is each of the others! _A relative Term._--Identity is a relative term, like most others that are expressive of quality. The term straight implies the idea of that which is not straight; beauty, the idea of deformity; greatness, its opposite; and so of others. Identity stands related to _diversity_ as its opposite. To have the idea of identity, is to have that of diversity also. To affirm the former, is to deny the latter, and to deny is to have the idea of that which is denied. I do not say there can be no _identity_ without diversity, but only that there can be no _idea_ of the one without the idea, also, of the other, any more than there can be the idea of a tall man without the idea of short men. _Opposite of Diversity._--To affirm identity, then, is simply to deny _diversity_, to predicate unity, sameness, oneness. Other objects there are, like this, it may be, similar in every respect, capable of being confounded with it, and mistaken for it, but they are _other_ and not _it_. This we affirm when we affirm identity, _non-diversity_, _non-otherness_. Whatever it be that marks off and distinguishes a thing from all other like or unlike objects--whatever constitutes its _individuality_, its _essence_--_in that consists its identity_. _Different applications of the Term._--Evidently, then, the word has somewhat different senses as applied to different classes of objects, whose individuality or essence varies. There are three distinct classes of objects to which the term is applicable. 1. Spiritual existence. 2. Organic and animate material existence. 3. Inorganic matter. _As applied to the first Class._--As regards the first class, _spiritual existences_, their identity consists in simple oneness and continuity of existence. It is enough that the soul or spirit exist, and continue to exist. So long as this is the case, identity is predicable of it. Should that existence cease, the identity ceases, since the object no longer exists of which identity can be affirmed. Should another spirit be created in its place, and even, _if the thing be supposable_, should it be endowed, not only with the same qualities, but the same _consciousness_, so as to be conscious of all that of which the former was conscious, still it would not be identical with the former. It is, by the very supposition, _another_ spirit, and not the same. To be identical with it, it must be the very same essence, being, or existence, and not some other in its place. It is only of spiritual immaterial existence that identity, in its strict and complete sense, is properly predicable, since it is only this class of existences that retains, unimpaired, its simple oneness, sameness, continuity of essence. _Personal Identity._--When we speak of _personal_ identity, we mean that of the spirit, the soul, the ego, in distinction from the corporeal material part. The _evidence_ of personal identity is _consciousness_. We know that the thinking conscious existence of to-day, which we call _self_, _me_, is one and the same with the thinking conscious self or me of yesterday, and not some other personal existence of like attributes and condition. _Locke's Idea._--Mr. Locke strangely mistook the _evidence_ of personal identity for identity _itself_, and affirmed that our identity _consists_ in our consciousness. If this were so, then, whenever our consciousness were interrupted, as in sound sleep, or in fainting, or delirium, our identity would be gone. This error has been pointed out, and fully explained, by Dr. Reid, and Bishop Butler, the former of whom makes this supposition: that the same individual is, at different periods of life, a boy at school, a private in the army, and a military commander; while a boy, he is whipped for robbing an orchard; when a soldier, he takes a standard from the enemy, and at that time recollects, perfectly, the whipping when a boy; when commander, he remembers taking the standard but not the whipping. It follows, according to Mr. Locke, that the soldier is identical with the boy, and the general with the soldier, because conscious of the same things, but the general is not identical with the boy, because not conscious of the same things, that is, _a_ is _b_, and _b_ is _c_, yet _a_ is not _c_. The truth is, _identity_, and the _evidence_ of it, are two things. Were there no consciousness of any thing past, there would still be identity so long as unity and continuity of existence remained. _2. Identity as applied to the second Class._--As regards _organic material_ existence, whether animal or vegetable, the identity consists in that which constitutes the essence or being of the thing, which constitutes it an animal or vegetable existence. It is not mere body, not mere particles of matter, of such number and nature, or even of such arrangement and structure, but along with this, there is a higher principle involved--that of life. The continuity of this mysterious principle of life, under the same general structure and organization of material parts, making throughout one complex unity, one entity, one being, though with many changes, it may be, of separate parts and particles composing the organization; this constitutes the identity of the object. The identity is no longer complete, no longer absolute, because there is no longer, as in the case of spiritual existence, absolute sameness of essence. Of the complex being under consideration, animal or vegetable, the life-principle is, indeed, one and the same throughout all periods of its existence, but the material organization retains not the same absolute essence, only the same general structure, and form, and adaptation of parts, while the parts and particles themselves are continually changing. It is only in a modified and partial sense, then, not in strict philosophical use of language, that we can predicate identity of any material organic existence. We mean by it, simply, _continuity of life_ under the same general structure and organization; for so far as it has unity at all, this is it. This enables us to distinguish such an object from any and all other like objects of the same kind or sort. _3. Identity as applied to the third Class._--As regards mere inorganic matter, its identity consists, again, in its absolute oneness and sameness. There must be no change of particles, for the essence of the thing now considered lies not in any peculiarity of form, or structure, or life-principle, all which are wanting, but simply in the number and nature of the particles that make up the mass or substance of the thing, and if these change in the least, it is no longer the same essence. There is, properly, then, no such thing as identity in the cases now under consideration, since the particles of any material substance are liable to constant changes. It is only in a secondary and popular sense that we speak of the identity of merely inorganic material substance; strictly speaking, it has no identity, and continues not the same for any two moments. We say, however, of two pieces of paper, that they are of the _same_ color, meaning that they are both white or both red; of two coins, that they are of the same fineness, the same size, and weight, etc., meaning, thereby, only that the two things are of the same _sort_ of color, the same degree of fineness, etc., and not that the color of the one or the fineness and size of the one is absolutely the essential and identical color, size, fineness of the other. It is by a similar use of terms, not in their strict and proper, but in a loose and secondary sense, that we speak of the identity or sameness of any material substance in itself considered. Strictly, it has no identity unless its substance is absolutely unchanged, which is not true of most, if, indeed, of any material existence, for any successive periods of time. _Popular Use._--There is a popular use of this term which requires further notice. We speak of the identity of a mountain, a river, a tree, or any like object in nature. It is the same mountain, we say, that we looked upon in childhood, the same tree under which we sat when a boy, the same river in which we bathed or fished in youth. Now there is a sense in which this is true and correct. There has been change of substance unquestionably, and therefore there is not _absolute_ identity; but there is, after all, _numerical_ sameness, and this is what we mean when we speak of the sameness or identity of the object. It constitutes a sufficient ground for such use of terms. You recognize the book, the mountain, the river, as one you have seen before. The tree that you pass in your morning walk you recognize as the very tree under which you sat ten years ago. Leaves have changed, bark and fibres have changed; branches are larger and more numerous; boughs, perhaps, have fallen by time and by tempest; it has changed as you have changed, it has grown old like yourself, with changing seasons; its verdure and foliage, like your hopes and plans, lie scattered around it, and yet it is _to you_ the same tree. How so? It is the same numerical unity. Of a thousand or ten thousand _similar_ trees, similar in species, in growth, and form, and adaptation of parts, in size, color, general appearance, etc., it is this individual one, and not some other of the same sort or species growing elsewhere, that you refer to. It is the same numerical unity and not some other one of the series. Still there must be continuity of existence in order to identity even in this popular sense of the term. Were the parts entirely changed and new ones substituted, as in the puzzle of the knife with several successive handles and blades, or the ship whose original timbers, planks, cordage, and entire substance, had, in course of time, by continued repairs, been removed and replaced by new; in such a case, we do not ordinarily speak or think of the object as being any longer the same. _This not absolute Identity._--In the cases now under consideration, in which, in popular language, objects are termed "same" and "identical," which are not strictly so, there is _comparative_ rather than _absolute_ unity and identity. There is reference always in such cases to other objects of the same kind, sort, and description, a series of which the object of present cognition is one, and to which series it holds the same relation now that it held formerly. As when, of several books on a table, you touch _one_, and after the interval of some moments or hours touch the same again; you say, The book I last touched is the same I touched before, the _identical_ one; you do not mean that its _substance_ is absolutely unchanged, that it has the same precise number of particles in its composition as before--this is not in your mind at all--but only that the unity thus designated is the same unity previously designated, that, and not some other one of the series of similar objects. It is a _comparative_ idea, a comparative identity, in which numerical unity is the element chiefly regarded. _Possible Plurality implied._--In all cases where the idea of identity arises in the mind, there is implied a _possible_ plurality of objects of the same general character; the idea of such diversity or plurality is before the mind, and the foundation of that idea is the difference of cognition. The same object is viewed by the same person at _different times_ or by _different persons_ at the same time, and in that case, though the object itself should be absolutely one and the same, yet there have been distinct, separate cognitions of it, and this plurality or difference of cognition is a sufficient foundation for the idea of a possible diversity of object. The book _as known_ to-day and the book _as known_ yesterday, are two distinct objects of thought. The cognition now, and the cognition then, are two separate acts of the mind; and the question arises, Are the _objects_ distinct, as well as the cognitions? This is the question of identity. You have an immediate, irresistible conviction that the object of these several cognitions is one and the same. You affirm its identity, absolute or comparative, as the case may be. _The Conception of Identity amounts to what._--In every case of affirmed identity, then, there is implied a possible plurality of objects; a difference of cognition of a given object, whether one person cognizant at different times, or different persons at the same time; a question whether the possible plurality, as regards the object of these different cognitions, is an _actual_ plurality; a conviction and decision that it is not, that the object is one and the same; and this sameness and unity are _absolute_ or _comparative_, according as we use the language in its strict, primitive, philosophical meaning, or in its loose and popular sense. In the one case, it is sameness of absolute essence, in the other, sameness of nominal relation to others of a series or class. IV. CAUSE. _Meaning of the Term._--The idea of cause is one with which every mind is familiar. It is not easy, however, to explain precisely what we mean by it, nor to fix its limits, nor to unfold its origin. We mean by this term, I think, as ordinarily employed, that on which some consequence depends, that but for which some event or phenomenon would not occur. In order to affirm that one thing is the cause of another, I must know, not merely that they are connected, but that the existence of the one depends on that of the other. This is more than mere antecedence, however invariable. The approach of a storm may be invariably indicated by the changes of the barometer. These changes precede the storm, but are not the cause of it. _Origin of the Idea._--_Whence do we derive_ the idea of cause?--a question of some importance, and much discussed. Evidently not from sense. I observe, for example, the melting of snow before the fire, or wax before the flame of a taper. What is it that I see in this case? Merely the phenomenon, nothing more. All that sense conveys, all that the eye reports, is simply the melting of the one substance in the presence and vicinity of the other. I _see_ no cause, no form transmitted from the one to the other, no action of the one on the other, but simply the vicinity of the two, and the change taking place in one. I _infer_ that the change takes place in consequence of the vicinity. I believe it; and if the experiment is often repeated with the same results, I cannot doubt that it is so. The idea of causality is, indeed, _suggested_ by what I have seen, but is not given by sense. I have not seen the cause; that lies hidden, occult, its nature wholly unknown, and its very existence known, not by what I have actually seen, but by that law of the mind which leads me to believe that every event must have a cause, and to look for that cause in whatever circumstance is known to be invariably connected with the given change or event. _Constitution of the Mind._--That such is the constitution of the mind, such the law of its action, admits of no reasonable doubt. No sooner is an event or phenomenon observed, than we conclude, at once, that it is an effect, and begin to inquire the cause. We cannot, by any effort of conception, persuade ourselves that there is absolutely no cause. _Not derived from Sense._--But is not this principle of causality derived from experience? We have already said that sense does not give it. I do not see with the eye the cause of the melting of the wax, much less does what I see contain the general principle, that _every_ event must have a cause. Sense does not give me this. _Whether from Consciousness._--Still, may it not be a matter of experience in another way, given by _consciousness_, though not by _sense_. For example, I am conscious of certain volitions. These volitions are accompanied with certain muscular movements, and these, again, are followed by certain sensible effects upon surrounding objects. These changes produced on objects without are directly connected thus with my own mental states and changes, with the volitions of which I am directly conscious. Given, the volition on my part, with the corresponding muscular effort, and the external change is produced. I never observe it taking place without such preceding volition. I learn to regard my will as the _cause_, and the external change as the _effect_. I observe that it is in the power of others to produce changes in like manner. Thus I obtain the general idea of cause. It is given by consciousness and experience. _Notion of Causality not thus derived._--It is to this source that a very able and ingenious French philosopher would attribute our first idea of cause. I refer to Maine de Biran. I should agree with M. de Biran, that consciousness of our own voluntary efforts, and of the effects thus produced, may give us our first notion of cause. But it does not give us the law of causality. It extends to a given instance only, explains that, explains nothing further than that, cannot go beyond. I am conscious that in this given instance I have set in operation a train of antecedents and sequences which results in the given effect. I am not conscious that _every_ event has, in like manner, a cause. My experience warrants no such assumption. No induction of facts and cases can possibly amount to this. Induction can multiply and generalize, but cannot stamp on that which is merely empirical and contingent, the character of universality and necessity. The law of causality, in a word, is to be distinguished from any given instance, or number of instances, of actually observed causation. The latter fall within the range of consciousness and experience, the former is given, if at all, as a law of the mind, a primary truth, an idea of reason. _Remarks of Professor Bowen._--As Professor Bowen has well observed, "The maxim, '_Every event must have a cause_,' is not, like the so-called laws of nature, a mere induction founded on experience, and holding good only until an instance is discovered to the contrary; it is a necessary and immutable truth. It is not derived from observation of natural phenomena, but is super-imposed upon such observation by a necessity of the human intellect. It is not made known through the senses; and its falsity, under any circumstances, is not possible, is not even conceivable. The _cause_ to which it points us, is not to be found in nature. The mere physicist, after vainly searching, ever since the world began, for a single instance of it, has, at length, abandoned the attempt as hopeless, and now confines himself to the mere _description_ of natural phenomena. The _true cause_ of these phenomena must be sought for in the realm, not of _matter_, but of _mind_." _What constitutes Cause._--In this last remark, the author quoted touches upon a question of no little moment. What constitutes a cause? We cannot here enter into the discussion of this question. It is sufficient to remark, that in the ordinary use of the word, as denoting that, but for which a given result will not be, many things beside mind are included as causes. A hammer, or some like instrument, is essential to the driving of a nail. The hammer may be called the cause of the nail being driven; the blow struck by means of the hammer may also be so designated. More properly, the arm which gave the blow, and, more correctly still, the mind which willed the movement of the arm, and not the consequent blow of the hammer, may be said to be the cause. If we seek for _ultimate_ and _efficient_ causes, we must, doubtless, come back to the realm of mind. It is mind that is, in every case, the first mover, the originator of any effect, and it may, therefore, be called the true and prime cause, the cause of causes. _History of the Doctrine._--_Aristotle's View._--The history of the doctrine of causality presents a number of widely different theories, a brief outline of which is all that we can here give. The most ancient division and classification of causes is that of Aristotle, which is based on the following analysis: Every work brought to completion implies four things: an agent by whom it is done, an element or material of which it is wrought, a plan or idea according to which it is fashioned, and an end for which it is produced. Thus, to the production of a statue there must be a statuary, a block of marble, a plan in the mind of the artist, and a motive for the execution of the work. The first of these is termed the _efficient_ cause, the second the _material_ cause, the third the _formal_, and the fourth the _final_ cause. This classification was universally adopted by the scholastic philosophers, and, to some extent, is still prevalent. We still speak of _efficient_ and of _final_ causes. _Locke's Derivation of Cause._--With regard to the origin of the idea of cause, there has been the greatest diversity of opinion. Locke derives it from sense; so do the philosophers of the sensationalist school. We perceive bodies modifying each other, and hence the notion of causality. _Theory of Hume and of Brown._--Hume denies the existence of what we call cause, or power of one object over another. He resolves it into succession or sequence of objects in regular order, and consequent association of them in our thoughts. Essentially the same is the theory of Brown, who resolves cause and effect into simple antecedence and sequence, beyond which we know nothing, and can affirm nothing. _Theory of Leibnitz._--The theory of Leibnitz verges upon the opposite extreme, and assigns the element of power or causal efficiency to every form of existence; every substance is a force, a cause, in itself. _Of Kant._--Kant and his school make cause a merely subjective notion, a law of the understanding, which it impresses upon outward things, a condition of our thought. We observe external phenomena, and, according to this law of our intelligence, are under the necessity of arranging them as cause and effect; but we do not know that, independent of our conception, there exists in reality any thing corresponding to this idea. The tendency of this theory, as well as that of Hume and Brown, to a thorough-going skepticism, is obvious at a glance. The theory of Maine de Biran has been already noticed. V. THE IDEA OF THE BEAUTIFUL, AND OF RIGHT. _These Ideas Intuitive._--- Among the primary ideas awakened in the mind by the faculty of original or intuitive conception, ideas of reason, as some writers would prefer to call them, must be included the notion of the _beautiful_, and also that of _right_--ideas more important in themselves, and in their bearing on human happiness, than almost any others which the mind entertains. That these ideas are to be traced, ultimately, to the originative or intuitive faculty, there can be little doubt. They are simple and primary ideas. They have the characteristics of universality and necessity. They are awakened intuitively and instantaneously in the mind, when the appropriate occasion is presented by sense. There are certain objects in nature and art, which, so soon as perceived, strike us as beautiful. There are certain traits of character and courses of conduct, which, so soon as observed, strike us as morally right and wrong. The ideas of the beautiful and the right are thus awakened in the mind on the perception of the corresponding objects. _Things to be considered respecting them._--Viewed as notions of the intuitive faculty, or original conceptions, it would be in place to consider more particularly the _circumstances_ under which each of these ideas originates, and the _characteristics_ of each; also what _constitutes_, in either case, the object, what constitutes the beautiful and the right. _These Topics reserved for separate Discussion._--These matters deserve a wider and fuller discussion, however, than would here be in place. The ideas under consideration are to be viewed, not merely as conceptions of the reason or intuition, but as constituting the material of two distinct and important departments of mental activity, two distinct classes of judgments, viz., the _æsthetic_ and the _moral_. The conceptions of the beautiful and the right, furnished by the originative or intuitive power of the mind, constitute the material and basis on which the reflective power works, and as thus employed, the mental activity assumes the form, and is known under the familiar names of _taste_ and _conscience_, or, as we may term them, the æsthetic and moral faculties. As such, we reserve them for distinct consideration in the following pages, bearing in mind, as we proceed, that these faculties, so called, are not properly new powers of the mind, but merely forms of the reflective faculty, as exercised upon this particular class of ideas. CHAPTER III. THE CONCEPTION AND COGNIZANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL § I.--CONCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL. _The Science which treats of this._--The investigation of this topic brings us upon the domain of a science as yet comparatively new, and which, in fact, has scarcely yet assumed its place among the philosophic sciences--_Æsthetics_, the science of the beautiful. _Difficulty of defining._--What, then, is the beautiful?--A question that meets us at the threshold, and that has received, from different sources, answers almost as many and diverse as the writers that have undertaken its discussion. It is easy to specify instances of the beautiful without number, and of endless variety; but that is not defining it. On the contrary, it is only increasing the difficulty; for, where so many things are beautiful, and so diverse from each other, how are we to decide what is that one property which they all have in common, viz., beauty? The difficulty is to fix upon any one quality or attribute that shall pertain alike to all the objects that seem to us beautiful. A figure of speech, a statue, a star, an air from an opera, all strike us as beautiful, all awaken in us the emotion which beauty alone can excite. But what have they in common? It were easy to fix upon something in the case of the statue, or of the star, which should account, perhaps, for the pleasure those objects afford us; but the same thing might not apply to the figure of speech, or to the musical air. It would seem almost hopeless to attempt the solution of the problem in this method. And yet there _must be_, it would seem, some principle or attribute in which these various objects that we call beautiful agree, which is the secret and substance of their beauty, and the cause of that uniform effect which they all produce upon us. Philosophers have accordingly proposed various solutions of the problem, some fixing upon one thing, some upon another; and it may be instructive to glance at some of these definitions. _Some make it a Sensation._--Of those who have undertaken to define what beauty is, there are some who make it a mere _feeling_ or sensation of the mind, and not an objective reality of any sort. It is not this, that, or the other quality of the external object, but simply a subjective emotion. It lies within us, and not without. Thus, Sir George Mackenzie describes it as "a certain degree of a certain species of pleasurable effect impressed on the mind." So also Grohman, Professor of Philosophy at Hamburg, in his treatise on æsthetic as science, defines the beautiful to be "the infinite consciousness of the reason as _feeling_." As the true is the activity of reason at work as _intellect_ or knowledge, and as the good is its province when it appears as _will_, so the beautiful is its activity in the domain of _sensibility_. Brown, Upham, and others, among English and American writers, frequently speak of the emotion of beauty, as if beauty itself were an emotion. _Others an Association._--Closely agreeing with this class of writers, and hardly to be distinguished from it, is that which makes beauty consist in certain _associations of idea and feeling_ with the object contemplated. This is the favorite doctrine with the Scotch metaphysicians. Thus Lord Jeffrey, who has written with great clearness and force on this subject, regards beauty as dependent entirely on association, "the reflection of our own inward sensations." It is not, according to this view, a quality of the object external, but only a feeling in our own minds. Its seat is within and not without. _Theory that Beauty consists in Expression._--Of the same general class, also, are those who, with Alison, Reid, and Cousin, regard beauty as the _sign_ or _expression_ of some quality fitted to awaken pleasing emotions in us. Nothing is beautiful, say these writers, which is not thus expressive of some mental or moral quality or attribute. It is not an original and independent quality of any peculiar forms or colors, says Alison, for then we should have a definite rule for the creation of beauty. It lies ultimately in the mind, not in matter, and matter becomes beautiful only as it becomes, by analogy or association, suggestive of mental qualities. The same is substantially the ancient Platonic view. Kant, also, followed in the main by Schiller and Fichte, takes the subjective view, and makes beauty a mere play of the imagination. _All these Theories make it subjective._--Whether we regard beauty, then, as a mere emotion, or as an association of thought and feeling with the external object, or as the sign and expression of mental qualities, in either case we make it ultimately subjective, and deny its external objective reality. _Different Forms of the objective Theory._--Of those who take the opposite view, some seek for the hidden principle of beauty in _novelty_; others, as Galen and Marmontel, in _utility_; others, as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hogarth, in the principle of _unity in variety_; others, in that of _order and proportion_, as Aristotle, Augustine, Crousez. All these writers, while they admit the existence of beauty in the external object, make it to consist in some quality or conformation of matter, as such. _The spiritual Theory._--There is still another theory of the beautiful, which, while admitting its external objective reality, seeks to divest it of that material nature in which the writers last named present it, and searches for its essence among principles ethereal and spiritual. According to this view beauty is the _spiritual life in its immediate sensible manifestation_; the hidden, invisible principle--spirit in distinction from matter, animating, manifesting itself in, looking out through, the material form. It is not matter as such, it is not spirit as such, much less a mere mental quality or mental feeling; it is the expression of the invisible and spiritual under sensible material forms. This view was first fully developed by Schelling and Hegel, and is adopted, in the main, by Jouffroy in his Cours d'Esthetique, by Dr. August Ruhlert, of the university of Breslau, in his able system of æsthetics, and by many other philosophical writers of distinction in Europe. _Questions for Consideration._--The following questions grow out of these various and conflicting definitions, as presenting the real points at issue, and, as such, requiring investigation. I. Is beauty something objective, or merely subjective and emotional? II. If the former, then what is it in the object that constitutes its beauty? I. _Question stated._--Is beauty merely subjective, an emotion of our own minds, or is it a quality of objects? When we speak, _e. g._, of the beauty of a landscape, or of a painting, do we mean merely a certain excitement of our sensitive nature, a certain feeling awakened by the object, or do we mean some quality or property belonging to that object? If the latter, then are we _correct_ in attributing any such quality to the object? _Emotion admitted._--Unquestionably, certain pleasing emotions are awakened in the mind in view of certain objects which we term beautiful; unquestionably those objects are the cause or occasion of such emotions; they have, under favorable circumstances, the power of producing them; unquestionably they have this power by virtue, moreover, of some quality or property pertaining to them. All this will be admitted by those who deny the objective reality of beauty. The question is not, whether there is in the object any quality which is the occasion or cause of our emotion, but whether the term beauty is properly the name of that cause, or of the emotion it produces. _Beauty not an Emotion._--The question would seem a very plain one if submitted to common sense. It would seem strange that any one should deliberately and intelligently take the position that beauty and sublimity are merely emotions of our minds, and not qualities of objects: when we hear men speaking in this way, we are half inclined to suspect that we misunderstand them, or that they misunderstand themselves. I look upon a gorgeous sunset, and call it beautiful. What is it that is beautiful? That sky, that cloud, that coloring, those tints that fade into each other and change even as I behold them, those lines of fire that lie in brilliant relief upon the darker background, as if some radiant angel had thrown aside his robe of light as he flew, or had left his smile upon the cloud as he passed through the golden gates of Hesperus, these, these, are beautiful; _there_ lies the beauty, and surely not in me, the beholder. An emotion is in my mind, but that emotion is not beauty; it is simple _admiration_, _i. e._, wonder and delight. There is no such emotion as beauty, common as is the ambiguous expression "emotion of beauty." There are emotions of fear, hope, joy, sorrow, and the like, and these emotions I experience; I know what they mean; but I am not conscious of having ever experienced an emotion of _beauty_, though I have often been filled with wonder and delight at the sight of the beautiful in nature or art. When I experience an emotion of fear, of hope, of joy, or of sorrow, what is it that is joyful or sorrowful, hopeful or fearful? My mind, of course, that is, I, myself. The object that occasions the emotion on my part, is in no other sense fearful or joyful than as it is the occasion of my being so. If, in like manner, beauty is an emotion, and I experience that emotion, it is, of course, my mind that is beautiful, and not the object contemplated. It is I, myself, that am beautiful, not the sunset, the painting, the landscape, or any thing of that sort, whatever. These things are merely the occasion of _my_ being beautiful. Could any doctrine be more consoling to those who are conscious of any serious deficiency on the score of personal attractions! Can any thing be more absurd? _The common View correct._--I beg leave to take the common sense view of this question, which I cannot but think is, in the present instance, the most correct, and still to think and speak of the beauty of _objects_, and not of our own minds. Such is certainly the ordinary acceptation and use of the term, nor can any reason be shown why, in strictest philosophy, we should depart from it. There is no need of applying the term to denote the emotion awakened in the mind, for that emotion is not, in itself, either a new or a nameless one, but simply that mingled feeling of wonder and delight which we call admiration, and which passes, it may be, into love. To make beauty itself an emotion, is to be guilty of a double absurdity. It is to leave the quality of the object which gives rise to the emotion altogether without a name, and bestow that name where it is not needed, on that which has already a name of its own. _Beauty still objective, though reflected from the Mind._--If to this it be replied, that the beauty which we admire and which _seems_ to be a property of the external object, is, nevertheless, of internal origin, being merely a transfer to the object, and association with it, of certain thoughts and feelings of our own minds, a reflection of our own consciousness gilding and lighting up the objects around us, which objects are then viewed by us as having a light and beauty of their own, I answer, that even on this supposition, the external object, as thus illumined, has the power of awakening the pleasing emotion within us, and that power is its beauty, a property or quality of the object still, although borrowed originally from the mind; just as the moon, though it give but a reflected light, still shines, and with a beauty of its own. So long as those thoughts and feelings lay hidden in the mind, untransferred, unassociated with the external object, they were not _beauty_. Not until the object is invested with them, and they have become a property of that object, do they assume, to the mental eye, the quality of beauty. So, then, beauty is even still an objective reality, something that lies without us, and not within us. _The Power of expressing an objective Quality, likewise._--In like manner, if it be contended that beauty is only the sign and expression of mental qualities, I reply, that power of signifying or expressing is certainly a property of the object, and that property is its beauty, and is certainly a thing objective, and not a mere emotion. _All Beauty not Reflection, nor Expression._--I am far from conceding, however, that all beauty is either the reflection or expression of what passes within the mind. There are objects which no play of the fancy, no transfer or association of the mental states, can ever render beautiful; while, on the other hand, there are others which require no such association, but of themselves shine forth upon us with their own clear and lustrous beauty. Suppose a child of lively sensibility, and with that true love of the beautiful, wherever discerned, which is one of the finest traits of the child's nature, to look for the first time upon the broad expanse of the ocean; it lies spread out before him a new and sudden revelation of beauty; its extent of surface, unbroken by the petty lines and boundaries that divide and mark off the lands upon the shore; its wonderful deep blue, a color he has seen hitherto only in the firmament above him, and not there as here--that deep blue relieved by the white sails, that, like birds of snowy wing, flit across its peaceful bosom, or lie motionless in the morning light on its calm expanse; its peculiar convexity of surface, as it stretches far out to the horizon, and lifts up its broad shoulders against the sky;--these things he beholds for the first time, they are associated with nothing in his past experience; he has never seen, never dreamed of such a vision; it is not the reflection of his own thoughts or fancies; but it is, nevertheless, to him a scene of rare and wondrous beauty, the recollection and first impression of which shall haunt him while he lives. If, in after life, he came to philosophize upon the matter, it would be difficult to convince him that what he thus admired was but the play of his own imagination, the transfer of his own mental state, the association of his own thought and feeling with the object before him; in a word, that the beauty which so charmed him lay not at all in the object contemplated, but only in his own mind. _A further Question._--That the beauty which we perceive is a quality of objects, and not merely a subjective emotion, that there is in the object something which, call it what we will, is the producing cause of the emotion in us, and that this objective cause, whatever it be, is, in the proper use of terms, to be recognized as beauty, this we have now sufficiently discussed. Admitting, however, these positions, the question may still arise, whether that which we call beauty in objects has, after all, an absolute existence, independent of the mind that is impressed by it? The beauty that I admire in yonder landscape, or in the wild flower that blooms at my feet, is, indeed, the beauty of the landscape or the flower, and not of my mind; it pertains to, and dwells in, the object, and not in me; but dwells it there independently of me, the observer, and when I do not behold it? If there were no intelligent, observing mind, to behold and feel that beauty, would the object still be beautiful, even as now? This admits of question. Is the beauty a fixed, absolute quality, inherent in the object as such, and _per se_, or is it something springing out of the relation between the mind of the observer and the object observed. _No Evidence of its Existence except its Effect._--That it is relative, and not absolute, may be argued from the fact that we have no evidence of any such quality or cause, save as in operation, save as producing effects in us; and as we could never have inferred the existence of the cause, had it not been for the effect produced, so we have no reason to suppose its existence when and where it does not manifest itself in operation, that is to say, when and where it is not observed. As the spark from the smitten steel is not strictly to be regarded as itself a property of the steel, nor yet of the flint, but as a relative phenomenon arising from the collision of the two, so beauty, it may be said, dwells not absolutely in the object _per se_, nor yet in the intelligent subject, but is a phenomenon resulting from the relation of the two. _Further Argument from diversity of Effects._--The same may be argued from the diversity of the effects produced. If beauty is a fixed, absolute quality of objects, it may be said, then the effects ought to be uniformly the same; whereas there is, in fact, no such uniformity, no standard of beauty, none of taste, but what seems to one man exceedingly fine, excites only the aversion and disgust of another, and even the same person is at different times differently affected by the same object. Hence it may be inferred that the beauty is merely a relation between the mind and the object contemplated, varying as the mind varies. _Reply to the first Argument._--To these arguments I reply, in the first place, that it is not necessary that a cause should be in actual operation, under our immediate eye, in order that we should conclude its independent and constant existence. If, whenever the occasion returns, the effects are observed, we conclude that the cause exists _per se_, and not merely in relation to us. Otherwise we could never believe the absolute existence of any thing, but should, with Berkley and Hume, call in question the existence of matter itself, save as phenomenal and relative to our senses. The same argument that makes the beauty of a rose relative merely to the observer, makes the rose itself merely a relative existence. How do I know that it exists? I see it, feel it, smell it; it lies upon my table; it affects my senses. I turn away now. I leave the room. How do I know _now_ that the rose exists? It no longer affects my senses; the cause no longer operates; the effect is no longer produced. I have just as much reason to say it no longer exists, as to say it is no longer beautiful. _Reply to the second Argument._--To the argument from the diversity of effect, I reply, that admitting the fact to be as stated, viz., that the same object is differently regarded by different minds, the diversity may arise from either of two sources. The want of uniformity may lie in the cause, or it may lie in the minds affected by it. The exciting cause may vary, and the effects produced by it will then be diverse; or the minds on which it operates may differ, and in that case, also, the effects will be diverse. We are not to conclude, then, from diversity of effect that the cause is not uniform. A beautiful object, it is true, affects different observers differently, but the reason of the diversity may be in _them_ and not in the object. What then is the fact? Are the minds of all observers equally susceptible of impression from the beautiful? By no means. They differ in education, habit of thought, culture, taste, native sensibility, and many other things. Hardly two minds can be found that are not diverse in these respects. Ought we then to expect absolute uniformity of effect? _Not to be conceded that there is no Agreement._--It is by no means to be conceded, however, that there is no such thing as a standard of beauty or of taste, no general agreement among men as to what is or is not beautiful, no general agreement as to the emotions produced. There is such agreement in both respects. Within certain limits it is uniform and complete. Certain aspects of nature, and certain works of art, are, in all ages, and by all men, regarded as beautiful. The Apollo Belvidere, and the Venus of the Capitol, are to us what they were to the ancients; the perfection of the beautiful. The great work of Raphael, scarcely finished at his death, the last touches still fresh from his hand--that work which, as it hung above his bier, drew tears from all eyes, and filled with admiration all hearts--is still the wonder and admiration of men. And so it will be in centuries to come. And so of the emotions produced by the contemplation of the beautiful. Making due allowance for habits of association, mental culture, and differences of native sensibility, we shall find men affected much in the same way by the beautiful in nature or art. The men of the same class and condition as to these matters--the peasant of one age or country, and the peasant of another, the philosopher of one time, and of another, the wealthy, uneducated citizen, and the fashionable fool, of one period and nation, and of another--experience much the same effects in view of one and the same object. The same general laws, too, preside over and regulate the different arts which have relation to the beautiful, in all ages of the world. _Consequences of the Theory that Beauty is merely relative._--If beauty be not absolute but relative only, it follows, 1. That, if there were no observers of nature or art, neither would be longer beautiful. 2. If, for any reason any thing is for the time unseen, as, _e. g._, a pearl in the sea, a precious stone in the mine, or a rich jewel in the casket, it has no beauty so long as it is there and thus. 3. As minds vary in susceptibility of impression, the same thing is beautiful to one person and not to another; at one time and not at another; nay, at one and the same moment it is both beautiful and not beautiful, according as the minds of the observers vary. I cannot say with truth, that the Mosaics of St. Peter's, or the great diamond of the East, are, at this moment, really beautiful, because I do not know who, or whether any one, may, at this moment, be looking at them. _Intimate Relation between the Mind and the Object._--While I maintain, however, the existence of beauty as an absolute and independent quality of objects, and not merely as relative to the mind that perceives and enjoys it, I would, by no means, overlook the very intimate relation which subsists, in the present case, between the perceiving mind and the object perceived. Beauty makes its appeal primarily to the senses. It pleases and charms us, because we are endowed with senses and a nature fitted to receive pleasure from such objects. In the _adaptation_ of our physical and mental constitution to the order and constitution of material things as they exist without, lies the secret of that power which the beautiful exerts over us. _Might have been otherwise constituted._--We might have been so constituted, doubtless, that the most beautiful objects should have been disgusting, rather than pleasing: the violet should have seemed an ugly thing, and the sweetest strains of music harsh and discordant. There are disordered senses, and disordered minds, to which, even now, those things, which we call beautiful, may so appear. For that adaptation of our sensitive nature to external objects, and of these objects to our sensitive nature, by virtue of which, the percipient mind recognizes and feels the beauty of the object perceived, and takes delight in it, we are indebted wholly to the wisdom and benevolence of the great Creator. _The Doctrine maintained._--Still, _given_, the present constitution and mutual adaptation of mind and matter, and we affirm the independent existence of the beautiful as an object _per se_, and not merely as an affection of the percipient mind. The perception and enjoyment of the beauty are subjective, relative, dependent; the beauty itself not so. _The second Question._--If beauty be, then, as we find reason to believe, not wholly a subjective affair, but a quality or property of external objects, the question now arises, II. What is it in the object, that constitutes its beauty? _Theory of Novelty._--And first, is it the _novelty_ of the thing? Is the novel the beautiful? Doubtless, novelty pleases us. It has this in common with the beautiful. Yet some things that are novel, are by no means beautiful. A mill for grinding corn is a great curiosity to one who has never seen such a machine before, but it might not strike him as particularly beautiful. Every thing, when first beheld, is novel; but every thing is not beautiful. Let us look more closely at the element of novelty. That is novel which is new to _us_ merely, which appears to us for the first time. It may be new to the intellect, a new idea, or to the sensibility, a new feeling, or to the will, a new act. As a new idea it satisfies our curiosity, as a new feeling it developes our nature, as a new volition it enlarges the sphere of our activity. In these respects, and for these reasons, novelty pleases, but in all this we discover no resemblance to the beautiful. _Novelty heightens Beauty._--It is not to be denied that novelty, in many cases, heightens the beauty of an object. By familiarity, we become, in a measure, insensible to the charms of that which, as first beheld, filled us with delight. The sensibility receives no further excitement from that to which it has become accustomed. To enjoy mountain scenery most highly, one must not always dwell among the mountains. To enjoy Niagara most highly, one must not live in the sight of it all his days. But beauty, and the _enjoyment_ of the beautiful, are surely different things, and while novelty is accessory to the full effect of the beautiful on our minds, and even indispensable to it, it is not, itself, the element of beauty, not the ground and substance of it. _Not always pleasing._--Jouffroy even denies that novelty is always pleasing. Some things, he contends, _displease_ us, simply because they are new. We become accustomed to them, and our dislike ceases. Thus it is, to some extent, with difference of color in the races. _Theory of the Useful._--Is, then, the _useful_ the beautiful? This theory next claims our attention. The foundation of the emotions awakened in us by the beautiful in nature or art, is the perception of utility. We perceive in the object a fitness to conduce, in some way, to our welfare, to serve, in some way, our purposes, and for this reason, we are pleased. The utility is the beauty. _The most useful not the most beautiful._--That the beauty of an object may, in our perception, be heightened by the discovery of its fitness to produce some desirable end, or rather, that this may add somewhat to the pleasure we feel in view of the object, is quite possible; that this is the main element and grand secret, either of that emotion on our part, or of the beauty which gives rise to it, is not possible. It is sufficient to say, that, if this were so, the most useful things ought, of course, to be the most beautiful. Is this the case? A stream of water conducted along a ship canal is more useful than the same stream tumbling over the rapids, or plunging over a perpendicular precipice. Is it also more beautiful? A swine's snout, to use a homely but forcible illustration of Burke, is admirably fitted to serve the purpose for which it was intended; useful exceedingly for rooting and grubbing, but not, on the whole, very beautiful. _Dissimilarity of the two._--Indeed, few things can be more unlike, in their effect upon the mind, in the nature of the emotions they excite, than the useful and the beautiful. This has been well shown by Jouffroy in his analysis of the beautiful. Kant has also clearly pointed out the same thing. Both please us, but not in the same way, not for the same reason. We love the one for its advantage to us, the other _for its own sake_. The one is a purely selfish, the other a purely disinterested love, a noble, elevated emotion. The two are heaven-wide asunder. The glorious sunset is of no earthly use to us, otherwise than mere beauty and pleasure are in themselves of use. The gorgeous spectacle becomes at once degraded in our own estimation by the very question of its possible utility. We love it not for the benefit it confers, the use we can make of it, but for its own sake, its own sweet beauty, because it is what it is. There it lies, pencilled on the clouds, evanescent, momentarily changing. There it is, afar off. You cannot reach it, cannot command its stay, have no wish to appropriate it to yourself, no desire to turn it to your own account, or reap any benefit from it, other than the mere enjoyment; still you admire it, still it is beautiful to you. Of what use to the beholder is the ruddy glow and flash of sunrise on the Alpine summits as seen from the Rhigi or Mount Blanc? Of what use, in fact, is beauty in any case, other than as it may be the means of refining the taste, and elevating the mind? That it has this advantage we are free to admit; and it is certainly one of the noblest uses to which any thing can be made subservient; but surely this cannot be what is meant when we are told that beauty _consists_ in utility, for this would be simply affirming that the cause consists in the effect produced. Beauty refines and elevates the mind, is a means of æsthetic and moral culture; as such it is of use, and in that use lies the secret and the subtle essence of beauty itself. In other words, a given cause produces a given effect, and that effect _constitutes_ the cause! _The utility of Beauty an incidental Circumstance._--The truth is, that while the beautiful does elevate and ennoble the mind, and thus furnish the means of the highest æsthetic and moral culture, this advantage is wholly incidental to the existence of beauty, not even a necessary or invariable effect, much less the constituting element. This is not the reason why we admire the beautiful. It does not enter into our thoughts at the moment. As on the summit of Rhigi, I watch the play of the first rosy light on the snowy peaks that lift themselves in stately grandeur along the opposite horizon, I am not thinking, at that moment, of the effect produced on my own mind, by the spectacle before me; I am wholly absorbed in the magnificence of the scene itself. It is beautiful, not because it is useful, not because it elevates my mind, and cultivates my taste, and contributes, in various ways, to my development, but it produces these effects because it is beautiful. The very thought of the useful is almost enough, in such cases, to extinguish the sentiment of the beautiful. _Beauty cannot be appropriated._--That only is useful which can be _appropriated_, and turned to account. But the beautiful, in its very nature, cannot be appropriated or possessed. You may appropriate the picture, the statue, the mountain, the waterfall, but not their beauty. These do not belong to you, and never can. They are the property of every beholder. Hence, as Jouffroy has well observed, the possession of a beautiful object never fully satisfies. The beauty is ideal, and cannot be possessed. It is an ethereal spirit that floats away as a silver cloud, ever near, yet ever beyond your grasp. It is a bow, spanning the blue arch, many-colored, wonderful; yonder, just yonder, is its base, where the rosy light seems to hover over the wood, and touch gently the earth; but you cannot, by any flight or speed of travel, come up with it. It is here, there, everywhere, except where you are. It is given you to behold, not to possess it. _Theory of Unity in Variety._--Evidently we must seek elsewhere than in utility the dwelling-place of beauty. The secret of her tabernacle is not there. Let us see, then, if _unity in variety_ may not be, as some affirm, the principle of the beautiful. The intellect demands a general unity, as, _e. g._, in a piece of music, a painting, or a play, and is not satisfied unless it can perceive such unity. The parts must be not only connected but related, and that relation must be obvious. At the same time the sensibility demands variety, as _e. g._, of tone and time in the music, of color and shade in the painting, of expression in both. The same note of a musical instrument continuously produced, or the same color unvaried in the painting, would be intolerable. The due combination of these two principles, unity and variety, say these writers, constitutes what we call beauty in an object. The waving line of Hogarth may be taken as an illustration of this principle. _Objection to this View._--Without entering fully into the discussion of this theory, it may be sufficient to say, that while the principle now named does enter, in some degree into our conception of the beautiful, it can hardly be admitted as the ground and cause, or even as the chief element of beauty. Not every thing is beautiful which presents both unity and variety. Some things, on the other hand, are beautiful which lack this combination. Some colors are beautiful, taken by themselves, and the same is true of certain forms, which, nevertheless, lack the element of variety. In the construction of certain mathematical figures, which please the eye by their symmetry and exactness, we may detect, perhaps, the operation of this principle. On the other hand, it will not account for the pleasure we feel when the eye rests upon a particular color that is agreeable. A bright red pebble, or a bit of stained glass, appears to a child very beautiful. It is the color that is the object of his admiration. We have simple unity but no variety there. On the other hand, in a beautiful sunset we have the greatest variety, but not unity, other than simply a numerical unity. We cannot, on the whole, accept this theory as a complete and satisfactory resolution of the problem of the beautiful, although it is supported by the eminent authority of Cousin, who, while he regards all beauty as ultimately pertaining to the spiritual nature, still finds in the principle, now under consideration, its chief characteristic so far as it assumes external form. _Order and Proportion._--Shall we then, with Aristotle. Augustine, Andrè, and others, ancient and modern, seek the hidden principle of beauty in the elements of _order and proportion_? What are order and proportion? Order is the arrangement of the several parts of a composite body. Proportion is the relation of the several parts to each other in space and time. Not every possible arrangement is order, but only that which appears conducive to the end designed, and not every possible arrangement of parts is proportion, but only that which furthers the end to be accomplished. To place the human eye in the back part of the head, the limbs remaining as they now are, would be _disorder_, for motion must in that case, as now, be forward, while the eye, looking backward, could no longer survey the path we tread. The limbs of the Arabian steed, designed for swiftness of locomotion, bear a proportion to the other parts of the body, somewhat different from that which the limbs of the swine, designed chiefly for support, and for movements slower, and over shorter distances, bear to his general frame. The proportion of each, however, is perfect as it is. Exchange each for each, and they are quite out of proportion. _Only another Form of the Useful._--Since order and proportion, then, have always reference to the end proposed to be accomplished, we have, in fact, in these elements, only another form of the useful, which, as we have already seen, is not the principle of beauty. _Not always Beautiful._--Accordingly, we find that order and proportion do not, in themselves, and when unassociated with other elements, invariably strike us as beautiful. The leg of the swine is as fine a specimen of order and proportion as that of the Arab courser, but is not so much admired for its beauty. It must be admitted, however, that these elements in combination, do with others, enter more or less fully into the formation of the beautiful, are intimately associated with its external forms. The absence or violation of these principles would mar the beauty of the object. _The spiritual Theory._--The only theory of beauty remaining to be noticed is the spiritual theory, which makes beauty consist, not in matter as such, nor in any mere arrangement of matter in itself considered, but in the manifestation or expression, under these sensible material forms, of the higher, the _hidden spiritual nature_, or element, appealing thus to our own spiritual nature, which is thereby awakened to sympathy. In the sensible world about us we find two elements diverse and distinct each from the other, the idea and the form, spirit and matter, the invisible and the visible. In objects that are beautiful we find these two elements united in such a way, that the one expresses or manifests the other, the form expresses the idea, the body expresses the spirit, the visible manifests the invisible, and our own spiritual nature recognizing its like, holds communion and sympathy with it as thus expressed. That which constitutes the beautiful, then, is this manifestation, under sensible forms, and so to our senses, of the higher and spiritual principle which is the life and soul of things. _Relation of the Beautiful to the True and the Good._--It differs from the true in that the true is not, like the beautiful, expressed under sensible forms, but is isolated, pure, abstract, not addressed to the senses, but to reason. It differs from the good, in that the good always proposes an end to be accomplished, and involves the idea of obligation, while the beautiful, on the contrary, proposes no end to be accomplished, acknowledges no obligation or necessity, but is purely free and spontaneous. Yet, though differing in these aspects, the good, the true, and the beautiful, are at basis essentially the same, even as old Plato taught, differing rather in their mode of expression, and the relations which they sustain to us, than in essence. _Relation of the Beautiful to the Sublime._--The relation of the beautiful to the _sublime_, according to this theory, is simply this: In the beautiful, the invisible and the visible, the finite and the infinite, are harmoniously blended. In the sublime, the spiritual element predominates, the harmony is disturbed, the sensible is overborne by the infinite, and our spirits are agitated by the presence, in an unwonted degree, of the higher element of our own being. Hence, while the one pleases, the other awes and subdues us. _Application of this Theory._--Such, in brief outline, is the theory. Let us see now whether it is applicable to the different forms of beauty, and whether it furnishes a satisfactory explanation and account of them. Surveying the different forms of being, we find among them different degrees of beauty. Does, then, every thing which is beautiful express or manifest, through the medium, and, as it were, under the veil, of the material form, the presence of the invisible spiritual element? and the more beautiful it is, does it so much the more plainly and directly manifest this element? _The Theory applied to inorganic Forms._--And first, to begin with the lowest, how is it with the inanimate, inorganic, merely chemical forms of matter? Here we have certain lines, certain figures, certain colors, that we call beautiful. What do they express of the higher or spiritual element of being? In themselves, and directly, they express nothing, perhaps. Yet are they not, after all, suggestive, symbolical of an idea and spirit dwelling, not in them, but in him who made them, of the Creator's idea and spirit, inarticulate expressions, mere natural signs, of a higher principle than dwells in these poor forms? Do they not suggest and express to us ideas of grace, elegance, delicacy, and the like? Do we not find ourselves attracted by, and, in a sort, in sympathy with these forms, as thus significant and expressive? Is it not thus that lines, and figures, and mathematical forms, the regular and sharply cut angles of the crystal, the light that flashes on its polished surface, or lies hid in beautiful color within it, the order, proportion, and movement, by fixed laws, of the various forms of matter, appear beautiful to us? For what are order, proportion, regularity, harmony, and movement, by fixed laws, and what are elegance, and grace of outline and figure, but so many signs and expressions of a higher intelligence? _Theory applied to vegetable Forms._--Passing onward and upward in the scale of being, taking into view, now, the organic forms of vegetable life, do we not find a more definite articulate expression of the spiritual and invisible under the material form? The flower that blooms in our path, the sturdy tree that throws out its branches against the sky, or droops pensively, as if weighed down by some hidden sorrow, address us more directly, speak more intimately to our spirits, than the mere crystal can do, however elegant its form, or definite its outline. They express sentiments, not ideas merely. They respond to the sensibilities, they appeal to the inner life of the soul. They are strong or weak, timid or bold, joyous or melancholy. It requires no vigorous exercise of fancy to attribute to them the sensibilities which they awaken in us. When in lively communion and sympathy with nature, we can hardly resist the conviction that the emotions which she calls into play in our own bosoms are, somehow, her own emotions also; that under these forms so expressive, so full of meaning to us, there lurks an intelligence, a soul. _To the animal Kingdom._--In the animal kingdom, this invisible spiritual principle, the energy that lies hidden under all forms of animate and organized substance, becomes yet more strongly and obviously developed. The approach is nearer, and the appeal is more direct, to our own spiritual nature. We perceive signs, not to be mistaken, of intelligence and of feeling; passion betrays itself, love, hate, fear, the very principles of our own spiritual being, the very image of our own higher nature. Beauty and deformity are now more strongly marked than in the lower degrees of the scale of being. _To Man._--In man we reach the highest stage of animal existence with which we are conversant, the highest degree of life, intelligence, soul--the being in whom the spiritual shines forth most clearly through the material veil--and, shall we not say also, the being most beautiful of all? The highest style of beauty to be found in nature pertains to the human form, as animated and lighted up by the intelligence within. It is the expression of the soul that constitutes this superior beauty. It is that which looks out at the eye which sits in calm majesty on the brow, lurks in the lip, smiles on the cheek, is set forth in the chiselled lines and features of the countenance, in the general contour of figure and form, and the particular shading and expression of the several parts, in the movement, and gesture, and tone; it is this looking out of the invisible spirit that dwells within, through the portals of the visible, this manifestation of the higher nature, that we admire and love; this constitutes to us the beauty of our species. Hence it is that certain features, not in themselves, perhaps, particularly attractive, wanting, it may be, in certain regularity of outline, or in certain delicacy and softness, are still invested with a peculiar charm and radiance of beauty from their peculiar expressiveness and animation. The light of genius, or the superior glow of sympathy, and a noble heart, play upon those plain, and, it may be, homely features, and light them up with a brilliant and regal beauty. Those, as every artist knows, are precisely the features most difficult to portray. The expression changes with the instant. The beauty flashes, and is gone, or gives place to a still higher beauty, as the light that plays in fitful corruscations along the northern sky, coming and going, but never still. _Man not the highest Type of Beauty._--Is then the human form the highest expression of the principle of beauty? It can hardly be; for in man, as in all things on the earth, is mingled along with the beauty much that is deformed, with the excellence much imperfection. We can conceive forms superior to his, faces radiant with a beauty that sin has never darkened, nor passion nor sorrow dimmed. We can conceive forms of beauty more perfect, purer, brighter, loftier than any thing that human eye hath seen or human ear heard. We conceive them, however, as existing only under some sensible form, as manifest in some way to sense, and the beauty with which we invest them is the beauty of the spiritual expressing itself in the outward and visible. It is the province of imagination to fashion these conceptions, and of art to attempt their realization. This, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the orator, each in his way, is ever striving to do, to present under sensible forms, the ideal of a more perfect loveliness and excellence than the actual world affords. This ideal can never be adequately and fully represented. The perfection of beauty dwells alone with God. _Consideration in favor of the Theory now explained._--It is in favor of the theory now under consideration, that it seems thus more nearly to meet and account for the various phenomena of beauty, than any other of those which have passed under our review, and that it accounts for them, withal, on a principle so simple and obvious. The crystal, the violet, the graceful spreading elm, the drooping willow, the statue, the painting, the musical composition, the grand cathedral, whatever in nature, whatever in art is beautiful, all mean something, all express something, and in this lies their beauty; and we are moved by them, because we, who have a soul, and in whom the spiritual nature predominates, can understand and sympathize with that which these forms of nature and art, in their semi-articulate way, seem all striving to express. _The Ideas thus expressed pertain not to Nature but to the divine Mind._--It is not necessary that, with the ancient Greeks, we should conceive of nature, as having herself an intelligent soul of these forms as themselves conscious of their own meaning and beauty. It is enough that we recognize them as conveying a sentiment and meaning not their own, but his who made them, and made them representative and expressive of his own beautiful thought. Words are not the only modes of expression. The soul speaks more earnestly and eloquently often in signs than in words. And when God speaks to men, he does it not always in the barren forms of human speech, but in the flower that he places by my path, in the tree, the mountain, the rolling ocean, the azure firmament. These are his _words_, and they are beautiful, and, when he will, they are terrible. Happy he who, in all these manifestations, recognizes the voice of God. § II.--COGNIZANCE OF THE BEAUTIFUL. _Beauty an Object of Cognition._--We have treated, in the preceding section, of the idea of the beautiful, in itself considered. We proceed to investigate the action of the mind as cognizant of the beautiful in its actual manifestations, whether in nature or art. Beauty, as we have found reason to believe, is not a conception merely, existing only in the mind, but a quality of certain objects. As such it has objective value and existence, and the mind is cognizant of it as such, perceives it, observes it, compares it and the object to which it pertains with other like and unlike objects, judges and decides respecting it. This quality of objects makes its appeal, as do all objects of perception, first to the senses, and through them to the mind. There is thus awakened in the mind, or suggested to it, the original and intuitive conception of the beautiful; there is also, and beside this, the cognizance by the mind of the beautiful as an actual and present reality manifest in the object before it. As it perceives other objects of a like nature, it classes them with the preceding, compares them severally, judges of their respective merits, their respective degrees and kinds of beauty. This discriminating power of the mind, as exercised upon the various objects of beauty and sublimity, whether in nature or art, we may designate by the general name of _taste_. _Nature of this Power._--There has been much difference of opinion as to the precise nature of this power, whether it is a distinct faculty of the mind, or the simple exercise of some faculty already known and described, whether it is of the nature of intellect, or of emotion, or the combination of both. Hence the various definitions of taste which have been given by different writers, some regarding it as strictly an intellectual faculty, others as an emotion, while the greater number regard it as including the action both of the intellect in perceiving, and of the sensibility in feeling, whatever is beautiful and sublime. What has been already said, sufficiently indicates with which of these general views our own most nearly accords. We use the term taste to denote the mind's power of cognizing the beautiful, a power of knowing, of discriminating, rather than of feeling, an exercise of judgment and the reflective power, directed to one particular class of objects, rather than any distinct faculty of the mind. Feeling is doubtless awakened on the perception of the beautiful; it may even precede the judgment by which we decide that the object before us is truly beautiful; but the feeling is not _itself_ the perception, or the judgment; is not itself _taste_, whatever may be its relation to taste. _Proposed Investigation._--As this is a matter of some importance to a correct psychology, and also of much difference of opinion, it seems necessary, for purposes of science, to investigate somewhat carefully the nature of this form of mental activity. It is not a matter to be settled by authority, by arbitrary definition, or dogmatic assertion. We must look at the views and opinions of others, and at the reasons for those opinions. _Definitions._--As preliminary to such investigation, I shall present some of the definitions of taste, given by the more prominent writers, representing each of the leading views already indicated. Blair defines it "a power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and art." Montesquieu, a French author of distinction, defines it "something which attaches us to certain objects by the power of an internal sense or feeling." Gerard, author of an Essay on Taste, makes it consist in the improvement of the internal senses, viz., sense of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, etc. Accordant with this are the lines of Akenside: "What, then, is taste but those internal powers, Active and strong, and feelingly alive To each fine impulse?" _Nature of these Definitions._--The definitions now given, it will be perceived, make taste a matter of _sensibility_, of mere _feeling_, a sensation or sense, a passive faculty of being pleased with the beauties of nature and art. _Another Class of Definitions._--Differing from this, others have carefully distinguished between the rational and emotional elements, the power of _discriminating_ and the power of _feeling_, and have made taste to consist properly in the former. Of this class is Brown. McDermot also takes the same view. This author, in his critical dissertation on the nature and principles of taste, defines it as the _power of discriminating_ those qualities of sensible and intellectual being, which, from the invisible harmony that exists between them and our nature, excite in us pleasant emotions. The emotion, however, though it may be the parent of taste, he would not regard as a constituent element of it. _Definitions combining both Elements._--The greater number, however, of those who have written on this subject, have combined in their definitions of taste both these elements, the power of perceiving and the power of feeling. So Burke: "That faculty, or those faculties of the mind which _are affected with_, or which _form a judgment of_, the works of imagination and the elegant arts." Alison: "That faculty of the mind by which we _perceive_ and _enjoy_ whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature and art." Reid also makes it consist in "the power of discerning and relishing" these objects. Voltaire makes the feeling quite as essential as the perception. Benard, Professor of Philosophy in the College Royal at Rouen, in the excellent article on taste, in the Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques, defines taste as "that faculty of the mind which makes us to discern and feel the beauties of nature, and whatever is excellent in works of art." It is a compound faculty, according to this author, inhabiting at once both worlds, that of sense and that of reason. Beauty reveals itself to us only under sensible forms, the faculty which contemplates the beautiful, therefore, seizes it only in its sensible manifestation. The pure idea, on the other hand, in its abstract nature, addresses not the taste but the understanding; it appears to us, not as the beautiful, but as the true. Taste, then, has to do with sense. Still, says Benard, "the essential element which constitutes it, pertains to the reason; it is, in truth, only one of the forms of this sovereign power, which takes different names according to the objects which it deals with; _reason_, properly speaking, when it employs itself in the sphere of speculative truth; _conscience_, when it reveals to us truths moral or practical; _taste_, when it appreciates the beauty and suitableness of objects in the real world, or of works of art." _These three Classes comprehensive._--Other authorities and definitions, almost without number, might be added, but they fall essentially under the three classes now specified. Which of these views, then, is the correct and true one? is the question now before us. Is taste a matter of feeling, or is it an intellectual discernment, or is it both? Evidently we cannot depend on authority for the decision of this question, since authorities differ. We must examine for ourselves. _Etymology of the Term._--To some extent the word itself may guide us. Borrowed, as are most if not all words expressing mental states and acts, from the sphere of sense, there was doubtless some reason why this word in particular was selected to denote the power of the mind now under consideration. Some close analogy, doubtless, was supposed to exist between the physical state denoted by this word in its primary sense, and the mental faculty to which we refer, so that, in seeking for a term by which to designate that intellectual faculty, none would more readily present itself, as appropriate and suggestive of the mental state intended, than the one in question. This analogy, whatever it be, while it cannot be taken as decisive of the question before us, is still an element not to be overlooked by the psychologist. What, then, is the analogy? How comes this word--_taste_--to be used, rather than any other, to denote the idea and power now under consideration? _Taste as a Sense._--In the domain of sense, certain objects brought in contact with the appropriate physical organ, affect us as sweet, sour, bitter, etc. This is purely an affection of the sensibility, mere feeling. We say the thing _tastes_ so and so. The power of distinguishing such qualities we call the power or sense of taste. Primarily mere sensation, mere feeling, we transfer the word to denote the power of judging by means of that sensation. There is, in the first instance, an affection of the organ by the object brought in contact with it, of which affection we are cognizant; then follows an intellectual perception or judgment that the object thus affecting us, possesses such and such qualities, is sweet, sour, bitter, salt, etc.. The sensation affords the ground of the judgment. The latter is based upon the former. The sensation, the simple feeling, affords the means of discriminating, judging, distinguishing, and to this latter power or process the word taste, in the physical sense, is more frequently appropriated. We say of such or such a man, his taste is acute, or his taste is impaired, or dull, etc., meaning his power of perceiving and distinguishing the various properties of objects which affect his sense of taste. _Analogy of this to the mental Process called Taste._--It is easy to perceive, now, the analogy between the physical power and process thus described, and the psychological faculty under consideration, to which the name primarily denoting the former has been transferred. Objects in nature and art present themselves to the observation, and awaken pleasure as beautiful, or excite disgust as the opposite. A mere matter of sensibility, of feeling, this. Presently, however, we begin to notice, not the mere feeling of pleasure or aversion, but the character of the object that awakens it, we discriminate, we attribute to the object such and such qualities, take cognizance of it as possessing those qualities. This discriminating power, this judgment of the mind that the object possesses such properties, we call taste. As, in the sphere of sense, the feeling awakened affords the means of judging and distinguishing, as to the qualities of the object, so here. The beautiful awakens sensation--a vivid feeling of pleasure, delight, admiration; deformity awakens the reverse; and this feeling enables us to judge of the object, as regards the property in question, viz., beauty or deformity, whether, and how far, as compared with other objects of the mind, it possesses this quality. In either case--the physical and the psychological--the process begins with sensation or feeling, but passes on at once into the domain of intellect, the sphere of understanding or judgment; and while, in either case, the word taste may, without impropriety, be used to denote the feeling or susceptibility of impression which lies at the foundation of the intellectual process, it is more strictly appropriate to the faculty of discriminating the objects, and the qualities of objects, which awaken in us the given emotions. So far as the word itself can guide us, then, it would seem to be in the direction now indicated. _Appeal to Consciousness._--Analogy, however, may mislead us. We must not base a doctrine or decide a question in psychology upon the meaning of a single term. Upon observation and consciousness of what actually passes in our own minds, in view of the beautiful, we must, after all, rely. Let us place ourselves, then, in the presence of the beautiful in nature or art, and observe the various mental phenomena that present themselves to our consciousness. I stand before a statue of Thorwalsden or Canova. The spell and inspiration of high art are upon me. What passes now in my mind? _The first Element._--First of all, I am conscious of almost instant emotion in view of the object, an emotion of pleasure and delight. No sooner do my eyes rest upon the chiselled form that stands in faultless and wondrous beauty before me, than this emotion awakens. It springs into play, as a fountain springs out of the earth by its own spontaneous energy, or, as the light plays on the mountain tops, and flushes their snowy summits, when the sun rises on the Alps. It is by no volition of mine that this takes place. _A second Element._--Along with the emotion, there is another thing of which, also, I am conscious. Scarcely have my eyes taken in the form and proportions on which they rest with delight, scarcely has the first thrill of emotion, thus awakened, made itself known to the consciousness, when I find myself exclaiming, "How beautiful!" The soul says it; perhaps the lips utter it. If not an oral, it is, at least, a mental affirmation. The mind perceives, at a glance, the presence of beauty, recognizes its divinity, and pays homage at its shrine; not now the blind homage of feeling, merely, but the clear-sighted perception of the intellect, the sure decision of the understanding affirming, with authority 'That which thou perceivest and admirest is beautiful.' This is an act of judgment, based, however, on the previous awakening of the sensibility. I know, because I feel. _A third Element._--In addition to these, there may, or may not be, another phase of mental action. I may begin, presently, to observe, with a more careful eye, the work before me, and form a critical estimate of it, scan its outline, its several parts, its effect as a whole, ascertain its merits, and its defects as a work of art, study its design, its idea, and how well it expresses that idea, and fulfills that design. I seek to know what it is in the piece that pleases me, and why it pleases me. This may, or may not, take place. Whether it shall occur, or not, will depend on the state of the mind at the moment, the circumstances in which it is placed, its previous training and culture, its habits of thought. This, too, is an exercise of judgment, comparing, distinguishing, deciding; a purely intellectual process. It is not so much a new element, as a distinct phase of that last named. It is the mind deciding and affirming now, not merely that the object is beautiful, but _in what_ and _why_ it is so. _Uniformity of Results._--I change now the experiment. I repeat it. I place myself before other works, before works of other artists--works of the painter, the architect, the musician, the poet, the orator. Whatever is beautiful, in art or nature, I observe. I perceive, in all cases, the same results, the occurrence of essentially the same mental phenomena. I conclude that these effects are produced, not fortuitously, but according to the constitution of my nature; that they are not specific instances, but general laws of mental action; in other words, that the mind possesses a susceptibility of being impressed in this manner by such objects, and also a faculty of judging and discriminating as above described. To these two elements, essentially, then, do the mental phenomena occasioned by the presence of the beautiful, reduce themselves. _The Question._--Which, then, of these elements is it that answers to the idea of taste, as used to denote a power of the mind? Is it the susceptibility of emotion in view of the beautiful, the power of feeling; or is it the faculty of judging and discriminating; or is it both combined? Our definitions, as we have seen, include both; the word, itself, may denote either; both are comprised in our analysis of the mental phenomena in view of the beautiful. _Not the first._--Is it the first? I think not. Taste is not mere emotion, nor mere susceptibility of emotion. A child or a savage may be deficient in taste, yet they may be as deeply moved in view of the beautiful, in nature or art, as the man of cultivated mind; nay, their emotion may exceed his. They may regard, with great delight and admiration, what he will view with entire indifference. So far from indicating a high degree of taste, the very susceptibility of emotion, in such cases, may be the sure indication of a want of taste. They are pleased with that which a cultivated and correct taste would condemn. The power of being moved is simply sensibility, and sensibility is not taste, however closely they may be related. _Taste the intellectual Element._--Is taste, then, the power of mental discrimination which enables me to say that such and such things are, or are not, beautiful, and which, in some cases, perhaps, enables me to decide why, or wherein they are so? Does it, in a word, denote the _intellectual_ rather than the _emotional_ element of the process? I am inclined to think this the more correct view. Susceptibility of emotion is, doubtless, concerned in the matter. It has to do with taste. It may be even the ground and foundation of its exercise, nay, of its existence. But it is not, itself, taste, and should not be included, therefore, in the definition. _Reason for distinguishing the two._--As we distinguish, in philosophical investigation, between an emotion and the intellectual perception that precedes and gives rise to it, or between the perception and the sensation on which it is founded, so I would distinguish _taste_, or the intellectual perception of the beautiful, from the _sensation_ or _feeling_ awakened in view of the object. The fact that both elements exist, and enter into the series of mental phenomena in view of the beautiful, is no reason why they should both be designated by the same term, or included in the same definition, but, rather, it is a reason why they should be carefully distinguished. The precise nature of this faculty may be more distinctly perceived, if we consider, more particularly, its relation to the _judgment_, and also to the _sensibility_. _Taste, as related to Judgment._--According to the view now taken, taste is only a modification, or rather a particular direction of that general power of the mind which we call _judgment_; it is judgment exercised about the beautiful. It is the office of the judgment to form opinions and beliefs, to inform us of relations, to decide that things are thus and thus, that this is this, and that is that. As employed in different departments of thought, it appears under different forms, and is known under diverse names. As employed about the actual and sensible, we call it understanding; in the sphere of abstract truth it works under the cognomen of reason; in the sphere of practical truth, the thing that is good and right to be done by me, it is known as conscience; in the sphere of the ideal and the beautiful it is taste. In all these departments of mental activity it is exercised, employs itself upon all these subjects, giving us opinion, belief, knowledge, as to them all. The judgment as thus exercised in relation to the beautiful, that is to say, the mind observing, comparing, discriminating, deciding, forming the opinion, or reaching it may be the positive knowledge that this thing is, or is not, beautiful--for this is simply what we mean by judgment in any particular instance--judgment, as thus exercised, is known by the name of _taste_. More strictly speaking, it is not so much the _exercise_ of the judgment in this particular way in given instances, as the _foundation_ or _ground_ of that exercise, the _discriminating faculty_ or _power_ of the mind by virtue of which it thus operates. _Judgment does not furnish the Ideas._--Does, then, the judgment, it may be asked, give us originally the ideas of the true, the beautiful, and the good? This we do not affirm. Judgment is not the source of ideas, certainly not of those now mentioned. It does not originate them. Their origin and awakening in the human mind is we should say, on this wise. The beautiful, the true, the good, exist as simple, absolute, eternal principles. They are in the divine mind. They are in the divine works. In a sense they are independent of Deity. He does not create them. He cannot reverse them or change their nature. He works according to them. They are not created by, but only _manifested in_, what God does. We are created with a nature so formed and endowed as to be capable of recognizing these principles and being impressed by them. The consequence is, that no sooner do we open the eye of reason and intelligence upon that which lies around and passes before us, in the world, than the idea of the true, the beautiful, the morally good, is awakened in the mind. We instinctively perceive and feel their presence in the objects presented to our notice. They are the product of our rational intelligence, brought into contact, through sense, with the world in which we dwell. The idea of beauty or of the right, thus once awakened in the mind, when afterward examples, or, it may be, violations, of these principles occur, the judgment is exercised in deciding that the cases presented do or do not properly fall under the class thus designated; and the judgment thus exercised in respect to the beautiful, we call _taste_, in respect to the right, _conscience_. _Taste as now defined._--As now defined, taste is, as to its principle, _the discriminating power of the mind with respect to the beautiful or sublime in nature or art_; that certain state, quality, or condition of the mental powers and the mental culture, the result partly of native difference and endowment, partly of education and habit, by virtue of which we are able to judge more or less correctly as to the beauty or deformity, the merit or demerit of whatever presents itself in nature or art as an object of admiration, whether and how far it is in reality beautiful, and of its fitness to awaken in us the emotions that we experience in view thereof. If we are able to observe, compare, discriminate, form opinions and conclusions well and correctly, on these matters, our taste is good; otherwise bad. Whether it be the one or the other, will depend not entirely on native endowment, not altogether on the degree to which the judgment is cultivated and developed in respect to other matters, but quite as much on the culture and training of the mind with respect to the specific objects of taste, viz., the beauties of nature and art. Men of strong minds, good understanding, and sound judgment in other matters, are not necessarily men of good taste. Like every other faculty of the mind, taste requires cultivation. _Taste and good Taste._--It is necessary to distinguish between taste, and good taste. Many writers use the terms indifferently, as when we say such a one is a man of taste, meaning of good taste, or such a one has no taste whatever, meaning that he is a man of bad taste. Strictly speaking, the savage who rejoices in the disfigurement of his person by tattooing, paint, and feathers, is a man of _taste_, as really as the Broadway dandy, or the Parisian exquisite. He has his faculty of judging in such matters, and exercises it--his standard of judging, and comes up to it. He is a man of taste, but not of correct taste. He has his own notions, but they do not agree with ours. He violates all the rules and principles by which well-informed minds are guided in such matters. He shocks our notions of fitness and propriety, excites in us emotions of disgust, or of the ludicrous, and, on the whole, we vote him down as a man of no authority in such matters. _As related to Sensibility._--Thus far we have spoken of taste only as related to the judgment. It is necessary to consider also its relation to the _sensibility_. Taste and sensibility are very often confounded. They are, in reality, quite distinct. Sensibility, so far as we are at present concerned with it, is the mind's _capability of emotion_ in view of the beautiful or sublime. Taste is its _capability of judging_, in view of the same. Viewed as acts, rather than as states or powers of the mind, sensibility is the feeling awakened in view of a beautiful object; taste is the judgment or opinion formed respecting it. In the case already supposed, I stand before a fine statue or painting. It moves me, attracts me, fills me with delight and admiration. In this, it is not directly and immediately my taste, but my sensibility, that is affected and brought into play. I begin to judge of the object before me as a work of art, to form an opinion respecting its merits and demerits; and, in so doing, my taste is exercised. _The two not always proportional._--Not only are the two principles distinct, but not always do they exist in equal proportion and development in the same mind. Persons of the liveliest sensibility are not always, perhaps not generally, persons of the nicest taste. The child, the uneducated peasant, the negro, are as highly delighted with beautiful forms and beautiful colors as the philosopher, but could not tell you so well why they were moved, or what it was, in the object, that pleased them; neither would they discriminate so well the truly beautiful from that which is not worthy of admiration. If there may be sensibility without taste, so, on the other hand, a high degree of taste is not always accompanied with a corresponding degree of sensibility. The practised connoisseur is not always the man who enjoys the most at sight of a fine picture. The skillful musician has much better taste in music than the child that listens, with mingled wonder and delight, to his playing; but we have only to glance at the countenance of each, to see at once which feels the most. _Sensibility not inconsistent with Taste._--I should not, however, infer from this, that a high degree of sensibility is inconsistent with a high degree of taste. This was Mr. Stewart's opinion. The feeling, he would say, will be likely to interfere with the judgment, in such a case. Doubtless; where the feeling is highly wrought upon and excited, it may, for the time, interfere with the cool and deliberate exercise of the judgment. Yet, nevertheless, if sensibility be wanting, there will not be likely to be much taste. If I feel no pleasure at sight of a beautiful landscape or painting, I shall not be likely to trouble myself much about its comparative merits or defects. It is useless, in such a case, to inquire what pleases me, or why I am pleased, when, in truth, nothing pleases me. There is no motive for the exercise of judgment in such a case, neither is there an opportunity for its action. The very foundation for such an exercise is wanting. A lively sensibility is the basis of a correct taste, the ground on which it must rest, the spring and life of its action. The two are related somewhat as genius and learning which are not always found in equal degree, yet are by no means inconsistent with each other. There may be a high degree of mental strength and activity, without corresponding acquisitions; yet there can hardly be learning without some degree of mental power and activity. There may be sensibility without much taste, but hardly much taste without sensibility. Taste is, in a great measure, acquired, cultivated, an art; sensibility, a native endowment. It may be developed, strengthened, educated, but not acquired. Genius produces, sensibility admires, taste judges or decides. Their action is reciprocal. If taste corrects and restrains the too ready or too extravagant sensibility, the latter, on the other hand, furnishes the ground and data upon which, after all, taste must rely in its decisions. _Cultivation of Taste._--We have investigated, with some care, as was proposed, the nature of that power of the mind which takes cognizance of the beautiful. On the cultivation of this power, a few words must be said in this connection. Taste is an intellectual faculty, a perceptive power, a matter of judgment, and, as such, both admits and requires cultivation. No forms of mental activity depend more on education and exercise, for their full development, than that class to which we give the general name of judgment, and no form of judgment more than that which we call taste. The mind uncultivated, untrained, unused to the nice perception of the beautiful, can no more judge correctly, in matters of taste, than the mind unaccustomed to judge of the distance, magnitude, or chemical properties of bodies, can form correct decisions upon these subjects. It must be trained by art, and strengthened by exercise. It must be made familiar with the laws, and conversant with the forms of beauty. It must be taught to observe and study the beautiful, in nature and in art, to discriminate, to compare, to judge. The works in literature and in art which have received the approbation of time, and the honorable verdict of mankind, as well as the objects in nature which have commanded the admiration of the race, must become familiar, not by observation only, but by careful study. Thus may taste be cultivated. HISTORICAL SKETCH. _View of Plato._--Among the ancients, _Plato_ was, perhaps, the first to distinguish the idea of the beautiful from other kindred ideas, and to point out its affinity with the true and the good, thus recognizing in it something immutable and eternal. In making the good and the beautiful identical, however, he mistakes the true character and end of art, Previously to Plato, and even by him, art and the beautiful were treated only in connection with ethics and politics' æsthetics, as a distinct department of science, was not known to the ancients. _Of Aristotle._--_Aristotle_ has not treated of the beautiful but only of dramatic art. Poetry, he thinks, originates in the tendency to imitate, and the desire to know. Tragedy is the imitation of _the better_. Painting should represent, in like manner, not _what is_, but what _ought to be_. In this sense, may be understood his profound remark, that _poetry is more true than history_. _Plotinus and Augustine._--After Aristotle, _Plotinus_ and _Augustine_ alone, among the ancients, have treated of the beautiful. The work of Augustine is not extant. It is known that he made beauty consist in unity and fitness of parts, as in music. The treatise of Plotinus is regarded as at once beautiful and profound. Material beauty is, with him, only the expression or reflection of spiritual beauty. The soul alone, the mind, is beautiful, and in loving the beautiful, the soul loves its own image as there expressed. Hence, the soul must, itself, be beautiful, in order to comprehend and feel beauty. The tendency of this theory is to mysticism. _Longinus and Quintilian._--Longinus, and Quintilian, treat of the sublime, only with reference to eloquence and oratory; so, also, Horace, of art, as having to do with poetry. _Bacon._--Among the moderns, _Bacon_ recognizes the fine arts as among the sciences, and poetry as one of the three chief branches of human knowledge, but nowhere, that I am aware, treats of the beautiful, distinctly, as such. _School of Leibnitz._--It was the school of _Leibnitz_ and _Wolf_ in Germany that first made the beautiful a distinct science. Baumgarten, disciple of Wolf, first conceived this idea. Like Plato, however, he makes the beautiful too nearly identical with the good and with morals. _School of Locke._--In England, the school of _Locke_ have much to say of beauty. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, while they do not clearly distinguish between the beautiful and the good, adopt the theory of unity in variety, as already explained. Hogarth falls into the same class, his idea of beauty being represented by the waving line. Burke does not distinguish sufficiently between the sublime and the terrible. _French Encyclopedists._--In France, the _Encyclopedists_ coincide, essentially, with the school of Locke, and treat of the beautiful, chiefly in its moral aspect. _The later Germans._--In Germany, again, _Winckelman_, an artist, and not a philosopher, seizing the spirit of the Greek art, ascribes, as Plato had done, the idea of beauty to God, from whom it passes into sensible things, as his manifestations. In opposition to this ideal and divine aspect, _Lessing_ takes a more practical view, regarding the beautiful from the stand-point of the _real_. _Herder_ and _Goethe_ contribute, also, much to the science of æsthetics. All these do little more than prepare the way for _Kant_, who goes more profoundly into the philosophy of the matter. He makes beauty a _subjective_ affair, a play of the imagination. _Schiller_ makes it the joint product of the reason and the sensibility, but still a _subjective_ matter, as Kant. _Schelling and Hegel._--_Schelling_ develops the spiritual or ideal theory of beauty. _Hegel_ carries out this theory and makes a complete science of it, classifies and analyzes the arts. His work is regarded as the first complete discussion of the philosophy of the fine arts. It is characterized by strength, clearness, depth, power of analysis, richness of imagination. _Theory of Jouffroy._--_Jouffroy_, in France, among the later writers, has treated fully, and in an admirable manner, of the philosophy of the beautiful. His theory is derived from that of Hegel, with some modifications. It is essentially the theory last presented in the discussion of the subject in the preceding section, viz., the expression of the spiritual or invisible element under sensible forms. No writer is more worthy of study than Jouffroy. His work is clear, strong, and of admirable power of analysis. _Cousin._--Among the eclectics, _Cousin_, in his treatise on the true, the beautiful, and the good, has many just observations, with much beauty and philosophic clearness of expression. _McDermot._--In English, beside the works already referred to, must be noticed the treatise of _McDermot_ on Taste, in which the nature and objects of taste are fully and well discussed. CHAPTER IV. IDEA AND COGNIZANCE OF THE RIGHT. § I.--IDEA OF RIGHT. _The Idea of Right a Conception of the Mind._--Among the conceptions which constitute the furniture of the mind, there is one, which, in many respects, is unlike all others, while, at the same time, it is more important than all others; that is, the notion or idea of _right_. _Universally prevalent._--When we direct our attention to any given instance of the voluntary action of any intelligent rational being, we find ourselves not unfrequently pronouncing upon its character as a _right_ or _wrong_ act. Especially is this the case when the act contemplated is of a marked and unusual character. The question at once arises, is it right? Or, it may be, without the consciousness of even a question respecting it, our decision follows instantly upon the mental apprehension of the act itself--this thing is right, that thing is wrong. Our decision may be correct or incorrect; our perception of the real nature of the act may be clear or obscure; it may make a stronger or weaker impression on the mind, according to our mental habits, the tone of our mental nature, and the degree to which we have cultivated the moral faculty. There may be minds so degraded, and natures so perverted, that the moral character of an act shall be quite mistaken, or quite overlooked in many cases; or, when perceived, it shall make little impression on them. Even in such minds, however, the _idea_ of right and wrong still finds a place, and the understanding applies it, though not perhaps always correctly, to particular instances of human conduct. There is no reason to believe that any mind possessing ordinary endowments, that degree of reason and intelligence which nature usually bestows, is destitute of this idea, or fails altogether to apply it to its own acts, and those of others. _The Question and its different Answers._--But here an important question presents itself: _Whence come_ these ideas and perceptions; their origin? How is it, why is it, that we pronounce an act right or wrong, when once fairly apprehended? How come we by these notions? The fact is admitted; the explanations vary. By one class of writers our ideas of this nature have been ascribed to _education_ and _fashion_; by another, to _legal restriction_, human or divine. Others, again, viewing these ideas as the offspring of nature, have assigned them either to the operation of a _special sense_, given for this specific purpose, as the eye for vision; or to the joint action of certain associated emotions; while others regard them as originating in an exercise of _judgment_, and others still, as _natural intuitions_ of the mind, or reason exercised on subjects of a moral nature. _Main Question._--The main question is, are these ideas _natural_, or _artificial and acquired_? If the latter, are they the result of education, or of legal restraint? If the former, are they to be referred to the _sensibilities_, as the result of a special sense or of association, or to the _intellect_, as the result of the faculty of judgment or as intuitions of reason? 1. _Education._--Come they from _Education and Imitation?_--So Locke, Paley, and others, have supposed. Locke was led to take this view, by tracing, as he did, all simple ideas, except those of our own mental operations, to sensation, as their source. This allows, of course, no place for the ideas of right and wrong, which, accordingly, he concluded, cannot be natural ideas, but must be the result of education. _Objection to this View._--Now it is to be conceded that education and fashion are powerful instruments in the culture of the mind. Their influence is not to be overlooked in estimating the causes that shape and direct the opinions of men, and the tendencies of an age. But they do not account for the _origin_ of any thing. This has been ably and clearly shown by Dugald Stewart, in answer to Locke; and it is a sufficient answer. Education and imitation both _presuppose_ the existence of moral ideas and distinctions; the very things to be accounted for. How came they who first taught these distinctions, and they who first set the example of making such distinctions, to be themselves in possession of these ideas? Whence did _they_ derive them? Who taught _them_, and set _them_ the example? This is a question not answered by the theory now under consideration. It gives us, therefore, and can give us, no account of the origin of the ideas in question. 2. _Legal Enactment._--Do we then derive these ideas from legal _restriction and enactment_? So teach some able writers. Laws are made, human and divine, requiring us to do thus and thus, and forbidding such and such things, and hence we get our ideas originally of right and wrong. _Presupposes Right._--If this be so, then, previous to all law, there could have been no such ideas, of course. But does not law _presuppose_ the idea of right and wrong? Is it not built on that idea as its basis? How, then, can it originate that on which itself depends, and which it presupposes? The first law ever promulgated must have been either a just or an unjust law, or else of no moral character. If the latter, how could a law which was neither just nor unjust, have suggested to the subjects of it any such ideas? If the former, then these qualities, and the ideas of them, must have existed _prior_ to the law itself; and whoever made the law and conferred on it its character, must have had already, in his own mind, the idea of the right and its opposite. It is evident that we cannot, in this way, account for the _origin_ of the ideas in question. We are no nearer the solution of the problem than before. In opposition to the views now considered, we must regard the ideas in question, as, directly or indirectly, the work of nature, and the result of our constitution. The question still remains, however, in which of the several ways indicated, does this result take place? 3. _Special Sense._--Shall we attribute these ideas to a _special sense_? This is the view taken by Hutcheson and his followers. Ascribing, with Locke, all our simple ideas to sensation, but not content with Locke's theory of moral distinctions as the result of education, he sought to account for them by enlarging the sphere of sensation, and introducing a new sense, whose specific office is to take cognizance of such distinctions. The tendency of this theory is evident. While it derives the idea of right and its opposite from our natural constitution, and is, so far, preferable to either of the preceding theories, still, in assigning them a place among the sensibilities, it seems to make morality a mere _sentiment_, a matter of feeling merely, an impression made on our sentient nature--a mere subjective affair--as color and taste are impressions made on our organs of sense, and not properly qualities of bodies. As these affections of the sense do not exist independently, but only relatively to us, so moral distinctions, according to this view, are merely subjective affections of our minds, and not independent realities. _Hume and the Sophists._--Hume accedes to this general view, and carries it out to its legitimate results, making morality a mere relation between our nature and certain objects, and not an independent quality of actions. Virtue and vice, like color and taste, the bright and the dull, the sweet and the bitter, lie merely in our sensations. These skeptical views had been advanced long previously by the Sophists, who taught that man is the measure of all things, that things are only what they seem to us. _Ambiguity of the term Sense._--It is true, as Stewart has observed, that these views do not necessarily result from Hutcheson's theory, nor were they, probably, held by him; but such is the natural tendency of his doctrine. The term _sense_, as employed by him, is, in itself, ambiguous, and may be used to denote a _mental perception_; but when we speak of _a_ sense, we are understood to refer to that part of our constitution which, when affected from without, gives us certain sensations. Thus the sense of hearing, the sense of vision, the sense of taste, of smell, etc. It is in this way that Hutcheson seems to have employed the term, and his illustrations all point in this direction. He was unfortunate, to say the least, in his use of terms, and in his illustrations; unfortunate, also, in having such a disciple as Hume, to push his theory to its legitimate results. If, by a special sense, he meant only a direct perceptive power of the mind, then, doubtless, Hutcheson is right in recognizing such a faculty, and attributing to it the ideas under consideration. But that is not the proper meaning of the word _sense_, nor is that the signification attached to it by his followers. _No Evidence of such a Faculty._--But if he means, by sense, what the word itself would indicate, some adaptation of the sensibilities to receive impressions from things without, analogous to that by which we are affected through the organs of sense, then, in the first place, it is not true that we have any such special faculty. There is no evidence of it; nay, facts contradict it. There is no such _uniformity_ of moral impression or sensation as ought to manifest itself on this supposition. Men's eyes and ears are much alike, in their activity, the world over. That which is white, or red, to one, is not black to another, or green to a third; that which is sweet to one, is not sour, or bitter, to another. At least, if such variations occur, they are the result only of some unnatural and unusual condition of the organs. But it is otherwise with the operation of the so-called special sense. While all men have probably, some idea of right and wrong, there is the greatest possible variety in its application to particular instances of conduct. What one approves as a virtue, another condemns as a crime. _No Need of it._--Nor, secondly, have we any need to call in the aid of a special sense to give us ideas of this kind. It is not true, as Locke and Hutcheson believed, that all our ideas, except those of our own mental operations, or consciousness, are derived ultimately from sensation. We have ideas of the true and the beautiful, ideas of cause and effect, of geometrical and arithmetical relations, and various other ideas, which it would be difficult to trace to the senses as their source; and which, equally with the ideas of right and wrong, would require, in that case, a special sense for their production. 4. _Association._--Shall we, then, adopt the view of that class of ethical writers who account for the origin of these ideas by _the principle of association_? Such men as Hartley, Mill, Mackintosh, and others of that stamp, are not lightly to be set aside in the discussion of such a question. Their view is, that the moral perceptions are the result of certain combined antecedent emotions, such as gratitude, pity, resentment, etc., which relate to the dispositions and actions of voluntary agents, and which very easily and naturally come to be transferred, from the agent himself, to the action in itself considered, or to the disposition which prompted it; forming, when thus transferred and associated, what we call the moral feelings and perceptions. Just as avarice arises from the original desire, not of money, but of the things which money can procure--which desire comes, eventually, to be transferred, from the objects themselves, to the means and instrument of procuring them--and, as sympathy arises from the transfer to others of the feelings which, in like circumstances, agitate our own bosoms, so, in like manner, by the principle of association, the feelings which naturally arise in view of the conduct of others, are transferred from the agent to the act, from the enemy or the benefactor, to the injury or the benefaction, which acts stand afterward, by themselves, as objects of approval or condemnation. Hence the disposition to approve all benevolent acts, and to condemn the opposite; which disposition, thus formed and transferred, is a part of conscience. So of other elementary emotions. _Makes Conscience a mere Sentiment._--It will be perceived that this theory, which is indebted chiefly to Mackintosh for its completeness, and scientific form, makes conscience wholly a matter of sentiment and feeling; standing in this respect, on the same ground with the theory of a special sense, and liable, in part, to the same objections. Hence the name _sentimental_ school, often employed to designate, collectively, the adherents of each of these views. While the theory, now proposed, might seem then to offer a plausible account of the manner in which our moral _sentiments_ arise, it does not account for the origin of our _ideas_ and _perceptions_ of moral rectitude. Now the moral faculty is not a mere sentiment. There is an intellectual perception of one thing as right, and another as wrong; and the question now before us is, Whence comes that perception, and the idea on which it is based? To resolve the whole matter into certain transferred and associated emotions, is to give up the inherent distinction of right and wrong as qualities of actions, and make virtue and vice creations of the sensibility, the play and product of the excited feelings. To admit the perception and idea of the right, and ascribe their origin to antecedent emotion, is, moreover, to reverse the natural order and law of psychological operation, which bases emotion on perception, and not perception on emotion. We do not first admire, love, hate, and then perceive, but the reverse. _Further Objections._--The view now under consideration, while it seems to resolve the moral faculty into mere feeling, thus making morality wholly a relative affair, makes conscience, itself, an acquired, rather than a natural faculty, a secondary process, a transformation of emotions, rather than itself an original principle. It does it, moreover, the further injustice of deriving its origin from the purely _selfish_ principles of our nature. I receive a favor, or an injury; hence I regard, with certain feelings of complacency, or the opposite, the man who has thus treated me. These feelings I come gradually to transfer to, and associate with, the act in itself considered, and this with other acts of the same nature; and so, at last, I come to have a moral faculty, and pronounce one thing right, and another wrong. _At Variance with Facts._--This view is quite inadmissible; at variance with facts, and the well-known laws of the human mind. The moral faculty is one of the earliest to develop itself. It appears in childhood, manifesting itself, not as an acquired and secondary principle, the result of a complicated process of associated and transferred emotion, requiring time for its gradual formation and growth, but rather as an original instinctive principle of nature. _Sympathy._--Adam Smith, in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments," has proposed a view which falls properly under the general theory of association, and may be regarded as a modification of it. He attributes our moral perceptions to the feeling of _sympathy_. To adopt the feelings of another is to approve them. If those feelings are such as would naturally be awakened in us by the same objects, we approve them as morally proper. Sympathy with the gratitude of one who has received a favor, leads us to regard the benefaction as meritorious. Sympathy with the resentment of an injured man, leads us to regard the injurer as worthy of punishment, and so the sense of demerit originates; sympathy with the feelings of others respecting our own conduct gives rise to self-approval and sense of duty. Rules of morality are merely a summary of these sentiments. _This View not sustained by Consciousness._--Whatever credit may be due to this ingenious writer, for calling attention to a principle which had not been sufficiently taken into account by preceding philosophers, we cannot but regard it as an insufficient explanation of the present case. In the first place, we are not _conscious_ of the element of sympathy in the decisions and perceptions of the moral faculty. We look at a given action of right or wrong, and approve of it, or condemn it _on that ground_, because it _is_ right or wrong, not because we sympathize with the feelings awakened by the act in the minds of others. If the process now supposed intervened between our knowledge of the act, and our judgment of its morality, we should know it and recognize it as a distinct element. _No imperative Character._--Furthermore, sympathy, like other emotions, has no _imperative_ character, and, even if it might be supposed to suggest to the mind some idea of moral distinctions, cannot of itself furnish a foundation for those feelings of _obligation_ which accompany and characterize the decisions of the moral faculty. _The Standard of Right._--But more than this, the view now taken makes the standard of right and wrong _variable_, and dependent on the feelings of men. We must know how others think and feel, how the thing affects them, before we can know whether a given act is right or wrong, to be performed or avoided. And then, furthermore, our feelings must agree with theirs; there must be sympathy and harmony of views and feelings, else the result will not follow. If any thing prevents us from knowing what are the feelings of others with respect to a given course of conduct, or if for any reason we fail to sympathize with those feelings, we can have no conscience in the matter. As those feelings vary, so will our moral perceptions vary. We have no fixed standard. There is no place left for right, as such, and absolutely. If no sympathy, then no duty, no right, no morality. _Result of the preceding Inquiries._--We have, as yet, found no satisfactory explanation of the origin of our moral ideas and perceptions. They seem not to be the result of education and imitation, nor yet of legal enactment. They seem to be natural, rather than artificial and acquired. Yet we cannot trace them to the action of the sensitive part of our nature. They are not the product of a special sense, nor yet of the combined and associated action of certain natural emotions, much less of any one emotion, as sympathy. And yet they are a part of our nature. Place man where you will, surround him with what influences you will, you still find in him, to some extent at least, indications of a moral nature; a nature modified, indeed, by circumstances, but never wholly obliterated. Evidently we must refer the ideas in question, then, to the intellectual, since they do not belong to the sensitive part of our nature. 5. _Judgment._--Are they then the product and operation of the faculty of judgment? But the judgment does not _originate_ ideas. It compares, distributes, estimates, decides to what class and category a thing belongs, but creates nothing. I have in mind the idea of a triangle, a circle, etc. So soon as certain figures are presented to the eye, I refer them at once, by an act of judgment, to the class to which they belong. I affirm that to be a triangle, this, a circle, etc.; the judgment does this. But judgment does not furnish my mind with the primary idea of a circle, etc. It deals with this idea already in the mind. So in our judgment of the beauty and deformity of objects. The perception that a landscape or painting is beautiful, is, in one sense, an act of judgment; but it is an act which presupposes the idea of the beautiful already in the mind that so judges. So also of moral distinctions. Whence comes the _idea_ of right and wrong which lies at the foundation of every particular judgment as to the moral character of actions? This is the question before us, still unanswered; and to this there remains but one reply. 6. _These Ideas intuitive._--The ideas in question are _intuitive_; suggestions or perceptions of _reason_. The view now proposed may be thus stated: It is the office of reason to discern the right and the wrong, as well as the true and the false, the beautiful and the reverse. Regarded subjectively, as conceptions of the human mind, right and wrong, as well as beauty and its opposite, truth and its opposite, are simple ideas, incapable of analysis or definition; _intuitions of reason_. Regarded as objective, right and wrong are realities, qualities absolute, and inherent in the nature of things, not fictitious, not the play of human fancy or human feeling, not relative merely to the human mind, but independent, essential, universal, absolute. As such, reason recognizes their existence. Judgment decides that such and such actions do possess the one or the other of these qualities; are right or wrong actions. There follows the sense of obligation to do or not to do, and the consciousness of merit or demerit as we comply, or fail to comply, with the same. In view of these perceptions emotions arise, but only as based upon them. The emotions do not, as the sentimental school affirm, originate the idea, the perception; but the idea, the perception, gives rise to the emotion. We are so constituted as to feel certain emotions in view of the moral quality of actions, but the idea and perception of that moral quality must _precede_, and it is the office of reason to produce this. _First Truths._--There are certain simple ideas which must be regarded as first truths, or first principles, of the human understanding, essential to its operations, ideas universal, absolute, necessary. Such are the ideas of personal existence, and identity, of time and space, as conditions of material existence; of number, cause, and mathematical relation. Into this class fall the ideas of the true, the beautiful, the right, and their opposites. The fundamental maxims of reasoning and morals find here their place. _How awakened._--These are, in a sense, intuitive perceptions; not strictly innate, yet connate; the foundation for them being laid in our nature and constitution. So soon as the mind reaches a certain stage of development they present themselves. Circumstances may promote or retard their appearance. They depend on opportunity to furnish the occasion of their springing up, yet they are, nevertheless, the natural, spontaneous development of the human soul, as really a part of our nature as are any of our instinctive impulses, or our mental attributes. They are a part of that native intelligence with which we are endowed by the author of our being. These intuitions of ours, are not themselves the foundation of right and wrong; they do not make one thing right and another wrong; but they are simply the reason why we so regard them. Such we believe to be the true account of the origin of our moral perceptions. § II.--COGNIZANCE OF THE RIGHT. _The Cognition distinguished from the Idea of Right._--Having, in the preceding section, discussed the _idea_ of the right, in itself considered, as a conception of the mind, we proceed now to consider _the action of the mind as cognizant of right_. The theme is one of no little difficulty, but, at the same time, of highest importance. _Existence of this Power._--After what has been already said, it is hardly necessary to raise the preliminary inquiry, as to the _existence_ of a moral faculty in man. That we do possess the power of making moral distinctions, that we do discriminate between the right and the wrong in human conduct, is an obvious fact in the history and psychology of the race. Consciousness, observation, the form of language, the literature of the world, the usages of society, all attest and confirm this truth. We are conscious of the operation of this principle in ourselves, whenever we contemplate our own conduct, or that of others. We find ourselves, involuntarily, and as by instinct, pronouncing this act to be right, that, wrong. We recognize the obligation to do, or to have done, otherwise. We approve, or condemn. We are sustained by the calm sense of that self-approval, or cast down by the fearful strength and bitterness of that remorse. And what we find in ourselves, we observe, also, in others. In like circumstances, they recognize the same distinctions, and exhibit the same emotions. At the story or the sight of some flagrant injustice and wrong, the child and the savage are not less indignant than the philosopher. Nor is this a matter peculiar to one age or people. The languages and the literature of the world indicate, that, at all times, and among all nations, the distinction between right and wrong has been recognized and felt. The [Greek: to dikaion] and [Greek: to kalon] of the Greeks, the _honestum_ and the _pulchrum_ of the Latins, are specimens of a class of words, to be found in all languages, the proper use and significance of which is to express the distinctions in question. Since, then, we do unquestionably recognize moral distinctions, it is clear that we have a moral faculty. _Questions which present themselves._--Without further consideration of this point, we pass at once to the investigation of the subject itself. Our inquiries relate principally to the _nature_ and _authority_ of this faculty. On these points, it is hardly necessary to say, great difference of opinion has existed among philosophers and theologians, and grave questions have arisen. What _is_ this faculty as exercised; a judgment, a process of reasoning, or an emotion? Does it belong to the rational or sensitive part of our nature: to the domain of intellect, or of feeling, or both? What is the value and correctness of our moral perceptions, and especially of that verdict of _approbation_ or _censure_, which we pass upon ourselves and others, according as the conduct conforms to, or violates, recognized obligation? Such are some of the questions which have arisen respecting the nature and authority of conscience. I. _The Nature of Conscience._--What is it? A matter of _intellect_, or of _feeling_; a _judgment_, or an _emotion_? A careful analysis of the phenomena of conscience, with a view to determine the several elements, or mental processes, that constitute its operation, may aid us in the solution of this question. ANALYSIS OF AN ACT OF CONSCIENCE. _Cognition of Right._--Whenever the conduct of intelligent and rational beings is made the subject of contemplation, whether the act thus contemplated be our own or another's, and whether it be an act already performed, or only proposed, we are cognizant of certain ideas awakened in the mind, and of certain impressions made upon it. First of all, the act contemplated strikes us as _right_ or _wrong_. This involves a double element, an _idea_, and a _perception_ or _judgment_. The _idea_ of right and its opposite are, in the mind, simple ideas, and, therefore, indefinable. In the act contemplated, we _recognize_ the one or the other of these simple elements, and pronounce it, accordingly, a right or wrong act. This is simply a _judgment_, a perception, an exercise of the understanding. _Of Obligation._--No sooner is this idea, this cognition, of the rightness or wrongness of the given act, fairly entertained by the mind, than another idea, another cognition, presents itself, given along with the former, and inseparable from it, viz., that of _obligation_ to do, or not to do, the given act: the _ought_, and the _ought not_--also simple ideas, and indefinable. This applies equally to the future and to the past, to ourselves and to others: I ought to do this thing. I ought to _have done_ it yesterday. He ought, or ought not to do, or to have done it. This, like the former, is an intellectual act, a perception or cognition of a truth, of a reality for which we have the same voucher as for any other reality or apprehended fact, viz., the reliability of our mental faculties in general, and the correctness of their operation in the specific instance. It is a conviction of the mind inseparable from the perception of right. Given, a clear perception of the one, and we cannot escape the other. _Of Merit and Demerit._--There follows a third element, logically distinct, but chronologically inseparable, from the preceding: the cognition of merit or demerit in connection with the deed, of good or ill desert, and the consequent approval or disapproval of the deed and the doer. No sooner do we perceive an action to be right or wrong, and to involve, therefore, an obligation on the part of the doer, than, there arises, also, in the mind, the idea of merit or demerit, in connection with the doing; we regard the agent as deserving of praise or blame, and in our own minds do approve or condemn him and his course, accordingly. This approval of ourselves and others, according to the apprehended desert of the act and the actor, constitutes a process of trial, an inner tribunal, at whose bar are constantly arraigned the deeds of men, and whose verdict it is no easy matter to set aside. This mental approval may be regarded by some as a matter of feeling, rather than an intellectual act. We speak of _feelings_ of approval and of condemnation. To approve and condemn, however, are, properly, acts of the judgment. The feelings consequent upon such approval or disapproval are usually of such a nature, and of such strength, as to attract the principal attention of the mind to themselves, and, hence, we naturally come to think and speak of the whole process as a matter of feeling. Strictly viewed, it is an intellectual perception, an exercise of judgment, giving sentence that the contemplated act is, or is not, meritorious, and awarding praise or blame accordingly. This completes the process. I can discover nothing in the operation of my mind, in view of moral action, which does not resolve itself into some one of these elements. _These Elements intellectual._--Viewed in themselves, these are, strictly, intellectual operations; the recognition of the right, the recognition of obligation, the perception of good or ill desert, are all, properly, acts of the intellect. Each of these cognitive acts, however, _involves a corresponding action of the sensibilities_. The perception of the right awakens, in the pure and virtuous mind, feelings of pleasure, admiration, love. The idea of obligation becomes, in its turn, through the awakened sensibilities, an impulse and motive to action. The recognition of good or ill desert awakens feelings of esteem and complacency, or the reverse; fills the soul with sweet peace, or stings it with sharp remorse. All these things must be recognized and included by the psychologist among the phenomena of conscience. These emotions, however, are based on, and grow out of, the intellectual acts already named, and are to be viewed as an incidental and subordinate, though by no means unimportant, part of the whole process. When we speak of conscience, or the moral faculty, we speak of a _power_, a faculty and not _merely_ a feeling or susceptibility of being affected. It is a cognitive power, having to do with realities, recognizing real distinctions, and not merely a passive play of the sensibilities. It is simply the mind's power of recognizing a certain class of truths and relations. As such, we claim for it a place among the strictly cognitive powers of the mind, among the faculties that have to do with the perception of truth and reality. _Importance of this Position._--This is a point of some importance. If, with certain writers, we make the moral faculty a matter of mere feeling, overlooking the intellectual perceptions on which this feeling is based, we overlook and leave out of the account, the chief elements of the process. The moral faculty is no longer a cognitive power, no longer, in truth, a faculty. The distinctions which it seems to recognize are merely _subjective_; impressions, feelings, to which there may, or may not, be a corresponding reality. We have at least no evidence of any such reality. Such a view subtracts the very foundation of morals. Our feelings vary; but right and wrong do not vary with our feelings. They are objective realities, and not subjective phenomena. As such, the mind, by virtue of the natural powers with which it is endowed by the Creator, recognizes them. The power by which it gives this, we call the _moral faculty_; just as we call its power to take cognizance of another class of truths and relations, viz., the beautiful, its _æsthetic_ faculty. In view of these truths and relations, as thus perceived, certain feelings are, in either case, awakened, and these emotions may, with propriety, be regarded as pertaining to, and a part of, the phenomena of conscience, and of taste; the full discussion of either of these faculties will include the action of the sensibilities; but in neither case will a true psychology resolve the faculty into the feeling. The mathematician experiences a certain feeling of delight in perceiving the relation of lines and angles, but the power of perceiving that relation, the faculty by which the mind takes cognizance of such truth, is not to be resolved into the feeling that results from it. _Result of Analysis._--As the result of our analysis, we obtain the following elements as involved in, and constituting, an operation of the moral faculty: (1.) The mental perception that a given act is right or wrong. (2.) The perception of obligation with respect to the same, as right or wrong. (3.) The perception of merit or demerit, and the consequent approbation or censure of the agent, as doing the right or the wrong thus perceived. (4.) Accompanying these intellectual perceptions, and based upon them, certain corresponding emotions, varying in intensity according to the clearness of the mental perceptions, and the purity of the moral nature. II. _Authority of Conscience._--Thus far we have considered the _nature_ of conscience. The question arises now as to its _authority_--the reliableness of its decisions. If conscience correctly discerns the right and the wrong and the consequent obligation, it will be likely to judge correctly as to the deserts of the doer. If it mistake these points, it may approve what is not worthy of approval, and condemn what is good. _What Evidence of Correctness._--How are we to know, then, whether conscience judges right? What voucher have we for its correctness? How far is it to be trusted in its perceptions and decisions? Perhaps we are so constituted, it may be said, as invariably to judge that to be right which is wrong, and the reverse, and so to approve where we should condemn. True, we reply, this may be so. It may be that I am so constituted, that two and two shall _seem_ to be four, when in reality they are five; and that the three angles of a triangle shall _seem_ to be equal to two right angles, when in reality they are equal to three. This may be so. Still it is a presumption in favor of the correctness of all our natural perceptions, that they are the operation of original principles of our constitution. It is not probable, to say the least, that we are so constituted by the great Author of our being, as to be habitually deceived. It may be that the organs of vision and hearing are absolutely false; that the things which we see, and hear, and feel, through the medium of the senses, have no correspondence to our supposed perceptions. But this is not a probable supposition. He who denies the validity of the natural faculties, has the burden of proof; and proof is of course impossible; for the simple reason, that, in order to prove them false, you must make use of these very faculties; and if their testimony is not reliable in the one case, certainly it is not in the other. We must then take their veracity for granted; and we have the right to do so. And so of our moral nature. It comes from the Author of our being, and if it is uniformly and originally wrong, then he is wrong. It is an error, which, in the nature of the case, can never be detected or corrected. We cannot get beyond our constitution, back of our natural endowments, to judge, _à priori_, and from an external position, whether they are correct or not. Right and wrong are not, indeed, the creations of the divine will; but the faculties by which we perceive and approve the right, and condemn the wrong, are from him; and we must presume upon their general correctness. _Not infallible._--It does not follow from this, however, nor do we affirm, that conscience is infallible, that she never errs. It does not follow that our moral perceptions and judgments are invariably correct, because they spring from our native constitution. This is not so. There is not one of the faculties of the human mind that is not liable to err. Not one of its activities is infallible. The reasoning power sometimes errs; the judgment errs; the memory errs. The moral faculty is on the same footing, in this respect, with any and all other faculties. _Its Value not thus destroyed._--But of what use, it will be said, is a moral faculty, on which, after all, we cannot rely? Of what use, we reply, is _any_ mental faculty, that is not absolutely and universally correct? Of what use is a memory or a judgment, that sometimes errs? We do not wholly distrust these faculties, or cast them aside as worthless. A time-keeper may be of great value, though not absolutely perfect. Its authorship and original construction may be a strong presumption in favor of its general correctness; nevertheless its hands may have been accidentally set to the wrong hour of the day. _Actual Occurrence of such Cases._--This is a spectacle that not unfrequently presents itself in the moral world--a man with his conscience pointing to the wrong hour; a strictly conscientious man, fully and firmly persuaded that he is right, yet by no means agreeing with the general convictions of mankind; an hour or two before, or, it may be, as much behind the age. Such men are the hardest of all mortals to be set right, for the simple reason, that they are conscientious. "Here is my watch; it points to such an hour; and my watch is from the very best maker. I cannot be mistaken." And yet he is mistaken, and egregiously so. The truth is, conscience is no more infallible than any other mental faculty. It is simply, as we have seen, a power of perceiving and judging, and its operations, like all other perceptions and judgments, are liable to error. _Diversity of Moral Judgment._--And this which we have just said, goes far to account for the great diversity that has long been known to exist in the moral judgments and opinions of men. It has often been urged, and with great force, against the supposed existence of a moral faculty in man, as a part of his original nature, that men think and act so differently with respect to these matters. Nature, it is said, ought to act uniformly; thus eyes and ears do not give essentially conflicting testimony, at different times, and in different countries, with respect to the same objects. Certain colors are universally pleasing, and certain sounds disagreeable. But not so, it is said, with respect to the moral judgments of men. What one approves, another condemns. If these distinctions are universal, absolute, essential; and if the power of perceiving them is inherent in our nature, men ought to agree in their perception of them. Yet you will find nothing approved by one age and people, which is not condemned by some other; nay, the very crimes of one age and nation, are the religious acts of another. If the perception of right and wrong is intuitive, how happens this diversity? _This Diversity accounted for._--To which I reply, the thing has been already accounted for. Our ideas of right and wrong, it was stated, in discussing their origin, depend on circumstances for their time and degree of development. They are not irrespective of opportunity. Education, habits, laws, customs, while they do not originate, still have much to do with the development and modification of these ideas. They may be by these influences aided or retarded in their growth, or even quite misdirected, just as a tree may, by unfavorable influences, be hindered and thwarted in its growth, be made to turn and twist, and put forth abnormal and monstrous developments. Yet nature works there, nevertheless, and in spite of all such obstacles, and unfavorable circumstances, seeks to put forth, according to her laws, her perfect and finished work. All that we contend is, that nature, under favorable circumstances, develops in the human mind, the idea of moral distinctions, while, at the same time, _men may differ much in their estimate of what is right, and what is wrong_, according to the circumstances and influences right and wrong to particular cases, and decide as to the morality of given actions, is an office of judgment, and the judgment may err in this, as in any other of its operations. It may be biassed by unfavorable influences, by wrong education, wrong habits, and the like. _Analogy of other Faculties._--The same is true, substantially, of all other natural faculties and their operations. They depend on circumstances for the degree of their development, and the mode of their action. Hence they are liable to great diversity and frequent error. Perception misleads us as to sensible objects, not seldom; even in their mathematical reasonings, men do not always agree. There is the greatest possible diversity among men, as to the retentiveness of the memory, and as to the extent and power of the reasoning faculties. The savage that thinks it no wrong to scalp his enemy, or even to roast and eat him, is utterly unable to count twenty upon his fingers; while the philosopher, who recognizes the duty of loving his neighbor as himself, calculates, with precision, the motions of the heavenly bodies, and predicts their place in the heaven, for ages to come. Shall we conclude, because of this diversity, that these several faculties are not parts of our nature? _General Uniformity._--We are by no means disposed to admit, however, that the diversity in men's moral judgments is so great, as might, at first, appear. There is, on the contrary, a general uniformity. As to the great essential principles of morals, men, after all, do judge much alike, in different ages and different countries. In details, they differ, in general principles, they agree. In the application of the rules of morality to particular actions, they differ widely, according to circumstances; in the recognition of the right and the wrong, as distinctive principles, and of obligation to do the right as known, and avoid the wrong as known, in this they agree. It must be remembered, moreover, that men do not always act according to their own ideas of right. From the general neglect of virtue, in any age or community, and the prevalence of great and revolting crimes, we cannot safely infer the absence, or even the perversion, of the moral faculty. _Precisely in what the Diversity consists._--It is important to bear in mind, throughout this discussion, the distinction between the _idea_ of right, in itself considered, and the _perception_ of a given act as right; the one a simple conception, the other an act of judgment; the one an idea derived from the very constitution of the mind, connate, if not innate, the other an application of that idea, by the understanding, to particular instances of conduct. The former, the _idea_ of moral distinctions, may be universal, necessary, absolute, unerring; the latter, the _application_ of the idea to particular instances, and the decision that such and such acts are, or are not, right, may be altogether an incorrect and mistaken judgment. Now it is precisely at this point that the diversity in the moral judgments of mankind makes its appearance. In recognizing the distinction of right and wrong, they agree; in the application of the same to particular instances in deciding _what_ is right and _what_ is wrong--a simple act of the judgment, an exercise of the understanding, as we have seen--in this it is that they differ. And the difference is no greater, and no more inexplicable, with respect to this, than in any other class of judgments. _Conscience not always a safe Guide._--I have admitted that conscience is not infallible. Is it, then, a safe guide? Are we, in all cases to follow its decisions? Since liable to err, it cannot be, in itself, I reply, in all cases, a safe guide. We cannot conclude, with certainty, that a given course is right, simply because conscience approves it. This does not, of necessity, follow. The decision that a given act is right, or not, is simply a matter of judgment; and the judgment may, or may not, be correct. That depends on circumstances, on education partly, on the light we have, be it more or less. Conscientious men are not always in the right. We may do wrong conscientiously. Saul of Tarsus was a conscientious persecutor, and verily thought he was doing God service. No doubt, many of the most intolerant and relentless bigots have been equally conscientious, and equally mistaken. Such men are all the more dangerous, because doing what they believe to be right. _It is, nevertheless, to be followed._--What, then, are we to do? Shall we follow a guide thus liable to err? Yes, I reply, follow conscience; but see that it be a right and well-informed conscience, forming its judgments, not from impulse, passion, prejudice, the bias of habit, or of unreflecting custom, but from the clearest light of reason, and especially of the divine word. We are responsible for the judgments we form in morals, as much as for any class of our judgments; responsible, in other words, for the sort of conscience we have. Saul's mistake lay, not in acting according to his conscientious convictions of duty, but in not having a more enlightened conscience. He should have formed a more careful judgment; have inquired more diligently after the right way. To say, however, that a man ought not to do what conscience approves, is to say that he ought not to do what he sincerely believes to be right. This would be a very strange rule in morals. _Conscience not exclusively intellectual._--I have discussed, as I proposed, the _nature_ and _authority_ of conscience. In this discussion I have treated of the moral faculty as an intellectual, rather than an emotional power I would not be understood, however, as implying that conscience has not also an emotional character. Every intellectual act, and faculty of action, partakes more or less of this character, is accompanied by feeling, and these feelings are in some degree peculiar, it may be, to the particular faculty or act of mind to which they relate. The exercise of imagination involves some degree of feeling, either pleasurable or painful, and that often in a high degree; so also the æsthetic faculty. It is peculiarly so with the exercise of the moral faculty. As already stated, in our analysis of an act of conscience, it is impossible to view our past conduct as right or wrong, and to approve or condemn ourselves accordingly, without emotion; and these emotions will vary in intensity, according to the clearness and force of our intellectual conception of the merit or demerit of our conduct. These feelings constitute an important part of the phenomena of moral action, and consequently of psychology; as they belong, however, to the department of _sensibility_, rather than of _intellect_, their further discussion is not here in place. They will be considered in connection with other emotions in the subsequent division of the work. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES SUPPLEMENTARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. INSTINCT.--THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE BRUTE AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THAT OF MAN. Closely connected with the philosophy of human intelligence is the science of _instinct_, or the intelligence of the brute--a subject of interest not merely in its relations to psychology, but to some other sciences, as natural history, and theology. _We work at a Disadvantage in such Inquiries._--With regard to this matter, it must be confessed, at the outset, that we work, in some respects, in the dark, in our inquiries and speculations concerning it. It lies wholly removed from the sphere of consciousness. We can only observe, compare, and infer, and our conclusions thus derived must be liable, after all, to error. The operations of our own minds we know by the clearest and surest of all sources of knowledge, viz., our own consciousness; the operation of brute intelligence must ever be in great measure unknown and a mystery to us. How far the two resemble each other, and how far they differ, it is not easy to determine, not easy to draw the dividing line, and say where brute intelligence stops and human intelligence begins. _Method proposed._--Let us first define instinct, the term usually applied to denote brute intelligence, and ascertain, if possible, what are its peculiar characteristics; we may then be able to determine wherein it differs from intelligence in man. _Definition._--I understand, by instinct, a law of action, governing and directing the movement of sentient beings--distinct, on the one hand, from the mere blind forces of matter, as attraction, etc., and from reason on the other; a law working to a given end by impulse, yet blindly--the subject not knowing why he thus works; a law innate, inherent in the constitution of the animal, not acquired but transmitted, the origin of which is to be found in the intelligent author of the universe. These I take to be the principal characteristics of that which we term instinct. _Instinct a Law._--It is a _law of action_. In obedience to it the bee constructs her comb, and the ant her chambers, and the bird her nest; and in obedience to it, the animal, of whatever species, seeks that particular kind of food which is intended and provided for it. These are merely instances of the operation of that law. The uniformity and universality which characterize the operations of this principle, show it to be a law of action, and not a merely casual occurrence. _Works by Impulse._--It is a law _working by impulse_, not mechanical or automatic, on the one hand, nor yet rational on the other. The impelling or motive force, in the case supposed, is not that of a weight acting upon machinery, or any like mechanical principle, nor yet the reflex action of a nerve when irritated, or the spasmodic action of a muscle. It is not analogous to the influence of gravitation on the purely passive forms of matter. Nor yet is it that higher principle which we term reason in man. The bird constructs her nest as she does, and the bee her cell, in obedience to some blind yet powerful and unfailing _impulse_ of her nature, guiding and directing her movements, prompting to action, and to this specific form of action, with a restless yearning, unsatisfied until the end is accomplished. Yet the creature does not herself understand the law by which she works. The bee does not know that she constructs her comb at that precise angle which will afford the greatest content in the least space, does not know why she constructs it at that precise angle, could give no reason for her procedure, even were she capable of understanding our question. It is not with her a matter of reflection, nor of reason, at all, but merely of blind, unthinking, yet unerring impulse. _As innate._--This law is _innate_, _inherent_ in the constitution of the animal, _not acquired_. It is not the result of education. The bird does not learn to build her nest, nor the bee her comb, nor the ant her subterranean chambers, by observing how the parent works and builds. Removed from all opportunities of observation or instruction, the untaught animal still performs its mission, constructs its nest or cell, and does it as perfectly in solitude as among its fellows, as perfectly on the first attempt as ever after. Whatever intelligence there is involved in these labors and constructions, and certainly the very highest intelligence would seem, in many instances, to be concerned in them, is an intelligence transmitted, and not acquired, the origin of which is to be sought, ultimately, not in the creature itself, but in the Author of all intelligence, the Creator of the universe. The intelligence is that not of the creature, but of the Creator. _Manifests itself irrespective of Circumstance._--It is to be further observed, with respect to the principle under consideration, that it often manifests its peculiar tendencies prior to the development of the appropriate organs. The young calf butts with its head before its horns are grown. The instinctive impulse manifests itself, also, under circumstances which render its action no longer needful. The beaver caught and confined in a room, constructs its dam, as aforetime, with whatsoever materials it can command, although, in its present circumstances, such a structure is of no possible use. These facts evidently indicate the presence and action of an impulse working blindly, without reflection, without reason, without intelligence, on the part of the animal. _Indications of Contrivance._--On the other hand, there are instances of brute action which seem to indicate contrivance and adaptation to circumstances. The bee compelled to construct her comb in an unusual and unsafe position, steadies it by constructing a brace of wax-work between the side that inclines and the nearest wall of the hive. The spider, in like manner, whose web is in danger, runs a line, from the part exposed to the severest strain or pressure, to the nearest point of support, in such a manner as to secure the slender fabric. A bird has been known, in like manner, to support a bough, which proved too frail to sustain the weight of the nest, and of her young, by connecting it, with a thread, to a stronger branch above. _These Facts do not prove Reason._--Facts of this nature, however interesting, and well authenticated, must be regarded rather as exceptions to the ordinary rule, the nearest approach which mere instinct has been known to make toward the dividing line that separates the brute from the human intelligence. They do not, in themselves, prove the existence of reason, of a discriminating and reflecting intelligence, on the part of the animal; for the same law of nature that impels the creature to build its nest or its comb, under ordinary circumstances, in the ordinary manner, may certainly be supposed to be capable of inducing a change of operation to meet a sudden exigency, and one liable at any time to occur. It is certainly not more wonderful, nor so wonderful, that the bee should be induced to brace her comb, or the spider her web, when in danger, as that either should be able to construct her edifice originally, at the precise angle employed. It must be remembered, moreover, that, in the great majority of cases, brute instinct shows no such capacity of adaptation to circumstances. _The Question before us._--We are ready now to inquire how far that which we call instinct in the brute, differs from that which we call intelligence in man. Is it a difference in _kind_, or only in _degree_? A glance at the history of the doctrine may aid us here. _Early Views._--From Aristotle to Descartes, philosophers took the latter view. They ascribed to the brute a degree of reason, such as would be requisite in man, were he to do the same things, and proceeding on this principle, they attributed to animals an intelligence proportioned to the wants of their nature and organization. This principle, it need hardly be said, is an assumption. It is not certain that the same action proceeds from the same principle in man, and in the brute; that whatever indicates and involves intelligence and reason, in the one case, as its source, involves the same in the other. This is a virtual _petitio principii_. It assumes the very point in question. It may be that what man does by virtue of an intelligent, reflecting, rational soul, looking before and after, the brute does by virtue of entirely a different principle, a mere unintelligent impulse of his nature, a blind sensation, prompting him to a given course. This is the question to be settled, the thing to be proved or disproved. And if the view already given of the character of brute instinct, is correct, the position now stated as possible, may be regarded as virtually established. _View of Descartes._--Descartes, perceiving the error of previous philosophers, went to the opposite extreme, and resolved the instinct and action of the brute into mere mechanism, a principle little different from that by which the weight moves the hands of the clock. The brute performs the functions of his nature and organization, just as the puppet moves hither and thither by springs hidden within, of which itself knows nothing. The bird, the bee, the ant, the spider, are so organized, such is the hidden mechanism of their curious nature, that at the proper times, and under the requisite conditions, they shall build, each its own proper structure; and perform, each, its own proper work and office. So doing, each moves automatically, mechanically. _Locke and his Disciples._--Differing, again, from this view, which certainly ascribes too little, as the opposite theory ascribes too much to the brute, Locke, Condillac, and their disciples in France and England, took the ground that the actions of the brute which seem to indicate intelligence, are to be ascribed to the power of habit, and to the law of association. The faculties of the brute, as indeed of man, resolve themselves ultimately into impressions from without. Nothing is innate. The dog scents his prey, and the beaver builds his dam, and the bird migrates to a warmer clime, from the mere force of habit, unreflecting, unintelligent. But how, it may occur to some one to ask, happens such a habit to be formed in the first place? How happens the poor insect, just emerging from the egg, to find in himself all requisite appliances and instruments for capturing his prey? How happens the bee always, throughout all its generations, to hit upon the same contrivance for storing its honey, and not only so, but to select out of a thousand different forms, and different possible angles, always the same one? And so of the ant, the spider, etc. And if this is a matter of education, as it certainly is not, then how came the first bee, the first ant, spider, or other insect, to hit upon so admirable an expedient? _The Scotch Philosophers._--On the other hand, Reid, Stewart, and the Scotch philosophers generally, departing widely from the merely mechanical view, have ascribed to instinct some actions which are properly automatic and involuntary, as the shutting of the eyelid on the approach of a foreign body, the action of the infant in obtaining its food from the mother's breast, and certain other like movements of the animal organization, which, according to recent discoveries in physiology, are to be attributed, rather to the simple reflex action of the nerves and muscles. This is not properly instinct. _Question returns._--Among these several views, where then, lies the truth? Unable to coincide with the merely mechanical theory of Descartes, or with the view which resolves all into mere habit and association, with Locke and Condillac, shall we fall back upon the ancient, and for a long time universally prevalent, view which makes instinct only a lower degree of that intelligence which, in man becomes reason and reflection? This we are hardly prepared to do. The well-known phenomena and laws of instinct, its essential characteristics as developed in the preceding pages, seem to point to a difference in kind and not merely in degree. _Reasons for this Opinion._--_1. The Brute incapable of high Cultivation._--To recapitulate briefly the points of difference: If instinct in the brute were of the same nature with intelligence in man, if it were, properly speaking, _intelligence_, the same in kind, differing only in degree, then, it ought, as in man, to be capable of cultivation to an indefinite extent, capable of being elevated, by due process of training, to a degree very much superior to that in which it first presents itself. Now, with certain insignificant exceptions, such is certainly not the case. No amount of training or culture ever brings the animal essentially above the ordinary range of brute capacity, or approximates him to the level of the human species. _2. Brute does not improve by Practice._--On this theory the brute ought, moreover, to improve by practice, which, for the most part, certainly he does not. The spider lays out its lines as accurately and constructs its web as well, and the bee her comb, and the bird her nest, on the first attempt, as after the twentieth or the fiftieth trial. There is no progress, no improvement. Its skill, if such it may be called, is a fixture. There is nothing of the nature of _science_ about it, for it is of the essential nature of all intelligent action to improve. _3. Does not adapt itself to Circumstances._--If it were of the nature of intelligence, it ought uniformly and invariably to adapt itself to changing circumstances, and not to keep on working blindly in the old way, when such procedure is no longer of use. It is not intelligence, but mere blind impulse, in the beaver, that leads him to build his dam on a dry floor or the pavement of a court-yard. _4. Opposite View proves too much._--It is furthermore to be noticed, that the theory under consideration, while it ascribes to the brute only a lower degree of intelligence, in reality places him, in some respects, far beyond man in point of intellect. If the instinct of the brute be intelligence at all, it is intelligence which leaves his prouder rival, man, in many cases, quite in the shade. No science of man can vie with the mathematical precision of the spider or the bee in the practical construction of lines and planes that shall enclose a given angle. The engineer must take lessons of the ant in the art of running lines and parallels. To the same humble insect belongs the invention of the arch and of the dome in architecture. Many of the profoundest questions and problems of science are in like manner virtually solved by those creatures that possess, it is claimed, only a _lower degree_ of intelligence than man. The facts are inconsistent with the theory. The theory either goes too far, or not far enough. If instinct is intelligence at all, it is intelligence, in some respects at least, _superior_ to man's. For reasons now stated, we must conclude that the intelligence of the brute differs in _kind_, and not in _degree_ merely, from that of man. _Faculties wanting in the Brute._--If now the inquiry be raised, what are the specific faculties which are wanting in the brute, but possessed by man, in other words, where runs the dividing line which marks off the domain of instinct from that of intellect, we reply, beginning with the differences which are most obvious, the brute is, in the first place, not a _moral_ and _religious_ being. He has no moral nature, no ideas of right and justice, none of accountability, and of a higher power. He is, moreover, not an _æsthetic_ being. He has no taste for beauty, nor appreciation of it. The horse, with all his apparent intelligence, looks out upon the most enchanting landscape as unmoved by its beauty as the carriage which he draws. He has no idea, no cognizance of the beautiful. The faculty of original conception, which furnishes man with ideas of this nature, seems to be wanting in the brute. He is, furthermore, not a _scientific_ being. He does not understand the principles by which he himself works. He makes no progress or improvement, accordingly, in the application of those principles, but works as well first as last. He learns nothing by experience. Certain grand rules and principles do indeed lie at the foundation of his work, but they have no _subjective_ existence in the brute himself. Now the faculties which constitute man a scientific being are those which, in the present treatise, we have grouped together under the title of _reflective_. These seem to be wanting in the brute. He never classifies, nor analyzes, never forms abstract conceptions, never generalizes, judges, nor reasons, never reflects on what is passing around him; never, in the true sense of the word, _thinks_. _Further Deficiency._--Here many, perhaps most, who have reflected upon the matter at all, would place the dividing line between man and the brute, denying him the possession of reason and reflection, the higher intellectual powers, but allowing him the other faculties which man enjoys. We must go further, however, and exclude imagination from the list of brute faculties. Having no idea of the beautiful, nor any power of forming abstract conceptions, the _ideals_, according to which imagination shapes its creations, are wholly wanting, and imagination itself, the faculty of the ideal, must also be wanting. _The Power to perceive and remember._--But has the brute the power of perception and memory, the only two distinct remaining faculties of the human mind? If we distinguish, as we must, the physical from the strictly intellectual element, in perception by the senses, the capacity to receive impressions of sense, from the capacity to _understand_ and _know_ the object, as such, from which the impressions proceed, while we must admit the former, we should question the existence of the latter in the brute. To know or understand the objects of sense, to distinguish them as such, from each other, and from self as the perceiving subject, is an attribute of intelligence in its strict and proper sense, an attribute of mind. If the brute possesses it, he possesses as really a mind, though not of so high an order, as man. _The dividing Line._--Now it is just here that we are compelled to place the line of division between the brute and man, between instinct and intellect. The brute has senses, as man; in some respects, indeed, more perfect than his. Objects external make impressions upon his senses; his eye, his ear, his various organs of sense, respond to these impressions. In a word, he has sensations, and those sensations are accompanied, as all sensations in their nature are, and must be, with consciousness, that is, they are felt. But this does not necessarily involve what we understand by consciousness in its higher sense, or _self-consciousness_. The brute has, we believe, no knowledge of himself as such, no _self-consciousness_, properly speaking; does not distinguish between self as perceiving, and the object as perceived, has no conception of self as a separate existence distinct from the objects around him, has, strictly speaking, no ideas, no thoughts, no intelligent comprehension of objects about him; has _sensations_, but no _perceptions_ in the true sense of the word, since perception involves the distinction of subject and object, or self-consciousness. These distinctions are lost to the brute, blindly merged in the one simple consciousness of physical sensation. He feels, but does not think, does not understand. Sensation takes the place of understanding and reason with him. It is his guide. To the impressions thus received, his nature blindly responds, he knows not how or why. He is so constituted by his wise and benevolent Maker, that sensation being awakened, the impulses of his nature at once spring into play, and prompt irresistibly to action, and to such action as shall meet the wants of the being. There is no need for intelligence to supervene, as with man. The brute feels and _acts_. Man feels, _thinks_, and acts. The Creator has provided, for, the former, a substitute which takes the place of intellect, and secures by blind, yet unerring impulse, the simple ends which correspond to his simpler necessities, and his humbler sphere. _Man's Superiority._--Herein lies man's mastership and dominion over the brute. He has what the brute has not, intellect, mind, the power of thought, the power to understand and know. Just so far as he fails to grasp this high prerogative, just so far as he is governed by sensation and its corresponding impulses, rather than by intelligence and reason, just in such degree he lays aside his superiority, and sinks to the sphere of the brute. Thus, in infancy and early life, there is little difference. Thus, many savage and uneducated races never rise far above the brute capacity, are mere creatures of sensation, impulse, instinct. _In one Respect inferior._--In one respect, indeed, man, destitute of intelligence or failing to govern himself by its precepts, sinks _below_ the brute. He has not the substitute for intelligence which the brute has, has not instinct to guide him, and teach him the true and proper bounds of indulgence, but giving way to passion and inclination, without restraint, presents that most melancholy spectacle on which the sun, in all his course, ever looks down, a man under the dominion of his own appetites, incapable of self-government, lost to all nobleness, all virtue, all self-respect. _Memory in the Brute._--It may still be asked, does not the brute _remember_? It is the office of memory to replace or represent what has been once felt or perceived. It simply reproduces, in thought, what has once passed before the mind. It originates nothing. Whatever, then, of intelligence was involved in the original act of perception and sensation, so much and no more is involved in the replacing those sensations and perceptions. If in the original act there was nothing but simple sensation, without intellectual apprehension of the object, without self-consciousness or distinction of subject from object, then, of course, nothing more than this will be subsequently reproduced. Mere images or phantasms of sensible objects may reappear, as shadows flicker and dance upon the wall, or as such images flit before us in our dreams. The memory of the brute is, probably, of this nature, rather a sort of dream than a distinct conception of past events. What was not clearly apprehended at first, will not be better understood now. Failing, in the first instance, to distinguish self from the object external, as the source of impressions, there can be no _recognition_ of that distinction when the object reappears, if it ever should, in conception. The essential element of memory, which connects the object or event of former perception with _self_ as the percipient, must, in such a case, be wanting. _The Brute associates rather than remembers._--What is usually called memory in the brute, is not, however, so much his capacity of conceiving of an absent object of sense, as his recognition of the object when again actually present to his senses. The dog manifests pleasure at the appearance of his master, and the horse chooses the road that leads to his former home. This is not so much memory as association of ideas or rather of feelings. Certain feelings and sensations are associated, confusedly blended, with certain objects. The reappearance of the objects, of course, reawakens the former feelings. Thus, the whip is associated with the sensation experienced in connection with it. So, too, a horse which has once been frightened by some object beside the road, will manifest fear on subsequently approaching the same place, although the same object may no longer be there. The surrounding objects which still remain, and which were associated with the more immediate object of fear in the first instance, are sufficient to awaken, on their reappearance, the former unpleasant sensations. A being endowed with intelligence and reason would connect the recurring object, in such a case, with his own former experience as the perceiving subject, would recall the time and the circumstances of the event and its connection with his personal history. This would be, properly, an act of memory. But there is no reason to suppose that such a process takes place with the brute. We have no evidence of any thing more, in his case, than the recurrence of the associated conception or sensation, along with the recurrence of the object which formerly produced it. Given, the object _a_, accompanied with surrounding objects _b, c, d_, and there is produced a given sensation, _y_. Given, again, at some subsequent time, the same object _a_, or any one of the associate objects _b, c, d_, and there is at once awakened a lively conception of the same sensation _y_. _Summary of Results._--This is, I think, all we can, with any certainty, attribute to the brute. He has sensations, and so far as mere sense is concerned, perceptions of objects, as connected with those sensations, but not perception in the true sense as involving intellectual apprehension. These sensations and confused perceptions recur, perhaps, as images or conceptions, in the absence of the objects that gave rise to them, and as thus reappearing, constitute what we may call the memory of the brute; but not, as with us, a memory which connects the object or event with his own former history, and the idea of a personal self as the percipient. Let the object, however, reappear, and the previous sensation associated therewith, is reawakened. This, I am aware, is not the view most commonly entertained of brute intelligence. We naturally conceive of the brute as possessing faculties similar to our own. The brute, in turn, were he capable of forming such a conception, would, probably, conceive of man, as endowed with capacities like his own. In neither case is this the right conception. CHAPTER II. MIND AS AFFECTED BY CERTAIN STATES OF THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM. _Statement._--There are certain mental phenomena connected with the relation which the mind sustains to the nervous organism, and depending intimately on the state of that organism, which seem to require the notice of the psychologist, though often overlooked by him; I refer to the phenomena of sleep, dreams, somnambulism, and insanity. So far as the activity of the mind is involved in these states or phenomena, they become proper objects of psychological inquiry. They present many problems difficult of solution, yet not the less curious and interesting, as phases of mental activity hitherto little understood. _View sometimes taken by Physiologists._--It becomes the more important for the psychologist to investigate these phenomena, inasmuch as views and theories little accordant with the true philosophy of the mind have sometimes been put forth by physiologists, in attempting to explain the phenomena in question. They have viewed the cerebral apparatus as competent of itself to produce the phenomena of thought, as _self-acting_, in the absence of the higher principle of intelligence which usually governs its operations, carrying on by a sort of automatic action, the processes usually ascribed to the mind or spiritual principle, while consciousness and volition are entirely suspended. Consciousness, in fact, is nothing but sensation, and thought a mere function of the brain. This is downright materialism, a doctrine utterly subversive of the very existence of that which we call mind or soul in man. If the cerebral organization is competent of itself during sleep to carry on those operations which in waking moments are ascribed to the spiritual element of our being, if thought is a function of the brain, as digestion is of the stomach, what need and what evidence of any thing more than merely cerebral action at any time? What, in fact, is the mind itself but cerebral activity, and what is man, with all his higher powers, but a mere animated organism? It becomes important, then, to account for the phenomena under consideration in some way more consistent with all just and true notions of the nature and philosophy of mind. _Distinction of normal and abnormal States._--Of these phenomena, while all may be regarded as intimately connected with and dependent on the state of the brain and nervous system, some seem to proceed from a normal, others from an abnormal and disordered state of the nervous and particularly the cerebral organism. Of the former class, are sleep and dreams; of the latter, somnambulism, the mesmeric state, so called, and the various forms of disordered mental action, or insanity. § I.--SLEEP. _Meaning of the Term._--What is sleep? Will the name itself afford any solution of this problem? Like most names of familiar things, we find the word descriptive of some particular circumstance or phase, some one prominent characteristic of the thing in question, rather than a _definition_--much less an explanation--of the thing itself. The word sleep, from _schlafen_, as the Latin _somnus_ from _supinus_, refers to the supine condition and appearance of the body when in this state; the relaxing of the muscles the falling back or sinking down of the frame, if unsupported. This is the first and most obvious effect to the eye of an observer, of the condition of sleep as regards the body. Further than this the word gives us no light. 1. _Sleep involves primarily Loss of Consciousness._--What then, further than this, is sleep? If we observe somewhat closely, and with a view to scientific arrangement, the different aspects or phenomena that present themselves as constituting that state of body and mind which we call sleep, the primary and most obvious fact, I apprehend, is _loss of consciousness_, of _the me_. Not perhaps of all consciousness, for we seem still to exist, but of self-consciousness, of the me as related to time, and place, and external circumstance We _lose ourselves_, as a common but most exact expression describes it. _We are not at the Time aware of this Loss._--Of course, sleep consisting primarily in loss of consciousness, we are not conscious of the fact that we sleep, for this would be a _consciousness_ that we were unconscious. Illustrations of this fact are of frequent occurrence. You are of an evening getting weary over your book. You are vaguely conscious of that weariness, amounting even to drowsiness; you find it difficult to follow the course of thought, or even to keep the line, but have no idea that you are at length actually asleep for the moment, till the sudden fall of the book awakens you. Nay, one who has been vigorously nodding for five minutes will, on recovering himself, stoutly deny that he has really been asleep at all; the truth is, he was not _conscious_ of it; we never are, directly. _This results from what?_--This loss of consciousness results from the inactivity of the bodily senses. It is these that afford us the data for a knowledge of self in relation to external things. In sleep these avenues of communication with the external world are shut up, and we silently drop off, and, as it were, float away from all _conscious_ connection with it. We no longer recognize our relations to time and space, nor even to our own bodies, which, as material, come under those relations; for it is by the senses alone that we get these ideas. So far as consciousness of these relations is concerned, we exist in sleep as in death, out of the laws and limits of time and space, and irrespective of the body and of all material existence. Mental action, however, doubtless goes on, and we are conscious of thought and of the feeling of the moment, but of nothing further. All self-consciousness is gone. _An Affection primarily of the nervous System._--Sleep, then, would seem to be primarily an affection of the nervous system; not of the reproductive--that goes on as usual, and even with increased vigor; nor yet of the muscular--that is still capable of action; but only of the nervous. That gets weary; by continued use, its vital active force is exhausted, it needs rest, becomes inactive, gradually drops off, and so there results this loss of consciousness, of which I have spoken. It is strictly, then, the nervous system, and not the whole body that sleeps. _Different Senses fall Asleep successively._--The different senses become inactive and fall asleep, not all at once, but successively. First, sight goes. The eye-lids droop, and close. Taste and smell probably next. Touch, and hearing, are among the last to give way. Hence, noises so easily disturb us, when falling asleep. Hence, too, we are most easily awaked by some one repeating our name, or by some one touching us. These senses are also the first to waken. One sense may be asleep and another awake. You may still hear what one is saying that sits near you, when already the eye is asleep. So in death, one _hears_ when no longer able to see or to speak. 2. _Loss of personal Control._--Accompanying this loss of self-consciousness is the loss of _personal control_, _i. e._, the control of the will over the bodily organization. This follows from the inactivity of the senses and of the nervous system, for it is only through that, and not by direct agency of the will, that we, at any time, exert voluntary power over the body. When that system becomes exhausted, and its force is spent, so that it can no longer furnish the motive power, nor execute the commands of the higher intelligence the will no longer maintains its empire over the physical organization, its little realm of matter, its control is suspended, its sceptre falls, and it realizes for the time the story of the enchanted palace on which a magic spell had fallen, suddenly arresting the busy tide of life, and sealing up, on the instant, the senses of king, courtiers, and attendants, in the unbroken sleep of ages. _Indications of approaching Sleep._--One of the first indications, accordingly, of the approach of sleep, is the relaxing of the muscles, the drooping of the eye-lid, the dropping of the head and of the arm, the sinking down of the body from an erect to a supine position. If in church, the head seeks the friendly support of the pew in front, fortunate if it can secure itself there from the still further demands of gravitation. _Analogous Cases._--In respect to the point now under consideration, the loss of control over the physical frame, the phenomena of sleep closely resemble those of intoxication, and of fainting; and for the same reason, in either case, _i. e._, the inactivity of the nervous system, which is the medium of voluntary power over the body. That inactivity of the nervous system is produced in the one case by natural, in the other by unnatural causes, but the direct effect is the same as regards the loss of voluntary power. The same effects are also produced in certain diseases, and eventually by death. 3. _Loss of Control over the Mind._--Analogous to this is the loss of voluntary control over the mental operations, which is in fact, so far as the mind is concerned, the essential feature and characteristic of sleep. Mental action still goes on, there is reason to suppose; in many cases we know that it does; but the thoughts come and go at their own pleasure, without regulation or control. It is not in our power to arrest a certain thought, and fix our minds upon it for the time, to the exclusion of others, as we can do in the waking moments, and which constitutes, in fact, the chief control and power we have over our thoughts, nor can we dismiss, and throw off, an unpleasant train of thought, a disagreeable impression, however much we may desire to be rid of it. We are at the mercy of our own thoughts and casual associations, which, in the ungoverned, spontaneous play of the mind's own inherent energy, and guided only by its own native laws, produce the wildest and strangest phantasmagoria, having to us all the semblance of reality, while we are, in truth, mere passive spectators of the scene. _Faculties of Mind not suspended in Sleep._--It has been supposed by some that the faculties of the mind are, in part or wholly, suspended in sleep, especially the higher faculties more immediately dependent on the will. So long as mental activity goes on, however,--and there is no evidence that it ever entirely ceases in sleep--so long there is thought, and so long must that thought and activity be exerted in some particular direction, and on some particular object. We cannot conceive of the mind as acting or thinking, and not exercising any of its faculties, for what is a faculty of the mind but its capacity of acting in this or that way or mode, and on this or that class of subjects. It may be perception, or conception, or memory, or imagination, or judgment, or reasoning, or any other faculty that is for the moment active; it _must_ be some one of the known faculties of the mind, unless, indeed, we suppose some new faculties to be then developed, of whose existence we are at other times unconscious. _Mental Action modified by certain Causes in Sleep._--The faculties will, however, be materially modified in their action during sleep, by the causes already named; chiefly these two: 1st. the entire suspension of voluntary control over the train of thought; 2d. the loss of personal consciousness as regards especially the bodily organization, and its present relations to time, and space, and all sensible objects. In consequence of the _former_ our thoughts will come and go all unregulated and disconnected; there will be no coherence; the slightest analysis will suffice for the associating principle; we shall be hurried on and borne away on the rushing tide of thought, as a frail passive leaf swept on the bosom of the rapids; we shall whirl hither and thither as in the dance of the witches; we shall waken in confusion, and seek to recover the reins of self-control, only to lose them again and be swept on in the fearful dance. _Want of Congruity owing to what._--In consequence of the _latter_ cause--the loss of sensational consciousness and of our relations to sensible objects--there will be an entire want of fitness and congruity in our mental operations. The laws of time, and space, and personal identity, will be altogether disregarded, and we shall not be conscious of the incongruity, nor wonder at the strangest and most contradictory combinations. Here, there, everywhere, now this and now that. The scene is in the valley of the Connecticut, and anon on the Ural mountains, or the desert of Arabia, and we do not notice the change as any thing at all remarkable. Now we are walking up the aisle of the church, in garments all too scanty for the proprieties of the occasion, and now it is a wild bull that is racing after us, and the transition from one to the other is instantaneous. Why should it not be, for it is by the senses alone that we are brought into conscious relation to the external world, and so made cognizant of the laws of time and space, and those senses being now locked in oblivion, what are time and space to us? _The Causes now named a sufficient Explanation of the Phenomena._--The causes already named will sufficiently account for the strange and distorted action of the various mental faculties as exercised in sleep. Memory, _e. g._, will give us the past with _variations_ ad libitum; things will appear to us, and events will seem to transpire, and forms and faces familiar will look out upon us, not as they really are, or ever were. We talk with a former friend, without the thought once occurring to us that he has been dead these many years. Impression there is, feeling, idea, fancy, association of all these, but hardly memory, or even imagination, much less judgment or reasoning. So it would seem at first. A closer inspection, however, will show us that there is in reality, in this spontaneous play of the mind, the exercise of all these faculties, only so modified by causes now named as to present strange and uncouth results. _Mental Faculties not immediately dependent on the Will._--If any of the mental faculties can be shown to be entirely dependent on the will for their activity and operation, so as to have no power to act except by its order or permission, then it would follow that when the will is no longer in possession of the throne, when its sway is for the time suspended as in sleep, the faculties thus dependent on it must lie inactive. But with regard to most if not all mental operations, we know the reverse to be true. They are capable of _spontaneous_, as well as voluntary action. Nay, some of them, it would seem, are not subject, in any case, directly to its control. It is not at our option whether to remember or forget, whether to perceive surrounding objects, whether such or such a thought shall, by the laws of association, follow next in the train of ideas and impressions. Some mental operations are more closely connected with and admit of a more direct interference on the part of the will than others, but it cannot be shown, I think, that any faculty is so far dependent on the will as not to be capable of action, irrespective of its demands. Indeed, facts seem to show that where once a train of mental action has been set in operation by the will, that action goes on, for a time, even when the will is withdrawn, or held in abeyance, as in sleep, or profound reverie. _Whence this Suspension of Power of the Will._--The question may occur, whence arises this suspension of the power of the will over the mental operations in sleep? What produces it? Does it, like the loss of voluntary power over the physical frame, result from the inactivity of the nervous apparatus? The fact that it always accompanies this, and is found in connection with it, that whatever produces the latter seems to be the occasion, also, of the former, as in the case of disease, delirium, mesmeric influence, stupefying drugs, inebriation, etc., and that the degree of the one, whether partial or complete, is in proportion to the degree of the other--these facts seem to me to favor the idea now suggested. _Summary of Results._--These, then, seem to be the principal phenomena of sleep: loss of sensational consciousness, loss of voluntary power over the body, loss of voluntary power over the operations of the mind. _Exhaustion of the nervous System._--Sleep, then, appears to be primarily an affection of the nervous system, the result of its exhaustion. By the law of nature, it cannot continue always active; repose must succeed to effort. Hence, the more rapid the exhaustion of the nervous system, from any cause, the more sleep is demanded. This we know to be the fact. The more sensitive the system, as in childhood, or with the gentler sex, as in men of great sensibility also, poets, artists, and others, the more sleep. On the other hand, those sluggish natures which allow nothing to excite or call into action the nervous system, sleep from precisely the opposite cause; not the exhaustion of nervous activity, but its absolute non-existence. If both our systems, the animal and the vegetative or nutritive, should sleep at once, says Rauch, there would be nothing to awaken us. That would be death. "In sleep, every man has a world of his own," says Heraclitus; "when awake, all men have one in common." Sleeping and waking, it has been beautifully said by another, are the ebb and flood of mind and matter on the ocean of our life. § II.--DREAMS. _Resumè of previous Investigation._--It has been shown in the preceding section, that sleep is primarily and chiefly an affection of the nervous system, in which, through exhaustion, the senses become inactive, and, as it were, dead, while, at the same, the nutritive system and the functions essential to life go on; that in consequence of this inactivity of the sensorium, there results, 1. Loss of consciousness, so far, at least, as regards all connection with, and relation to, external things; 2. Loss of voluntary power over the physical and muscular frame; 3. Loss of voluntary control over the operations of the mind; the mind still remaining active, however, and its operations going on, uncontrolled by the will. We are now prepared to take up, more particularly, that specific form of mental activity in sleep, called dreaming; a state which admits of easy explanation on principles already laid down. _A Dream, what._--What, then, is a _dream_? I reply, it is any mental action in sleep, of which, for any reason, we are afterward _conscious_. This is not the case with all, perhaps, with most mental action during sleep. Senses and the will are inactive, then, for the most part, and whatever thoughts and impressions may be wrought out in the laboratory of the mind, whatever play of forces and wondrous alchemy may there be going on, when the controlling principle that presides over and directs its operations is withdrawn, are, for the most part, never subsequently reported. Let the sensitivity be partially aroused, however, let some disturbing cause come in to prevent entire loss of sensibility, or let the conceptions of the mind present themselves with more than usual vividness and force of impression, and what we then think may afterward be remembered. This is the philosophy of dreams. What is thus remembered of our thoughts in sleep, we call a dream, more especially applying the term to such of our thoughts and conceptions in sleep, as have some degree of coherence and connection between themselves, so as to constitute a sort of unity. _Sources of our Dreams._--Our dreams take shape and character from a variety of circumstances. They are not altogether accidental nor unaccountable; and even when we cannot trace the connection, there is reason to suppose that such connection exists between the dream, and the state of the body, or of the mind, at the time, as, if known, would account for the shape and complexion of the dream. The principal sources, or, perhaps, it were more correct to say, modifying influences of our dreams are, 1, Our present bodily sensations, and especially the internal state of the physical system, and, 2, Our previous waking thoughts, dispositions, and prevalent states of mind. _Illustrations of the first._--As to the first of these modifying causes, instances of its operation will probably occur to every one from his own experience. You find yourself on a hard bed, or, it may be, have thrown yourself into some uncomfortable position, and you dream of broken bones or of the rack. The band of your robe buttons tightly about the neck, and you dream of hanging. You have taken a late supper of food highly seasoned and indigestible, and in your dreams a black bear very heavy and huge, quietly seats himself on your chest, or, as a military officer once dreamed, under similar circumstances, the prince of darkness sits cross-legged over your stomach, with the Bunker Hill monument in his lap. The instance related by Mr. Stewart, of the gentleman, who, sleeping with bottles of hot water at his feet, dreamed that he was walking along the burning crater of Mount Ætna, is in point here. Here the bodily sensation of heat upon the soles of the feet suggests the idea of a situation in which such a sensation would be likely to occur, and this idea blending with the sensation which is permanent and real, assumes, also, the character of reality, and the dream shapes itself accordingly. So when a window falls, or some sudden noise is heard, if it do not positively awaken you so far as to make known the real cause, you hear the sound, the sensorium partially aroused, mistakes it, perhaps, for the sound of a gun, and instantly you are in the midst of a battle at sea, or a fight with robbers. To such an extent are our dreams modified by sensible impressions of this sort, that it is possible, by skillful management, to shape and direct, to some extent, at least, the dreams of another as you will. An instance is related of an officer who was made, in this way, in his sleep, to go through with all the minutia of a duel, even to the firing of the pistol which was placed in his hand, at the proper moment, the noise of which awoke him. This was simply an _acted_ dream. _Latent Disease._--Not unfrequently, some physical disorder, incipient or latent, of which we may not be aware in our waking moments, makes itself felt in the state of sleep, when the system is more susceptible of internal impressions, and thus modifies the dreams. In such cases, the dreams may serve as a sort of _index_ of the state of the physical system, and somewhat, doubtless, of the apparently prophetic character of certain dreams may be accounted for in this way. _The second Source._--A second source, if not of our dreams themselves, at least of the peculiar shape and character which they assume, is to be found in our previous thoughts, and prevalent mental occupations and dispositions. We fall asleep, and mental action goes on much as before, in whatever direction and channel it had already received an impulse. Whatever has made the deepest impression on us through the day, has longest or most intently occupied us, _repeats_ itself the moment we lose our consciousness of surrounding objects. The mind goes on with the new and strange spectacle, or with the unfinished problem, and unsolved intricate study of the day or of the night hour; and not seldom is the train of thought resumed and pursued to some purpose. On waking in the morning, we find little difficulty in completing a demonstration or solving a difficulty which had appeared insurmountable when we left it the previous night. Now the truth is, we did not leave it the previous night. It occupied us in our sleep. The brain was busy with it, it may be, all the night. It is solved in the morning, not because the mind is fresher then, but because it has been at work upon it through the night. Sometimes we are conscious of this on waking, and can dimly recall the severe continuous mental toil which went on while we slept. Usually, I suppose, we have no consciousness of it, and our only evidence of it is the well-known law and habit of the mind, to run in its worn and latest channels, together with the often observed fact that the difficulty previously felt is, somehow, strangely solved. _Further Illustration of the same Principle._--Condorcet is not the only mathematician who has received, in sleep, suggestions which led to the right solution of a problem that he had been obliged to leave unfinished on retiring for the night; nor is Franklin the only statesman who has, in dreams, reached a satisfactory conclusion respecting some intricate political movement. However this may be, there can be no reasonable doubt that our previous mental occupation, our prevalent state and disposition of mind, our habits of thought and habits of feeling, determine and shape the complexion of our dreams. They have a _subjective_ connection, are by no means so disconnected with us and our real history, so much a matter of hap-hazard, as one may suppose. It was not without reason that President Edwards took notice of his dreams as affording an index of the state of his heart, and his real native propensities. They are the vane that shows which way the mind is set. Who will say that the dreams of Lady Macbeth, those dreams of a guilty conscience, are not among the most truthful of the portraitures of the great master dramatist? _Native Talent then shows itself._--Not only our native disposition and prevalent cast of thought betray themselves in dreams, but, as a certain writer has remarked, our native talents show out in those moments of spontaneous mental action. Talents which have had no opportunity to develop themselves, owing to our education and professional pursuits, take their chance and their time when we sleep, and we are poets, artists, orators, whatever nature designed, whatever the trammelled mind longs, but longs in vain, to be in our waking moments. _Incoherency of Dreams._--The _incoherency_ of our dreams has been sufficiently accounted for in what I have previously said. It is not, I think, owing chiefly, as Upham supposes, to our loss of voluntary power and control over our thoughts during sleep, though it is quite true that we have no such control. The truth is, we are not at the time _aware_ of any such incoherency. It cannot, of course, be owing then to our loss of voluntary power, since no increase of such power would enable us to repair a defect which we are unconscious of, but is owing entirely to another cause already mentioned, viz., that in sleep we lose our _relation_ to things around us, lose our place, and our time, and hence, retain no standard of judging as to what is, and what is not, consentaneous and fit, self-consistent and coherent. _Apparent Reality._--Nothing is more remarkable in dreams than their apparent _reality_. The scenes, actions, and incidents, all stand out with peculiar distinctness, are projected as images into the air before us, and have not at all the semblance of any thing merely subjective. This has been, by some, ascribed to the fact that there is nothing to distract or call off the attention from the conceptions of the mind in dreams; we are wholly in them, and hence they appear as realities. I do not find, however, that in proportion as my attention in waking moments is wholly absorbed in any train of thought, those conceptions manifest any such tendency to project themselves, so to speak, into objective reality. They are still mere conceptions, only more vivid. I am inclined, therefore, to attribute the seeming reality of dreams to another source. We are accustomed to regard every thing as _objective_, which is out of the reach and control of our will, which comes and goes irrespective of us and our volition. Now, such we find to be the prime law of cerebral action in sleep. Of course, then, we are deceived into the belief that these conceptions over which we have no control, are not conceptions, but _perceptions_, realities. _Estimate of Time._--Nothing has seemed to some writers more mysterious than the entire disproportion between the _real_ and _apparent_ time of a dream. I refer to the fact that our dreams occupy frequently such very minute portions of time, while they seem to us to stretch over such long continued periods. An instance is related of an officer confined in the prisons of the French Revolution, who was awakened by the call of the sentry changing guard, fell asleep again, witnessed, as he supposed, a very long and very horrible procession of armed and bloody warriors, defiling on horseback down a certain street of Paris, occupying some hours in their passage, then awoke in terror in season to hear distinctly the response of the sentry to the challenge given before the dream began. The mind in such cases, say some, operates more rapidly than at other times. There is no evidence of that. Mr. Stewart has suggested, I think, the right explanation. As our dreams seem to us real, and we have no means of estimating time otherwise than by the apparent succession of events, the conceptions of the brain, that is, our dreams, seem to us to take up just so much time in passing as the _events themselves_ would occupy were they real. This is perfectly a natural result, and it fully accounts for the apparent anomaly in question. _Prophetic Aspect._--Are dreams sometimes _prophetic_, and how are such to be accounted for? Cicero narrates a remarkable instance of what would seem to be a prophetic dream. I refer to the account of the two Arcadians who came to Megara and occupied different lodgings. The one imploring help, then murdered, and informing his comrade that his body would be taken out of the city early in the morning, by a certain gate, in a covered wagon. Agitated by the dream, the other repairs at the designed time to the appointed place, meets the wagon, discovers the body, arrests the murderer, and delivers him to justice. _Other Instances of the like Nature._--Another instance, perhaps equally striking, is narrated in the London _Times_. A Mr. Williams, residing in Cornwall, dreamed thrice in the same night that he saw the Chancellor of England killed, in the vestibule of the House of Commons. The dream so deeply impressed him that he narrated it to several of his acquaintance. It was subsequently ascertained that on the evening of that day the Chancellor, Mr. Perceval, was assassinated according to the dream. Now, this was certainly a remarkable coincidence. Was it any thing more? Was it merely an accidental thing--a matter of chance--that the dream should occur as it did, and should tally so closely with the facts? But these are not singular instances. Many such are on record. _Case related by Dr. Moore._--Dr. Moore, author of an interesting work on the use of the body in relation to the mind, narrates the following, as coming under his own observation. A friend of his dreamed that he was amusing himself, as he was in the habit of doing, by reading the epitaphs in a country church-yard, when a newly made grave attracted his attention. He was surprised to find on the stone the name, and date of death, of an intimate friend of his, with whom he had passed that very evening in conversation. Nothing more was thought of the dream, however, nor, perhaps, would it ever have recurred to mind, had he not received intelligence, some months afterward, of the death of this friend, which took place at the very date he had, in his dream, seen recorded on the tombstone. _Case related by Dr. Abercrombie._--The case mentioned by Dr. Abercrombie is another of these remarkable coincidences. Two sisters sleeping in the same room adjoining that of a sick brother, the one awakens in affright, having dreamed that the watch had stopped, and that on mentioning it to her sister, the latter replied, "Worse than that has happened, for ----'s breath has stopped also." On examination the watch was found going and the brother in a sound sleep. The next night the dream was repeated precisely as before with the same result. The next morning as one of the sisters had occasion to take the watch from the writing-desk she was surprised to find it had stopped, and at the same moment was startled by a scream from the other sister in the chamber of the sick man, who had, at that moment, expired. _Additional Cases._--Another instance of a similar nature is related, but I know not on how good authority. The sister of Major Andrè, it is said, dreamed of her absent brother, one night, as arrested and on trial before a court martial. The appearance of the officers, their dress, etc., was distinctly impressed on her mind; the room, the relative position of the prisoner and his judges, were noticed; the general nature of the trial, and its result, the condemnation of her brother. She woke deeply impressed. Her fears were shortly afterward confirmed by the sad intelligence of her brother's arrest, trial, and execution, and, what is remarkable, the facts corresponded to her dream, both as respects the time of occurrence, the place, the appearance of the room, position, and dress of the judges, etc. Washington and Knox were particularly designated, though she had never seen them. Another instance is related of a man who dreamed that the vessel in which his brother was an officer, and, in part, owner of the cargo, was wrecked on a certain island, and the vessel lost, but the hands saved. He was so impressed that he went directly and procured an extra insurance of five thousand dollars on his brother's portion of the property. By the next arrival news came that the vessel was wrecked, at the time and place of which the man had dreamed, and the mariners saved. _Coincidences._--Now it is perfectly easy to call all these things _coincidences_. They certainly are. But is it certain, or it is probable, that they are _mere_ coincidences? To call them coincidences, and pass them off as if they were easily and fully accounted for in that way, is but a shallow concealment of our ignorance under a certain show of philosophy. It is but a conjecture at the best; a conjecture, moreover, which explains nothing, but leaves the mystery just as great as before; a conjecture which is by no means the most probable of all that might be made, but, on the contrary, one of the most improbable of all, as it seems to me. Mark, the cases I have now mentioned do not come under any of the laws or conditions laid down as giving rise or modification to our dreams. They are not suggested, so far as it appears, by any present bodily sensation on the part of the dreamer, nor was there any reason in the nature of the case why any such event, much less conjunction of events, should be apprehended by the dreamer in his waking moments. It was not the simple carrying out of his waking thoughts. Doubtless many dreams regarded as prophetic, may be explained on these principles. They are the result of our present sensations or impressions, or of the excited and anxious state of mind and train of thought during the day. But not so in the cases now cited. _Not necessary to suppose them Supernatural._--Shall we believe, then, that dreams are sometimes prophetic? We have no reason to doubt that they _may_ be so. Are they, in that case, _supernatural_ events? No doubt the future may be supernaturally communicated in dreams. No doubt it has been, and that not in a few cases, as every believer in the sacred Scriptures must admit. But this is not a necessary supposition. A dream may be prophetic, yet not supernatural. Some law, not fully known to us, may exist, by virtue of which the nervous system, when in a highly excited state, becomes susceptible of impressions not ordinarily received, and is put in communication, in some way to us mysterious, with scenes, places, and events, far distant, so as to become strangely cognizant of the coming future. Can any one show that this is impossible? Is it more improbable than that the cases recorded are mere chance coincidences? Is it not quite as likely to be so, as that the event should correspond, in so many cases and so striking a manner, with the previous dream, and yet there be _no cause, whatever_, for the correspondence? Is it not as reasonable, even, as to suppose direct divine interposition to reveal the future, the possibility of which interposition I by no means deny, but the reason for which does not become apparent? Is it not possible that there may be some natural law or agent of the sort now intimated, some as yet unexplained, but partially known, condition of the physical system, when in a peculiarly sensitive state, of which the _modus operandi_ is not yet understood, but the existence of which is indicated in cases like those now described? That this is the true explanation, I by no means affirm; I make the suggestion merely to indicate what, it seems to me, may be a _possible_ solution of the problem. _Possible Modes of accounting for the Facts._--Evidently there are only these four possible solutions. 1. To deny the facts themselves, _i. e._, that any such dreams occurred, or at least, that they were verified in actual result. 2. To call them accidental coincidences. 3. To admit a supernatural agency. 4. To explain them in the way suggested. Our choice lies, as it seems to me, between the second and the last of these suppositions. § III.--SOMNAMBULISM. _Relation to the magnetic State._--Somnambulism or sleep-walking, is called, by some writers, _natural magnetic sleep_. They suppose it to differ from the state ordinarily called mesmeric, chiefly in this, that the former is a natural, and the latter an artificial process. _Resemblance of this to other cognate Phenomena._--We shall have occasion, as we proceed, to notice the very close resemblance between dreaming, somnambulism, mesmerism, and insanity, all, in fact, closely related to each other, characterized each and all by one and the same great law, and passing into each other by almost imperceptible gradations. _Method proposed._--It will be to the purpose, first to describe the phenomena of somnambulism, then to inquire whether they can be accounted for. _Description._--The principal phenomena of somnambulism are the following: The subject, while in a state of sound sleep, and perfectly unconscious of what he does, rises, walks about, finds his way over dangerous, and, at other times, inaccessible places, speaks and acts as if awake, performs in the dark, and with the eyes closed, or even bandaged, operations which require the closest attention and the best vision, perceives, indeed, things not visible to the eye in its ordinary waking state, perhaps even things absent and future, and when awakened from this state, is perfectly unconscious of what has happened, and astonished to find himself in some strange and unnatural position. _An Instance narrated._--A case which fell under the observation of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, when a student in the seminary, is narrated in the French Encyclopedia. A young minister, resident there, was a somnambulist, and to satisfy himself as to the nature of this strange disease, the Archbishop went every night into his room, after the young man was asleep. He would arise, take paper, pen, and ink, and proceed to the composition of sermons. Having written a page in a clear legible hand, he would read it aloud from top to bottom, with a clear voice and proper emphasis. If a passage did not please him, he would erase it, and write the correction, plainly, in its proper place, over the erased line or word. All this was done without any assistance from the eye, which was evidently asleep; a piece of pasteboard interposed between the eye and the paper produced no interruption or inconvenience. When his paper was exchanged for another of the same size, he was not aware of the change, but when a paper of a different size was substituted, he at once detected the difference. This shows that the sense of tact or feeling was active, and served as a guiding sense. _Other Cases of a similar Nature._--Similar cases, almost without number, are on record, in which much the same phenomena are observed. In some instances it is remarked that the subject, having written a sentence on a page, returns, and carefully dots the i's, and crosses the t's. These phenomena are not confined to the night. Persons have fallen into the magnetic state, while in church, during divine service, have gone home with their eyes closed, carefully avoiding obstacles in their way, as persons or carriages passing; and have been sent, in this state, of errands to places several miles distant, going and returning in safety. An amusing incident is on record of a gentleman who found that his hen-roost was the scene of nightly and alarming depredations, which threatened the entire devastation of the premises, and what was strange, a large and faithful watch-dog gave no alarm. Determined to ascertain the true state of the case, he employed his servants to watch. During the night the thief made his appearance, was caught, after much resistance, and proved to be the _gentleman himself_, in a state of sound sleep, the author of all the mischief. _A remarkable Instance._--Another case is also related, which presents some features quite remarkable. In a certain school for young ladies, I think in France, prizes had been offered for the best paintings. Among the competitors was a young and timid girl who was conscious of her inferiority in the art, yet strongly desirous of success. For a time she was quite dissatisfied with the progress of her work, but by and by began to notice, as she resumed her pencil in the morning, that something had been added to the work since she last touched it. This was noticed for some time, and quite excited her curiosity. The additions were evidently by a superior hand, far excelling her own in skill and workmanship. Her companions denied, each, and severally, all knowledge of the matter. She placed articles of furniture against her door in such a way that any one entering would be sure to awaken her. They were undisturbed, but still the mysterious additions continued to be made. At last, her companions concluded to watch without, and make sure that no one entered her apartment during the night, but still the work went on. At length it occurred to them to watch her movements, and now the mystery was explained. They saw her, evidently in sound sleep, rise, dress, take her place at the table, and commence her work. It was her own hand that, unconsciously to herself, had executed the work in a style which, in her waking moments, she could not approach, and which quite surpassed all competition. The picture, notwithstanding her protestations that it was not her painting, took the prize. _The Question._--How is it now, that in a state of sleep, with the eye, probably, fast closed, and the room in darkness, this girl can use the pencil in a manner so superior to any thing that she can do in the day time, with her eyes open, and in the full possession and employment of her senses and her will? _Several Things to be accounted for._--Here are, in fact, several things to be accounted for. How is it that the somnambulist rises and moves about in a state of apparently sound sleep? How is it that she performs actions requiring often a high degree of intelligence, and yet without apparent consciousness? How is it that she moves fearlessly and safely, as is often the case, over places where she could not stand for a moment, in her waking state, without the greatest danger? How is it that she can see without the eye, and perform actions in utter darkness, requiring the nicest attention, and the best vision, and not only do them, but in such a manner as even to surpass what can be done by the same person in any other state, under the most favorable circumstances? _First, the Movement._--As to the first thing--the movement and locomotion in sleep--it may be accounted for in two ways. We may suppose it to be wholly automatic. This is the view of some eminent physiologists. The conscious soul, they say, has nothing to do with it, no knowledge of it. The will has nothing more to do with it, than it has with the contraction of a muscle, or irritation in an amputated limb. _Objection to this View._--For reasons intimated already, we cannot adopt the automatic theory. It seems to us subversive of all true science of the mind. The body is self-moved in obedience to the active energy of the nervous organism, and this organism again, acts only as it is acted upon by the mind that animates, pervades, and controls that organism. In the waking state, this mental action, and the consequent nervous and muscular activity, are under the control of the will. In sleep, this control is, for the time, suspended, and the thoughts come and go as it may chance, subject to no law but that of the associative principle. The mind, however, is still active, and the thoughts are busy in their own spontaneous movement. To this movement, the brain and nervous system respond. That the brain itself thinks, that the nerves and muscles act, and the limbs move automatically, without the energizing activity of the mind, is a supposition purely gratuitous, inconsistent with all the known facts and evident indications of the case, and at war with all just notions of the relation of body and mind. _Another Theory._--Another, and much more reasonable supposition is, that the will, which ordinarily in sleep loses control both over the mind and the body, in the state of somnambulism regains, in some way, and to some extent, its power over the latter, so that the body rises and moves about in accordance with the thought and feeling that happen, at the moment, to be predominant in the mind. There is no control of the will over those thoughts and suggestions: they are spontaneous, undirected, casual, subject only to the ordinary laws of association; but for the time, whether owing to the greater vividness and force of these suggestions and impressions, or to the disturbed and partially aroused state of the sensorial organism, the will, acting in accordance with these suggestions of the mind, so far regains its power over the bodily organism, that locomotion ensues. The dream is then simply acted out. The body rises, the hand resumes the pen, and the appropriate movements and actions corresponding to the conceptions of the mind in its dream, are duly performed. _The second Point of Inquiry._--This virtually answers the second question, how the somnambulist can perform actions requiring intelligence, yet without apparent consciousness. There is, doubtless, consciousness at the time--there must be; the thought and feeling of the moment are known to us at the moment. Not to be conscious of thought and feeling, is, not to think and feel. That the acts thus performed are not subsequently remembered, is no evidence that they were not objects of consciousness at the time of their occurrence. This is absence of memory, and not of consciousness. _Not remembered._--Why they are not subsequently remembered, we may, or may not, be able to explain. Not improbably, it may be owing to the partial inactivity of the senses, and the consequent failure to perceive the actual relations of the person to surrounding objects. But to whatever it may be owing, it does not prove that the mind is, for the time, unconscious of its own activity, for that is impossible. _Third Question._--As to the third question, how the somnambulist can safely move where the waking person cannot, as along the edge of precipices, and on the roofs of houses, the explanation is simple and easy. The eye is closed. The sense of touch is the only guide. Now the foot requires but a space of a few inches for its support, that, given it knows nothing further, asks nothing beyond. It is the eye that informs us at other times of the danger beyond, and so creates, in fact, the present danger. You walk safely on a two-inch plank one foot from the ground. The same effort of the muscles will enable you to walk the same plank one hundred feet from the ground, if you do not know the difference. This the somnambulist, with closed eye, and trusting to the sense of feeling alone, does not recognize. _A Question still to be answered._--But the most difficult question remains. How is it that the sleep-walker in utter darkness, reads, writes, paints, runs, etc., better even than others can do, or even than he himself can do at other times and with open eyes. How can he do these things without seeing? and how see in the dark and with the organs of vision fast locked in sleep. The facts are manifest. Not so ready the explanation. I can see how the body can move and with comparative safety, and even how the cerebral action may go on in sleep, without subsequent remembrance. But to read, to write, to paint, to run swiftly when pursued through a dark cellar, without coming in contact with surrounding objects, are operations requiring the nicest power of vision, and how there can be vision without the use of the proper organ of vision, is not to me apparent. It does not answer this question to say that the action is automatic. That would account for one's seeing, but not _without eyes_. The movement from place to place, according to the same theory, is also automatic; that accounts for a person's walking in sleep, but not for his walking _without legs_. Nor does it solve the difficulty to say that in sleep the life of the soul is merged in that of the body; doubtless, but how can the body see without the eye, or the eye without light? _Theory of a general Sense._--The only theory that seems to offer even a plausible solution is that advanced by some German psychologists, and by Rauch in this country, of a _general sense_. The several special senses, they say, are all resolvable into one general sense as their source, viz., that of feeling. They refer us in illustration to the ear of the crab, to the eye of the fly and the snail, to the scent of flies, in which cases, respectively, we find no _organ_ of hearing, or vision, or smell, but simply an expansion of the general nerve of sensation, or some filament from it, connecting with a somewhat thinner and more delicate membrane than the ordinary skin. This shows that our ordinary way of perceiving things is not the only way; that special organs of vision, etc., are not needed in order to all perception, much less to sensation. It has been found by experiment that bats, after their eyes have been entirely removed, will fly about as before, and avoid all obstacles just as before. In these cases, it is contended, perception is merely _feeling heightened_, the exercise of the general sense into which the special senses are severally merged. And this, it is said, may be the case with the somnambulist. _Remarks on this Theory._--There is doubtless truth in the general statement now advanced. I do not see, however, that it accounts for all that requires explanation in the case. It explains, perhaps, how, without the organ of vision, a certain dim, confused perception of objects might be furnished by the general sense, but not for a _clearer_ vision and a _nicer_ operation than the waking eye can give. This, to me, remains yet unexplained. Is there an inner consciousness, a hidden soul-life not dependent on the bodily organization, which at times comes forth into development and manifests itself when the usual relations of body and soul are disturbed and suspended? So some have supposed, and so it may be for aught we know to the contrary, but this is only to solve one mystery by supposing another yet greater. _Must admit what._--Whatever theory we adopt, or even if we adopt none, we must admit, I think, in view of the facts in the case, that in certain disordered and highly excited states of the nervous system, as, _e. g._, when weakened by disease, so that ordinary causes affect it more powerfully than usual, _it can, and does sometimes, perceive what, under ordinary circumstances, is not perceptible to the eye, or to the ear; nay, even dispenses with the use of eye and ear, and the several organs of special sense_. This occurs, as we have seen, in somnambulism, or natural magnetic sleep. We meet with the same thing also in even stranger forms, in the mesmeric state, and in some species of insanity. _The mental Process obvious._--So far as regards the purely mental part of the phenomena, the operations of the mind in somnambulism, there is nothing which is not easily explained. In somnambulism, as indeed in all these states so closely connected--sleep, dreams, the mesmeric process, and even insanity--_the will loses its controlling power over the train of thought, and, consequently, the thought or feeling that happens to be dominant gives rise to, and entirely shapes, the actions that may in that state be performed_. This dominant thought or feeling, in the case of the somnambulist, is, for the most part, probably, the result of previous causes; a continuation of the former mental action, which, when the influence of the will is suspended and the senses closed, by a sort of inherent activity keeps on in the same channel as before. Of such action, the soul is itself probably conscious at the moment, but afterward no recollection of it lingers in the mind. § IV.--DISORDERED MENTAL ACTION. _Relation to other mental Phenomena._--Closely allied to somnambulism, dreaming, etc., are certain forms of disordered mental condition commonly termed insanity; having this one element in common with the former, the loss or suspension of all voluntary control over the train of thought. This must be regarded as the characteristic feature and essential ground-work of the various phenomena in all these various states. _Classification._--The forms of disordered mental action are various, and admit of some classification. Some are transient, others permanent, arising from some settled disorder of the intellect, or the sensibilities. I. _Transient Forms._--Of these, some are artificially produced, as by exciting drugs, stimulants, intoxicating drinks, etc., others by physical and natural causes, as disease, etc. _Delirium, artificial._--The most common of these forms of disordered mental action is that transient and artificial state produced by intoxicating drugs and drinks. This is properly called delirium, and takes place whenever total or even partial inebriation occurs, whether from alcoholic or narcotic stimulants, as the opium of the Chinese, and the Indian hemp or _hachish_ of the Hindoos. The same effects, substantially, are produced, also, by certain plants, as the deadly night-shade and others, and also by aconite. In all these cases the effect is wrought primarily, it would seem, upon the blood, which is brought into a poisonous state, and thus deranges the action of the nerves and the brain. The _hachish_ or Indian hemp, which, in the East, is used for purposes of intoxication more generally, perhaps, than even opium, or alcoholic drinks, may serve as an illustration of the manner in which these various stimulants affect the senses. At first the subject perceives an increased activity of mind; thoughts come and go in swift succession and pleasing variety; the imagination is active--memory, fancy, reason, all awake. Gradually this mental activity increases and _frees itself from voluntary control_; attention to any special subject becomes difficult or even impossible; ideas, strange and wonderful, come and go at random with no apparent cause and by no known law of suggestion; these absorb the attention until the mind is at last given up to them, and there is no further consciousness of the external things, while, at the same time, the patient is susceptible, as in the magnetic state, of influence and impression from without. How closely, in many respects, this resembles the state of the mind in somnambulism, mesmerism, and ordinary dreaming, I need not point out. The mental excitement produced by opium is perhaps greater, and the images that throng the brain, and assume the semblance of reality, are more numerous and real. The subsequent exhaustion and reaction in either case are fearful. For illustration of this the reader is referred to the Confessions of an Opium Eater, by the accomplished De Quincey. _Delirium of Disease._--The ordinary _delirium of disease_ is essentially of the same nature with that now described, differing rather in its origin, or producing cause, than in its effects. It comes on often in much the same way; increased mental activity shows itself; attention is fixed with difficulty; strange images, and trains of thought at once singular and uncontrolled by the will, come and go; the mind at last is possessed by them and loses all control over its own movements. Every thing now, which the mind conceives, assumes the form of reality. It has no longer conceptions but perceptions. Figures move along the walls and occupy the room. They are as really _seen_, that is, the _sensation_ is the same, as in any case of healthy and actual vision; only the effect is wrought from within outward, from the sensorium to the optic nerve and retina, instead of the reverse, as in actual vision. Voices are heard also, and various sounds, in the same manner; the producing cause acting from within outward, and not from without inward. _Differs from Dreaming._--This state differs from dreaming in that the subject is not necessarily asleep, and that it involves a greater and more serious disorder of the faculties, as well as of longer continuance. The illusions are perhaps also more decided, and more vividly conceived as external and real entities. Like dreams, and unlike the conceptions of the magnetic state, these ideas and illusions may be subsequently recalled, and in many cases are so; the mind, however, finding it difficult still to believe that they were _fictions_, and not actual occurrences. In dreaming, the things which we seem to see and hear are changes produced in the sensorium by cerebral or other influences. In delirium, the sensorium itself is disordered and produces false appearances, spectres, etc. _Mania._--That form of disordered mental action termed _mania_, differs from that already described in that, along with the derangement of the intellect, there is more or less emotional disorder. The patient is strongly excited on any thing that at all rouses the feelings. There may be much or little intellectual derangement accompanying this excitement. The two forms, in fact, pass into each by a succession of almost indefinable links. The main element is the same in each, _i. e._, loss of voluntary control over the thoughts and feelings. Each is produced by physical causes, and is of transient duration. _Power of Suggestion._--In all these forms of delirium now described, whether artificial or natural, the mind is open to suggestions from without, and these become often controlling ideas. Hence it is of imperative necessity that the attendant should be on his guard as to what he says or does in the presence of the patient. An instance in point is related by Dr. Carpenter, in which a certain eminent physician lost a number of his patients in fever by their jumping from the window, a fact accounted for at once, when we come to hear that he was stupid enough to caution the attendants, _in the hearing of his patients_, against the possibility of such an event. II. _Permanent Forms._--I proceed next to notice those more permanent forms of mental disorder, commonly termed _insanity_, a term properly applied to designate those cases of abnormal mental activity in which there seems to be either some settled disorder of the intellect, as, _e. g._, when the brain has been weakened by successive attacks of mania, epilepsy, etc., or else some permanent tendency to disordered emotional excitement. _Disorder of the Intellect._--Where the intellectual faculties are disordered, the chief elementary feature of the case is the same as in those already noticed, viz., _Loss of voluntary control over the mental operations_--the psychological ground-work, as we have seen, of all the various forms of abnormal mental action which have as yet come under our notice. _Memory affected._--In the cases now under consideration, the memory is the faculty that in most cases gives the first signs of failure, particularly that form of memory which is strictly voluntary, viz., recollection. In consequence of this, past experience is placed out of reach, cannot be made available, and therefore reasoning and judgment are deficient. The thoughts lose their coherency and connection, as they are thus cut loose from the fixtures of the past, to which the laws of association no longer bind them; they come and go with a strange automatic sort of movement, over which the mind feels that it has little power. Gradually this little fades away; the will no longer exercises its former and rightful control over the mental activities; its sway is broken, its authority gone; the mind loses control of itself, and, like a vessel broken from her moorings, swings sadly and hopelessly away into the swift stream of settled insanity. The mind still retains its full measure of activity, perhaps greatly increased; but it acts as in a _dream_. All its conceptions are realities to it, and the actually real world, as it mingles with the dream and shapes it, is but vaguely and imperfectly apprehended through the confused media of the mind's own conceptions. All this may be, and often is, realized, where there is entire absence of all emotional excitement. _Not easily cured._--The condition now described is much less open to medical treatment than the mental states previously mentioned. Indeed, where there is insanity resulting from settled cerebral disorder, there is very little hope of cure. Nature may in time recover herself; she may not. This depends on age, constitution, predisposing causes, and a variety of circumstances not altogether under human control. _Disordered Action of the Sensibilities._--Another form of insanity is that which consists in, or arises from, not any primary disorder of the intellectual faculties, but a tendency to disordered _emotional_ excitement. Sometimes this is general, extending to all the emotions. These cases require careful treatment. The patient is like a child, and must be governed mildly and wisely, is open to argument and motives of self-control. In other cases, some one emotion is particularly the seat and centre of the disturbance, while the others are comparatively tranquil. In such cases the exaggerated emotion may prompt to some specific action, as suicide, or murder, etc. This is termed _impulsive_ insanity. The predominant idea or impulse tyrannizes over the mind, and, by a sort of irresistible fatality, drives it on to the commission of crime. The patient may be conscious of this impulse, and revolt from it with horror; there may be no pleasure or desire associated with the deed, but he is unable to resist. He is like a boat in the rapids of Niagara. So fearful the condition of man when reason is dethroned, and the will no longer master. MENTAL PHILOSOPHY. DIVISION SECOND THE SENSIBILITIES. PRELIMINARY TOPICS. CHAPTER I. NATURE, DIFFICULTY, AND IMPORTANCE OF THIS DEPARTMENT OF THE SCIENCE. _Previous Analysis._--In entering upon the investigation of a new department of our science, it may be well to recur, for a moment, to the analysis and classification of the powers of the mind which has been already given in the introduction to the present volume. The faculties of the mind were divided in that analysis, it will be remembered, into three grand departments, the Intellect, the Sensibilities, and the Will; the first comprising the various powers of _thinking_ and _knowing_, the second of _feeling_, the third of _willing_. The first of these main divisions has been already discussed in the preceding pages. Upon the second we now enter. _Difference of the two Departments._--This department of mental activity differs from the former, as feeling differs from thinking. The distinction is broad and obvious. No one can mistake it who knows any thing of his own mental operations. Every one knows the difference, though not every one may be able to explain it, or tell precisely in what it consists. But whether able to define our meaning or not, we are perfectly conscious that to think and to feel are different acts, and involve entirely different states of mind. The common language of life recognizes the distinction, alike that of the educated and of the uneducated, the peasant and the man of science. The literature of the world recognizes it. _Relation of the two._--As regards the relation of the two departments to each other, the intellect properly precedes the sensibility. The latter implies the former, and depends upon it. There can be no feeling--I speak, of course, of mental feeling, and not of mere physical sensation--without previous cognizance of some object, in view of which the feeling is awakened. Affection always implies an object of affection, desire, an object of desire; and the object is first apprehended by the intellect before the emotion is awakened in the mind. When we love, we love something, when we desire, we desire something, when we fear, or hope, or hate, there is always some object, more or less clearly defined, that awakens these feelings, and in proportion to the clearness and vividness of the intellectual conception or perception of the object, will be the strength of the feeling. _Strength of Feelings as related to Strength of Intellect._--The range and power of the sensibilities, then, in other words, the mind's capacity of feeling, depends essentially upon the range and vigor of the intellectual powers. Within certain limits, the one varies as the other. The man of strong and vigorous mind is capable of stronger emotion than the man of dwarfed and puny intellect. Milton, Cromwell, Napoleon, Webster, surpassed other men, not more in clearness and strength of intellectual perception, than in energy of feeling. In this, indeed, lay, in no small degree, the secret of their superior power. In the most eloquent passages of the great orators of ancient or modern times, it is not so much the irresistible cogency and unrelenting grasp of the terrible logic, that holds our attention, and casts its spell over us, as it is the burning indignation that exposes the sophistries, and tears to shreds the fallacies of an opponent, and sweeps all argument and all opposition before it like a devouring fire. The orations of Demosthenes, of Burke, of Webster, furnish numerous examples of this. _Influence of the Feelings on the Intellect._--On the other hand, it is equally true that the state of the intellect in any case depends not a little on the nature and strength of the mind's capacities of feeling. A quick and lively sensibility is more likely to be attended with quickness and strength of intellectual conception; imagination, perception, fancy, and even reasoning, are quickened, and set in active play, by its electric touch. A man with sluggish and torpid sensibilities, is almost of necessity a man of dull and sluggish intellect. A man without feeling, if we can conceive so strange a phenomenon, would be a man, the measure of whose intellectual capacity would be little above that of the brutes. _Importance of this Department of the mental Faculties._--Such being the nature of the sensibilities, the _importance_ of this department of mental activity becomes obvious at a glance. The springs of human action lie here. We find here a clue to the study of human nature and of ourselves. To understand the complicated and curious problem of human life and action, to understand history, society, nations, ourselves, we must understand well the nature and philosophy of the sensibilities. Here we find the motives which set the busy world in action, the causes which go to make men what they are in the busy and ever changing scene of life's great drama. It is the emotions and passions of men which give, at once, the impulse, and the direction, to their energies, constitute their character, shape their history and their destiny. A knowledge of man and of the world is emphatically a knowledge of the human heart. _Extract from Brown._--The importance of this part of our nature is well set forth in the following passage from Dr. Thomas Brown: "We might, perhaps, have been so constituted, with respect to our intellectual states of mind, as to have had all the varieties of these, our remembrances, judgments, and creations of fancy, without our emotions. But without the emotions which accompany them, of how little value would the mere intellectual functions have been! It is to our vivid feelings of this class we must look for those tender regards which make our remembrances sacred, for that love of truth and glory, and mankind, without which to animate and reward us in our discovery and diffusion of knowledge, the continued exercise of judgment would be a fatigue rather than a satisfaction, and for all that delightful wonder which we feel when we contemplate the admirable creations of fancy, or the still more admirable beauties of the unfading model, that model which is ever before us, and the imitation of which, as has been truly said, is the only _imitation_ that is itself _originality_. By our other mental functions, we are mere spectators of the machinery of the universe, living and inanimate; by our _emotions_, we are admirers of nature, lovers of man, adorers of God.... _Less attractive Aspects._--"In this picture of our emotions, however, I have presented them in their fairest aspects; there are aspects which they assume, as terrible as these are attractive; but even terrible as they are, they are not the less interesting objects of our contemplation. They are the enemies with which our mortal combat, in the warfare of life, is to be carried on; and of these enemies that are to assail us, it is good for us to know all the arms and all the arts with which we are to be assailed; as it is good for us to know all the misery which would await our defeat, as well as all the happiness which would crown our success, that our conflict may be the stronger, and our victory, therefore, the more sure. "In the list of our emotions of this formidable class, is to be found every passion which can render life guilty and miserable; a single hour of which, if that hour be an hour of uncontrolled dominion, may destroy happiness forever, and leave little more of virtue than is necessary for giving all its horror to remorse. There are feelings as blasting to every desire of good that may still linger in the heart of the frail victim who is not yet wholly corrupted, as those poisonous gales of the desert, which not merely lift in whirlwinds the sands that have often been tossed before, but wither even the few fresh leaves, which on some spot of scanty verdure, have still been flourishing amid the general sterility." _Difficulty of the Study._--With regard to the difficulty attending the study of this part of our nature, a word seems necessary in passing. It has been supposed to constitute a peculiar difficulty in the way of the successful investigation of this department of mental activity, that the sensibilities are, in their very nature, of such an exciting character, as to preclude the calm, dispassionate observation and reflection so necessary to correct judgment. At the moment of exercising any lively emotion, as hope, fear, anger, etc., the mind is in too great perturbation to be in any condition for accurate self-observation, and when the excitement has subsided, the important moment has already passed. Mr. Stewart has particularly noticed this difficulty in his Introduction to the Active and Moral Powers, and quotes Hume to the same effect. _Not peculiar to this Department of the Science._--The difficulty in question, however, is one which, in reality, pertains to all mental science, and not to this department of it alone; and so Hume, in the passage cited by Mr. Stewart, seems to intend. It is true that while we are under the influence of any exciting emotion, we are in no mood, and in no suitable state to observe, with critical eye, the workings of our own minds; neither are we in any condition to do so when engaged in the less exciting, but not less absorbing _intellectual_ occupation of reasoning, or imagining, or remembering. The moment we begin to observe ourselves as thus engaged, the mind is no longer employed as before, the experiment which we wish to observe is interrupted, and instead of reasoning, imagining, or remembering, we are only observing ourselves. Our only resource, in either case, is to turn back and gather up, as well as we can from _memory_, the data of our mental activity and condition while thus and thus employed. And this we can do with regard to the action of the sensibilities, as well as of the intellect, provided only the degree of emotion and excitement is not so great as to interfere with the present consciousness, and so with the subsequent recollection of what was passing in our own minds. _Sources of Information._--Nor are we dependent entirely on self-observation. Our sources of information are twofold, the observation of our own minds, and of others. From the latter source we may learn much of the nature of this department of mental action. The sensibilities of others are more open to our inspection, and less readily mistaken, than their intellectual states. Nor do we meet, in this case, with the same difficulty; for however excited and incapable of self-inspection, at the moment, the subject of any strong emotion or passion may be, the spectator, at least, is able to observe the effect of that passion, and note its phenomena, with calm and careful eye. CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE SENSIBILITIES. _Certain Distinctions may be noticed._--Including, under the term sensibility, according to the definition already given, whatever is of the nature of _feeling_, in distinction from thought or cognition, and limiting the term also to feelings strictly _mental_, in distinction from merely physical sensation, it is obvious that there are certain leading distinctions still to be observed in this class of our mental states, certain great and strongly marked divisions or differences, by which we shall do well to be guided in our arrangement and classification of them. Our feelings are many and various; it is impossible to enumerate or classify them with perfect precision; yet there are certain points of resemblance and difference among them, certain groups or classes into which they naturally divide themselves. _A general Distinction indicated._--One general distinction lies at the outset, patent and obvious, running through all forms and modes of sensibility, namely, the difference of _agreeable_ and _disagreeable_. Every feeling is, in its very nature, and of necessity, one or the other, either pleasing or painful. In some cases the distinction is much more strongly marked than in others; sometimes it may be hardly perceptible, and it may be difficult to determine, so slight is the degree of either, whether the feeling under consideration partakes of the character of pleasure or pain; sometimes there is a blending of the two elements, and the same emotion is at once pleasing and painful to the mind that experiences it. But I cannot conceive of a feeling that is neither agreeable or disagreeable, but positively indifferent. The state of indifference is not an exercise of sensibility, but a simple _want_ of it, as the very name denotes by which we most appropriately express this state of mind, _i. e._, _apathy_ ([Greek: a pathos]). _Simple Emotions._--Passing this general and obvious distinction, we find among our sensibilities a large class which we may denominate _simple emotions_. These comprise the joys and sorrows of life in all their varieties of modification and degree, according as the objects which awaken them differ. Under this class fall those general states of the mind which, without assuming a definite and obvious form, impart a tinge and coloring of joyousness or sadness to all our activity. Under this class, also, must be included the more specific forms of feeling, such as the grief or sorrow we feel at the loss of friends, sympathy with the happiness or sorrow of others, the enjoyment arising from the contemplation or persuasion of our own superiority, and the chagrin of the reverse, the enjoyment of the ludicrous, of the new and wonderful, of the beautiful, to which must be added the satisfaction resulting from the consciousness of right action, and those vivid feelings of regret in view of the wrong, which, in their higher degree, assume the name of remorse, and fall like a chill and fearful shadow over the troubled path of earthly life. These all are simple emotions, and all, moreover, are but so many forms of joy and sorrow, varying as the objects vary which give rise to them. _Further Difference of instinctive and rational Emotion._--It will be observed, however, that of these several specific forms of simple emotion, some are of a higher order than the others. Such are those last named in the series, the feelings awakened in view of the ludicrous, in view of the new and wonderful, in view of the beautiful, and in view of the right, or, in general, the æsthetic and moral emotions. These, as seeming to possess a higher dignity, and to involve a higher degree of intellectual development, we may denominate the _rational_, in distinction from the other simple emotions, which, to mark the difference, we may term _instinctive_. _Emotions of a complex Character._--Passing on in our analysis, we come next to a class of emotions differing from that already considered, in being of a complex character. It is no longer a simple feeling of delight and satisfaction in the object, or the reverse, but along with this is blended the wish, more or less definite and intense, of good or ill, to the object which awakens the emotion. The feeling assumes an active form, becomes objective, and travels out from itself and the bosom that cherishes it, to the object which calls it forth. In this desire of good or ill to the object, the simple element of joy or sorrow, the subjective feeling, is often merged and lost sight of; yet it ever exists as an essential element of the complex emotion. _Further Subdivision of this Class._--Of this class are the feelings usually denominated _affections_, which may be further subdivided into _benevolent_ and _malevolent_, according as they seek the good or the ill of their respective objects. As the _simple emotions_ are all but so many modes and forms of the feeling of _joy_, and its opposite, _sorrow_, so the _affections_ are but so many different modifications of the one comprehensive principle of _love_, and its opposite, _hate_. _Various Objects of Affection._--The affections vary as the objects vary on which they rest. Of the benevolent class, the more prominent are, love of kindred, of friends, of benefactors, of home and country. Of the malevolent affections, so called, the more important are the feeling of resentment in view of personal injury, of indignation at the wrongs of others, the feeling of jealousy, and the like. _The Passions._--These various affections, both malevolent and benevolent, when they rise above the ordinary degree, and become impatient of restraint, imperious, no longer under the control of reason and sober reflection, but themselves assuming the command of the whole man, and impelling him toward the desired end, regardless of other and higher interests, become the _passions_ of our nature, with which no small part of the self-conflict and self-discipline of this our mortal life is to be maintained. _The Desires._--There is still another class of emotions, differing essentially in their nature from each of the two leading divisions already mentioned, that is, our _desires_. These are of two sorts. Those which are founded in the physical nature and constitution of man--as the desire of food, of muscular exertion, of repose, of whatever is adapted to the animal nature and wants--are usually denominated _appetites_: those, on the other hand, which take their rise from the nature and wants of the mind, rather than of the body, may be termed _rational_, in distinction from _animal_ desires or appetites. Of these the more important are the desire of happiness, of knowledge, of power, of society, of the esteem of others. As joy has its opposite, sorrow, and love its opposite, hate, so also desire has its opposite, aversion; and the objects of aversion are as numerous as the objects of desire. The desire of wealth has its counterpart, the aversion to poverty and want; the desire of life and happiness stands over against the aversion to suffering and death. The two are so to speak, the positive and negative poles of feeling. _Hope and Fear._--There is yet another and important class of our emotions, having not a little to do with the happiness or misery of life, casting its lights and shadows over no small part of our little path from the cradle to the grave, our _hopes_ and our _fears_. These, however important in themselves, are, nevertheless, but modifications of the principles of desire and aversion, and are, therefore, to be referred to the same general division of the sensibilities. Hope is the desire of some expected good, fear the aversion to some anticipated evil. _Summary of Classes._--To the three comprehensive classes now named, _Simple Emotions_, _Affections_, and _Desires_ may be referred, if I mistake not, the various sensibilities of our nature; or, if the analysis and classification be not complete and exhaustive, it is at least sufficiently minute for our present purpose. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE LEADING DIVISIONS OF THE SENSIBILITIES ADOPTED BY DIFFERENT WRITERS. _Important to know the Principles of Division adopted by others._--The discussion of the present topic would be incomplete without a glance at the _history_ of the same. It is of service, having obtained some definite results and conclusions of our own, to know also what have been the views and conclusions of others upon the same matter. As with regard to the intellectual powers, so also with respect to the sensibilities, different principles of division and classification have been adopted by different writers. Our limits will allow us to glance only at the more important of these. _General Principles of Classification._--Of those who have written upon the sensibilities, some have placed them in contrast to each other, as hope and fear, love and hate, etc., making this the principle of division; others have classed them as personal, social, etc.; others as relating to time, the past, the present, and the future; others as instinctive and rational; while most who have had occasion to treat of this part of our mental constitution, have considered it with reference solely or mainly to the science of ethics or morals, and have adopted such a division and arrangement as best suited that end, without special regard to the psychology of the matter. _Of the Greek Schools._--Among the Greeks, the Academicians included the various emotions under the four principal ones, fear, desire, joy, and grief, classing despair and aversion under grief, while hope, courage, and anger were comprised under desire. To denote the _passivity_ of the mind, as acted upon, and under the influence of emotion, the Greeks named the passions in general, [Greek: pathos], suffering, whence our terms pathos, pathetic, etc., whence also the Latin _passio_ and _patior_, from which our word _passion_. The Stoics, in particular, designated all emotions as [Greek: pathê], diseases, regarding them as disorders of the mind. _Hartley's Division._--Among the moderns, _Hartley_ divides the sensibilities into the two leading classes of _grateful_ and _ungrateful_ ones; under the former, including love, desire, hope, joy, and pleasing recollection; under the latter, the opposites of these emotions, hatred, aversion, fear, grief displeasing recollection. _Distinction of primitive and derivative._--Certain other English writers, as _Watts_ and _Grove_, derive all the emotions ultimately from the three principal ones, admiration, love, and hatred, which they term the _primitive_ passions, all others being _derivative_. _Division of Cogan._--_Cogan_, whose treatise on the passions is a work of much interest, divides the sensibilities into _passions_, _emotions_, and _affections_; by the first of these terms designating the first impression which the mind receives from some impulsive cause; by the second, the more permanent feeling which succeeds, and which betrays itself by visible signs in the expressions of the countenance and the motions of the body; while by affections, he denotes the less intense and more durable influence exerted upon the mind by the objects of its regard. The passions and affections are, by this author, further divided into those which spring from _self-love_ and those which are derived from the _social principle_. _Classification of Dr. Reid._--_Dr. Reid_ divides the active principles, as he terms them, into three classes, the _mechanical_, the _animal_, and the _rational_, including, under the first, our instincts and habits, under the second, our appetites, under the third, our higher principles of action. _Of Stewart._--_Dugald Stewart_ makes two classes, the _instinctive_ or _implanted_, and the _rational_ or _governing_ principles, under the former including _appetites_, _desires_, and _affections_, under the latter, _self-love_ and the _moral faculty_. The desires are distinguished from the appetites, in that they do not, like the former, take their rise from the body, nor do they operate, periodically, after certain intervals, and cease after the attainment of their object. Under the title of affections, are comprehended all those principles of our nature that have for their object the communication of good or of ill to others. _Of Brown._--_Dr. Brown_ divides the sensibilities, to which he gives the general name of _emotions_, with reference to their relation to _time_, as _immediate_, _retrospective_, and _prospective_. Under the former, he includes, as involving no moral feeling, cheerfulness and melancholy, wonder and its opposite, feelings of beauty and the opposite, feelings of sublimity and of the ludicrous; as involving moral feeling, the emotions distinctive of vice and virtue, emotions of love and hate, of sympathy, of pride and humility. Under _retrospective_ emotion he includes anger, gratitude, regret, satisfaction; under _prospective_ emotion, all our desires and fears. _Of Upham._--Prof. Upham divides the sensibilities into the two leading departments, the _natural_ and the _moral_, the former comprehending the _emotions_ and the _desires_, the latter, the _moral sentiments_ or _conscience_. Under the class of desires, he includes our instincts, appetites, propensities, and affections. _Of Hickok._--Dr. Hickok classes the sensibilities under the departments of _animal_, _rational_, and _spiritual_ susceptibility; the former comprehending instincts, appetites, natural affections, self-interested feelings, and disinterested feelings; the second, æsthetic, scientific, ethic, and theistic emotions; while the latter or spiritual susceptibility differs from each of the others, in not being, like them, constitutional, but arising rather from the personal disposition and character. _Remarks on the foregoing Divisions._--Our limits forbid, nor does the object of the present work require, a critical discussion of these several plans of arrangement. It is but justice to say, however, that no one of these several methods of arrangement is altogether satisfactory. They are not strictly scientific. The method of Cogan, for example, derives all our sensibilities ultimately from the two principles of self-love, or desire for our own happiness, and the social principle, or regard for the condition and character of others; which again resolve themselves, according to this author, into the two cardinal and primitive affections of _love_ and _hate_. This division strikes us at once as arbitrary, and, therefore, questionable; and, also, as _ethical_ rather than _psychological_. There are many simple emotions which cannot properly be resolved into either of these two principles. On the other hand, the psychological distinction between the emotions and desires is overlooked in this arrangement. The same remarks apply substantially to several of the other methods noticed. _Objection to Stewart's Division._--The arrangement of Mr. Stewart is liable to this objection, that the principle of self-love, and also the moral faculty, which he classes by themselves as _rational_ principles, in distinction from the other emotions as _implanted_ or _instinctive_ principles, are as really implanted in our nature, as really constitutional or instinctive, as any other. Appetite, moreover, is but one form or class of desires; self-love is but another, _i. e._, the desire of our own happiness. _To Upham's Division._--The division of Mr. Upham is still more objectionable on the same ground. The _natural_ and the _moral_ sentiments, into which two great classes he divides the sensibilities, are distinct neither in fact nor in name; the moral sentiments, so called, are as really and truly _natural_, founded in our constitution, as are our desires and affections; nor is the term natural properly opposed to the term moral as designating distinct and opposite things. The terms instinctive and rational, which Mr. Stewart employs, though not free from objection, much more accurately express the distinction in view, could such a distinction be shown to exist. _Difference of ethical and psychological Inquiry._--In a work, the main object of which is to unfold the principles of ethical science, it may be desirable to single out from the other emotions, and place by themselves, the principle of self-love, together with the social principle and the moral sentiments, as having more direct reference to the moral character and conduct. In a strictly psychological treatise, however, in which the aim is simply to unfold, and arrange in their natural order, the phenomena of the human mind, such a principle of classification is evidently inadmissible. The different operations and emotions of the mind must be studied and arranged, not with reference to their _logical_ or _ethical_ distinctions, but solely their _psychological_ differences. Viewed in this light, the moral sentiments, so far as they are of the nature of feeling or sensibility at all, and not rather of intellectual perception, are simple emotions, and do not inherently differ from any other feelings of the same class. The satisfaction we feel in view of right, and the pain in view of wrong past conduct, differ from the pain and pleasure we derive from other sources, only as the _objects_ differ which call forth the feelings. They are essentially of the same class, the difference is specific rather than generic. They are modifications of the one generic principle of joy and sorrow, and differ from each other not so much as each differs from a _desire_, or an affection of love or hate. _Objection to Brown's Arrangement._--The classification of Dr. Brown, if not ethical, is, perhaps, equally far from being psychological. The relation of the different emotions to _time_ is an accidental, and not an essential difference, and it is, moreover, a distinction wholly inapplicable to far the larger portion of the sensibilities, viz., those which he calls immediate emotions, or "those which arise without involving necessarily _any notion_ of time." This is surely _lucus a non lucendo_. SENSIBILITIES. PART FIRST. SIMPLE EMOTIONS. CHAPTER I. INSTINCTIVE EMOTIONS. _Previous Analysis._--It will be recollected that in the analysis which has been given of the sensibilities, they were arranged under three generic classes, viz., Simple Emotions, Affections, and Desires, all, however, having this in common, that they are in themselves agreeable or disagreeable, as states of mind, according as the object which awakens them is viewed as either good or evil. _Nature of simple Emotions._--Of these, the _simple emotions_, which are first to be considered, comprise, it will be remembered, that large class of feelings which, in their various modifications and degrees, constitute the joys and sorrows of life. They may be comprised, with some latitude of meaning, under the general terms joy and sorrow, as modifications of that comprehensive principle or phase of human experience. They are awakened in view of an object regarded as good or as evil; an object, moreover, of present possession and present enjoyment or suffering; in which last respect they differ from _desires_, which have respect always to some good, or apparent good, _not_ in present possession, but viewed as attainable. _Division of simple Emotions._--Of these simple emotions, again, some may be called _instinctive_, as belonging to the _animal_ nature, and, to some extent, common to man with the brutes, in distinction from others of a higher order, involving or presupposing the exercise of reason and the reflective powers. It is of the former class that we are to treat in the present chapter. § I.--OF THAT GENERAL STATE OF THE MIND KNOWN AS CHEERFULNESS; AND ITS OPPOSITE, MELANCHOLY. _Nature of this Feeling._--There is a state of mind, of which every one is at times conscious, in which, without any immediately exciting cause, a general liveliness and joyousness of spirit, seldom rising to the definiteness of a distinct emotion, a subdued under-current of gladness, seems to fill the soul, and flow on through all its channels. It is not so much itself joy, as a disposition to be joyful; not so much itself a visible sun in the heavens, as a mild, gently-diffused light filling the sky, and bathing all objects in its serene loveliness and beauty. It has been well termed "a sort of perpetual gladness." _Prevalence at different Periods of Life._--There are those, of fortunate temperament, with whom this seems to be the prevailing disposition, to whom every thing wears a cheerful and sunny aspect. Of others, the reverse is true. In early life this habitual joyousness of spirit is more commonly prevalent; in advanced years, more rarely met with. Whether it be that age has chilled the blood, or that the sober experience of life has saddened the heart, and corrected the more romantic visions of earlier years, as life passes on we are less habitually under the influence of this disposition. It is no longer the prevailing frame of the mind. In the beautiful language of another, "We are not happy, without knowing why we are happy, and though we may still be susceptible of joy, perhaps as intense, or even more intense, than in our years of unreflecting merriment, our joy must arise from a cause of corresponding importance; yet even down to the close of extreme old age there still recur occasionally some gleams of this almost instinctive happiness, like a vision of other years, or like those brilliant and unexpected corruscations which sometimes flash along the midnight of a wintry sky, and of which we are too ignorant of the circumstances that produce them, to know when to predict their return." _The opposite Feeling._--Corresponding to this general state of mind now described, is one of quite the opposite character--that habitual disposition to sadness which is usually called melancholy. Like its opposite, cheerfulness, it is rather a frame of mind than a positive emotion, and, like its opposite, it exists, often, without any marked and definite cause to which we can attribute it. It is that state in which subsiding grief, or the pressure of any severe calamity now passing away, leaves the mind, the grey and solemn twilight that succeeds a partial or total eclipse. It is, with many persons, the habitual state of mind, through long periods, perhaps even the greater part, of life. Not unfrequently it occurs that minds, of the rarest genius and most delicate sensibility, are subject to that extreme and habitual depression of spirits which casts a deep gloom over the brightest objects, and renders life itself a burden. This state of habitual gloom and despondency, itself usually a form of disease, the result of some physical derangement, deepens sometimes into a fixed and permanent disorder of the mind, and constitutes one of the most pitiable and hopeless forms of insanity. Such was the case with the melancholy, but most amiable and gentle Cowper. _Element of poetic Sensibility._--In its milder forms, the state of mind which I describe, constitutes, not unfrequently, an element of what is termed poetic genius, a melancholy arising from some sad experience of the troubles and conflicts of life, and from sympathy with the suffering and sorrowing world, the great sad heart of humanity--a melancholy that, like the plaint of the Æolian harp, lends sweetness and richness to the music of its strain. Such are many of the strains of Tennyson; such the deep under-current of Milton's poetry; such, preëminently, the spirit and tone of John Foster, one of the truest and noblest specimens of poetic genius, although a writer of prose. A quick and lively sensibility, itself an inseparable concomitant of true genius, is not unfrequently accompanied with this gentler form of melancholy. The truly great soul that communes with itself, with nature, and with eternal truth, is no stranger to this subdued yet pleasing sadness. It is this to which Milton pays beautiful tribute in the _Il Penseroso_, and which he thus invokes: "But hail, thou goddess, sage and holy, Hail, divinest Melancholy! Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast, and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain Flowing with majestic train, And sable stole of Cyprus lawn Over thy decent shoulders drawn. Come, but keep thy wonted state, With even step and musing gait, And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes." _Not inconsistent with Wit._--It should be remarked that the disposition of which we speak is not inconsistent with the occasional and even frequent prevalence of feelings of directly the opposite nature. A prevailing tendency to sadness is not unfrequently associated with an almost equally prevailing tendency to emotions of the ludicrous. The same liveliness of sensibility which prepares the soul to feel keenly whatever in life is adapted to awaken sad and sober reflections, also disposes it to notice quickly the little incongruities of character, the foibles and follies of mankind, in which a duller eye would detect nothing absurd or comical. It is, moreover, the natural tendency of the mind to spring back, like the bow unstrung, from one extreme of feeling to its opposite, and seek relief from its sadness in the lighter sallies of wit. And so we have the melancholy Cowper singing John Gilpin, and the author of the Night Thoughts, in conversation, a jovial and witty man. § II.--SORROW AT LOSS OF FRIENDS. _Differs from Melancholy._--Beside the general states of mind already described, and which can hardly be called distinct emotions, there are certain specific forms of joy and sorrow which claim our attention. Prominent among these is the grief we feel at any great and sudden bereavement or calamity, as, for example, the loss of friends. This is a state of mind closely allied, indeed, to the melancholy of which I have spoken, but differs from it in that it springs from a more obvious and immediate cause, and is at once more definite and more intense. After a time, when the first bitterness of anguish is past, and the mind recovers itself in a measure from the violence of the shock it has received, and which, for the time, like a sudden blow, seemed to stagger all its energies, when other causes begin to operate, and other scenes and cares demand its attention, its sorrow, at first violent and irrepressible, gradually subsides into that calmer but more permanent form which we have already described as melancholy. _Effects of Grief upon the Mind in the first Shock of any Calamity._--When the loss is very great, especially if it comes suddenly to us--and what bereavement, however long anticipated and feared, does not at last overtake us suddenly?--the mind is at first, in a manner, stupefied and amazed, unable to realize its loss, and looks helplessly about it for relief. To this succeeds a state of mental anguish, more or less intense, in proportion to the liveliness of the sensibilities, and the strength of the previous attachment. In many cases the sorrow is uncontrollable, and finds relief in tears, or in those more violent expressions of anguish in which the burdened heart of man in all ages has been wont to indicate its grief, as the rending of the garments, the beating of the breast, the tearing of the hair, and other like demonstrations of utter and hopeless sorrow. The mind in such a state resigns itself passively to the violence of its emotion, and is swept on by the rushing current that overflows its banks. It is Rachel mourning for her children, and refusing to be comforted. It is David going to the chamber over the gate, and exclaiming, as he goes, "O Absalom, my son! my son!" _Subsequent State of Mind._--When the first violence of grief has subsided, and reflection succeeds to passion, the mind begins to recall the circumstances of its loss, and sets itself to comprehend the greatness and reality of the calamity that has befallen it. It dwells with interest and satisfaction on all the worth and virtues of the departed, magnifies all that was good, excuses or overlooks all that was faulty, recalls the words, the tones, the looks, and gathers up the slightest memento of the former history, with the same sacred regard and reverence with which it treasures in the funeral urn the ashes of the dead. A sacredness and dignity invest the character, and the life, when once the angel death has set his seal upon them. _Silence of deep Grief._--The deepest sorrow is not always, perhaps not usually, the most violent and demonstrative. It is when the first sudden passion of grief is passed and the soul retires within herself to meditate upon her loss, calmly gathering her mantle about her to hide from the observation of others those tears and that sorrow which are sacred, it is then that the deepest sorrow, and the heaviest darkness gather about the burdened spirit. The truest, deepest grief is ever silent. It shrinks from human observation. It finds no words for expression, wishes none. It is a veiled and silent goddess, whose rites and altars are hidden from the eye of day. It is the nature of joy to communicate itself. It is the nature of sorrow, whatever may be the occasion whence it springs, to retire within itself. It seeks its chamber that it may weep there. _Effect of Time in assuaging Sorrow._--The effect of time in softening and allaying the violence of grief, is known to every one. The manner in which this effect is produced is worthy of attention. A recurrence to the laws of suggestion may explain this. It will be recollected that among the secondary or subjective laws which regulate the suggestion of our thoughts, the interval of time which has elapsed since the occurrence of any event holds an important place. That which has taken place but recently is more likely to recur again to mind than events of remoter date. On the first occurrence of any calamity, or bereavement, every thing tends to remind us of our loss, and this constant suggestion of it has a powerful effect in keeping alive our sorrow. As time passes on, however, the objects which once suggested only that which we had lost, become associated with, and so suggest other objects and occurrences; or, if they still remind us of our loss, the remembrance is mingled with that of other scenes and events which have since transpired, and other feelings which have since agitated our hearts. Thus time is constantly mingling other ingredients in the cup of our grief. The law of _the most recent_ still holds in suggestion, and thus the very principle that formerly reminded us continually of our loss, now shuts it out, by interposing between it and us what has since transpired. The thought of the past comes up less frequently, and when it recurs, is mingled with so many other associated objects, and experiences, that it no longer awakens emotions of unmitigated grief. Gradually other objects interest us, other plans and duties engage us, other emotions agitate the heart, as successive waves beat on the same troubled shore, and render fainter, at each return, the traces which former billows had impressed upon its sands. Thus time, the _great consoler_, assuages our sorrows, and the unbroken darkness that once hung over the mind, and shrouded all its thoughts and purposes, gives place, at length, to a chastened and subdued sadness, that suffuses the past with a soft and mellow radiance. We are ever moving on, swiftly, steadily, in the current of events, and objects whose fearful magnitude, once, from their very nearness, engrossed our whole attention as we passed into their deep shadow, gradually diminish as they recede, until their dark outline is barely discernible on the distant horizon. § III.--SYMPATHY WITH THE HAPPINESS AND SORROW OF OTHERS. _In what Manner awakened._--Closely allied to the emotions of joy and sorrow awakened by our own personal experience of good and of evil, is the sympathy we feel with the joys and sorrows of others in similar circumstances. Joy is contagious. So also is grief. We cannot behold the emotions of others, without, in some degree, experiencing a corresponding emotion. Nor is it necessary to be eye-witnesses of that happiness, or sorrow. The simple description of any scene of happiness or of misery affects the heart, and touches the chords of sympathetic emotion. We picture the scene to ourselves, we fancy ourselves the spectators, or, it may be, the actors and the sufferers; we imagine what would be our own emotions in such a case, and in proportion to the liveliness of our power of conception, and also of our power of feeling, will be our sympathy with the real scene and the real sufferers. _Nature of this Principle._--The sympathy thus awakened, whether with the joy or the sorrow of others, is a simple emotion, distinct in its nature from both the affections and the desires, and it is, moreover, instinctive, rather than rational--a matter of impulse, a principle implanted in our nature, and springing into exercise, as by instinct, whenever the occasion presents itself, rather than the result of reason and reflection. It is a susceptibility which we possess, to some extent, at least, in common with the brutes, who are by no means insensible to the distresses or to the happiness of their fellows. It is a susceptibility which manifests itself in early life, before habits of reflection are formed, and under circumstances which preclude the supposition that it may be the result of education, or in any manner an acquired and not an original and implanted principle. So far from being the result of reflection, reason and reflection are often needed to check the emotion, and keep it within due bounds. There are times when sympathy, for example, with the distresses of others, would stand in the way of efficient and necessary action, and when it is needful to summon all the resources of reason to our aid, in the stern and resolute performance of a duty which brings us into conflict with this instinctive principle of our nature. The judge is not at liberty to regard the tears of the heart-broken wife or child, when he rises to pronounce the stern sentence of violated law upon the wretched criminal. The kind-hearted surgeon must for the time be deaf to the outcries of his patient, and insensible to his sufferings, or his ministrations are at an end. _Usual Limitation of the Term._--The term sympathy is more frequently used to denote the emotion awakened by the sufferings of others, than our participation in their joys. There can be no doubt, however, of the tendency of our nature to each of these results, and that it is, in fact, but one and the same principle under a twofold aspect. Nor does the word itself more properly belong to, and more truly express, the one, than the other of these aspects. We as readily rejoice with those who do rejoice, as we weep with those who weep, and in either case our feeling is _sympathy_ ([Greek: sunpathos]). _This Limitation accounted for._--The reason why the term is more frequently applied to denote participation in the sorrows of others, is obvious on a little reflection. Such, and so benevolent, are the arrangements of a kind Providence, that happiness is the prevalent law of being, and sorrow the exception to that general rule. It is diffused as the sunshine, and the gentle air over all things that breathe, and even inanimate objects, by a sort of sympathetic gladness, reflected from our own minds, seem to share in the general joy. Calamity and sorrow, at least in their more marked and definite forms, come, like storm and tempest in nature, more seldom, and, when they do occur, are the more remarkable and stand out more impressively from the common experience of life, from their very rarity. _More Need of Sympathy with Sorrow._--There is doubtless, also, more occasion for sympathy with the sorrows of others, when those sorrows do occur, than with their joys, and this may be another reason for the more frequent use of the term in this connection. Sorrow _needs_ sympathy, as joy does not. It leans for support on some helping and friendly arm. Joy is, in its nature, strong and self-sustaining, sorrow the reverse. It is a wise and kind provision of the Author of our nature, by which there is implanted in our constitution an instinctive sympathy with sorrow and suffering in all their forms, even when we ourselves are not directly the objects on which the calamity falls. _Remark of Dr. Brown._--It is well remarked by Dr. Brown that "we seem to sympathize less with the pleasures of others than we truly do, because the real sympathy is lost in that constant air of cheerfulness which it is the part of good manners to assume. If the laws of politeness required of us to assume, in society, an appearance of sadness, as they now require from us an appearance of some slight degree of gayety, or, at least, of a disposition to be gay, it is probable that we should then remark any sympathy with gladness, as we now remark particularly any sympathy with sorrow; and we should certainly, then, use the general name to express the former of these, as the more extraordinary, in the same way as we now use it particularly to express the feelings of commiseration. Joy," remarks the same writer, "may be regarded as the common dress of society, and real complacency is thus as little remarkable as a well-fashioned coat in a drawing-room. Let us conceive a single ragged coat to appear in the brilliant circle, and all eyes will be instantly fixed on it. Even beauty itself, till the buzz of astonishment is over, will, for the moment, scarcely attract a single gaze, or wit a single listener. Such, with respect to the general dress of the social mind, is _grief_. It is something for the very appearance of which we are not prepared." _Not true that we sympathize only with Sorrow._--These reasons sufficiently account for the almost exclusive attention paid by moralists to this part of our sympathetic nature, as well as for the almost exclusive use of the term itself to denote participation in the sorrows, rather than in the joys of others. It is not necessary to infer from this circumstance, as some have done, that our sympathies are only with sorrow, that we do not experience a corresponding emotion in view of the happiness of others, a view as unfavorable to our nature as it is remote from truth. _Distinction of Terms._--Sympathy, as usually employed, to denote a fellowship with the sufferings of others, is synonymous with the more specific term _commiseration_, and this again is interchangeable with the terms pity and compassion. So far as use establishes a difference between these terms, it is perhaps this: we more frequently employ the word compassion where there is an ability and a disposition to relieve the suffering; we pity and we commiserate what it is out of our power to remedy. _Strength of this Feeling._--The emotion of sympathy, especially in that form more specially under consideration, is probably one of the strongest and most marked in its effects upon the mind, of any of the feelings of which we are susceptible. When fully aroused, it amounts even to a passion, When the object that awakens it is exposed to imminent danger and there is need of instant and efficient exertion to avert the danger, and bring that relief which, if it comes at all, must come speedily, then there is no prudent calculation of consequences, no deliberation, no hesitation, no fear, but, regardless of every danger, the sympathizer, forgetful of himself, and thinking only of the object to be accomplished, plunges into the sea or into the flames, faces the wild beast, or the more savage human foe, seizes the assassin's arm, or rushes desperately between the murderous weapon and its victim. This boldness and energy of action are, indeed, the result of sympathy, rather than the direct exercise of the emotion itself, but they show how powerful is the feeling from which they spring. _Irrespective of moral Qualities._--It is worthy of note, moreover, that the emotion of which we speak, is, in great measure, irrespective of the moral qualities of the sufferer. He may be a criminal on the rack or the gallows, the most hardened and abandoned of men, and the suffering to which he is exposed may be the just punishment of his crimes, still it is impossible for any one whose heart is not itself hardened against all human suffering, to regard the miserable victim with other than feelings of compassion. That must be a hard heart that could witness the agony of even its worst enemy, in such a case, without pity for the sufferer. _Design of this Principle._--If we inquire, now, for what end this feeling was implanted in our nature, its final cause is obvious. It is a benevolent arrangement, the design of which is twofold:--first, to prevent undue suffering, by keeping in check the excited passions that would otherwise prompt to the infliction of immoderate and unjust punishment when the object of our resentment is in our power; secondly, to secure that relief to the sufferer which, in circumstances of peril, might fail to be afforded were it not for the pressure and impulse of so strong and sudden an emotion. _Adaptation to Circumstances._--A further and incidental benefit insulting from the possession of a lively sensibility to the joys and sorrows of others, has been noticed by Cogan, in his treatise on the passions, viz., that it disposes the mind to accommodate itself readily to the tastes, manners, and dispositions of those with whom we have occasion to associate. A mind of quick and ready sympathy easily enters into the feelings and understands the conduct of others under given circumstances, and is able to adapt itself to the same, easily, and by a sort of instinct. It places itself at once in the same position, and governs itself accordingly. _Sympathy not to be traced to Self-love as its Origin._--The question has arisen, whether sympathy, which, of all the sensibilities, would seem to lie at the furthest remove from all admixture of selfishness, is not, after all, to be traced ultimately to the principle of self-love. Those philosophers who regard this principle as the main-spring of all human action, and the parent source of all the various emotions that agitate the human heart, are at some pains to show that even the feeling of pity may be traced to the same origin. It was the theory of Hobbes, that the sentiment of pity at the calamities of others springs from the imagination, or fiction as he terms it, of a similar calamity befalling ourselves. Adam Smith also maintains that it is only from our own experience that we can form any idea of the sufferings of others, and that the way in which we form such an idea is by supposing ourselves in the same circumstances with the sufferer, and then conceiving how we should be affected. All this is very true. It is in this way, doubtless, that we get the idea of what another is suffering. But the _idea_ of what he suffers is one thing, and our _sympathy_ with that suffering is another. One is a conception, and the other is the feeling awakened by that conception. Moreover, it does not follow, as Mr. Stewart has well shown in his criticism upon this theory, that the sympathy in this case arises from our conceiving or believing, for the moment, those sufferings to be really our own. The feeling which arises on the contemplation of our own real or fancied distress, is quite another feeling in its character, from that of pity or compassion. The two emotions are readily distinguished. The mere uneasiness which we feel at the sight of another's suffering, and the desire which we naturally feel to be rid of that uneasiness, are not the chief elements in compassion. If they were, the sure and simple remedy would be to run away from the distress which occasions the uneasiness, to put it as quickly as possible out of sight and out of mind. Such an emotion; prompting to such a course, might well be termed selfish. But this is not the true nature of sympathy. It is not a mere unpleasant sensation produced by observing the sufferings of another, though such a sensation, doubtless, is produced in a sensitive mind, and accompanies, or may even be said to form a part of, the emotion which we term sympathy; there is, over and above this feeling of uneasiness, a _fellowship_ of sorrow and of suffering, a bearing of that suffering with him, as _his_, and not as our own, a pain _for him_, and not for ourselves, the result and urgent prompting of which is the impulse, the strong irrepressible desire to relieve, not ourselves from uneasiness, but the sufferer from that which occasions his distress. _What follows from this Theory._--If compassion for others were the offspring of fear for ourselves, then, as Butler has well said, the most fearful natures ought to be the most compassionate, which is far from being the case. It may be added, also, that if sympathy is, in any respect, a _selfish_ principle, then they who are most completely and habitually governed by selfish considerations ought, for the same reason, to be the most keenly alive to the sufferings of others, which is little less than a contradiction in terms. CHAPTER II. RATIONAL EMOTIONS. § I.--EMOTIONS OF JOY OR SADNESS ARISING FROM THE CONTEMPLATION OF OUR OWN EXCELLENCE OR THE REVERSE. _Nature and Objects of this Emotion._--Among those susceptibilities which, while implanted in our nature, and springing into exercise by their own spontaneous energy, imply in their operation the exercise of the reflective powers, and in general, of the higher intellectual faculties, and which on that account, we designate as _rational_, in distinction from the _instinctive_ emotions, a prominent place is due to those vivid feelings of pleasure, and pain, with which we contemplate any real or supposed excellence, or defect, in ourselves. The direct object of the emotions now under consideration, is self in some form or aspect. The immediate cause of these emotions is some real or fancied excellence which we possess, or, on the other hand, some real or imagined deficiency. This excellence or deficiency may pertain to our intellectual or to our moral qualities and attainments, or even to our circumstances and condition in life, to any thing, in short, which is _ours_, and which distinguishes us from our fellows. The quality contemplated may be a real possession and attainment, or it may exist only in our imagination and conceit. And so, also, of the defect; that, too, may be real, or imaginary. In either case, vivid feelings are awakened in the mind. It is impossible to contemplate ourselves either as possessing or as lacking any desirable quality without emotion, pleasing or painful, and that in a high degree. _In what Manner awakened._--These emotions are awakened in either of two ways: by the simple contemplation of the supposed excellence, or defect, in _themselves_ considered as pertaining to us; or, more frequently, by _the comparison of ourselves with others_ in these respects. It is to the feelings awakened, in the latter case, by the perceived superiority or inferiority of ourselves to others, as the result of such comparison, that the terms pride and humility are ordinarily applied. These terms are relative, and imply, always, some process of comparison. There may be, however, the painful consciousness of defect, or the pleasing consciousness of some high and noble attainment, when the relation which we sustain to others, as regards these points, forms no part of the object of contemplation. The comparison is not of ourselves with others, but only of our present with our former selves. We are satisfied and delighted at our own progress and improvement, or humbled and cast down at our repeated failure, and manifest deficiency. _Not the same with moral Emotion._--The emotions now under consideration must not be confounded with the satisfaction which arises in view of moral worthiness, and the regret and disapprobation with which we view our past conduct as morally wrong. The emotions of which we now speak, are not of the nature of moral emotion, however closely allied in some respects. It is not the verdict of an approving or condemning conscience that awakens them. They have no reference to the right as such. The object is viewed, not in the light of obligation or duty, but merely as a _good_, a thing agreeable and desirable. Thus viewed, its possession gives us pleasure, its absence, pain. _Not blame-worthy in itself._--In the simple emotion thus awakened, the satisfaction and pleasure with which we regard our own intellectual and moral attainments, or even our external circumstances, there is nothing blamable or unworthy of the true man. It is simply the working of nature. The susceptibility to such emotion is part of our constitution, implanted and inherent. As Dr. Brown has well remarked, it is impossible to desire excellence, and not to rejoice at its attainment; and if it is culpable to feel pleasure at attainments which have made us nobler than we were before, it must, of course, have been culpable to desire such excellence. _In what Cases the Emotion becomes culpable._--It is only when the emotion exists in an undue degree, or with regard to unworthy objects, when the supposed excellence upon which we congratulate ourselves really does not exist, or, when existing, we are disposed to set ourselves up above others on account of it, and perhaps to look down upon others for the lack of it, or even to make them feel by our manner and bearing what and how great the difference is between them and us; it is only under such forms and modifications, that the feeling becomes culpable and odious. These it not unfrequently assumes. They are the states of mind commonly denoted by the term _pride_, as the word is used in common speech; and the censure usually and very justly attached to the state of mind designated by that term, must be understood as applicable to the disposition and feelings now described, and not to the simple emotion of pleasure in view of our own real or supposed attainments. That which we condemn in the proud man is not that he excels others, or is conscious of thus excelling, or takes pleasure even in that consciousness, but that, comparing himself with others, and feeling his superiority, he is disposed to think more highly of himself than he ought, on account of it, and more contemptuously of others than he ought, and especially if he seeks to impress others with the sense of that superiority. _Different Forms which this Disposition assumes._--This he may do in several ways. He may be fond of displaying his superiority, and of courting the applause and distinction which it brings. Then he is the _vain_ man. He may make much of that which really is worth little, and plume himself on what he does not really possess. Then he is the _conceited_ man. He may look with contempt upon and treat with arrogance his inferiors. Then he is the _haughty_ man. Or he may have too much pride to show in this way his own pride; too much self-respect to put on airs, and court attention by display; too much sense to rate himself very far above his real worth; too much good breeding to treat others with arrogance and hauteur. In that case he contents himself with his own high opinion and estimate of himself, and the enjoyment of his own conscious superiority to those around him. He is simply the proud man then, not the vain, the conceited, or the arrogant. The difference, however, is not so much that he thinks less highly of himself, and less contemptuously of others in comparison, but that he does not so fully show what he thinks. The superiority is felt, but it is not so plainly manifested. _The Disposition, as thus manifested, reprehensible._--Of this disposition and state of mind in any of its manifestations as now described, it is not too much to say that it is worthy of the censure which it commonly receives. It is not merely unamiable and odious, but morally reprehensible. Especially is this the case where the superiority consists, not in mental or moral endowments and attainments, but in adventitious circumstances, such as beauty or strength of person, station in society, wealth, or the accident of birth--circumstances which imply no necessary worth in the possessor, no real and inherent superiority to those on whom he looks down. In such a case, pride is purely contemptible. _Incompatible with the highest Excellence._--The highest excellence is ever incompatible with the disposition to think highly of our present attainments and excellence, and to place ourselves above others in comparison. Emotions of pleasure may indeed arise in our minds, as we view the unmistakable evidences of our own improvement. But the noblest nature is that which looks neither at itself, to mark its own acquirements, nor yet at others below itself, to mark its own superiority, but whose earnest gaze is fixed only on that which is above and superior to itself--the beau ideal ever floating before it of an excellence not yet attained--in comparison with which all present attainments seem of little moment. The truly great and noble mind is ever humble, and conscious of its own deficiencies. § II.--ENJOYMENT OF THE LUDICROUS. _Properly an Emotion._--Among the sources of rational enjoyment which the constitution of our nature affords, must be reckoned the feeling awakened by the perception of the _ludicrous_. We class this among the emotions, inasmuch as it is a matter of feeling, and of pleasurable feeling, differing in its nature not more from the intellectual faculties, on the one hand, than from the affections and desires, on the other. It is a species of joy or gladness, a pleasurable excitement of feeling, awakened by a particular class of objects. Whatever else may be true of the feeling in question, the character of agreeableness is inseparable from it. It falls, therefore, properly into that class of feelings which comprises the various modifications of joy and sorrow, and which we have denominated simple emotions. _Why rational._--We term it _rational_, rather than instinctive, inasmuch as it implies, if I mistake not, the exercise of the higher intellectual faculties. It is the prerogative of reason. The brute nature has no perception, and of course no enjoyment, of the ludicrous. The idiot has none. The uncultivated savage nature has it only in a slight degree. In this respect the feeling under consideration is quite analogous to the enjoyment of the beautiful and sublime, and also to the feeling awakened in view of right or wrong action, the approbation or disapprobation of our past conduct. All these, though founded in our nature and constitution, are rational rather than instinctive, as implying the exercise of those faculties which more peculiarly distinguish man from the lower orders of being. _In what Way to be defined._--To define precisely the emotion of the ludicrous would be as difficult as to give an exact definition of any other feeling. We must content ourselves, as in all such cases, by determining the circumstances or conditions which give occasion for the feeling. Though we cannot define the emotion itself, we can carefully observe and specify the various objects and occasions that give rise to it. _The Question stated._--_Views of Locke and Dryden._--Under what circumstances, then, is the feeling of the ludicrous awakened? What is that certain peculiarity, or quality, of a certain class of objects, which constitutes what we call _the ludicrous_, objectively considered? Various answers have been given to this question, by writers not unaccustomed to the careful observation of mental phenomena. Mr. Locke's definition of wit is to this effect, that it consists in "putting those ideas together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, whereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy." This, it has been justly remarked, is too comprehensive, since it includes the entire range of eloquence and poetry. It comprends the sublime and the beautiful as well as the witty. It applies to the most facetious passages of Hudibras; it applies equally well to the most eloquent passages of Burke or Webster, and to many of the finest passages of Paradise Lost. Still more comprehensive is Dryden's definition, who says of wit, that it is a propriety of thoughts and words, or thoughts and words eloquently adapted to the subject, a definition which, it has been jocosely remarked, would include at once Blair's Sermons, Campbell's Pleasures of Hope, Cæsar's Commentaries, the Philippics of Cicero, and the funeral orations of Bossuet, as peculiarly witty productions. It should in justice be remarked, however, that neither Dryden nor Locke, in their use of the term wit, seem to have had in mind what we now understand by it, viz., facetiousness, or the mirth-provoking power, but rather to have employed the word in that more general sense, in which it was formerly almost exclusively used, to denote smartness and vigor of the intellectual powers, good sense, sound judgment, quickness of the apprehension, more particularly as these qualities are exhibited in discourse or in writing. _Definition of Johnson._--Johnson comes nearer the mark when he defines wit as "a kind of _concordia discors_, a combination of dissimilar images, a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike." Not much removed from this, if not indeed derived from it, is the definition of wit given by Campbell, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric--"that which excites agreeable surprise in the mind, by the strange assemblage of related images presented to it." To this, also, applies the same objection as to the preceding definitions, that it includes too much, the beautiful and sublime not less than the ludicrous, eloquence as well as wit. _Of Hobbes._--Hobbes defines laughter, which, so far as relates to the mind, is merely the expression of the feeling of the ludicrous, to be "a sudden glory, arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or our own former infirmity." There can be little doubt, I think, that the object which excites laughter, always present itself to the mind as in some sense its inferior; and in so far, the definition involves an essential element of the ludicrous. The person laughing is always, for the time being, superior, in his own estimation at least, to the person or thing laughed at. It is some awkwardness, some blunder, some defect of body, mind, or manner, some lack of sharpness and sense, or of courage, or of dignity, some perceived incongruity between the true character or position of the individual and his present circumstances, that excites our laughter and constitutes the ludicrous. _Objections to this Theory._--It is not true, however, that the laughter, or the disposition to laugh, arises from the simple conception of our own superiority, or the inferiority of the object contemplated, even in the cases supposed; for if that were so, then wherever and whenever we discover such superiority, the feeling of the ludicrous ought to be awakened, and the greater the superiority, the stronger the tendency to mirth; which is far from being the case. We are not disposed to laugh at the misfortunes of others, however superior our own condition may be to theirs in that very respect. My estate may be better than my neighbor's, or my health superior to his, but I am not disposed to laugh at him on that account. On the theory of Hobbes, no persons ought to be so full of merriment, even to overflowing, as the proud, self-conceited, and supercilious, who are most deeply impressed with the idea of their own vast superiority to people and things in general. The fact is precisely the reverse. Such persons seldom laugh, and when they do, the smile that plays for a moment on the face is of that cold and disdainful nature which is far removed from genuine and hearty merriment. It has little in it, as it has been well said, "of the _full glorying and eminency_ of laughter," but is rather like the smile of Cassius. "He loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort, As if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit, That could be moved to smile at any thing." We cannot then resolve the ludicrous into the simple perception of some inferiority of the object or person thus regarded, to ourselves, since there are many kinds of inferiority which do not, in the least, awaken the sense of the ludicrous, while, at the same time, those who are most impressed by the consciousness of their superiority are not usually most disposed to mirth. _Incongruity the essential Element._--If we are required now to specify in what consists the essential character of the ludicrous, and of wit which may be regarded as the exciting or producing cause of the same, we should detect it in _the grouping_, _or bringing together in a sudden and unexpected manner_, _ideas or things that are in their nature incongruous_. The _incongruity_ of the objects thus brought into juxtaposition, and the _surprise_ felt at the _novel_ and _unexpected_ relation thus discovered, are, it seems to me, the true essential elements in the idea of the ludicrous. If we examine closely the different objects that give rise to this emotion, we shall find, I think, always something incongruous, and consequently unusual and unexpected, in the relations presented, whether of ideas or of things. It may be the result of accident, or of awkwardness, or of mental obtuseness, or of design; it matters not in what mode or from what source the thing proceeds; whenever these conditions are answered, the sense of the ludicrous is awakened. _Relation of Surprise to the ludicrous._--Surprise is an essential concomitant of the ludicrous. This is the state of mind into which we are thrown by the occurrence of any thing new, strange, out of the usual course, and, therefore, unexpected. Whatever is incongruous, is likely to be unusual, and of course unexpected, and hence strikes the mind with more or less surprise. Not every thing that surprises us, however, is witty. The sudden fall of a window near which we are sitting, or the unexpected discharge of a musket within a few paces of us, may cause us to start with surprise, but would not strike us probably as particularly facetious. We are surprised to hear of the death of a friend, or of some fearful accident, attended with loss of life to many, but there is no mirthfulness in such surprise. It is only that form of surprise which is awakened by the perception of the incongruous, and not the surprise we feel in general at any thing new and strange, that is related to the ludicrous. It is rather a concomitant, therefore, than strictly an element of the emotion we are now considering. _Novelty as related to Wit._--How much novelty and suddenness add to the effect of wit, every one knows. A story however witty, once heard, loses its freshness and zest, and, often repeated, becomes not merely uninteresting, but irksome, and at length intolerable. In the same manner, and for the same reason, a witticism which we know to have been premeditated produces little effect, as compared with the same thing said in sudden repartee, and on the spur of the moment. That a man should have studied out some curious relations and combinations of things in his closet, does not surprise us so much, as that he should happen to conceive of these relations at the very moment when they would meet the exigency of the occasion. The epithets which we most commonly apply to any witty production or facetious remark, indicate the same thing; we call it lively, fresh, sparkling, full of vivacity and zest--terms borrowed, perhaps, from the choicer wines, which will not bear exposure but lose their flavor and life when once brought to the air. _Even the Incongruous not always ludicrous._--We come to this result, then, in our own attempted analysis, that the incongruity of the ideas or objects brought into relation with each other constitutes the essential characteristic, the invariable element of the ludicrous, the effect being always greatly heightened by the surprise we feel at the novel and unexpected combinations thus presented. It must be remarked, however, that even the incongruous and unexpected fail to awaken the sense of the ludicrous, when the object or event contemplated is of such a nature as to give rise to other and more serious emotions. When the occurrence, however novel and surprising in itself, or even ludicrous, is of such a nature as to endanger the life, or seriously injure the well-being of ourselves or of others, in the one case fear, in the other compassion, are at once awakened, and all sense of the ludicrous is completely at an end. The graver passion is at variance with the lighter, and banishes it from the mind. Should we see a well dressed and portly man, of some pretension and bearing, accidentally lose his footing and sprawl ingloriously in the gutter, our first impulse undoubtedly would be to laugh. The incongruity of his present position and appearance with his general neatness of person and dignity of manner would appeal strongly to the sense of the ridiculous. Should we learn, however, that in the fall he had broken his leg, or otherwise seriously injured himself, our mirthfulness at once gives place to pity. _Discovery of Truth not allied to the ludicrous._--It is for a similar reason that the discovery of any new and important truth in science, however strange and unexpected, never awakens the feeling of the ludicrous. Its importance carries it over into a higher sphere of thought and feeling. Kepler's law of planetary motion must have been at first a strange and wonderful announcement; the chemical identity of charcoal and the diamond presents, in a new and strange relation, objects apparently most unlike and incongruous; yet, in all probability, neither the astronomer, nor the chemist, who made and announced these discoveries, were regarded by the men of the time as having done any thing peculiarly witty. We look at the importance of the results in such cases, and whatever of oddity or incongruity there may be in the ideas or objects thus related, fails to impress the mind in the presence of graver emotions. _Various Forms of the ludicrous._--The incongruity that awakens the feeling of the ludicrous may present itself in many diverse forms. It may relate to _objects_, or to _ideas_. In either case, the grouping or bringing together of the incongruous elements may be _accidental_, or it may be _intentional_. If accidental, it passes for a blunder; if intentional, it takes the name of wit. _Accidental and intentional grouping of Objects incongruous._--Of the _accidental_ grouping of _objects_ that are incongruous, we have an instance in the case already supposed, of the well dressed and dignified gentleman unexpectedly prostrate in the mud. If in place of the dignified gentleman we have the dandy, or the Broadway exquisite, fresh from the toilet, the incongruity is so much the greater, and so much the greater our mirth. Let the hero of the scene, for instance, be such a one as Hotspur so contemptuously describes as coming to parley with him after battle:-- "When I was dry with rage and extreme toil, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed, Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin, new-reaped, Showed like a stubble-land at harvest home. He was perfumed like a milliner; And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet box, which ever and anon He gave his nose, and took't away again;" --imagine such a character, with all his finery, floundering in the mud, and the ludicrousness of the scene would be such as to set at naught all attempts at gravity, even on the part of those who seldom smile. When the incongruous objects are purposely brought into relation for the sake of exciting mirth, the wit may be _at the expense of others_, in which case we have either the practical joke, or simple buffoonery, imitating the peculiarities and incongruities of others; or the joker may play off his wit _at his own expense_, and act the clown or the fool for the amusement of observers. _Accidental grouping of incongruous Ideas._--When the incongruity is that not of _objects_, but of _ideas_ brought into new and unexpected relation, and when this is the result of accident or awkwardness, rather than of design, we have what is termed a _blunder_ or a _bull_. In such a case there is always involved some inconsistency between the thing meant, and the thing said or done. There is an apparent congruity, but a real incongruity of the related ideas. An instance of this occurs in the anecdote related by Sydney Smith, of a physician, who, being present where the conversation turned upon an English nobleman of rank and fortune, but without children, remarked, with great seriousness, that to be childless was a misfortune, but he thought he had observed that it was _hereditary_ in some families. Of this nature is most of the wit which we call Irish; the result of accident rather than design--a blunder, a bull. It is said that during the late rebellion in Ireland, the enraged populace, on a certain occasion, vented their wrath against a famous banker, by solemnly resolving to burn all his bank-notes which they could lay hands on; forgetting, in their rage, that this was only to make themselves so much the poorer, and him so much the richer. The instance given by Mr. Mahan is also in point, of two Irishmen walking together through the woods, the foremost of whom seizing a branch, as he passed along, and holding it for a while, suddenly let it fly back, whereby his companion behind was suddenly reduced to a horizontal position, but on recovering himself, congratulated his associate on having held back the branch as long as he did, since it must otherwise have killed him. _Intentional grouping of incongruous Ideas._--The _intentional_ grouping of incongruous ideas, for the purpose of exciting the feeling of the ludicrous, is more properly denominated _wit_. This, again, may assume diverse forms. Where the ideas are entirely dissimilar, but have a name or sound in common, which similarity of mere sound or name is seized upon as the basis of comparison, the wit takes the name of a _pun_. The more complete the incongruity of the two ideas, thus brought into strange and unexpected relation, under cover of a word, the more perfect the pun, and the more ludicrous the effect. This kind of wit is deservedly reckoned as inferior. "By unremitting exertions," says a quaint writer, "it has been at last put under, and driven into cloisters, from whence it must never again be suffered to emerge into the light of the world." One invaluable blessing, adds the same author, produced by the banishment of punning is, an immediate reduction of the number of wits. _The Burlesque._--When the wit is employed in debasing what is great and imposing, by applying thereto figures and phrases that are mean and contemptible, it takes the name of _burlesque_. The pages of Hudibras afford abundant illustrations of this form of the ludicrous. The battle of Don Quixote and the wind-mills is a burlesque on the ancient tournaments. _The Mock-Heroic._--The mock-heroic, by a contrary process, provokes the sense of the ridiculous by investing what is inconsiderable and mean with high-sounding epithets and dignified description. The battle of the mice and frogs is an instance of this. _The double Meaning._--Beside the varieties of intentional incongruity of ideas already mentioned, there are certain less important forms of witticism, which can perhaps hardly be classed under any of the foregoing divisions. The whole tribe of _double entendres_, or double meanings, where one thing is said and another thing is meant, or at least where the apparent and honest is not the only or the real meaning; _satire_, which is only a modification of the same principle, drawn out into somewhat more extended and dignified discourse, and which, under the form of apparent praise, hides the shafts of ridicule and invective; _sarcasm_, which conveys the intended censure and invective in a somewhat more indirect and oblique manner;--these are all but various modes of what we have called intentional incongruity of ideas. _This Principle, in what Respects of dangerous Tendency._--Of the value of this principle of our nature, I have as yet said nothing. To estimate it at its true worth, is not altogether an easy thing. On the one hand, there can be little doubt that, carried to excess, it becomes a dangerous principle. The tendency to view all things, even perhaps the most sacred, in a ludicrous light, and to discover fanciful and remote relations between objects and ideas the most diverse and incongruous, must exert an unhappy influence on the general tone and character of both the mind and the heart. Where wit, or the disposition to the ludicrous, becomes the predominant quality of the mind, impressing the other and nobler faculties into its lawless service, it must be to the detriment of the mind's highest energies and capacities; to the detriment especially of that sincerity and honesty of purpose, and that earnest love of truth, which are the foundation of all true greatness. I speak in this of the excess and abuse of wit; I speak of the _mere_ wit. _Of use to the Mind._--On the other hand, the tendency to the ludicrous has its uses in the economy and constitution of our nature, and they are by no means to be overlooked. It gives a lightness and buoyancy, a freshness and life, to the faculties that would otherwise be jaded in the weary march and routine of life. It is to the mind what music is to the soldier on the march. It enlivens and refreshes the spirits. A hearty laugh doeth good like a medicine. A quick and keen perception of the ludicrous, when not permitted to usurp undue control, but made the servitor of the higher powers and propensities, and keeping its true place, not in the fore-front, but in the background of the varied and busy scene, is to be regarded as one of the most fortunate mental endowments. _Wit often associated with noble Qualities._--There is no necessary connection, no connection of any sort, perhaps, between wisdom and dullness, although a great part of mankind have always persisted in the contrary opinion. The laughter-loving and laughter-provoking man is by no means a fool. He who goes through the world, such as it is, and sees in all its caprices, and inconsistencies, and follies, and absurdities, nothing to laugh at, much more justly deserves the suspicion of a lack of sense. "Wit," it has been justly remarked, "is seldom the only eminent quality which resides in the mind of any man; it is commonly accompanied by many other talents of every description, and ought to be considered as a strong evidence of a fertile and superior understanding. Almost all the great poets, orators, and statesmen of all times, have been witty." _Wit as an Instrument for correcting Folly._--There is one important use of the faculty under consideration, to which I have not as yet alluded. I refer to its power as an instrument for keeping in check the follies and vices of those who are governed by no higher principle than a regard to the good opinion of society, and a fear of incurring the ridicule of an observing and sharp-sighted world. To such, and such there are in multitudes, "_the world's dread laugh_" is more potent and formidable than any law of God or man. There are, moreover, many lighter foibles and inconsistencies of even good men, for which the true and most effective weapon is ridicule. _Remarks of Sydney Smith._--I cannot better conclude my remarks upon this part of our mental constitution, than by citing some very just observations of Sydney Smith--himself one of the keenest wits of the age. "I have talked of the _danger_ of wit; I do not mean by that to enter into common-place declamation against faculties, because they _are_ dangerous; wit is dangerous, eloquence is dangerous, a talent for observation is dangerous, every thing is dangerous that has energy and vigor for its characteristics; nothing is safe but mediocrity.... But when wit is combined with sense and information; where it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty and something much _better_ than witty, who loves honor, justice, decency, good nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit; wit is _then_ a beautiful and delightful part of our nature." § III.--ENJOYMENT OF THE NEW AND WONDERFUL. _Surprise and Ennui._--Of that form of surprise which arises in view of the incongruous, and which accompanies the feeling of the ludicrous, I have already had occasion to speak, in treating of that emotion. Of the feeling of surprise in general, its nature, and occasions, and also of that feeling to which it stands opposed, and which for want of a better term we may call _ennui_, I am now to speak. _Definition and nature of Surprise._--Surprise may be defined as the feeling awakened by the perception of whatever is new and wonderful. It is, in itself considered, an agreeable emotion, rather than otherwise. Variety and novelty are usually pleasing; our nature demands them, and is gratified at their occurrence. Monotony, the unbroken thread, and ever-recurring routine of ordinary life and duty, weary, and, after a time, disgust us. Upon this listlessness and lethargy of the mind, a new and unexpected event, as the arrival of a friend, or the reception of some unlooked-for intelligence, breaks in with an agreeable surprise. Hence the eagerness of men, in all ages and all nations, to hear or see some new thing. It is only when the new event or intelligence is of the nature of positive evil, when the news is of some misfortune, real or imagined, when the experience of present, or the fear of future suffering, is the direct and natural result of the occurrence, that the surprise becomes a painful emotion. And even in such cases, I am not quite sure that there is not in the first excitement of the mind upon the reception of bad news, as of the death of a friend, or the calamity of a neighbor, something for the moment, of the nature of pleasure mingling with the pain. We deeply regret the occurrence, but are pleased to have heard the news. The thing grieves us, but not the hearing of it. It is not the surprise that pains us, but the thing at which we are surprised. Surprise, like every other form of mental excitement, is not, in itself, and within due bounds, disagreeable, but the reverse. _How awakened._--This emotion is awakened, as already stated, in view of any thing unforeseen and unexpected. We naturally anticipate, to some extent, the course of the future. We presume it will be substantially as the past. We expect the recurrence of what has often and usually occurred, and whenever any thing breaks in on this established order of events, we are surprised at the interruption in the ordinary train of sequences. Hence the new and the strange always excite surprise. _Differs from Wonder._--Surprise differs from wonder, in that the latter involves an _intellectual_ element, the effort of the mind to satisfy itself of the cause and proper explanation of the new and strange phenomenon. Surprise is purely a matter of sensibility, of feeling, and not of intellect. The mind is wholly passive under this emotion. It may lead to action, as may any other emotion, but, like every other emotion, it is, in itself, an influence exerted upon the mind, and not by it, something passively received, and not actively put forth. _From Astonishment._--It differs from astonishment in that the latter expresses a higher degree of mental excitement, as in view of some occurrence exceedingly remarkable and strange, or of some object whose magnitude and importance fills the mind. _Design of this Principle._--The end to be accomplished by this provision of our nature is sufficiently obvious. Our attention is thereby called to whatever is out of the ordinary course, and which, from the circumstance that it is something unusual, may be supposed to require attention, and we are put on our guard against the approaching danger, or roused to meet the present emergency. Surprise is the alarm-bell that calls all our energies into action, or at least warns them to be in present readiness for whatever service may be needed. The same principle operates also as a stimulus to exertion in the ordinary affairs of life. We seek new things, we are weary with the old, and this simple law of our nature is often one of the strongest incitements to effort. _The opposite Feeling._--The opposite of surprise is that uneasy feeling, of which we are conscious, from the constant recurrence of the same objects in unvaried sequence; as, for instance, from the continued repetition of the same sound, or series of sounds, the uniform succession of the same or similar objects in the landscape, and the like. Every one knows how tedious becomes a perfectly straight and level road, with the same objects occurring at regular intervals, and with nothing to break the dead monotony of the scene. The most rugged passes of the Alps would be a relief in exchange, both to body and mind. The repetition of the same song, or the same succession of musical sounds, however pleasing in themselves, becomes in like manner, after a time, intolerable. For want of a better term, for I am not sure that we have in our own language any one word that exactly expresses the feeling now under consideration, we may borrow of the French the somewhat expressive term _ennui_, by which to designate this form of the sensibility. _Use of Ennui._--There can be little doubt that this feeling subserves a valuable purpose in the constitution and economy of our nature. It is the needed motive and stimulus to action, without which we should settle down often into a sluggish indifference and contentment with things as they are, instead of pressing forward to something worthier and better. § IV.--ENJOYMENT OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME. _The Enjoyment, as distinguished from the intellectual Perception of the Beautiful._--Of the _idea_ of the beautiful, and of the action of the mind as _cognizant_ of it, in so far as regards the intellectual faculties, I have already treated in another connection. But it is not the intellect alone that comes under the influence of the beautiful. What the sense perceives, what the taste and judgment recognize and approve, the sensibility is quick to feel. Emotion is awakened. No sooner is a beautiful object perceived in nature or art, than we are conscious of lively sensations of pleasure. So strong and so universal are these feelings, that many writers have been led to speak of beauty itself, as if it were an emotion, a merely subjective matter, an affair of feeling merely. The incorrectness of this view has been already shown, and we need not enter upon the discussion anew. _The term Admiration._--The feeling awakened by the perception of the beautiful, like some other feelings of which we are conscious, has not a name that precisely designates it; hence the expression--ambiguous, and, therefore, objectionable--emotions of beauty, employed by certain writers to denote the feeling in question. The word _admiration_, though often used in a somewhat wider sense, perhaps more nearly expresses the emotion to which I refer, than any other word in our language. We are surprised at what is new and strange. We admire what is beautiful and sublime. The feeling is one of pure and unalloyed pleasure, mingled with more or less of wonder or surprise, in case the object contemplated is one which is new to us, or one of rare and surpassing beauty. As the beautiful has its opposite--the deformed or ugly--so the feeling which it awakens stands contrasted with an opposite emotion, viz., _disgust_. In connection with this form of sensibility, there are some questions requiring consideration. _Whether the Emotion is immediate._--It is a question somewhat debated, whether the emotions awakened by the beautiful and sublime are immediate, or reflective; whether they spring up at once on perception of the object, or only as the result of reflection and reasoning. Those who maintain that beauty consists in utility, or in order and proportion, fitness, unity with variety, etc., must, of course, regard the emotions awakened by it as not immediate, since, according to their theory, time must be allowed for the understanding to convince itself, in the first place, that the object _is_ useful, etc. The qualities constituting the beauty must be first apprehended by the mind as existing in the object, before there can be emotion, and to do this is the work of reflection. If, however, beauty is but the expression of the invisible under the visible and sensible forms, then all that is necessary to produce emotion is simply the perception of the object thus expressive, since the moment it is perceived, it is perceived as expressing something, and thus, appealing to our own spiritual nature, awakens immediate emotion. _How to be decided._--The question must be decided by the observation of facts, and the result will constitute an additional argument in favor of one, or the other, of the general views of the beautiful now named. What then are the facts in the case, as given by consciousness, and observation? _Testimony of Consciousness._--So far as I can judge, no sooner do we find ourselves in presence of a beautiful object than we are conscious of emotions of pleasure. There is no previous cross-questioning of the object to find out whether it is adapted to this or that useful end, or whether the rules of order, and proportion, are observed in its construction. Before we have time to think of these things, the sensibility has already responded to the appeal which beauty ever makes to our sensitive nature, and the first distinct fact of which we are conscious is an emotion of pleasure. _Effect of Repetition._--Consciousness assures us, more over, that the pleasure is usually quite as vivid at the first sight of a beautiful object as ever after, which would indicate that it is not the result of reflection. In truth, repetition is found, in most cases, to weaken the emotion, and familiarity may even destroy it. Yet every repetition adds to our opportunity for observation and reflection, and strengthens our conviction of the utility, the order, the fitness, the proportion, of that which we observe. _Critical Reflection subsequent to Emotion._--It seems evident, moreover, that whatever reflections of this nature we may choose to indulge, are uniformly subsequent to the first emotion of pleasure and delight, to the first impression made upon us by the beauty of the object--after-thoughts readily to be distinguished from those first impressions--and that they are usually the result of a special volition to inform ourselves as to these matters; whereas the emotion is spontaneous and involuntary. Doubtless a pleasure arises from the perception of the qualities referred to, but it is a pleasure of another kind from that which arises in view of the beautiful, as such. We must think, then, that the emotions awakened by the beautiful are immediate, not reflective. _Further Question._--Closely allied to the preceding is the question, Which precedes the other, the emotion which a beautiful object awakens, or the judgment of the mind that the object is beautiful. Logically, doubtless, the two things may be distinguished, but not, perhaps, in order of time. No sooner is the object perceived, than it is both perceived and felt to be beautiful. The emotion awakened and the mental affirmation, "That is beautiful," are both immediate on the perception of the object, synchronous events, so far as concerns at least our ability to distinguish between them in point of time. _Logically, Emotion precedes._--In point of logical relation, the emotion, I think, must be allowed the precedence, although so high an authority as Kant decides otherwise. Had we no emotion in view of the beautiful, we should not know that it was beautiful. As, universally, sensation is the indispensable condition of perception, and logically, at least, its antecedent, so here the feeling of the beautiful is the condition and source of the perception of the beautiful. The object strikes us as being so, moves us, affects us, produces on us the impression, and hence we say, "That is beautiful." Had we no susceptibility of emotion in view of the beautiful, it may be seriously questioned whether we should ever have the perception or impression that any given object is beautiful. _The Beautiful as distinguished from the Sublime._--There is still another point deserving attention. In discussing the æsthetic emotions, we have spoken as yet only of the feeling awakened by the _beautiful_. How do these emotions differ--in degree merely--or in nature? _The Opinion that they differ only in Degree._--Some have maintained that sublimity is only a higher _degree_ of what we call beauty. A little stream playing among the hills and tumbling over the rocks is beautiful; a little further on, as it grows larger, and swifter, and stronger, it becomes sublime. If this be so, it is a very simple matter: the surveyor's chain, or a ten foot pole, will, at any time, give us the difference, and enable us to determine at once whether a river or a mountain is merely pretty, or sublime. _Different Emotions excited by each._--If they differ in _kind_, however, and not merely in quantity, it may not be so easy to tell just what the difference is. We can best detect it, perhaps, by observing carefully the difference of the emotions excited in us by the two classes of objects. I contemplate an object, which, in common with all the world, I call beautiful. What emotion does that object awaken in me? An emotion of pleasure and delight, for which I can find, perhaps, no better name than admiration. I contemplate now another object which men call sublime. What now are my emotions? Admiration there may be, but not, as before, a calm, placid delight; far otherwise. An admiration mingled with awe, a sense of greatness and of power in the object now oppresses me, and I stand as before some superior being, or element, in whose presence I feel my comparative feebleness and insignificance. _The Sublime conveys the Idea of superior Power._--Accordingly we find that the objects which men call sublime are invariably such as are fitted to awaken such emotions. They are objects which convey the idea of superior force and power--something grand in its dimensions or in its strength--something vast and illimitable, beyond our comprehension and control. The boundless expanse of the ocean, the prairie, or the pathless desert, the huge mass of some lofty mountain, the resistless cataract, the awful crash of the thunder, as it rolls along the trembling firmament, the roar of the sea in a storm when it lifteth up its waves on high, the movements of an army on the battle-field--these, and such as these, are the objects we call sublime. The little may be beautiful, it is never sublime. Nor is the merely great always so, but only when it conveys the idea of superior power. Montmorenci is beautiful, Niagara is sublime. A Swiss valley, nestling among the hills, is beautiful; the mountains that tower above it through the overhanging clouds into the pure upper sky, and in the calm, serene majesty of their strength stand looking down upon the slumbering world at their feet, and all the insignificance of man and his little affairs, are sublime. _The Sublime and the Beautiful associated._--Nor is the sublime always unassociated with the beautiful. Niagara is not more sublime than beautiful. The deep emerald hue of the waters as they plunge, the bow on the mist, the foam sparkling in the abyss below, are each among the most beautiful objects in nature. The sublime and the beautiful are often mingled thus, distinct elements, but conjoined in the same object. The highest æsthetic effect is produced by this combination. The beauty tempers the sublimity; the sublimity elevates and ennobles the beauty. It is thus at Niagara. It is thus when the sunrise flashes along the summits of the snowy Alps. _The Beautiful tranquilizes, the Sublime agitates._--The beautiful pleases us; so, in a sense, does the sublime. Both produce agreeable emotions. Yet they differ. In the enjoyment of the beautiful there is a calm, quiet pleasure; the mind is at rest, undisturbed, can at its leisure and sweet will admire the delicacy and elegance of that which fills it with delight. But in the perception of the sublime it is otherwise. The mind is agitated, is in sympathy with the stir, and strife, and play of the fierce elements, or is oppressed with the feeling of its own insignificance, as contrasted with the stern majesty and strength of what it contemplates. Hence the sublime takes a deeper hold on the mind than the merely beautiful, awes it, elevates it, rouses its slumbering energies, quickens the slow course of thought, and makes it live, in brief moments, whole hours and days of ordinary life. The beautiful charms and soothes us; the sublime subdues us and leads us captive. The one awakens our sympathy and love, the other rouses in us all that is noble, serious, and great in our nature. _Relation of the Sublime to Fear._--The relation of the sublime to fear has been noticed by several writers. Memdelssohn, Ancillon, Kant, Jouffroy, Blair, have spoken of it, as well as Burke. The latter was not far from right in his theory of fear as an element of the sublime. It were better to say _awe_ than fear, for the boldest and stoutest hearts are fully susceptible of it; and it were better to speak of it as an element of our emotion in view of the sublime, than as an element of the sublime itself. _Cultivation of æsthetic Sensibility._--I cannot, in this connection, entirety pass without notice a topic requiring much more careful consideration than my present limits will permit--the cultivation of the æsthetic sensibility--of a love for the beautiful. _This Culture neglected._--The love of the beautiful is merely one of the manifold forms of the sensibility, and, in common with every other feeling and propensity of our nature, it may be augmented, quickened, strengthened to a very great degree by due culture and exercise. It is an endowment of nature, but, like other native endowments, it may be neglected and suffered to die out. This, unfortunately, is too frequently the case with those especially who are engaged in the active pursuits of life. The time and the attention are demanded for other and more important matters, and so the merely beautiful is passed by unheeded. It admits of question, whether it is not a serious defect in our systems of education, that so little attention is paid to the culture of the taste, and of a true love for the beautiful. The means of such a culture are ever at hand. The great works and the most perfect models in art are not, indeed, accessible to all. Not every one can cross the seas to study the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo. But around us in nature, along our daily paths, are the works of a greater Artist, and no intelligent and thoughtful mind need be unobservant of their beauty. Nor is there danger, as some may apprehend, that we shall carry this matter to excess. The tendencies of our age and of our country are wholly the reverse. The danger is rather that in the activity and energy of our new life, the higher culture will be overlooked, and the love of the beautiful die out. _Value of this Principle._--The love of the beautiful is the source of some of the purest and most exquisite pleasures of life. It is the gift of God in the creation and endowment of the human soul. Nature lays the foundation for it among her earliest developments. The child is, by nature, a lover of the beautiful. Nor is it in early life alone that this principle has its natural and normal developments. On the contrary, under favorable circumstances, it grows stronger and more active as the mind matures, and the years pass on. Happy he who, even in old age, keeps fresh in his heart this pure and beautiful fountain of his youth; who, as days advance, and shadows lengthen, and sense grows dull, can still look, with all the admiration and delight of his childish years, on whatever is truly beautiful in the works of God or man. § V.--SATISFACTION IN VIEW OF RIGHT CONDUCT, AND REMORSE IN VIEW OF WRONG. _The Feeling, as distinguished from the Perception of Right._--In the chapter on the Idea and Cognizance of the Right, the notion of right, in itself considered, and also the mind's action as cognizant of the right, so far at least as concerns the _intellectual_ faculties thus employed, were fully discussed. It is not necessary now to enter again upon the investigation of these topics. But, as in the cognizance of the beautiful, so in the cognizance of the right, not only is the intellect exercised, but the sensibility also is aroused. As consequent upon the perceptions of the intellect, _emotion_ is awakened; and that emotion is both definite and strong. It is peculiar in its operation. No emotion that stirs the human bosom is more uniform in its development, more strongly marked in its character, or exerts a deeper and more permanent influence on the happiness and destiny of man, than the satisfaction with which he views the virtuous conduct of a well-spent hour or a well-spent life, and the regret, amounting sometimes to remorse, with which, on the contrary, he looks back upon the misdeeds and follies of the past. Of all the forms of joy and sorrow that cast their lights and shadows over the checkered scene and pathway of human existence, there are none which, aside from their ethical relations, are of deeper interest to the psychologist, or more worthy his careful study, than the emotions to which I now refer. _The moral Faculty not resolvable into moral Feeling._--So deeply have certain writers been impressed with the importance of this part of our nature, that they have not hesitated to resolve the moral faculty itself into the emotions now under consideration, and to make the recognition of moral distinctions ultimately a mere matter of feeling. This, whether regarded ethically, or psychologically, is certainly a great mistake, fatal in either case to the true science whether of morals or of mind. Right and wrong, as also the beautiful and its opposite, are not mere conceptions of the human mind. They have an actual objective existence and reality and, as such, are cognized by the mind, which perceives a given act to be right or wrong, and, as such, obligatory or the opposite, and approves or condemns the deed, and the doer accordingly. So far the intellect is concerned. But the process does not stop here. Sensibility is awakened. The verdict and calm decisions of the judgment are taken up by the feelings, and made the basis and occasion of a new form of mental activity. It is with this excitement of the sensibility in view of conduct as right or wrong, that we are now concerned, and while we can by no means resolve all our moral perceptions and judgments into this class of emotions, we would still assign it an important place among the various forms of mental activity. _Not limited to our own Conduct._--The emotion of which we speak is not limited to the occasions of our own moral conduct; it arises, also, in view of the moral actions of others. A good deed, an act of generosity, magnanimity, courage, by whomsoever performed, meets our approbation, and awakens in our bosoms feelings of pleasure. If the act is one of more than ordinary heroism and self-sacrifice, we are filled with admiration. Instances of the opposite excite our displeasure and disgust. No small part of the interest with which we trace the records of history, or the pages of romance, arises from that constant play of the feelings with which we watch the course of events, and the development of character, as corresponding to or at variance with the demands of our moral nature. _A good Conscience an Object of universal Desire._--But it is chiefly when we become ourselves the actors, and the decisions of conscience respect our own good or evil deeds that we learn the true nature and power of the moral emotions. A good conscience, it has been said, is the only object of universal desire, since even bad men wish, though in vain, for the happiness which it confers. It would perhaps be more correct to say that an accusing conscience is an object of universal dread. But in either case, whether for approval or condemnation, very great is its power over the human mind. _Sustaining Power of a good Conscience._--We all know something of it, not only by the observation of others, but by the consciousness of our own inner life. In the testimony of a good conscience, in its calm, deliberate approval of our conduct, lies one of the sweetest and purest of the pleasures of life; a source of enjoyment whose springs are beyond the reach of accident or envy; a fountain in the desert making glad the wilderness and the solitary place. It has, moreover, a sustaining power. The consciousness of rectitude, the approval of the still small voice within, that whispers in the moment of danger and weakness, "_You are right_," imparts to the fainting soul a courage and a strength that can come from no other source. Under its influence the soul is elevated above the violence of pain, and the pressure of outward calamity. The timid become bold, the weak are made strong. Here lies the secret of much of the heroism that adorns the annals of martyrdom and of the church. Women and children, frail and feeble by nature, ill fitted to withstand the force of public opinion, and shrinking from the very thought of pain and suffering, have calmly faced the angry reproaches of the multitude, and resolutely met death in its most terrific forms, sustained by the power of an approving conscience, whose decisions were, to them, of more consequence than the applause or censure of the world, and whose sustaining power bore them, as on a prophet's chariot of fire, above the pains of torture and the rage of infuriated men. _Power of Remorse._--Not less is the power of an accusing conscience. Its disapprobation and censure, though clothed with no external authority, are more to be dreaded than the frowns of kings or the approach of armies. It is a silent constant presence that cannot be escaped, and will not be pacified. It embitters the happiness of life, cuts the sinews of the soul's inherent strength. It is a fire in the bones, burning when no man suspects but he only who is doomed to its endurance; a girdle of thorns worn next the heart, concealed, it may be, from the eye of man, but giving the wearer no rest, day nor night. Its accusations are not loud, but to the guilty soul they are terrible, penetrating her inmost recesses, and making her to tremble as the forest trembles at the roar of the enraged lion, as the deep sea trembles in her silent depths, when her Creator goeth by on the wings of the tempest, and the God of glory thundereth. The bold bad man hears that accusing voice, and his strength departs from him. The heart that is inured to all evil, and grown hard in sin, and fears not the face of man, nor the law of God, hears it, and becomes as the heart of a child. How terrible is remorse! that worm that never dies, that fire that never goes out. We cannot follow the human soul beyond the confines of its present existence. But it is an opinion entertained by some, and in itself not improbable, that, in the future, conscience will act with greatly increased power. When the causes that now conspire to prevent its full development and perfect action, shall operate no longer; when the tumult of the march and the battle are over; when the cares, the pleasures, the temptations, the vain pursuits, that now distract the mind with their confused uproar, shall die away in the distance, and cease to be heard, in the stillness of eternity, in the silence of a purely spiritual existence, the still small voice of conscience may perhaps be heard as never before. In the busy day-time we catch, at intervals, the sound of the distant ocean, as a low and gentle murmur. In the still night, when all is hushed, we hear it beating, in heavy and constant surges, on the shore. And thus it may be with the power of conscience in the future. SENSIBILITIES. PART SECOND. THE AFFECTIONS. CHAPTER I. BENEVOLENT AFFECTIONS. _Character of the Affections as a Class._--Of the three generic classes into which the sensibilities were divided, viz., Simple Emotions, Affections, and Desires, the first alone has, thus far, engaged our attention. We now approach the second. It will be remembered that, in our analysis of the sensibilities, the Affections were distinguished from the Simple Emotions, as being of a complex character, involving, along with the feeling of delight and satisfaction in the object, or the reverse, the wish, more or less definite and intense, of good or ill to the object that awakens the emotion. The feeling thus assumes an active and transitive form, going forth from itself, and even forgetting itself, in its care for the object. _How divided._--The affections, it will also be remembered, were further divided into the _benevolent_ and _malevolent_, according as they seek the good or the ill of the object on which they fasten. As the simple emotions are but so many forms of _joy_ and _sorrow_, so, likewise, the affections are but so many modifications of the principle of _love_ and its opposite, _hate_. _Effects upon the Character in their marked Development._--When these give tone to the general character of an individual, he becomes the philanthropist or misanthropist, the man of kind and gentle disposition, or the hater of his race, according as the one or the other principle predominates. Roused to more than ordinary activity, breaking away from the restraints of reason, and the dictates of sober judgment, assuming the command of the soul, and urging it on to a given end, regardless of other and higher interests, these affections assume the name of _passions_, and the spectacle is presented of a man driven blindly and madly to the accomplishment of his wishes, as the ship, dismantled, drives before the storm; or else, in stern conflict with himself and the feelings that nature has implanted in his bosom, controlling with steady hand his own restless and fiery spirit. _Relation to the simple Emotions._--The relation which the affections, as a class, bear to the simple emotions, deserves a moment's attention. The one class naturally follows and grows out of the other. What we enjoy, we come naturally to regard with feelings of affection, while that which causes pain, naturally awakens feelings of dislike and aversion. So love and hate succeed to joy and sorrow in our hearts, as regards the objects contemplated. The simple emotions precede and give rise to the affections. _Enumeration._--The benevolent affections, to which we confine our attention in the present chapter, assume different forms, according to their respective objects. The more prominent are, _love of kindred_, _love of friends_, _love of benefactors_, _love of home and country_. Of these we shall treat in their order. § I.--LOVE OF KINDRED. _Includes what._--Under this head we may include the _parental_, the _filial_, and the _fraternal_ affection, as modifications of the same principle, varying according to the varying relations of the parties concerned. _Does not grow out of the Relations of the Parties._--That the affection _grows out_ of the relations sustained by the parties to each other, I am not prepared to affirm, although some have taken this view; I should be disposed rather to regard it as an implanted and original principle of our nature; still, that it is very much influenced and augmented by those relations, and that it is manifestly adapted to them, no one, I think, can deny. _But adapted to that Relation._--How intimate and how peculiar the relation, for example, that subsists between parent and child, and how deep and strong the affection that binds the heart of the parent to the person and well-being of his offspring. The one corresponds to the other; the affection to the relation; and the duties which that relation imposes, and all the kind offices, the care, and attention which it demands, how cheerfully are they met and fulfilled, as prompted by the strength and constancy of that affection. Without that affection, the relation might still exist, requiring the same kind offices, and the same assiduous care, and reason might point out the propriety and necessity of their performance, but how inadequate, as motives to action, would be the dictates of reason, the sense of propriety, or even the indispensable necessity of the case, as compared with that strong and tender parental affection which makes all those labors pleasant, and all those sacrifices light, which are endured for the sake of the helpless ones confided to its care. There was need of just this principle of our nature to meet the demands and manifold duties arising from the relation to which we refer; and in no part of the constitution of the mind is the benevolence of the great Designer more manifest. What but love could sustain the weary mother during the long and anxious nights of watching by the couch of her suffering child? What but love could prompt to the many sacrifices and privations cheerfully endured for its welfare? Herself famished with hunger, she divides the last morsel among those who cry to her for bread. Herself perishing with cold, she draws the mantle from her own shoulders to protect the little one at her side from the fury of the blast. She freely perils her own life for the safety of her child. These instances, while they show the strength of that affection which can prompt to such privation and self-sacrifice, show, also, the end which it was designed to subserve, and its adaptation to that end. _This Affection universal._--The parental affection is universal, not peculiar to any nation, or any age, or any condition of society. Nor is it strong in one case, and weak in another, but everywhere and always one of the strongest and most active principles of our nature. Nor is it peculiar to our race. It is an emotion shared by man in common with the lower orders of intelligence. The brute-beast manifests as strong an affection for her offspring, as man under the like circumstances exhibits. The white bear of the arctic glaciers, pursued by the hunter, throws herself between him and her cub, and dies in its defence. All these circumstances, the precise adaptation of the sensibility in question to the peculiar exigencies it seemed designed to meet, the strength and constancy of that affection, the universality of its operation, and the fact that is common to man with the brute, all go to show that the principle now under consideration must be regarded as an instinctive and original principle, implanted in our nature by the hand that formed us. _Strengthened by Circumstances._--But though an original principle, and, therefore, not derived from habit or circumstance, there can be no doubt that the affection of which we speak is greatly modified, and strengthened, by the circumstances in which the parent and child are placed with respect to each other, and also by the power of habit. Like most of our active principles, it finds, in its own use and exercise, the law of its growth. So true is this, that when the care and guardianship of the child are transferred to other hands, there springs up something of the parent's love, in the heart to which has been confided this new trust. It seems to be a law of our nature that we love those who are dependent on us, who confide in us, and for whom we are required to exert ourselves. The more dependent and helpless the object of our solicitude, and the greater the sacrifice we make, or the toil we endure, in its behalf, the greater our regard and affection for it. If in the little group that gathers around the poor man's scanty board, or evening fireside, there is one more tenderly loved than another, one on whom his eye more frequently rests, or with more tender solicitude than on the others, it is that one over whose sick-bed he has most frequently bent with anxiety, and for whose benefit he has so often denied himself the comforts of life. By every sacrifice thus made, by every hour of toil and privation cheerfully endured, by every watchful, anxious night, and every day of unremitting care and devotion, is the parental affection strengthened. And to the operation of the same law of our nature is doubtless to be attributed the regard which is felt, under similar circumstances, by those who are not parents, for the objects of their care. But it may reasonably be doubted whether, in such case, the affection, although of the same nature, ever equals, in intensity and fervor, the depth and strength of a parent's love. _Strongest in the Mother._--The parental affection, though common to both sexes, finds its most perfect development in the heart of the mother. Whether this is the natural result of the principle already referred to, the care and effort that devolve in greater degree upon the mother, and awaken a love proportionably stronger, or whether it is an original provision of nature to meet the necessity of the case, we can but see in the fact referred to a beautiful adaptation of our nature to the circumstances that surround us. _Stronger in the Parent than in the Child._--The love of the parent for the child is stronger than that of the child for the parent. There was need that it should be so. Yet is there no affection, of all those that find a place in the human heart, more beautiful and touching than filial love. Nor, on the contrary, is there any one aspect of human nature, imperfect as it is, so sad and revolting as the spectacle sometimes presented, of filial ingratitude, a spectacle sure to awaken the indignation and abhorrence of every generous heart. When the son, grown to manhood, forgets the aged mother that bore him, and is ashamed to support her tottering steps, or leaves to loneliness and want the father whose whole life has been one of care and toil for him, he receives, as he deserves, the contempt of even the thoughtless world, and the scorn of every man whose opinion is worth regarding. There have not been wanting noble instances of the strength of the filial affection. If parents have voluntarily incurred death to save their children, so, also, though perhaps less frequently, have children met death to save a parent. _Value of these Affections._--The parental and filial affections lie at the foundation of the social virtues. They form the heart to all that is most noble and elevating, and constitute the foundation of all that is truly great and valuable in character. Deprived of these influences, men may, indeed, become useful and honorable members of society--such cases have occurred--but rather as exceptions to the rule. It is under the genial influences of home, and parental care and love, that the better qualities of mind and heart are most favorably and surely developed, and the character most successfully formed for the conflicts and temptations of future life. _Not inconsistent with the manly Virtues._--Nor is the gentleness implied in the domestic affections inconsistent with those sterner qualities of character, which history admires in her truly great and heroic lives. Poets have known this, painters have seized upon it, critics have pointed it out in the best ideal delineations, both of ancient and of modern times. It softens the gloomy and otherwise forbidding character of stern Achilles; it invests with superior beauty, and almost sacredness, the aged Priam suing for the dead body of Hector; it constitutes one of the brightest ornaments with which Virgil knew how to adorn the character of the hero of the Æneid, while in the affection of Napoleon for his son, and in the grief of Cromwell for the death of his daughter, the domestic affection shines forth in contrast with the strong and troubled scenes of eventful public life, as a gentle star glitters on the brow of night. § II.--LOVE OF FRIENDS. _Much said in Praise of Friendship._--Among the benevolent affections that find a place in the human heart, friendship has ever been regarded as one of the purest and noblest. Poets and moralists have vied with each other in its praise. Even those philosophers who have derived all our active principles from self-love have admitted this to a place among the least selfish of our emotions. There can be no doubt that it is a demand of our nature, a part of our original constitution. The man who, among all his fellows, finds no one in whom he delights, and whom he calls his friend, must be wanting in some of the best traits and qualities of our common humanity, while, on the other hand, pure and elevated friendship is a mark of a generous and noble mind. _On what Circumstances it depends._--If we inquire whence arises this emotion in any given case, on what principles or circumstances it is founded, we shall find that, while other causes have much to do with it, it depends chiefly on the _more or less intimate acquaintance_ of the parties. There must, indeed, be on our part some perception of high and noble qualities belonging to him whom we call our friend, and some appreciation, also, of those qualities. We must admire his genius, or his courage, or his manly strength and prowess, or his moral virtues, or, at least, his position and success. All these things come in to modify our estimate and opinion of the man, and may be said to underlie our friendship for him. Still, it is not so much from these circumstances, as from personal and intimate acquaintance, that friendship most directly springs. Admiration and respect for the high qualities and noble character of another, are not themselves friendship, however closely related to it. They may be, and doubtless are, to some extent, the foundation on which that affection rests, but they are not its immediately producing cause. They may exist where no opportunity for personal acquaintance is afforded, while, on the other hand, a simple and long-continued acquaintance, with one whom we, perhaps, should not, in our own candid judgment, pronounce superior to other men, either in genius, or fortune, or the nobler qualities of the soul, may, nevertheless, ripen into strong and lasting friendship. _How Acquaintance leads to Friendship._--To what is this owing? Not so much, I suspect, to the fact that acquaintance reveals always something to admire, even in those whom we had not previously regarded with special deference--although this, I am willing to admit, may be the case--but rather to that simple law of mental activity which we call association. The friend whom we have long and intimately known, the friend of other, and earlier, and, it may be, happier years, is intimately connected with our own history. His life and our own have run side by side, on rather, like vines springing from separate roots, have intertwined their branches until they present themselves as one to the eye. It is this close connection of my friend with whatever pertains to myself, of his history with my history, and his life with my life, that contributes in great measure to the regard and interest I feel for him. He has become, as it were, a part of myself. The thought of him awakens in my mind pleasing remembrances, and is associated with agreeable conceptions of the walks, the studies, the sports, the varied enjoyments and the varied sorrows that we have shared together. _Regard for inanimate Objects._--The same principle extends also to inanimate objects, as places and scenes with which we have become familiar, the meadows through which we roamed in childhood, the books we read, the rooms we inhabited, even the instruments of our daily toil. These all become associated with ourselves, we form a sort of friendship for them. The prisoner who has spent long years of confinement in his solitary cell, forms a species of attachment for the very walls that have shut him in, and looks upon them for the last time, when at length the hour of deliverance arrives, not without a measure of regret. The sword that has been often used in battle is thenceforth, to the old soldier, the visible representative of many a hard-fought field, and many a perilous adventure. Uncouth and rusty it may be, ill-formed, and unadorned, in its plain and clumsy iron scabbard, but its owner would not exchange it for one of solid gold. It is not strange that the principle of association, which attaches us so closely even to inanimate objects, should enter largely as an element into the friendships we form with our own species. _Other Causes auxiliary._--I would by no means deny, however, that other causes may, and usually do, contribute to the same result. Mere acquaintance and companionship do not, of necessity, nor invariably, amount to friendship. There must be some degree of sympathy, and congeniality of thought and feeling, some community of interests, pursuits, desires, hopes, something in common between the two minds, or no friendship will spring up between them. Acquaintance, and participation in the same scenes and pursuits, furnish, to some extent, this common ground. But even where this previous companionship is wanting, there may exist such congeniality and sympathy between two minds, the tastes and feelings, the aims and aspirations of each may be so fully in unison, that each shall feel itself drawn to the other, with a regard which needs only time and opportunity to ripen into strong and lasting friendship. _Dissimilarity not inconsistent with Friendship._--Nor is it necessary, in order to true friendship, that there should be complete similarity or agreement. The greatest diversity even may exist in many respects, whether as to qualities of mind, or traits of character. Indeed, such diversity, to some extent, must be regarded as favorable to friendship, rather than otherwise. We admire, often, in others, the very qualities which we perceive to be lacking in ourselves, and choose for our friends those whose richer endowments in these respects may compensate in a measure for our own deficiencies. The strongest friendships are often formed in this way by persons whose characters present striking points of contrast. Such diversity, in respect to natural gifts and traits of character, is not inconsistent with the closest sympathy of views and feelings in regard to other matters, and therefore not inconsistent with the warmest friendship. _Limitation of the Number of Friends._--It was, perhaps, an idle question, discussed in the ancient schools of philosophy, whether true friendship can subsist between more than two persons. No reason can be shown why this affection should be thus exclusive, nor do facts seem to justify such a limitation. The addition of a new friend to the circle of my acquaintance does not necessarily detract aught from the affection I bear to my former friends, nor does it awaken suspicion or jealousy on their part. In this respect, friendship is unlike the love which exists between the sexes, and which is exclusive in its nature. It must be admitted, at the same time, that there are limits to this extension, and that he who numbers a large circle of friends is not likely to form a very strong attachment for any one of them. Not unfrequently, indeed, a friendship thus unlimited is the mark, as Mr. Stewart suggests, of a cold and selfish character, prompted to seek the acquaintance of others by a regard to his own advantage, and a desire for society, rather than by any real attachment to those whose companionship he solicits. True and genuine friendship is usually more select in its choice, and is wholly disinterested in its character. A cold and calculating policy forms no part of its nature. It springs from no selfish or even prudential considerations. It burns with a pure and steady flame in the heart that cherishes it, and burns on even when the object of its regard is no longer on earth. Our friendships are not all with the living. We cherish the memory of those whom we no longer see, and welcome to the heart those whom we no longer welcome to our home and fireside. _Effect of adventitious Circumstances._--Reverses in life, changes in fortune, the accidents of health and sickness, of wealth and poverty, of station and influence, have little power to weaken the ties of true friendship once formed. They test, but do not impair its strength. True friendship only makes us cling the closer to our friend in his adversity; and when fortune frowns, and the sunshine of popular favor passes away, and "there is none so poor to do him reverence," whom once all men courted and admired, we still love him, who, in better days, showed himself worthy of our love and who, we feel, is none the less worthy of it, now that we must love him for what he _is_, and not for what he has. That is not worthy the name of friendship, which will not endure this test. _Changes in moral Character._--Much more seriously is friendship endangered by any change of moral character and principle, on the part of either of the friends. So long as the change affects merely the person, the wealth, the social position, the power, the good name even, we feel that these are but the external circumstances, the accidents, the surroundings, and not the man himself, and however these things may vary, our friend remains the same. But when the change is in the heart and character of the man himself, when he whose sympathies and moral sentiments were once in unison with our own, shows himself to be no longer what he once was, or what we fondly thought him to be, there is no longer that community of thought and feeling between us that is essential to true and lasting friendship. Yet, even in such a case, we continue to cherish for the friend of former years a regard and affection which subsequent changes do not wholly efface. We think of him _as he was_, and not as he is; as he was in those earlier and better days, when the heart was fresh and unspoiled, and the feet had not as yet turned aside from the paths of rectitude and honor. § III.--LOVE OF BENEFACTORS. _As related to Friendship._--Closely allied to the affections we feel for our friends is the emotion we cherish towards our benefactors. Like the former, it is one of the forms of that principle into which all kindly affection ultimately resolves itself, namely, love, differing as the object differs on which it rests, but one in nature under all these varieties of form. The love which we feel for a benefactor, differs from that which we feel for a friend, as the latter again differs from that which we feel for a parent or a child. It differs from friendship, in that the motive which prompted the benefaction, on the part of the giver, may be simple benevolence, and not personal regard; while, on our part, the emotion awakened may be simple gratitude to the generous donor, a gratitude which, though it may lead to friendship, is not itself the result of personal attachment. _Nature of this Affection._--If we inquire more closely into the nature of this affection, we find that it involves, as do all the benevolent affections, a feeling of pleasure or delight, together with a benevolent regard for the object on which the affection rests. The pleasure, in this case, results from the reception of a favor. It is not, however, merely a pleasure in the favor received, as in itself valuable, or as meeting our necessities; it is, over and beyond this, a pleasure in the giver as a noble and generous person, and as standing in friendly relations to us. Such conceptions are always agreeable to the mind, and that in a high degree. The benevolent regard which we cherish for such a person, the disposition and wish to do him good in turn, are the natural result of this agreeable conception of him; and the two together, the pleasure, and the benevolent regard, constitute the complex emotion which we call gratitude. _Regards the Giver rather than the Gift._--If this be the correct analysis of the affection now under consideration, it is not so much the _gift_, as the _giver_, that awakens the emotion; and this view is confirmed by the fact that when, from any circumstances, we are led to suspect a selfish motive on the part of the donor, that the gift was prompted, not so much by regard to us, as by regard to his own personal ends, for favors thus conferred we feel very little gratitude. The gift may be the same in either case, but not the giver. _Modes of manifesting Gratitude._--Philosophers have noticed the different manner in which persons of different character, and mental constitution, are affected by the reception of kindness from others, and the different modes in which their gratitude expresses itself. Some are much more sensibly affected than others by the same acts of kindness; and even when gratitude may exist in equal degree, it is not always equally manifested. We naturally look, however, for some exhibition of it, in all cases, where favors have been conferred; its due exhibition satisfies and pleases us; its absence gives us pain, and we set it down as indicative of a cold and selfish nature. _A disordered Sensibility indicated by the Absence of this Principle._--One of the most painful forms of disordered sensibility--the insanity, not of the intellect, but of the feelings--is that which manifests itself in the entire indifference and apathy with which the kindest attentions are received, or even worse, the ill-concealed and hardly-suppressed hatred which is felt even for the generous benefactor. A case of this sort is mentioned by Dr. Bell, the accomplished superintendent of the MacLean Asylum for the insane, as coming under his notice, in which the patient, a lady, by no means wanting in mental endowments, seemed utterly destitute and incapable of natural affection. Having, on one occasion, received some mark of kindness from a devoted friend, she exclaimed, "I suppose I ought to love that person, and I should, if it were possible for me to love any one; but it is not. I do not know what that feeling is." A more sad and wretched existence can hardly be conceived than that which is thus indicated--the deep night and winter of the soul, a gloom unbroken by one ray of kindly feeling for any living thing, one gleam of sunshine on the darkened heart. Happily such cases are of rare occurrence. The kindness of men awakens a grateful response, in every human heart, whose right and normal action is not hindered by disorder, or prevented by crime. _Disorder of the moral Nature._--Is it not an indication of the imperfect and disordered condition of our moral nature, that while the little kindnesses of our fellow men awaken in our breasts lively emotions of gratitude, we receive, unmoved, the thousand benefits which the great Author of our being is daily and hourly conferring, with little gratitude to the giver of every good and perfect gift? § IV.--LOVE OF HOME AND COUNTRY. _Its proper Place._--Among the emotions which constitute our sensitive nature, the love of home and of country, or the patriotic emotion, holds a prominent rank. It falls into that class of feelings which we term affections, inasmuch as it involves not only an emotion of pleasure, but a desire of good towards the object which awakens the feeling. _Founded on the Separation of the Race._--The affection now to be considered implies, as its condition, the separation of the human race into families, tribes, and nations, and of its dwelling-places into corresponding divisions of territory and country, a division founded not more in human nature, than in the physical conditions and distributions of the globe, broken as it is into different countries, by mountain, river, and sea. No one can fail to perceive, in this arrangement, a design and provision for the distribution of the race into distinct states and nations. To this arrangement and design the nature of man corresponds. To him, in all his wanderings, there is no place like home, no land like his native land. It may be barren and rugged, swept by the storms, and overshadowed by the frozen hills, of narrow boundary, and poor in resources, where life is but one continued struggle for existence with an inhospitable climate, unpropitious seasons, and an unwilling soil; but it is his own land, it is his father-land, and sooner than he will see its soil invaded, or its name dishonored, he will shed the last drop of blood in its defence. _Other Causes auxiliary._--The strong tendency to rivalry and war, between different tribes, tends, doubtless, to keep alive the patriotic sentiment, by binding each more closely to the soil, which it finds obliged to defend at the sacrifice of treasure, and of life. The great diversity of language, manners, and customs, which prevails among different nations, must also tend very strongly to separate nations still more widely from each other, and bind them more closely to their own soil, and their own institutions. _Effect of Civilization._--Such are some of the causes which give rise to the patriotic sentiment. Civilization tends, in a measure, doubtless, to diminish the activity of these causes. In proportion as society advances, as national jealousies and rivalries diminish, as wars become less frequent, as nations come to understand better each other's manners, laws, and languages, and to learn that their interests, apparently diverse, are really identical, this progress of civilization and culture, removing, as it does, in great measure, the barriers that have hitherto kept nations asunder, must tend, it would seem, to weaken the influence of those causes which contribute to keep alive the patriotic feeling. And such we believe to be the fact. It is in the early period of a nation's existence, the period of its origin and growth, of its weakness and danger, that the love of country most strongly developes itself. It is then that sacrifices are most cheerfully made, and danger and toil most readily met, and life most freely given, for the state whose foundations can no other way be laid. As the state, thus founded in treasure and in blood, and vigilantly guarded in its infancy, gains maturity and strength, becomes rich, and great, and powerful, comes into honorable relation with the surrounding states and nations, the love of country seems not to keep pace with its growth in the hearts of the people, but rather to diminish, as there is less frequent and less urgent occasion for its exercise. _National Pride._--There is, however, a counteracting tendency to be found in the national pride which is awakened by the prosperity and power of a country, and especially by its historic greatness. The citizen of England, or of France, at the present day, has more to defend, and more to love, than merely his own home and fireside, the soil that he cultivates, and the institutions that guarantee his freedom and his rights. The past is intrusted to him, as well as the present. The land whose honor and integrity he is determined to maintain, at all hazard and personal sacrifice, is not the England, or the France, of to-day merely, but of the centuries. He remembers the glories of the empire, the armies, and the illustrious leaders that have carried his country's flag with honor into all lands, the monarchs that, in succession, from Clovis and Charlemagne, from Alfred and Harold the dauntless, have sat in state upon the throne that claims his present allegiance, the generations that have contributed to make his country what it now is; and he feels that not merely the present greatness and power of his country, but all its former greatness and glory, are intrusted to his present care and keeping. _Depends upon Association._--If we inquire more closely into the philosophy of the matter, we shall find, I think, that the principle of _association_ is largely concerned as the immediately producing cause of the emotion now under consideration. We connect with the idea of any country the history and fortunes, the virtues and vices of its inhabitants, of those who, at any time, recent or remote, have passed their brief day, and acted their brief part, within its borders, and whose unknown dust mingles with its soil. They have long since passed away, but the same hills stand, the same rivers flow along the same channels, the same ocean washes the ancient shores, the same skies look down upon those fields and waters, and with these aspects and objects of nature we associate all that is great and heroic in the history of the people that once dwelt among those hills, and along those shores. Every lofty mountain, every majestic river, every craggy cliff and frowning headland along the coast, stand as _representative_ objects, sacred to the memory of the past, and the great deeds that have been there performed. How much this must add to the force and power of the patriotic emotion is obvious at a glance. _Same Principle concerned in the Love of Home._--In like manner, by the same principle of association, we connect our own personal history with the places where we dwell, and the country we inhabit. They become, in a measure, identified with ourselves. To love the home of our childhood, and our native land, is but to love our former selves, since it is here that our little history lies, and whatever we have wrought of good or ill. _An original Principle._--With respect to the character of this emotion, while it is doubtless awakened and strengthened by the law of association, still I cannot but regard it as an original provision and principle of our nature, springing up instinctively in the bosom, showing itself essentially the same under all conditions of society, and in all ages and countries. It waits not for education to call it forth, nor for reason and reflection to give it birth; while at the same time, reason and reflection doubtless contribute largely to its development and strength. _Strongest where it might be least expected._--It has been frequently observed, by those who have made human nature their study, that the patriotic feeling is not confined to the inhabitants of the most favored climes and countries, but, on the contrary, is often most strongly developed in nations less populous, and in countries little favored by nature. The inhabitants of wild, mountainous regions, of sterile shores, of barren plains, manifest as strong a love of home and country, as any people on the globe. It is thus with the Swiss among their mountain fastnesses, and with the poor Esquimaux of northern Greenland, where, beyond the arctic circle, cold and darkness reign undisturbed the greater part of the year. Even in those dreary realms, and in those bosoms little refined, the voice of nature is heard, and the love of home and of country is strong. Even beggars have been known to die of nostalgia, or home-sickness. CHAPTER II. MALEVOLENT AFFECTIONS. _As distinguished from the Benevolent._--The affections have already been distinguished from other forms of the sensibility, by the circumstance that they involve, along with the feeling of pleasure or pain, some feeling of kindness or the opposite, toward the object; in the one case we term them benevolent, in the other, malevolent affections. Of the former, I have treated in the preceding chapter; of the latter, I am now to speak. _Resentment the generic Name._--These affections may be comprised under the general name _resentment_, as that which underlies and constitutes the basis of them all. Envy, jealousy, revenge, etc., may be regarded as but so many modifications, or perversions, of this general principle. As the benevolent affections are all so many forms of love, going forth toward diverse objects, and varying as the objects vary, so the malevolent affections are so many forms of the opposite principle, _i. e._, aversion, varying, likewise, with the objects. _Founded in Nature._--As the benevolent, so likewise the malevolent or irascible feelings are, as to their principle, instinctive; they have their foundation in our nature. They are, as such, universally exhibited under the appropriate circumstances; they are early in their development, showing themselves often prior to the exercise of the reflecting and reasoning powers; they are, also, to some extent, common to man with the brutes. _Capable, however, of rational Exercise and Control._--While we pronounce them instinctive, however, we would by no means imply that they are not capable of being deliberately and intelligently exercised, or that they are not in fact, frequently so exercised. What instinct originally teaches, reason and reflection, when, at a later date, they come into play, may sanction and confirm. On the other hand, they may repress and forbid what instinct prompts. In the former case, the emotion, affection, passion, is none the less an instinctive principle in its nature and origin, although it has now passed from the domain of mere instinct to the higher sphere of reason and intelligence. What was done in the first instance from sudden impulse, blindly, without thought, is now done deliberately and intelligently. This may be the case with all our instinctive principles of action, as well as with those now particularly under consideration. Instinct and reason, or intelligence, though _distinguished_ from, are not necessarily _opposed_ to each other, in the sense that one and the same mental act may not proceed, now from one, now from the other, of these principles. The love which I cherish for my friends, or my kindred, may be purely instinctive, it may be strictly rational, a matter of reflection, the result of deliberate purpose. _Existence of such a Principle denied by some._--The existence of such a principle as resentment, among the original and constitutional elements of our nature, has been called in question by some writers. It has been thought derogatory to the divine character, that the Creator should implant the principle of resentment in the human heart. He commands us to love, and not to hate, and what he expressly forbids, he cannot have made provision for in the very constitution of the mind. Such a principle, it is also maintained, is altogether unnecessary. This is the ground taken by Mr. Winslow, in his work on moral philosophy. _The Question at Issue._--There is certainly much force in the view thus presented. The question before us, however, is not, what we might, à priori, have _supposed_ the nature of man to be, nor, what it _ought_ to be, but simply, what _is_ that nature as a matter of fact? Whether such a principle as resentment is _necessary_ in a well-constituted mind, is not now the question; nor yet whether the Creator could consistently implant such a principle within us; nor, again, what may be the moral character of such a principle; but simply, Is there such a principle among the native elements of human character? If it be found there, we may conclude, either, that the Creator has placed it there for some wise purpose, or else, that the nature with which man comes into the world is no longer an adequate expression of the will of the Creator concerning him, but has, in some way, lost its original purity and integrity. _Existence of such a Principle._--Now that there are certain irascible feelings which find a place, under certain circumstances, in the human bosom, whenever the fitting occasion calls them forth, can hardly be denied; nor yet that they have their foundation in the nature of man. We have the same evidence of this, that we have of the existence of any other original and native principle. It manifests itself universally, uniformly, under all the varieties of social condition, among all nations, in all ages of the world. It developes itself at an early period of life, before education or example can have come in to account for its existence. Reason may subsequently control and restrain it, or it may fail to do so; but the principle exists before it can be either indulged or restrained. When the occasion which calls it forth is some injury or evil inflicted upon ourselves, the feeling takes the name of _resentment_; when others are the objects of that injustice, the feeling awakened is more properly termed _indignation_. We resent our own wrongs, we are indignant at those of others. The principle is, in either case, the same, and is as truly a part of our nature, as gratitude for favors received, or sympathy with the sorrows of the afflicted. _Term Malevolent, how employed._--The term _malevolent_, as used to designate this class of affections, is, it must be confessed, liable to serious objection. It has come into use as a convenient term, in place of, and for the want of, something better, to mark the distinction between the feelings now under consideration, and those of the opposite character, already considered; and as we call those _benevolent_, so we call these _malevolent_, merely by way of contrast, and not as implying any thing _criminal_ in the character of the emotions themselves. The term, however, is unfortunate, as seeming to involve a meaning not intended. The moral character of the affections thus designated, is an open question, to be decided upon its own merits, and not to be considered as settled, one way or the other, by the use of the term now under consideration. This question we shall presently discuss. For the present, we have to consider, more particularly, the several forms in which the malevolent or irascible feeling presents itself. _Nature of Resentment._--_Resentment_ is the feeling awakened in view of injury received. It is precisely the opposite of gratitude, which is the feeling awakened by benefits conferred. As, in the latter case, there springs up at once in the heart an affectionate regard for the generous donor, so, in the former there is awakened, at once a feeling of resentment against those who have done us the wrong. It is an instinctive emotion. No sooner are we conscious of the injury than we are conscious also of the feeling of resentment. _Design of this Principle._--The design of this principle of our nature is evident. It arms us against those sudden dangers and assaults, which no foresight can anticipate, nor prudence prevent, and which, when they occur, require instant action, and prompt redress. In such cases, reason and reflection would come to our aid too late; were we left to their counsels, however wise those counsels might be, we should already have suffered the injury from which they would seek to protect us. Something is needed that shall prompt to speedier action; some watchman vigilant and armed, ready on the first approach of danger to strike his alarm-bell, and summon the garrison to action. This we have in the principle of resentment. Were it not for this principle, moreover, a cautious and timid policy might often prevail over the sense of justice, and honor, and right, or a selfish policy might keep us back from interfering, at our own peril, for the protection of the injured, and the punishment of the aggressor. Instinct sets us right in such matters, before reason has time to act. _Necessary to the Punishment of Crime._--The malevolent feeling, at least in the form now under consideration, seems to be, in some degree, necessary for the punishment of crime, and the protection of society. It may be doubted whether, without it, we should act with sufficient energy, and promptness, for the redress of wrong, when that wrong is not inflicted upon ourselves. Nature has guarded against this danger, by planting in the human bosom an innate sense of justice, a hatred of wrong and injury wantonly inflicted, and a quick resentment against the perpetrator, which leads us to seek his detection and punishment, silences the pleadings of compassion in his behalf, and arms us to inflict the merited blow. That is but a weak and short-sighted benevolence, that is incapable of hatred of crime, and criminals; and that, under the flimsy pretence of compassion for the unfortunate, and humanity, would shield from justice, and due punishment, those who strike at the highest interests of society, and put in jeopardy all that is most dear and sacred to man. There are cases, in which compassion becomes malice aforethought, and stern resentment is the only true benevolence. It is one of the sublimest and most glorious attributes of deity, as portrayed in the Scriptures, that with the highest benevolence he combines the stern, inflexible hatred of wrong, so that, while it can with truth be said, "God is love," it can with equal truth be affirmed, "our God is a consuming fire." _Liable to abuse._--While, however, the principle now considered has its uses, and must be regarded as a most important provision of nature for the necessities of our race, it must also be conceded that it is a principle liable to abuse, and requiring to be kept in careful check. Especially in its sudden and instinctive action, upon the reception of personal harm or danger, are we liable to be carried to extremes, and indulge a resentment out of proportion to the merits of the case. _A Check on excessive Resentment._--Against this excessive resentment of injuries, real or imaginary, nature has provided a check needful and salutary, in the indignation with which any such manifestation is sure to be regarded by others, and the loss of that sympathy, otherwise on our side, but now turned in favor of the object of our too great resentment. The wise and prudent man will carefully avoid such a result, and this prudence will act as a powerful curb on his anger. To the man of virtuous and honorable sentiments there is also another restraint, hardly less powerful, upon the exercise of the malevolent feeling in any undue degree, and that is, the feeling of self-degradation and humiliation which such a man must feel, in consequence of his excessive resentment, when the heat of passion cools, and the moments of calmer reflection ensue. Even as exercised within due bounds, the malevolent affection is, from its very nature, a painful one. Not only the first emotion on the reception of injury or insult is one of a disagreeable nature, but the wish or desire, which instantly follows and accompanies it, of inflicting in return some ill upon the aggressor, is also a feeling which disturbs and disquiets the mind, and inflicts a species of suffering upon the mind that cherishes it, that may not improperly be termed its own punishment. And this again may be regarded, and doubtless is, to some extent, a check upon the indulgence of the malevolent affection. _Violent Exhibitions of this Feeling, where found._--It is accordingly in natures uncultivated and rude, little accustomed to self control, and the restraints of reason and religion, that we naturally look for the violent and excessive outbursts of passion. A regard for our own happiness, a due sense of our own dignity and moral worth, and a decent respect for the opinions of those about us, whose approbation and sympathy we desire, contribute, if not to diminish the strength, at least to repress the manifestation, in any considerable degree, of the feeling of resentment, in those who have arrived at years of discretion, and have profited by the lessons of experience. The child is angry with the stone against which he strikes his foot, and vents his resentment for any injury upon the unconscious instrument, which was the means of its infliction. The savage tears from his flesh the arrow that has wounded him, and breaks it into fragments. This is undoubtedly the instinct of nature, untaught by reason and reflection. It is probably the first impulse of every man, on the reception of any injury, and before he has time to reflect on the folly of such a course, to express in some manner his resentment against the immediate instrument of his suffering. _Deliberate Form of Resentment._--When the first impulse has passed, and time gives opportunity for reflection, this instinctive resentment dies away, or gives place to a deliberate and rational form of the same emotion. Thus affected, the mind casts about it to ascertain the real extent of its injury, and the best means of redress; it distinguishes between the conscious agent, and the unconscious instrument of its wrong, between the intentional injury and the unintentional, and, it may be, accidental harm; it takes into view the circumstances of the case, and the probable motives of the doer, and graduates its resentment accordingly. _Illustration of deliberate Resentment._--The law of retaliation which prevails among savage tribes, and which demands blood for blood, life for life, and exacts the fearful penalty with a justice inexorable and sure, though often long delayed, and which never loses sight of its victim, though years, and broad lands, and wide waters intervene, affords an illustration of deliberate in distinction from instinctive resentment. The law of honor, so called, as it exists among civilized nations, also illustrates the same principle. _Pointed out by Butler and others._--The distinction which we have indicated between the instinctive and deliberate form of this emotion, was clearly pointed out by Butler, though by no means original with him, as some writers have supposed; it is quite too obvious and important a distinction to have escaped the notice of earlier, and even of ancient philosophers, nor is it at all peculiar to this one affection, but common to all the sensibilities as I have already said. _Modifications of the general Principle._--There are certain modifications of the malevolent affection, which require a passing notice in this connection. I refer to those emotions commonly known as _envy_, _jealousy_, and _revenge_. These are all but different forms of the same general principle, varying as the different circumstances and objects vary which call them forth. _Nature of Envy._--_Envy_ is that form of resentment which too often, and too easily, finds a place in the human bosom, when another is more fortunate, more successful, more honored and esteemed, than ourselves. Especially is this the case, when the fortunate one is from our own circle of companionship, and our own rank in life, and when the honors and distinctions, or the wealth and power, that fall to his lot are such as we might ourselves have aspired to reach. We never, I suspect, envy those whose condition is, and originally was, very far removed from our own. The peasant envies not the lord of the realm, nor the beggar the king, but rather his fellow-peasant, or fellow-beggar, whose hut is warmer, and whose ragged garment not so ragged, as his own. It is the passion of a weak and narrow mind, a mean and degrading emotion, the opposite of every thing noble and generous. _Nature of Jealousy._--_Jealousy_ is that form of the malevolent affection which has relation more particularly, though not exclusively, to the attachment which exists between the sexes, and which is awakened by the supposed rivalry of another. It is one of the most painful of the malevolent affections, and, when thoroughly roused, one of the strongest and most powerful principles of our nature. It is the peculiarity of this passion, that the object of its suspicion, and resentment, is, at the same time, the object of the heart's deepest love, and, it may be, adoration; the strength and bitterness of the passion being in proportion to the fervor and earnestness of that affection. In the character of Othello, we have a fine delineation of the working and development of this trait of human character, as in Cassius we have a portraiture of the corresponding affection of envy. _Nature of Revenge._--_Revenge_ is resentment in its most deliberate form, planned and carried into execution, not for the prevention of crime or injury, nor yet with reference to the ends of justice, but for the simple gratification of personal hatred. As such, and springing from such a motive, it is usually excessive in degree, and malicious in character. It is a dark and deadly passion, not more dangerous to society than degrading to the bosom that harbors it. It has not one redeeming quality to recommend it. It is neither the mark of a noble and generous, nor yet of a manly and brave spirit. It is the offspring of fear, rather than of courage. It usually seeks to accomplish, by secret and unlawful means, what it is ashamed or afraid to do openly, and by fair and honorable measures. It is a passion closely allied to those which may be supposed to reign in the bosom of a fiend. _Qualifying Remark._--I have spoken of envy, jealousy, and revenge, as modifications or different forms of the general principle of resentment, or the irascible propensity. There is, however, one important respect in which they all differ from the parent principle from which they spring. The latter, resentment, while founded in our nature, may, in exercise, be either instinctive or deliberate, as already shown; the former imply, I suspect, always some degree of deliberation, some element of choice. They are natural, in so far as there is a tendency in our nature to the exercise of these feelings under given circumstances, and, inasmuch as the principle from which they spring is founded in our nature, as one of its original elements; but they are not, like that principle, sometimes instinctive in their operation, but always, on the contrary, involve, as it seems to me, some process of thought, reflection, deliberation, choice. _Moral Character of the malevolent Affections._--It has been a question, much discussed, whether the class of feelings under consideration, in the present chapter, has _any moral character_, and if so, _what_? The question pertains, perhaps, more properly, to moral than to mental science, but we cannot pass it entirely without notice in this connection. So far as regards those forms of the malevolent emotion last considered, envy, jealousy, and revenge, there can be little doubt. Their exercise involves, as already stated, something of reflection and choice. They are not instinctive, but voluntary in their operation, capable, therefore, of control, and if not subjected to the stern dominion of reason, if not checked and subdued by the higher principles that should ever govern our conduct, we are reprehensible. Their indulgence in any form, and to any degree, must be regarded as blameworthy. They are _perversions_ of that principle of resentment, which, for wise reasons, nature has implanted in our bosoms. Their tendency is evil, and only evil. They are _malevolent_ in the full and proper sense of that term. _Of simple Resentment._--As to the primary principle of resentment in its simple and proper form, in so far as its operation is deliberate and voluntary, rather than purely instinctive, implying the exercise of reflection and reason, it must possess, in common with all other mental acts of that nature, some moral character. Within due limits, and on just occasions, it is a virtue; when it passes those limits, when it becomes excessive, or is uncalled for, by the circumstances of the case, it becomes a vice. _Of Resentment as instinctive._--The question before us properly relates to that form of resentment which is purely instinctive, unaccompanied by the exercise of reason and the reflective powers. Has such an emotion, strictly speaking, any moral character? How far are we responsible for its exercise? It seems to be a principle of manifest justice, and accordant with the common sense of mankind, that a man should be held responsible only for his rational and voluntary acts, for such things as it lies in his power to do, or not to do, according as he chooses. But that which is purely instinctive, is certainly not of this character. It may be in my power to repress the feeling of resentment that arises in my bosom on the reception of manifest injustice and wrong; I may refuse to harbor such a feeling; I may struggle to rise above it; but the feeling itself is instinctive, and I can no more prevent its first awakening and impulse, than I can prevent the involuntary contraction of the muscles upon the incision of the surgeon's knife. _Views of others--Upham, Reid, Chalmers._--Such is the view now generally entertained, we believe, by psychologists. "Instinctive resentment," says Mr. Upham, "has no moral character." "A moral character attaches only to the voluntary form of resentment." The same may be said of other affections, and of the sensibilities generally. In so far as they are purely instinctive, they have no moral character. Dr. Reid, in his Active Powers of the Human Mind, holds this language, "Nothing in which the will is not concerned can justly be accounted either virtuous or immoral." The practice of all criminal courts, and all enlightened nations, he adds, is founded upon this principle; insomuch, "that if any judicature in any nation should find a man guilty, and the object of punishment, for what they allow to be altogether involuntary, all the world would condemn them as men who knew nothing of the first and most fundamental rules of justice." Dr. Chalmers claims for the principle now under consideration a place among the primary and universal moral judgments of mankind. "It is in attending to these popular, or rather universal decisions, that we learn the real principles of moral science. And the first, certainly, of these popular, or rather universal decisions is, that nothing is moral or immoral that is not voluntary. "That an action, then, be the rightful object either of moral censure or approval, it must have had the consent of the will to go along with it. It must be the fruit of a volition, else it is utterly beyond the scope, either of praise for its virtuousness, or of blame for its criminality. If an action be involuntary, it is as unfit a subject for any moral reckoning, as are the pulsations of the wrist." (Sketches of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Chapter V. _On the Morality of the Emotions_.) SENSIBILITIES PART THIRD. DESIRES. CHAPTER I. NATURE AND CLASSIFICATION OF DESIRES. _General Character of Desire._--What we enjoy we love, and what we enjoy and love, becomes, when no longer present, or when, although yet present, its future absence is regarded as probable, an object of _desire_. In the latter case it is perhaps more properly the continuance of the loved object, rather than the object itself, that is desired. Strictly speaking, we desire only that which is not in possession, and which is regarded as good and agreeable. More frequently the objects of desire are those things which, in some measure, we have actually enjoyed, and learned by experience how to prize. In many cases, however, we learn in other ways than by our own experience the value of an object; we gather it from observation, from the testimony of others, partly, perhaps, from imagination; and in such cases what is known or supposed to be agreeable and a good thing, though never, perhaps, actually enjoyed by ourselves, may be an object of desire. Thus I may desire wealth, or power, long before they come into my possession to be enjoyed. The felicities which await the righteous in the future may be distinct and definite objects of desire, while yet we are pilgrims on the earth, and have not seen "the land that is very far off." Even in the cases supposed, however, we have enjoyed, to some extent, if not the very same, yet similar objects; we have experienced something, though it may be on a small scale, of the advantages which wealth and power confer, while in our enjoyment of earthly happiness there is doubtless something on which the imagination can build its more glorious anticipations of the future, and it is this enjoyment and realization of a present or a past good, that constitutes the foundation of our desires. If we had never enjoyed aught, it may be doubted whether we should ever desire aught. _Law of the Sensibility._--The great law of the sensibility, then, may be thus stated, as regards the order and relation of the several classes of emotion to each other: I _enjoy_, I _love_, I _desire_; and the reverse, I _suffer_, I _dislike_, I cherish _aversion_. That such is the order or law of mental operation has been ably shown by Damiron in his Cours de Philosophie, and also, before him, by Jouffroy. _Conditions of Desire._--Desire is a feeling simple and indefinable. We can merely specify the conditions which it observes, and the occasions on which it is awakened. These conditions or occasions are the two already mentioned; the previous enjoyment, in some degree, of an agreeable object, and the present or contemplated absence of that object. Where these conditions are fulfilled, desire springs up at once in the mind, a desire proportioned to the degree of that previous enjoyment, and the strength of the affection thereby awakened in our minds for the object of our regard. _Opposite of Desire, Aversion._--The opposite of desire is aversion, the feeling that arises in view of an object not as agreeable but as disagreeable, not as a good but as an ill. This, too, like desire, is based upon some measure of experience; we have suffered somewhat of real or imagined ill, which, while it continues, is an object of dislike or hatred, and regarded as something which, though now absent, may possibly be realized in the future, becomes an object of aversion. Aversion, as well as its opposite, desire, finds its object in the future, while its basis lies in the past. It will not be necessary to treat particularly of our aversions as a distinct class of emotions, since they are, for the most part, simply the counterparts of our desires, the desire of life, or happiness, having its equivalent in the aversion which we feel to suffering, and to death; so of other desires. _Desire always preceded by Emotion._--With regard to the nature of desires, it may further be remarked that while they imply always an object, an agreeable object, and that an absent one; while they imply, also, some previous enjoyment of that now absent object, or, at least, some knowledge of its existence and adaptation to our wants, as the foundation on which they rest, they do not take their rise immediately from the simple perception or intellectual contemplation of that absent object, as presented again merely to thought or imagination, but always some emotion or affection is first awakened by such thought or perception, and the desire succeeds to, and springs out of, that emotion. The mere perception of the object which formerly pleased me, does not, of itself, awaken in me immediately a desire for the object, but first an emotion or affection, and from that arises the desire. _Permanence of the Desires._--The greater permanence which our desires seem to possess, as compared with other simple emotions and affections, and which has been sometimes regarded as a distinguishing characteristic of this class of feelings, is owing, probably, not so much to the nature of desire, in itself considered, as to the fact that the object desired is always an absent object, and so long as it so remains, the desire for it is likely to continue. Were our desires always gratified as soon as they are definitely known, they would be no more permanent than any other state of mind. _Desire a motive Power._--The desires, it is to be noticed, moreover, are, in their nature, motive powers, springs of action to the mind. They are, if not the only, at least the chief source of mental activity. They prompt and excite the mind to action. The faculties, both physical and mental, are, in a manner, subject to their control. The intellect itself leads not to action; nor do the emotions; they agitate the mind, but it is only as they awaken desire, and that desire fixes upon a definite object, possible, but not in possession, that mind and body are both aroused to go forth for the attainment of the absent object of desire. _Classification of Desires._--Our desires may be classed according to their objects. These are of two sorts or classes: those which pertain to the physical nature and constitution, and those which relate to the wants of the mind rather than of the body. The desires, accordingly, may be classed as twofold--the _animal_, and the _rational_; the former having their source in the physical constitution of man, the latter in the nature and wants of the mind, rather than of the body. Of the former class are the desire of food, of sex, of exertion, of repose, of whatever, in a word, is adapted to the animal nature and wants. Of the latter class, the more prominent are the desire of happiness, of knowledge, of power, of society, of the esteem of others. In connection with our desires are to be considered also those emotions which are known under the name of hope and fear, and which, as was stated in our previous analysis of the sensibilities, are to be regarded rather as modifications of desire, than as distinct principles or modes of mental activity. CHAPTER II. DESIRES ARISING FROM THE PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION. _Nature of Appetite as compared with other Forms of Desire._--These are usually called _appetites_, in distinction from those desires which are founded in the nature of the mind. They are, however, properly, a class of desires though not always so ranked by philosophical writers. They are feelings which arise always in view of some good, real, or supposed, which has its adaptation to the wants of our nature, but which is not in present possession. This absence creates a longing for the object, which longing, so far as it relates to the mind at all, and not merely to the muscular sensation--as of hunger, etc.--is purely a _desire_. It differs from the other desires, in the respect mentioned, that it takes its rise from the constitution and wants of the body, rather than of the mind. It is not, however, on this account, the less a mental state, a psychological phenomenon. _Ambiguity of the Term._--The term _appetite_ is ambiguous; sometimes denoting the uneasy physical sensations, as hunger, thirst, etc., which are conditions of the muscular and nervous systems, and not states of the mind; sometimes the mental condition which results from this, and which is properly called desire. It is only with the latter that psychology has to do; the former fall within the province of physiology. _Enumeration of the more important, and the End accomplished by each._--The desires, of the class to which we now refer, are various, comprehending all those which immediately relate to, and arise from, the various bodily wants. The more important are the desire of food, and of sex, to which may be added the desire of action, and of repose. The constitution of our physical system is such as to lay the foundation of these desires. They pertain to our animal nature, and, as such, have a most important part to perform in the economy of life. They all relate, directly or indirectly, to the continuance of life, whether that of the individual, or of the species. Each of the appetites, or animal desires, as we prefer to call them, has its own specific object to accomplish, with reference to this general end. The desire of food looks to the preservation of individual life and vigor, by repairing the waste which the physical system is continually undergoing. The desire of muscular exertion and repose has the same general design. The desire of sex has for its object the preservation of the species. _Importance of these Principles._--Not only has each of these desires a specific end to accomplish, but it is an end which, so far as we can see, would not otherwise be accomplished. Reason might suggest the expediency of taking food to sustain the system, or of resting at intervals from exertion, in order to recruit our exhausted energies; but were it not for the desires that nature has implanted in us demanding positive gratification, and reminding us when we transgress those laws which govern our physical being, how often, in the pressure of business, should we neglect the due care of the body, and deprive ourselves of needed food, or needed rest, or needed muscular exertion. Were it not for the demands of appetite, how imperfectly should we judge either as to the proper proportion, or the proper quantity, and quality, of that refreshment which the body needs, and which food, and rest, and muscular exercise supply. And the same may be said of the other animal desires. They are necessary to the economy of life, by supplying a motive which would not otherwise exist, and thus securing a result not otherwise obtained. The principles to which we refer, are not, therefore, to be regarded as of little importance because relating to the wants of the body, and common to man with the animal races, generally; or the contrary, they are of the highest importance and value; a due regard to them is essential to the highest well-being, and the neglect or abuse of them brings its own sure and speedy punishment. To be ashamed of our animal nature, is to be ashamed of ourselves, and of the constitution that God gave us; to think lightly of it, is to despise the divine wisdom and benevolence. It is no part of an intelligent and rational nature to contemn the casket that contains all its treasure. Even were that casket worthless in itself, it would be valuable for the office it performs; much more when it is itself a piece of rare workmanship, curiously and wonderfully wrought. _Not selfish._--The appetites are not to be regarded as essentially selfish, in their nature. They relate, indeed, to our own personal wants; so do all our desires, and, in some measure, all our sensibilities. But when exercised within due bounds, they are not inconsistent with the rights and happiness of others, but the rather promotive of these results; and, therefore, not in the proper sense of the term are they _selfish_ propensities. Their ultimate aim is not the securing of a certain amount of enjoyment to the individual by their gratification, but the securing of a certain end, not otherwise reached, by means of that enjoyment. They are to be set down as original and implanted principles of our nature, rather than as selfish and acquired propensities. _Dangerous Tendency._--I would, by no means, however overlook the fact that the animal desires are of dangerous tendency when permitted to gain any considerable control over the mind, and that they require to be kept within careful bounds. They are liable to abuse. When suffered to become predominant over other and higher principles of action, when, from subjection and restraint, they rise to the mastery, and govern the man, then sinks the man to the level of the brute, and there is presented that saddest spectacle of all that the sun beholds in his course about the earth, a mind endowed with capacity of reason and intelligence, but enslaved to its own base passions. There is no slavery so degrading as that, none so hopeless. The most earnest efforts, the best and most sincere purposes and resolutions are too often made in vain, and the mind, struggling, to little purpose, with its own propensities, and its own vitiated nature, is swept on by the fearful current of its ungoverned, and now ungovernable, appetites, as the ship over which neither sail nor helm have any further power, is swept along in swift and ever lessening circles by the fatal maëlstrom. _Curious Law of our Nature._--It seems to be the law of our nature, that while our active principles gain strength by exercise, the degree of enjoyment or of suffering which they are capable of affording, diminishes by repetition. This has been clearly stated by Mr. Stewart. It follows from this, that while by long and undue indulgence of any of the animal desires, the gratification originally derived from such indulgence is no longer capable of being enjoyed, the desire itself may be greatly increased, and constantly increasing, in its demands. It is hardly possible to conceive a condition more wretched and miserable, than that of a mind compelled thus to drain the bitter dregs of its cup of pleasure, long since quaffed, and to repeat, in endless round, the follies that no longer have power to satisfy, even for the brief moment, the poor victim of their enchantment. The drunkard, the glutton, the debauchee, afford illustrations of this principle. _Acquired Appetites._--Beside the natural appetites of which I have hitherto spoken, and which are founded in the constitution of the physical system, there are certain appetites which must be regarded as artificial and acquired, such as the desire, so widely and almost universally prevalent, in countries both savage and civilized, for narcotic and stimulating drugs of various kinds, and for intoxicating drinks. CHAPTER III. DESIRES ARISING FROM THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MIND. § I.--DESIRE OF HAPPINESS. _Propriety of the Designation Self-love._--Among that class of desires that have their foundation in the mental rather than in the physical constitution, one of the most important is the _desire of happiness_, or, as it is frequently called, _self-love_. The propriety of this designation has been called in question. "The expression," says Mr. Stewart, "is exceptionable, for it suggests an analogy (where there is none, in fact) between that regard which every rational being must necessarily have to his own happiness, and those benevolent affections which attach us to our fellow-creatures. There is surely nothing in the former of these principles analogous to the affection of _love_; and, therefore, to call it by the appellation of _self-love_, is to suggest a theory with respect to its nature, and a theory which has no foundation in truth." _This Position questionable._--I apprehend that in this remark, Mr. Stewart may have gone too far. The regard which we have for our own happiness certainly differs from that which we entertain for the happiness of others, as the objects differ on which, in either case, the regard is fixed. That the emotion is not essentially of the same _nature_, however, psychologically considered, is not so clear. Love or affection, as it has been defined in the preceding chapters, is the enjoyment of an object, mingled with a wish or desire of good to the same. Love of friends is the pleasure felt in, and the benevolent regard for, them. Love of self, in like manner, is the enjoyment of, and the desire of, good to self. Whoever, then, enjoys himself, and wishes his own good, exercises self-love; and the essential ingredient of this affection is the desire for his own happiness. Not only, then, is there an _analogy_ between the two principles, the desire of our own happiness, and the regard which we feel for others, but _something more_ than an analogy; they are essentially of the same nature so far as regards the mental activity exercised in either case, and the term love as properly designates the one, as the other, of these states of mind. I may love myself, as truly as I love my friend, nor is it the part of a rational nature to be destitute of the principle of self-love. _Not to be confounded with Selfishness._--There is more force in the objection, also urged by Mr. Stewart, against the phrase _self-love_, used to denote the desire of happiness, that it is, from its etymology, liable to be confounded, and in fact, often is confounded, with the word _selfishness_, which denotes a very different state of mind. The word selfishness is always used in an unfavorable sense, to denote some disregard of the happiness and rights of others; but no such idea properly attaches to self-love, or the desire of happiness, which, as Mr. Stewart justly remarks, is inseparable from our nature as rational and sensitive beings. _Views of Theologians._--Misled, perhaps, by the resemblance of the words, many theological writers, both ancient and modern, have not only represented self-love as essentially sinful, but even as the root and origin of evil, the principle of original sin. So Barrow expressly affirms, citing Zuingle as authority. English moralists have sometimes taken the same view, and the earlier American divines very generally held it. _Self-love not criminal._--It can hardly be that a principle, which seems to belong to our nature as intelligent and rational beings, should be essentially criminal in it nature. The mistake, doubtless, arises from overlooking the distinction, already indicated, between self-love and selfishness The love of self, carried to the extreme of disregarding the happiness of others, and trespassing upon the rights of others, in the way to self-gratification, is indeed a violation of the principles of right, and is equally condemned by nature, speaking in the common sense and reason of man, and by divine revelation. But neither reason, nor the divine law, forbid that regard to our own happiness which self-love, in its true and proper sense, implies, and which exists, it may safely be affirmed, in every human bosom in which the light of intelligence and reason has not gone out in utter darkness. The sacred Scriptures nowhere forbid this principle. They enjoin upon us, indeed, the love of our neighbor; but the very command to love him as myself, so far from forbidding self-love, implies its existence as a matter of course, and presents that as a standard by which to measure the love I ought to bear to others. _Opinion of Aristotle._--Much more correct than the opinions to which I have referred, is the view taken by Aristotle in his Ethics, who speaks of the good man as necessarily a lover of himself, and, in _the true sense, preëminently_ so. "Should a man assume a preëminence in exercising justice, temperance, and other virtues, though such a man has really _more true self-love_ than the multitude, yet nobody would impute his affection to him as a crime. Yet he takes to himself the fairest and greatest of all goods, and those the most acceptable to the ruling principle in his nature, which is, properly, himself, in the same manner as the sovereignty in every community is that which most properly constitutes the state. He is said, also, to have, or not to have, the command of himself, just as this principle bears sway, or as it is subject to control; and those acts are considered as most voluntary which proceed from this legislative or sovereign power. Whoever cherishes and gratifies this ruling part of his nature, is _strictly and peculiarly a lover of himself_, but in quite a different sense from that in which self-love is regarded as a matter of reproach." (Ethic. Nic., lib. ix., cap. viii.) This view appears to me eminently just. That man is not, in the true and proper sense, a self-lover who seeks his present at the expense of his future and permanent well-being, or who tramples upon the rights and happiness of others, intent only upon his gratification. The glutton, the drunkard, the debauchee, are not the truest lovers of self. They stand fairly chargeable, not with too much, but _too little_ regard for their own happiness and well-being. _Not the only original Principle._--But while the desire of happiness is a principle which has its foundation in the constitution of the mind, and which is characteristic of reason and intelligence, it is by no means to be regarded as the only original principle of our nature. Certain moralists have sought to resolve all other active principles into self-love, making this the source and spring of all human conduct, so that, directly or indirectly, whatever we do finds its origin and motive in the love of self. According to this view, I love my friends, my kindred, my country, only because of the intimate connection between their well-being and my own; I pity and relieve the unfortunate only to relieve myself of the unpleasant feelings their condition awakens; I sacrifice treasure, comfort, health, life itself, only for the sake of some greater good that is to be thus and only thus procured; even the sense of right, and the obligations of a religious nature, which bind and control me, find their chief strength, as principles of action, in that regard for my own happiness which underlies all other considerations. _Such a View indefensible._--This is a view not more derogatory to human nature than inconsistent with all true psychology. That the principle under consideration is one of the most powerful springs of human conduct, that it enters more largely than we may ourselves, at the time, be aware, into those motives and actions that wear the appearance of entire disinterestedness, I am disposed to admit, nor would I deny that our sense of right, and of religious obligation, finds a strong support in that intimate and inseparable connection which exists between duty and happiness. The Scriptures constantly appeal to our love of happiness as a motive to right action. Their rewards and promises on the one hand, and their warnings and threatenings on the other, all rest on this assumed law of human nature, that man everywhere and always desires his own well-being. But that this is the only and ultimate ground of human action, that all the benevolent affections, all honor, and virtue, all sense of duty and right, all religious emotion and religious principle resolves itself into this, neither reason, nor revelation, nor the closest observation of the human mind, do either teach or imply. _This Desire, in what Sense rational._--_Stewart's View._--We have spoken, thus far, of the desire of happiness as a rational principle. Is it, in such a sense, peculiar to a rational and intelligent nature? Does it so imply and involve the exercise of reason, that it is not to be found except in connection with, and as the result of, that principle? If so, it can hardly be called an original and implanted, or, at least, an _instinctive_ principle. And such is the view taken by Mr. Stewart, in his Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers. The desire of happiness implies, in his estimation, a deliberate and intelligent survey of the various sources of enjoyment, a looking before and after, to ascertain what will, and what will not, contribute to ultimate and permanent well-being; and this it is the part of reason to perform. _Not exclusively so._--That the desire of happiness, as exercised by a rational nature, involves something of this process, some general idea of what constitutes happiness, or what is good on the whole and not merely for the present, some perception of consequences, some comprehensive view and comparison of the various principles of action and courses of conduct, as means to this general end, may, indeed, be admitted. And, so far as the exercise of self-love is of the nature now indicated, it is certainly a rational rather than an instinctive act. But I see no reason why one and the same emotion, or mental activity of any sort, may not be, at one time, the result of reflection, at another, of impulse; now deliberate and rational, and now, instinctive in its character. We know this to be the case, for example, with the affections, both benevolent and malevolent. A principle of action may be none the less instinctive, and originally implanted in man's nature, from the fact that, when he arrives at years of discretion, his reason confirms and strengthens what nature had already taught, or even adopts it as one of its own cardinal principles. It is not necessary, in order to _all_ desire of good, that I should know, completely and comprehensively, in what good consists, and I may still desire my own happiness, according to the measure of my knowledge and capacity, when I simply know that I am happy at the present moment. _Desire of continued Existence._--Closely analogous to the principle now under consideration, if not, indeed, properly a form or modification of it, is the desire of _continued existence_. No desire that finds a place in the human bosom, perhaps, is stronger or more universal than this. Life is valued above all other possessions; riches, honors, place, power, ease, are counted as of little worth in comparison. There are, indeed, occasions when life is willingly sacrificed, rather than to incur dishonor and reproach, or for the defence of the innocent and helpless who depend on us for protection, or for some great and good cause that demands of the good and true man such service as may cost life. Even in such cases, the importance of the interests which demand and receive such a sacrifice, show the value we attach to that which is laid upon the altar. _Increases with Age._--The desire of continued existence seems to increase, as age advances, and life wears away. We always value that the more of which we have but little. It is a striking proof of the divine benevolence, that, in a world so full of care, and toil, and sorrow, as the present is, and must be, to the multitude of its inhabitants, there are few so miserable as not to regard continued existence as a boon to be purchased at any price. § II.--DESIRE OF KNOWLEDGE. _An original Principle._--Among the various principles that enter into the composition of our nature, and are the motive powers of the human mind, awakening and calling forth its energies, and impelling it to action, the desire of knowledge holds an important place. From its early manifestation, before reason and reflection have as yet, to any extent, come into play, and from its general, if not universal existence, we infer that it is one of those principles originally implanted in our nature by the great Author of our being. _Not Curiosity._--The desire of knowledge, though often spoken of as synonymous with _curiosity_, is not altogether identical with it. Curiosity has reference rather to the novelty and strangeness of that which comes before the mind. It is the feeling awakened by these qualities, rather than the general desire to know what is yet unknown. It is of more limited application, and while it implies a desire to understand the object in view of which it is awakened, implies also some degree of wonder, at the unusual and unexpected character of the object as thus presented. While, then, curiosity is certainly a most powerful auxiliary to the desire of learning, and stimulates the mind to exertions it might not otherwise put forth, it is hardly to be viewed as identical with the principle under consideration. _Manifested in early Life._--The desire of knowledge is never, perhaps, more strongly developed than in early life, and never partakes more fully of the character of curiosity than then. To the child, all things are new and strange. He looks about him upon a world as unknown to him as he is to it, and every different object that meets his eye is a new study, and a new mystery to him. The desire to acquaint himself with the new and unknown world around him, keeps him constantly employed, constantly learning. _In later Years._--As he grows up, and the sphere of his intellectual vision enlarges, every step of his progress only opens new and wider fields to be explored, beyond the limits of his previous investigations. If there is less of childish curiosity, there is more of earnest, manly, irrepressible desire and determination to know. His studies assume this or that direction, according to native taste and temperament, early associations, or the force of circumstances; he becomes a student of science, or a student of letters, or of art, or of the practical professions and pursuits of life; but turn in what direction and to what pursuits he will, the desire to know still lives within him, as a sacred lamp ever burning before the shrine of truth. _Explains the Love of Narrative._--Every one has remarked the eagerness with which children listen to stories, histories, and fables. This is owing not more to the love of the ideal, which is usually very strongly developed in early life, than to the desire of knowing what presents itself to the mind as something new and unknown, yet with the semblance of reality. Nor does this love of narrative forsake us as we grow older. We have still our romances, our histories, our poems, epic and tragic, to divert us amid the graver cares of life; and the old man is, perhaps, as impatient as the child, to go on with the story, and comprehend the plot, when once his interest and curiosity are awakened. _A benevolent Provision._--We cannot but regard it as a benevolent provision of the Creator, so to constitute the human mind, that not only knowledge itself, but the very process of its acquisition, should be a pleasure. And when we consider how great is the importance to man of this desire of knowledge, and how great is the progress of even the humblest mind, from the dawn of its intelligence, on to the period of its full maturity and strength; how, under the influence of this desire, the mind of a Newton, a Kepler, a Bacon, a Descartes, a Leibnitz, moves on, from the slow and feeble acquisitions of the nursery, to the great and sublime discoveries that are to shed a light and glory, not only on the name of the discoverer, but on the path of all who come after him, we can hardly attach too high an importance to this part of our mental constitution. _A rational, though an instinctive Principle._--The desire of knowledge, like many of the active principles which have already fallen under our notice, is capable of rational exercise and control, while, at the same time, an implanted and instinctive principle. It operates, at first, rather as a blind impulse, impelling the mind to a given end; when reason assumes her sway of the mind and its restless energies, what was before a mere impulse and instinct of nature, now becomes a deliberate and rational purpose. _Moral Character._--As to moral character, it may, or may not, pertain to the exercise of the principle under consideration. The desire of knowledge is not of necessity a virtuous affection of the mind. Characteristic as it is of a noble and superior nature, more elevated and excellent, as it certainly is, than the merely animal desires and impulses, it is not inseparably connected with moral excellence. As rationally exercised it is laudable and virtuous, provided we seek knowledge with proper motives, and for right ends; otherwise, the reverse. Inasmuch, however, as we are under obligation to act in this, as in all other matters, from pure motives, and for right ends, the mere absence of such a motive, the desire and pursuit of knowledge in another manner, and from other motives, becomes blameworthy. § III.--DESIRE OF POWER. _A native Principle._--The desire of power must be regarded as an original principle of our nature. Like the desire of happiness, and of knowledge, it is both early in its development, and powerful in its influence over the mind. It is also universally manifest. _In what Manner awakened._--Of the idea of power or cause, and of the manner in which the mind comes, in the first instance, to form that idea, I have already spoken, under the head of original conception. We see changes taking place in the external world. We observe these changes immediately and invariably preceded by certain antecedents. The idea of cause is thus suggested to the mind, and cause implies power of one thing over another to produce given effects. We find, also, our own volitions attended with corresponding effects upon objects external, and thus learn, still further, that we ourselves possess power over other objects. The idea thus awakened in the mind, there springs up, also, in connection with the idea, an activity of the sensibilities. The power which we find ourselves to have over objects about us affords us pleasure; what we enjoy we love, and what we love we desire; and so there is awakened in the mind a strong and growing desire for the possession of power. _Pleasure of exerting Power._--The pleasure which we derive from producing, in any instance, a manifest effect, and from the consciousness that we have in ourselves the power to produce like effects whenever we will, is one of the highest sources of enjoyment of which nature has made as capable. It is, to a great extent, the spring and secret of the constant activity of which the world is full. It shows itself in the sports of childhood, and in the graver pursuits of maturer years. The infant, when it finds that it can move and control its own little limbs, the boy learning the art of such athletic sports as he perceives his fellows practise, the man when he finds that he can control the action of his fellow-man, and bend the will of others to his own, are each, and perhaps equally, delighted at the acquisition of this new power; and the pleasure is generally in proportion to the novelty of the acquisition, and the apparent greatness of the effect produced. _Strength and Influence of this Principle._--The love of power is one of the strongest of the ruling principles of the human mind. It has its seat in the deepest foundations of our nature. I can _do_ something; I can do what others do; I can do more than they; such is the natural order and progression of our endeavors, and such also the measure and increase of our delight. What, but the love of power, leads to those competitions of strength with strength, which mark the athletic games and contests of all nations, civilized and savage? What, but the love of power, impels the hunter over the pathless mountains, and deserts, in quest of those savage denizens and lords of nature, whose strength is so far superior to his own? What, but the love of power, leads the warrior forth, at the head of conquering armies, to devastate and subdue new realms? _Seen also in other Pursuits._--And in the peaceful pursuits of life, how largely does the same impulse mingle with the other, and perhaps more apparent, motives of human action? The man of science, as he watches the nightly courses of the stars, or resolves the stubborn compounds of nature into their simple and subtle elements, as he discovers new laws, and unlocks the secrets that have long baffled human inquiry, derives no small part of his gratification from the consciousness of that power which he thus exercises over the realm of matter subjected to his will. And when, in like manner, the orator, on whose words depend the lives of men, and the fate of nations, stands forth to accuse or defend, to arouse the slumbering passions, and inflame the patriotism, the courage, the resentment of his audience, or to soothe their anger, allay their prejudice, awaken their pity or their fears, how does the consciousness of his power over the swaying, agitated multitude before him, mingle with the emotions that swell his bosom, and augment the fierce delight of victory? _Auxiliary to desire of knowledge._--The desire of power is accessory to, and in some cases, perhaps, the foundation of certain other principles of action. It is especially auxiliary to the desire of knowledge, inasmuch as every new acquisition of truth is an accession of power to the mind, and is, therefore, on that account, as well as for its own sake, desirable. As a general thing, the more we know, the more and the better we can do. Every mental acquisition becomes, in some sense, an instrument to aid us in further and larger acquisitions. We are enabled to call to our aid the very forces and elements of nature which our discoveries have, in a manner, subjected to our sway, and to conform our own conduct to those established laws which science reveals. The mind is thus stimulated, in all its investigations, and toilsome search for truth, by the assurance that every increase of knowledge is, in some sense, an increase, also, of power. Hence the aphorism so current, and generally attributed to Bacon, which affirms that knowledge _is_ power. _Auxiliary also to love of Liberty._--The _love of liberty_, according to some writers, proceeds also, in part, at least, from the desire of power, the desire of being able to do whatever we like. Whatever deprives us of liberty trenches upon our power. In like manner, writers upon morals have noticed the fact that the _pleasure of virtue_ is in a measure due to the same source. When evil habits predominate and acquire the mastery, we lose the power of self-control, the mind is subjected to the baser passions, and this loss of power is attended with the painful consciousness of degradation. On the other hand, to the mind that is bent on maintaining its integrity, though it be by stern and determined conflict with the evil influences that surround it, and its own natural propensities to a course of sinful indulgence, every fresh struggle with those adverse influences becomes a pledge of final success, and the hour of victory, when it comes at last, as come it will, is an hour of triumph and of joy. § IV.--CERTAIN MODIFICATIONS OF THE DESIRE OF POWER;--AS, THE DESIRE OF SUPERIORITY, AND OF POSSESSION. _General Statement._--There are certain desires to which the human mind is subject, and which seem to have a foundation in nature, which, though frequently regarded as distinct principles of action, are more properly, perhaps, to be viewed as but modifications of the principle last considered. I refer to the _desire of superiority_, and _the desire of possession_; or, as they are more succinctly termed, ambition and avarice. _The Desire to excel, universal._--The desire to excel is almost universal among men. It shows itself in every condition of society, and under all varieties of character and pursuit. It animates the sports of childhood, and gives a zest to the sober duties and realities of life. It penetrates the camp, the court, the halls of legislation, and of justice; it enters alike into the peaceful rivalries of the school, the college, the learned professions, and into those more fearful contests for superiority which engage nations in hostile encounter on the field of strife and carnage. What have we, under all these manifestations, but the desire of superiority, and what is that but the desire of power in one of its most common forms? _Not peculiar to Man._--This is a principle not peculiar to human nature, but common to man with the brute. The lower animals have also their rivalries, their jealousies, their contests for superiority in swiftness, and in strength, and he is the acknowledged leader who proves himself superior in these respects to his fellows. _Not the same with Envy._--The desire to excel, or the principle of emulation, is not to be confounded with envy with which it is too frequently, but not necessarily, associated. Envy is pained at the success of a rival; a just and honorable emulation, without seeking to detract from the well-merited honors of another, strives only to equal and surpass them. This distinction is an important one, and has been very clearly pointed out by _Mr. Stewart_, and also by _Bp. Butler_, and, still earlier, by _Aristotle_. "Emulation," says Butler, "is merely the desire of superiority over others, with whom we compare ourselves. To desire the attainment of this superiority by the particular means of others being brought down below our own level, is the distinct notion of envy." To the same effect, Aristotle, as quoted by Stewart: "Emulation is a good thing, and belongs to good men; envy is bad, and belongs to bad men. What a man is emulous of he strives to attain, that he may really possess the desired object; the envious are satisfied if nobody has it." _Not malevolent of Necessity._--Dr. Reid has classed emulation with the malevolent affections, as involving a sentiment of ill-will toward the rival; but, as Mr. Stewart very justly remarks, this sentiment is not a _necessary_ concomitant of the desire of superiority, though often found in connection with it; nor ought emulation to be classed with the affections, but with the desires, for it is the desire which is the active principle, and the affection is only a concomitant circumstance. _View maintained by Mr. Upham._--Mr. Upham denies emulation a place among the original and implanted principles of our nature, on this ground. All our active principles, he maintains, from instinct upward, are subordinate to the authority and decisions of conscience, as a faculty paramount to every other. But the desire of superiority he supposes to be utterly inconsistent with the law of subordination. Whenever man perceives a superior, he perceives one with whom, by this law of his nature, if such it be, he is brought into direct conflict and collision, and as he is surrounded by those who, in some respect, are his superiors, he is really placed in a state of perpetual warfare and misery; nor can he regard even the Supreme Being with other feelings than those of unhallowed rivalry. A principle that would lead to such results, he concludes, cannot be founded in the constitution of our nature. He accordingly resolves the desire of superiority into the principle of imitativeness. _The Correctness of this View called in Question._--It is difficult to perceive the force of this reasoning. The desire of superiority, it is sufficient to say, whatever be its origin, leads to no such results. As actually manifest in human character and conduct, it does not show itself to be inconsistent with due subordination to authority, nor does it involve man in necessary and perpetual conflict with his fellows, nor does it present the Supreme Being as an object of unhallowed rivalry. We have only to do with facts, with the phenomena actually presented by human nature; and we do not find the facts to correspond with the view now given. Nor can we perceive any reason, in the nature of the case, why the desire in question _should_ lead, or be supposed to lead, to such results. The desire of superiority does not necessarily imply the desire to be superior to every body, and every thing, in the universe. It may have its natural and proper limits; and such we find to be the fact. _Actual Limitations of this Principle._--We desire to excel not, usually, those who are far above us in rank and fortune, but our fellows and companions; our rivals are mostly those who move in the same sphere with ourselves. The artist vies with his brother artist, the student with his fellow student, and even where envy and ill-will mingle, as they too often do, with the desire, still, the object of that envy is not every one, indiscriminately, who may happen to be superior to ourselves, but only our particular rival in the race before us. The child at school does not envy Sir Isaac Newton, or the illustrious Humboldt, but the urchin that is next above himself in the class. The desire of superiority, like every other desire of the human mind, looks only at what is possible to be accomplished, at what is probable, even; it aims not at the clouds, but at things within our reach, things to be had for the asking and the striving. But whatever view we take of the matter, the desire of superiority certainly exists as an active principle in the human mind; nor do we see any reason why it should not be admitted as an original principle founded in the constitution of our nature, or, at least, as one of the forms and modifications of such a principle, viz., the love of power. _This Principle requires Restraint._--I would by no means deny, however, that the desire now under consideration is one which is liable to abuse, and which requires the careful and constant restraints of reason and of religious principle. The danger is, that envy and ill-will, toward those whom we regard as rivals and competitors with us, for those honors and rewards which lie in our path, shall be permitted to mingle with the desire to excel. Indeed, so frequently are the two conjoined, that to the reflecting and sensitive mind, superiority itself almost ceases to be desirable, since it is but too likely to be purchased at the price of the good-will, and kind feeling, of those less fortunate, or less gifted, than ourselves. _Another Form of the same Desire._--_The desire of possession_ may be regarded, also, as a modification of the desire of power. That influence over others which power implies, and which is, to some extent, commanded by superiority of personal strength or prowess, by genius, by skill, by the various arts and address of life, or by the accident of birth and hereditary station, is still more directly and generally attainable, by another, and perhaps a shorter route--the possession of wealth. This, as the world goes, is the key that unlocks, the sceptre that controls, all things. Personal prowess, genius, address, station, the throne itself, are, in no inconsiderable degree, dependent upon its strength, and at its command. He who has this can well afford to dispense with most other goods and gifts of fortune; so far, at least, as concerns the possession of power. He may be neither great, nor learned, nor of noble birth; neither elegant in person, nor accomplished in manners, distinguished neither for science, nor virtue; he may command no armies, he may sit upon no throne; yet with all his deficiencies, and even his vices, if so he have wealth, he has power. Unnumbered hands are ready to task their skill at his bidding, unnumbered arms, to move and toil and strive in his service, unnumbered feet hasten to and fro upon his errands. He commands the skill and labor of multitudes whom he has never seen, and who know him not. In distant quarters of the globe, the natives of other zones and climes hasten upon his errands; swift ships traverse the seas for him; the furs of the extreme North, the rich woods and spices of the tropics, the silks of India, the pearls and gems of the East--whatever is costly, and curious, and rare, whatever can contribute to the luxury and the pride of man--these are his, and for him. No wonder that he who desires power, should desire that which is one of the chief avenues and means to the attainment of power, and that what is valued, at first, rather as an instrument than as an end, should presently come to be regarded and valued for its own sake. _A twofold Aspect--Covetousness, Avarice._--There are, if I mistake not, two forms which the desire of possession assumes. The one is the simple desire of acquiring, that there may be the more to spend; the other of accumulating, adding to the heaps already obtained--which may be done by keeping fast what is already gotten, as well as by getting more. The one is the desire of getting, which is not inconsistent with the desire of spending, but, in fact, grows out of that in the first instance; the other is the desire of increasing, and the corresponding dread of diminishing, what is gotten, which, when it prevails to any considerable degree, effectually prevents all enjoyment of the accumulated treasure, and becomes one of the most remarkable and most odious passions of our perverted nature. The term _covetousness_ answers somewhat nearly to the one, _avarice_ to the other, of these forms of desire. It must be added, also, that it seems to be the natural tendency of the primitive and milder form of this principle, to pass into the other and more repulsive manifestation. He who begins with desiring wealth as a means of gratifying his various wants, too frequently ends with desiring it for its own sake, and becomes that poorest and most miserable of all men, the miser. _The inordinate love of Money not owing wholly to Association._--Whence arises that inordinate value which the miser attaches to money, which, in reality, is but the mere representative of enjoyment, the mere means to an end? Why is he so loth to part with the smallest portion of the representative medium, in order to secure the reality, the end for which alone the means is valuable? Is it that, by the laws of association, the varied enjoyments which gold has so often procured, and which have a fixed value in our minds, are transferred with all their value to the gold which procured them? Doubtless this is, in some measure, the case, and it may, therefore, in part, account for the phenomenon in question. The gold piece which I take from my drawer for the purchase of some needful commodity, has, it may be, an increased value in my estimation, from the recollection of the advantages previously derived from the possession of just such a sum. But why should such associations operate more powerfully upon the miser, than upon any other person? Why are we not _all_ misers, if such associations are the true cause and explanation of avarice? Nay, why is not the spendthrift the most avaricious of all men, since he has more frequently exchanged the representative medium for the enjoyment which it would procure, and has, therefore, greater store of such associations connected with his gold? _The true Explanation._--Dr. Brown, who has admirably treated this part of our mental constitution, has suggested, I think, the true explanation of this phenomenon. So long as the gold itself is in the miser's grasp, it is, and is felt to be, a permanent possession; when it is expended, it is usually for something of a transient nature, which perishes with the using. It seems to him afterward as so much utter loss, and is regretted as such. Every such regretted expenditure increases the reluctance to part with another portion of the treasure. There is, moreover, another circumstance which heightens this feeling of reluctance. The enjoyment purchased is one and simple. The gold with which it was purchased is the representative, not of that particular form of enjoyment alone, but of a thousand others as well, any one of which might have been procured with the same money. All these possible advantages are now no longer possible. Very great seems the loss. Add to this the circumstance that the miser, in most cases, probably, has accumulated, or set his heart upon accumulating, a certain round sum, say so many thousands or hundreds of thousands. The spending a single dollar breaks that sum, and, therewith, the charm is broken, and he who was a millionaire before that unlucky expenditure, is a millionaire no longer. It is mainly in these feelings of regret, which attend the necessary expenses of the man who has once learned to set a high value upon wealth, that avarice finds, if not its source, at least its chief strength and aliment. _Odiousness of this Vice._--There is, perhaps, no passion or vice to which poor human nature is subject, that is, in some respects, more odious and repulsive than this. There is about it no redeeming feature. It is pure and unmingled selfishness, without even the poor apology that most other vices can offer, of contributing to the present enjoyment and sensual gratification of the criminal. The miser is denied even this. He covets, not that he may enjoy, but that he may refrain from enjoying. _Strongest in old Age._--"In the contemplation of many of the passions that rage in the heart with greatest fierceness," says Dr. Brown, "there is some comfort in the thought that, violent as they may be for a time, they are not to rage through the whole course of life, at least if life be prolonged to old age; that the agitation which at every period will have some intermissions, will grow gradually less as the body grows more weak, and that the mind will at last derive from this very feebleness a repose which it could not enjoy when the vigor of the bodily frame seemed to give to the passion a corresponding vigor. It is not in avarice, however, that this soothing influence of age is to be found. It grows with our growth and with our strength, but it strengthens also with our very weakness. There are no intermissions in the anxieties which it keeps awake; and every year, instead of lessening its hold, seems to fix it more deeply within the soul itself, as the bodily covering around it slowly moulders away.... The heart which is weary of every thing else is not weary of coveting more gold; the memory which has forgotten every thing else, continues still, as Cato says in Cicero's dialogue, to remember where its gold is stored; the eye is not dim to gold that is dim to every thing beside; the hand which it seems an effort to stretch out and fix upon any thing, appears to gather new strength from the very touch of the gold which it grasps, and has still vigor enough to lift once more, and count once more, though a little more slowly, what it has been its chief and happiest occupation thus to lift and count for a period of years far longer than the ordinary life of man. When the relations or other expectant heirs gather around his couch, not to comfort, nor even to seem to comfort, but to await, in decent mimicry of solemn attendance, that moment which they rejoice to view approaching; the dying eye can still send a jealous glance to the coffer near which it trembles to see, though it scarcely sees, so many human forms assembled; and that feeling of jealous agony, which follows and outlasts the obscure vision of floating forms that are scarcely remembered, is at once the last misery and the last consciousness of life." § V.--DESIRE OF SOCIETY _A natural Principle._--There can be little doubt that the desire of society is one of the original principles of our nature. It shows itself at a very early period of life, and under all the diverse conditions of existence. Its universal manifestation, and that under circumstances which preclude the idea of education or imitation in the matter, proves it an implanted principle, having its seat in the constitution of the mind. _Manifested by Animals of every Species._--The child rejoices in the company of its fellows. The lower animals manifest the same regard for each other's society, and are unhappy when separated from their kind. Much of the attachment of the dog to his master may, not improbably, be owing to the same source. The beast of labor is cheered and animated by his master's presence, and the patient ox as he toils along the furrow, or the highway, moves more willingly when he hears the well-known step and voice of his owner trudging by his side. Every one knows how much the horse is inspirited by the chance companionship, upon the way, of a fellow-laborer of his own species. Horses that have been accustomed to each other's society on the road, or in the stall, frequently manifest the greatest uneasiness and dejection when separated; and it has been observed by those acquainted with the habits of animals, that cattle do not thrive as well, even in good pasture, when solitary, as when feeding in herds. _Social Organizations of Animals._--Accordingly we find most animals, when left to the instinct of nature, associating in herds, and tribes, larger or smaller, according to the habits of the animal. They form their little communities, have their leaders, and, to some extent, their laws, acknowledged and obeyed by all, their established customs and modes of procedure--in which associations, thus regulated, it is impossible not to recognize the essential feature and principle of what man, in his political associations of the same nature, calls the _state_. What else are the little communities of the bee, and the ant, and the beaver, but so many busy cities, and states, of the insect and animal tribes? _The social State not adopted because of its Advantages merely._--It may be said that man derives advantages from the social state, and adopts it for that reason. Unquestionably he does derive immense advantages from it; but is that the reason he desires it? Is the desire of society consequent upon the advantages, experienced or foreseen, which accrue from it, or are the advantages consequent upon the desire and the adoption of the state in question? Is it matter of expediency and calculation, of policy and necessity, or of native instinct and implanted constitutional desire? What is it with the lower animals? Has not nature provided in their very constitution for their prospective wants, and, by implanting in them the desire for each other's society, laid the foundation for their congregating in tribes and communities? Is it not reasonable to suppose that the same may be true of man? The analogy of nature, the early manifestation of the principle prior to education and experience, the universality and uniformity of its operation, and the fact that it shows itself often in all its strength under circumstances in which very little benefit would seem to result from the social condition, as with the savage races of the extreme North, and with many rude and uncultivated tribes of the forest and the desert--all these circumstances go to show that the desire of society is founded in the nature of man, and is not a mere matter of calculation and policy. _Man's Nature deficient without this Principle._--And this is a sufficient answer to the theory of those who, with Hobbes, regard the social condition of man as the result of his perception of what is for his own interest, the dictate of prudence and necessity. The very fact that it is for his interest would lead us to expect that some provision should be made for it in his nature; and this is precisely what we find to be the case. Were it otherwise, we should feel that, in one important respect, the nature of man was deficient, inferior even to that of the brute. But the truth is, the whole history of the race is one complete and compact contradiction of the theory of Hobbes, and shows with the clearness of demonstration, that the _natural_ condition of man is not that of seclusion, and isolation from his fellows, but of society and companionship. _Strength of this Principle._--So strongly is this principle rooted in the very depths of our nature, that when man is for a length of time shut out from the society of his fellow men, he seeks the acquaintance and companionship of brutes, and even of insects, and those animals for whom, in his usual condition, he has a marked repugnance, as a relief from utter loneliness and absolute solitude. Mr. Stewart relates the instance of a French nobleman, shut up for several years a close prisoner in the Castle of Pignerol, during the reign of Louis XIV., who amused himself, in his solitude, by watching the movements of a spider, to which he at length became so much attached, that when the jailor, discovering his amusement, killed the spider, he was afflicted with the deepest grief. Silvio Pellico, in his imprisonment, amused himself in like manner. Baron Trench sought to alleviate the wretchedness of his long imprisonment, by cultivating the acquaintance or friendship of a mouse, which in turn manifested a strong attachment to him, played about his person, and took its food from his hand. The fact having been discovered by the officers, the mouse was removed to the guard-room, but managed to find its way back to the prison door, and, at the hour of visitation, when the door was opened, ran into the dungeon, and manifested the greatest delight at finding its master. Being subsequently removed and placed in a cage, it pined, refused all sustenance, and in a few days died. "The loss of this little companion made me for some time quite melancholy," adds the narrator. _Case of Silvio Pellico._--How strongly is the desire for society manifested in these words of Silvio Pellico, when forbidden to converse with his fellow-prisoner. "I shall do no such thing. I shall speak as long as I have breath, and invite my neighbor to talk to me. If he refuse, I will talk to my window-bars. I will talk to the hills before me. I will talk to the birds as they fly about. I _will_ talk." Facts of this nature clearly indicate that the love of society is originally implanted in the human mind. _Illustrated from the History of Prison Discipline._--The same thing is further evident from the effects of entire seclusion from all society, as shown in the history of prison discipline. For the facts which follow, as well as for some of the preceding, I am indebted to Mr. Upham. The legislature of New York some years since, by way of experiment, directed a number of the most hardened criminals in the State prison at Auburn, to be confined in solitary cells, without labor, and without intermission of their solitude. The result is thus stated by Messrs. Beaumont and Tocqueville, who were subsequently appointed commissioners by the French government to examine and report on the American system of prison discipline. "This, trial from which so happy a result had been anticipated, was fatal to the greater part of the convicts; in order to reform them, they had been subjected to complete isolation; but this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal, without intermission, and without pity; it does not reform, it kills. The unfortunates on whom this experiment was made, fell into a state of depression so manifest that their keepers were struck with it; their lives seemed in danger if they remained longer in this situation; five of them had already succumbed during a single year; their moral state was no less alarming; one of them had become insane; another, in a fit of despair, had embraced the opportunity, when the keeper brought him something, to precipitate himself from his cell, running the almost certain chance of a mortal fall. Upon those, and similar effects, the system was finally judged." The same results substantially have followed similar experiments in other prisons. It is stated by Lieber, that in the penitentiary of New Jersey, ten persons are mentioned as having been killed by solitary confinement. Facts like these show how deeply-rooted in our nature is the desire of society, and how essential to our happiness is the companionship of our fellow-beings. § VI.--DESIRE OF ESTEEM. _An important and original Principle._--Of the active principles of our nature, few exert a more important influence over human conduct, few certainly deserve a more careful consideration, than the regard which we feel for the approbation of others. The early period at which this manifests itself, as well as the strength which it displays, indicate, with sufficient clearness, that it is an original principle, founded in the constitution of the mind. _Cannot be regarded as an acquired Habit._--When we see children of tender age manifesting a sensitive regard for the good opinion of their associates, shrinking with evident pain from the censure of those around them, and delighted with the approbation which they may receive; when, in maturer years, we find them--children no longer--ready to sacrifice pleasure and advantage in every form, and to almost any amount, and even to lay down life itself to maintain an honorable place in the esteem of men, and to preserve a name and reputation unsullied--and these things we do see continually--we cannot believe that what shows itself so early, and so uniformly, and operates with such strength, is only some acquired principle, the result of association, or the mere calculation of advantage, and a prudential regard to self-interest. In many cases we know it cannot be so. It is not the dictate of prudence, or the calculation of advantage, that influences the little child; nor is it the force of such considerations that induces the man of mature years to give up ease, fortune, and life itself, for the sake of honor and a name. Even where the approbation or censure of those who may pass an opinion, favorable, or unfavorable, upon our conduct, can be of no benefit or injury to us, that approbation is still desired, that censure is still feared. We prefer the good opinion of even a weak man, or a bad man, to his disesteem; and even if the odium which, in that case, we may chance to incur in the discharge of duty, is felt to be unjust and undeserved, and our consciousness of right intention and right endeavor sustains us under all the pressure of opinion from without, it is impossible, nevertheless, not to be pained with even that unjust and undeserved reproach. We feel that, in losing the confidence and esteem of others, we incur a heavy loss. Want and wretchedness may drive a man to desperate and reckless courses; yet few, probably, can be found, so wretched and desperate, who, in all their misery, would not prefer the good opinion and the good offices of their fellow-man. _Accounted for neither by the selfish nor the associative Principle._--It can hardly be, then, a _selfish_ and prudential principle--this strong desire of esteem; nor yet can it be the result of association, as some have inferred; since it shows itself under circumstances where a selfish regard for one's own interests could not be supposed to operate, and with a power which no laws of association can explain. _Hume's Theory._--Hardly better is it accounted for on the principle which Hume suggests, that the good opinion of others confirms our good opinion of ourselves, and hence is felt to be desirable. Doubtless there is need enough, in many cases, perhaps in most, of some such confirmation. Nor would I deny that this may be one element of the pleasure which we derive from the esteem of others. Dr. Brown, in his analysis of the principle under consideration, has very justly included this among the components of the pleasure thus derived. But it by no means accounts for the origin, nor explains the nature, of this desire. It is rather an incidental circumstance than the producing cause. _This Principle as it relates to the Future._--Perhaps in no one of its aspects is the desire of esteem more remarkable, than when it relates to the future--the desire to leave a good name behind us, when we are no longer concerned with the affairs of time. It would seem as if the good or ill opinion of men would be of no moment whatever to us, when once we have taken our final departure from the stage of life. We pass to a higher tribunal, and the verdict of approving or reproving millions, the applause of nations, the condemnation of a world in arms against us, will hardly break the silence or disturb the deep repose of the tomb. These approving and condemning voices will die away in the distance, or be heard but as the faint echo of the wave that lashes some far-off shore. Yet, though the honors that may then await our names will be of as little moment to us, personally, as the perishing garlands that the hand of affection may place upon our tombs, we still desire to leave a name unsullied at least, if not distinguished, even as we desire to live in the memory and affections of those who survive us. _How to be explained._--To what, then, can be owing this desire of the good opinion and esteem of those who are to come after us, and whose opinion, be it good or ill, can in no way affect our happiness? Philosophers have been sadly at a loss to account for it, especially those who trace the desire of esteem to a selfish origin. Some, with Wollaston and Smith, have referred it to the illusions of the imagination, by which we seem, to ourselves, to be present, and to witness the honors, and listen to the praises, which the future is to bestow. Such an illusion may possibly arise in some hour of reverie, some day-dream of the mind; but it is impossible to suppose that any one of sound mind should be permanently influenced by such an illusion, or fail to perceive, when reason resumes her sway, that it _is_ an illusion, and that only. _Admits of Explanation in another Way._--If, however we regard the desire of the good opinion of others as an original principle of our nature, and not as springing from selfish considerations, it is easy to see how the same principle may extend to the future. If, irrespective of personal advantage, we desire the esteem of our fellow-men while we live, so, also, without regard to such advantage, we may desire their good opinion when we are no longer among them. True, it is only a name that is transmitted and honored, as Wollaston says, and not the man himself. _He_ does not live because his _name_ does, nor is _he_ known because his name is known. As in those lines of Cowley, quoted by Stewart: "'Tis true the two immortal syllables remain, But, O! ye learned men, explain What essence, substance, what hypostasis In five poor letters is? In these alone does the great Cæsar live-- 'Tis all the conquered world could give." Yet reason as we may, it is no trait of a noble and ingenuous mind to be regardless of the opinions of the future. The common sentiment of men, even the wisest and the best, finds itself, after all, much more influenced by such considerations than by any reasoning to the contrary. _Not unworthy of a noble Mind._--Nor is it altogether unworthy of the ambition of a noble and generous mind to leave a good name as a legacy to the future; in the language of Mr. Stewart, "to be able to entail on the casual combination of letters which compose our name, the respect of distant ages, and the blessings of generations yet unborn. Nor is it an unworthy object of the most rational benevolence to render these letters a sort of magical spell for kindling the emulation of the wise and good whenever they shall reach the human ear." _Desire of Esteem not a safe Rule of Conduct._--I would by no means be understood, however, to present the desire of esteem as, on the whole, a safe and suitable rule of conduct, or to justify that inordinate ambition which too frequently seeks distinction regardless of the means by which it is acquired, or of any useful end to be accomplished. The mere love of fame is by no means the highest principle of action by which man is guided--by no means the noblest or the safest. It is ever liable to abuse. Its tendencies are questionable. The man who has no higher principle than a regard to the opinions of others is not likely to accomplish any thing great or noble. He will lack that prime element of greatness, _consistency_ of character and purpose. His conduct and his principles will vary to suit the changing aspect of the times. He will, almost of necessity, also lack firmness and strength of character. It is necessary, sometimes, for the wise and good man to resist the force and pressure of public opinion. He must do that, or abandon his principles, and prove false at once to duty, and to himself. To do this costs much. It requires, and, at the same time, imparts, true strength. Such strength comes in no other way. That mind is essentially weak that depends for its point of support on the applause of man. In the noble language of Cicero, "To me, indeed, those actions seem all the more praiseworthy which we perform without regard to public favor, and without observation of man.. The true theatre for virtue is conscience; there is none greater." The praise of man confers no solid happiness, unless it is felt to be deserved; and if it _be_ so, that very consciousness is sufficient. _Disregard of public Opinion equally unsafe._--It must be confessed, however, that if a regard to the opinions of others is not to be adopted as a wise and safe rule of conduct, an entire disregard of public opinion is, on the other hand, a mark neither of a well ordered mind, nor of a virtuous character. "Contempta fama," says Tacitus, "contemnantur virtutes." Accordingly we find that those who, from any cause, have lost their character and standing in society, and forfeited the good opinion of their fellow-men, are apt to become desperate and reckless, and ready for any crime. CHAPTER IV. HOPE AND FEAR. _Nature of these Emotions._--In the analysis of the sensibilities, which was given in a preceding chapter, _hope and fear_ were classed as modifications of _desire and aversion_, having reference to the probability that the object which is desired or feared may be realized. Desire always relates to something in the future, and something that is agreeable, or viewed as such, and also something possible, or that is so regarded. Add to this future agreeable something the idea or element of _probability_, let it be not only something possible to be attained, but not unlikely to be, and what was before but mere desire, more or less earnest, now becomes _hope_, more or less definite or strong, according as the object is more or less desirable, and more or less likely to be realized. And the same is true of fear; an emotion awakened in view of any object regarded as disagreeable, in the future, and as more or less likely to be met. As desire and aversion do not necessarily relate to different objects, but are simply counterparts of each other, the desire of any good implying always an aversion to its loss, so, also, hope and fear may both be awakened by the same object, according as the gaining or losing of the object becomes the more probable. What we hope to gain we fear to lose. What we fear to meet, we hope to escape. _The Strength of the Feeling dependent, in part, on the Importance of the Object._--The _degree_ of the emotion, however, in either case, the readiness with which it is awakened, and the force and liveliness with which it affects the mind, are not altogether in proportion to the probability merely that the thing will, or will not, be as we hope or fear, but somewhat in proportion, also, to the importance of the object itself. That which is quite essential to our happiness is more ardently desired, than what is of much less consequence, though, perhaps, much more likely to be attained; and because it is more important and desirable, even a slight prospect of its attainment, or a slight reason to apprehend its loss, more readily awakens our hopes, and our fears, and more deeply impresses and agitates the mind, than even a much stronger probability would do in cases of less importance. What we very much desire, we are inclined to hope for, what we are strongly averse to, we are readily disposed to fear. Nothing is more desirable to the victim of disease than recovery, and hence his hope and almost confident expectation that he shall recover, when, perhaps, to every eye but his own, the case is hopeless. Nothing could be more dreadful to the miser than the loss of his treasure, and nothing, accordingly, does he so much fear. Poverty would be to him the greatest of possible calamities, and of this, accordingly, he lives in constant apprehension. Yet nothing is really more unlikely to occur. It is the tendency of the mind, in such cases, to magnify both the danger of the evil, on the one hand, and the prospect of good on the other. _Illustration from the case of a Traveller._--"There can be no question," says Dr. Brown, "that he who travels in the same carriage, with the same external appearances of every kind, by which a robber could be tempted or terrified, will be in equal danger of attack, whether he carry with him little of which he can be plundered, or such a booty as would impoverish him if it were lost. But there can be no question, also, that though the probabilities of danger be the same, the fear of attack would, in these two cases, be very different; that, in the one case, he would laugh at the ridiculous terror of any one who journeyed with him, and expressed much alarm at the approach of evening;--and that, in the other case, his own eye would watch, suspiciously, every horseman who approached, and would feel a sort of relief when he observed him pass carelessly and quietly along, at a considerable distance behind." _Uneasiness attending the sudden Acquisition of Wealth._--This tendency of the imagination to exaggerate the real, and conjure up a thousand unreal dangers, when any thing of peculiar value is in possession, which it is certainly possible, and it may be slightly probable, that we may lose, may, perhaps, account for the uneasiness, amounting often to extreme anxiety, that frequently accompanies the sudden acquisition of wealth. The poor cobbler, at his last, is a merry man, whistling at his work, from morning till night. Bequeath him a fortune, and he quits at once his last and his music; he is no longer the light-hearted man that he was; his step is cautious, his look anxious and suspicious; he grows care-worn and old. He that was never so happy in his life as when a poor man, now dreads nothing so much as poverty. While he was poor, there was nothing to fear, but every thing to hope, from the future; now that he is rich, there is nothing further to hope, but much to fear, since if the future brings any change in his condition, as it is not unlikely to do, it will, in all probability, be a change, not from wealth to still greater wealth, but from present affluence to his former penury. _The Pleasure of Hope surpasses the Pleasure of Reality._--It will, doubtless, be found generally true, that the pleasure of hope surpasses the pleasure derived from the realization of the object wished and hoped for. The imagination invests with ideal excellence the good that is still future, and when the hour of possession and enjoyment comes, the reality does not fully answer the expectation. Or, as in the case, already supposed, of the acquisition of wealth, there come along with the desired and expected treasure, a thousand cares and anxieties that were not anticipated, and that go far to diminish the enjoyment of the acquisition. From these, and other causes, it happens, I believe, not unfrequently, that those enjoy the most, who have really the least, whether of wealth, or of any other good which the mind naturally desires as a means of happiness; nor can we fail to see in this a beautiful provision of divine benevolence for the happiness of the great human family. _Influence on the Mind._--The influence of hope, upon the human mind, is universally felt, and recognized, as one of the most powerful and permanent of those varied influences, and laws of being, that make us what we are. It is limited to no period of life, no clime and country, no age of the world, no condition of society, or of individual fortune. It cheers us, alike, in the childhood of our being, in the maturity of our riper years, and in the second childhood of advancing age. There is no good which it cannot promise, no evil for which it cannot suggest a remedy and a way of escape, no sorrow which it cannot assuage. It is strength to the weary, courage to the desponding, life to the dying, joy to the desolate. It lingers with gentle step about the couch of the suffering, when human skill can do no more; and, upon the tombs of those whose departure we mourn, it hangs the unfading garland of a blessed immortality. "Angel of life! thy glittering wings explore Earth's loveliest bounds, and ocean's widest shore." The same poet who sang so well the pleasures of hope, has depicted the influence of this emotion, on the mind which some great calamity has bereft of reason. "Hark, the wild maniac sings to chide the gale That wafts so slow her lover's distant sail; * * * * * Oft when yon moon has climbed the midnight sky And the lone sea-bird wakes its wildest cry, Piled on the steep, her blazing fagots burn To hail the bark that never can return; And still she waits, but scarce forbears to weep, That constant love can linger on the deep." It is, indeed, a touching incident, illustrative not more of the strength of this principle of our nature, than of the benevolence which framed our mental and moral constitution, that when, under the heavy pressure of earthly ills, reason deserts her empire, and leaves the throne of the human mind vacant, _Hope_ still lingers to cheer even the poor maniac, and calmly takes her seat upon that vacant throne, even as the radiant angels sat upon the stone by the door of the empty sepulchre. MENTAL PHILOSOPHY DIVISION THIRD THE WILL PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. _Leading Divisions._--In our analysis and distribution of the powers of the mind, they were divided into three generic classes, viz., Intellect, Sensibility, and Will. Of these, the two former have been discussed in the preceding pages; it now remains to enter upon the examination of the third. _Importance and Difficulty of this Department._--This is, in many respects, at once the most important and the most difficult of the three. Its difficulty becomes apparent when we consider what questions arise respecting this power of the mind, and what diverse and conflicting views have been entertained, not among philosophers only, but among all classes of men, and in all ages of the world, concerning these matters. Its importance is evident from the relation which this faculty sustains to the other powers of the mind, and from its direct and intimate connection with some of the most practical and personal duties of life. Whatever control we have over ourselves, whether as regards the bodily or the mental powers, whatever use and disposition it is in our power to make of the intellectual faculties with which we are endowed, and of the sensibilities which accompany or give rise to those intellectual activities, and of the physical organization which obeys the behests of the sovereign mind, whatever separates and distinguishes us from the mere inanimate and mechanical forces of nature on the one hand, or the blind impulses of irrational brute instinct on the other; for all this, be it more or less, we are indebted to that faculty which we call the Will. And hence it happens that in this, as in many other cases, the most abstract questions of philosophy become the most practical and important questions of life. In every system of mental philosophy the Will holds a cardinal place. The system can no more be complete without it, than a steamship without the engines that are to propel her. As is the view taken of the Will, such is essentially the system. _Relation to Theology._--Nor is it to be overlooked that the doctrine of the Will is a cardinal doctrine of theology, as well as of psychology. Inasmuch as it has a direct and practical bearing upon the formation of character, and upon the moral and religious duties of life, it comes properly within the sphere of that science which treats of these duties, and of man's relation to his Maker. Hence every system of theology has to do with the Will; and according to the view taken of this faculty, such essentially is the system. If in psychology, still more in theology, is this the stand-point of the science. _Not, therefore, to be treated as a theological Doctrine._--Not, however, on this account, is the matter to be treated as theological and not strictly psychological. It is a matter which pertains properly and purely to psychology. It is for that science which treats of the laws and powers of the human mind to unfold and explain the activity of this most important of all the mental faculties. To this science theology must come for her data, so far as she has occasion to refer to the phenomena of the Will. The same may be said of ethical, as well as of theological science. In so far as they are concerned with the moral powers, and with the human will, they must both depend on psychology. With in her proper sphere they stand, not as teachers, but as learners. _The more Care requisite on this Account._--For this reason all the more care is necessary, in the study and explanation of the present theme. An error in this part of the investigation is likely to extend beyond the bounds of the science itself, into other and kindred sciences. The most serious consequences may flow from it, in other and wider fields of thought. _Sources of Information._--The sources of our information are essentially the same in this as in the preceding divisions of the science. They are twofold; the consciousness of what passes in our own minds, and the observation of others. Our single business is to ascertain facts, actual phenomena; not to inquire what might be, or what _ought_ to be, according to preconceived notions and theories, but what _is_. This is to be learned, not by reasoning and logical argument, but by simple observation of phenomena. Having once ascertained these, we may infer, and conclude, and reason from them, as far as we please, and our conclusions will be correct, provided the data are correct from which we set forth, and provided we reason correctly from these principles. _Method to be pursued._--In treating of this department of mental activity, it will be our first business, then, to point out the well established and evident facts pertaining to the matter in hand, viewed simply as psychological phenomena, as modes in which the human mind manifests itself in action, according to the laws of its constitution. These being ascertained, we shall be prepared to consider some of the more difficult and doubtful matters respecting the will, on which the world has long been divided, and which can never be intelligently discussed, much less settled, without a clear understanding, in the first place, of the psychological facts in the case, about which there need be, and should be, no dispute. CHAPTER I. NATURE OF THE WILL. _What the Will is._--I understand, by the will, that power which the mind has of determining or deciding what it will do, and of putting forth volitions accordingly. The will is the _power_ of doing this; willing, is the exercise of the power; volition, is the deed, the thing done. The will is but another name for the executive power of the mind. Whatever we do intelligently and intentionally, whether it implies an exercise of the intellect, or of the feelings, or of both, that is an act of the will. All our voluntary, in distinction from our involuntary movements of the body, and movements of mind, are the immediate results of the activity of the Will. _Condition of a Being destitute of Will._--We can, perhaps, conceive of a being endowed with intellect and sensibility, but without the faculty of will. Such a being, however superior he might be to the brutes in point of intelligence, would, so far as regards the capacities of action, be even their inferior, since his actions must be, as theirs, the result of mere sensational impulse, without even that unerring instinct to guide him, which the brute possesses, and which supplies the place of reason and intelligent will. To this wretched condition man virtually approximates when, by any means, the will becomes so far enfeebled, or brought under the dominion of appetite and passion, as to lose the actual control of the mental and physical powers. _Will not distinct from the Mind._--It must be borne in mind, of course, as we proceed, that the will is nothing but the mind itself willing, or having power to will, and not something distinct from the mind, or even a _part_ of the mind, as the handle and the blade are distinct parts of the knife. The power to think, the power to feel, the power to will, are distinct powers, but the mind is one and indivisible, exercising now one, now another, of these powers. § I.--ELEMENTS INVOLVED IN AN ACT OF WILL. _Proposed Analysis._--In order to the better understanding of the nature of this faculty, let us first analyze its operations, with a view to ascertain the several distinct stages or elements of the mental process which takes place. We will then take up these several elements, one by one, for special investigation. _Observation of an Act of Will._--What, then, are the essential phenomena of an act of the will? Let us arrest ourselves in the process of putting forth an act of this kind, and observe precisely what it is that we do, and what are the essential data in the case. I am sitting at my table. I reach forth my hand to take a book. Here is an act of my will. My arm went not forth self-moved and spontaneously, it was sent, was bidden to go; the soul seated within, animating this physical organism, and making it subservient to her will, moved that arm. Here, then, is clearly an act of will. Let us subject it to the test of observation. _The first Element._--First of all, then, there was evidently, in this case, _something to be done_--an end to be accomplished--a book to be reached. The action, both of body and of mind, was directed to that end, and but for that the volition would not have been put forth. It is to be observed, moreover, that the end to be accomplished, in this case, was a _possible_ one--the book was, or was supposed to be, within my reach. Otherwise I should not have attempted to reach it. _A second Element._--I observe, furthermore, in the case under consideration, a motive, impelling or inducing to that end; a _reason why_ I willed the act. It was curiosity, perhaps, to see what the book was, or it may have been some other principle of my nature, which induced me to put forth the volition. _A further Step in the Process._--But the motive does not, itself, produce the act. It is merely the _reason why_ I produce it. It has to do not directly with the action, but with me. Its immediate effect terminates on me, and it is only indirectly that it affects the final act. The next step in the process, then, is to be sought, not in the final act, but in my mind as influenced by motive; and that step is my _choice_. Previous to my putting forth the volition to move my arm, there was a choice or decision to do so. In view of the end to be accomplished, and influenced by the motive, I _made up my mind_--to use a common but not inapt expression--to perform the act. The question arose, for the instant, Shall I do it? The very occurrence of a thing to be done, a possible thing, and of a motive for doing it, raises, of itself, the question, Shall it be done? The question may be at once decided in the affirmative, in the absence of reasons to the contrary, or, in the absence of reflection, so quickly decided, that, afterward, we shall hardly be conscious that it was ever before the mind. Or it may be otherwise. Reasons to the contrary suggest themselves--counter influences and motives--in view of which we hesitate, deliberate, decide; and that decision, in view of all the circumstances, is our _preference_, or _choice_. In most cases the process is so rapid as to escape attention; but subsequent reflection can hardly fail to detect such a process, more or less distinctly marked. _The final Stage of the Act._--We have reached now the point at which it is decided, in our own minds, what course to pursue. In the case supposed, I have decided to take up the book. The volition is not yet put forth. Nothing now remains, however, but to put forth the volition, and at once the muscular organism, if unimpeded and in health, obeys the will. The thing is done, and the experiment concluded. _Summary of Results._--I repeat now the experiment ten or a hundred times, but always with like results. I find always, where there is an act of the will, some end to be obtained, some motive, a choice, an executive volition. I conclude that these are the essential phenomena of all voluntary action. Of these, the two former, viz., the end to be accomplished, and the motive, may be regarded as more properly _conditions_ of volition, than constituent elements of it. Still, so intimately is the volition connected with one, at least, of these conditions, viz., the motive, that it claims special consideration. The ends to be accomplished by volition are as numerous as the infinite variety of human purposes and actions, and, of course, admit of no complete enumeration or classification. We confine our further attention, then, to these elements--the motive, the choice, the executive volition--and proceed to their more careful investigation as phenomena of the will. § II.--INVESTIGATION OF THESE ELEMENTS. _The first of these Elements, Motive, always implied in Action._--I. THE MOTIVE--that which incites the mind to action--the reason why it acts, and acts as it does. We never act without some such incitement, some reason for acting; at least this is true of all our intelligent and voluntary actions, of which, alone, we now speak. It may be nothing more than mere present impulse, mere animal appetite or passion, even that is a motive, a reason why we act. We cannot conceive of any being having the power of voluntary action, and exerting that power without _any reason whatever_ why he did it. The reason may, or may not, be clearly apprehended by his own mind--that is another question; but whether distinctly and clearly recognized as such, or not, by our own minds, a reason there always is for what we do. _In what Sense this Term employed._--Strictly speaking, the motive is not any and every influence which may bear upon the mind as an inducement to action, but only the _prevailing_ inducement, that which _actually moves_ or induces us to perform the proposed act. In this sense, there may be many different inducements, but only one motive. Such, however, is not the ordinary use of the term. That is usually called a motive which is of a nature to influence the mind, and induce volition, whether it is, in the given case, effective, or not. To avoid confusion, I adopt the general use. _Nature of Motives._--As to the nature of the motives from which we act, they are manifestly of two kinds, and widely distinct. There is desire, and there is the sense of moral obligation or duty;--the agreeable, and the right; each of these constitutes a powerful motive to action. We find ourselves, under the influence of these motives, acting, now from desire, now from sense of duty, now in view of what is in itself agreeable, and now in view of what is right; and the various motives which influence us and result in action, may be resolved into one or the other of these powerful elements. _These Elements distinguished._--These are quite _distinct_ elements, never to be confounded with, nor resolved into each other. _Desire_ is the feeling which arises in view of some good not in present possession, something agreeable, and to be obtained; it looks forward to that; its root and spring is that grand principle of our nature, the love of happiness. Its appeal is to that. Its strength lies in that _Duty_, as we have already shown--that sense of obligation which is implied in the very idea of _right_--is quite another principle than that, not founded in that; springs not from self-love, or the desire of happiness; is, on the contrary, a simple, primitive, fundamental idea of the human mind, based in the inherent, essential, eternal nature of things. Given the right, the perception of right, and there is given, also along with it, the sense of _obligation_. _Their Action not always in Unison._--These two motives may act in different directions; they frequently do so. Desire impels me one way, duty another. Conflict then arises. Which shall prevail, desire or duty, depends on circumstances, on my character already formed, my habits of thought and feeling, my degree of self-control, my conscientiousness, the strength of my native propensities, the clearness with which, at the time, I apprehend the different courses of conduct proposed, their character and their consequences. Desire may prevail, and then I go counter to my sense of obligation. Remorse follows. I am wretched. I suffer penalty. Duty prevails, and I do that which I believe to be right, regardless of consequences. I suffer in property, health, life, external good, but am sustained by that approving voice within, which more than compensates for all such losses. That there are these two springs or motives of human action, and that they are _distinct_ from each other, is what I affirm, and what no one, I think, who reflects on what consciousness reveals, will be disposed to deny. _Motives of Duty not resolvable into Motives of Interest._--Should any still contend that this very approval of conscience, this peace and happiness which result from doing right, are, themselves, the motive to action, in the case supposed, and so, self-love, a desire of happiness, is, after all, the _only motive_, I reply, this is an assumption utterly without proof. Consciousness contradicts it. The history of the human race contradicts it. There is such a thing as doing right for its own sake, irrespective of good to ourselves. Every man is conscious of such distinction, and of its force as a motive of conduct. Every _virtuous_ man is conscious of acting, at times, at least, from such a motive. _Coincidence of Desire and Duty._--It is only when desire and duty coincide, that the highest happiness can be reached, when we no longer desire and long for, because we no longer view as agreeable, that which is not strictly right. This is a state never fully realized in this life. It implies perfection of character, and a perfect world. _Desires, as Motives of Action, further distinguished._--Desire, and the feeling of obligation, I have spoken of as motives of conduct. The former, again, is not always of one sort. Desire is, indeed, in itself, a simple element, springing from one source, but not always directed to the same object. We desire now one thing, now another. There are two classes, at least, of desires quite easy to be distinguished, the physical and the psychical, the one relating to the wants of the body, the other to the craving of the higher nature; the mere animal instincts, propensities, passions, looking to animal gratification; and the higher rational self-love, which seeks the true and permanent well-being, under the guidance of reason. Each of these furnishes a powerful motive, or class of motives, to human action. They are each, however, but different forms of _desire_. _The second Element, Choice, always involved in Volition._--II. CHOICE.--This is an essential element in volition, and next in order. As, setting aside such acts as are purely spontaneous and mechanical, we never, intelligently and purposely, do any thing without a volition to do it, so we never put forth volition without exercising _choice_. The act performed is not a _voluntary_ act, unless it is something which I _choose_ to do. True, my choice may be influenced by extraneous causes--may even be constrained--circumstances may virtually compel me to choose as I do, by shutting me up to this one course, as being either the only right, or the only desirable course. And these circumstances, that thus influence my decisions, may be essentially beyond my control, as they not unfrequently are. Yet, all things considered, it is my _choice_ to do thus and not otherwise, and so long as I do choose, and am free to act accordingly, the act is voluntary. _The Position illustrated._--This may be illustrated by the case of the soldier who, in the bombardment of his native city, is ordered to point his piece in the direction of his own dwelling. To disobey, is death. To obey, is to put in jeopardy those who are dear to him. He hesitates, but finally chooses to obey orders. He aims his piece as directed, sadly against his inclination; yet, on the whole, it is his _choice_ to do it. He prefers that to the certainty of dishonorable death, a death which would in no way benefit or protect those whom he wishes to save. A man, of his own accord, lies down upon the surgeon's operating table, and stretches out his arm to the knife. It is his choice--a hard choice, indeed, but, nevertheless, decidedly his choice. He prefers that to still greater suffering, or even death. In these cases--and they are only instances and illustrations of what, in a less marked and decided way, is continually occurring--we see the utmost strain and pressure of circumstances upon a man's choice, making it morally certain that he will decide as he does, shutting him up to that decision, in fact, yet his choice remaining unimpaired, and his act a _free_ act; free, because he does as he, on the whole, and under the circumstances, chooses to do. He does the thing voluntarily. _Another Case supposed._--Suppose, now, the man were forcibly seized, and borne by sheer strength to the table, and placed upon it, and held there while the operation was performed. In that case, he no longer acts, is only acted upon, no longer chooses and wills to go there, nay, chooses and wills directly the contrary. The difference in the two cases, is the difference between a voluntary act, chosen reluctantly, indeed, and under the pressure of an exigency, but still _chosen_, and the passive suffering of an action which, so far from being voluntary, was, in no sense, an act of his own. _Choice always influenced by Circumstances._--Now, as regards the actual operation of things, our choices are, in fact, always influenced by circumstances, and these circumstances are various and innumerable; a thousand seen and unseen influences are at work upon us, to affect our decisions Were it possible to estimate aright all these influences, to calculate, with precision, their exact weight and effect, then our choice, under any given circumstances, might be predicted with unerring certainty. This can never be exactly known to man. Sagacity may approximate to it, and may, so far, be able to read the future, and predict the probable conduct of men in given circumstances. To the omniscient, these things _are_ fully known, and to his eye, therefore, the whole future of our lives, our free choices and voluntary acts, lie open before they are yet known to ourselves. _Conclusion stated._--From what has been said, it appears that it is not inconsistent with the nature of choice, to be influenced, nay, decided by circumstances, even when circumstances are beyond our control. _Diversity of Objects essential to Choice._--What is _implied_ in an act of choice? Several things. In order to choice, there must, of course, be _diversity of objects_ from which to choose. If there were but one possible course to be pursued, it were absurd to speak of choice. Hence, even in the cases just now supposed, there was a diversity of objects from which to choose--death, or obedience to orders, suffering from the surgery, or greater suffering and danger without it, and between these the man made his choice. _Liberty of Selection also essential._--As a further condition of choice, there is implied _liberty_ of selection from among the different objects proposed. It were of no use that there should be different courses of conduct--different ends, or different means of attaining an end--proposed to our understanding, if it were not in our power to select which we pleased, if we were not free to go which way we will. Choice always implies that different actions and volitions are possible, and are, as such, submitted to our decision and preference. There can be no volition without choice, and no choice without liberty to choose. Whatever interferes, then, with that liberty, and diminishes or takes it away, interferes, also, with my choice, and diminishes or destroys that. The very _essence_ of a voluntary act consists in its being an act of choice, or a free-will act. No tyranny can take this away, except such as destroys, also, all voluntary and responsible action. You may command me to burn incense on a heathen altar. The very command leaves it optional with me whether to obey. If I do not, the penalty is death. Very well--I may _choose_ the penalty, rather than the crime, and no power on earth can _compel_ me to choose otherwise. I die, but I die a _free_ man. True, you may bind me, and by mechanical force urge me to the altar, and by superior strength of other arms, may cause my hand to put incense there, but it is not _my_ act then; it is the act of those who use me as a mere passive instrument; it is no more my act, than it would be the act of so much iron, or wood, or other instrument. _Deliberation implied._--Choice, moreover, implies deliberation, the balancing and weighing of inducements, the comparison and estimate of the several goods proposed, the several ends and objects, the various means to those ends; the exercise of reason and; judgment in this process. I see before me different courses, different ends proposed to my understanding, am conscious of diverse inducements and reasons, some urging me in one direction, some in another. Native propensities impel me toward this line of conduct. Rational self-love puts in a claim for quite another procedure. Benevolence, and a sense of duty, it may be, conspire to urge me in still another direction. I am at liberty to choose I must choose. I can go this way or that, must go in one or the other. I hesitate, deliberate, am at a loss. Now there is no choice which does not virtually involve some process of this kind. It may be very rapid; so rapid as to escape detection, in many cases, so that we are hardly conscious of the process. In other cases, we are painfully conscious of the whole scene; we hesitate long, are in doubt and suspense between conflicting motives and interests. Desire and duty wage a fierce contest within us. Shall we choose the agreeable? Shall we choose the right? And then, again, which is really the agreeable, and which is truly the right? _Final Decision._--As the result of this deliberation, we finally decide, one way, or the other. This decision is our _preference_, our choice. Our minds, as we say, are made up what to do, what course to pursue. When the time comes, we shall act. Something may prevent our having our way; opportunity may not offer, or we may see fit, subsequently to reconsider and revoke our decision. Otherwise, our choice is carried out in action. Choice implies, then, these things: diversity of objects, liberty of selection, deliberation, decision, or preference. _The final Element._--III. EXECUTIVE VOLITION.--In our investigation of the several elements or momenta of an act of the Will, we have as yet considered but two, viz., _motive_ and _choice_--the first, more properly a _condition_ of voluntary action, than itself a constituent part of it, yet still, a condition so indispensably connected with volition, as to require investigation in connection with the latter. It only remains now to notice the last stage of the process, the final element, which added, the process is complete--that is, the _executive act of the mind_, _volition_ properly so called. When the objects to be attained have been presented, when the motives or inducements to action have been considered, when, in view of all, the choice or preference has been made, it still remains to put forth the volition, or the act will not be performed. This may never happen. Opportunity may never offer. But suppose it does. We _will_. This done, the bodily mechanism springs into play, obedient to the call and command of the soul. Even now, the action does not of necessity correspond to the volition. Even now, we may be disappointed. Other wills may be in action in opposition to ours. Other arms may move in obedience to those other wills. Or we may find the thing too much for us to do, impracticable, beyond our strength and means, or disease may palsy the frame, so that it shall not obey the mandate of the spirit. Nevertheless the _volition_ is complete. That depends not on the success of the exertion. We have _willed_, and with that our mental action ceases. What remains is physical, not psychological. If we succeed, if the volition finds itself answered in execution, then, also, the act once performed is thenceforth out of our power. It is done, and stands a permanent historic event, beyond our control, beyond our decision or revocation. Our power over it ceases in the moment of volition. Our connection with it may never cease. It moves on in its inevitable career of consequences, and, like a swift river, bears us along with it. We have no more to do with it, but it has to do with us; it may be to our sorrow, it may be, forever. Such are, in brief, the main psychological facts, relating to the will, as they offer themselves to our consciousness and careful inspection. CHAPTER II. RELATION OF THE WILL TO OTHER POWERS OF THE MIND _Activity of the Intellect in Volition._--It is a matter of some importance to ascertain the relation which the will sustains to the other mental powers. There can be no doubt that the activity of the will is preceded, in all cases by that of the intellect. I must first perceive some object presented to my understanding, before I can will its attainment. In the case already supposed, the book lying on my table is an object within the cognizance of sense, and to perceive it is an act of intellect. Until perceived, the will puts not forth any volition respecting it. Nor does the mere perception occasion volition. In connection with the perception of the book, ideas present themselves to the mind, curiosity is awakened, the mind is set upon a train of thought, which results in the desire and the volition to take the book. In all this the intellect is active. In a word, whatever comes in as a motive to influence the mind in favor of, or against a given course, must in the first instance address itself to the understanding, and be comprehended by that power, before it can influence the mental decisions. A motive which I do not comprehend is no motive; a reason which I do not perceive, or understand, is, to me, no reason. _Activity of the Sensibilities also involved._--But does volition immediately follow the action of the intellect in the case supposed? Do we first understand, and then will; or does something else intervene between the intellectual perception and the volition? Were there no _feeling_ awakened by the intellectual perception, would there be any volition with regard to the object perceived? I think, I _feel_, I will; is not that the order of the mental processes? "We can easily imagine," says Mackintosh, "a percipient and thinking being without a capacity of receiving pleasure or pain. Such a being might perceive what we do; if we could conceive him to reason, he might reason justly; and if he were to judge at all, there seems no reason why he should not judge truly. But what could induce such a being to _will_ or to _act_? It seems evident that his existence could only be a state of passive contemplation. Reason, as reason, can never be a motive to action. It is only when we superadd to such a being sensibility, or the capacity of emotion, or sentiment of desire and aversion, that we introduce him into the world of action." _Opinion of Locke._--To the same effect, Locke: "Good and evil, present and absent, it is true, work upon the mind, but that which immediately determines the will from time to time, to every voluntary action, is the uneasiness of _desire_, fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure. That it is this uneasiness that determines the will to the successive voluntary actions, whereof the greatest part of our lives is made up, and by which we are conducted through different courses to different ends, I shall endeavor to show both from experience and the reason of the thing." Elsewhere again: "For good, though appearing and allowed ever so great, yet till it has raised desires in our minds, and thereby made us uneasy in its want, it reaches not our wills; we are not within the sphere of its activity." _Testimony of Consciousness._--The general opinion of philosophical writers is now in accordance with the views thus expressed. The intellect they regard as acting upon the will not directly, but through the medium of the sensibilities, the various emotions and desires which are awakened by the perceptions of the intellect. That this is the correct view, admits of little doubt. The question is best settled by an appeal to consciousness. In the case supposed, the perception of the book upon the table does not, of itself, directly influence my will. It is not until some feeling is aroused, my curiosity excited, or desire, in some form, awakened, that my will acts. The object must not only be perceived, but perceived as agreeable, and the wish to possess it be entertained, before the volition is put forth. _Whether this Rule applies in all Cases._--That this is so as regards a large class of our volitions, will hardly be denied. When the motive to action is of the nature of _desire_, it is the sensibility, and not the intellect, that is directly, concerned in shaping the action of the will. I first perceive the object to be agreeable; I next desire its possession, as such; then I will its attainment. The intellectual activity gives rise to emotion, and the latter leads to volition. It may be supposed, however, that when the motive which influences the will is not of the nature of desire, but rather of a sense of obligation or duty, then the case is otherwise, the intellectual perception of the right, and of the obligation to do the right, being sufficient of themselves to lead the mind to action. But as the intellectual perception of the agreeable is followed by emotion or desire in view of the same, so the intellectual perception of the right is followed, in like manner, by a certain class of feelings or emotions, usually called moral sensibilities; and it is the _feeling_, in either case, and not the _knowing_, the sensibility, and not the intellect, that is directly in contact with the will. I know that I ought, and I feel that I ought, are states of mind closely connected, indeed, but not identical; and it is the latter which leads directly to volition. _Desire and Volition not always distinguished._--Another point requiring investigation, is the precise relation between volition and _desire_. Are they the same thing, and if not, wherein do they differ? It has been the custom of certain writers not to distinguish between desire and volition, as states of mind, or to regard them as differing, if at all, only in degree. Thus Condillac, and writers of the French school, as also Brown, Mill, and others, in Great Britain, have treated of volition as only a stronger degree of desire, which, again, is only a form of emotion. Even McCosh, in his treatise on moral government, while insisting on the distinction between emotions and desires, regards wishes, desires, and volitions, as belonging essentially to the same class of mental states. "Appealing to consciousness," says that able and elegant writer, "we assert that there is a class of mental states embracing wishes, desires, volitions, which cannot be analyzed into anything else. These mental states or affections are very numerous, and occupy a place in the human mind second to no other. They differ from each other in degree, and possibly even in some minor qualities but they all agree in other and more important respects and so are capable of being arranged under one head." And in a subsequent paragraph he remarks to the same effect, "Later mental inquirers are generally disposed to admit that the volition the positive determination to take a particular step, the resolution, for instance, to give a sum of money to take our friend to a warmer climate for the restoration of his health, is more than a mere emotion. But if we are thus to constitute a separate attribute to which to refer volition, it is worthy of being inquired whether we should not arrange, under the same head, wishes, desires, and the cognate states, as being more closely allied in their nature to volitions than to the common emotions." _The Difference generic._--It is on this latter point that we are compelled to join issue with the writer just quoted. A wish, a desire, are forms of _feeling_; a volition is not. The difference is generic, and not one of degree merely. A desire differs from any other form of feeling, not so much, not so radically, as it differs from a volition. A wish or desire may _lead_ to volition, or it may not. We often wish or desire what we do not will. The object of our desires may not be within the sphere of our volitions, may not be possible of attainment, may not depend, in any sense, upon our wills. Or it may be something which reason and the law of right forbid, yet, nevertheless, an object of natural desire. And so, on the other hand, we may, from a sense of duty, or from the dictates of reason and prudence, will what is contrary to our natural inclinations, and our volitions, so far from representing our desires, in that case, may be directly contrary to them. _Opinion of Reid._--Accordant with the view now expressed, are the following remarks of Dr Reid: "With regard to our actions, we may desire what we do not will, and will what we do not desire, nay, what we have a great aversion to. A man a-thirst has a strong desire to drink, but, for some particular reason, he determines not to gratify his desire. A judge, from a regard to justice and the duty of his office, dooms a criminal to die, while, from humanity and particular affection, he desires that he should live. A man, for health, may take a nauseous draught for which he has no desire, but a great aversion. Desire, therefore, even when its object is some action of our own, is only an excitement to the will, but is not volition. The determination of the mind may be not to do what we desire to do." _Opinion of Locke._--To the same effect is the following from Locke: "This caution, of being careful not to be misled by expressions that do not enough keep up the difference between the _will_ and several acts of the mind that are quite distinct from it, I think the more necessary, because I find the will often confounded with several of the affections, especially _desire_, and one put for the other, and that by men who would not willingly be thought not to have had very distinct notions of things, and not to have writ very clearly about them. This, I imagine, has been no small occasion of obscurity and mistake in this matter; and therefore is, as much as may be, to be avoided. For, he that shall turn his thoughts inward upon what passes in his mind when he _wills_, shall see that the _will_ or power of _volition_ is conversant about nothing, but that particular determination of the mind, whereby, barely by a thought, the mind endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop to any action which it takes to be in its power. This well considered, plainly shows that the _will_ is perfectly distinguished from _desire_, which, in the very same action may have quite a contrary tendency from that which our will sets us upon. A man whom I cannot deny, may oblige me to use persuasions to another, which, at the same time I am speaking, I may wish may not prevail on him. In this case, it is plain, the _will_ and _desire_ run counter. I will the action that tends one way, while my desire tends another, and that right contrary. Whence it is evident," he adds, "that _desiring_ and _willing_ are two distinct acts of the mind; and, consequently, that the _will_, which is but the power of _volition_, is much more distinct from _desire_." _Testimony of Consciousness._--The testimony of consciousness seems to be clearly in accordance with the views now expressed. We readily distinguish between our desires and our volitions. We are conscious of willing, often, what is contrary to our desires; the course which honor and duty approve, and which we resolutely carry out, is in disregard of many fond and cherished desires which still agitate the bosom. And even when our desires and volitions coincide, it requires but little reflection to discover the difference between them. It is a difference recognized in the common language of life, and in the writings and conversation of men who are by no means theorists or metaphysicians. _Further Illustrations of the Distinction._--Mr. Upham, who has very clearly and ably maintained the distinction now in question, refers us, in illustration, to the case of Abraham offering his son upon the altar of sacrifice, sternly, resolutely willing, in obedience to the divine command, what must have been repugnant to every feeling of the father's heart; to the memorable instance of Brutus ordering and witnessing the execution of his own sons, as conspirators against the State, the struggle between the strong will and the strong paternal feeling evidently visible in his countenance, as he stood at the dreadful scene; and the case of Virginius, plunging the knife into the bosom of a beloved daughter, whose dishonor could in no other way be averted. In all these, and many other similar cases, private interests and personal affections are freely and nobly sacrificed, in favor of high public interests, and moral ends; yet, to do this, the will must act in opposition to the current of natural feeling and desire. CHAPTER III. FREEDOM OF THE WILL. _Problems respecting the Will._--Our attention has thus far been directed to the psychological facts respecting the will, in itself considered, and also in its relations to the other mental powers. It becomes necessary now, in order to the more complete understanding of the matter, to look at some of the disputed points, the grand problems, respecting the human will, which have for ages excited and divided the reflecting world. The way is prepared for these more difficult questions, when once the simple facts, to which our attention has already been directed, are well understood. These questions are numerous, but, if I mistake not, they all resolve themselves virtually into the one general problem of the _freedom_ of the will, or, at least, so link themselves with that as to admit of discussion in the same connection. _Freedom, what._--In approaching this much-disputed question, it is necessary to ascertain, in the first place, what is _meant_ by freedom, and what by _freedom of the will_, else we may discuss the matter to no purpose. Various definitions of freedom have been given. It is a word in very common use, and, in its general application, not liable to be misunderstood. Every one who understands the ordinary language of life, knows well enough what freedom is. It denotes the opposite of restraint; the power to do what one likes, pleases, is inclined to do. My person is free, when it can come and go, do this or that, as suits my inclination. Any faculty of the mind, or organ of the body, is free, _when its own specific and proper action is not hindered_. Freedom of motion, is power to move when and where we please Freedom of speech, is power to say what we like. Freedom of action, is power to do what we like. _Freedom of the Will, what._--What, then, is freedom of the _will_? What can it be but the power of exercising, without restraint or hindrance, its own specific and proper function, viz., the putting forth volitions, just such volitions as we please. This as we have seen, is the proper office of the will, its specific and appropriate action. If nothing prevents or restrains me from forming and putting forth such volitions as I please, then my will is free; and not otherwise. Freedom of the will, then, is _not_ power to _do what one wills_, in the sense of executing volitions when formed that is simple freedom of the limbs, and muscular apparatus, not of will--a freedom which may be destroyed by a stroke of paralysis, or an iron chain;--it is not a freedom of walking, if one wills to walk, or of singing, or flying, or moving the right arm, if one is so disposed. That is freedom, but not freedom of the _will_. My will is free, not when I can _do_ what I _will_ to do, but _when I can will to do_ just what I please. Whatever freedom the will has, must lie within its own proper sphere of action, and not without it; must relate to that, and not to something else. This distinction, so very obvious, has, nevertheless, been sometimes strangely overlooked. Is, then, the human will free, in the sense now defined? Let us first notice some presumptions in favor of its freedom then the more direct argument. § I.--PRESUMPTIONS IN FAVOR OF FREEDOM. _The general Conviction of Freedom a Presumption in its Favor._--1. It is a presumption in favor of freedom that there is among men, a very general, not to say universal conviction of freedom. It is a prevalent idea, an established conviction and belief of the mind. We are conscious of this belief ourselves, we observe it in others. When we perform any act, or choose any course of conduct, we are impressed with the belief that we could have done or chosen differently, had we been so disposed. We never doubt or call in question this ability, in regard to the practical matters of life. The languages and the literature of the world bear witness to the universality of this belief. Now this general conviction and firm belief of freedom constitute, to say the least, a presumption, and a strong one, in favor of the doctrine. If men are free to do as they like, then they are free to _will_ as they like, for the willing precedes the doing; and if they are not thus free, how happens this so general conviction of a freedom which they do not possess? _The Appeal to Consciousness._--The argument is sometimes stated, by the advocates of freedom, in a form which is liable to objection. The appeal is made directly to consciousness. We are _conscious_, it is said, of freedom, conscious of a power, when we do any thing, to do otherwise, to take some other course instead. Strictly speaking, we are conscious only of our present state of mind. I may _know_ the past; but it is not a matter of consciousness; I may also know, perhaps, what _might have_ been, in place of the actual past, but of this I am not conscious. When I experience a sensation, or put forth a volition, I am conscious of that sensation or volition; but I am not conscious of what never occurred, that is, of some other feeling or volition instead of an actual one. I may have a firm conviction, amounting even to knowledge, that at the moment of experiencing that feeling, or exercising that volition, it was possible for me to have exercised a different one; but it is a conviction, a belief, at most a knowledge, and not, properly, consciousness. I am conscious of the _conviction_ that I am free, and that I can do otherwise than as I do; and this, in itself, is a presumption, that I have such a power; but I am not conscious of the power itself. It may be said, that if there were any restraint upon my will, to prevent my putting forth such volitions as I please, or to prevent my acting otherwise than I do, I _should be_ conscious of such restraint; and this may be very true; and from the absence of any such consciousness of restraint, I may justly infer that I am free; but this, again, is an _inference_, and not a _consciousness_. One thing, however, I am conscious of, that my _actual_ volitions are such, and only such, as I please to put forth; and this leads to the conviction that it is in my power to put forth any volition that I may please. _Our moral Nature a Presumption in Favor of Freedom._--2. It is a further presumption in favor of the entire freedom of the will, that man's moral nature seems to imply it. We approve or condemn the conduct of others. It is with the understanding that they acted freely, and could have done otherwise. We should never think of praising a man for doing what he could not help doing, or of blaming him for what it was utterly out of his power to avoid. So, also, we approve and condemn our own actions, and always with the understanding that these actions and volitions were free. There may be regret for that which was unavoidable, but never a sense of _guilt_, never _remorse_. The existence of these feelings always implies freedom of the will, the power to have done otherwise. Let any man select that period of his history, that act of his whole life, for which he blames himself most, and of which the recollection casts the deepest gloom and sadness over all his subsequent years, and let him ask himself why it is that he so blames himself for that course, and he will find, in every case, that it is because he knows that he might have done differently. Take away this conviction, and you take away the foundation of all his remorse, and of self-condemnation. The same thing is implied, also, in the feeling of obligation. It is impossible to feel under moral obligation to do what it is utterly and absolutely out of our power to do. _This View maintained by Mr. Upham._--"There are some truths," says Mr. Upham, "which are so deeply based in the human constitution, that all men of all classes receive them, and act upon them. They are planted deeply and immutably in the soul, and no reasoning, however plausible, can shake them. And, if we are not mistaken, the doctrine of the freedom of the will, as a condition of even the possibility of a moral nature, is one of these first truths. It seems to be regarded, by all persons, without any exception, as a dictate of common sense, and as a first principle of our nature, that men are morally accountable, and are the subjects of a moral responsibility in any respect, whatever, only so far as they possess freedom, both of the outward action, and of the will. They hold to this position, as an elementary truth, and would no sooner think of letting it go than of abandoning the conviction of their personal existence and identity. They do not profess to go into particulars, but they assert it in the mass, that man is a moral being only so far as he is free. And such a unanimous and decided testimony, bearing, as it absolutely does, the seal and superscription of nature herself, is entitled to serious consideration." _Also by Dr. Reid._--Dr. Reid, also, takes essentially the same view. He regards it as a first principle, to be ranked in the same class with the conviction of our personal existence and identity, and the existence of a material world, "that we have some degree of power over our actions, and the determinations of our will." It is implied, he maintains, in every act of volition, in all deliberation, and in every resolution or purpose formed in consequence of deliberation. "It is not more evident," he says, "that mankind have a conviction of the existence of a material world, than that they have the conviction of some degree of power in themselves, and in others, every one over his own actions, and the determinations of his will--a conviction so early, so general, and so interwoven with the whole of human conduct, that it must be the natural effect of our constitution, and intended by the Author of our being to guide our actions." _Consequences of the Opposite._--3. The consequences of the opposite view afford a presumption in favor of freedom. If the will is not free, if all our liberty is merely a liberty to do what we will to do, or to execute the volitions which we form, but we have no power over the volitions themselves, then we have no power whatever to will or to act differently from what we do. This is _fatalism_. All that the fatalist maintains is, that we are governed by circumstances out of our own control, so that, situated as we are, it is impossible for us to act otherwise than as we do. From this follows, as a natural and inevitable consequence, the absence of all accountability and obligation. The foundation of these, as we have already seen, is freedom. Take this away, and you strike a fatal blow at man's moral nature. It is no longer possible for me to feel under obligation to do what I have absolutely no power to do, or to believe myself accountable for doing what I could not possibly avoid. Morality, duty, accountability, become mere chimeras, idle fancies of the brain, devices of the priest and the despot, to frighten men into obedience and subjection. _This View sustained by Facts._--These are not random statements. It is a significant fact, that those who have undertaken to deny accountability, and moral obligation, have, almost without exception, I believe, been advocates of the doctrine of necessity. Indeed, it seems impossible to maintain such views upon any other ground; while, on the other hand, the denial of the freedom of the will leads almost of necessity to such conclusions. "Remorse," says Mr. Belsham, "is the exquisitely painful feeling which arises from the belief that, in circumstances precisely the same, we might have chosen and acted differently. This _fallacious_ feeling is superseded by the doctrine of necessity." Equally plain, and to the same effect, are the following passages from the correspondence of Diderot, as quoted by Mr. Stewart: "Examine it narrowly, and you will see that the word liberty is a word devoid of meaning; that there are not, and that there cannot be, free beings; that we are only what accords with the general order, with our organization, our education, and the chain of events. These dispose of us invincibly. We can no more conceive of a being acting without a motive, than we can of one of the arms of a balance acting without a weight. The motive is always exterior and foreign, fastened upon us by some cause distinct from ourselves.... We have been so often praised and blamed, and have so often praised and blamed others, that we contract an inveterate prejudice of believing that we and they will and act freely. But if there is no liberty, there is no action that merits either praise or blame; neither vice nor virtue; nothing that ought either to be rewarded or punished.... The doer of good is lucky, not virtuous.... _Reproach others for nothing, and repent of nothing; this is the first step to wisdom._" _These Opinions not to be charged upon all Necessitarians._--It is not to be supposed, of course, that all who deny the freedom of the will, adopt the views above expressed. Whether such denial, however, consistently followed out to its just and legitimate conclusions, does not lead to such results, is another question. § II.--THE DIRECT ARGUMENT. _Another Mode of Argument._--Thus far we have considered only the presumptions in favor of the freedom of the will. We find them numerous and strong. The question is, however, to be decided not by presumptions for or against, but by direct argument based upon a careful inquiry into the psychological facts of the case. To this let us now proceed, bearing in mind, as we advance, what are the essential phenomena of the will, as already ascertained, and what is meant by freedom of the will as already defined. _The Will free unless its appropriate Action is hindered._--It is evident that, if we are right in our ideas of what freedom is, the will is strictly and properly free, provided nothing interferes with, and prevents, our putting forth such volitions as we please and choose to put forth. The specific and appropriate action of the will, as we have seen, is simply to put forth volitions. Whatever freedom it has, then, must lie within that sphere, and not without it, must relate to _that_, and not to _something else_; whatever restraint or want of freedom it has, must also be found within these limits. My will is free, when I can _will to do_ just what I _please_. _Strength of Inclination, no Impediment._--If this be so, then it is clear, 1. That mere _strength of inclination_ can by no means impair the freedom of the will. Be the inclination never so strong, it matters not. Nay, so far from interfering with freedom, it is an essential element of it. Freedom presupposes and implies inclination. One is surely none the less free because very strongly inclined to do as he likes, provided he _can do_ what he wishes or prefers. This is as true of the action of the will as of any other action. _The Source of Inclination, of no Consequence to the present Inquiry._--2. It is evident, furthermore, that freedom has nothing to do with the _source_ of my inclinations, any more than with their strength. It makes no difference what causes my preference, or whether any thing causes it. I _have_ a preference, an inclination, a disposition to do a given thing, and put forth a given volition--am disposed to do it, and _can_ do it--then I am free, my will is free. It is of no consequence _how I came_ by that inclination or disposition. The simple question is, Am I at liberty to follow it? _The Interference must be from without, and must affect the Choice._--It is evident, moreover, according to what has now been said, that if there be really any restraint upon the will, or lack of freedom in its movements, it must proceed from something extraneous, outside the will itself, something which comes in from without, and that in such a way as to _interfere, in some way with my choice_; for it is there that the element of freedom lies. But whatever interferes with my choice, _interferes with my willing at all_; the act is no longer a _voluntary_ act. Choice is essential to volition, the very element of it. In order to an act of will as we have seen, there must be liberty to choose, deliberation, actual preference. Volition presupposes them, and is based on them. Whatever prevents them, prevents volition. Whatever places me in such a state of mind that I have no preference at all, no choice, as to any given thing, places me in such a state that I have also no volition as to that thing. The question of freedom is forestalled in such a case, becomes absurd. Where there is no volition, there is of course no freedom of volition, nor yet any want of freedom. Freedom of will is power to will as I like, but now I _have_ no liking, no preference. _The Supposition varied._--But suppose now that I am not prevented from choosing, but only from carrying out my choice in actual volition; from willing, according to my choice. Then, also, the act is no longer properly a _volition_, an act of will, for one essential element of every such act, viz., _choice_, is wanting. I _have_ a choice, indeed, but it is not here, not represented in this so-called volition, lies in another direction, is, in fact, altogether opposed to this, my so-called volition. There _can be_ no such volition. The human mind is a stranger to any such phenomenon, and if it did occur, it would not be volition, not an act of the will, not a _voluntary_ act. Whatever, then, comes in, either to prevent my choosing, or to prevent my exercising volition _according_ to my choice, does, in fact, prevent my willing at all. If there _be_ an act of the will, it is, in its very nature, a _free_ act, and cannot be otherwise. Allow me to choose, and to put forth volition according to my choice, and you leave me _free_. Prevent this, and you prevent my willing at all. _The Limitation, as usually regarded, not really one._--Those who contend that the will is not free, _place the limitation back of the choice_. Choice is governed by _inclination_, they say, and inclination depends on _circumstances_, on education, habits, fashion, etc., things, in great measure, _beyond our control_; and while these circumstances remain the same, a man cannot choose otherwise than he does. To this I reply, that, as we have already seen, the will is strictly and properly free, _provided_ nothing interferes with, and prevents, our putting forth such volitions as we _choose_ to put forth. Is there, then, any thing in these circumstances which are supposed to control our choice, and to be so fatal to our freedom, is there in them any thing which really interferes with, or prevents our willing as we _choose_? Does the fact that I am inclined, and strongly so, to a given choice, prevent me from putting forth that choice in the shape of executive volition? So far from this, that inclination is the very circumstance that leads to my doing it. All that could _possibly_ be contended, is that the supposed inclination to a given choice is likely to prevent my having some _other_ and _different_ choice. But that has nothing to do with the question of the freedom of my will, which depends, as we have seen, not on the power to choose _otherwise_ than one is inclined, or than one likes, but _as_ he likes. What force, I ask again, is there in any circumstance, or combination of circumstances, which go to mould and shape my inclinations and my disposition, and have no further power over me, what force in them, or what tendency, to prevent my _willing as I choose_, _as_ I like, _as_ I am inclined? Nay, if my will acts at all, it must, as I have shown, act in this way, and therefore act freely. _Freedom of Inclination not Freedom of Will._--But suppose I have no power to _like_, or to be inclined, differently from what I do like, and am now inclined? I reply, it matters not as to the present question. The supposition now made, takes away or limits, not the freedom of the will, it does not touch that; but the freedom of the _affections_. Can I like what I do not like--and can I put forth such volitions as I please or choose--are two distinct questions, and again I repeat that the freedom of our will depends, _not_ on our having this or that particular choice, but on our being able to carry out whatever choice we do make into our volitions; _not_ on our being able to will otherwise than we choose, nor yet on our ability to choose otherwise than we do, but simply on our being able to will _as_ we choose, whatever that choice may be. _Are the Sensibilities Free._--Have I, in reality, however, any freedom of the affections, any power _under given circumstances_, to be affected otherwise than I am, to feel otherwise than I do? I reply, the affections are not _elements_ of the will, are not under its immediate control; are not strictly voluntary. It depends on a great variety of circumstances, what, in any given case, your affections or inclinations may be. You have no power of will _directly_ over them. You can modify and shape them, only by shaping your own voluntary action so far as that bears upon their formation. _By shaping your_ CHARACTER _which_ IS _under your control_, you may, in a manner, at least, determine the nature and degree of the emotions which will arise, under given circumstances, in your bosom. _The two Questions entirely distinct._--But, however that may be, it has nothing to do, I repeat, with the question now under discussion. The freedom of the affections, and the freedom of the will, are by no means the same thing. We have already seen that there may be a fixed and positive connection between my inclinations and my choice, and so my will, and yet my will be perfectly free. This is the main thing to be settled; and there seems to be no need of further argument to establish this point; and if this be so, it decides the question as to the freedom of the will. _Bearing of this View upon the divine Government._--The view now taken, leaves it open and quite in the power of Providence, so to shape circumstances, guide events, and so to array, and bring to bear on the mind of man, motives and inducements to any given course, as virtually to control and determine his conduct, by controlling and determining his _inclinations_, and so his choice; while, at the same time, the man is left perfectly free to put forth such volitions as he pleases, and to do as he _likes_. There can be no higher liberty than this. To this point I shall again revert, when the question comes up respecting the divine agency in connection with human freedom. CHAPTER IV. CERTAIN QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE PRECEDING. § I.--CONTRARY CHOICE. _The Question stated._--In the preceding chapters our attention has been directed to the psychological facts respecting the will, and also to the general question respecting the freedom of the will. Closely connected with this main question, and involved in its discussion, are certain inquiries of a like nature, which cannot wholly be passed by, and for the consideration of which the way is now prepared. One of these respects _the power of contrary choice_. Have we any such power? Is the freedom, which, as we have seen, belongs to the very nature of the will, _such_ a freedom as allows of our choosing, under given circumstances, any otherwise than we do? When I put forth a volition, all other things being as they are, _can_ I, at that moment, in place of that volition, put forth a different one in its stead? _Not identical with the preceding._--This question is not identical with that respecting the freedom of the will, for it has been already shown that there may be true freedom without any such power as that now in question. My will is free, provided I can put forth such volitions as I please, irrespective of the power to substitute other volitions and choices in place of the actual ones. _Such Power not likely to be exercised._--The question, however, is one of some importance, whether we have any such power or not. And whether we have it or not, one thing is certain--we are not likely to exercise it. If among the fixed and given things, which are to remain as they are, we include whatever inclines or induces the mind to choose and act as it does, then, power or no power to the contrary, the choice _will_ be as it is, and would be so, if we were to try the experiment a thousand times; for choice depends on these preceding circumstances and inducements--the inclination of the mind--and if this is given, and made certain, the choice to which it will lead becomes certain also. A choice opposed to the existing inclination, to the sum total of the existing inducements to action, is not a choice at all; it is a contradiction in terms. The power of contrary choice, then, is one which, from the nature of the case, will never be put in requisition, unless something lying back of the choice, viz., inclination, be changed also. _But does such Power exist._--The question is not, however, whether such a power is likely to be employed, but whether it _exists_; not whether the choice _will be_ thus and thus, but whether it _can be_ otherwise. When, from various courses of procedure, all practicable, and at my option, I select or choose one which, on the whole, I will pursue, have I no _power_, under those very circumstances, and at that very moment, to choose some other course instead of that? _Can_ my choice be otherwise than it is? _In what Sense there is such Power._--Abstractly, I suppose, it can. Power and inclination are two different things. The power to act is one thing, and the disposition to exert that power is another thing. _Logically_, one does not involve the other. The power may exist without the disposition, or the disposition without the power. There is _power_, logically, abstractly considered, to choose, even when inclination is wanting; you have only to supply the requisite inclination, and the power is at once exerted, the choice is made, the act is performed. But the change of inclination does not _create any new power_; it simply puts in requisition a power already existing. § II.--POWER TO DO WHAT WE ARE NOT DISPOSED TO DO. _The Question under another Form._--Closely analogous to the question last discussed, virtually, indeed, the same question under another form, is the inquiry, whether we can, at any moment, will or do what we are not, at that moment, inclined to do. Have I any such power or freedom as this, that _I_ CAN _do what I am not_ DISPOSED _or do not wish to do?_ My disposition being to pursue a given course, is it really in my _power_ to pursue a different one? In order to determine this question, let us see what constitutes, or in what consists, the _power_ of doing, in any case, what we _are_ disposed to do; and then we may be able to judge whether that power still exists, in case the disposition is wanting. _In what Power consists._--It is admitted that I _can_ do what I wish or am disposed to do. Now, in what consists that power? That depends on _what sort_ of act it is that I am to put forth. Suppose it be a physical act. My power to do what I wish, in that case, consists in my having certain physical organs capable of doing the given thing, and under the command of my will. Suppose it be an intellectual act. My power, in that case, of doing what I like, depends on my having such mental faculties as are requisite for the performance of the given act, and these under control. So long, then, as I have the faculties, physical or mental, that are requisite to the performance of a given act, and those faculties are under the control of my will, so that I can exert them if I please, and when I please, so long my power of doing what I like is unimpaired, and complete, as, _e. g._, the power of walking, or adding a column of accounts. _But suppose the Disposition wanting._--Suppose, now, the disposition to be wanting; does the power also disappear, or does it remain? I have the same faculties as before, and they are as fully under the control of the will as ever, and that constitutes all the power I ever had. I have the power, then, of doing what I have no inclination to do. Whatever I can do if I like, that also I _can_ do, even if I do _not_ like. In itself considered, the power to do a thing may be quite complete, and independent of the inclination or disposition to do or not to do. _Will it be put in Requisition?_--But will this power be ever exercised? Certainly not, so long as the disinclination continues. In order to the doing of any thing, there must not only be _power_ to do it, but _disposition_. If the latter be wanting, the former, though it may exist, will never be put forth. _Our Actions not consequently inevitable._--Have I, then, no power, that is really available, to do what I do not happen to be, at this moment, inclined to do? Am I shut up to the actual inclinations and choices of any given hour or moment? Am I under the stern rule of inevitable necessity and fate to do as I do, to choose as I choose, to be inclined as I am inclined? By no means. My inclinations are not fixed quantities. They may change. They depend, in part, on the intellectual conceptions: these may vary; in part on the state of the heart: divine grace may change the heart. _Actual Choices not necessary ones._--The actual choice of any given moment is by no means a necessary one. Another might have been in its stead. A different inclination is certainly possible and conceivable, and a different inclination _would_ have led to a different choice. If, instead of looking at the advantage or agreeableness of a proposed course, and being influenced by that consideration, I had looked at the right, the obligation in the case, my choice would have been a different one, for I should have been influenced by a different motive. Two different objects were presented to my mind, _a_ and _b_. As it is, I choose _a_, but _might_ have chosen _b_, and _should_, had I been so inclined. Why did I choose _a_? Because, as the matter then presented itself to my mind, I was so inclined. But I might have taken a different view of the whole thing, and then my inclination and my choice would have been different. It was in my power to have thought, to have felt, to have acted differently. What is more, I not only _might_, but, perhaps, _ought_ to have felt and acted differently. I am responsible for having such an inclination as leads to a wrong choice responsible for my opinions and views which influence my feelings; responsible for my disposition, in so far as it is the result of causes within my own control. _Different Uses of the Term Power._--It ought to be clearly defined in all such discussions _what we mean_ by the principal _terms_ employed. In the present instance what we mean by the words _power_, _ability_, _can_, etc., ought to be distinctly stated. Now, there are two senses in which these words are used, and the question before us turns, in part, on this difference. 1. We may use the word power, _e. g._, to denote all that is requisite or essential to the _actual doing_ of a thing, whatever is so connected with the doing, that, if it be wanting, the thing will not be done. Or, 2. In a more limited sense, to denote merely all that is requisite to the doing the thing, provided we please or choose to do it, all that is requisite in order to our doing what we _like_ or wish. The latter distinguishes between the _ability_ and the _willingness_ to do; the former includes them both in the idea of power. In order to the _actual doing_ there must be both. But does the word _power_ properly include both? In ordinary language, certainly, we distinguish the two. I _can_ do a thing, and I wish to do it, are distinct propositions, and neither includes the other. It is only by a license of speech that we sometimes say I _cannot_, when we mean simply, I have no wish or disposition. If we make the distinction in question between power and disposition, then we _can_ do what we have no wish to do. If we do not make it, but include in the term power the disposition to exert the power, then we _cannot_ do what we have no disposition to do. § III.--INFLUENCE OF MOTIVES I. IS THE WILL ALWAYS AS THE GREATEST APPARENT GOOD? _The Answer depends on the Meaning of the Question._--If by this be meant simply whether the mind always wills as it is, on the whole, and under all the circumstances, disposed or inclined to will, I have already answered the question. If more than that be meant, if we mean to ask whether we always, in volition, act with reference to the one consideration of _advantage_ or utility, the good that is to accrue, in some way, to ourselves or others from the given procedure--and this is what the question seems to imply--I deny that this is so. I have already shown, in presenting the psychological facts respecting the will, that our motives of action are from two grand and diverse sources: _desire_ and _duty_--_self-love_, or, at most such love as involves mere natural emotion, and _sense of obligation_; that we do not always act in view merely of the agreeable, but also in view of the _right_, and that these two are not identical. Now the greatest apparent good is not always the right; nor even the _apparent_ right. We are conscious of the difference, and of acting, now from the one, now from the other, of these motives. But to say that the will is always according to the greatest apparent good, is to resolve all volition into the pursuit of the agreeable, and all motives of action into self-love. It is to merge the feeling of obligation in the feeling of desire, and lose sight of it as in itself a distinct motive of action. _Defect in the Socratic Philosophy._--This was the capital defect in the ethical system of Socrates, who held that men always pursue what they think to be good, and, therefore, always do what they think is right, since the good and the right are identical; sometimes, indeed, mistaking an apparent good for a real one, but always doing as well as they know how; from which it is but a short step to the conclusion that sin is only so much ignorance, and virtue so much knowledge--a conclusion to which the modern advocates of the doctrines under discussion would by no means assent, but from which that shrewd thinker and most consistent logician saw no escape. II. IS THE WILL DETERMINED BY THE STRONGEST MOTIVE? _The Term "strongest" as thus employed._--Much depends on what we mean by "strongest" in this connection, and what by the word "determined?" If we mean, by the strongest motive, the one which in a given case prevails, that in view of which the mind decides and acts, then the question amounts merely to this. Does the _prevalent_ motive actually _prevail_? To say that it does, is much the same as to say, that a straight stick is a straight stick. And what else can you mean by strongest motive? What standard have you for measuring motives and gauging their strength, except simply to judge of them by the _effects_ they produce? Or, who ever supposed that, of two motives, it was not the stronger but the weaker one that in a given case prevailed? _The Word "determined."_--The question may be made, however, to turn upon the word _determined_. Is the will _determined_ by that motive which prevails? Is it _determined_ at all by _any_ motive or by any thing? If by this word it be meant or implied that the motive, and not the mind itself is the producing cause of the mind's own action, then I deny that the will _is, in any such sense_, determined, whether by the strongest motive, or any other. The will is simply the mind or the soul willing; its acts are determined by itself, and itself only. If you mean simply that the motive _influences_ the will, prevails with it, becomes the _reason why_ the will decides as it does, this I have already shown to be true, and in this sense, undoubtedly, the motive determines the volition, just as the fall of an apple from a tree is, in the first instance, produced or caused by the law of gravitation; but the particular direction which it takes in falling, depends on, and is determined by, adventitious circumstances as, _e. g._, the obstacles it meets in its descent. Those obstacles, in one sense, determine the motion; they are the reason and explanation of the fact that it falls _just as_ it does, and not otherwise; but they are not the producing cause of the motion itself. III. ARE MOTIVES THE CAUSE, AND VOLITIONS THE EFFECT? _Incorrect Use of the Term Cause._--It is common, with a certain class of writers, to speak of motive as the _cause_ of action or volition. This is, if at all correct and allowable, certainly not a fortunate use of terms. The agent is properly the _cause_ of any act, and in volition the soul itself is the agent. It is the mind itself, which is, strictly, the efficient cause of its own acts. The motive is the _reason why_ I act, and not the producer or cause of my act. In common speech, this distinction is not always observed. We say, I do such a thing _because_ of this or that, meaning for such and such reasons. In philosophical discussion it is necessary to be more exact. _Liable to be misunderstood._--The use of the word, as now referred to, is particularly to be avoided as liable to mislead the incautious reader or hearer. It suggests the idea of physical necessity, of _irresistibility_. Given, the law of gravitation, _e. g._, and a body unsupported _must_ fall--no choice, no volition; whereas, the action of the mind in volition is, by its essential nature, _voluntary_, directly opposed to the idea of compulsion. Those who use the word in this manner are generally careful to disclaim, it is true, any such sense; but such are our associations with the word _cause_, as _ordinarily_ employed, that it is difficult to avoid sliding, unawares, into the old and familiar idea of some sort of absolute physical necessity. It were better to say, therefore, that motives are the reasons why we act thus and thus. To go further than this, to call the motive the _cause_ of the volition, is neither a correct nor a fortunate use of terms, since the idea is thereby conveyed, guard against it as you will, that, in some way, the influence was irresistible, the event unavoidable. _The Phrase "moral Necessity."_--The same objections lie with still greater force against the phrase _moral necessity_ as applied to this subject. Those who use it are careful, for the most part, to define their meaning, to explain that they do not mean necessity at all, but only the _certainty_ of actions. The word itself, however, is constantly contradicting all such explanations, constantly suggesting another and much stronger meaning. That is necessary, properly speaking, which depends not on my will or pleasure, which cannot be avoided, but must be, and must be as it is. Now, to say of an act of the will, that it is necessary, in this sense, is little short of a contradiction in terms. The two ideas are utterly incongruous and incompatible. A volition may be certain to take place; it may be the motive that makes it certain, but if this is all we mean, it is better to say just this, and no more. If this is all we mean, then we do not mean that volitions are necessary in any proper sense of that term. There is no need to use the word necessity, and then explain that we do not mean necessity, but only certainty. It is precisely on this unfortunate use of terms that the strongest objections are founded, against the true doctrine of the connection of motive with volition. Even Mill, one of the ablest modern necessitarians, objects to the use of this term, and urges its abandonment. _The true Connection.--What, then, is the connection between Motive and Volition?_--I have all along admitted, that there is such a connection between volitions and motives, that the former never occur without the latter, that they stand related as antecedent and consequent, and that motives, while not the producing cause of volitions, are still the _reason why_ the volitions are _as_ they are, and not otherwise. They furnish the occasion of their existence, and the explanation of their character. So much as this, the psychology of the subject warrants--more than this it does not allow. More than this we seem to assert, however, when we insist on saying that motive is the cause, and volition the effect. We seem, however we may disclaim such intention, to make the mind a mere mechanical instrument, putting forth volitions only as it is impelled by motives, these, and not the mind, being the real producing cause, and the volitions following irresistibly, just as the knife or chisel is but the passive instrument in the hand of the architect, and not at all the producing cause of the effects which follow. _Difference of the two Cases._--Now there is a vast difference between these two cases. The impulse, communicated to the saw, produces the effect irresistibly; not so the motive. The saw is a passive instrument; not so the _mind_. There is, in either case, a fixed connection between the antecedent and the consequent, but the _nature_ of the connection is widely different, and it is a difference of the greatest moment. It is precisely the difference indicated by the two words _cause_ and _reason_--as applied to account for a given occurrence--the one applicable to material and mechanical powers and processes, the other to intelligent, rational, voluntary agents. There is a _cause_ why the apple falls. It is gravitation. There is a _reason_ why mind acts and wills as it does. It is motive. _But_ IS _the Mind the producing Cause of its own Volitions?_--This, the advocates of moral necessity deny. "If we should thus cause a volition," says Dr. Edwards, "we should doubtless cause it by a causal act. It is impossible that we cause any thing without a causal act. And as it is supposed that we cause it freely, the causal act must be a free act, _i. e._, an act of the will, or volition. And as the supposition is, that all our volitions are caused by ourselves, the causal act must be caused by another, and so on infinitely, which is both impossible and inconceivable." That is, if the mind causes its own volitions, it can do it only by first acting to cause them, and that causative act is, itself, a volition, and requires another causative act to produce it, and so on ad infinitum. _The Dictum Necessitatis proves too much._--This celebrated argument has been called, not inappositely, the _dictum necessitatis_. It rests upon the assumption, that no cause can act, but by first acting to produce that act. Now this virtually shuts out _all_ cause from the universe, or else involves us in the infinite series. Apply this reasoning to any cause whatever, and see if it be not so. Suppose, _e. g._, that _motive_, and not the mind itself, is the producing cause of volition. Then, according to the dictum, motive cannot act, but by first acting in order to act, and for that previous causative act, there must have been an ulterior cause, and so on forever, in an endless succession of previous causative acts. _The Dictum as applicable to Mind._--But it may be said this dictum applies only to mind, or voluntary action. How, then, is it known, that mind cannot act without first acting in order to act? Would not this virtually shut out and extinguish all mental action? The mind thinks; must it first think, in order to think? It reasons, judges, conceives, imagines; must it first reason, judge, etc., _in order_ to reason, and judge, and conceive, and imagine? If not, then why may it not _will_ without first _willing_ to will? _The Dictum as applicable to Deity._--If mind is not the cause of its own volitions, then how is it with the volitions of the infinite and eternal mind? Are they caused or uncaused? If caused, then by what? If by himself, then there is again the infinitely recurring series according to the dictum. If by something else, still we do not escape the series, for each causative act must have its prior cause. Are the volitions of Deity, then, _uncaused_? Then certainly there is no such thing as cause in the universe. Motives, then, are no longer to be called causes. Deity is not, in fact, the cause of any thing, since not the cause of those volitions by which alone all things are produced. If he is not the cause of these, then not the cause of their consequences and effects. In either case, you shut out all cause from the universe, whether the dictum be applied to mind or to motion, to man or to God; or else you are, in either case, involved in the vortex of this terrible infinitive series. To give up the dictum, is to admit that mind may be the producing cause of its own volitions. CHAPTER V. THE DOCTRINE OF THE WILL VIEWED IN CONNECTION WITH CERTAIN TRUTHS OF RELIGION. _The Relation of Psychology to Theology._--The very close connection between the philosophy of the will, and the science of theology, has already been remarked. We have discussed the questions which have come before us thus far, on purely psychological grounds, without reference to their theological bearing. It would be manifest injustice to the matter in hand, however, were we to overlook entirely the relation of our philosophy to those higher truths which pertain to the domain of theological science. The whole question respecting the freedom of the human will, especially, assumes a new importance, when viewed in connection with the truths of natural and revealed religion. It ceases to be a speculative, and becomes an eminently practical question when thus viewed. There are two points which require special attention, as regards that connection; the one, _God's power over man_, the other, _man's power over himself_. § I.--THE POWER WHICH GOD EXERTS OVER THE HUMAN MIND AND WILL. _Dependence of Man._--It seems to be the teaching of reason, no less than of religion, that man stands to the Creator in the relation of absolute dependence. The one is the subject, the other the sovereign. The control of Deity extends, not merely to the elements and forces of nature, which are by no means the chief and most important part of his works, but over all intelligent, rational beings. This is implied, not only in the fact that he is the Creator of all, but in the fact of moral government, and of a superintending providence. Manifestly, there could be no such thing as moral government, and no control over the affairs of the world, if the conduct of men, the minds and hearts of intelligent beings, were not subject to that control. This is not only the inference which reason draws from the acknowledged supremacy of the Creator, it is not only thus a tenet of natural religion, but it is also one of the plainest doctrines of revealed truth. In the most explicit and direct terms, the Scriptures ascribe to God the supreme control of human conduct, of the human mind and heart. This power over the thoughts and purposes of intelligent beings is the very highest power. _This Control unlimited._--This control, moreover, in order to be complete and effective, must reach beyond the present and passing moment, must take in the future, must sweep through the whole range of coming duration, and comprehend whatever is to be. Nothing must take place without his foreknowledge and permission. The minutest events, the falling of a sparrow, the number of the forest leaves, and of the hairs of our head, must be no exception to this general law. _Implies a Plan, and that Plan embraces human Conduct._--If we suppose the supreme Being to be, not only a Creator and Ruler, but a wise and intelligent one, then we must suppose him to have some _plan_ of operations. The very idea of _providence_, indeed, implies this. And this plan must be supposed to extend to, and include, future events, all events, minute events; for the little and the great are linked together, the future and the present are linked together, and the plan and government that has to do with one, must have to do with all, and with human conduct among the rest. This, again, is not more clearly the doctrine of reason than of revelation. _The Difficulty stated._--Whatever freedom man has, then, it must be such a freedom as is consistent with God's complete control and government of him. Neither his present nor his future conduct, neither his thoughts, his feelings, nor his purposes, must be beyond the reach of the divine purpose and control. But how are these things to be reconciled--man's entire freedom, God's entire control and government of him? _Different Positions assumed._--Both are facts, and, therefore, true. Either, by itself, can be well enough conceived and comprehended, but, taken together, they appear inconsistent. Many do not hesitate to pronounce them so. Some, who accept them both as true, regard them as still inexplicable and incomprehensible. Others receive one and reject the other, or, at least, assume such a position as amounts to a virtual rejection of one of these truths. Thus the fatalist secures the supreme government of God, only at the expense of human freedom, and thus weakens, if not destroys, the foundation of human accountability. Others again, in their horror of fatalism, preserve the freedom and accountability of man, at the expense of the divine government and purposes, thus virtually placing man beyond the power and control of Deity. _Application of the preceding Psychology to this Question._--How, then, are these two great facts to be reconciled? If we mistake not, a true psychology, a correct view of the nature of the will, prepares the way for this. What have we found to be the process of the mind in volition? The several steps of the process are found to be these: In the first place, some object to be accomplished is presented, as such, to the understanding. This object, thus presented, appealing to the desires or to the sense of duty influences or inclines the mind. This, again, leads to choice, choice to volition, volition to action. _Freedom lies where._--Now in this whole process, _where_ does the element of freedom lie? Not in the final executive act--the doing as we will to do--for that is merely a bodily function, a physical and not a mental power; nor yet in the control of the motives which influence or incline us; for these are, for the most part, out of our power. Evidently freedom, so far as it pertains to the human will, lies in the power of forming and putting forth such volitions as we please, in other words, of choosing as we like, and willing as we choose, so that whatever our inclinations may be, we shall be at liberty to choose and to will accordingly. This is the highest practical freedom of which it is possible to conceive, and it is all the freedom which pertains to the human will. _How this may consist with the divine Control._--Let us see, now, if this be not a liberty perfectly compatible with the divine government and control over us. These volitions and choices of ours are by no means arbitrary or casual; there is a reason for them; a reason why we choose as we do. We choose thus and thus, because we are, on the whole, so disposed or _inclined_; and this inclination or disposition depends on a great variety of circumstances, on the nature and strength of the motive presented, our physical and mental constitution and habits, our power of self-control, the strength of our desires, as compared with our sense of duty, the presence or absence of the exciting object; in fine, on a great variety of predisposing causes and circumstances, all of which are to be taken into the account, when the question is, why do we choose thus, and not otherwise? Now, these circumstances which go to determine our inclinations, and so our choices and volitions, are, in a great measure, beyond our direct control. Our physical and mental constitution, our external condition, our state of mind, and circumstances at any given moment, whatever in the shape of motive or inducement may be present with moving power to the mind, inclining us this way or that, all this lies much more under divine control than under our own. _The Point of Connection._--Here, then, to speak reverently, lies the avenue of approach, through which Deity may come in and take possession of the human mind, and influence and shape its action, without infringing, in the least, on its perfect freedom. He has only to present such motives as shall seem to the mind weighty and sufficient, has only to touch the main-spring of human inclination, lying back of actual choice, has only to secure within us a disposition or liking to any given course, and our choice follows with certainty, and our volition, and our action; and that action and volition are _free_ in the highest sense, because our choice was free. We acted just as we pleased, just as we were inclined. _The Influence of Man over his fellow Men an Illustration of the same Principle._--Now this is just what we, in a limited way, and to a small extent, are constantly doing with respect to our fellow men. We present motives, inducements, to a given course, we work upon their inclinations, we appeal to their sensibilities, their natural desires, their sense of duty, and in proportion as we gain access to their hearts, we are successful in shaping and controlling their conduct. The great and difficult art of governing men lies in this. We have only to suppose a _like_ power, but complete and perfect, to be exercised by the supreme disposer and controller of events, so shaping and ordering circumstances as to determine the inclinations of men, gaining access, not in an uncertain and indirect manner, but by immediate approach to the human heart, all whose springs lie under his control, so that he can touch and command them as he will; we have only to conceive this, and we have, as it seems to me, a full and sufficient explanation of the fact that man acts freely, and just as he is inclined, while yet he is perfectly under the divine control. _Power which the Scriptures ascribe to God._--And this, if I mistake not, is precisely the sort of control and power over man which the Scriptures always ascribe to God, viz., power over the inclinations, affections, dispositions, from which proceed all our voluntary actions. In his hand are the _hearts_ of men, and he can turn them as the rivers of water are turned. _The Theory does not suppose a divine Influence to Evil._--It is not necessary to suppose that God ever influences men to evil; the supposition is inconsistent with the divine character, with all we know and conceive of Deity. Nor is any such influence over man necessary in order to the accomplishment of evil, but, on the contrary, much is needed to restrain and prevent him from sin. Sufficient already are the motives and influences that incline him to go astray; feeble and inefficient, the inducements to a better life. Could we suppose, however, any influence of this sort to be exerted over man, inclining him to evil, we can still see how such influence might be perfectly consistent with his entire freedom. It is not the integrity of human freedom, but the integrity of the divine character, that forbids such a supposition. _Does not interfere with Responsibility._--Does such a power over human conduct, as that now attributed to the supreme Being, interfere with human _responsibility_? Not in the least. Responsibility rests with him who acts freely and as he pleases, doing that which is right or wrong, of his own accord, knowing what he does, and because he has a mind to do it. And it is thus man acts, under whatever decree of divine influence we may suppose him placed. § II.--MAN'S POWER OVER HIMSELF. _Unjust to require what it is impossible to perform._--Have I power, in all cases, to do what the divine will requires; power to do _right_? It would seem to be the verdict of reason, and the common sense of mankind, that to require of any man what is literally and absolutely beyond his power, is unjust, and that such a requirement, if it were made, would impose no obligation, since obedience would be impossible. We cannot suppose God to be guilty of such manifest injustice. His commands are right. They carry with them the judgment and reason of men. Conscience approves them. Obligation attends them. They must, therefore, be such commands as it is possible for us to obey. It would be manifest injustice and wrong to require of me what it is actually and absolutely out of my power to do. _Supposed Disinclination._--But suppose I have really no inclination, no disposition, to do right. My affections and desires are all wrong, inclining me to evil, and my sense of duty or moral obligation is not strong enough to prevail against these natural desires and evil inclinations; suppose this, which, alas! is too often true, and what then becomes of my _power_ to do right? Does it any longer exist? Have I any power to change those affections and inclinations; or, they remaining as they are, have I any power to go contrary to them? A question this, at once profoundly philosophical, and intensely practical. _Position of the Fatalist._--The fatalist has no hesitation in replying _no_, to these questions. Man has no power to change the current of his own inclinations, nor yet to go against that current. He is wholly under the influence of motives; they turn him this way and that. He has power to do as he wills, but no power over the _volitions_ themselves. He has power to do only what he has a mind to do. He has no mind, no inclination to do right, therefore, no power to do so. _This Position at Variance with a true Psychology._--A correct psychology, as we have already seen, gives a different answer. It is not true, as a matter of fact in the philosophy of the human mind, that man has no _power_ to do what he has no _disposition_ to do; nor is it true that his inclinations and affections are wholly out of his power and control. In both respects, fatalism is at war, not more with the common sense of mankind, than with a sound and true philosophy. _Confounds Power with Inclination._--To say that man has no _power_ to do what he is not _inclined_ to do, is to confound power with inclination. They are distinct things. The one may exist without the other. I have power to do what I have no disposition to do; on the other hand, I may have the disposition to do what is not in my power. I have power to set fire to my own house, or to my neighbor's, or to cut off my right hand; power, but no disposition. Present a motive sufficiently weighty to change my mind, and incline me to the act, and you create, in that way, a new disposition, but no new power. This point has been fully discussed in the previous chapter, and I need not here repeat the argument. It was shown that in order to the actual doing of a thing, two things are requisite, namely, the _power_ to do, and the inclination to _exert_ that power; and that neither involves the other. Where the power alone exists, the thing _can be_ done, but _will not be_; where both exist, it both _can_ and _will_ be done. It is not true, then, in any proper use of terms, that want of inclination is want of power. _Our Inclinations not wholly beyond our Control._--Equally incorrect is the position that our inclinations and affections are wholly out of our own control. Within certain limits it is in our power to change them. Inclination is not a fixed quantity. It may change. It ought to change. In many respects it is constantly changing. We take different views of things, and so our feelings and inclinations change. Circumstances change, the course of events changes; and our disposition is modified accordingly. So that while the affections and inclinations are certainly not under the _direct_ and _immediate_ control of the will, it is still, in a great measure, in our power to modify and control them. While they remain as they are, it is quite certain that we shall do as we do; but it is not _necessary_ that they _should_, nor _certain_ that they _will_, remain as they are. _The true Answer._--To the question, then, _can_ the man whose inclinations are to evil, whose heart is wrong, do right? a true psychology answers _yes_. He _can_ do what he is not inclined to do; nor is that evil inclination itself a fixed quantity; he can be, he may be, otherwise inclined. _Something else needed beside Power._--- It must be admitted, however, that so long as the heart is wrong, so long as the evil disposition continues, so long the man _will_ continue to do evil, notwithstanding all his _power_ to the contrary. Left to himself, there is very little probability of his effecting any material change in himself for the better. In order to do this, there is needed an influence from without, and from above; an influence that shall _incline_ him to obedience, that shall make him _willing_ to obey. _The Gospel meets this Necessity._--This is precisely the want of his nature which divine grace meets. It creates within him a _clean heart_, and renews within him a _right spirit_. This is the sublime mystery of regeneration. The soul that is thus born of God is made _willing_ to do right. The inclinations are no longer to evil, but to good, and the man still doing that which he pleases, is pleased to do the will of God. The change is in the disposition; it is a change of the affections, of the _heart_; thus the Scriptures always represent it. This was all that was wanted to secure obedience, and this divine grace supplies. It is not our province to discuss theological questions, as such. It has been our aim, simply, to show the relation of a true psychology to the system of truth revealed in the Scriptures. The perfect _coincidence_ of the two is an argument in favor of each. CHAPTER VI. POWER OF WILL. _Differences in this respect._--There are great differences among men, as regards the strength and energy of this, as compared with the other departments of mental activity. The difference is, perhaps, as great in this respect, as in regard to the other mental faculties. Not all are gifted with equal power of imagination, not all with equal strength of memory, or of the reasoning faculty; not all with equal strength of the executive power of the mind. Some persons exhibit a weakness of will, a want of decision and firmness, an irresolution of character and purpose. They waver and hesitate in cases of doubt and emergency, requiring decision and energy. They are governed by no fixed purpose. The course which they adopt to-day, they abandon to-morrow for the opposite. They are controlled by circumstances. Opposition turns them from their course, difficulties discourage them. They are easily persuaded, easily led; ill fitted to be themselves leaders of men. Others, again, are firm and inflexible as a rock. They choose their course, and pursue it, regardless of difficulties and consequences. Difficulties only arouse them to new effort. Opposition only strengthens their decision and purpose. They are hard to be persuaded, when once their minds are made up, and harder still to be driven. They take their stand, nothing daunted by opposing numbers, and, with Fitz-James, when suddenly confronted and surrounded by the hosts of Roderic Dhu, exclaim, "Come one, come all, this _rock_ shall fly From its firm base, as soon as _I_." _Instances of Firmness._--Napoleon, fiery and impetuous as he was, possessed this energy and strength of will. Obstacles, difficulties, insurmountable to other men, established usages, institutions, armies, thrones, all were swept away before the irresistible energy of that mighty will, and that determined purpose, as the wave, driven before the storm, clears itself a path among the pebbles and shells that lie strewn upon the shore. In the character of his brother Joseph, King of Spain, we have an example of the opposite. Mild, cultivated, refined, amiable, of elegant tastes, a man of letters, loving retirement and leisure, he was lacking in that energy and decision of character which fit men for command in camps and courts. We have in the firm and terrible energy of Cromwell, as contrasted with the mildness and inefficiency of his son and successor Richard, the same difference illustrated. The Puritan leaders of the English Revolution were men of stern and determined energy of character. Among the Romans, Cæsar presents a notable example of that strength of will which fits men for great enterprises; while the great Roman orator, with all his acquisitions of varied learning, and all his philosophy, and all his eloquence, was deficient in firmness of purpose. _Often exhibited in military Leaders._--In general it may be remarked that great military commanders have usually been distinguished for this trait of character. It was by virtue of their energy, and decision, and firmness of purpose, that they accomplished what they did, succeeding where other men would have failed. Thus it was with Hannibal, with Frederic the Great, with Wellington, with our own Washington. They were, by nature, endowed with those qualities which fitted them for their important and difficult stations; while, at the same time, the work to which they were called, and the circumstances in which they were placed, tended greatly to develop and strengthen those peculiar traits and qualities, and this among the rest. _The same Trait exhibited in other Stations of Life._--Strength of will shows itself, however, in other relations and stations of life, as well as in the military commander. The leader of a great political party, as, for example, of the Administration, or of the Opposition, in the English Parliament, has abundant occasion for firmness and strength of purpose. It was not less strength of will, than of moral principle, in Socrates, that led him resolutely to withstand the popular clamor, and the opinions of his associate judges, and refuse to sentence the unsuccessful military commanders, on the day when the decision lay in his hands; the same trait showed itself in that retreat after the battle of Delius, so graphically described by Plato, when he walked alone and slowly from the field, where all was confusion and flight, with such coolness and such an air of calm self-reliance, that no enemy ventured to approach him; it was shown not less in his determined refusal to escape from prison, and the unjust sentence of death, notwithstanding all the entreaties and remonstrances of friends. _Strength of Will in the Orator._--The truly great orator, rising to repel the assaults of his antagonist, or to allay the prejudices and take command of the passions and opinions of a popular assembly, calm and collected, and conscious of his strength, master of his own emotions, and of all his powers, presents an illustration of the same principle. It was seen in Webster, when he rose in the Senate to reply to Hayne. The very aspect of the man conveyed to all beholders the idea of power--a strength, not merely of gigantic intellect, but of resolute will _determined_ to conquer. _Strength of Will as shown in the Endurance of Suffering._--The same principle is sometimes manifested in a different manner, and in different circumstances. If it leads to heroic _actions_, it leads also to heroic _endurance_ and suffering. It was the firm and stubborn will of Regulus, that sent him back to Carthage, to endure all that the disappointed malice of his foes could invent. It was the firm will of Jerome of Prague, that kept him from recantation in the face of death; the firm will of Cranmer, that thrust his right hand into the flames, and kept it there till it was quite consumed. A like firmness of purpose has been exhibited in thousands of instances, both in the earlier and later annals of Christian martyrdom. Rather than renounce a principle, or abandon the deeply-cherished convictions of the soul, natures, the most frail and feeble, have calmly met and endured the greatest sufferings, with a firmness, and courage, and power of endurance, that nothing could shake or overcome. _How to be attained._--To multiply instances is needless. But how shall this strength of will, so desirable, so essential to true greatness and nobleness of character, be attained? In part it is the gift of nature, doubtless--the result of that physical and mental constitution with which some are more fortunately endowed; in part it is an acquisition to be made, as any other mental or physical acquisition, by due care and training. It will be of service, especially, in any endeavor of this sort, to accustom ourselves to decide with promptness, and act with energy in the many smaller and less important affairs of life, and to carry out a purpose, once deliberately formed, with persistence, even in trivial matters. The habit thus formed, we may be able afterward, and gradually, to carry into higher departments of action, and into circumstances of greater embarrassment and difficulty. On the other hand, this must not be carried to the extreme of _obstinacy_, which is the refusal to correct a mistake, or acknowledge an error, or listen to the wiser and better counsels of others. CHAPTER VII. HISTORICAL SKETCH.--OUTLINE OF THE CONTROVERSY RESPECTING FREEDOM OF THE WILL. _Question early Discussed._--The question respecting human freedom, was very early a topic of inquiry and discussion. It enters prominently into the philosophy of all nations, so far as we know, among whom either philosophy or theology have found a place. It is by no means confined to Christian, or even to cultivated nations. It holds a prominent place in the theological systems and disputes of India and the East, at the present day. The missionary of the Christian faith meets with it, to his surprise, perhaps, in the remotest regions, and among tribes little cultivated. It is a question, at once so profound, and yet of such personal and practical moment, that it can hardly have escaped the attention of any thoughtful and reflecting mind, in any country, or in any age of the world. _The Greek Philosophy._--Among the Greeks, conflicting opinions respecting this matter prevailed in the different schools. The _Epicureans_, although asserting human liberty in opposition to the doctrine of universal and inexorable _fate_, were, nevertheless, _necessitarians_, if we may judge from the writings of Lucretius, whose idea of liberty, as Mr. Stewart has well shown, is compatible with the most perfect necessity, and renders man "as completely a piece of passive mechanism as he was supposed to be by Collins and Hobbes." This liberty is, itself, the _necessary effect of some cause_, and the reason assigned for this view is precisely that given by modern advocates of necessity, namely, that to suppose otherwise, is to suppose _an effect without a cause_. On the other hand, the _Stoics_, while maintaining the doctrine of _fate_, held, nevertheless, to the utmost liberty of the will. With the consistency of these views, we are not now concerned. Epictetus is referred to by Mr. Stewart, as an example of this not unusual combination of fatalism and free-will. _The Jewish Sects._--Very similar was the relation of the two rival sects among the Jews, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the former holding the doctrine of human freedom, the latter of such a degree, at least, of fatality, as is inconsistent with true liberty. _The Arabian Schools._--Among no people, perhaps, has this question been more eagerly and widely discussed, than by the Arabians, whose philosophy seems to have grown out of their theology. When that remarkable book, the Koran, first aroused the impulsive mind of the Arab from his idle dreams, and startled him into consciousness of higher truth, the very first topic of inquiry and speculation about which his philosophic thought employed itself, seems to have been this long-standing question of human ability and the freedom of the will. The Koran taught the doctrine of necessity and fate. A sect soon arose, called _Kadrites_, from the word _kadr_, power, freedom, holding the opposite doctrine, that man's actions, good and bad, are under the control of his own will. From this was gradually formed a large body of _dissenters_, as they styled themselves, and in maintaining these views on the one side, and opposing them on the other, the controversy became more and more one of philosophy, and for some three centuries, with varied learning and skill, Arabian scholars and philosophers disputed, warmly, this most difficult and abstruse of metaphysical questions. Fatalism seems ultimately to have prevailed, as, indeed, a doctrine so congenial to error, and to every false system of religious belief, would be quite likely to do, where any such system is established. _The Scholastics and the Reformers._--Among the scholastic divines of the middle ages, some held to the liberty of the will, while many allowed only what they called the liberty of _spontaneity_, _i. e._, power to _do_ as we will, in opposition to liberty of _indifference_, or power over the determinations of the will itself. Among the moderns, the Reformers differed among themselves on the matter of liberty, the Lutherans, with Melanchthon, opposing the scheme of necessity; Calvin and Bucer maintaining it, as the necessary consequence of their views of divine predestination. _Distinguished modern Advocates of Necessity._--Among the philosophical writers of the last and the present century, a very strong array of eminent names is on the side of necessity. Hobbes, Locke--who is claimed, however, by each side--Leibnitz, Collins, Edwards, Priestley, Belsham, Lord Kames, Hartley, Mill, advocate openly the doctrine of necessity. _Doctrine of Hobbes._--The views of _Hobbes_ seem to have given shape to the opinions of subsequent advocates of this theory. The only liberty which he allows, is that of doing what one wills to do, or what the scholastics called the liberty of spontaneity. Water is free, and at liberty, when nothing prevents it from flowing down the stream. Liberty he defines, accordingly, to be "_the absence of all impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent_." A man whose hands are tied, is not at liberty to go; the impediment is not in him, but in his bands; while he who is sick or lame, is at liberty, because the obstacle is in himself. A free agent is one who can do as he wills. This is essentially the view of freedom adopted by the later advocates of necessity, and almost in the same terms it is the view of Collins, Priestley, and Edwards. _Doctrine of Locke._--It is, also, _Locke's_ idea of freedom. Liberty, he says, is the power of any agent "to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other." This extends only to the carrying out our volitions when formed, and not to the matter of willing or preferring; power over the determinations of the will, itself, is not included in this definition. _Locke Inconsistent._--In this, Locke was inconsistent with himself, since, in his chapter on power, he seems to be maintaining the doctrine of human freedom. The liberty here intended, it has been justly remarked by Bledsoe, is not freedom of the will, or of the mind in willing, but only of the body; it refers to the motion of the body, not to the action of the mind. Locke expressly says, "there may be _volition_ where there is no liberty;" and gives, in illustration, the case of a man falling through a breaking bridge, who has volition or preference not to fall, but no liberty, since he cannot help falling. In this, again, Locke is inconsistent, since, elsewhere, he distinguishes between volition and desire or preference, while here he does not distinguish them. There can be no doubt that Locke supposed himself an advocate of human freedom, for such is the spirit of his whole treatise, especially of his twenty-first chapter; at the same time, it must be confessed, his definitions are incomplete, and his language inconsistent and vacillating, so that there is some reason to class him, as Priestley does, with those who really adopt the scheme of necessity without knowing or intending it. _View of Leibnitz._--Leibnitz was led to adopt the doctrine of necessity from his general theory of the _sufficient reason_, that is, that nothing occurs without a _reason why_ it should be so, and not otherwise. This principle he carries so far as to deny the power of Deity to create two things perfectly alike, and the power of either God or man to _choose_ one of two things that are perfectly alike. This principle presents the mind as always determined by the greatest apparent good, and establishes, as its author supposed, by the certainty of demonstration, the absolute impossibility of free agency. _View of Collins._--Collins maintains the necessity of all human actions, from experience, from the impossibility of liberty, from the divine foreknowledge, from the nature of rewards and punishments, and the nature of morality. He takes pains to reconcile this doctrine with man's accountability and moral agency, and is careful to define his terms with great exactness. Thus the terms liberty and necessity are defined as follows: "First, though I deny _liberty_ in a certain meaning of the word, yet I contend for _liberty_ as it signifies a _power in man to do as he wills or pleases_. Secondly, when I affirm _necessity_, I contend only for _moral necessity_, meaning thereby that man, who is an intelligent and sensible being, is determined by his reason and his senses; and I deny man to be subject to such necessity as is in clocks and watches, and such other beings, which, for want of sensation and intelligence, are subject to an _absolute_, _physical_, or _mechanical necessity_". _Coincidence of Collins and Edwards._--The coincidence of these views and definitions, and, indeed, of the plan of argument, with the definitions and the arguments of Edwards, is remarkable. No two writers, probably, were ever further removed from each other in their general spirit and character, and in their system of religious belief; yet as regards this doctrine, the definitions and views of one were those of the other, and as Mr. Stewart has justly remarked, the coincidence is so perfect, that the outline given by the former, of the plan of his work, might have served with equal propriety as a preface to the latter. _Views of Edwards._--No writer has more ably discussed this question than the elder Edwards. He is universally conceded to be one of the ablest metaphysicians, as well as theologians, of modern times. His work on the Freedom of the Will is a masterpiece of reasoning. At the same time, as to the character and tendency of the system therein maintained, the greatest difference of opinion exists. By some he is regarded as a fatalist, by others he is claimed as an advocate of human freedom. There is some ground for this difference of opinion. No writer, from Plato downward, was ever perfectly self-consistent; it would be strange if Edwards were so. That the general scheme of necessity, maintained by Edwards, tends, in some respects, to fatalism,--that the ablest champions of fatalism, and even writers of atheistic, and immoral views, have held essentially the same doctrine, and maintained it by the same arguments--must be conceded; that such was not the design and spirit of his work, that such was not his own intention, is perfectly evident. _Main Positions of Edwards._--The definitions of Edwards, as we have already seen, are the same with those of Collins and Hobbes. He understands by liberty _merely a power to do as one wills_. The mind is always determined by the greatest apparent good. The motive determines the act, _causes_ it. The mind acts, wills, chooses, etc., but the motive is the _cause_ of its action. That the mind should be the cause of its own volitions, implies, he maintains, an act of will preceding the volition, that is a volition prior to volition, and so on forever in an infinite series. This argument, the famous _dictum necessitatis_, has been considered in a previous chapter. Now, to say that motive is the producing cause, and volition the effect, especially if the connection of the two is of the _same nature_ as that between physical causes and effects, as Edwards affirms, is certainly to say that which looks very strongly toward fatalism. _Necessity, what._--Edwards maintains the doctrine of _necessity_. But what did he mean by _moral necessity_? The phrase is unfortunate, for reasons already suggested--it does convey the idea of irresistibility, of something which _must_ and _will be_--in spite of all contrary will and endeavor. This, however, he is careful to disclaim. He means by moral and philosophical necessity simple CERTAINTY, "nothing different from certainty." "No opposition or contrary will and endeavor," he says, "is supposable in the case of moral necessity, which is a certainty of the inclination and will itself." Now we must allow him to put his own meaning upon the terms he uses; and to say that under given circumstances, there being given such and such motives, inclinations, and preferences, such and such volitions will _certainly_ follow, is not to say that the will is not free in its action--is not to shut us up to absolute fate--is not, in fact, to say any thing more than is strictly and psychologically true. In defending himself from this very charge, he uses the following explicit language in a letter to a minister of the Church of Scotland: "ON THE CONTRARY, _I have largely declared that the connection between antecedent things and consequent ones, which takes place with regard to the acts of men's wills, which is called moral necessity, is called by the name of necessity_ IMPROPERLY; and that such a necessity as attends the acts of men's wills is more properly called certainty than necessity; it being no other than the certain connection between the subject and predicate of the proposition which affirms their existence." "Nothing that I maintain supposes that men are at all hindered by any fatal necessity, from doing, and even willing and choosing as they please, with full freedom; free with the highest degree of liberty that ever was thought of, or that could possibly enter into the heart of man to conceive." This is explicit, and ought to satisfy us as to what Edwards himself thought of his own work, and meant by it. Still a man does not always understand himself, is not always the best judge of his own arguments, is not always consistent with himself, does not always express his own real opinions, nor do himself justice, in every part of his reasonings. This is certainly the case with Edwards. We are at a loss to reconcile some passages in his treatise with the foregoing extract, _e. g._, _the dictum necessitatis_; also his declaration that the difference between natural and moral necessity "lies _not so much_ IN THE NATURE of the connection as in the two terms connected." This is an unfortunate admission for those who would shield him from the charge of fatalism. If the necessity, by which a volition follows the given motive, is, after all, of the _same nature_ with that by which a stone falls to the earth, or water freezes at a given temperature, it is all over with us as to any consistent, intelligible defence of the freedom of the will. If, moreover, the doctrine of Edwards leaves man full power, as he says above, to _will and to choose as he pleases_, what becomes of the _dictum_, which makes it impossible for the mind to determine its own volitions? _Does not distinguish between the Affections and the Will._--It should be remembered that Edwards does not distinguish between the will and affections. This distinction had not, at that time, been clearly drawn by writers on the philosophy of the mind. The twofold division of mental powers, into understanding and will, was then prevalent; the affections, of course, were classed with the latter. Hence there is not that definiteness in the use of terms which modern psychology demands. Had Edwards distinguished between the affections and the will, it must have given a different cast to his entire work. Even Locke, whose philosophy Edwards follows in the main, had distinguished between _will_ and _desire_, as we have already seen; but in this he is not followed by Edwards, who, while he does not regard them as "words of precisely the same signification," yet does not think them "so entirely distinct that they can ever be said to _run counter_." _Views of the later Necessitarians._--Of the views of the later advocates of necessity, Priestley, Belsham, Diderot, and others, of that school, we have already spoken in a previous chapter. They carry out the scheme, with the greatest boldness and consistency, to its legitimate consequences, fatalism, and the denial of free agency and accountability. God is the real and only responsible doer of whatever comes to pass, and man the passive instrument in his hand. Remorse, regret, repentance, are idle terms, and to praise or blame ourselves or others, for any thing that we or they have done, is merely absurd. _Advocates of the Opposite._--On the other hand, the doctrine of the freedom of the will has not wanted able advocates among the more recent philosophical writers. In general it may be remarked, that those who have treated of the powers of the human mind, as psychologists, have, for the most part, maintained the essential freedom of the will, while the advocates of the opposite view have been chiefly metaphysicians, rather than psychologists, and, in most cases, have viewed the matter from a theological rather than a philosophical point of view. Among the more recent and able advocates of the freedom of the will, are Cousin and Jouffroy, in France, Tappan and Bledsoe, in our own country. Previously, Mr. Stewart, in his appendix to his "Active and Moral Powers," had concisely, but very ably, handled the matter, and earlier still, Kant, in Germany, had conceded the liberty of the will as a matter of _consciousness_, while unable to reconcile it with the dictates of reason. _View of Hamilton._--Substantially the same view is taken by the late Sir William Hamilton, who, by general consent, stands at the head of modern philosophers, and who accepts the doctrine of liberty as a _fact_, an immediate dictum of consciousness, while, at the same time, he is unable to _conceive_ of its possibility, since "to conceive a free act, is to conceive an act which, being a cause, is not, in itself, an effect; in other words, to conceive an absolute commencement;" and this he regards as impossible. At the same time, it is equally beyond our power, he thinks, to conceive the possibility of the opposite, the doctrine of necessity, since that supposes "an _infinite series of determined causes_," which cannot be conceived. But though inconceivable, freedom is not the less a fact given by consciousness and is to be placed in the same category with many other facts among the phenomena of mind, "which we must admit as actual, but of whose possibility we are wholly unable to form a notion." _Remarks upon this View._--The difficulty here presented,--if I may venture a remark upon the opinions of so profound a thinker, and the same is true of Kant,--turns evidently on the peculiar idea of freedom entertained by those writers, namely, that in order to be free, an act of the will must be wholly undetermined, not itself an effect, but an absolute commencement. Any influence, from any source, going to determine or incline a man to will as he does, renders the act no longer free. Such freedom is certainly inconceivable; and what is more, impracticable; it exists as little among the possibilities of the actual world, as among the possibilities of thought. We never act, except under the influence of motive and inclination; and if acts thus performed are not free then no acts that we perform are so. _View of Coleridge._--This eminent disciple of the earlier German philosophy, derives from Kant the view of freedom now explained, and carries it to the furthest extreme. All influence and inclination are inconsistent with freedom. The disposition to do a thing renders the will, and the act of the will, no longer free. A _nature_, of any kind, is inconsistent with freedom. This, of course, shuts out all freedom from the actual world. Nor is it possible to conceive how even the acts of Deity can be any more free than ours, on this supposition; nor how, if any such freedom as this were supposed to exist, an act thus performed, without any motive, or any disposition or inclination on the part of the agent, could be a _rational_ or accountable act. _Views of Cousin, and Jouffroy._--Cousin and Jouffroy while by no means denying the influence of motive upon the mind, place the fact of liberty in the power which the mind has of being itself a cause, and of putting forth volitions from its own proper power. The law of inertia, contends Jouffroy, which requires a moving force proportioned to the movement of a material body, does not apply to the human mind, and "to apply this law to the relation which subsists between the resolutions of my will and the motives which act upon it, is to suppose that my being, that I myself, am not a cause; for a cause is something which produces an act by its own proper power." Cousin, in like manner, places liberty in the absolute and undetermined power of the will to act as cause; and "this cause, in order to produce its effect, has need of no other theatre, and no other instrument than itself. It produces it directly, with out any thing intermediate, and without condition; ... being always able to do what it does not do, and able not to do what it does. Here, then, in all its plenitude, is the characteristic of liberty." _View of Tappan._--One of the ablest defenders of the freedom of the will in our own country, Mr. Tappan, in his review of Edwards, takes essentially the position just explained. All cause lies ultimately in the will. It is this which makes the nisus or effort that produces any event or phenomenon. Of this nisus the mind or will is itself the cause, and, as such, it is _self-moved_. It makes its nisus of itself, and of itself it forbears to make it, and within the sphere of its activity, and in relation to its objects, it has the power of selecting, by a mere arbitrary act, any particular object. It is a cause, all whose acts, as well as any particular act, considered as phenomena demanding a cause, are accounted for _in itself alone_. _Position of Bledsoe._--Similar is the position of Mr. Bledsoe, one of the most recent reviewers of Edwards, a writer of marked ability and candor. He denies, however, that volition is the _effect_ of any thing, whether motive of mind, in the sense that motion of the arm is an effect. It is _activity_, _action_, _the cause of action_, but not _effect_. In distinction from most writers of the same theological views, he denies that the will is _self-determined_, or that it is _determined at all_, and by any thing. It is the _determiner_, but not the _determined_. REFERENCES. Among the authorities which have been consulted in the preparation of this work, the following may be referred to, with profit, by the reader who desires to pursue the subject further. I. THE INTELLECT. A. ON THE INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES IN GENERAL. _Locke._--Essays on the Human Understanding. _Reid._--Essays on the Intellectual Powers. Walker Ed. " Works.--By _Hamilton_, with _notes and dissertations_. _Dugald Stewart._--Philosophy of the Human Mind. Bowen Ed. " Philosophical Essays. _Brown._--Lectures on the Philosophy of the Mind. The works of _Upham_, _Wayland_, _Winslow_, _Mahan_, may also be consulted, with profit. _Cousin._--Cours de, 1828. Id., 1829. " Fragments Philosophiques. _Jouffroy._--Mélanges Philosophiques. Nouvelles Mélanges. " Esquisses de D. Stewart. Préface. _Descartes._--Méditations. Id., Discours de la Métnode. _Leibnitz._--Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement Humain. _Malebranche._--Recherche de la Vérité. _Royer Collard._--OEuvres de Reid. Fragments. _Damiron._--Cours de Philosophie. _Hegel._--Encyklopädie der Philosoph. Wissenchaft. _Rosenkrantz._--Psychologie. _Kant._--Anthropologie. Kritik Reiner Vernunft. " Kritik der Urtheilskraft. _Aristotle._--Metaphysics. " On the Soul. _Plato._--Republic. _Cicero._--Tusculanæ Questiones. B. ON THE SPECIFIC FACULTIES. I. SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. _Hamilton._--Supplementary Dissertation, Note D. _O. Wight._--Philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton. Part II. _Stewart._--Philosophical Essays. Ess. II. Brown.--Philosophy of Human Mind. _Mill._--Analysis of Human Mind. _A. Smith._--Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Of the External Senses. _Young._--Lectures on Intellectual Philosophy. _Comte._--Philosophy Positive. _Müller._--Elements of Physiology. _Tissot._--Anthropologie. _Maine de Biran._--Nouvelles Considerations sur les Rapports, etc. _Jouffroy._--Nouvelles Mélanges Philosophiques. _Royer Collard._--Fragments in Jouffroy's OEuvres de Reid. _Tortual._--Die Sinne des Menschen. _Buffier._--Traité des Premières Vérités. _Amédée Jacques._--Psychologie. Manuel de Phil. à l'usage des Coll. _Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques._ Art. Sens. _Aristotle._--De Anima. Parva Naturalia. _J. Barth. Saint Hilaire._--Psychologie de Aristotle. Notes and preface. II. MEMORY. _Stewart._--Intellectual Philosophy. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. (Walker.) _Brown._--Philosophy of Human Mind. _Mill._--Analysis of Human Mind. _Abercrombie._--On Intellectual Powers. _Hume._--Treatise on Human Nature. Book I. Part I. _Aristotle._--Parva Naturalia. _Barthèleme Saint Hilaire._--Psychologie d'Aristotle. Part II. _Malebranche._--Recherche de la Vérité. Liv. II. _Rosenkrantz._--Psychologie. _Hegel._--Encycl. Phil. Wissench. Dritter Theil. III. IMAGINATION. _Stewart._--Intellectual Philosophy. _Brown._--Philosophy of Human Mind. _Rauch._--Psychologie. Part II. _Sidney Smith._--Sketches of Philosophy. _Mill._--Analysis of Human Mind. _Amédée Jacques._--Manuel de Philosophie. Psychol. V. _Rosenkrantz._--Psychologie. _Die Einbildungskraft._ _Hegel._--Encyc. der Phil. Wissenchaft. Dritter Theil. _L's Einbildung._ IV. ABSTRACTION AND GENERALIZATION. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. _Brown._--Philosophy of Human Mind. _Stewart._--Intellectual Philosophy. _A. Smith._--Considerations on First Formation of Language. _J. S. Mill._--System of Logic. _Whewell_.--Philosophy of Inductive Sciences. _James Mill._--Analysis of Human Mind. _Thomson._--Laws of Thought. _Cousin._--Elements of Psychology. (Henry.) _Hume._--Treatise of Human Nature. Book I. Part I. V. REASONING. _Hamilton._--Supplementary Dissertation, Note A. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. _Stewart._--Intellectual Philosophy. Part II. _Locke._--On the Human Understanding. Book IV. _Whewell._--Philosophy of Inductive Sciences. _Buffier._--Premières Vérités. _Brown._--Philosophy of Human Mind. _Mill._--System of Logic. _Hamilton._--Discussions on Philosophy. (Turnbull Ed.) Article IV, Logic; also Appendix II. A and B. _Baynes._--New Analytic of Logical Forms. _Descartes._--Discours de la Méthode. _Condillac._--Art de Penser. _Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques._ Logique. _Pascal._--Pensées--de l'Art de Persuader. _Port-Royal._--Logique. _Aristotle._--Organon. VI. INTUITIVE CONCEPTION. FIRST PRINCIPLES. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. Essay VI., cap. III. _Hamilton._--Dissertation A. §§ 3, 4, 5. _Stewart._--Intellectual Philosophy. Part II., cap. I. _Coleridge._--Aids to Reflection. _Mill._--System of Logic. Book II., caps. V. and VI. _Buffier._--Premières Vérités. Part I., cap. VII. TIME, SPACE. _Cousin._--Cours de Philosophie. Tome II., Leçons XVII, XVIII. " Idem. Elements of Psychologie. Henry. Cap. III. _Locke._--Essay on the Human Understanding. Book II., cap. XXVI. _Stewart._--Philosophical Essays. Essay II., cap. II. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. Essay III., cap. II. _Mill._--Analysis of the Human Mind. Cap. XIV., § V. _Roger Collard._--Fragments, IX., X. _Kant._--Kritik rein. vernunft. Transcend. Æsthet. Part I., § II. _Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques._ Temps. Espace. _Hegel._--Encyclop. Philosoph. Wissench. Tsweiter Theil. Erst. Abschnitt. IDENTITY. _Locke._--Essay, etc. Book II., cap. XXVII. _Cousin._--Review of do. as above. Eléments Psychologie, cap. III. _Reid._--Intellectual Powers. Essay III., cap. III. _Mill._--Analysis, etc., cap. XIV., § VII. _Whately._--Logic--Appendix. On Ambiguous Terms. _Butler._--Dissertation on Identity. CAUSALITY. _Mill._--System of Logic. Book III., cap. XXI. _Whewell._--Philosophy of Inductive Sciences. Part I. Book III. _Locke._--Essay. Book II., cap. XXVI. _Tappan._--On the Will. Cap. II. Cause. _Bowen._--Metaphysics and Ethics. _Maine de Biran._--Examples des Leçons de Philosophie de Laromiquière. _Cousin._--OEuvres de Maine Biran. Preface. As above. El. Psychologie. cap. IV. THE BEAUTIFUL. _Kames._--Elements of Criticism. _Alison._--On Taste. _McDermot._--On Taste. _Stewart._--Philosophical Essays. Part II. _Brown._--Philosophy of the Human Mind. _Emotions of Beauty._ _Jouffroy._--Cours d'Esthetique. _Cousin._--Philosophy of the Beautiful. (Daniel, Trans.) _Kant._--Kritik der Urtheilskraft. _Hegel._--Cours d'Esthetique. (Benard, Tr.) THE RIGHT. _Stewart._--Active and Moral Powers. (Walker Ed.) _Brown._--Philosophy of the Human Mind. Ethical Science. _Butler._--Sermons. _Paley._--Moral Philosophy. _Adam Smith._--Theory of Moral Sentiments. _Upham._--Mental Philosophy. Vol. II. _Winslow._--Elements of Moral Philosophy. _Wayland._--Moral Philosophy. _Whewell._--Elements of Morality. _Jouffroy._--Introduction to Ethics. (Channing, Tr.) " Cours de Droit Natural. _Emile Saisset._--Manuel de Philosophie à l'usage des Coll. _Morals._ _Descartes._--Lettres. _Cicero._--De Officiis. _Aristotle._--Nicom. Eth. _Plato._--Republic and Gorgias. II. THE SENSIBILITIES _Stewart._--Active and Moral Powers. (Walker Ed.) _Reid._--Faculties of the Human Mind. Essay III. _Brown._--Philosophy of the Human Mind. _Emotions._ _Upham._--Mental Philosophy. Vol. II. _Cogan._--On the Passions. _Descartes._--Les Passions de l'Âme. _Condillac._--Traité des Sensations. _Damiron._--Cours de Philosophie. _De la Sensibilitè._ _Jouffroy._--Mélanges Philosophiques. _De l'Amour de Soi._ _Aristotle._--On the Soul. Books II. and III. III. THE WILL. _Edwards._--On the Will. _Tappan._--Review of do. _Day._--Review of do. _Bledsoe._--Examination of do. _I. Taylor._--Essay introductory to do. _Tappan._--On the Will. and do. on Moral Agency. _Mahan._--On the Will. _Upham._--On the Will. _Reid._--On the Faculties of the Human Soul. Essay IV. _Belsham._--Philosophy of the Human Mind. _Mill._--System of Logic. Book VI., cap. II. _Mill._--Analysis of the Human Mind. Cap. XXIV. _Cogan._--Ethical Questions. Question IV. _Stewart._--Active and Moral Powers. Cap. VI. _Reid._--Essays on Active Powers. Essay II. _Locke._--On the Human Understanding. Book II., cap. XXI. _Hamilton._--Philosophy of the Conditioned, cap. II., § 1. (O. W. Wight.) _Jouffroy._--Introduction to Ethics, § IV. _Leibnitz._--Essays de Théodicée. _Cousin._--Fragments Philosophiques. Preface. _Amédée Jacques._--Manuel de Phil. _Psychologie._ _Volonté._ XV.-XVII. _Maine de Biran._--OEuvres. Vol. IV. " Controversy with Clarke. _Cousin._--Psychologie. (Henry, Tr.) Cap. X. _Damiron._--Psychologie. Liv. I., § II., cap. III. _Emile Saisset._--Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques. Art. _Libertè._ * * * * * Transcriber's note: Many omissions of punctuation have been silently corrected, as have obvious typographical errors. Variations in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained. Inconsistencies in headings are as in the original. Duplicated section headings on consecutive lines have been removed. The section General Observations (page 94 and 162) has been added to the Table of Contents. References has been added to the Table of Contents. Corrections include: Page 55 "as that two straight lines should enclose a space" the "a" is missing in the original and has been added. Page 89 "The soul seated in its presence-chamber, the brain, can cognize nothing beyond and without, for nothing can get except where it is present." the first letter of "get" is missing. It has been assumed that get is the most likely intention. Page 435 No reference to Memdelssohn has been found. It is possibly a reference Moses Mendelssohn. Page 568 "In order to do this, there is needed an influence from without," The "do" is missing and has been added. The text is arbitrary about spacing of e. g. and i. e., as the spaced variant is in the majority, it has been used throughout. The author has wrongly spelled Leibniz as Leibnitz throughout. This has been retained. The references to M'Dermot in the text have been changed to McDermot to conform with the References. Likewise M'Cosh (p534) is almost certainly James McCosh. 
8910	----	THE SYSTEM OF NATURE; or, _THE LAWS_ of the MORAL AND PHYSICAL WORLD. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH OF M. DE MIRABAUD VOL. II. PRODUCTION NOTES: First published in French in 1770 under the pseudonym of Mirabaud. This e-book based on a facsimile reprint of an English translation originally published 1820-21. This e-text covers the second of the original two volumes. CONTENTS PART II. Of the Divinity.--Proofs of his existence.-- Of his attributes.--Of his influence over the happiness of man. CHAP. I. The origin of man's ideas upon the Divinity. CHAP. II. Of mythology.--Of theology CHAP. III. Of the confused and contradictory ideas of theology. CHAP. IV. Examination of the proofs of the existence of the Divinity, as given by Clarke. CHAP. V. Examination of the proofs offered by Descartes, Malebranche, Newton, &c. CHAP. VI. Of Pantheism; or of the natural ideas of the Divinity. CHAP. VII. Of Theism--Of the System of Optimism--Of Final Causes CHAP. VIII. Examination of the Advantages which result from Man's Notions on the Divinity;--of their Influence upon Morals;--upon Politics;--upon Science;--upon the Happiness of Nations, and that of individuals. CHAP. IX. Theological Notions cannot be the Basis of Morality.--Comparison between Theological Ethics and Natural Morality--Theology prejudicial to the Human Mind. CHAP. X. Man can form no Conclusion from the Ideas which are offered him of the Divinity.--Of their want of just Inference.--Of the Inutility of his Conduct. CHAP. XI Defence of the Sentiments contained in this Work.--Of Impiety.--Do there exist Atheists? CHAP. XII. Is what is termed Atheism, compatible with Morality? CHAP. XIII. Of the motives which lead to what is falsely called Atheism.--Can this System be dangerous?--Can it be embraced by the Illiterate? CHAP. XIV. A summary of the Code of Nature. A Brief Sketch of the Life and Writings of M. de Mirabaud MIRABAUD'S SYSTEM OF NATURE Translated from the Original BY SAMUEL WILKINSON PART II. ON THE DIVINITY:--PROOFS OF HIS EXISTENCE:--OF HIS ATTRIBUTES: OF HIS INFLUENCE OVER THE HAPPINESS OF MAN. CHAP. I. _The Origin of Man's Ideas upon the Divinity._ If man possessed the courage, if he had the requisite industry to recur to the source of those opinions which are most deeply engraven on his brain; if he rendered to himself a faithful account of the reasons which make him hold these opinions as sacred; if he coolly examined the basis of his hopes, the foundation of his fears, he would find that it very frequently happens, those objects, or those ideas which move him most powerfully, either have no real existence, or are words devoid of meaning, which terror has conjured up to explain some sudden disaster; that they are often phantoms engendered by a disordered imagination, modified by ignorance; the effect of an ardent mind distracted by contending passions, which prevent him from either reasoning justly, or consulting experience in his judgment; that this mind often labours with a precipitancy that throws his intellectual faculties into confusion; that bewilders his ideas; that consequently he gives a substance and a form to chimeras, to airy nothings, which he afterwards idolizes from sloth, reverences from prejudice. A sensible being placed in a nature where every part is in motion, has various feelings, in consequence of either the agreeable or disagreeable effects which he is obliged to experience from this continued action and re-action; in consequence he either finds himself happy or miserable; according to the quality of the sensations excited in him, he will love or fear, seek after or fly from, the real or supposed causes of such marked effects operated on his machine. But if he is ignorant of nature, if he is destitute of experience, he will frequently deceive himself as to these causes; for want of either capability or inclination to recur back to them, he will neither have a true knowledge of their energy, nor a clear idea of their mode of acting: thus until reiterated experience shall have formed his ideas, until the mirror of truth shall have shewn him the judgment he ought to make, he will be involved in trouble, a prey to incertitude, a victim to credulity. Man is a being who brings with him nothing into the world save an aptitude to feeling in a manner more or less lively according to his individual organization: he has no innate knowledge of any of the causes that act upon him: by degrees his faculty of feeling discovers to him their various qualities; he learns to judge of them; time familiarizes him with their properties; he attaches ideas to them, according to the manner in which they have affected him; these ideas are correct or otherwise, in a ratio to the soundness of his organic structure: his judgment is faulty or not, as these organs are either well or ill-constituted; in proportion as they are competent to afford him sure and reiterated experience. The first moments of man are marked by his wants; that is to say, the first impulse he receives is to conserve his existence; this he would not be able to maintain without the concurrence of many analogous causes: these wants in a sensible being, manifest themselves by a general languor, a sinking, a confusion in his machine, which gives him the consciousness of a painful sensation: this derangement subsists, is even augmented, until the cause suitable to remove it re-establishes the harmony so necessary to the existence of the human frame. Want, therefore, is the first evil man experiences; nevertheless it is requisite to the maintenance of his existence. Was it not for this derangement of his body, which obliges him to furnish its remedy, he would not be warned of the necessity of preserving the existence he has received. Without wants man would be an insensible machine, similar to a vegetable; like that he would be incapable of preserving himself; he would not be competent to using the means required to conserve his being. To his wants are to be ascribed his passions; his desires; the exercise of his corporeal functions; the play of his intellectual faculties: they are his wants that oblige him to think; that determine his will, that induce him to act; it is to satisfy them or rather to put an end to the painful sensations excited by their presence, that according to his capacity, to the natural sensibility of his soul, to the energies which are peculiar to himself, he gives play to his faculties, exerts the activity of his bodily strength, or displays the extensive powers of his mind. His wants being perpetual, he is obliged to labour without relaxation, to procure objects competent to satisfy them. In a word, it is owing to his multiplied wants that man's energy is kept in a state of continual activity: as soon as he ceases to have wants, he falls into inaction--becomes listless--declines into apathy--sinks into a languor that is incommodious to his feelings or prejudicial to his existence: this lethargic state of weariness lasts until new wants, by giving him fresh activity, rouse his dormant faculties--throw off his stupor--re-animate his vigour, and destroy the sluggishness to which he had become a prey. From hence it will be obvious that evil is necessary to man; without it he would neither be in a condition to know that which injures him; to avoid its presence; or to seek his own welfare: without this stimulus, he would differ in nothing from insensible, unorganized beings: if those evanescent evils which he calls _wants_, did not oblige him to call forth his faculties, to set his energies in motion, to cull experience, to compare objects, to discriminate them, to separate those which have the capabilities to injure him, from those which possess the means to benefit him, he would be insensible to happiness--inadequate to enjoyment. In short, _without evil man would be ignorant of good_; he would be continually exposed to perish like the leaf on a tree. He would resemble an infant, who, destitute of experience, runs the risque of meeting his destruction at every step he takes, unguarded by his nurse. What the nurse is to the child, experience is to the adult; when either are wanting, these children of different lustres generally go astray: frequently encounter disaster. Without evil he would be unable to judge of any thing; he would have no preference; his will would be without volition, he would be destitute of passions; desire would find no place in his heart; he would not revolt at the most disgusting objects; he would not strive to put them away; he would neither have stimuli to love, nor motives to fear any thing; he would be an insensible automaton; he would no longer be a man. If no evil had existed in this world, man would never have dreamt of those numerous divinities, to whom he has rendered such various modes of worship. If nature had permitted him easily to satisfy all his regenerating wants, if she had given him none but agreeable sensations, his days would have uninterruptedly rolled on in one perpetual uniformity; he would never have discovered his own nakedness; he would never have had motives to search after the unknown causes of things--to meditate in pain. Therefore man, always contented, would only have occupied himself with satisfying his wants; with enjoying the present, with feeling the influence of objects, that would unceasingly warn him of his existence in a mode that he must necessarily approve; nothing would alarm his heart; every thing would be analogous to his existence: he would neither know fear, experience distrust, nor have inquietude for the future: these feelings can only be the consequence of some troublesome sensation, which must have anteriorly affected him, or which by disturbing the harmony of his machine, has interrupted the course of his happiness; which has shewn him he is naked. Independent of those wants which in man renew themselves every instant; which he frequently finds it impossible to satisfy; every individual experiences a multiplicity of evils--he suffers from the inclemency of the seasons--he pines in penury--he is infected with plague--he is scourged by war--he is the victim of famine--he is afflicted with disease--he is the sport of a thousand accidents, &c. This is the reason why all men are fearful; why the whole human race are diffident. The knowledge he has of pain alarms him upon all unknown causes, that is to say, upon all those of which he has not yet experienced the effect; this experience made with precipitation, or if it be preferred, by instinct, places him on his guard against all those objects from the operation of which he is ignorant what consequences may result to himself. His inquietude is in proportion; his fears keep pace with the extent of the disorder which these objects produce in him; they are measured by their rarity, that is to say, by the inexperience he has of them; by the natural sensibility of the soul; and by the ardour of his imagination. The wore ignorant man is, the less experience he has, the more he is susceptible of fear; solitude, the obscurity of a forest, silence, and the darkness of night, desolate ruins, the roaring of the wind, sudden, confused noises, are objects of terror to all who are unaccustomed to these things. The uninformed man is a child whom every thing astonishes; who trembles at every thing he encounters: his alarms disappear, his fears diminish, his mind becomes calm, in proportion as experience familiarizes him, more or less, with natural effects; his fears cease entirely, as soon as he understands, or believes he understands, the causes that act; or when he knows how to avoid their effects. But if he cannot penetrate the causes which disturb him, if he cannot discover the agents by whom he suffers, if he cannot find to what account to place the confusion he experiences, his inquietude augments; his fears redouble; his imagination leads him astray; it exaggerates his evil; paints in a disorderly manner these unknown objects of his terror; magnifies their powers; then making an analogy between them and those terrific objects, with whom he is already acquainted, he suggests to himself the means he usually takes to mitigate their anger; to conciliate their kindness; he employs similar measures to soften the anger, to disarm the power, to avert the effects of the concealed cause which gives birth to his inquietudes, which fills him with anxiety, which alarms his fears. It is thus his weakness, aided by ignorance, renders him superstitious. There are very few men, even in our own day, who have sufficiently studied nature, who are fully apprised of physical causes, or with the effects they must necessarily produce. This ignorance, without doubt, was much greater in the more remote ages of the world, when the human mind, yet in its infancy, had not collected that experience, taken that expansion, made those strides towards improvement, which distinguishes the present from the past. Savages dispersed, erratic, thinly scattered up and down, knew the course of nature either very imperfectly or not at all; society alone perfects human knowledge: it requires not only multiplied but combined efforts to unravel the secrets of nature. This granted, all natural causes were mysteries to our wandering ancestors; the entire of nature was an enigma to them; all its phenomena was marvellous, every event inspired terror to beings who were destitute of experience; almost every thing, they saw must have appeared to them strange, unusual, contrary to their idea of the order of things. It cannot then furnish matter for surprise, if we behold men in the present day trembling at the sight of those objects which have formerly filled their fathers with dismay. _Eclipse, comets, meteors_, were, in ancient days, subjects of alarm to all the people of the earth: these effects, so natural in the eyes of the sound philosopher, who has by degrees fathomed their true causes, have yet the right, possess the power, to alarm the most numerous, to excite the fears of the least instructed part of modern nations. The people of the present day, as well as their ignorant ancestors, find something marvellous, believe there is a supernatural agency in all those objects to which their eyes are unaccustomed; they consider all those unknown causes as wonderful, that act with a force of which their mind has no idea it is possible the known agents are capable. The ignorant see wonders _prodigies, miracles_, in all those striking effects of which they are unable to render themselves a satisfactory account; all the causes which produce them they think _supernatural_; this, however, really implies nothing more than that they are not familiar to them, or that they have not hitherto witnessed natural agents, whose energy was equal to the production of effects so rare, so astonishing, as those with which their sight has been appalled. Besides the ordinary phenomena to which nations were witnesses without being competent to unravel the causes, they have in times very remote from ours, experienced calamities, whether general or local, which filled them with the most cruel inquietude; which plunged them into an abyss of consternation. The traditions of all people, the annals of all nations, recal, even at this day, melancholy events, physical disasters, dreadful catastrophes, which had the effect of spreading universal terror among our forefathers, But when history should be silent on these stupendous revolutions, would not our own reflection on what passes under our eyes be sufficient to convince us, that all parts of our globe have been, and following the course of things, will necessarily be again violently agitated, overturned, changed, overflowed, in a state of conflagration? Vast continents have been inundated, seas breaking their limits have usurped the dominion of the earth; at length retiring, these waters have left striking, proofs of their presence, by the marine vestiges of shells, skeletons of sea fish, &c. which the attentive observer meets with at every step, in the bowels of those fertile countries we now inhabit--subterraneous fires have opened to themselves the most frightful volcanoes, whose craters frequently issue destruction on every side. In short, the elements unloosed, have at various times, disputed among themselves the empire of our globe; this exhibits evidence of the fact, by those vast heaps of wreck, those stupendous ruins spread over its surface. What, then, must have been the fears of mankind, who in those countries believed he beheld the entire of nature armed against his peace, menacing with destruction his very abode? What must have been the inquietude of a people taken thus unprovided, who fancied they saw nature cruelly labouring to their annihilation? Who beheld a world ready to be dashed into atoms; who witnessed the earth suddenly rent asunder; whose yawning chasm was the grave of large cities, whole provinces, entire nations? What ideas must mortals, thus overwhelmed with terror, form to themselves of the irresistible cause that could produce such extended effects? Without doubt they did not attribute these wide spreading calamities to nature; neither did they conceive they were mere physical causes; they could not suspect she was the author, the accomplice of the confusion she herself experienced; they did not see that these tremendous revolutions, these overpowering disorders, were the necessary result of her immutable laws; that they contributed to the general order by which she subsists; that, in point of fact, there was nothing more surprising in the inundation of large portions of the earth, in the swallowing up an entire nation, in a volcanic conflagration spreading destruction over whole provinces, than there is in a stone falling to the earth, or the death of a fly; that each equally has its spring in the necessity of things. It was under these astounding circumstances, that nations, bathed in the most bitter tears, perplexed with the most frightful visions, electrified with terror, not believing there existed on this mundane ball, causes sufficiently powerful to operate the gigantic phenomena that filled their minds with dismay, carried their streaming eyes towards heaven, where their tremulous fears led them to suppose these unknown agents, whose unprovoked enmity destroyed, their earthly felicity, could alone reside. It was in the lap of ignorance, in the season of alarm, in the bosom of calamity, that mankind ever formed his first notions of the _Divinity_. From hence it is obvious that his ideas on this subject are to be suspected, that his notions are in a great measure false, that they are always afflicting. Indeed, upon whatever part of our sphere we cast our eyes, whether it be upon the frozen climates of the north, upon the parching regions of the south, or under the more temperate zones, we every where behold the people when assailed by misfortunes, have either made to themselves national gods, or else have adopted those which have been given them by their conquerors; before these beings, either of their own creation or adoption, they have tremblingly prostrated themselves in the hour of calamity, soliciting relief; have ignorantly attributed to blocks of stone, or to men like themselves, those natural effects which were above their comprehension; the inhabitants of many nations, not contented with the national gods, made each to himself one or more gods, which he supposed presided exclusively over his own household, from whom he supposed he derived his own peculiar happiness, to whom he attributed all his domestic misfortunes. The idea of these powerful agents, these supposed distributors of good and evil, was always associated with that of terror; their name was never pronounced without recalling to man's wind either his own particular calamities or those of his fathers. In many places man trembles at this day, because his progenitors have trembled for thousands of years past. The thought of his gods always awakened in man the most afflicting ideas. If he recurred to the source of his actual fears, to the commencement of those melancholy impressions that stamp themselves in his mind when their name is announced, he would find it in the conflagrations, in the revolutions, in those extended disasters, that have at various times destroyed large portions of the human race; that overwhelmed with dismay those miserable beings who escaped the destruction of the earth; these in transmitting to posterity, the tradition of such afflicting events, have also transmitted to him their fears; have delivered down to their successors, those gloomy ideas which their bewildered imaginations, coupled with their barbarous ignorance of natural causes, had formed to them of the anger of their irritated gods, to which their alarm falsely attributed these sweeping disasters. If the gods of nations had their birth in the bosom of alarm, it was again in that of despair that each individual formed the unknown power that he made exclusively for himself. Ignorant of physical causes, unpractised in their mode of action, unaccustomed to their effects, whenever he experienced any serious misfortune, whenever he was afflicted with any grievous sensation, he was at a loss how to account for it; he therefore attributed it to his household gods, to whom he made an immediate supplication for assistance, or rather for forbearance of further affliction: this disposition in man has been finely pourtrayed by Aesop in his fable of "the Waggoner and Hercules." The motion which in despight of himself was excited in his machine, his diseases, his troubles, his passions, his inquietude, the painful alterations his frame underwent, without his being able to fathom the true causes; at length death, of which the aspect in so formidable to a being strongly attached to existence, were effects he looked upon either as supernatural, or else he conceived they were repugnant to his actual nature; he attributed them to some mighty cause, which maugre all his efforts, disposed of him at each, moment. Thus palsied with alarm, benumbed with terror, he pensively meditated upon his sorrows; agitated with fear, he sought for means to avert the calamities that threatened him with destruction; his imagination, thus rendered desperate by his endurance of evils which he found inevitable, formed to him those phantoms which he called gods; before whom he trembled from a consciousness of his own weakness; thus disposed, he endeavoured by prostration, by sacrifices, by prayers, to disarm the anger of these imaginary beings to which his trepidation had given birth; whom he ignorantly imagined to be the cause of his misery, whom his fancy painted to him as endowed with the power of alleviating his sufferings: it was thus in the extremity of his grief, in the exacerbation of his mind, weighed down with misfortune, that unhappy man fashioned those chimeras which filled him with the most gloomy ideas, which he transmitted to his posterity, as the surest means of avoiding the evils to which he had been himself subjected. Man never judges of those objects of which he is ignorant, but through the medium of those which come within his knowledge: thus man, taking himself for the model, ascribed will, intelligence, design, projects, passions; in a word, qualities analogous to his own, to all those unknown causes of which he experienced the action. As soon as a visible or supposed cause affects him in an agreeable manner, or in a mode favourable to his existence, he concludes it to be good, to be well intentioned towards him: on the contrary, he judges all those to be bad in their nature, evilly disposed, to have the intention of injuring him, which cause him any painful sensations. He attributes views, plans, a system of conduct like his own, to every thing which to his limited ideas appears of itself to produce connected effects; to act with regularity; to constantly operate in the same manner; that uniformly produces the same sensations in his own person. According to these notions, which he always borrows from himself, from his own peculiar mode of action, he either loves or fears those objects which have affected him; he in consequence approaches them with confidence or timidity; seeks after them or flies from them in proportion as the feelings they have excited are either pleasant or painful. Having travelled thus far, he presently addresses them; he invokes their aid; prays to them for succour; conjures them to cease his afflictions; to forbear tormenting him; as he finds himself sensible to presents, pleased with submission, he tries to win them to his interests by humiliation, by sacrifices; he exercises towards them the hospitality he himself loves; he gives them an asylum; he builds them a dwelling; he furnishes them with costly raiment; he makes their altars smoke with delicious food; he proffers to their acceptance the earliest flowers of spring; the finest fruits of autumn; the rich grain of summer; in short he sets before them all those things which he thinks will please them the most, because he himself places the highest value on them. These dispositions enable us to account for the formation of tutelary gods, of lares, of larvae, which every man makes to himself in savage and unpolished nations. Thus we perceive that weak superstitious mortals, ignorant of truth, devoid of experience, regard as the arbiters of their fate, as the dispensers of good and evil, animals, stones, unformed inanimate substances, which the effort of their heated imaginations transform into gods, whom they invest with intelligence, whom they clothe with desires, to whom they give volition. Another disposition which serves to deceive the savage man, which will equally deceive those whom reason shall not enlighten on these subjects, is his attachment to omens; or the fortuitous concurrence of certain effects, with causes which have not produced them; the co-existence of these effects with certain causes, which have not the slightest connection with them, has frequently led astray very intelligent beings; nations who considered themselves very enlightened; who have either been disinclined or unable to disentangle the one from the other: thus the savage attributes bounty or the will to render him service, to any object whether animate or inanimate, such as a stone of a certain form, a rock, a mountain, a tree, a serpent, an owl, &c. if every time he encounters these objects in a certain position, it should so happen that he is more than ordinarily successful in hunting, that he should take an unusual quantity of fish, that he should be victorious in war, or that he should compass any enterprize whatever that he may at that moment undertake: the same savage will be quite as gratuitous in attaching malice, wickedness, the determination to injure him, to either the same object in a different position, or any others in a given posture, which way have met his eyes on those days when he shall have suffered some grievous accident, have been very unsuccessful in his undertakings, unfortunate in the chace, disappointed in his draught of fish: incapable of reasoning he connects these effects with causes, that reflection would convince him have nothing in common with each other; that are entirely due to physical causes, to necessary circumstances, over which neither himself nor his omens have the least controul: nevertheless he finds it much easier to attribute them to these imaginary causes; he therefore _deifies_ them; looks upon them as either his guardian angels, or else as his most inveterate enemies. Having invested them with supernatural powers, he becomes anxious to explain to himself their mode of action; his self-love prevents his seeking elsewhere for the model: thus he assigns them all those motives that actuate himself; he endows them with passions; he gives them design--intelligence--will--imagines they can either injure him or benefit him, as he may render them propitious or otherwise to his views: he ends with worshipping them; with paying them divine honours; he appoints them priests; or at least always consults them before he undertakes any object of moment: such is their influence, that if they put on the evil position, he will lay aside the most important undertaking. The savage in this is never more than an infant, that is angry with the object that displeases him; just like the dog who gnaws the stone by which he has been wounded, without recurring to the hand by which it was thrown. Such is the foundation of man's faith, in either happy or unhappy omens: devoid of experience, unaccustomed to reason with precision, fearing to call in the evidence of truth, he looks upon them either as gods themselves, or else as warnings given him by his other gods, to whom he attributes the faculties of sagacity and foresight, of which he is himself miserably deficient. Ignorance, when involved in disaster, when immersed in trouble, believes a stone, a reptile, a bird, much better instructed than himself. The slender observation of the ignorant only serves to render him more superstitious; he sees certain birds announce by their flight, by their cries, certain changes in the weather, such as cold, heat, rain, storms; he beholds at certain periods, vapours arise from the bottom of some particular caverns? there needs nothing further to impress upon him the belief, that these beings possess the knowledge of future events; enjoy the gifts of prophecy: he looks upon them as supernatural agents, employed by his gods: it is thus he becomes the dupe to his own credulity. If by degrees the truth flashing occasionally on his mind, experience and reflection arrive at undeceiving him, with respect to the power, the intelligence, the virtues actually residing in these objects; he at least supposes them put in activity by some secret, some hidden cause; that they are the instruments, employed by some invisible agent, who is either friendly or inimical to his welfare. To this concealed agent, therefore, he addresses himself; pays him his vows; emplores his assistance; deprecates his wrath; seeks to propitiate him to his interests; is willing to soften his anger; for this purpose he employs the same means, of which he avails himself, either to appease or gain over the beings of his own species. Societies in their origin, seeing themselves frequently afflicted by nature, supposed either the elements, or the concealed powers who regulated them, possessed a will, views, wants, desires, similar to their own. From hence, the sacrifices imagined to nourish them; the libations poured out to them; the steams, the incense to gratify their olfactory nerves. Their superstition led them to believe these elements or their irritated movers were to be appeased like irritated man, by prayers, by humiliation, by presents. Their imagination was ransacked to discover the presents that would be most acceptable in their eyes; to ascertain the oblations that would be most agreeable, the sacrifices that would most surely propitiate their kindness: as these did not make known their inclinations, man differed with his fellow on those most suitable; each followed his own disposition; or rather each offered what was most estimable in his own eyes; hence arose differences never to be reconciled the bitterest animosities; the most unconquerable aversions; the most, destructive jealousies! Thus some brought the fruits of the earth, others offered sheaves of corn: some strewed flowers over their fanes; some decorated them with the most costly jewels; some served them with meats; others sacrificed lambs, heifers, bulls; at length such was their delirium, such the wildness of their imaginations, that they stained their altars with human gore, made oblations of young children immolated virgins, to appease the anger of these supposed deities. The old men, as having the most experience, were usually charged with the conduct of these peace-offerings, from whence, the name PRIEST; [Greek letters], _presbos_, in the Greek meaning an old man. These accompanied them with ceremonies, instituted rites, used precautions by consulting omens; adopted formalities, retraced to their fellow citizens the notions transmitted to them by their forefathers; collected the observations made by their ancestors; repeated the fables they had received; added commentaries of their own; subjoined supplications to the idols at whose shrine they were sacrificing. It is thus the sacerdotal order was established; thus that public worship was established; by degrees each community formed a body of tenets to be observed by the citizens; these were transmitted from race to race; held sacred out of reverence for their fathers; at length it was deemed sacrilege to doubt these pandects in any one particular; even the errors, that had crept into them with time, were beheld with reverential awe; he that ventured to reason upon them, was looked upon as an enemy to the commonwealth; as one whose impiety drew down upon them the vengeance of these adored beings, to which alone imagination had given birth; not contented with adopting the rituals, with following the ceremonies invented by themselves, one community waged war against another, to oblige it to receive their particular creeds; which the old men who regulated them, declared would infallibly win them the favor of their tutelary deities: thus very often to conciliate their favor, the victorious party immolated on the altars of their gods, the bodies of their unhappy captives; frequently they carried their savage barbarity the length of exterminating whole nations, who happened to worship gods different from their own: thus it frequently happened, that the friends of the serpent, when victorious, covered his altars with the mangled carcases of the worshippers of the stone, whom the fortune of war had placed in their hands: such were the unformed, the precarious elements of which rude nations every where availed themselves to compose their superstitions: they were always a system of conduct invented by imagination: conceived in ignorance, organized in misfortune, to render the unknown powers, to whom they believed nature was submitted, either favorable to their views, or to, induce them to cease those afflictions, which natural causes, for the wisest purposes, were continually heaping upon them; thus some irascible, at the same time placable being, was always chosen for the basis of the adopted superstition; it was upon these puerile tenets, upon these absurd notions, that the old men or the priests rested their doctrines; founded their rights; established their authority: it was to render these fanciful beings friendly to the race of man, that they erected, temples, raised altars, loaded them with wealth; in short, it was from such rude foundations, that arose the magnificent structure of superstition; under which man trembled for thousands of years: which governed the condition of society, which determined the actions of the people, gave the tone to the character, deluged the earth with blood, for such a long series of ages. But although these superstitions were originally invented by savages, they still have the power of regulating the fate of many civilized nations, who are not less tenacious of their chimeras, than their rude progenitors. These systems, so ruinous in their principles, have been variously modified by the human mind, of which it is the essence, to labour incessantly on unknown objects; it always, commences by attaching to these, a very first-rate importance, which it afterwards never dares coolly to examine. Such was the course of man's imagination, in the successive ideas which he either formed to himself, or which he received from his fathers, upon the divinity. The first theology of man was grounded on fear, modelled by ignorance: either afflicted or benefitted by the elements, he adored these elements themselves; by a parity of reasoning, if reasoning it can be called, he extended his reverence to every material, coarse object; he afterwards rendered his homage to the agents he supposed presiding over these elements; to powerful genii; to inferior genii; to heroes; to men endowed with either great or striking qualities. Time, aided by reflection, with here and there a slight corruscation of truth, induced him in some places to relinquish his original ideas; he believed he simplified the thing by lessening the number of his gods, but he achieved nothing by this towards attaining to the truth; in recurring from cause to cause man finished by losing sight of every thing; in this obscurity, in this dark abyss, his mind still laboured, he formed new chimeras, he made new gods, or rather he formed a very complex machinery; still, as before, whenever he could not account for any phenomenon that struck his sight, he was unwilling to ascribe it to physical causes; and the name of his Divinity, whatever that might happen to be, was always brought in to supply his own ignorance of natural causes. If a faithful account was rendered of man's ideas upon the Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word _Gods_ has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of natural, the source of known causes ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods; thus giving a vague definition to an unknown cause, at which either his idleness, or his limited knowledge, obliges him to stop. When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon, the novelty or the extent of which strikes him with wonder, but of which his ignorance precludes him from unravelling the true cause, or which he believes the natural powers with which he is acquainted are inadequate to bring forth; does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? Ignorance may be said to be the inheritance of the generality of men; these attribute to their gods not only those uncommon effects that burst upon their senses with an astounding force, but also the most simple events, the causes of which are the most easy to be known to whoever shall be willing to meditate upon them. In short, man has always respected those unknown causes, those surprising effects which his ignorance prevented him from fathoming. But does this afford us one single, correct idea of the _Divinity_? Can it be possible we are acting rationally, thus eternally to make him the agent of our stupidity, of our sloth, of our want of information on natural causes? Do we, in fact, pay any kind of adoration to this being, by thus bringing him forth on every trifling occasion, to solve the difficulties ignorance throws in our way? Of whatever nature this great cause of causes may be, it is evident to the slightest reflection that he has been sedulous to conceal himself from our view; that he has rendered it impossible for us to have the least acquaintance with him, except through the medium of nature, which he has unquestionably rendered competent to every thing: this is the rich banquet spread before man; he is invited to partake, with a welcome he has no right to dispute; to enjoy therefore is to obey; to be happy is to render that worship which must make him most acceptable; _to be happy himself is to make others happy; to make others happy is to be virtuous; to be virtuous he must revere truth: to know what truth is, he must examine with caution, scrutinize with severity, every opinion he adopts:_ this granted, is it at all consistent with the majesty of the Divinity, is it not insulting to such a being to clothe him with our wayward passions; to ascribe to him designs similar to our narrow view of things; to give him our filthy desires; to suppose he can be guided by our finite conceptions; to bring him on a level with frail humanity, by investing him with our qualities, however much we may exaggerate them; to indulge an opinion that he can either act or think as we do; to imagine he can in any manner resemble such a feeble play-thing, as is the greatest, the most distinguished man? No! it is to degrade him in the eye of reason; to violate every regard for truth; to set moral decency at defiance; to fall back into the depth of cimmerian darkness. Let man therefore sit down cheerfully to the feast; let him contentedly partake of what he finds; but let him not worry the Divinity with his useless prayers, with his shallow-sighted requests, to solicit at his hands that which, if granted, would in all probability be the most injurious for himself; these supplications are, in fact, at once to say, that with our limited experience, with our slender knowledge, we better understand what is suitable to our condition, what is convenient to our welfare, than the mighty _Cause of all causes_ who has left us in the hands of nature: it is to be presumptuous in the highest degree of presumption; it is impiously to endeavour to lift up a veil which it is evidently forbidden man to touch; that even his most strenuous efforts attempt in vain. It remains, then, to inquire, if man can reasonably flatter himself with obtaining a perfect knowledge of the power of nature; of the properties of the beings she contains; of the effects which may result from their various combinations? Do we know why the magnet attracts iron? Are we better acquainted with the cause of polar attraction? Are we in a condition to explain the phenomena of light, electricity, elasticity? Do we understand the mechanism by which that modification of our brain, which we tall volition, puts our arm or our legs into motion? Can we render to ourselves an account of the manner in which our eyes behold objects, in which our ears receive sounds, in which our mind conceives ideas? All we know upon these subjects is, that they are so. If then we are incapable of accounting for the most ordinary phenomena, which nature daily exhibits to us, by what chain of reasoning do we refuse to her the power of producing other effects equally incomprehensible to us? Shall we be more instructed, when every time we behold an effect of which we are not in a capacity to develope the cause, we may idly say, this effect is produced by the power, by the will of God? Undoubtedly it is the great _Cause of causes_ must have produced every thing; but is it not lessening the true dignity of the Divinity, to introduce him as interfering in every operation of nature; nay, in every action of so insignificant a creature as man? As a mere agent executing his own eternal, immutable laws; when experience, when reflection, when the evidence of all we contemplate, warrants the idea, that this ineffable being has rendered nature competent to every effect, by giving her those irrevocable laws, that eternal, unchangeable system, according to which all the beings she contains must eternally act? Is it not more worthy the exalted mind of the GREAT PARENT OF PARENTS, _ens entium_, more consistent with truth, to suppose that his wisdom in giving these immutable, these eternal laws to the macrocosm, foresaw every thing that could possibly be requisite for the happiness of the beings contained in it; that therefore he left it to the invariable operation of a system, which never can produce any effect that is not the best possible that circumstances however viewed will admit: that consequently the natural activity of the human mind, which is itself the result of this eternal action, was purposely given to man, that he might endeavour to fathom, that he might strive to unravel, that he might seek out the concatenation of these laws, in order to furnish remedies against the evils produced by ignorance. How many discoveries in the great science of natural philosophy has mankind progressively made, which the ignorant prejudices of our forefathers on their first announcement considered as impious, as displeasing to the Divinity, as heretical profanations, which could only be expiated by the sacrifice of the enquiring individuals; to whose labour their posterity owes such an infinity of gratitude? Even in modern days we have seen a SOCRATES destroyed, a GALLILEO condemned, whilst multitudes of other benefactors to mankind have been held in contempt by their uninformed cotemporaries, for those very researches into nature which the present generation hold in the highest veneration. _Whenever ignorant priests are permitted to guide the opinions of nations, science can make but a very slender progress:_ natural discoveries will be always held inimical to the interest of bigotted superstitious men. It may, to the minds of infatuated mortals, to the shallow comprehension of prejudiced beings, appear very pious to reply on every occasion our gods do this, our gods do that; but to the contemplative philosopher, to the man of reason, to the real adorers of the great _Cause of causes_, it will never be convincing, that a sound, a mere word, can attach the reason of things; can have more than a fixed sense; can suffice to explain problems. The word GOD is for the most part used to denote the impenetrable cause of those effects which astonish mankind; which man is not competent to explain. But is not this wilful idleness? Is it not inconsistent with our nature? Is it not being truly impious, to sit down with those fine faculties we have received, and give the answer of a child to every thing we do not understand; or rather which our own sloth, or our own want of industry has prevented us from knowing? Ought we not rather to redouble our efforts to penetrate the cause of those phenomena which strike our mind? Is not this, in fact, the duty we owe to the great, the universal Parent? When we have given this answer, what have we said? nothing but what every one knows. Could the great _Cause of causes_ make the whole, without also making its part? But does it of necessity follow that he executes every trifling operation, when he has so noble an agent as his own nature, whose laws he has rendered unchangeable, whose scale of operations can never deviate from the eternal routine he has marked out for her and all the beings she embraces? Whose secrets, if sought out, contain the true balsam of life--the sovereign remedy for all the diseases of man. When we shall be ingenuous with ourselves, we shall be obliged to agree that it was uniformly the ignorance in which our ancestors were involved, their want of knowledge of natural causes, their unenlightened ideas on the powers of nature, which gave birth to the gods they worshipped; that it is, again, the impossibility which the greater part of mankind find to withdraw, themselves out of this ignorance, the difficulty they consequently find to form to themselves simple ideas of the formation of things, the labour that is required to discover the true sources of those events, which they either admire or fear, that makes them believe these ideas are necessary to enable them to render an account of those phenomena, to which their own sluggishness renders them incompetent to recur. Here, without doubt, is the reason they treat all those as irrational who do not see the necessity of admitting an unknown agent, or some secret energy, which for want of being acquainted with Nature, they have placed out of herself. The phenomena of nature necessarily breed various sentiments in man: some he thinks favorable to him, some prejudicial, while the whole is only what it can be. Some excite his love, his admiration, his gratitude; others fill him with trouble, cause aversion, drive him to despair. According to the various sensations he experiences, he either loves or fears the causes to which he attributes the effects, which produce in him these different passions: these sentiments are commensurate with the effects he experiences; his admiration is enhanced, his fears are augmented, in the same ratio as the phenomena which strikes his senses are more or less extensive, more or less irresistible or interesting to him. Man necessarily makes himself the centre of nature; indeed he can only judge of things, as he is himself affected by them; he can only love that which he thinks favorable to his being; he hates, he fears every thing which causes him to suffer: in short, as we have seen in the former volume, he calls confusion every thing that deranges the economy of his machine; he believes all is in order, as soon as he experiences nothing but what is suitable to his peculiar mode of existence. By a necessary consequence of these ideas, man firmly believes that the entire of nature was made for him alone; that it was only himself which she had in view in all her works; or rather that the powerful cause to which this nature was subordinate, had only for object man and his convenience, in all the stupendous effects which are produced in the universe. If there existed on this earth other thinking beings besides man, they would fall exactly into similar prejudices with himself; it is a sentiment founded upon that predilection which each individual necessarily has for himself; a predilection that will subsist until reason, aided by experience, in pointing out the truth, shall have rectified his errors. Thus, whenever man is contented, whenever every thing is in order with respect to himself, he either admires or loves the causes to which he believes he is indebted for his welfare; when he becomes discontented with his mode of existence, he either fears or hates the cause which he supposes has produced these afflicting effects. But his welfare confounds itself with his existence; it ceases to make itself felt when it has become habitual, when it has been of long continuance; he then thinks it is inherrent to his essence; he concludes from it that he is formed to be always happy; he finds it natural that every thing should concur to the maintenance of his being. It is by no means the same when he experiences a mode of existence that is displeasing to himself: the man who suffers is quite astonished at the change which his taken place in his machine; he judges it to be contrary to the entire of nature, because it is incommodious to his own particular nature; he, imagines those events by which he is wounded, to be contrary to the order of things; he believes that nature is deranged every time she does not procure for him that mode of feeling which is suitable to his ideas: he concludes from these suppositions that nature, or rather that the agent who moves her; is irritated against him. It is thus that man, almost insensible to good, feels evil in a very lively manner; the first he believes natural, the other he thinks opposed to nature. He is either ignorant, or forgets, that he constitutes part of a whole, formed by the assemblage of substances, of which some are analogous, others heterogeneous; that the various beings of which nature is composed, are endowed with a variety of properties, by virtue of which they act diversely on the bodies who find themselves within the sphere of their action; that some have an aptitude to attraction, whilst it is of the essence of others to repel; that even those bodies that attract at one distance, repel at another; that the peculiar attractions and repulsions of the particles of bodies perpetually oppose, invariably counteract the general ones of the masses of matter: he does not perceive that these beings, as destitute of goodness, as devoid of malice, act only according to their respective essences; follow the laws their properties impose upon them; without being in capacity to act otherwise than they do. It is, therefore, for want of being acquainted with these things, that he looks upon the great Author of nature, the great _Cause of causes_, as the immediate cause of those evils to which he is submitted; that he judges erroneously when he imagines that the Divinity is exasperated against him. The fact is, man believes that his welfare is a debt due to him from nature; that when he suffers evil she does him an injustice; fully persuaded that this nature was made solely for himself, he cannot conceive she would make him, who is her lord paramount, suffer, if she was not moved thereto by a power who is inimical to his happiness; who has reasons with which he is unacquainted for afflicting, who has motives which he wishes to discover, for punishing him. From hence it will be obvious, that evil, much more than good, is the true motive of those researches which man has made concerning the Divinity--of those ideas which he has formed to himself--of the conduct he has held towards him. The admiration of the works of nature, or the acknowledgement of its goodness, seem never alone to have determined the human species to recur painfully by thought to the source of these things; familiarized at once with all those effects which are favourable to his existence, he does not by any means give himself the same trouble to seek the causes, that he does to discover those which disquiet him, or by which he is afflicted. Thus, in reflecting upon the Divinity, it was generally upon the cause of his evils that man meditated; his meditations were fruitless, because the evil he experiences, as well as the good he partakes, are equally necessary effects of natural causes, to which his mind ought rather to have bent its force, than to have invented fictitious causes of which he never could form to himself any but false ideas; seeing that he always borrowed them, from his own peculiar mariner of existing, acting, and feeling. Obstinately refusing to see any thing, but himself, he never became acquainted with that universal nature of which he constitutes such a very feeble part. The slightest reflection, however, would have been sufficient to undeceive him on these erroneous ideas. Everything tends to prove that good and evil are modes of existence that depend upon causes by which a man is moved; that a sensible being is obliged to experience them. In a nature composed of a multitude of beings infinitely varied, the shock occasioned by the collision of discordant matter must necessarily disturb the order, derange the mode of existence of those beings who have no analogy with them: these act in every thing they do after certain laws, which are in themselves immutable; the good or evil, therefore, which man experiences, are necessary consequences of the qualities inherent to the beings, within whose sphere of action he is found. Our birth, which we call a benefit, is an effect as necessary as our death, which we contemplate as an injustice of fate: it is of the nature of all analogous beings to unite themselves to form a whole: it is of the nature of all compound beings to be destroyed, or to dissolve themselves; some maintain their union for a longer period than others; some disperse very quickly, as the ephemeron; some endure for ages, as the planets; every being in dissolving itself gives birth to new beings; these are destroyed in their turn; to execute the eternal, the immutable laws of a nature that only exists by the continual changes that all its parts undergo. Thus nature cannot be accused of malice, since every thing that takes place in it is necessary--is produced by an invariable system, to which every other being, as well as herself, is eternally subjected. The same igneous matter that in man is the principle of life, frequently becomes the principle of his destruction, either by the conflagration of a city, the explosion of a volcano, or his mad passion for war. The aqueous fluid that circulates through his machine, so essentially necessary to his actual existence, frequently becomes too abundant, and terminates him by suffocation; is the cause of those inundations which sometimes swallow up both the earth and its inhabitants. The air, without which he is not able to respire, is the cause of those hurricanes, of those tempests, which frequently render useless the labour of mortals. These elements are obliged to burst their bonds, when they are combined in a certain manner; their necessary but fatal consequences are those ravages, those contagions, those famines, those diseases, those various scourges, against which man, with streaming eyes and violent emotions, vainly implores the aid of those powers who are deaf to his cries: his prayers are never granted; but the same necessity which afflicted him, the same immutable laws which overwhelmed him with trouble, replaces things in the order he finds suitable to his species: a relative order of things which was, is, and always will be the only standard of his judgment. Man, however, made no such simple reflections: he either did not or would not perceive that every thing in nature acted by invariable laws; he continued stedfast in contemplating the good of which he was partaker, as a favor; in considering the evil he experienced, as a sign of anger in this nature, which he supposed to be animated by the same passions as himself or at least that it was governed by secret agents, who acted after his own manner, who obliged it to execute their will, that was sometimes favourable, sometimes inimical to the human species. It was to these supposed agents, with whom in the sunshine of his prosperity he was but little occupied, that in the bosom of his calamity he addressed his prayers; he thanked them, however, for their favours, fearing lest their ingratitude might farther provoke their fury: thus when assailed by disaster, when afflicted with disease, he invoked them with fervor: he required them to change in his favor the mode of acting which was the very essence of beings; he was willing that to make the slightest evil he experienced cease, that the eternal chain of things might be broken; and the unerring, undeviating course of nature might he arrested. It was upon such ridiculous pretensions, that were founded those supplications, those fervent prayers, which mortals, almost always discontented with their fate, never in accord in their respective desires, addressed to their gods. They were unceasingly upon their knees before the altars, were ever prostrate before the power of the beings, whom they judged had the right of commanding nature; who they supposed to have sufficient energy to divert her course; who they considered to possess the means to make her subservient to their particular views; thus each hoped by presents, by humiliation, to induce them to oblige this nature, to satisfy the discordant desires of their race. The sick man, expiring in his bed, asks that the humours accumulated in his body should in an instant lose those properties which renders them injurious to his existence; that by an act of their puissance, his gods should renew or recreate the springs of a machine worn out by infirmities. The cultivator of a low swampy country, makes complaint of the abundance of rain with which his fields are inundated; whilst the inhabitant of the hill, raises his thanks for the favors he receives, solicits a continuance of that which causes the despair of his neighbour. In this, each is willing to have a god for himself, and asks according to his momentary caprices, to his fluctuating wants, that the invariable essence of things, should be continually changed in his favour. From this it must be obvious, that man every moment asks a _miracle_ to be wrought in his support. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that he displayed such ready credulity, that he adopted with such facility the relation of the marvellous deeds which were universally announced to him as the acts of the power, or the effects of the benevolence, of the various gods which presided over the nations of the earth: these wonderful tales, which were offered to his acceptance, as the most indubitable proofs of the empire of these gods over nature, which man always found deaf to his entreaties, were readily accredited by him; in the expectation, that if he could gain them over to his interest, this nature, which he found so sullen, so little disposed to lend herself to his views, would then be controuled in his own favor. By a necessary consequence of these ideas, nature was despoiled of all power; she was contemplated only as a passive instrument, who acted at the will, under the influence of the numerous, all-powerful agents to whom the various superstitions had rendered her subordinate. It was thus for want of contemplating nature under her true point of view, that man has mistaken her entirely, that he believed her incapable of producing any thing by herself; that he ascribed the honor of all those productions, whether advantageous or disadvantageous to the human species, to fictitious powers, whom he always clothed with his own peculiar dispositions, only he aggrandized their force. In short, it was upon the ruins of nature, that man erected the imaginary colossus of superstition, that he reared the _altars of a Jupiter, the temples of an Apollo_. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them. As soon as man becomes enlightened, his powers augment, his resources increase in a ratio with his knowledge; the sciences, the protecting arts, industrious application, furnish him assistance; experience encourages his progress, truth procures for him the means of resisting the efforts of many causes, which cease to alarm him as soon as he obtains a correct knowledge of them. In a word, his terrors dissipate in proportion as his mind becomes enlightened, because his trepidation is ever commensurate with his ignorance, and furnishes this great lesson, that _man, instructed by truth, ceases to be superstitious_. CHAP. II. _Of Mythology, and Theology_. The elements of nature were, as we have shewn, the first divinities of man; he has generally commenced with adoring material beings; each individual, as we have already said, as may be still seen in savage nations, made to himself a particular god, of some physical object, which he supposed to be the cause of those events, in which he was himself interested; he never wandered to seek out of visible nature, the source either of what happened to himself, or of those phenomena to which he was a witness. As he every where saw only material effects, he attributed them to causes of the same genus; incapable in his infancy of those profound reveries, of those subtle speculations, which are the fruit of time, the result of leisure, he did not imagine any cause distinguished from the objects that met his sight, nor of any essence totally different from every thing he beheld. The observation of nature was the first study of those who had leisure to meditate: they could not avoid being struck with the phenomena of the visible world. The rising and setting of the sun, the periodical return of the seasons, the variations of the atmosphere, the fertility and sterility of the earth, the advantages of irrigation, the damage caused by floods, the useful effects of fire, the terrible consequences of conflagration, were proper and suitable objects to occupy their thoughts. It was natural for them to believe that those beings they saw move of themselves, acted by their own peculiar energies; according as their influence over the inhabitants of the earth was either favorable or otherwise, they concluded them to have either the power to injure them, or the disposition to confer benefits. Those who first acquired the knowledge of gaining an ascendancy over man, then savage, wandering, unpolished, or dispersed in woods, with but little attachment to the soil, of which he had not yet learned to reap the advantage, were always more practised observers--individuals more instructed in the ways of nature, than the people, or rather the scattered hordes, whom they found ignorant and destitute of experience: their superior knowledge placed them in a capacity to render these services--to discover to them useful inventions, which attracted the confidence of the unhappy beings to whom they came to offer an assisting hand; savages who were naked, half famished, exposed to the injuries of the weather, obnoxious to the attacks of ferocious beasts, dispersed in caverns, scattered in forests, occupied with hunting, painfully labouring to procure themselves a very precarious subsistence, had not sufficient leisure to make discoveries calculated to facilitate their labour, or to render it less incessant. These discoveries are generally the fruit of society: isolated beings, detached families, hardly ever make any discoveries--scarcely ever think of making any. The savage is a being who lives in a perpetual state of infancy, who never reaches maturity unless some one comes to draw him out of his misery. At first repulsive, unsociable, intractable, he by degrees familiarizes himself with those who render him service; once gained by their kindness, he readily lends them his confidence; in the end he goes the length of sacrificing to them his liberty. It was commonly from the bosom of civilized nations that have issued those personages who have carried sociability, agriculture, art, laws, gods, superstition, forms of worship, to those families or hordes as yet scattered; who united them either to the body of some other nations, or formed them into new nations, of which they themselves became the leaders, sometimes the king, frequently the high priest, and often their god. These softened their manners--gathered them together--taught them to reap the advantages of their own powers--to render each other reciprocal assistance--to satisfy their wants with greater facility. In thus rendering their existence more comfortable, thus augmenting their happiness, they attracted their love; obtained their veneration, acquired the right of prescribing opinions to them, made them adopt such as they had either invented themselves, or else drawn up in the civilized countries from whence they came. History points out to us the most famous legislators as men, who, enriched with useful knowledge they had gleaned in the bosom of polished nations, carried to savages without industry, needing assistance, those arts, of which, until then, these rude people were ignorant: such were the Bacchus's, the Orpheus's, the Triptolemus's, the Numa's, the Zamolixis's; in short, all those who first gave to nations their gods--their worship--the rudiments of agriculture, of science, of superstition, of jurisprudence, of religion, &c. It will perhaps be enquired, If those nations which at the present day we see assembled, were all originally dispersed? We reply, that this dispersion may have been produced at various times, by those terrible revolutions, of which it has before been remarked our globe has more than once been the theatre; in times so remote, that history has not been able to transmit us the detail. Perhaps the approach of more than one comet may have produced on our earth several universal ravages, which have at each time annihilated the greater portion of the human species. These hypotheses will unquestionably appear bold to those who have not sufficiently meditated on nature, but to the philosophic enquirer they are by no means inconsistent. There may not only have been one general deluge, but even a great number since the existence of our planet; this globe itself may have been a new production in nature; it may not always have occupied the place it does at present. Whatever idea may be adopted on this subject, if it is very certain that, independent of those exterior causes, which are competent to totally change its face, as the impulse of a comet may do, this globe contains within itself, a cause adequate to alter it entirely, since, besides the diurnal and sensible motion of the earth, it has one extremely slow, almost imperceptible, by which every thing must eventually be changed in it: this is the motion from whence depends the _precession_ of the _equinoctial points_, observed by _Hipparchus_ and other mathematicians, now well understood by astronomers; by this motion, the earth must at the end of several thousand years change totally: this motion will at length cause the ocean to occupy that space which at present forms the lands or continents. From this it will be obvious that our globe, as well as all the beings in nature, has a continual disposition to change. This motion was known to the ancients, and was what gave rise to what they called their great year, which the Egyptians fixed at thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five years: the Sabines at thirty-six thousand four hundred and twenty-five, whilst others have extended it to one hundred thousand, some even to seven hundred and fifty-three thousand years. Again, to those general revolutions which our planet has at different times experienced, way he added those that have been partial, such as inundations of the sea, earthquakes, subterraneous conflagrations, which have sometimes had the effect of dispersing particular nations, and to make them forget all those sciences with which they were, before acquainted. It is also probable that the first volcanic fires, having had no previous vent, were more central, and greater in quantity, before they burst the crust of earth; as the sea washed the whole, it must have rapidly sunk down into every opening, where, falling on the boiling lava, it was instantly expanded into steam, producing irresistible explosion: whence it is reasonable to conclude, that the primaeval earthquakes wore more widely extended, and of much greater force, than those which occur in our days. Other vapours may be produced by intense heat, possessing a much greater elasticity, from substances that evaporate, such as mercury, diamonds, &c.; the expansive force of these vapours would be much greater than the steam of water, even at red hot heat consequently they, way have had sufficient energy to raise islands, continents, or even to have detached the moon from the earth; if the moon, as has been supposed by some philosophers, was thrown out of the great cavity which now contains the South Sea; the immense quantity of water flowing in from the original ocean, and which then covered the earth, would much contribute to leave the continents and islands, which might be raised at the same time, above the surface of the water. In later days we have accounts of huge stones falling, from the firmament, which may have been thrown by explosion from some distant earthquake, without having been impelled with a force sufficient to cause them to circulate round the earth, and thus produce numerous small moons or satellites. Those who were able to escape from the ruin of the world, filled with consternation, plunged in misery, were but little conditioned to preserve to their posterity a knowledge, effaced by those misfortunes, of which they had been both the victims and the witnesses: overwhelmed with dismay, trembling with fear, they were not able to hand down the history of their frightful adventures, except by obscure traditions; much less to transmit to us the opinions, the systems, the arts, the sciences, anterior to these petrifying revolutions of our sphere. There have been perhaps men upon the earth from all eternity; but at different periods they may have been nearly annihilated, together with their monuments, their sciences, and their arts; those who outlived these periodical revolutions, each time formed a new race of men, who by dint of time, labour, and experience, have by degrees withdrawn from oblivion the inventions of the primitive races. It is, perhaps, to these periodical revolutions of the human species, that is to be ascribed the profound ignorance in which we see man yet plunged, upon those objects that are the most interesting to him. This is, perhaps, the true source of the imperfection of his knowledge--of the vices of his political institutions--of the defect in his religion--of the growth of superstition, over which terror has always presided; here, in all probability, is the cause of that puerile inexperience, of those jejune prejudices, which almost every where keep man in a state of infancy, and which render him so little capable of either listening to reason or of consulting truth. To judge by the slowness of his progress, by the feebleness of his advance, in a number of respects, we should be inclined to say, the human race has either just quitted its cradle, or that he was never destined to attain the age of virility--to corroborate his reason. However it may be with these conjectures, whether the human race may always have existed upon the earth, whether it may have been a recent production of nature, whether the larger animals we now behold were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, who have increased in bulk with the progression of time, or whether, as the Egyptian philosophers thought, mankind were originally hermaphrodites, who like the _aphis_ produced the sexual distinction after some generations, which was also the opinion of Plato, and seems to have been that of Moses, who was educated amongst these Egyptians, as may be gathered from the 27th and 28th verses of the first chapter of GENESIS: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them--And GOD blessed them, and GOD said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth:" it is not therefore presuming too much to suppose, as the Egyptians were a nation very fond of explaining their opinions by hieroglyphics, that that part which describes Eve as taken out of Adam's rib, was an hieroglyphic emblem: showing that mankind was in the primitive state of both sexes, united, who was afterwards divided into males and females. However, I say, this may be, it is extremely easy to recur to the origin of many existing nations: we shall find them always in the savage state; that is, to say, dispersed; composed of families detached from each other; of wandering, hordes; these were collected together, approximated at the voice of some missionary or legislator, from whom they received great benefits, who gave them gods, opinions, and laws. These personages, of whom the people newly congregated readily acknowledged the superiority, fixed the national gods, leaving to each individual, those which he had formed to himself, according to his own peculiar ideas, or else substituting others brought from those regions, from whence they themselves had emigrated. The better to imprint their lessons on the minds of their new subjects, these men became the guides, the priests, the sovereigns, the masters of these infant societies; they formed discourses by which they spoke to the imagination of their willing auditors. POETRY seem best adapted to strike the mind of these rude people, to engrave on their memory those ideas with which they were willing to imbue them: its images, its fictions, its numbers, its rhyme its harmony, all conspired to please their fancy, to render permanent the impressions it made: thus, the entire of nature, as well as all its parts, was personified, by its beautiful allegories: at its soothing voice, trees, stones, rocks, earth, air, fire, water, by imagination took intelligence, held conversation with man, and with themselves; the elements were deified by its songs, every thing was figuratively detailed in harmonious lays. The sky, which according to the then philosophy, was an arched concave, spreading over the earth, which was supposed to be a level plain; (for the doctrine of _antipodes_ is of rather modern date) was itself made a god; was considered a more suitable residence, as making a greater distinction for these imaginary deities than the earth on which man himself resided. Thus the firmament was filled with deities. Time, under the name of Saturn, was pictured as the son of heaven; or Coelus by earth, called Terra, or Thea; he was represented as an inexorable divinity--naturally artful, who devoured his own children--who revenged the anger of his mother upon his father; for which purpose she armed him with a scythe, formed of metals drawn from her own bowels, with which he struck Coelus, in the act of uniting himself to Thea, and so mutilated him, that he was ever after incapacitated to increase the number of his children: he was said to have divided the throne with Janus king of Italy, his reign seems to have been so mild, so beneficent, that it was called the _golden age_; human victims were sacrificed on his altars, until abolished by Hercules, who substituted small images of clay. Festivals in honor of this god, called Saturnalia, were instituted long antecedent to the foundation of Rome they were celebrated about the middle of December, either on the 16th, 17th, or 18th; they lasted in latter times several days, originally but one. Universal liberty prevailed at the celebration, slaves were permitted to ridicule their masters--to speak freely on every subject--no criminals were executed--war never declared; the priests made their human offerings with their heads uncovered; a circumstance peculiar to the Saturnalia, not adopted at other festivals. The igneous matter, the etherial electric fluid, that invisible fire which vivifies nature, that penetrates all beings, that fertilizes the earth, which is the great principle of motion, the source of heat, was deified under the name of Jupiter: his combination with every being in nature was expressed by his metamorphoses--by the frequent adulteries imputed to him. He was armed with thunder, to indicate he produced meteors, to typify the electric fluid that is called lightning. He married the winds, which were designated under the name of Juno, therefore called the Goddess of the Winds, their nuptials were celebrated with great solemnity; all the gods, the entire brute creation, the whole of mankind attended, except one young woman named Chelone, who laughed at the ceremonies, for which impiety she was changed by Mercury into a tortoise, and condemned to perpetual silence. He was the most powerful of all the gods, and considered as the king and father both of gods and men: his worship was very extended, performed with greater solemnity, than that of any other god. Upon his altars smoked goats, sheep, and white bulls, in which he is said to have particularly delighted; the oak was rendered sacred to him, because he taught mankind to live upon acorns; he had many oracles where his precepts were delivered, the most celebrated of these were at Dodona and Ammon in Lybia; he was supposed to be invisible to the inhabitants of the earth; the Lacedemonians erected his statue with four heads, thereby indicating, that he listened readily to the solicitations of every quarter of the earth. Minerva is represented as having no mother, but to have come completely armed from his brains, when his head was opened by Vulcan; by which it is meant to infer that wisdom is the result of this ethereal fluid. Thus, following the same fictions, the sun, that beneficent star which has such a marked influence over the earth, became an Osiris, a Belus, a Mithras, an Adonis, an Apollo. Nature, rendered sorrowful by his periodical absence, was an Isis, an Astarte, a Venus, a Cybele. Astarte had a magnificent temple at Hieropolis served by three hundred priests, who were always employed in offering sacrifices. The priests of Cybele, called Corybantes, also Galli, were not admitted to their sacred functions without previous mutilation. In the celebration of their festivals these priests used all kinds of indecent expressions, beat drums, cymbals, and behaved just like madmen: his worship extended all over Phrygia, and was established in Greece under the name of _Eleusinian mysteries_. In short, every thing was personified: the sea was under the empire of Neptune; fire was adored by the Egyptians under the name of Serapis; by the Persians, under that of Ormus or Oromaze; and by the Romans, under that of Vesta and Vulcan. Such was the origin of mythology: it may be said to be the daughter of natural philosophy, embellished by poetry; only destined to describe nature and its parts. If antiquity is consulted, it will be perceived without much trouble, that these famous sages, those legislators, those priests, those conquerors, who were the instructors of infant nations, themselves adored active nature, or the great whole considered relatively to its different operations or qualities; that this was what they caused the ignorant savages whom they had gathered together to adore. It was the great whole they deified; it was its various parts which they made their inferior gods; it was from the necessity of her laws they made fate. The Greeks called it Nature, a divinity who had a thousand names. Varro says, "I believe that God is the soul of the universe, and that the universe is God." Cicero says "that in the mysteries of Samothracia, of Lemnos, of Eleusis, it was nature much more than the gods, they explained to the initiated." Pliny says, "we must believe that the world, or that which is contained under the vast extent of the heavens, is the Divinity; even eternal, infinite, without beginning or end." It was these different modes of considering nature that gave birth to Polytheism, to idolatry. Allegory masqued its mode of action: it was at length parts of this great whole, that idolatry represented by statues and symbols. To complete the proofs of what has been said; to shew distinctly that it was the great whole, the universe, the nature of things, which was the real object of the worship of Pagan antiquity, hardly any thing can be more decisive than the beginning of the hymn of Orpheus addressed to the god Pan. "O Pan! I invoke thee, O powerful god! O universal nature! the heavens, the sea, the earth, who nourish all, and the eternal fire, because these are thy members, O all powerful Pan," &c. Nothing can be more suitable to confirm these ideas, than the ingenious explanation which is given of the fable of Pan, as well as of the figure under which he is represented. It is said, "Pan, according to the signification of his name, is the emblem by which the ancients have designated the great assemblage of things or beings: he represents the universe; and, in the mind of the wisest philosophers of antiquity, he passed for the greatest and most ancient of the gods. The features under which he is delineated form the portrait of nature, and of the savage state in which she was found in the beginning. The spotted skin of the leopard, which serves him for a mantle, imagined the heavens filled with stars and constellations. His person was compounded of parts, some of which were suitable to a reasonable animal, that is to say, to man; and others to the animal destitute of reason, such as the goat. It is thus," says he, "that the universe is composed of an intelligence that governs the whole, and of the prolific, fruitful elements of fire, water, earth, air. Pan, loved to drink and to follow the nymphs; this announces the occasion nature has for humidity in all her productions, and that this god, like nature, is strongly inclined to propagation. According to the Egyptians, and the most ancient Grecian philosophers, Pan had neither father nor mother; he came out of Demogorgon at the same moment with the Destinies, his fatal sisters; a fine method of expressing that the universe was the work of an unknown power, and that it was formed after the invariable relations, the eternal laws of necessity; but his most significant symbol, that most suitable to express the harmony of the universe, is his mysterious pipe, composed of seven unequal tubes, but calculated to produce the nicest, the most perfect concord. The orbs which compose the seven planets of our solar system, are of different diameters; being bodies of unequal mass, they describe their revolutions round the sun in various periods; nevertheless it is from the order of their motion that results the harmony of the spheres," &c. Here then is the great macrocosm, the mighty whole, the assemblage of things adored and deified by the philosophers of antiquity; whilst the uninformed stopped at the emblem under which this nature was depicted; at the symbols under which its various parts, its numerous functions were personified; his narrow mind, his barbarous ignorance, never permitted him to mount higher; they alone were deemed worthy of being, initiated into the mysteries, who knew the realities masqued under these emblems. Indeed, it is not to be doubted for an instant, that the wisest among the Pagans adored nature; which ethnic theology designated under a great variety of nomenclature, under an immense number of different emblems. Apuleius, although a decided Platonist, accustomed to the mysterious, unintelligible notions of his master, calls "Nature the parent of all; the mother of the elements, the first offspring of the world;" again, "the mother of the stars, the parent of the seasons, and the governess of the whole world."--She was worshipped by many under the appellation of the _mother of the gods_. Indeed, the first institutors of nations, and their immediate successors in authority, only spoke to the people by fables, allegories, enigmas, of which they reserved to themselves the right of giving an explanation: this, in fact, constituted the mysteries of the various worship paid to the Pagan divinities. This mysterious tone they considered necessary, whether it was to mask their own ignorance, or whether it was to preserve their power over the uninformed, who for the most part only respect that which is above their comprehension. Their explications were generally dictated either by interest, or by a delirious imagination, frequently by imposture; thus from age to age, they did no more than render nature and its parts, which they had originally depicted, more unknown, until they completely lost sight of the primitive ideas; these were replaced by a multitude of fictitious personages, under whose features this nature had primarily been represented to them. The people, either unaccustomed to think, or deeply steeped in ignorance, adored these personages, without penetrating into the true sense of the emblematical fables recounted to them. These ideal beings, with material figures, in whom they believed there resided a mysterious virtue, a divine power, were the objects of their worship, the source of their fears, the fountain of their hopes. The wonderful, the incredible actions ascribed to these fancied divinities, were an inexhaustible fund of admiration, which gave perpetual play to the fancy; which delighted not only the people of those days, but even the children of latter ages. Thus were transmitted from age to age, those marvellous accounts, which, although necessary to the existence of the power usurped by the ministers of these gods, did, in fact, nothing more than confirm the blindness of the ignorant: these never supposed that it was nature, its various operations, its numerous component parts--that it was the passions of man and his diverse faculties that lay buried under an heap of allegories; they did not perceive that the passions and faculties of human nature were used as emblems, because man was ignorant of the true cause of the phenomena he beheld. As strong passions seemed to hurry man along, in despite of himself, they either attributed these passions to a god, or deified them; frequently they did both: it was thus love became a deity; that eloquence, poetry, industry, were transformed into gods, under the names of Hermes, Mercury, Apollo; the stings of conscience were called the Furies: the people, bowed down in stupid ignorance, had no eyes but for these emblematical persons, under which nature was masked: they attributed to their influence the good, to their displeasure the evil, which they experienced: they entered into every kind of folly, into the most delirious acts of madness, to render them propitious to their views; thus, for want of being acquainted with the reality of things, their worship frequently degenerated into the most cruel extravagance, into the most ridiculous folly. Thus it is obvious, that every thing proves nature and its various parts to have every where been the first divinities of man. Natural philosophers studied these deities, either superficially or profoundly,--explained some of their properties, detailed some of their modes of action. Poets painted them to the imagination of mortals, either in the most fascinating colours, or under the most hideous deformities; embodied them--furnished them with reasoning faculties--recounted their exploits--recorded their will. The statuary executed sometimes with the most enrapturing art, the ideas of the poets,--gave substance to their shadows--form to their airy nothings. The priest decorated these united works with a thousand marvellous qualities--with the most terrible passions--with the most inconceivable attributes; gave them, "a local habitation and a name." The people adored them; prostrated themselves before these gods, who were neither susceptible of love or hatred, goodness, or malice; they became persecuting, malevolent, cruel, unjust, in order to render themselves acceptable to powers generally described to them under the most odious features. By dint of reasoning upon these emblems, by meditating upon nature, thus decorated, or rather disfigured, subsequent speculators no longer recollected the source from whence their predecessors had drawn their gods, nor the fantastic ornaments with which they had embellished them. Natural philosophers and poets were transformed by leisure into metaphysicians and theologians; tired with contemplating what they could have understood, they believed they had made an important discovery by subtilly distinguishing nature from herself--from her own peculiar energies--from her faculty of action. By degrees they made an incomprehensible being of this energy, which as before they personified, this they called the mover of nature, divided it into two, one congenial to man's happiness, the other inimical to his welfare; these they deified in the same manner as they had before done nature with her various parts. These abstract, metaphysical beings, became the sole object of their thoughts; were the subject of their continual contemplation; they looked upon them as realities of the highest importance: thus nature quite disappeared; she was despoiled of her rights; she was considered as nothing more than an unwieldy mass, destitute of power; devoid of energy, as an heap of ignoble matter purely passive: who, incapable of acting by herself, was not competent to any of the operations they beheld, without the direct, the immediate agency of the moving powers they had associated with her: which they had made the fulcrum necessary to the action of the lever. They either did not or would not perceive, that the _great Cause of causes, ens entium, Parent of parents_, had, in unravelling chaotic matter, with a wisdom for which man can never be sufficiently grateful, with a sagacity which he can never sufficiently admire, foreseen every thing that could contribute not only to his own individual happiness, but also to that of all the beings in nature; that he had given this nature immutable laws, according to which she is for ever regulated; after which she is obliged invariably to act; that he has described for her an eternal course, from which it is not permitted her to deviate, even for an instant; that she is therefore, rendered competent to the production of every phenomena, not only that he beholds, but of an infinity that he has never yet contemplated; that she needs not any exterior energy for this purpose, having received her powers from a hand far superior to any the feeble weak imagination of man is able to form; that when this nature appears to afflict him, it is only from the contraction of his own views, from the narrowness of his own ideas, that he judges; that, in fact, what he considers the evils of nature, are the greatest possible benefits he can receive, if he was but in a condition to be acquainted with previous causes, with subsequent effects. That the evils resulting to him from his own vices, have equally their remedies in this nature, which it is his duty to study; which if he does he will find, that the same omnipotent goodness, who gave her irrefragable laws, also planted in her bosom, balsams for all his maladies, whether physical or moral: but that it is not given him to know what this great, this universal cause is, for purposes of which he ought not to dispute the wisdom, when he contemplates the mighty wonders that surround him. Thus man ever preferred an unknown power, to that of which he was enabled to have some knowledge, if he had only deigned to consult his experience; but he presently ceases to respect that which he understands; to estimate those objects which are familiar to him: he figures to himself something marvellous in every thing he does not comprehend; his mind, above all, labours to seize upon that which appears to escape his consideration; in default of experience, he no longer consults any thing, but his imagination, which feeds him with chimeras. In consequence, those speculators who have subtilly distinguished nature from her own powers, have successively laboured to clothe the powers thus separated with, a thousand incomprehensible qualities: as they did not see this power, which is only a mode, they made it a spirit--an intelligence--an incorporeal being; that is to say, of a substance totally different from every thing of which we have a knowledge. They never perceived that all their inventions, that all the words which they imagined, only served to mask their real ignorance; that all their pretended science was limited to saying, in what manner nature acted, by a thousand subterfuges which they themselves found it impossible to comprehend. Man always deceives himself for want of studying nature; he leads himself astray, every time he is disposed to go out of it; he is always quickly necessitated to return; he is even in error when he substitutes words which he does not himself understand, for things which he would much better comprehend if he was willing to look at them without prejudice. Can a theologian ingenuously believe himself more enlightened, for having substituted the vague words spirit, incorporeal substance, &c. to the more intelligible terms nature, matter, mobility, necessity? However this may be, these obscure words once imagined, it was necessary to attach ideas to them; in doing this, he has not been able to draw them from any other source than the beings of this despised nature, which are ever the only beings of which he is enabled to have any knowledge. Man, consequently, drew them up in himself; his own soul served for the model of the universal soul, of which indeed according to some it only formed a portion; his own mind was the standard of the mind that regulated nature; his own passions, his own desires, were the prototypes of those by which he actuated this being; his own intelligence was that from which he formed that of the mover of nature; that which was suitable to himself, he called the order of nature; this pretended order was the scale by which he measured the wisdom of this being; in short, those qualities which he calls perfections in himself, were the archetypes in miniature, of the perfections of the being, he thus gratuitously supposed to be the agent, who operated the phenomena of nature. It was thus, that in despite of all their efforts, the theologians were, perhaps always will be, true Anthropomorphites. A sect of this denomination appeared in 359, in Egypt, they held the doctrine that their god had a bodily shape. Indeed it is very difficult, if not impossible to prevent man from making himself the sole model of his divinity. Montaigne says "man is not able to be other than he is, nor imagine but after his capacity; let him take what pains he may, he will never have a knowledge of any soul but his own." Xenophanes said, "if the ox or the elephant understood either sculpture or painting, they would not fail to represent the divinity under their own peculiar figure that in this, they would have as much reason as Polyclitus or Phidias, who gave him the human form." It was said to a very celebrated man that "God made man after his own image;" "man has returned the compliment," replied the philosopher. Indeed, man generally sees in his God, nothing but a man. Let him subtilize as he will, let him extend his own powers as he may, let him swell his own perfections to the utmost, he will have done nothing more than make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom he will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. He will never see in such a god, but a being of the human species, in whom he will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until he has formed a being totally inconceivable. It is according to these dispositions that he attributes intelligence, wisdom, goodness, justice, science, power, to his divinity, because he is himself intelligent; because he has the idea of wisdom in some beings of his own species; because he loves to find in them ideas favourable to himself: because he esteems those who display equity; because he has a knowledge, which he holds more extensive in some individuals than himself; in short, because he enjoys certain faculties which depend on his own organization. He presently extends or exaggerates all these qualities in forming his god; the sight of the phenomena of nature, which he feels he is himself incapable of either producing or imitating, obliges him to make this difference between the being he pourtrays and himself; but he knows not at what point to stop; he fears lest he should deceive himself, if he should see any limits to the qualities he assigns, the word infinite, therefore, is the abstract, the vague term which he uses to characterize them. He says that his power is infinite, which signifies that when he beholds those stupendous effects which nature produces, he has no conception at what point his power can rest; that his goodness, his wisdom, his knowledge are infinite: this announces that he is ignorant how far these perfections ma be carried in a being whose power so much surpasses his own; that he is of infinite duration, because he is not capable of conceiving he could have had a beginning or can ever cease to be; because of this he considers a defect in those transitory beings of whom he beholds the dissolution, whom he sees are subjected to death. He presumes the cause of those effects to which he is a witness, of those striking phenomena that assail his sight, is immutable, permanent, not subjected to change, like all the evanescent beings whom he knows are submitted to dissolution, to destruction, to change of form. This mover of nature being always invisible to man, his mode of action being, impenetrable, he believes that, like his soul or the concealed principle which animates his own body, which he calls spiritual, a spirit, is the moving power of the universe; in consequence he makes a spirit the soul, the life, the principle of motion in nature. Thus when by dint of subtilizing, he has arrived at believing the principle by which his body is moved is a spiritual, immaterial substance, he makes the spirit of the universe immaterial in like manner: he makes it immense, although without extent; immoveable, although capable of moving nature: immutable, although he supposes him to be the author of all the changes, operated in the universe. The idea of the unity of God, which cost Socrates his life, because the Athenians considered those Atheists who believed but in one, was the tardy fruit of human meditation. Plato himself did not dare to break entirely the doctrine of _Polytheism_; he preserved Venus, an all-powerful Jupiter, and a Pallas, who was the goddess of the country. The sight of those opposite, frequently contradictory effects, which man saw take place in the world, had a tendency to persuade him there must be a number of distinct powers or causes independent of each other. He was unable to conceive that the various phenomena he beheld, sprung from a single, from an unique cause; he therefore admitted many causes or gods, acting upon different principles; some of which he considered friendly, others as inimical to his race. Such is the origin of that doctrine, so ancient, so universal, which supposed two principles in nature, or two powers of opposite interests, who were perpetually at war with each other; by the assistance of which he explained, that constant mixture of good and evil, that blending of prosperity with misfortune, in a word, those eternal vicissitudes to which in this world the human being, is subjected. This is the source of those combats which all antiquity has supposed to exist between good and wicked gods, between an Osiris and a Typhoeus; between an Orosmadis and an Arimanis; between a Jupiter and the Titanes; in these rencounters man for his own peculiar interest always gave the palm of victory to the beneficent deity; this, according to all the traditions handed down, ever remained in possession of the field of battle; it was so far right, as it is evidently for the benefit of mankind that the good should prevail over the wicked. When, however, man acknowledged only one God, he generally supposed the different departments of nature were confided to powers subordinate to his supreme orders, under whom the sovereign of the gods discharged his care in the administration of the world. These subaltern gods were prodigiously multiplied; each man, each town, each country, had their local, their tutelary gods; every event, whether fortunate or unfortunate, had a divine cause; was the consequence of a sovereign decree; each natural effect, every operation of nature, each passion, depended upon a divinity, which a theological imagination, disposed to see gods every where, mistaking nature, either embellished or disfigured. Poetry tuned its harmonious lays, on these occasions, exaggerated the details, animated its pictures; credulous ignorance received the portraits with eagerness--heard the doctrines with submission. Such is the origin of Polytheism: indeed the Greek word _Theos_, [Greek letters], is derived from _Theaomai_, [Greek letters], which implies to contemplate, or take a view of secret or hidden things. Such are the foundations, such the titles of the hierarchy, which man established between himself and his gods, because he generally believed he was incapable of the exalted privilege of immediately addressing himself to the incomprehensible Being whom he had acknowledged for the only sovereign of nature, without even having any distinct idea on the subject: such is the true genealogy of those inferior gods whom the uninformed place as, a proportional means between themselves and the first of all other causes. In consequence, among the Greeks and the Romans, we see the deities divided into two classes, the one were called great gods, because the whole world were nearly in accord in deifying the most striking parts of nature, such as the sun, fire; the sea, time, &c. these formed a kind of aristocratic order, who were distinguished from the minor gods, or from the multitude of ethnic divinities, who were entirely local; that is to say, were reverenced only in particular countries, or by individuals; as in Rome, where every citizen had his familiar spirit, called lares; and household god, called penates. Nevertheless, the first rank of these Pagan divinities, like the latter, were submitted to Fate, that is, to destiny, which obviously is nothing more than nature acting by immutable, rigorous, necessary laws; this destiny was looked upon as the god of gods; it is evident, that this was nothing more than necessity personified; that therefore it was a weakness in the heathens to fatigue with their sacrifices, to solicit with their prayers, those divinities whom they themselves believed were submitted to the decrees of an inexorable destiny, of which it was never possible for them to alter the mandates. _But man_, generally, _ceases to reason, whenever his theological notions are either brought into question, or are the subject of his inquiry_. What has been already said, serves to show the common source of that multitude of intermediate powers, subordinate to the gods, but superior to man, with which he filled the universe: they were venerated under the names of nymphs, demi-gods, angels, daemons, good and evil genii, spirits, heroes, saints, &c. Among the Romans they were called _Dei medioxumi_, intermediate angels; they were looked upon as intercessors, as mediators, as powers whom it was necessary to reverence, in order either to obtain their favour, appease their anger, or divert their malignant intentions; these constitute different classes of intermediate divinities, who became either the foundation of their hopes, the object of their fears, the means of consolation, or the source of dread to those very mortals who only invented them when they found it impossible to form to themselves distinct, perspicuous ideas of the incomprehensible Being who governed the world in chief; or when they despaired of being able to hold communication with him directly. Meditation and reflection diminished the number of those deities which composed the ethnic polytheism: some who gave the subject more consideration than others, reduced the whole to one all-powerful Jupiter; but still they painted this being in the most hideous colours, gave him the most revolting features, because they were still obstinately bent on making man, his action and his passions, the model: this folly led them into continual perplexities, because it heaped together contradictory, incompatible, extravagant qualities; it was quite natural it should do so: the limited views, the superficial knowledge, the irregular desires of frail, feeble mortals, were but little calculated to typify the mind of the real Divinity; of that great _Cause of causes_, that _Parent of parents_, from whom every thing must have emanated. Although they persuaded themselves it was sinning to give him rivals, yet they described him as a jealous monarch who could not bear a division of empire; thus taking the vanity of earthly princes for their emblem, as if it was possible such a being could have a competitor like a terrestrial monarch. Not having contemplated the immutable laws with which he has invested nature, to which every thing it contains is subjected, which are the result of the most perfect wisdom, they were puzzled to account for the contrariety of those effects which their weak minds led them to suppose as evils; seeing that sometimes those who fulfilled in the most faithful manner their duties in this life, were involved in the same ruin with the boldest, the most inconsiderate violaters: thus in making him the immediate agent, instead of the first author, the executive instead of the formative power, they caused him to appear capricious, as unreasonably vindictive against his creatures, when they ought to have known that his wisdom was unlimited, his kindness without bounds, when he infused into nature that power which produces these apparently contradictory effects; which, although they seem injurious to man's interests, are, if he was but capacitated to judge fairly, the most beneficial advantages that he can possibly derive. Thus they made the Divinity appear improvident, by continually employing him to destroy the work of his own hands: they, in fact, taxed him with impotence, by the perpetual non-performance of those projects of which their own imbecillity, their own erring judgment, had vainly supposed him to be the contriver. To solve these difficulties, man created enemies to the Divinity, who although subordinate to the supreme God, were nevertheless competent to disturb his empire, to frustrate his views. Can any thing be worse conceived, can any thing be more truly derogatory to the great _Parent of parents_, than thus to make him resemble a king, who is surrounded with adversaries, willing to dispute with him his diadem? Such, however, is the origin of the _Fable of the Titanes_, or of the _rebellious angels_, whose presumption caused them to be plunged into the abyss of misery--who were changed into _demons_, or into evil genii: these according to their mythology, had no other functions, than to render abortive the projects of the Divinity; to seduce, to raise to rebellion, those who were his subjects. Miserable invention, feeble subterfuge, for the vices of mankind, although decorated with all the beauty of language. Can then sublimity of versification, the harmony of numbers, reconcile man to the idea that the puny offspring of natural causes is adequate for a single instant to dispute the commands, to thwart the desires, to render nugatory the decrees of a Being whose wisdom is of the most polished perfection; whose goodness is boundless; whose power must be more capacious than the human mind can possibly conceive? In consequence of this _Fable of the Titanes_, the monarch of nature was represented as perpetually in a scuffle with the enemies he had himself created; as unwilling totally to subdue those with whom these fabulists have described him as dividing his authority--partaking his supreme power. This again was borrowed from the conduct of earthly monarchs, who, when they find a potent enemy, make a treaty with him; but this was quite unnecessary for the great _Cause of causes_; and only shows that man is utterly incapable of forming any other ideas than those which he derives from the situation of those of his own race, or of the beings by whom he is surrounded. According to this fable the subjects of the universal Monarch were never properly submitted to his authority; like an earthly king, he was in a continual state of hostility, and punished those who had the misfortune to enter into the conspiracies of the enemies of his glory: seeing that human legislators put forth laws, issued decrees, they established similar institutions for the Divinity; established oracles; his ministers pretended, through these mysterious mediums, to convey to the people his heavenly mandates, to unveil his concealed intentions: the ignorant multitude received these without examination, they did not perceive that it was man, and not the Divinity, who thus spoke to them; they did not feel that it must be impossible for weak creatures to act contrary to the will of God. The _Fable of the Titanes, or rebellious angels_, is extremely ancient; very generally diffused over the world; it serves for the foundation of the theology of the Brachmins of Hindostan: according to these, all living bodies are animated by _fallen angels_, who under these forms expiate their rebellion. These contradictory notions were the basis of nearly all the superstitions of the world; by these means they imagined they accounted for the origin of evil--demonstrated the cause why the human species experience misery. In short, the conduct of the most arbitrary tyrants of the earth was but too frequently brought forth, too often acted upon, in forming the character of the Divinity, held forth to the worship of man: their imperfect jurisprudence was the source from whence they drew that which they ascribed to their god. Pagan theology was remarkable for displaying in the character of their divinities the most dissolute vices; for making them vindictive; for causing them to punish with extreme rigour those, crimes which the oracles predicted; to doom to the most lasting torments those who sinned without knowing their transgression; to hurl vengeance on those who were ignorant of their obscure will, delivered in language which set comprehension at defiance; unless it was by the priest who both made and fulminated it. It was upon these unreasonable notions, that the theologians founded the worship which man ought to render to the Divinity. Do not then let us be at all surprised if the superstitious man was in a state of continual alarm: if he experienced trances--if his mind was ever in the most tormenting dread; the idea of his gods recalled to him unceasingly, that of a pitiless tyrant who sported with the miseries of his subjects; who, without being conscious of their own wrong, might at each moment incur his displeasure: he could not avoid feeling that although they had formed the universe entirely for man, yet justice did not regulate the actions of these powerful beings, or rather those of the priests; but he also believed that their elevated rank placed them infinitely above the human species, that therefore they might afflict him at their pleasure. It is then for want of considering good and evil as equally necessary; it is for want of attributing them to their true causes, that man has created to himself fictitious powers, malicious divinities, respecting whom it is found so difficult to undeceive him. Nevertheless, in contemplating nature, he would have been able to have perceived, that _physical evil_ is a necessary consequence of the peculiar properties of some beings; he would have acknowledged that plague, contagion, disease, are due to physical causes under particular circumstances; to combinations, which, although extremely natural, are fatal to his species; he would have sought--in the bosom of nature herself the remedies suitable to diminish these evils, or to have caused the cessation of those effects under which he suffered: he would have seen in like manner that _moral evil_ was the necessary consequence of defective institutions; that it was not to the Divinity, but to the injustice of his fellows he ought to ascribe those wars, that poverty, those famines, those reverses of fortune, those multitudinous calamities, those vices, those crimes, under which he so frequently groans. Thus to rid himself of these evils he would not have uselessly extended his trembling hands towards shadows incapable of relieving him; towards beings who were not the authors of his sorrows; he would have sought remedies for these misfortunes in a more rational administration of justice--in more equitable laws--in more I reasonable institutions--in a greater degree of benevolence towards his fellow man--in a more punctual performance of his own duties. As these gods were generally depicted to man as implacable to his frailties as they denounced nothing but the most dreadful punishments against those who involuntarily offended, it is not at all surprising that the sentiment of fear prevailed over that of love: the gloomy ideas presented to his mind were calculated to make him tremble, without making him better; an attention to this truth will serve to explain the foundation of that fantastical, irrational, frequently cruel worship, which was paid to these divinities; he often committed the most cruel extravagancies against his own person, the most hideous crimes against the person of others, under the idea that in so doing, he disarmed the anger, appeased the justice, recalled the clemency, deserved the mercy of his gods. In general, the superstitious systems of man, his human and other sacrifices, his prayers, his ceremonies, his customs; have had only for their object either to divert the fury of his gods, whom he believed he had offended; to render them propitious to his own selfish views; or to excite in them that good disposition towards himself, which his own perverse mode of thinking made him imagine they bestowed exclusively on others: on the other hand, the efforts, the subtilties of theology, have seldom had any other end, than to reconcile in the divinities it has pourtrayed, those discordant ideas which its own dogmas has raised in the minds of mortals. From what has preceded, it may fairly be concluded that ethnic theology undermined itself by its own inconsistencies; that the art of composing chimeras may therefore with great justice be defined to be that of combining those qualities which are impossible to be reconciled with each other. CHAP. III. _Of the confused and contradictory Ideas of Theology._ Every thing that has been said, proves pretty clearly, that, in despite of all his efforts, man has never been able to prevent himself from drawing together from his own peculiar nature, the qualities he has assigned to the Being who governs the universe. The contradictions necessarily resulting from the incompatible assemblage of these human qualities, which cannot become suitable to the same subject, seeing that the existence of one destroys the existence of the other, have been shewn:--the theologians themselves have felt the insurmountable difficulties which their divinities presented to reason: they were so substantive, that as they felt the impossibility of withdrawing themselves out of the dilemma, they endeavoured to prevent man from reasoning, by throwing his mind into confusion--by continually augmenting the perplexity of those ideas, already so discordant, which they offered him of the gods. By these means they enveloped them in mystery, covered them with dense clouds, rendered them inaccessible to mankind: thus they themselves became the interpreters, the masters of explaining, according either to their fancy or their interest, the ways of those enigmatical beings they made him adore. For this purpose they exaggerated them more and more--neither time nor space, nor the entire of nature could contain their immensity--every thing became an impenetrable mystery. Although man has originally borrowed from himself the traits, the colours, the primitive lineaments of which he composed his gods; although he has made them jealous, powerful, vindictive monarchs, yet his theology, by force of dreaming, entirely lost sight of human nature. In order to render his divinities still more different from their creatures, it assigned them, over and above the usual qualities of man, properties so marvellous, so uncommon, so far removed from every thing of which his mind could form a conception, that he lost sight of them himself. From thence he persuaded himself these qualities were divine, because he could no longer comprehend them; he believed them worthy of his gods, because no man could figure to himself any one distinct idea of them. Thus theology obtained the point of persuading man he must believe that which he could not conceive; that he must receive with submission improbable systems; that he must adopt, with pious deference, conjectures contrary to his reason; that this reason itself was the most agreeable sacrifice he could make on the altars of his gods, who were unwilling he should use the gift they had bestowed upon him. In short, it had made mortals implicitly believe that they were not formed to comprehend the thing of all others the most important to themselves. Thus it is evident that superstition founded its basis upon the absurd principle that man is obliged to accredit firmly that which he is in the most complete impossibility of comprehending. On the other hand, man persuaded himself that the gigantic, the truly incomprehensible attributes which were assigned to these celestial monarchs, placed between them and their slaves a distance so immense, that these could not be by any means offended with the comparison; that these distinctions rendered them still greater; made them more powerful, more marvellous, more inaccessible to observation. Man always entertains the idea, that what he is not in a condition to conceive, is much more noble, much wore respectable, than that which he has the capacity to comprehend. The more a thing is removed from his reach, the more valuable it always appears. These prejudices in man for the marvellous, appear to have been the source that gave birth to those wonderful, unintelligible qualities with which superstition clothed these divinities. The invincible ignorance of the human mind, whose fears reduced him to despair, engendered those obscure, vague notions, with which mythology decorated its gods. He believed he could never displease them, provided he rendered them incommensurable; impossible to be compared with any thing, of which he had a knowledge; either with that which was most sublime, or that which possessed the greatest magnitude, From hence the multitude of negative attributes with which ingenious dreamers have successively embellished their phantoms, to the end that they might more surely form a being distinguished from all others, or which possessed nothing in common with that which the human mind had the faculty of being acquainted with: they did not perceive that after all their endeavours, it was nothing wore than exaggerated human qualities, which they thus heaped together, with no more skill than a painter would display who should delineate all the members of the body of the same size, taking a giant for dimension. The theological attributes with which metaphysicians decorated these divinities, were in fact nothing but pure negations of the qualities found in man, or in those beings of which he has a knowledge; by these attributes their gods were supposed exempted from every thing which they considered weakness or imperfection in him, or in the beings by whom he is surrounded: they called every quality infinite, which has been shewn is only to affirm, that unlike man, or the beings with whom he is acquainted, it is not circumscribed by the limits of space; this, however, is what he can never in any manner comprehend, because he is himself finite. Hobbes in his _Leviathan_, says, "whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude, nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, infinite force, or infinite power. When we say any thing is infinite, we signify only, that we are not able to conceive the ends and bound of the thing named, having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability." Sherlock says, "the word infinite is only a negation, which signifies that which has neither end, nor limits, nor extent, and, consequently, that which has no positive and determinate nature, and is therefore nothing;" he adds, "that nothing but custom has caused this word to be adopted, which without that, would appear devoid of sense, and a contradiction." When it is said these gods are eternal, it signifies they have not had, like man or like every thing that exists, a beginning, and that they will never have an end: to say they are immutable, is to say, that unlike himself or every thing which he sees, they are not subject to change: to say they are immaterial, is to advance, that their substance or essence is of a nature not conceivable by himself, but which must from that very circumstance be totally different from every thing of which he has cognizance. It is from the confused collection of these negative qualities, that has resulted the theological gods; those metaphysical wholes of which it is impossible for man to form to himself any correct idea. In these abstract beings every thing is infinity,--immensity,-- spirituality,--omniscience,--order,--wisdom,--intelligence,-- omnipotence. In combining these vague terms, or these modifications, the ethnic priests believed they formed something, they extended these qualities by thought, and they imagined they made gods, whilst they only composed chimeras. They imagined that these perfections or these qualities must be suitable to their gods, because they were not suitable to any thing of which they had a knowledge; they believed that incomprehensible beings must have inconceivable qualities. These were the materials of which theology availed itself to compose those inexplicable shadows before which they commanded the human race to bend the knee. Nevertheless, experience soon proved that beings so vague, so impossible to be conceived, so incapable of definition, so far removed from every thing of which man could have any knowledge, were but little calculated to fix his restless views; his mind requires to be arrested by qualities which he is capacitated to ascertain; of which he is in a condition to form a judgment. Thus after it had subtilized these metaphysical gods, after it had rendered them so different in idea, from every thing that acts upon the senses, theology found itself under the necessity of again assimilating them to man, from whom it had so far removed them: it therefore again made them human by the moral qualities which it assigned them; it felt that without this it would not be able to persuade mankind there could possibly exist any relation between him and such vague, ethereal, fugitive, incommensurable beings; that it would never be competent to secure for them his adoration. It began to perceive that these marvellous gods were only calculated to exercise the imagination of some few thinkers, whose minds were accustomed to labour upon chimerical subjects, or to take words for realities; in short it found, that for the greater number of the material children of the earth it was necessary to have gods more analogous to themselves, more sensible, more known to them. In consequence these divinities were re-clothed with human qualities; theology never felt the incompatibility of these qualities with beings it had made essentially different from man, who consequently could neither have his properties, nor be modified like himself. It did not see that gods who were immaterial, destitute of corporeal organs, were neither able to think nor to act as material beings, whose peculiar organizations render them susceptible of the qualities, the feelings the will, the virtues, that are found in them. The necessity it felt to assimilate the gods to their worshippers, to make an affinity between them, made it pass over without consideration these palpable contradictions--this want of keeping in their portrait: thus ethnic theology obstinately continued to unite those incompatible qualities, that discrepancy of character, which the human mind attempted in vain either to conceive or to reconcile: according to it, pure spirits were the movers of the material world; immense beings were enabled to occupy space, without however excluding nature; immutable deities were the causes of those continual changes operated in the world: omnipotent beings did not prevent those evils which were displeasing to them; the sources of order submitted to confusion: in short, the wonderful properties of these theological beings every moment contradicted themselves. There is not less discrepancy, less incompatibility, less discordance in the human perfections, less contradiction in the moral qualities attributed to them, to the end that man might be enabled to form to himself some idea of these beings. These were all said to be _eminently_ possessed by the gods, although they every moment contradicted each other: by this means they formed a kind of patch-work character, heterogeneous beings, discrepant phenomena, entirely inconceivable to man, because nature had never constructed any thing like them, whereby he was enabled to form a judgment. Man was assured they were eminently good--that it was visible in all their actions. Now goodness is a known quality, recognizable in some beings of the human species; this is, above every other, a property he is desirous to find in all those upon whom he is in a state of dependence; but he is unable to bestow the title of good on any among his fellows, except their actions produce on him those effects which he approves--that he finds in unison with his existence--in conformity with his own peculiar modes of thinking. It was evident, according to this reasoning, these ethnic gods did not impress him with this idea; they were said to be equally the authors of his pleasures, as of his pains, which were to be either secured or averted by sacrifices: thus when man suffered by contagion, when he was the victim of shipwreck, when his country was desolated by war, when he saw whole nations devoured by rapacious earthquakes, when he was a prey to the keenest sorrows, he at least was unable to conceive the bounty of those beings. How could he perceive the beautiful order which they had introduced into the world, while he groaned under such a multitude of calamities? How was he able to discern the beneficence of men whom he beheld sporting as it were with his species? How could he conceive the consistency of those who destroyed that which he was assured they had taken such pains to establish, solely for his own peculiar happiness? But had his mind been properly enlightened, had he been taught to know, that nature, acting by unerring laws, produces all the phenomena he beholds as a necessary consequence of her primitive impulse--that like the rest of nature he was himself subjected to the general operation--that no peculiar exemption had been made in his behalf--that sacrifices were useless--that the great _Parent of parents_, equally mindful of all his creatures, had set in action with the most consummate wisdom an invariable system, the apparent, casual evils of which were ever counterbalanced by the resulting good; that without repining, it was his duty, his interest, to submit; at the same time to examine with sedulity, to search with earnestness, into the recesses of this nature for remedies to the sorrows he endured. If he had been thus instructed, we should never behold him arraigning either the kindness, the wisdom, or the consistency of the gods; he would neither have ascribed his sufferings to the malicious interference of inferior deities, so derogatory to the divine majesty of the _Great Cause of causes_, nor would he have taxed with either inconsistency or unkindness, that nature which cannot act otherwise than she does. Perhaps of all the ideas that can be infused into the mind of man, none is more really subversive of his true happiness, none more incompatible with the reality of things, than that which persuades him he is himself a privileged being, the king of a nature where every thing is submitted to laws, the extent of which his finite mind cannot possibly conceive. Even admitting it should ultimately turn out to be a fact, he has yet no one positive evidence to justify the assumption; experience, which after all must always prove the best criterion for his judgment, daily proves, that in every thing he is subjected, like every other part of nature, to those invariable decrees from which nothing that he beholds is exempted. Feeble monarch! of whom a grain of sand, some atoms of bile, some misplaced humours, destroy at once the existence and the reign: yet thou pretendest every thing was made for thee! Thou desirest that the entire of nature should be thy domain, and thou canst not even defend thyself from the slightest of her shocks! Thou makest to thyself a god for thyself alone; thou supposest that he unceasingly occupieth himself only for thy peculiar happiness; thou imaginest every thing was made solely for thy pleasure; and, following up thy presumptuous ideas, thou hast the audacity to call nature good or bad as thy weak intellect inclines: thou darest to think that the kindness exhibited towards thee, in common with other beings, is contradicted by the evil genii thy fancy has created! Dost thou not see that those beasts which thou supposest submitted to thine empire, frequently devour thy fellow-creatures; that fire consumeth them; that the ocean swalloweth them up; that those elements of which thou sometimes admirest the order, which sometimes thou accusest of confusion, frequently sweep them off the face of the earth; dost thou not see that all this is necessarily what it must be; that thou art not in any manner consulted in any of this phenomena? Indeed, according to thine own ideas, if thou wast to examine them with care, dost thou not admit that thy gods are the universal cause of all; that they maintain the whole by the destruction of its parts. Are they not then according to thyself, the gods of nature--of the ocean--of rivers--of mountains--of the earth, in which they occupiest, so very small a space--of all those other globes that thou seest roll in the regions of space--of those orbs that revolve round the sun that enlighteneth thee?--Cease, then, obstinately to persist in beholding nothing but thy sickly self in nature; do not flatter thyself that the human race, which reneweth itself, which disappeareth like the leaves on the trees, can absorb all the care, can ingross all the tenderness of that universal being, who, according to thyself, properly understood, ruleth the destiny of all things. Submit thyself in silence to mandates which thy unavailing prayers; can never change; to a wisdom which thy imbecility cannot fathom; to the unerring shafts of a fate, which nothing but thine own vanity, aided by thy perverse ignorance, could ever question, being the best possible good that can befall thee! which if thou couldst alter, thou wouldst with thy defective judgment render worse! What is the human race compared to the earth? What is this earth compared to the sun? What is our sun compared to those myriads of suns which at immense distances occupy the regions of space? not for the purpose of diverting thy weak eyes; not with a view to excite thy stupid admiration, as thou vainly imaginest; since multitudes of them are placed out of the range of thy visual organs: but to occupy the place which necessity hath assigned them. Mortal, feeble and vain! restore thyself to thy proper sphere; acknowledge every where the effect of necessity; recognize in thy benefits, behold in thy sorrows, the different modes of action of those various beings endowed with such a variety of properties, which surround thee; of which the macrocosm is the assemblage; and do not any longer suppose that this nature, much less its great cause, can possess such incompatible qualities as would be the result of human views or of visionary ideas, which have no existence but in thyself. As long as theologians shall continue obstinately bent to make man the model of their gods; as long ask they shall pertinaciously undertake to explain the nature of these gods, which they will never be able to do, but after human ideas, although they may associate the most heterogeneous properties, the most discrepant functions; so long, I say, experience will contradict at every moment the beneficent views they, attach to their divinities; it will be in vain that they call them good: man, reasoning thus, will never be able to find good but in those objects which impel him in a manner favourable to his actual mode of existence; he always finds confusion in that which fills him with grievous sensations; he calls evil every thing that painfully affects him, even cursorily; those beings that produce in him two modes of feeling, so very opposite to each other, he will naturally conclude are sometimes favourable, sometimes unfavourable to him; at least, if he will not allow that they act necessarily, consequently are neither one nor the other, he will say that a world where he experiences so much evil cannot be submitted to men who are perfectly good; on the other hand, he will also assume that a world in which man receives so many benefits, cannot be governed by those who are without kindness. Thus he is obliged to admit of two principles equally powerful, who are in hostility with each other; or rather, he must agree that the same persons are alternately kind and unkind; this after all is nothing more than avowing they cannot be otherwise than they are; in this case it would be useless to sacrifice to them--to make solicitation; seeing it would be nothing but _destiny_--the necessity of things submitted invariable rules. In order to justify these beings, constructed upon mortal principles, from injustice, in consequence of the evils the human species experience, the theologian is reduced to the necessity of calling them punishments inflicted for the transgressions of man. But then these general calamities include all men. Some, at least, may be supposed not to have offended. Thus he involves contradictions he finds it difficult to reconcile; to effectuate this he makes his _anthropomorphites_ immaterial--incorporeal; that is, he says they are the negation of every thing of which he has a knowledge; consequently, beings who can have no relation with corporeal beings: and this avails him no better, as will be evident by reasoning on the subject. To offend any one, is to diminish the sum of his happiness; it is to afflict him, to deprive him of something, to make him experience a painful sensation. How is it possible man can operate on such beings; how can the physical actions of a material substance have any influence over an immaterial substance, devoid of parts, having no point of contact. How can a corporeal being make an incorporeal being experience incommodious sensations? On the other hand, _justice_, according to the only ideas man can ever form of it, supposes, a permanent disposition to render to each what is due to him; the theologian will not admit that the beings he has jumbled together owe any thing to man; he insists that the benefits they bestow are all the gratuitous effects of their own goodness; that they have the right to dispose of the work of their hands according to their own pleasure; to plunge it if they please into the abyss of misery; in short, that their volition is the only guide of their conduct. It is easy to see, that according to man's idea of justice, this does not even contain the shadow of it; that it is, in fact, the mode of action adopted by what he calls the most frightful tyrants. How then can he be induced to call men just who act after this manner? Indeed, while he sees innocence suffering, virtue in tears, crime triumphant, vice recompensed, and at the same time, is told the beings whom theology has invented are the authors, he will never be able to acknowledge them to have _justice_. But he will find no such contradictory qualities in nature, where every thing is the result of immutable laws: he will at once perceive that these transient evils produce more permanent good; that they are necessary to the conservation of the whole, or else result from modifications of matter, which it is competent for him to change, by altering his own mode of action; a lesson that nature herself teaches him when he is willing to receive her instructions. But to form gods with human passions, is to make them appear unjust; to say that such beings chastise their friends for their own I good, is at once to upset all the ideas he has either of kindness or unkindness: thus the incompatible human qualities ascribed to these beings, do in fact destroy their existence. If it be insisted they have the knowledge and power of man, only that they are more extended, then it becomes a very natural reply, to say, since they know every thing, they ought at least to restrain mischief; because this would be the observation of man upon the action of his fellows;--if it be urged these qualities are similar to the same qualities possessed by man, then it may be fairly asked in what do they differ? To this, if any answer be given, be what it may, it will still be only changing the language: it will be invariably another method of expressing the same thing; seeing that man with all his ingenuity, will never be able to describe properties but after himself or those of the beings by whom he is surrounded. Where is the man filled with kindness, endowed with humanity, who does not desire with all his heart to render his fellow creatures happy? If these beings, as the theologians assert, really have man's qualities augmented, would they not, by the same reasoning, exercise their infinite power to render them all happy? Nevertheless, in despite of these theologists, we scarcely find any one who is perfectly satisfied with his condition on earth: for one mortal that enjoys, we behold a thousand who suffer; for one rich man who lives in the midst of abundance, there are thousands of poor who want common necessaries: whole nations groan in indigence, to satisfy the passions of some avaricious princes, of some few nobles, who are not thereby rendered more contented--who do not acknowledge themselves more fortunate on that account. In short, under the dominion of these beings, the earth is drenched with the tears of the miserable. What must be the inference from all this? That they are either negligent of, or incompetent to, his happiness. But the mythologists will tell you coolly, that the judgments of his gods are impenetrable! How do we understand this term? Not to be taught--not to be informed--impervious--not to be pierced: in this case it would be an unreasonable question to inquire by what authority do you reason upon them? How do you become acquainted with these impenetrable mysteries? Upon what foundation do you attribute virtues which you cannot penetrate? What idea do you form to yourself of a justice that never resembles that of man? Or is it a truth that you yourself are not a man, but one of those impenetrable beings whom you say you represent? To withdraw themselves from this, they will affirm that the justice of these idols are tempered with mercy, with compassion, with goodness: these again are human qualities: what, therefore, shall we understand by them? What idea do we attach to mercy? Is it not a derogation from the severe rules of an exact, a rigorous justice, which causes a remission of some part of a merited punishment? Here hinges the great incompatibility, the incongruity of those qualities, especially when augmented by the word _omni_; which shews how little suitable human properties are to the formation of divinities. In a prince, clemency is either a violation of justice, or the exemption from a too severe law: nevertheless, man approves of clemency in a sovereign, when its too great facility does not become prejudicial to society; he esteems it, because it announces humanity, mildness, a compassionate, noble soul; qualities he prefers in his governors to rigour, cruelty, inflexibility: besides, human laws are defective; they are frequently too severe; they are not competent to foresee all the circumstances of every case: the punishments they decree are not always commensurate with the offence: he therefore does not always think them just: but he feels very well, he understands distinctly, that when the sovereign extends his mercy, he relaxes from his justice--that if mercy he merited, the punishment ought not to take place--that then its exercise is no longer clemency, but justice: thus he feels, that in his fellow creatures these two qualities cannot exist at the same moment. How then is he to form his judgment of beings who are represented to possess both in the extremest degree? Is it not, in fact, announcing these beings to be men like ourselves, who act with our imperfections on an enlarged scale? They then say, well, but in the next world these idols will reward you for all the evils you suffer in this: this, indeed, is something to look to, if it could be contemplated alone; unmixed with all they have formerly asserted: if we could also find that there was an unison of thinking on this point--if there was a reasonable comprehensible view of it held forth: but alas! here again human pleasures, human feelings, are the basis on which these rewards are rested; only they are promised in a way we cannot comprehend them; houris, or females who are to remain for ever virgins, notwithstanding the knowledge of man, are so opposed to all human comprehension, so opposite to all experience, are such mystic assertions, that the human mind cannot possibly embrace an idea of them: besides this is only promised by one class of these beings; others affirm it will be altogether different: in short, the number of modes in which this hereafter reward is promised to him, obliges man to ask himself one plain question, Which is the real history of these blissful abodes? At this question he staggers--he seeks for advice: each assures him that the other is in error--that his peculiar mode is that which will really have place; that to believe the other is a crime. How is he to judge now? Take what course he will, he runs the chance of being wrong; he has no standard whereby to measure the correctness of these contradictory assurances; his mind is held suspended; he feels the impossibility of the whole being right; he knows not that which he ought to elect! Again, they have positively asserted these beings owe nothing to man: how then is he to expect in a future life, a more real happiness than he enjoys in the present? This they parry, by assuring him it is founded upon their promises, contained in their revealed oracles. Granted: but is he quite certain these oracles have emanated from themselves? If they are so different in their detail, may there not be reasonable ground for suspecting some of them are not authentic? If there is, which are the spurious, which are the genuine? By what rule is he to guide himself in the choice; how, with his frail methods of judging, is he to scrutinize oracles delivered by such powerful beings--to discriminate the true from the false? The ministers of each will give you an infallible method, one that, is according to their own asseveration, cannot err; that is, by an implicit belief in the particular doctrine each promulgates. Thus will be perceived the multitude of contradictions, the extravagant hypotheses which these human attributes, with which theology clothes its divinities, must necessarily produce. Beings embracing at one time so many discordant qualities will always be undefinable--can only present a train of ideas calculated to displace each other; they will consequently ever remain beings of the imagination. These beings, say their ministers, created the heavens, the earth, the creatures who inhabit it, to manifest their own peculiar glory; they have neither rivals, nor equals in nature; nothing which can be compared with them. Glory is, again, a human passion: it is in man the desire of giving his fellow-creatures an high opinion of him; this, passion is laudable when it stimulates him to undertake great projects--when it determines him to perform useful actions--but it is very frequently a weakness attached to his nature; it is nothing more than a desire to be distinguished from those beings with whom he compares himself, without exciting him to one noble, one generous act. It is easy to perceive that beings who are so much elevated above men, cannot be actuated by such a defective passion. They say these beings are jealous of their prerogatives. Jealousy is another human passion, not always of the most respectable kind: but it is rather difficult to conceive the existence of jealousy with profound wisdom, unlimited power, and the perfection of justice. Thus the theologians by dint of heaping quality on quality, aggrandizing each as is added, seem to have reduced themselves to the situation of a painter, who spreading all his colours upon his canvas together, after thus blending them into an unique mass, loses sight of the whole in the composition. They will, nevertheless, reply to these difficulties, that goodness, wisdom, justice, are in these beings qualities so pre-eminent, so distinct, have so little affinity with these same qualities in man, that they are totally dissimilar--have not the least relation. Admit this to be the case, How then can he form to himself any idea of these perfections, seeing they are totally unlike those with which he is acquainted? They surely cannot mean to insinuate that they are the reverse of every thing he understands; because that would, in effect, bring them to a precise point which would not need any explanation; it is therefore a matter of certainty this cannot be the case: then if these qualities, when exercised by the beings they have described, are only human actions so obscured, so hidden, as not to be recognizable by man, How can weak mortals pretend to announce them, to have a knowledge of them, to explain them to others? Does then theology impart to the mind the ineffable boon of enabling it to conceive that which no man is competent to understand? Does it procure for its agents the marvellous faculty of having distinct ideas of beings composed of so many contradictory properties? Does it, in fact, make the theologian himself one of these incomprehensible beings. They will impose silence, by saying the oracles have spoken; that through these mystical means they have made themselves known to mortals. The next question would naturally be, When, where, or to whom have these oracles spoken? Where are these oracles? An hundred voices raise themselves in the same moment; hands of Briaraeus are immediately stretched forth to shew them in a number of discordant collections, which each maintains, with an equal degree of vehemence, is the true code--the only doctrine man ought to believe: he runs them over, finds they scarcely agree in any one particular; but that in all the heaviest penalties are denounced against those who doubt the smallest part of any one of them. These beings of consummate wisdom are made to speak an obscure, irrational language; some of them, although their goodness is proclaimed, have been cruel and sanguinary; others, although their justice is held forth, have been partial, unjust, capricious; some, who are represented as all merciful, destine to the most hideous punishments the unhappy victims to their wrath: examine any one of them more closely, he will find that they have never in any two countries held literally the same language: that although they are said to have spoken in many places, that they have always spoken variously: What is the necessary result? The human mind, incapable of reconciling such manifest contradictions, unable to obtain from their ministers any corroborative evidence, that is not disputed by the others, falls into the strangest perplexity; is involved in doubts, entangled in a labyrinth to which no clue is to be found. Thus the relations, which are supposed to exist between man and these theological idols, can only be founded on the moral qualities of these beings: if these are not known to him, if he cannot in any manner comprehend them, they cannot by any ingenuity of argument serve him for models. In order that they may be imitated, it is needful that these qualities were cognizable by the being who is to imitate them. How can he imitate that goodness, that justice, that mercy, which does not resemble either his own, or any thing he can conceive? If these beings partake in nothing of that which forms man--if the properties they do possess, although different, are not within the reach of his comprehension--if, he cannot embrace the most distant idea of them, which the theologian assures him he cannot, How is it possible he can set about imitating them? How follow a conduct suitable to please them--to render himself acceptable in their sight? What can in effect be the motive of that worship, of that homage, of that obedience, which these beings are said to exact--which he is informed he should offer at their altars, if he does not establish it upon their goodness--their veracity--their justice: in short, upon qualities which he is competent to understand? How can he have clear, distinct ideas of those qualities, if they are no longer of the same nature as those which he has learned to reverence in the beings of his own species? To this they will reply, because none of them ever admit the least doubt of the rectitude of their own individual creed, that there can be no proportion between these idols and mortals, who are the work of their hands; that it is not permitted to the clay to demand of the potter who has formed it, "why ye have fashioned me thus;"--but if there can be no common measure between the workman and his work--if there can be no analogy between them, because the one is immaterial, the other corporeal, How do they reciprocally act upon each other? How can the gross organs of the one, comprehend the subtile quality of the other? Reasoning in the only way he is capable, and it surely will never be seriously argued that he is not to reason, will he not perceive that the earthen vase could only have received the form which it pleased the potter to give; that if it is formed badly, if it is rendered inadequate to the use for which it was designed, the vase is not in this instance to be blamed; the potter certainly has the power to break it; the vase cannot prevent him; it will neither have motives nor means to soften his anger; it will be obliged to submit to its destiny; but he will not be able to prevent his mind from thinking the potter harsh in thus punishing the vase, rather than by forming it anew, by giving it another figure, render it competent to the purposes he intended. According to these notions the relations between man and these theological beings have no existence, they owe nothing to him, are dispensed from shewing him either goodness or justice; that man, on the contrary, owes them every thing: but contradictions appear at every step. If these have promised by their oracles any thing to man, it is rather difficult for him to believe, that what is so solemnly promised does not belong to him if he fulfils the condition of the promise. The difference a theologian may choose to find in these relations will hardly be convincing to a reasonable mind. The duties of man towards these beings can, according to their own shewing, have no other foundation than the happiness he expects from them: thus the relation has a reciprocity, it is founded upon their goodness, upon their justice, it demands obedience on his part, a conduct suitable to the benefits he receives. Thus, in whatever manner the theological system is viewed, it destroys itself. Will theology never feel that the more it endeavours to exaggerate the human qualities, the less it exalts the beings it pictures; the more incomprehensible it renders them, the more it contributes to swell its own ocean of contradictions; that to take human passions, mortal faculties at all, is perhaps the worst means it can pursue to form a perfect being; but that if it must persist in this method, then the further they remove them from man, the more they debase him, the more they weaken the relations subsisting between them: that in thus aggregating human properties, it should carefully abstain from associating in these pictures those qualities which man finds detestable in his fellows. Thus, despotism in man is looked upon as an unjust, unreasonable power; if it introduces such a quality into its portraits, it cannot rationally suppose them suitable to cultivate the esteem, to attract the voluntary homage of the human race: if, however, the canvas be examined, we shall frequently be struck, with perceiving this the leading feature; we shall equally find a want of keeping through the whole; that shadows are introduced, where lights ought to prevail; that the colouring is incongruous--the design without harmony. The discrepancy of conduct which theology imputes to these idols, is not less remarkable than the contrariety of qualities it ascribes to them, or the inconsistency of the passions with which it invests them; sometimes, according to this, they are the friends to reason, desirous of the happiness of society; sometimes they are inimical to virtue; interdict the use of reason; flattered with seeing society disturbed, they sometimes afflict man without his being able to guess the cause of their displeasure; sometimes they are favourable to mankind--at others, indisposed towards the human species: sometimes they are represented as permitting crimes for the pleasure of punishing them--at others, they exert all their power to arrest crime in its birth; sometimes they elect a small number to receive eternal happiness, predestinating the rest to perpetual misery--to everlasting torments; at others, they throw open the gates of mercy to all who choose to enter them; sometimes they are pourtrayed as destroying the universe--at others, as establishing the most beautiful order in the planet we inhabit; sometimes they are held forth as countenancing deception--at others, as having the highest reverence for truth--as holding deceit in abomination. This, again, is the necessary result of the human faculties, the mortal passions, the frail qualities of which they compose the beings they hold forth to the admiration, to the worship, to the homage of the world. Perhaps the most fatal consequences have arisen from founding the moral character of these divinities upon that of man. Those who first had the confidence to tell man that in these matters it was not permitted him to consult his reason, that the interests of society demanded its sacrifice, evidently proposed to themselves to make him the sport of their own wantonness--to make him the blind instrument of their own unworthiness. It is from this radical error that has sprung all those extravagances which the various superstitions have introduced upon the earth: from hence has flowed that sacred fury which has frequently deluged it with blood: here is the cause of those inhuman persecutions which have so often desolated nations: in short, all those horrid tragedies which have been acted on the vast theatre of the world, by command of the different ministers of the various systems, whose gods they have said ordained these shocking spectacles. The theologians themselves have thus been the means, of calumniating the gods they pretended to serve, under the pretext of exalting their name--of covering them with glory; in this they may have been said to be true atheists, since they seem only to have been anxious to destroy the idols they themselves had raised, by the actions they have attributed to them--which has debased them in the eye of reason--rendered their existence more than doubtful to the man of humanity. Indeed, it would require more than human credulity to accredit the assertion that these beings ever could order the atrocities committed in their name. Every time they have been willing to disturb the harmony of mankind--whenever they have been desirous to render him unsociable, they have cried out that their gods ordained that he should be so. Thus they render mortals uncertain, make the ethical system fluctuate by founding it upon changeable, capricious idols, whom they represent much more frequently cruel and unjust, than filled with bounty and benevolence. However it may be, admitting if they will for a moment that their idols possess all the human virtues in an infinite degree of perfection, we shall quickly be obliged to acknowledge that they cannot connect them with those metaphysical, theological, negative attributes, of which we have already spoken. If these beings are spirits that are immaterial, how can they be able to act like man, who is a corporeal being? Pure spirits, according to the only idea man can form of them, having no organs, no parts, cannot see any thing; can neither hear our prayers, attend to our solicitations, nor have compassion for our miseries. They cannot be immutable, if their dispositions can suffer change: they cannot be infinite, if the totality of nature, without being them, can exist conjointly with them: they cannot be omnipotent, if they either permit or do not prevent evil: they cannot be omnipresent, if they are not every where: they must therefore be in the evil as well as in the good. Thus in whatever manner they are contemplated, under whatever point of view they are considered, the human qualities which are assigned to them, necessarily destroy each other; neither can these same properties in any possible manner combine themselves with the supernatural attributes given to them by theology. With respect to the revealed will of these idols, by means of their oracles, far from being a proof of their good will, of their commisseration for man, it would rather seem evidence of their ill-will. It supposes them capable of leaving mankind for a considerable season unacquainted with truths highly important to their interests; these oracles communicated to a small number of chosen men, are indicative of partiality, of predilections, that are but little compatible with the common Father of the human race. These oracles were ill imagined, since they tend to injure the immutability ascribed to these idols, by supposing that they permitted man to be ignorant at one time of their will, whilst at another time they were willing he should be instructed on the subject. Moreover, these oracles frequently predicted offences for which afterwards severe punishments were inflicted on those who did no more than fulfil them. This, according to the reasoning of man, would be unjust. The ambiguous language in which they were delivered, the almost impossibility of comprehending them, the inexplicable mysteries they contained, seemed to render them doubtful; at least they are not consistent with the ideas man is capable of forming of infinite perfection: but the fact clearly is, they were thus rendered capable of application to the contingency of events--could be made to suit almost any circumstances: this would render it not a very improbable conjecture, that these oracles were solely delivered by the priests themselves. It these were tried by the only test of which he has any knowledge--HIS REASON, it would naturally occur to the mind of man, that mystery could never, on any occasion, be used in the promulgation of substantive decrees meant to operate on the obedience, to actuate the moral conduct of man: it is quite usual with most legislators to render their laws as explicit as possible, to adapt them to the meanest understanding; in short, it would be reckoned want of good faith in a government, to throw a thick, mysterious veil over the announcement of that conduct which it wished its citizens to adopt; they would be apt to think such a procedure was either meant to cover its own peculiar ignorance, or else to entrap them into a snare; at best, it would be considered as furnishing a never-failing source of dispute, which a wise government would endeavour to avoid. It will thus be obvious, that the ideas which theology has at various times, under various systems, held forth to man, have for the most part been confused, discordant, incompatible, and have had a general tendency to disturb the repose of mankind. The obscure notions, the vague speculations of these multiplied creeds, would be matter of great indifference, if man was not taught to hold them as highly important to his welfare--if he did not draw from them conclusions pernicious to himself--if he did not learn from these theologians that he must sharpen his asperity against those who do not contemplate them in the same point of view with himself: as he perhaps, then, will never have a common standard, a fixed rule, a regular graduated scale, whereby to form his judgment on these points--as all efforts of the imagination must necessarily assume divers shapes, undergo a variety of modifications, which can never be assimilated to each other, it was little likely that mankind would at all times be able to understand each other on this subject; much less that they would be in accord in the opinions they should adopt. From hence that diversity of superstitions which in all ages have given rise to the most irrational disputes; which have engendered the most sanguinary wars; which have caused the most barbarous massacres; which have divided man from his fellow by the most rancorous animosities, that will perhaps never be healed; because he has been impelled to consider the peculiar tenets he adopted, not only as immediately essential to his individual welfare, but also as intimately connected with the happiness, closely interwoven with the tranquillity of the nation of which he was a citizen. That such contrariety of sentiment, such discrepancy of opinion should exist, is not in the least surprising; it is, in fact, the natural result of those physical causes to which, as long as he exists, he is at all times submitted. The man of a heated imagination cannot accommodate himself to the god of a phlegmatic, tranquil being: the infirm, bilious, discontented, angry mortal, cannot view him under the same aspect as he who enjoys a sounder constitution,--as the individual of a gay turn, who enjoys the blessing of content, who wishes to live in peace. An equitable, kind, compassionate, tender-hearted man, will not delineate to himself the same portrait of his god, as the man who is of an harsh, unjust, inflexible, wicked character. Each individual will modify his god after his own peculiar manner of existing, after his own mode of thinking, according to his particular mode of feeling. A wise, honest, rational man will always figure to himself his god as humane and just. Nevertheless, as fear usually presided at the formation of those idols man set up for the object of his worship; as the ideas of these beings were generally associated with that of terror as the recollections of sufferings, which he attributed to them, often made him tremble; frequently awakened in his mind the most afflicting, reminiscence; as it sometimes filled him with inquietude, sometimes inflamed his imagination, sometimes overwhelmed him with dismay, the experience of all ages proves, that these vague idols became the most important of all considerations--was the affair which most seriously occupied the human race: that they every where spread consternation--produced the most frightful ravages, by the delirious inebriation resulting from the opinions with which they intoxicated the mind. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to prevent habitual fear, which of all human passions is the most incommodious, from becoming a dangerous leaven; which in the long run will sour, exasperate, and give malignancy to the most moderate temperament. If a misanthrope, in hatred of his race, had formed the project of throwing man into the greatest perplexity,--if a tyrant, in the plenitude of his unruly desire to punish, had sought out the most efficacious means; could either the one or the other have imagined that which was so well calculated to gratify their revenge, as thus to occupy him unceasingly with objects not only unknown to him, but which no two of them should ever see with precisely the same eyes; which notwithstanding they should be obliged to contemplate as the centre of all their thoughts--as the only model of their conduct--as the end of all their actions--as the subject of all their research--as a thing of more importance to them than life itself; upon which all their present felicity, all their future happiness, must necessarily depend? Could the gods themselves, in their solicitude to punish the impious Prometheus, for having stolen fire from the sun, have imagined a more certain method of executing their wishes? Was not Pandora's box, though stuffed with evils, trifling when compared with this? That at least left hope, to the unfortunate Epimetheus; this effectually cut it off. If man was subjected to an absolute monarch, to a sultan who should keep himself secluded from his subjects; who followed no rule but his own desires; who did not feel himself bound by any duty; who could for ever punish the offences committed against him; whose fury it was easy to provoke; who was irritated even by the ideas, the thoughts of his subjects; whose displeasure might be incurred without even their own knowledge; the name of such a sovereign would assuredly be sufficient to carry trouble, to spread terror, to diffuse consternation into the very souls of those who should hear it pronounced; his idea would haunt them every where--would unceasingly afflict them--would plunge them into despair. What tortures would not their mind endure to discover this formidable being, to ascertain the secret of pleasing him! What labour would not their imagination bestow, to discover what mode of conduct might be able to disarm his anger! What fears would assail them, lest they might not have justly hit upon the means of assuaging his wrath! What disputes would they not enter into upon the nature, the qualities of a ruler, equally unknown to them all! What a variety of means would not be adopted, to find favour in his eyes; to avert his chastisement! Such is the history of the effects superstition has produced upon the earth. Man has always been panic-struck, because the systems adopted never enable him to form any correct opinion, any fixed ideas, upon a subject so material to his happiness; because every thing conspired either to give his ideas a fallacious turn, or else to keep his mind in the most profound ignorance; when he was willing to set himself right, when he was sedulous to examine the path which conducted to his felicity, when he was desirous of probing opinions so consequential to his peace, involving so much mystery, yet combining both his hopes and his fears, he was forbidden to employ the only proper method,--HIS REASON, guided by his experience; he was assured this would be an offence the most indelible. If he asked, Wherefore his reason had then been given him, since he was not to use it in matters of such high behest? he was answered, those were mysteries of which none but the initiated could be informed; that it sufficed for him to know, that the reason which he seemed so highly to prize, which he held in so much esteem, was his most dangerous enemy--his most inveterate, most determined foe. Where can be the propriety of such an argument? Can it really be that reason is dangerous? If so, the Turks are justified in their predilection for madmen: but to proceed, he is told that he must believe in the gods, not question the mission of their priests; in short, that he had nothing to do with the laws they imposed, but to obey them: when he then required that these laws might at least be made comprehensible to him; that he might be placed in a capacity to understand them; the old answer was returned, that they were _mysteries_; he must not inquire into them. But where is the necessity for mystery in points of such vast importance? He might, indeed, from time to time consult these oracles, when he was able to make the sacrifices demanded; he would then receive precepts for his conduct: these were always, however, given in such vague, indeterminate terms, that he had scarcely the chance of acting right. At different times the same oracles delivered different opinions: thus he had nothing, steady; nothing permanent, whereby to guide his steps; like a blind man left to himself in the streets, he was obliged to grope his way at the peril of his existence. This will serve to shew the urgent necessity there is for truth to throw its radiant lustre on systems big with so much importance; that are so calculated to corroborate the animosities, to confirm the bitterness of soul, between those whom nature intended should always act as brothers. By the magical charms with which these idols were surrounded, the human species has remained either as if it was benumbed, in a state of stupid apathy, or else he has become furious with fanaticism: sometimes, desponding with fear, man cringed like a slave who bends under the scourge of an inexorable master, always ready to strike him; he trembled under a yoke made too ponderous for his strength: he lived in continual dread of a vengeance he was unceasingly striving to appease, without ever knowing when he had succeeded: as he was always bathed in tears, continually enveloped in misery--as he was never permitted to lose sight of his fears--as he was continually exhorted to nourish his alarm, he could neither labour for his own happiness nor contribute to that of others; nothing could exhilirate him; he became the enemy of himself, the persecutor of his fellow-creatures, because his felicity here below was interdicted; he passed his time in heaving the most bitter sighs; his reason being forbidden him, he fell into either a state of infancy or delirium, which submitted him to authority; he was destined to this servitude from the hour he quitted his mother's womb, until that in which he was returned to his kindred dust; tyrannical opinion bound him fast in her massive fetters; a prey to the terrors with which he was inspired, he appeared to have come upon the earth for no other purpose than to dream--with no other desire than to groan--with no other motives than to sigh; his only view seemed to be to injure himself; to deprive himself of every rational pleasure, to embitter his own existence; to disturb the felicity of others. Thus, abject, slothful, irrational, he frequently became wicked, under the idea of doing honour to his gods; because they instilled into his mind that it was his duty to avenge their cause, to sustain their honour, to propagate their worship. Mortals were prostrate from race to race, before vain idols to which fear had given birth in the bosom of ignorance, during the calamities of the earth; they tremblingly adored phantoms which credulity had placed in the recesses of their own brain, where they found a sanctuary which time only served to strengthen; nothing could undeceive them; nothing was competent to make them feel, it was themselves they adored--that they bent the knee before their own work--that they terrified themselves with the extravagant pictures they had themselves delineated; they obstinately persisted in prostrating themselves, in perplexing themselves, in trembling; they even made a crime of endeavouring to dissipate their fears; they mistook the production of their own folly; their conduct resembled that of children, who having disfigured their own features, become afraid of themselves when a mirror reflects the extravagance they have committed. These notions so afflicting for themselves, so grievous to others, have their epoch from the calamities of man; they will continue, perhaps augment, until their mind, enlightened by discarded reason, illumined by truth, shall set in their true colours these various systems; until reflection guided by experience, shall attach no more importance to them, than is consistent with the happiness of society; until man, bursting the chains of superstition--recalling to mind the great end of his existence--taking a rational view of that which surrounds him, shall no longer refuse to contemplate nature under her true character; shall no longer persist in refusing to acknowledge she contains within herself the cause of that wonderful phenomena which strikes on the dazzled optics of man: until thoroughly persuaded of the weakness of their claim to the homage of mankind, he shall make one pious, simultaneous, mighty effort, and _overthrow the altars of Moloch and his priests_. CHAP. IV. _Examination of the Proofs of the Existence of the Divinity, as given by CLARKE._ The unanimity of man in acknowledging the Divinity, is commonly looked upon as the strongest proof of his existence. There is not, it is said, any people on the earth who have not some ideas, whether true or false, of an all-powerful agent who governs the world. The rudest savages as well as the most polished nations, are equally obliged to recur by thought to the first cause of every thing that exists; thus it is affirmed, the cry of Nature herself ought to convince us of the existence of the Godhead, of which she has taken pains to engrave the notion in the minds of men: they therefore conclude, that the idea of God is innate. Perhaps there is nothing of which man should be more sedulously careful than permitting a promiscuous assemblage of right with wrong--of suffering false conclusions to be drawn from true propositions; this will not improbably be found to be pretty much the case in this instance; the existence of the great _Cause of causes_, the _Parent of parents_, does not, I think, admit of any doubt in the mind of any one who has reasoned: but, if this existence did not rest upon better foundations than the unanimity of man on this subject, I am fearful it would not be placed upon so solid a rock as those who make this asseveration may imagine: the fact is, man is not generally agreed upon this point; if he was, superstition could have no existence; the idea of God cannot be _innate_, because, independent of the proofs offered on every side of the almost impossibility of innate ideas, one simple fact will set such an opinion for ever at rest, except with those who are obstinately determined not to be convinced by even their own arguments: if this idea was innate, it must be every where the same; seeing that that which is antecedent to man's being, cannot have experienced the modifications of his existence, which are posterior. Even if it were waived, that the same idea should be expected from all mankind, but that only every nation should have their ideas alike on this subject, experience will not warrant the assertion, since nothing can be better established than that the idea is not uniform even in the same town; now this would be an insuperable quality in an innate idea. It not unfrequently happens, that in the endeavour to prove too much, that which stood firm before the attempt, is weakened; thus a bad advocate frequently injures a good cause, although he may not be able to overturn the rights on which it is rested. It would, therefore, perhaps, come nearer to the point if it was said, "that the natural curiosity of mankind have in all ages, and in all nations, led him to seek after the primary cause of the phenomena he beholds; that owing to the variations of his climate, to the difference of his organization, the greater or less calamity he has experienced, the variety of his intellectual faculties, and the circumstances under which he has been placed, man has had the most opposite, contradictory, extravagant notions of the Divinity, but that he has uniformly been in accord in acknowledging both the existence, and the wisdom of his work--NATURE." If disengaged from prejudice, we analyze this proof, we shall see that the universal consent of man, so diffused over the earth, actually proves little more than that he has been in all countries exposed to frightful revolutions, experienced disasters, been sensible to sorrows of which he has mistaken the physical causes; that those events to which he has been either the victim or the witness, have called forth his admiration or excited his fear; that for want of being acquainted with the powers of nature, for want of understanding her laws, for want of comprehending her infinite resources, for want of knowing the effects she must necessarily produce under given circumstances, he has believed these phenomena were due to some secret agent of which he has had vague ideas--to beings whom he has supposed conducted themselves after his own manner; who were operated upon by similar motives with himself. The consent then of man in acknowledging a variety of gods, proves nothing, except that in the bosom of ignorance he has either admired the phenomena of nature, or trembled under their influence; that his imagination was disturbed by what he beheld or suffered; that he has sought in vain to relieve his perplexity, upon the unknown cause of the phenomena he witnessed, which frequently obliged him to quake with terror: the imagination of the human race has laboured variously upon these causes, which have almost always been incomprehensible to him; although every thing confessed his ignorance, his inability to define these causes, yet he maintained that he was assured of their existence; when pressed, he spoke of a spirit, (a word to which it was impossible to attach any determinate idea) which taught nothing but the sloth, which evidenced nothing but the stupidity of those who pronounced it. It ought, however, not to excite any surprise that man is incapable of forming any substantive ideas, save of those things which act, or which have heretofore acted upon his senses; it is very evident that the only objects competent to move his organs are material,--that none but physical beings can furnish him with ideas,--a truth which has been rendered sufficiently clear in the commencement of this work, not to need any further proof. It will suffice therefore to say that the idea of God is not an innate, but an acquired notion; that it is the very nature of this notion to vary from age to age; to differ in one country from another; to be viewed variously by individuals. What do I say? It is, in fact, an idea hardly ever constant in the same mortal. This diversity, this fluctuation, this change, stamps it with the true character of an acquired opinion. On the other hand, the strongest proof that can be adduced that these ideas are founded in error, is, that man by degrees has arrived at perfectioning all the sciences which have any known objects for their basis, whilst the science of theology has not advanced; it is almost every where at the same point; men seem equally undecided on this subject; those who have most occupied themselves with it, have effected but little; they seem, indeed, rather to have rendered the primitive ideas man formed to himself on this head more obscure,--to have involved in greater mystery all his original opinions. As soon as it is asked of man, what are the gods before whom he prostrates himself, forthwith his sentiments are divided. In order that his opinions should be in accord, it would be requisite that uniform ideas, analogous sensations, unvaried perceptions, should every where have given birth to his notions upon this subject: but this would suppose organs perfectly similar, modified by sensations which have a perfect affinity: this is what could not happen: because man, essentially different by his temperament, who is found under circumstances completely dissimilar, must necessarily have a great diversity of ideas upon objects which each individual contemplates so variously. Agreed in some general points, each made himself a god after his own manner; he feared him, he served him, after his own mode. Thus the god of one man, or of one nation, was hardly ever that of another man, or of another nation. The god of a savage, unpolished people, is commonly some material object, upon which the mind has exercised itself but little; this god appears very ridiculous in the eyes of a more polished community, whose minds have laboured more intensely upon the subject. A spiritual god, whose adorers despise the worship paid by the savage to a coarse, material object, is the subtle production of the brain of thinkers, who, lolling in the lap of polished society quite at their leisure, have deeply meditated, have long occupied themselves with the subject. The theological god, although for the most part incomprehensible, is the last effort of the human imagination; it is to the god of the savage, what an inhabitant of the city of Sybaris, where effiminacy and luxury reigned, where pomp and pageantry had reached their climax, clothed with a curiously embroidered purple habit of silk, was to a man either quite naked, or simply covered with the skin of a beast perhaps newly slain. It is only in civilized societies, that leisure affords the opportunity of dreaming--that ease procures the facility of reasoning; in these associations, idle speculators meditate, dispute, form metaphysics: the faculty of thought is almost void in the savage, who is occupied either with hunting, with fishing, or with the means of procuring a very precarious subsistence by dint of almost incessant labour. The generality of men, however, have not more elevated notions of the divinity, have not analyzed him more than the savage. A spiritual, immaterial God, is formed only to occupy the leisure of some subtle men, who have no occasion to labour for a subsistence. Theology, although a science so much vaunted, considered so important to the interests of man, is only useful to those who live at the expense of others; or of those who arrogate to themselves the privilege of thinking for all those who labour. This science becomes, in some polished societies, who are not on that account more enlightened, a branch of commerce extremely advantageous to its professors; equally unprofitable to the citizens; above all when these have the folly to take a very decided interest in their unintelligible system--in their discordant opinions. What an infinite distance between an unformed stone, an animal, a star, a statue, and the abstracted Deity, which theology hath clothed with attributes under which it loses sight of him itself! The savage without doubt deceives himself in the object to which he addresses his vows; like a child he is smitten with the first object that strikes his sight--that operates upon him in a lively manner; like the infant, his fears are alarmed by that from which he conceives he has either received an injury or suffered disgrace; still his ideas are fixed by a substantive being, by an object which he can examine by his senses. The Laplander who adores a rock,--the negro who prostrates himself before a monstrous serpent, at least see the objects they adore. The idolater falls upon his knees before a statue, in which he believes there resides some concealed virtue, some powerful quality, which he judges may be either useful or prejudicial to himself; but that subtle reasoner, called a metaphysician, who in consequence of his unintelligible science, believes he has a right to laugh at the savage, to deride the Laplander, to scoff at the negro, to ridicule the idolater, doth not perceive that he is himself prostrate before a being of his own imagination, of which it is impossible he should form to himself any correct idea, unless, like the savage, he re-enters into visible nature, to clothe him with qualities capable of being brought within the range of his comprehension. For the most part the notions on the Divinity, which obtain credit even at the present day, are nothing more than a general terror diversely acquired, variously modified in the mind of nations, which do not tend to prove any thing, save that they have received them from their trembling, ignorant ancestors. These gods have been successively altered, decorated, subtilized, by those thinkers, those legislators, those priests, who have meditated deeply upon them; who have prescribed systems of worship to the uninformed; who have availed themselves of their existing prejudices, to submit them to their yoke; who have obtained a dominion over their mind, by seizing on their credulity,--by making them participate in their errors,--by working on their fears; these dispositions will always be a necessary consequence of man's ignorance, when steeped in the sorrows of his heart. If it be true, as asserted, that the earth has never witnessed any nation so unsociable, so savage, to be without some form of religious worship--who did not adore some god--but little will result from it respecting the Divinity. The word GOD, will rarely be found to designate more than the unknown cause of those effects which man has either admired or dreaded. Thus, this notion so generally diffused, upon which so much stress is laid; will prove little more than that man in all generations has been ignorant of natural causes,--that he has been incompetent, from some cause or other, to account for those phenomena which either excited his surprise or roused his fears. If at the present day a people cannot be found destitute of some kind of worship, entirely without superstition, who do not acknowledge a God, who have not adopted a theology more or less subtle, it is because the uninformed ancestors of these people have all endured misfortunes--have been alarmed by terrifying effects, which they have attributed to unknown causes--have beheld strange sights, which they have ascribed to powerful agents, whose existence they could not fathom; the details of which, together with their own bewildered notions, they have handed down to their posterity who have not given them any kind of examination. It will readily be allowed, that the universality of an opinion by no means proves its truth. Do we not see a great number of ignorant prejudices, a multitude of barbarous errors, even at the present day, receive the almost universal sanction of the human race? Are not nearly all the inhabitants of the earth imbued with the idea of magic--in the habit of acknowledging occult powers--given to divination--believers in enchantment--the slaves to omens--supporters of witchcraft--thoroughly persuaded of the existence of ghosts? If some of the most enlightened persons are cured of these follies, they still find very zealous partizans in the greater number of mankind, who accredit them with the firmest confidence. It would not, however, be concluded by men of sound sense, in many instances not by the theologian himself, that therefore these chimeras actually have existence, although sanctioned with the credence of the multitude. Before Copernicus, there was no one who did not believe that the earth was stationary, that the sun described his annual revolution round it. Was, however, this universal consent of man upon a principle of astronomical science, which endured for so many thousand years, less an error on that account? Yet to have doubted the truth of such a generally-diffused opinion, one that had received the sanction of so many learned men--that was clothed with the sacred vestments of so many ages of credulity--that had been adopted by Moses, acknowledged by Solomon, accredited by the Persian magi--that Elijah himself had not refuted--that had obtained the fiat of the most respectable universities, the most enlightened legislators, the wisest kings, the most eloquent ministers; in short, a principle that embraced all the stability that could be derived from the universal consent of all ranks: to have doubted, I say, of this, would at one period have been held as the highest degree of profanation, as the most presumptuous scepticism, as an impious blasphemy, that would have threatened the very existence of that unhappy country from whose unfortunate bosom such a venomous, sacrilegious mortal could have arisen. It is well known what opinion was entertained of Gallileo for maintaining the existence of the antipodes. Pope Gregory excommunicated as atheists all those who gave it credit. Thus each man has his God: But do all these gods exist? In reply it will be said, somewhat triumphantly, each man hath his ideas of the sun, do all these suns exist? However narrow may be the pass by which superstition imagines it has thus guarded its favourite hypothesis, nothing will perhaps be more easy than the answer: the existence of the sun is a fact verified by the daily use of the senses; all the world see the sun; no one bath ever said there is no sun; nearly all mankind have acknowledged it to be both luminous and hot: however various may be the opinions of man, upon this luminary, no one has ever yet pretended there was more than one attached to our planetary system. But we may perhaps be told, there is a wide difference between that which can be contemplated by the visual organs, which can be understood by the sense of feeling, and that which does not come under the cognizance of any part of the organic structure of man. We must confess theology here has the advantage; that we are unable to follow it through its devious sinuosities; amidst its meandering labyrinths: but then it is the advantage of those who see sounds, over those who only hear them; of those who hear colours, over those who only see them; of the professors of a science, where every thing is built upon laws inverted from those common to the globe we inhabit; over those common understandings, who cannot be sensible to any thing that does not give an impulse to some of their organs. If man, therefore, had the courage to throw aside his prejudices, which every thing conspires to render as durable as himself--if divested of fear he would examine coolly--if guided by reason he would dispassionately view the nature of things, the evidence adduced in support of any given doctrine; he would, at least, be under the necessity to acknowledge, that the idea of the Divinity is not innate--that it is not anterior to his existence--that it is the production of time, acquired by communication with his own species--that, consequently, there was a period when it did not actually exist in him: he would see clearly, that he holds it by tradition from those who reared him: that these themselves received it from their ancestors: that thus tracing it up, it will be found to have been derived in the last resort, from ignorant savages, who were our first fathers. The history of the world will shew that crafty legislators, ambitious tyrants, blood-stained conquerors, have availed themselves of the ignorance, the fears, the credulity of his progenitors, to turn to their own profit an idea to which they rarely attached any other substantive meaning than that of submitting them to the yoke of their own domination. Without doubt there have been mortals who have dreamed they have seen the Divinity. Mahomet, I believe, boasted he had a long conversation with the Deity, who promulgated to him the system of the Mussulmans. But are there not thousands, even of the theologians, who will exhaust their breath, and fatigue their lungs with vociferating this man was a liar; whose object was to take advantage of the simplicity, to profit by the enthusiasm, to impose on the credulity of the Arabs; who promulgated for truths, the crazy reveries of his own distempered imagination? Nevertheless, is it not a truth, that this doctrine of the crafty Arab, is at this day the creed of millions, transmitted to them by their ancestors, rendered sacred by time, read to them in their mosques, adorned with all the ceremonies of superstitious worship; of which the inhabitants of a vast portion of the earth do not permit themselves for an instant to doubt the veracity; who, on the contrary, hold those who do not accredit it as dogs, as infidels, as beings of an inferior rank, of meaner capacities than themselves? Indeed that man, even if he were a theologian, would not experience the most gentle treatment from the infuriated Mahometan, who should to his face venture to dispute the divine mission of his prophet. Thus the ancestors of the Turk have transmitted to their posterity, those ideas of the Divinity which they manifestly received from those who deceived them; whose impositions, modified from age to age, subtilized by the priests, clothed with the reverential awe inspired by fear, have by degrees acquired that solidity, received that corroboration, attained that veteran stability, which is the natural result of public sanction, backed by theological parade. The word God is, perhaps, among the first that vibrate on the ear of man; it is reiterated to him incessantly; he is taught to lisp it with respect; to listen to it with fear; to bend the knee when it is reverberated: by dint of repetition, by listening to the fables of antiquity, by hearing it pronounced by all ranks and persuasions, he seriously believes all men bring the idea with them into the world; he thus confounds a mechanical habit with instinct; whilst it is for want of being able to recal to himself the first circumstances under which his imagination was awakened by this name; for want of recollecting all the recitals made to him during the course of his infancy; for want of accurately defining what was instilled into him by his education; in short, because his memory does not furnish him with the succession of causes that have engraven it on his brain, that he believes this idea is really inherent to his being; innate in all his species. Iamblicus, indeed, who was a Pythagorean philosopher not in the highest repute with the learned world, although one of those visionary priests in some estimation with theologians, (at least if we may venture to judge by the unlimited draughts they have made on the bank of his doctrines) who was unquestionably a favourite with the emperor Julian, says, "that anteriorly to all use of reason, the notion of the gods is inspired by nature, and that we have even a sort of feeling of the Divinity, preferable to the knowledge of him." It is, however, uniformly by habit, that man admires, that he fears a being, whose name he has attended to from his earliest infancy. As soon as he hears it uttered, he without reflection mechanically associates it with those ideas with which his imagination has been filled by the recitals of others; with those sensations which he has been instructed to accompany it. Thus, if for a season man would be ingenuous with himself, he would concede that in the greater number of his race, the ideas of the gods, and of those attributes with which they are clothed, have their foundation, take their rise in, are the fruit of the opinions of his fathers, traditionally infused into him by education--confirmed by habit--corroborated by example--enforced by authority. That it very rarely happens he examines these ideas; that they are for the most part adopted by inexperience, propagated by tuition, rendered sacred by time, inviolable from respect to his progenitors, reverenced as forming part of those institutions he has most learned to value. He thinks he has always had them, because he has had them from his infancy; he considers them indubitable, because he is never permitted to question them--because he never has the intrepidity to examine their basis. If it had been the destiny of a Brachman, or a Mussulman, to have drawn his first breath on the shores of Africa, he would adore, with as much simplicity, with as much fervour, the serpent reverenced by the Negroes, as he does the God his own metaphysicians have offered to his reverence. He would be equally indignant if any one should presumptuously dispute the divinity of this reptile, which he would have learned to venerate from the moment he quitted the womb of his mother, as the most zealous, enthusiastic fakir, when the marvellous wonders of his prophet should be brought into question; or as the most subtile theologian when the inquiry turned upon the incongruous qualities with which he has decorated his gods. Nevertheless, if this serpent god of the Negro should be contested, they could not at least dispute his existence. Simple as may be the mind of this dark son of nature, uncommon as may be the qualities with which he has clothed his reptile, he still may be evidenced by all who choose to exercise their organs of sight; not so with the theologian; he absolutely questions the existence of every other god but that which he himself has formed; which is questioned in its turn by his brother metaphysician. They are by no means disposed to admit the proofs offered by each other. Descartes, Paschal, and Doctor Samuel Clarke himself, have been accused of atheism by the theologians of their time. Subsequent reasoners have made use of their proofs, and even given them as extremely valid. Doctor Bowman published a work, in which he pretends all the proofs hitherto brought forward are crazy and fragile: he of course substitutes his own; which in their turn have been the subject of animadversion. Thus it would appear these theologians are not more in accord with themselves than they are with Turks or Pagans. They cannot even agree as to their proofs of existence: from age to age new champions arise, new evidence is adduced, the old discarded, or treated with contempt; profound philosophers, subtle metaphysicians, are continually attacking each other for their ignorance on a point of the very first importance. Amidst this variety of discussion, it is very difficult for simple winds, for those who steadily search after truth, who only wish to understand what they believe, to find a point upon which they can fix with reliance--a standard round which they may rally without fear of danger--a common measure that way serve them for a beacon to avoid the quicksands of delusion--the sophistry of polemics. Men of very great genius have successively miscarried in their demonstrations; have been held to have betrayed their cause by the weakness of the arguments by which they have supported it; by the manner in which they have attempted to establish their positions. Thus many of them, when they believed they had surmounted a difficulty, had the mortification to find they had only given birth to an hundred others. They seem, indeed, not to be in a capacity to understand each other, or to agree among themselves, when they reason upon the nature and qualities of beings created by such a variety of imaginations, which each contemplates diversely, upon which the natural self-love of each disputant induces him to reject with vehement indignation every thing that does not fall in with his own peculiar mode of thinking--that does not quadrate either with his superstition or his ignorance, or sometimes with both. The opponents of Clarke charge him with begging the question in his work on _The Being and Attributes of God_. They say he has pretended to prove this existence _a priori_, which they deem impossible, seeing there is nothing anterior to the first of causes; that therefore it can only be proved _a posteriori_, that is to say, by its effects. Law, in his _Inquiry into the Ideas of Space, Time, Immensity, &c_. has attacked him very triumphantly, for this manner of proof, which is stated to be so very repugnant to the school-men. His arguments have been treated with no more ceremony by Thomas D'Aquinas, John Scott, and others of the schools. At the present day I believe he is held in more respect--that his authority outweighs that of all his antagonists together. Be that as it may, those who have followed him have done nothing more than either repeat his ideas, or present his evidence under a new form. Tillotson argues at great length, but it would be rather difficult to understand which side of the question he adopts on this momentous subject; whether he is a Necessitarian, or among the opposers of Fatalism. Speaking of man, he says, "he is liable to many evils and miseries, which he can neither prevent or redress; he is full of wants, which he cannot supply, and compassed about with infirmities which he cannot remove, and obnoxious to dangers which he can never sufficiently provide against: he is apt to grieve for what he cannot help, and eagerly to desire what he is never able to obtain." If the proofs of Clarke, who has drawn them up in twelve propositions, are examined with attention, I think they may be fairly shielded from the reproach with which they have been loaded; it does not appear that he has proved his positions _a priori,_ but _a posteriori,_ according to rule. It seems clear, however, that he has mistaken the proof of the existence of the effects, for the proof of the existence of the cause: but here he seems to have more reason than his critics, who in their eagerness to prove that Clarke has not conformed to the rules of the schools, would entirely overlook the best, the surest foundation whereon to rest the existence of the _Great Cause of causes,_ that _Parent of Parents_, whose wisdom shines so manifestly in nature, of which Clarke's work may be said to be such a masterly evidence. We shall follow, step by step, the different propositions in which this learned divine developes the received opinions upon the Divinity; which, when applied to nature, will be found to be so accurate, so correct, as to leave no further room to doubt either the existence or the wisdom of her great author, thus proved through her own existence. Dr. Clarke sets out with saying: "_1st. Something has existed from all eternity_." This proposition is evident--hath no occasion for proofs. Matter has existed from all eternity, its forms alone are evanescent; matter is the great engine used by nature to produce all her phenomena, or rather it is nature herself. We have some idea of matter, sufficient to warrant the conclusion that this has always existed. First, that which exists, supposes existence essential to its being. That which cannot, annihilate itself, exists necessarily; it is impossible to conceive that that which cannot cease to exist, or that which cannot annihilate itself, could ever have had a beginning. If matter cannot be annihilated, it could not commence to be. Thus we say to Dr. Clarke, that it is matter, it is nature, acting by her own peculiar energy, of which no particle is ever in an absolute state of rest, which hath always existed. The various material bodies which this nature contains often change their form, their combination, their properties, their mode of action: but their principles or elements are indestructible--have never been able to commence. What this great scholar actually understands, when he makes the assertion "that an eternal duration is now actually past," is not quite so clear; yet he affirms, "that not to believe it would be a real and express contradiction." We may, however, safely admit his argument, "that when once any proposition is clearly demonstrated to, be true, it ought not to disturb us that there be perhaps some perplexing difficulties on the other side, which merely for want of adequate ideas of the manner of the existence of the things demonstrated, are not easily to be cleared." _2nd, "There has existed from eternity some one unchangeable and independent Being."_ We may fairly inquire what is this Being? Is it independent of its own peculiar essence, or of those properties which constitute it such as it is? We shall further inquire, if this Being, whatever it may be, can make the other beings which it produces, or which it moves, act otherwise than they do, according to the properties which it has given them? And in this case we shall ask, if this Being, such as it way be supposed to be, does not act necessarily; if it is not obliged to employ indispensible means to fulfil its designs, to arrive at the end which it either has, or may be supposed to have in view? Then we shall say, that nature is obliged to act after her essence; that every thing which takes place in her is necessary; but that she is independent of her forms. A man is said to be independent, when he is determined in his actions only by the general causes which are accustomed to move him; he is equally said to be dependent on another, when he cannot act but in consequence of the determination which this last gives him. A body is dependent on another body when it owes to it its existence, and its mode of action. A being existing from eternity cannot owe his existence to any other being; he cannot then be dependent upon him, except he owes his action to him; but it is evident that an eternal or self-existent Being contains in his own nature every thing that is necessary for him to act: then, matter being eternal, is necessarily independent in the sense we have explained; of course it hath no occasion for a mover upon which it ought to depend. This eternal Being is also immutable, if by this attribute be understood that he cannot change his nature; but if it be intended to infer by it that he cannot change his mode of action or existence, it is without doubt deceiving themselves, since even in supposing an immaterial being, they would be obliged to acknowledge in him different modes of being, different volitions, different ways of acting; particularly if he was not supposed totally deprived of action, in which case he would be perfectly useless. Indeed it follows of course that to change his mode of action he must necessarily change his manner of being. From hence it will be obvious, that the theologians, in making their gods immutable, render them immoveable, consequently they cannot act. An immutable being, could evidently neither have successive volition, nor produce successive action; if this being hath created matter, or given birth to the universe, there must have been a time in which he was willing that this matter, this universe, should exist; and this time must have been preceded by another time, in which he was willing that it might not yet exist. If God be the author of all things, as well as of the motion and of the combinations of matter, he is unceasingly occupied in producing and destroying; in consequence, he cannot be called immutable, touching his mode of existing. The material world always maintains itself by motion, and the continual change of its parts; the sum of the beings who compose it, or of the elements which act in it, is invariably the same; in this sense the immutability of the universe is much more easy of comprehension, much more demonstrable than that of an other being to whom, they would attribute all the effects, all the mutations which take place. Nature is not more to be accused of mutability, on account of the succession of its forms, than the eternal Being is by the theologians, by the diversity of his decrees. Here we shall be able to perceive that, supposing the laws by which nature acts to be immutable, it does not require tiny of these logical distinctions to account for the changes that take place: the mutation which results, is, on the contrary, a striking proof of the immutability of the system which produces them; and completely brings mature under the range of this second proposition as stated by Dr. Clarke. _3dly, "That unchangeable and independent Being which has existed from eternity without any eternal cause of its existence, must be self-existent, that is, necessarily existing."_ This proposition is merely a repetition of the first; we reply to it by inquiring, Why matter, which is indestructible, should not be self-existent? It is evident that a being who had no beginning, must be self-existent; if he had existed by another, he would have commenced to be; consequently he would not be eternal. _4thly, "What the substance or essence of that Being which is self-existent, or necessarily existing, is, we have no idea; neither is it at all possible for us to comprehend it."_ Dr. Clarke would perhaps have spoken more correctly if he had said his essence is impossible to be known: nevertheless, we shall readily concede that the essence of matter is incomprehensible, or at least that we conceive it very feebly by the manner in which we are affected by it; but without this we should be less able to conceive the Divinity, who would then be impervious on any side. Thus it must necessarily be concluded, that it is folly to argue upon it, since it is by matter alone we can have any knowledge of him; that is to say, by which we can assure ourselves of his existence,--by which we can at all guess at his qualities. In short we must conclude, that every thing related of the Divinity, either proves him material, or else proves the impossibility in which the human mind will always find itself, of conceiving any being different from matter; without extent, yet omnipresent; immaterial, yet acting upon matter; spiritual, yet producing matter; immutable, yet putting every thing in activity, &c. Indeed it must be allowed that the incomprehensibility of the Divinity does not distinguish him from matter; this will not be more easy of comprehension when we shall associate it with a being much less comprehensible than itself; we have some slender knowledge of it through some of its parts. We do not certainly know the essence of any being, if by that word we are to understand that which constitutes its peculiar nature. We only know matter by the sensations, the perceptions, the ideas which it furnishes; it is according to these that we judge it to be either favorable or unfavourable, following the particular disposition of our organs. But when a being does not act upon any part of our organic structure, it does not exist for us; we cannot, without exhibiting folly, without betraying our ignorance, without falling into obscurity, either speak of its nature, or assign its qualities; our senses are the only channel by which we could have formed the slightest idea of it; these not having received any impulse, we are, in point of fact, unacquainted with its existence. The incomprehensibility of the Divinity ought to convince man that it is a point at which he is bound to stop; indeed he is placed in a state of utter incapacity to proceed: this, however, would not suit with those speculators who are willing to reason upon him continually, to shew the depth of their learning,--to persuade the uninformed they understand that which is incomprehensible to all men; by which they expect to be able to submit him to their own views. Nevertheless, if the Divinity be incomprehensible, It would not be straining a point beyond its tension, to conclude that a priest, or metaphysician, did not comprehend him better than other men: it is not, perhaps, either the wisest or the surest way to become acquainted with him, to represent him to ourselves, by the imagination of a theologian. _5thly, "Though the substance, or essence of the self-existent Being, is in itself absolutely incomprehensible to us, yet many of the essential attributes of his nature are strictly demonstrable, as well as his existence. Thus, in the first place, the self-existent Being must of necessity be eternal."_ This proposition differs in nothing from the first, except Dr. Clarke does not here understand that as the self-existent Being had no beginning, he can have no end. However this may be, we must ever inquire, Why this should not be matter? We shall further observe, that matter not being capable of annihilation, exists necessarily, consequently will never cease to exist; that the human mind has no means of conceiving how matter should originate from that which is not itself matter: is it not obvious, that matter is necessary; that there is nothing, except its powers, its arrangement, its combinations, which are contingent or evanescent? The general motion is necessary, but the given motion is not so; only during the season that the particular combinations subsist, of which this motion is the consequence, or the effect: we may be competent to change the direction, to either accelerate or retard, to suspend or arrest, a particular motion, but the general motion can never possibly be annihilated. Man, in dying, ceases to live; that is to say, he no longer either walks, thinks, or acts in the mode which is peculiar to human organization: but the matter which composed his body, the matter which formed his mind, does not cease to move on that account: it simply becomes susceptible of another species of motion. _6thly, "The self-existent Being must of necessity be infinite and omnipresent."_ The word infinite presents only a negative idea--which excludes all bounds: it is evident that a being who exists necessarily, who is independent, cannot be limited by any thing which is out of himself; he must consequently be his own limits; in this sense we may say he is infinite. Touching what is said of his omnipresence, it is equally evident that if there be nothing exterior to this being, either there is no place in which he must not be present, or that there will be only himself and the vacuum. This granted, I shall inquire if matter exists; if it does not at least occupy a portion of space? In this case, matter, or the universe, must exclude every other being who is not matter, from that place which the material beings occupy in space. In asking whether the gods of the theologians be by chance the abstract being which they call the vacuum or space, they will reply, no! They will further insist, that their gods, who are not matter, penetrate that which is matter. But it must be obvious, that to penetrate matter, it is necessary to have some correspondence with matter, consequently to have extent; now to have extent, is to have one of the properties of matter. If the Divinity penetrates matter, then he is material; by a necessary deduction he is inseparable from matter; then if he is omnipresent, he will be in every thing. This the theologian will not allow: he will say it is a mystery; by which I shall understand that he is himself ignorant how to account for his own positions; this will not be the case with making nature act after immutable laws; she will of necessity be every where, in my body, in my arm, in every other material being, because matter composes them all. The Divinity who has given this invariable system, will without any incongruous reasoning, without any subterfuge, be also present every where, inasmuch as the laws he has prescribed will unchangeably act through the whole; this does not seem inconsistent with reason to suppose. _7th, "The Self-existent Being must of necessity be but one."_ If there he nothing exterior to a being who exists necessarily, it must follow that he is unique. It will be obvious that this proposition is the same with the preceding one; at least, if they are not willing to deny the existence of the material world. _8th, "The self-existent and original Cause of all things, must be an intelligent being."_ Here Dr. Clarke most unquestionably assigneth a human quality: intelligence is a faculty appertaining to organized or animated beings, of which we have no knowledge out of these beings. To have intelligence, it is necessary to think; to think, it is requisite to have ideas; to have ideas, supposes senses; when senses exist they are material; when they are material, they cannot be a pure spirit, in the language of the theologian. The necessary Being who comprehends, who contains, who produces animated beings, contains, includes, and produceth intelligence. But has the great whole a peculiar intelligence, which moveth it, which maketh it act, which determineth it in the mode that intelligence moves and determines animated bodies; or rather, is not this intelligence the consequence of immutable laws, a certain modification resulting from certain combinations of matter, which exists under one form of these combinations, but is wanting under another form? This is assuredly what nothing is competent absolutely, and demonstrably to prove. Man having placed himself in the first rank in the universe, has been desirous to judge of every thing after what he saw within himself, because he hath pretended that in order to be perfect it was necessary to be like himself. Here is the source of all his erroneous reasoning upon nature--the foundation of his ideas upon his gods. He has therefore concluded, perhaps not with the most polished wisdom, that it would be indecorous in himself, injurious to the Divinity, not to invest him with a quality which is found estimable in man--which he prizes highly--to which he attaches the idea of perfection--which he considers as a manifest proof of superiority. He sees his fellow-creature is offended when he is thought to lack intelligence; he therefore judges it to be the same with the Divinity. He denies this quality to nature, because he considers her a mass of ignoble matter, incapable of self-action; although she contains and produces intelligent beings. But this is rather a personification of an abstract quality, than an attribute of the Deity, with whose perfections, with whose mode of existence, he cannot by any possible means become acquainted according to the fifth proposition of Dr. Clarke himself. It is in the earth that is engendered those living animals called worms; yet we do not say the earth is a living creature. The bread which man eats, the wine that he drinks, are not themselves thinking substances; yet they nourish, sustain, and cause those beings to think, who are susceptible of this modification of their existence. It is likewise in nature, that is formed intelligent, feeling, thinking beings; yet it cannot be rationally said, that nature feels, thinks, and is intelligent after the manner of these beings, who nevertheless spring out of her bosom. How! cries the metaphysician, the subtilizing philosopher, what! refuse to the Divinity, those qualities we discover in his creatures? Must, then, the work be more perfect than the workman? Shall God, who made the eye, not himself see? Shall God, who formed the ear, not himself hear! This at a superficial view appears insuperable: but are the questioners, however triumphantly they may make the inquiry, themselves aware of the length this would carry them, even if their queries were answered with the most unqualified affirmative? Have they sufficiently reflected on the tendency of this mode of reasoning? If this be admitted as a postulatum, are they prepared to follow it in all its extent? Suppose their argument granted, what is to be done with all those other qualities upon which man does not set so high a value? Are they also to be ascribed to the Divinity, because we do not refuse him qualities possessed by his creatures? By a parity of reasoning we should attach faculties that would be degrading to the Divinity. Thus it ever happens with those who travel out of the limits of their own knowledge; they involve themselves in perpetual contradictions which they can never reconcile; which only serve to prove that in arguing upon points, on which universal ignorance prevails, the result is constantly that all the deductions made from such unsteady principles, must of necessity be at war with each other, in hostility with themselves. Thus, although we cannot help feeling the profound wisdom, that must have dictated the system we see act with such uniformity, with such constancy, with such astonishing power, we cannot form the most slender idea of the particular nature of that wisdom; because if we were for an instant to assimilate it to our own, weak and feeble as it is, we should from that instant be in a state of contradiction; seeing we could not then avoid considering the evil we witness, the sorrow we experience, as a dereliction of this wisdom, which at least proves one great truth, _that we are utterly incapable of forming an idea of the Divinity_. But in contemplating things as our own experience warrants in whatever we do understand, in considering nature as acting by unchangeable laws, we find good and evil necessarily existing, without at all involving the wisdom of the great _Cause of causes_; who thus has no need to remedy that, which the further progress of the eternal system will regulate of itself, or which industry and patient research on our parts will enable us to discover the means of futurely avoiding. _9th, "The self-existent and original Cause of all things, is not a necessary agent, but a being endued with liberty and choice._" Man is called free, when he finds within himself motives that determine him to action, or when his will meets no obstacle to the performance of that to which his motives have determined him. The necessary Being of which question is here made, doth he find no obstacles to the execution of the projects which are attributed to him? Is he willing, adopting their own hypothesis, that evil should be committed, or can he not prevent it? In this latter case he is not free; if his will does meet with obstacles, if he is willing to permit evil; then he suffers man to restrain his liberty, by deranging his projects; if he has not these projects, then they are themselves in error who ascribe them to him. How will the metaphysicians draw themselves out of this perplexing intricacy? The further a theologian goes, whilst considering his gods as possessed of human qualities, as acting by mortal motives, the more he flounders--the greater the mass of contradiction he heaps together: thus if it be asked of him, can God reward crime, punish virtue, he will immediately answer, no! In this answer he will have truth: but then this truth, and the freedom which is ascribed to him, cannot, according to human ideas, exist together; because if this being cannot love vice, cannot hate virtue, and it is evident he cannot, he is in fact not more free than man himself. Again, God is said to have made a covenant with his creatures; now it is the very essence of a covenant to restrict choice; and that being must be considered a necessary agent who is under the necessity of fulfilling any given act. As it is impossible to suppose the Divinity can act irrationally, it must be conceded that as he made these laws, he is himself obliged to follow them: because if he was not, as we must again suppose he does nothing without a good reason, he would thereby imply, that the mode of action he adopted would be wiser; which would again involve a contradiction. The theologians fearing, without doubt, to restrain the liberty of the Divinity, have supposed it was necessary that he should not be bound by his own laws, in which they have shewn somewhat more ignorance of their subject than they imagined. _10th, "The self-existent Being, the supreme Cause of all things, must of necessity have infinite power."_ As nature is adequate to produce every thing we see--as she contains the whole united power of the universe, her power has consequently no limits: the being who conferred this power cannot have less. But if the ideas of the theologians were adopted, this power would not appear quite so unlimited; since, according to them, man is a free agent, consequently has the means of acting contrary to this power, which at once sets a boundary to it. An equitable monarch is perhaps nothing less than he is a free agent; when he believes himself bound to act conformably to the laws, which he has sworn to observe, or which he cannot violate without wounding his justice. The theologian is a man who may be very fairly estimated neuter; because he destroys with one hand what he establishes with the other. _11th, "The Supreme Cause and Author of all things, must of necessity be infinitely wise."_ As nature produces all things by certain immutable laws, it will require no great difficulty to allow that she may be infinitely wise: indeed, whatever side of the argument may be taken, this fact will result as a necessary consequence. It will hardly admit of a question that all things are produced by nature: if, therefore, we do not allow her wisdom to be first rate, it would be an insult to the Divinity, who gave her her system. If the theologian himself is to take the lead, he also admits that nature operates under the immediate auspices of his gods; whatever she does, must then, according to his own shewing, be executed with the most polished wisdom. But the theologian is not satisfied with going thus far: he will insist, not only that he knows what these things are, but also that he knows the end they have in view: this, unfortunately, is the rock he splits upon. According to his own admission, the ways of God are impenetrable to man. If we grant his position, what is the result? Why, that it is at random he speaks. If these ways are impenetrable, by what means did he acquire his knowledge of them? How did he discover the end proposed by the Deity? If they are not impenetrable, they then can be equally known to other men as to himself. The theologian would be puzzled to shew he has any more privileges in nature than his fellow mortals. Again, if he has asserted these things to be impenetrable, when they are not so, he is then in the situation that he has himself placed Mahomet: he is no longer worthy of being attended to, because he has swerved from veracity. It certainly is not very consistent with the sublime idea of the Divinity that he should be clothed with that weak, vain passion of man, called glory: the being who had the faculty of producing such a system as it operated in nature, could hardly be supposed to have such a frivolous passion as we know this to be in our fellows: and as we can never reason but after what we do know, it would appear nothing can be more inconsistent than thus continually heaping together our own feeble, inconsistent views, and then supposing the great _Cause of causes_ acts by such futile rules. _12th, "The supreme Cause and Author of all things must of necessity be a being of infinite goodness, justice, and truth, and all other moral perfections, such as become the supreme governor and judge of the world."_ We must again repeat that these are human qualities drawn from the model of man himself; they only suppose a being of the human species, who should be divested of what we call imperfections: this is certainly the highest point of view in which our finite minds are capable of contemplating the Divinity: but as this being has neither species nor cause, consequently no fellow creatures, he must necessarily be of an order so different to man, that human faculties can in no wise be appropriately assigned to him. The idea of perfection, as man understands it, is an abstract, metaphysical, negative idea, of which he has no archetype whereby to form a judgment: he would call that a perfect being, who, similar to himself, was wanting in those qualities which he finds prejudicial to him; but such a being would after all be no wore than a man. It is always relatively to himself, to his own mode of feeling and of thinking, that a thing is either perfect or imperfect; it is according to this, that in his eyes a thing is more or less useful or prejudicial; agreeable or disagreeable. Justice includes all moral perfections. One of the most prominent features of justice, in the ideas of man, is the equity of the relations subsisting between beings, founded upon their mutual wants. According to the theologian, his gods owe nothing to man. How then does he measure out his ideas of justice? For a monarch to say he owed nothing to his subjects, would be considered, even by this theologian himself, as rank injustice; because he would expect the fulfilment of duties on their part, without exercising those which devolved upon himself. Duties, according to the only idea man can form of them, must be reciprocal. It is rather stretching the human capabilities, to understand the relations between a pure spirit and material beings--between finity and infinity--between eternal beings and those which are transitory: thus it is, that metaphysics hold forth an inconceivable being by the very attributes with which they clothe him; for either he has these attributes, or he has them not: whether he has them or has them not, man can only understand them after his own powers of comprehension. If he does at all understand them, he cannot have the slightest idea of justice unaccompanied by duties, which are the very basis, the superstructure, the pillars upon which this virtue rests. Whether we are to view it as self-love or ignorance in the theologian, that he thus dresses up his gods after himself, it certainly was not the happiest effort of his imagination to work by an inverse rule: for, according to himself, the qualities he describes are all the negation of what he calls them. Doctor Clarke himself stumbles a little upon these points; he insists upon free agency, and uses this extraordinary method to support his argument; he says, "God is, by necessity, a free agent: and he can no more possibly cease to be so, than he can cease to exist. He must of necessity, every moment choose to act, or choose to forbear acting; because two contradictories cannot possibly be true at once. Man also is by necessity, not in the nature of things, but through God's appointment, a free agent. And it is no otherwise in his power to cease to be such, than by depriving himself of life." Will Doctor Clarke permit us to put one simple question: If to be obligated to do a certain given thing, is to be free, what is it to be coerced? Or if two contradictories cannot be true at once, by what rule of logic are we to measure the idea of that freedom which arises out of necessity. Supposing necessity to be what Dr. Johnson, (using Milton as his authority) says it is, "compulsion," "fatality," would it be considered a man was less restrained in his actions because he was only compelled to do what was right? The restraint would undoubtedly he beneficial to him, but it would not therefore render him more a free agent. If the Divinity cannot love wickedness, cannot hate goodness, (and surely the theologians themselves will not pretend he can,) then the power of choice has no existence as far as these two things are concerned; and this upon Clarke's own principle, because two contradictories cannot be true at once. Nothing could, I think, appear a greater contradiction, than the idea that the _Great Cause of causes_ could by any possibility love vice: if such a monstrous principle could for a moment have existence, there would be an end of all the foundations of religion. The Doctor is very little happier in reasoning upon _immateriality_. He says, by way of illustrating his argument, "that it is possible to infinite power to create an immaterial cogitative substance, endued with a power of beginning motion, and with a liberty of will or choice." Again, "that immaterial substances are not impossible; or, that a substance immaterial is not a contradictory notion. Now, whoever asserts that it is contradictory, must affirm that whatever is not matter is nothing; and that, to say any thing exists which is not matter, is saying that there exists something which is nothing, which in other words is plainly this,--that whatever we have not an idea of, is nothing, and impossible to be." It could, I am apt to believe, never have entered into any reasonable mind that a thing was impossible because he could have no idea of it:--many things, on the contrary, are possible, of which we have not the most slender notion: but it does not, I presume, flow consecutively out of this admission, that therefore every thing is, which is not impossible. Doctor Clarke then, rather begs the question on this occasion. In the schools it is never considered requisite to prove a negative; indeed, this is ranked by logicians amongst those things impossible to be, but it is considered of the highest importance to soundness of argument, to establish the affirmative by the most conclusive reasoning. Taking this for granted, we will apply the doctor's own reasoning. He says, "Nothing is that of which every thing, can truly be affirmed. So that the idea of nothing, if I may so speak, is absolutely the negative of all ideas; the idea, therefore, either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms." To affirm, of a thing with truth, it must be necessary to be acquainted with that thing. To have ideas, as we have already proved, it is necessary to have perceptions; to have perceptions, it is requisite to have sensations; to have sensations, requires organs. An idea cannot be, and not be, at the same moment: the idea of substance, it will scarcely be denied, is that of a thing solid, real, according to Dryden; capable of supporting accidents, according to Watts; something of which we can say that it is, according to Davies; body, corporeal nature, according to Newton; the idea of immaterial, according to Hooker, is incorporeal. How then am I to understand immaterial substance? Is it not, according to these definitions, that which cannot couple together? If a thing be immaterial, it cannot be a substance; if a substance, it cannot be immaterial: those I apprehend will not have many ideas, who do not see this is a complete negative of all ideas. If, therefore, on the outset, the doctor cannot find words, by which he can convey the idea of that of which he is so desirous to prove the existence, by what chain of reasoning does he flatter himself that he is to be understood? He will endeavour to draw out of this dilemma, by assuring as there are things which we can neither see nor touch, but which do not the less exist on that account. Granted: but from thence we can neither reason upon them, nor assign them qualities; we must at least either feel them or something like them, before we can have any idea of them: this, however, would not prove they were not substances, nor that substances can be immaterial. A thing may with great possibility exist of which we have no knowledge, and yet be material; but I maintain until we have a knowledge of it, it exists not for us, any more than colours exist for a man born blind; the man who has sight knows they do exist, can describe them to his dark neighbour; from this description the blind man may form some idea of them by analogy with what he himself already knows; or, perhaps, having a finer tact than his neighbour, he may be enabled to distinguish them by their surfaces; it would, therefore, be bad reasoning in the man born blind, to deny the existence of colours; because although these colours may have no relation with the senses in the absence of sight, they have with those who have it in their power to see and to know them: this blind man, however, would-appear a little ridiculous if he undertook to define them with all their gradations of shade; with all their variations under different masses of light. Again, if those who were competent to discriminate these modifications of matter called colours, were to define them to this blind man, as those modifications of matter called sound, would the blind man be able to have any conception of them? It certainly would not be wise in him to aver, that such a thing as colorific sound had no existence, was impossible; but at least he would be very justifiable in saying, they appeared contradictions, because he had some ideas of sound which did not at all aid him in forming those of colour; he would not, perhaps, be very inconclusive if he suspected the competency of his informer to the definition attempted, from his inability to convey to him in any distinct, understood terms, his own ideas of colours. The theologian is a blind man, who would explain to others who are also blind, the shades and colours of a portrait whose original he has not even stumbled upon in the dark. There is nothing incongruous in supposing that every thing which has existence is matter; but it requires the complete inversion of all our ideas, to conceive that which is immaterial; because, in point of fact, this would be a quality of which "nothing can with truth be affirmed." It is, indeed true, that Plato, who was a great creator of chimeras, says, "those who admit nothing but what they can see and feel, are stupid ignorant beings, who refuse to admit the reality of the existence of invisible things." With all due deference to such an authority, we may still venture to ask, is there then no difference, no shade, no gradation, between an admission of possibilities and the proof of realities. Theology would then be the only science in which it is permitted to conclude that a thing is, as soon as it is possible to be. Will the assertion of either Clarke or Plato stand absolutely in place of all evidence? Would they themselves permit such to be convincing if used against them? The theologians evidently hold this Platonic, this dogmatical language; they have dreamed the dreams of their master; perhaps if they were examined a little, they would be found nothing more than the result of those obscure notions, those unintelligible metaphysics, adopted by the Egyptian, Chaldean, and Assyrian priests, among whom Plato drew up his philosophy. If, however, philosophy means that which we are led to suppose it does, by the great John Locke, it is "a system by which natural effects are explained." Taken in this sense we shall be under the necessity of agreeing, that the Platonic doctrines in no wise merit this distinction, seeing he has only drawn the human mind from the contemplation of visible nature, to plunge it into the unfathomable depths of invisibility--of intangibility--of suppositious speculation, where it can find little other food except chimeras or conjecture. Such a philosophy is rather fantastical, yet it would seem we are required to subscribe to its positions without being allowed to compare them with reason, to examine them through the medium of experience, to try the gold by the action of fire: thus we have in abundance the terms spirits, incorporeal substances, invisible powers, supernatural effects, innate ideas, mysterious virtues, possessed by demons, &c. &c. which render our senses entirely useless, which put to flight every thing like experience; while we are gravely told that "nothing is that, of which no thing can truly be affirmed." Whoever may be willing to take the trouble of reading the works of Plato and his disciples, such as Proclus, Iamblicus, Plotinus, and others, will not fail to find in them almost every doctrine, every metaphysical subject of the theologian; in fact, the theurgy of many of the modern superstitions, which for the most part seems to be little more than a slight variation of that adopted by the ethnic priests. Dreamers have not had that variety in their follies, that has generally been imagined. That some of these things should be extensively admitted, by no means affords proof of their existence. Nothing appears more facile than to make mankind admit the greatest absurdities, under the imposing name of mysteries; after having imbued him from his infancy with maxims calculated to hoodwink his reason--to lead him astray--to prevent him from examining that which he is told he must believe. Of this there cannot well exist a more decisive proof than the great extent of country, the millions of human beings who faithfully and without examination have adopted the idle dreams, the rank absurdities, of that arch impostor Mahomet. However this may be, we shall be obliged again to reply to Plato, and to those of his followers who impose upon us the necessity of believing that which we cannot comprehend, that, in order to know that a thing exists, it is at least necessary to have some idea of it; that this idea can only come to us by the medium of our senses; that consequently every thing of which our senses do not give us a knowledge, is in fact nothing for us; and can only rest upon our faith; upon that admission which is pretty generally, even by the theologian himself, considered as rather a sandy foundation whereon to erect the altar of truth: that if there be an absurdity in not accrediting the existence of that which we do not know, there is no less extravagance in assigning it qualities; in reasoning upon its properties; in clothing it with faculties, which may or may not be suitable to its mode of existence; in substituting idols of our own creation; in combining incompatible attributes, which will neither bear the test of experience nor the scrutiny of reason; and then endeavouring to make the whole pass current by dint of the word infinite, which we will now examine. Infinite, according to Dennis, means "boundless, unlimited." Doctor Clarke thus describes it:--he says, "The self-existent being must be a most simple, unchangeable incorruptible being; without parts, figure, motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in matter. For all these things do plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in their very notion, and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity." Ingenuously, is it possible for man to form any true notion of such a quality? The theologians themselves acknowledge he cannot. Further, the Doctor allows, "That as to the particular manner of his being infinite, or every where present, in opposition to the manner of created things being present in such or such finite places, this is as impossible for our finite understandings to comprehend or explain, as it is for us to form an adequate idea of infinity." What is this, then, but that which no man can explain or comprehend? If it cannot be comprehended, it cannot be detailed; if it cannot be detailed, it is precisely "that of which nothing can with truth be affirmed;" and this is Dr. Clarke's own explanation of nothing. Indeed, is not the human mind obliged by its very nature to join limited quantities to other quantities, which it can only conceive as limited, in order to form to itself a sort of confused idea of something beyond its own grasp, without ever reaching the point of infinity, which eludes every attempt at definition? Then it would appear that it is an abstraction, a mere negation of limitation. Our learned adversary seems to think it strange that the existence of incorporeal, immaterial substances, the essence of which we are not able to comprehend, should not be generally accredited. To enforce this belief, he says, "There is not so mean and contemptible a plant or animal, that does not confound the most enlarged understanding, upon earth: nay, even the simplest and plainest of all inanimate beings have their essence or substance hidden from us in the deepest and most impenetrable obscurity." We shall reply to him, _First_, That the idea of an immaterial substance; or being without extent, is only an absence of ideas, a negation of extent, as we have already shewn; that when we are told a being is not matter, they speak to us of that which is not, and do not teach us that which is; because by insisting that a being is such, that it cannot act upon any of our senses, they, in fact, inform us that we have no means of assuring ourselves whether such being exists or not. _Secondly_, We shall avow without the least hesitation, that men of the greatest genius, of the most indefatigable research, are not acquainted with the essence of stones, plants, animals, nor with the secret springs which constitute some, which make others vegetate or act: but then at least we either feel them or see them; our senses have a knowledge of them in some respects; we can perceive some of their effects; we have something whereby to judge of them, either accurately or inaccurately; we can conceive that which is matter, however varied, however subtle, however minute, by analogy with other matter; but our senses cannot compass that which is immaterial on any side; we cannot by any possible means understand it; we have no means whatever of ascertaining its existence; consequently we cannot even form an idea of it; such a being is to us an occult principle, or rather a being which imagination has composed, by deducting from it every known quality. If we are ignorant of the intimate combination of the most material beings, we at least discover, with the aid of experience, some of their relations with ourselves: we have a knowledge of their surface, their extent, their form, their colour, their softness, their density; by the impressions they make on our senses, we are capable of discriminating them--of comparing them--of judging of them in some manner--of seeing them--of either avoiding or courting them, according to the different modes in which we are affected by them; we cannot apply any of these tests to immaterial beings; to spirits; neither can those men who are unceasingly talking to mankind of these inconceivable things. _Thirdly_, We have a consciousness of certain modifications in ourselves, which we call sentiment, thought, will, passions: for want of being acquainted with our own peculiar essence; for want of precisely understanding the energy of our own particular organization, we attribute these effects to a concealed cause, distinguished from ourselves; which the theologians call a spiritual cause, inasmuch as it appears to act differently from our body. Nevertheless, reflection, experience, every thing by which we are enabled to form any kind of judgment, proves that material effects can only emanate from material causes. We see nothing in the universe but physical, material effects, these can only be produced by analogous causes; it is, then certainly more rational to attribute them to nature herself, of which we may know something, if we will but deign to meditate her with attention, rather than to spiritual causes, of which we must for ever remain ignorant, let us study them as long as we please. If incomprehensibility be not a sufficient reason for absolutely denying the possibility of immateriality, it certainly is not of a cogency to establish its existence; we shall always be less in a capacity to comprehend a spiritual cause, than one that is material; because materiality is a known quality; spirituality is an occult, an unknown quality; or rather it is a mode of speech of which we avail ourselves to throw a veil over our own ignorance. We are repeatedly told that our senses only bring us acquainted with the external of things; that our limited ideas are not capable of conceiving immaterial beings: we agree frankly to this position; but then our senses do not even shew us the external of these immaterial substances, Which the theologians will nevertheless attempt to define to us; upon which they unceasingly dispute among themselves; upon which even until this day they are not in perfect unison with each other. The great John Locke in his familiar letters, says, "I greatly esteem all those who faithfully defend their opinions; but there are so few persons who, according to the manner they do defend them, appear fully convinced of the opinions they profess, that I am tempted to believe there are more sceptics in the world than are generally imagined." Abady, one of the most strenuous supporters of immaterialism, says, "The question is not what incorporeity is, but whether it be." To settle this disputable point, it were necessary to have some data whereon to form our judgment; but how assure ourselves of the existence of that, of which we shall never be competent to have a knowledge? If we are not told what this is; if some tangible evidence be not offered to the human mind; how shall we feel ourselves capacitated to judge whether or not its existence be even possible? How form an estimate of that picture whose colours elude our sight, whose design we cannot perceive, whose features have no means of becoming familiar to our mind, whose very canvas refuses itself to our all research, of which the artist himself can afford no other idea, no other description, but that it is, although he himself can neither shew us how or where! We have seen the ruinous foundations upon which men have hitherto erected this fanciful idea of immateriality; we have examined the proofs which they have offered, if proofs they can be called, in support of their hypothesis; we have sifted the evidence they have been willing to have accredited, in order to establish their position; we have pointed out the numberless contradictions that result from their want of union on this subject, from the irreconcileable qualities with which they clothe their imaginary system. What conclusion, then, ought fairly, rationally, consistently, to be drawn from the whole? Can we, or can we not admit their argument to be conclusive, such as ought to be received by beings who think themselves sane? Will it allow any other inference than that it has no existence; that immateriality is a quality hitherto unproved; the idea of which the mind of man has no means of compassing? Still they will insist, "there are no contradictions between the qualities which they attribute to these immaterial substances; but there is a difference between the understanding of man and the nature of these substances." This granted, are they nearer the point at which they labour? What standard is it necessary man should possess, to enable him to judge of these substances? Can they shew the test that will lead to an acquaintance with them? Are not those who have thus given loose to their imagination, who have given birth to this system, themselves men? Does not the disproportion, of which they speak with such amazing confidence, attach to themselves as well as to others? If it needs an infinite mind to comprehend infinity--to form an idea of incorporeity--can the theologian himself boast he is in a capacity to understand it? To what purpose then is it they speak of these things to others? Why do they attempt descriptions of that which they allow to be indescribable? Man, who will never be an infinite being, will never be able to conceive infinity; if, then, he has hitherto been incompetent to this perfection of knowledge, can he reasonably flatter himself he will ever obtain it; can he hope under any circumstances to conquer that which according to the shewing of all is unconquerable? Nevertheless it is pretended, that it is absolutely necessary to know these substances: but how prove the necessity of having a knowledge of that which is impossible to be known? We are then told that good sense and reason are sufficient to convince us of its existence: this is taking new ground, when the old has been found untenable: for we are also told that reason is a treacherous guide; one that frequently leads us astray; that in religious matters it ought not to prevail: at least then they ought to shew us the precise time when we must resume this reason. Shall we consult it again, when the question is, whether what they relate is probable; whether the discordant qualities which they unite are consistently combined; whether their own arguments have all that solidity which they would themselves wish them to possess? But we have strangely mistaken them if they are willing that we should recur to it upon these points; they will instead, insist we ought blindly to be directed by that which they vouchsafe to inform us; that the most certain road to happiness is to submit in all things to that which they have thought proper to decide on the nature of things, of which they avow their own ignorance, when they assert them to be beyond the reach of mortals. Thus it would appear that when we should consent to accredit these mysteries, it would never arise of our own knowledge; seeing this can no otherwise obtain but by the effect of demonstrable evidence; it would never arise from any intimate conviction of our minds; but it would be entirely on the word of the theologian himself, that we should ground our faith; that we should yield our belief. If these things are to the human species what colours are to the man born blind, they have at least no existence with relation to ourselves. It will avail the blind man nothing to tell him these colours have no less existence, because he cannot see them. But what shall we say of that portrait whose colours the blind man attempts to explain, whose features he is willing we should receive upon his authority, whose proportions are to be taken from his description, merely because we know he cannot behold them? The Doctor, although unwilling to relinquish his subject, removes none of the difficulty when he asks, "Are our five senses, by an absolute necessity in the nature of the thing, all and the only possible ways of perception? And is it impossible and contradictory there should be any being in the universe, indued with ways of perception different from these that are the result of our present composition? Or are these things, on the contrary, purely arbitrary; and the same power that gave us these, may have given others to other beings, and might, if he had pleased have given to us others in this present state?" It seems perfectly unnecessary to the true point of the argument to reason upon what can or cannot be done: I therefore reply, that the fact is, we have but five senses: by the aid of these man is not competent to form any idea whatever of immateriality; but he is also in as absolute a state of ignorance, upon what might be his capabilities of conception, if he had more senses. It is rather acknowledging a weakness in his evidence, on the part of the Doctor, to be thus obliged to rest it upon the supposition of what might be the case, if man was a being different to what he is; in other words, that they would be convincing to mankind if the human race were not human beings. Therefore to demand what the Divinity could have done in such a case, is to suppose the thing in question, seeing we cannot form an idea how far the power of the Divinity extends: but we may be reasonably allowed to use the theological argument in elucidation; these men very gravely insist, upon what authority must be best known to themselves, "that God cannot communicate to his works that perfection which he himself possesses;" at the same moment they do not fail to announce his omnipotence. Will it require any capacity, more than is the common lot of a child, to comprehend the absurd contradiction of the two assertions? As beings possessing but five senses, we must then, of necessity, regulate our judgment by the information they are capable of affording us: we cannot, by any possibility, have a knowledge of those, which confer the capacity to comprehend beings, of an order entirely distinguished from that in which we occupy a place. We are ignorant of the mode in which even plants vegetate, how then be acquainted with that which has no affinity with ourselves? A man born blind, has only the use of four senses; he has not the right, however, of assuming it as a fact, there does not exist an extra sense for others; but he may very reasonably, and with great truth aver, that he has no idea of the effects which would be produced in him, by the sense which he lacks: notwithstanding, if this blind man was surrounded by other men, whose birth had also left them devoid or sight, might he not without any very unwarrantable presumption, be authorized to inquire of them by what right, upon what authority, they spoke to him of a sense they did not themselves possess; how they were enabled to reason, to detail the minutiae of that sensation upon which their own peculiar experience taught them nothing? In short, we can again reply to Dr. Clarke, and to the theologians, that following up their own systems, the supposition is impossible, and ought not to be made, seeing that the Divinity, who according to their own shewing, made man, was not willing that he should have more than five senses; in other words, that he should be nothing but what he actually is; they all found the existence of these immaterial substances upon the necessity of a power that has the faculty to give a commencement to motion. But if matter has always existed, of which there does not seem to exist a doubt, it has always had motion, which is as essential to it as its extent, and flows from its primitive properties. Indeed the human mind, with its five senses, is not more competent to comprehend matter devoid of motion, than it is to understand the peculiar quality of immateriality: motion therefore exists only in and by matter; mobility is a consequence of its existence; not that the great whole can occupy other parts of space than it actually does; the impossibility of that needs no argument, but all its parts can change their respective situations--do continually change them; it is from thence results the preservation, the life of nature, which is always as a whole immutable: but in supposing, as is done every day, that matter is inert, that is to say, incapable of producing any thing by itself, without the assistance of a moving power, which sets it in motion, are we by any means enabled to conceive that material nature receives this activity from an agent, who partakes in nothing of material substance? Can man really figure to himself, even in idea, that that which has no one property of matter, can create matter, draw it from its own peculiar source, arrange it, penetrate it, give it play, guide its course? Is it not, on the contrary, more rational to the mind, more consistent with truth, more congenial to experience, to suppose that the being who made matter is himself material: is there the smallest necessity to suppose otherwise? Can it make man either better or worse, that he should consider the whole that exists as material? Will it in any manner make him a worse subject to his sovereign; a worse father to his children; a more unkind husband; a more faithless friend? Motion, then, is co-eternal with matter: from all eternity the particles of the universe have acted and reacted upon each other, by virtue of their respective energies; of their peculiar essences; of their primitive elements; of their various combinations. These particles must have combined in consequence of their affinity; they must have been either attracted or repelled by their respective relations with each other; in virtue of these various essences, they must have gravitated one upon the other; united when they were analagous; separated when that analogy was dissolved, by the approach of heterogeneous matter; they must have received their forms, undergone a change of figure, by the continual collision of bodies. In a material world the acting powers must be material: in a whole every part of which is essentially in motion, there is no occasion for a power distinguished from itself; the whole must be in perpetual motion by its own peculiar energy. The general motion, as we have elsewhere proved, has its birth from the individual motion, which beings ever active must uninterruptedly communicate to each other. Thus every cause produces its effect; this effect in its turn becomes a cause, which in like manner produces an effect; this constitutes the eternal chain of things, which although perpetually changing in its detail, suffers no change in its whole. Theology, after all, has seldom done more than personify this eternal series of motion; the principle of mobility inherent to matter: it has clothed this principle with human qualities, by which it has rendered it unintelligible: in applying these properties, they have taken no means of understanding how far they were suitable or not: in their eagerness to make them assimilate, they have extended them beyond their own conception; they have heaped them together without any judgment; and they have been surprised when these qualities, contradictory in themselves, did not enable them satisfactorily to account for all the phenomena they beheld; from thence they have wrangled; accused each other of imbecility; yet infuriated themselves against whoever had the temerity to question that which they did not themselves understand; in short, they have acted like a man who should insist that all other men should have precisely the same vision that he himself had dreamed. Be this as it may, the greater portion of what either Dr. Clarke or the theologians tell us, becomes, in some respects, sufficiently intelligible as soon as applied to nature--to matter: it is eternal, that is to say, it cannot have had a commencement, it never will have an end; it is infinite, that is to say, we have no conception of its limits. Nevertheless, human qualities, which must be always borrowed from ourselves, and with others we have a very slender acquaintance, cannot be well suitable to the entire of nature; seeing that these qualities are in themselves modes of being, or modes which appertain only to particular beings: not to the great whole which contains them. Thus, to resume the answers which have been given to Dr. Clarke, we shall say: _First_, we can conceive that matter has existed from all eternity, seeing that we cannot conceive it to have been capable of beginning. _Secondly_, that matter is independent, seeing there is nothing exterior to itself; that it is immutable, seeing it cannot change its nature, although it is unceasingly changing its form and its combinations. _Thirdly_, that matter is self-existent, since not being able to conceive it can be annihilated, we cannot possibly conceive it can have commenced to exist. _Fourthly_, that we do not know the essence, or the true nature of matter, although we have a knowledge of some of its properties; of some of its qualities: according to the mode in which they act upon us. _Fifthly_, that matter not having had a beginning, will never have an end, although its numerous combinations, its various forms, have necessarily a commencement and a period. _Sixthly_, that if all that exists, or every thing our mind can conceive is matter, this matter is infinite; that is to say, cannot be limited by any thing; that it is omnipresent, seeing there is no place exterior to itself, indeed, if there was a place exterior to it, that would be a vacuum. _Seventhly_, that nature is unique, although its elements or its parts may be varied to infinity, indued with properties extremely opposite; with qualities essentially different. _Eighthly_, that matter, arranged, modified, and combined in a certain mode, produces in some beings what we call intelligence, which is one of its modes of being, not one of its essential properties, _Ninthly_, that matter is not a free agent, since it cannot act otherwise than it does, in virtue of the laws of its nature, or of its existence; that consequently, heavy bodies must necessarily fall; light bodies by the same necessity rise; fire must burn; man must experience good and evil, according to the quality of the beings whose action he experiences. _Tenthly_, that the power or the energy of matter, has no other bounds than those which are prescribed by its own existence. _Eleventhly_, that wisdom, justice, goodness, &c. are qualities peculiar to matter combined and modified, as it is found in some beings of the human species; that the idea of perfection is an abstract, negative, metaphysical idea, or mode of considering objects, which supposes nothing real to be exterior to itself. _Twelfthly_, that matter is the principle of motion, which it contains within itself: since matter alone is capable of either giving or receiving motion: this is what cannot be conceived of immateriality or simple beings destitute of parts, devoid of extent, without mass, having no ponderosity, which consequently cannot either move itself or other bodies. CHAP. V. _Examination of the Proofs offered by DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, NEWTON, &c_. If the evidence of Clarke did not prove satisfactory--if the theologians of his day disputed the manner in which he handled his subject--if they were disposed to think he had not established his argument upon proper foundations, it did not seem probable that either the system of Descartes, the sublime reveries of Malebranche, or the more methodical mode adopted by Newton, were at all likely to meet with a better reception; the same objections will lie against them all, that they have not demonstrated the existence of their immaterial substances; although they have incessantly spoken of them, as if they were things of which they had the most intimate knowledge. Unfortunately this is a rock which the most sublime geniuses have not been competent to avoid: the most enlightened men have done little more than stammer upon a subject which they have all concurred in considering of the highest importance; which they unceasingly hold forth as the most necessary for man to know; without at the same time considering he is not in a condition to occupy himself with objects inaccessible to his senses--which his mind, consequently, can never grasp--which his utmost research cannot bring into that tangible shape by which alone he can be enabled to form a judgment. To the end that we may be convinced of that want of solidity which the greatest men have not known how to give to the proofs they have offered, but which they have successively imagined has established their positions, let us briefly examine what the most celebrated philosophers, what the most subtile metaphysicians have said. For this purpose we will begin with Descartes, the restorer of philosophy among the moderns, to whose sublime errors we are indebted for the effulgent truths of the Newtonian system. This great man himself tells us, "All the strength of argument which I have hitherto used to prove the existence of immaterial substances, consists in this, that I acknowledge it would not be possible, my nature was such as it is, that is to say, that I should have in me the idea of immateriality, if this incorporeity did not truly exist; this same immateriality, of which the idea is in me, possesses all those high perfections of which our mind can have some slight idea, without however being able to comprehend them." In another place he says, "We must necessarily conclude from this alone, that because I exist, and have the idea of immateriality, that is to say, of a most perfect being, the existence is therefore most evidently demonstrated." There are not, perhaps, many except Descartes himself, to whom this would appear quite so conclusive; who would be impressed with the conviction which he seems to imagine is so very substantive. _First_, We shall reply to Descartes, it is not a warrantable deduction, that because we have an idea of a thing, we must therefore conclude it exists; to give validity to such a mode of reasoning would be productive of the greatest mischief; would, in fact, tend to subvert all human institutions. Our imagination presents us with the idea of a sphinx, or of an hippogriff, besides a thousand other fantastical beings; are we, on that authority, to insist that these things really exist? Is the mere circumstance of our having an idea of various parts of nature, discrepantly jumbled together, without any other evidence as to the assemblage, a sufficient warrantry for calling upon mankind to accredit the existence of such heterogeneous masses? If a philosopher of the most consummate experience, of the greatest celebrity, one who enjoyed the confidence of mankind above every other, was to detail the faculties and perfections of these visionary beings, although he should hold them forth as the perfection of all natural combinations, would, I say, any reasonable being lend himself to the asseveration? _Secondly_, It is obvious that the mere circumstance of existence, does not prove the absolute existence of any thing anterior to itself; although in man, as well as the other beings of nature, it is evidence that something has existed before him. If this argument was to be admitted, are they aware how far it, would carry them? To maintain that the existence of one being demonstrably proves the existence of an anterior being, would be, in fact, denying that any thing was self-existent. The fallacy of such a position is too glaring to need refutation. _Thirdly_, It is not possible he should have a distinct, positive idea of immateriality, of which be, as well as the theologian, labours to prove the existence. It is impossible for man, for a material being, to form to himself a correct idea, or indeed any idea, of incorporeity; of a substance without extent, acting upon nature, which is corporeal; a truth which it may not be presuming too much to say we have already sufficiently proved. _Fourthly_, It is equally impossible for man to have any clear, decided idea of perfection, of infinity, of immensity, and other theological attributes. To Descartes we must therefore reply as we have done to Dr. Clarke on his twelfth proposition. Thus nothing can well be less conclusive than the proofs upon which Descartes rests the existence of immateriality. He gives it thought and intelligence, but how conceive these qualities without a subject to which they may adhere? He pretends that we cannot conceive it but "as a power which applies itself successively to the parts of the universe." Again, he says, "that an immaterial substance cannot be said to have extent, but as we say of fire contained in a piece of iron, which has not, properly speaking, any other extension than that of the iron itself." According to these notions we shall be justified in taxing him with having announced in a very clear, in a most unequivocal manner, that this is nature herself: this indeed is a pure Spinosism; it was decidedly on the principles of Descartes that Spinosa drew up his system; in fact it flows out of it consecutively. We might, therefore, with great reason, accuse Descartes of atheism, seeing that he very effectually destroys the feeble proofs he adduces in support of his own hypothesis; we have solid foundation for insisting that his system overturns the idea of the creation, because if from the modification we subtract the subject, the modification itself disappears: and if, according to the Cartesians, this immateriality is nothing without nature, they are complete Spinosians, with another name. If incorporeity is the motive-power of this nature, it no longer exists independently; it, in fact, exists no longer than the subject to which it is inherent subsists. Thus no longer existing independently, it will exist only while the nature which it moves shall endure; without matter, without a subject to move, to preserve, what is to become of it, according to this doctrine, or rather according to this elucidation of a system which is in itself untenable? It will be obvious from this, that Descartes, far from establishing on a rocky foundation the existence of this immateriality, totally destroys his own system. The same thing will necessarily happen to all those who reason upon his principles; they will always finish by confuting him, and by contradicting themselves. The same want of just inference, the same discrepancy, will obtrude themselves in the principles of the celebrated Father Malebranche; which, if considered with the slightest attention, appear to conduct directly to Spinosism; in fact, can any thing be more in unison with the language of Spinosa himself, than to say, as does Malebranche, "that the universe is only an emanation from God; that we see every thing in God, that every thing we see is only God; that God alone does every thing that is done; that all the action, with every operation that takes place in nature, is God himself; in a word, that God is every being and the only being." Is not this formally asserting that nature herself is God? Moreover, at the same time Malebranche assures us we see every thing in God, he pretends that it is not yet clearly demonstrated that matter and bodies have existence; that faith alone teaches us these mysteries, of which, without it, we should not have any knowledge whatever. In reply, it might be a very fair question, how the existence of the being who created matter can be demonstrated, if the existence of this matter itself be yet a problem? He himself acknowledges "that we can have no distinct demonstration of the existence of any other being than of that which is necessary;" he further adds, "that if it be closely examined, it will be seen, that it is not even possible to know with certitude, if God be or be not truly the creator of a material, of a sensible world." According to these notions, it is evident, that, following up the system of Malebranche, man has only his faith to guarantee the existence of the world; yet faith itself supposes its existence; if it be not, however, certain that it does exist, and the Bishop of Cloyne, Dr. Berkeley, has also held this in doubt, how shall we be persuaded that we must believe the oracles which have been delivered to a visionary world? On the other hand, these notions of Malebranche completely overturns all the theological doctrines of free agency. How can the liberty of man's action be reconciled with the idea that it is the Divinity who is the immediate mover of nature; who actually gives impulse to matter and bodies, without whose immediate interference nothing takes place; who pre-determines his creatures to every thing they do? How can it be pretended, if this doctrine is to be accredited, that human souls have the faculty of forming thoughts--have the power of volition--are in a condition to move themselves--have the capacity to modify their existence? If it be supposed with the theologians, that the conservation of the creatures in the universe is a continued creation, must it not appear, that being thus perpetually recreated, they are enabled to commit evil? It will then be a self-evident fact, that, admitting the system of Malebranche, God does every thing, and that his creatures are no more than passive instruments in his hands. Under this idea they could not be answerable for their sins, because they would have no means of avoiding them. Under this notion they could neither have merit or demerit; they would be like a sharp instrument in their own hands, which whether it was applied to a good or to an evil purpose, it would attach to themselves, not to the instrument: this would annihilate all religion: it is thus that theology is continually occupied with committing suicide. Let us now see, if the immortal Newton, the great luminary of science, the champion of astronomical truth, will afford us clearer notions, more distinct ideas, more certain evidence of the existence of immaterial substances. This great man, whose comprehensive genius unravelled nature, whose capacious mind developed her laws, seems to have bewildered himself, the instant he lost sight of them. A slave to the prejudices of his infancy, he had not the courage to hold the lamp of his own enlightened understanding to the agent theology has so gratuitously associated with nature; he has not been able to allow that her own peculiar powers were adequate to the production of that beautiful phenomena, he has with such masterly talents so luminously explained. In short, the sublime Newton himself becomes an infant when he quits physics, when he lays aside demonstration, to lose himself in the devious sinuosities, in the inextricable labyrinths, in the delusive regions of theology. This is the manner in which he speaks of the Divinity: "This God," says he, "governs all, not as the soul of the world, but as the lord and sovereign of all things. It is in consequence of his sovereignty that he is called the Lord God, [Greek letters], _pantokrator_, the universal emperor. Indeed the word God is relative and relates itself with slaves; the Deity is the dominion or the sovereignty of God, not over his own body, as those think who look upon God as the soul of the world, but over slaves." From this it will be seen that Newton, as well as the theologians, makes the Divinity a pure spirit, who presides over the universe as a monarch, as a lord paramount; that is to say, what man defines in earthly governors, despot, absolute princes, powerful monarchs, whose governments have no model but their own will, who exercise an unlimited power over their subjects, transformed into slaves; whom they usually compel to feel in a very grievous manner the weight of their authority. But according to the ideas of Newton, the world has not existed from eternity, the staves of God have been formed in the course of time; from this it would be a just inference, that before the creation of the world the god of Newton was a sovereign without subjects. Let us see if this truly great philosopher is more in unison with himself in the subsequent ideas which he delivers on this subject. "The supreme God," he says, "is an eternal, infinite, and absolutely perfect being; but however perfect a being may be, if he has no sovereignty he is not the supreme God. The word God signifies Lord, but every lord is not god; it is the sovereignty of the spiritual Being which constitutes God; it is the true sovereignty which constitutes the true God; it is the supreme sovereignty which constitutes the supreme God; it is a false sovereignty which constitutes a false god. From true sovereignty, it follows, that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; and from his other perfections, it follows, that he is supremely or sovereignly perfect. He is eternal, infinite, omniscient; that is to say, he exists from eternity, and will never have an end; he governs all, and he knows every thing that is done, or that can be done. He is neither eternity nor infinity, but he is eternal and infinite; he is not space or duration, but he exists and is present." The term here used is _adest_, which appears to have been placed there to avoid saying that God is contained in space. In all this unintelligible series, nothing is to be found but incredible efforts to reconcile the theological attributes, the abstract with the human qualities, which have been ascribed to the Divinity; we see in it negative qualities, which can no longer be suitable to man, given, however, to the Sovereign of nature, whom he has supposed a king. However it may be, this picture always supposes the Supreme God to have occasion for subjects to establish his sovereignty. It makes God stand in need of man for the exercise of his empire; without these, according to the text, he would not be a king; he could have had no empire when there was nothing: but if this description of Newton was just, if it really represented the Divinity, we might be very fairly permitted to ask, Does not this Spiritual King exercise his spiritual empire in vain, upon refractory beings, who do not at all times do that which he is willing they should; who are continually struggling against his power; who spread disorder in his states? This Spiritual Monarch, who is master of the minds, of the souls, of the wills, of the passions of his slaves, does he leave them the freedom of revolting against him? This infinite Monarch, who fills every thing with his immensity, who governs all, does he also govern the man who sins; does he direct his actions; is he in him when he offends his God? The devil, the false god, the evil principle, hath he not, according to this, a more extensive empire than the true God, whose projects, if we are to believe the theologians, he is unceasingly overturning? In earthly governments the true sovereign is generally considered to be him whose power in a state influences the greater number of his subjects. If, then, we could suppose him to be omnipresent, that is, present in all places, should we not say he was the sad witness to all the outrages committed against his authority, and we should not entertain a very exalted opinion of his power if he permitted them to continue. This, it is true, would be arguing upon a monarch of this world, still it would be the language held by observers. Is the spirituality of the Divinity well supported by those who say he fills all space, who from that instant give him extent, ascribe to him volume, make him correspond with the various points of space? This is the very reverse of an immaterial substance. "God is one," continues Newton, "and he is the same for ever, and every where, not only by his virtue alone, or by his energy, but also by his substance." But how are we to conceive that a being who is in continual activity, who produces all the changes which beings undergo, can always be himself the same? What is to be understood by either this virtue or this energy? These are relative terms, which do not present any clear, distinct idea to our mind, except as they apply to man: what are we, however, to understand by the divine substance? If this substance be spiritual, that is, devoid of extent, how can there exist in it any parts? How can it give impulse to matter, how set it in motion? How can it even be conceived by mortals? Nevertheless Newton informs us, "that all things are contained in him, and are moved in him, but without reciprocity of action: God experiences nothing by the motion of bodies; these experience no resistance whatever by his omnipresence." It would here appear that he clothes the Divinity with that which bears the character of vacuum--of nothing; without that, it would be almost impossible not to have a reciprocal action or relation between these substances, which are either penetrated or encompassed on all sides. It must be obvious, that in this instance our scientific author does not distinctly understand himself. He proceeds, "It is an incontestible truth, that God exists necessarily, and the same necessity obliges to exist always and every where: from whence it follows, that he is in every thing similar to itself; he is all eyes, all ears, all brains, all arms, all feeling, all intelligence, all action; but in a mode by no means human, by no means corporeal, and which is totally unknown to us. In the same manner as a blind man has no idea of colours, it is that we have no idea of the mode in which God feels and understands." The necessary existence of the Divinity is precisely the thing in question; it is this existence that it was needful to have verified by proofs as clear, by evidence as distinct, by demonstration as strong, as gravitation and attraction. One would have hardly thought it possible the expansive capabilities of Newton would not have compassed it. But oh, unrivalled genius! so mighty, so powerful, so colossal, while yet you was a geometrician; so insignificant, so weak, so inconsistent; when you became a theologian; that is to say, when you reasoned upon that which can neither be calculated, nor submitted to experience; how could you think of speaking to us on a subject which, by your own confession is to you just what a picture is to a man born blind? Wherefore quit nature, which had already explained to you so much? Why seek in imaginary spaces those causes, those powers, that energy, which she would have distinctly pointed out to you, had you been willing to have consulted her with your usual sagacity? The gigantic, the intelligent Newton, suffers himself to be hoodwinked--to be blinded by prejudice; he has not courage to look a question fairly in the face, when that question involves notions which habit has rendered sacred to him; he turns his eyes from truth, he casts behind him his experience, he lulls to sleep his reason, when it becomes necessary to probe opinions full of contradictions, yet fraught with the best interests of humanity. Let us, however, continue to examine how far the most transcendent genius is capable of leading himself astray, when once he abandons experience, when once he chains up his reason, when once he suffers himself to be guided by his imagination. "God," continues the father of modern philosophy, "is totally destitute of body and of corporeal figure; here is the reason why he cannot be either seen, touched, or understood; and ought not to be adored under any corporeal form." What idea, however, can be formed of a being who is resembled by nothing of which we have any knowledge? What are the relations that can be supposed to exist between such very dissimilar beings? When man renders this being his adoration, does he not, in fact, in despite of himself, make him a being similar to his own species; does he not suppose that, like himself, he is sensible to homage--to be won by presents--gained by flattery; in short, he is treated like a king of the earth, who exacts the respect, demands the fealty, requires the obedience of all who are submitted to him. Newton adds, "we have ideas of his attributes, but we do not know that it is any one substance; we only see the figures and the colours of bodies; we only hear sounds; we only touch the exterior surfaces; we only scent odours; we only taste flavours: no one of our senses, no one of our reflections, can shew us the intimate nature of substances: we have still less ideas of God." If we have an idea of the attributes of God, it is only because we clothe him with those which belong to ourselves; which we never do more than aggrandize, which we only augment or exaggerate; we then mistake them for those qualities with which we were at first acquainted. If in all those substances which are pervious to our senses, we only know them by the effects they produce on us, after which we assign them qualities, at least these qualities are something tangible, they give birth to clear and distinct ideas. This superficial knowledge, however slender it may be, with which our senses furnish us, is the only one we can possibly have; constituted as we are, we find ourselves under the necessity of resting contented with it, and we discover that it is sufficient for our wants; but we have not even the most superficial idea of immateriality, or a substance distinguished from all those with which we have the slightest acquaintance. Nevertheless, we hear men hourly reasoning upon it, disputing about its properties, advancing its faculties, as if they had the most demonstrable evidence of the fact; tearing each other in pieces, because the one does not readily admit what the other asserts, upon a subject which no man is competent to understand. Our author goes on "We only have a knowledge of God by his attributes, by his properties, by the excellent and wise arrangement which he has given to all things, and by their FINAL CAUSES: we admire him in consequence of his perfections." I repeat, that we have no real knowledge of the Divinity; that we borrow his attributes from ourselves; but it is evident these cannot be suitable to the Universal Being, who neither can have the same nature nor the same properties as particular beings; it is nevertheless after ourselves that we assign him intelligence, wisdom, perfection, in subtracting from them what we call defects. As to the order, or the arrangement of the universe, man finds it excellent, esteems it the perfection of wisdom, as long as it is favorable to his species; or when the causes which are co-existent with himself do not disturb his own peculiar existence; otherwise he is apt to complain of confusion, and final causes vanish: he then attributes to an immutable God, motives equally borrowed from his own peculiar mode of action, for deranging the beautiful order he so much admires in the universe. Thus it is always in himself, that is, in his own individual mode of feeling, that he draws up the ideas of the order, the wisdom, the excellence, the perfection which he ascribes to the Deity; whilst the good as well as the evil which take place in the world, are the necessary consequence of the essence of things; of the general, immutable laws of nature; in short, of the gravitation, of the repulsion of matter; of those unchangeable laws of motion, which Newton himself has so ably thrown into light; but which he has by a strange fatuity forborne to apply when the question was concerning the cause of these phenomena, which prejudice has refused to the capabilities of nature. He goes on, "We revere, and we adore God, on account of his sovereignty: we worship him like his slaves; a God destitute of sovereignty, of providence, and of final causes, would be no more than nature and destiny." It is true that superstition enjoins man to adore its gods like ignorant slaves, who tremble under a master whom they know not; he certainly prays to them on all occasions, sometimes requesting nothing less than an entire change in the essence of things, to gratify his capricious desires, and it is perhaps well for him they are not competent to grant his request: in the origin, as we have shewn, these gods were nothing more than nature acting by necessary laws, clothed under a variety of fables; or necessity personified under a multitude of names. However this may be, we do not believe that true religion, that sterling worship which renders man grateful, whilst it exalts the majesty of the Divinity, requires any such meanness from man that he should act like a slave; he is rather expected to sit down to the banquet prepared for him, with all the dignity of an invited guest; under the cheering consciousness of a welcome that is never accorded to slaves; nothing is required at his hands, but that he should conduct himself temperately in the banquetting-house; that he should be grateful for the good cheer he receives; that he should have virtue; (which we have already sufficiently explained is to render himself useful, by making others happy); that he should not by pertinaciously setting up whimsical opinions, and insisting on their adoption by his neighbour, disturb the harmony of the feast; that he should be sufficiently intelligent to know when he is really felicitous, and not seek to put down the gaiety of his fellow guests; but that he should rise from the board satisfied with himself, contented with others; in short, to comprise the whole in a trite axiom of one of the Greek philosophers, he should learn the invaluable secret, "to _bear_ and _forbear_." But to proceed. Newton tells us, "that from a physical and blind necessity, which should preside every where, and be always the same, there could not emanate any variety in the beings; the diversity which we behold, could only have its origin in the ideas and in the will of a being which exists necessarily;" but wherefore should not this diversity spring out of natural causes, from matter acting upon matter; the action of which either attracts and combines various yet analogous elements, or else separates beings by the intervention of those substances which have not a disposition to unite? Is not bread the result of the combination of flour, yeast and water? As for the blind necessity, as it is elsewhere said, we must acknowledge it is that of which we are ignorant, either of its properties or its energies; of which being blind ourselves we have no knowledge of its mode of action. Philosophers explain all the phenomena that occur by the properties of matter; and though they feel the want of a more intimate acquaintance with natural causes, they do not therefore the less believe them deducible from these properties or these causes. Are, therefore, the philosophers atheists, because they do not reply, it is God who is the author of these effects? Is the industrious workman, who makes gunpowder, to be challenged as an atheist, because he says the terrible effects of this destructive material, which inspired the native Americans with such awe, which raised in their winds such wonder, are to be ascribed to the junction of the apparently harmless substances of nitre, charcoal and sulpher, set in activity by the accession of trivial scintillations, produced from the collision of steel with flint, merely because some bigoted _Priest of the Sun_, who is ignorant of the composition, chooses to think it is not possible such a striking phenomenon could be the work of any thing short of the secret agents, whom he has himself appointed to govern the world? "It is allegorically said that God sees, hears, speaks, smiles, loves, hates, desires, gives, receives, rejoices, grows angry, fights, makes, or fashions, &c. because all that is said of God, is borrowed from the conduct of man, by an imperfect analogy." Man has not been able to act otherwise, for want of being acquainted with nature and her eternal course: whenever he has imagined a peculiar energy which he has not been able to fathom, he has given it the name of God; and he has then made him act upon the self-same principles, as he himself would adopt, according to which he would act if he was the master. It is from this proneness to _Theanthropy_, that has flowed all those absurd, and frequently dangerous ideas, upon which are founded the superstitions of the world; who all adore in their gods either natural causes of which they are ignorant, or else powerful mortals of whose malice they stand in awe. The sequel will shew the fatal effects that have resulted to mankind from the absurd ideas they have very frequently formed to themselves of the Divinity; that nothing could be more degrading to him, more injurious to themselves, than the idea of comparing him to an absolute sovereign, to a despot, to a tyrant. For the present let us continue to examine the proofs offered in support of their various systems. It is unceasingly repeated that the regular action, the invariable order, which reigns in the universe, the benefits heaped upon mortals, announce a wisdom, an intelligence, a goodness, which we cannot refuse to acknowledge, in the cause which produces these marvellous effects. To this we must reply, that it is unquestionably true that not only these things, but all the phenomena he beholds, indicate the existence of something gifted very superiorly to erring man; the great question, however, is one that perhaps will never be solved, what is this being? Is this question answered by heaping together the estimable qualities of man? Speaking with relation to ourselves, which is all that the theologian really does, although in such numerous regions he pretends to do a great deal more, we can apply the terms goodness, wisdom, intelligence, the best with which we are acquainted, to this being for the want of having those that may be appropriate; but I maintain, this does not, in point of fact, afford us one single idea of the _Great Cause of causes_; we admire his works; and knowing that what we approve highly in our own species, we attribute to their being wise, we say the Divinity displays wisdom. So far it is well; but this, after all, is a human quality. If we consult experience, we shall presently be convinced that our wisdom does not bear the least affinity to the actions attributed to the Divinity. To get at this a little closer, we must endeavour to find out what we do not call wisdom in man; this will help us to form an estimate, how very incompetent we are to describe the qualities of a being that differs so very materially from ourselves. We most certainly should not call him a wise man, who having built a beautiful residence, should himself set it on fire; and thus destroy what he had laboured so much to bring to perfection: yet this happens every day in nature, without its being in any manner a warrantry for us to charge her with folly. If therefore we were to form our judgments after our own puny ideas of wisdom, what should we say? Why, in point of fact, just what the man does, who, thinking he has had too much rain, implores fine weather? Which, properly translated, is neither more nor less than giving the Divinity to understand he best knows what is proper for himself. The just, the only fair inference to be drawn from this, is, that we positively know nothing about the matter; that those who pretend they do, would, if it was upon any other subject, he suspected of having an unsound mind. We do not mean to insist that we are in the right, but we mean to aver that the object of this work is not so much either to build up new systems, or to put down old ones, as by shewing man the inconclusiveness of his reasonings upon matters not accessible to his comprehension--to induce him to be more tolerant to his neighbour--to invite him to be less rancorous against those who do not see with his eyes--to hold forth to him motives for forbearance, against those whose system of faith may not exactly harmonize with his own--to render him less ferocious in support of opinions, which, if he will but discard his prejudices, he may find not so solidly bottomed as he imagines. All we know is scarcely more than that the motion we witness in the universe is the necessary consequence of the laws of matter; that the uniformity of this motion is evidence of their immutability; that it is not too much to say it cannot cease to act in the manner it does, as long as the same causes operate, governed by the same circumstances. We evidently see that motion, however regular in our mind, that order, however beautiful to our admiring optics, yields to what we term disorder, to that which we designate frightful confusion, as soon as new causes, not analogous to the preceding, either disturb or suspend their action. We further know that a better knowledge of nature, the consequence of time, the result of patient, laborious, physical researches, with the comparison of facts and the application of experience, has enabled man in many instances to divert from himself the evil effects of inevitable causes, which anterior to these discoveries overwhelmed his unhappy progenitors with ruin. How far these salutary developements are to be carried by industry, what may be achieved by honesty, what light is to be gathered from the recession of prejudice, the wisest among men is not competent to decide. Certain it is, that phenomena which for ages were supposed to denounce the anger of the Deity against mankind, are now well understood to be common effects of natural causes. Order, as we have elsewhere shewn, is only the effects which result to ourselves from a series of motion; there cannot be any disorder relatively to the great whole; in which all that takes place is necessary; in which every thing is determined by laws which nothing can change. The order of nature may be damaged or destroyed relatively to ourselves, but it is never contradicted relatively to herself, since she cannot act otherwise than she does: if we attribute to her the evils we sustain, we are equally obliged to acknowledge we owe to her the good we experience. It in said, that animals furnish a convincing proof of the powerful cause of their existence; that the admirable harmony of their parts, the mutual assistance they lend each other, the regularity with which they fulfill their functions, the preservation of these parts, the conservation of such complicated wholes, announce a workman who unites wisdom with power; in short, whole tracts of anatomy and botany have been copied to prove nothing more than that these things exist, for of the power that produced them there cannot remain a doubt. We shall never learn more from these erudite tracts, save that there exists in nature certain elements with an aptitude to attraction; a disposition to unite, suitable to form wholes, to induce combinations capable of producing very striking effects. To be surprised that the brain, the heart, the arteries, the veins, the eyes, the ears of an animal, act as we see them--that the roots of plants attract juices, or that trees produce fruit, is to be surprised that a tree, a plant, or an animal exists at all. These beings would not exist, or would no longer be that which we know they are, if they ceased to act as they do: this is what happens when they die. If the formation, the combination, the modes of action, variously possessed by these beings, if their conservation for a season, followed by their destruction or dissolution, prove any thing, it is the immutability of those laws which operate in nature: we cannot doubt the power of nature; she produces all the animals we behold, by the combination, of matter, continually in motion; the harmony that subsists between the component parts of these beings, is a consequence of the necessary laws of their nature, and of that which results from their combination. As soon as this accord ceases, the animal is necessarily destroyed: from this we must conclude that every mutation in nature is necessary; is only a consequence of its laws; that it could not be otherwise than it is, under the circumstances in which it is placed. Man, who looks upon himself as the _chef d'oeuvre_, furnishes more than any other production a proof of the immutability of the laws of nature: in this sensible, intelligent, thinking being, whose vanity leads him to believe himself the sole object of the divine predilection, who forms his God after his own peculiar model, we see only a more inconstant, a more brittle machine; one more subject to be deranged by its extreme complication, than the grosser beings: beasts destitute of our knowledge, plants that vegetate, stones devoid of feeling, are in many respects beings more highly favored than man: they are at least exempted from the sorrows of the mind--from the torments of reflection--from that devouring, chagrin to which he is so frequently a prey. Who is he who would not be a plant or a stone, every time reminiscence forces upon his imagination the irreparable loss of a beloved object? Would it not be better to be an inanimate mass, than a restless, turbulent, superstitious being, who does nothing but tremble under the imaginary displeasure of beings of his own creation; who to support his own gloomy opinions, immolates his fellow creatures at the shrine of his idol; who ravages the country, and deluges the earth with the blood of those who happen to differ from him on a speculative point of an unintelligible creed? Beings destitute of life, bereft of feeling, without memory, not having the faculties of thought, at least are not afflicted by the idea of either the past, the present, or the future; they do not at any rate believe themselves in danger of becoming eternally unhappy, because they way have reasoned badly; or because they happened to be born in a land where truth has never yet shed its refulgent beams on the darkened mind of perplexed mortals. Let it not then be said that we cannot have an idea of a work, without also having an idea of the workman, as distinguished from his work: the savage, when he first beheld the terrible operation of gunpowder, did not form the most distant idea that it was the work of a man like himself. Nature is not to be contemplated as a work of this kind; she is self-existent. In her bosom every thing is produced: she is an immense elaboratory, provided with materials, who makes the instruments of which she avails herself in her operations. All her works are the effects of her own energies; of those agents which she herself produces; of those immutable laws by which she sets every thing in activity. Eternal, indestructible elements, ever in motion, combine themselves variously, and thus give birth to all beings, to all the phenomena which fill the weak eyes of erring mortals with wonder and dismay; to all the effects, whether good or bad, of which man experiences the influence; to all the vicissitudes he undergoes, from the moment of his birth until that of his death; to order and to confusion, which he never discriminates but by the various modes in which he is affected: in short, to all those miraculous spectacles with which he occupies his meditation--upon which he exercises his reason--which frequently spread consternation over the surface of the earth. These elements need nothing when circumstances favour their junction, save their own peculiar properties, whether individual or united, with the motion that is essential to them, to produce all those phenomena which powerfully striking the senses of mankind, either fill him with admiration, or stagger him with alarm. But supposing for a moment that it was impossible to conceive the work, without also conceiving the workman, who watches over his work, where must we place this workman? Shall it be interior or exterior to his production? Is he matter and motion, or is he only space or the vacuum? In all these cases either he would be nothing, or he would be contained in nature: as nature contains only matter and motion, it must be concluded that the agent who moves it is material; that he is corporeal; if this agent be exterior to nature, then we can no longer form any idea of the place which he occupieth: neither can we better conceive an immaterial being; nor the mode in which a spirit without extent can act upon matter from which it is separated. These unknown spaces, which imagination has placed beyond the visible world, can have no existence for a being, who with difficulty sees down to his feet; he cannot paint to his mind any image of the power which inhabit them; but if he is compelled to form some kind of a picture, he must combine at random the fantastical colours which he is ever obliged to draw from the world he inhabits: in this case he will really do no more than reproduce in idea, part or parcels of that which he has actually seen; he will form a whole which perhaps has no existence in nature, but which it will be in vain he strives to distinguish from her; to place out of her bosom. When he shall be ingenuous with himself, When he shall be no longer willing to delude others, he will be obliged to acknowledge, that the portrait he has painted, although in its combination it resembles nothing in the universe, is nevertheless in all its constituent members an exact delineation of that which nature presents to our view. Hobbes in his _Leviathan_ says, "The universe, the whole mass of things, is corporeal, that is to say, body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth: also every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the universe is body; and that which is not body, is no part of the universe; and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing; and consequently no where: nor does it follow from hence, that spirits are nothing, for they have dimensions, and are therefore really bodies; though that name in common speech be given to such bodies only as are visible, or palpable, that is, that have some degree of opacity: but for spirits they call them incorporeal; which is a name of more honour, and may therefore with more piety be attributed to God himself, in whom we consider not what attribute expresseth best his nature, which is incomprehensible; but what best expresseth our desire to honour him." It will be insisted that if a statue or a watch were shewn to a savage, who had never before seen either, he would not be able to prevent himself from acknowledging that these things were the works of some intelligent agent of greater ability, possessing more industry than himself: it will be concluded from thence, that we are in like manner obliged to acknowledge that the universe, that man, that the various phenomena, are the works of an agent, whose intelligence is more comprehensive, whose power far surpasses our own. Granted: who has ever doubted it? the proposition is self-evident; it cannot admit of even a cavil. Nevertheless we reply, in the _first place_, that it is not to be doubted that nature is extremely powerful; diligently industrious: we admire her activity every time we are surprised by the extent, every time we contemplate the variety, every time we behold those complicated effects which are displayed in her works; or whenever we take the pains to meditate upon them: nevertheless, she is not really more industrious in one of her works than she is in another; she is not fathomed with more ease in those we call her most contemptible productions, than she is in her most sublime efforts: we no more understand how she has been capable of producing a stone or a metal, than the means by which she organized a head like that of the illustrious Newton. We call that man industrious who can accomplish things which we cannot; nature is competent to every thing: as soon therefore as a thing exists, it is a proof she has been capable of producing it: but it is never more than relatively to ourselves that we judge beings to be industrious: we then compare them to ourselves; and as we enjoy a quality which we call intelligence, by the assistance of which we accomplish things, by which we display our diligence, we naturally conclude from it, that those works which most astonish us, do not belong to her, but are to be ascribed to an intelligent being like ourselves, but in whom we make the intelligence commensurate with the astonishment these phenomena excite in us; that is to say, in other words, to our own peculiar ignorance, and the weakness incident to our nature. In the _second place_, we must observe, that the savage, to whom either the statue or the watch is brought, will or will not have ideas of human industry: if he has ideas of it, he will feel that this watch or this statue, way be the work of a being of his own species, enjoying faculties of which he is himself deficient: if he has no idea of it, if he has no comprehension of the resources of human art, when he beholds the spontaneous motion of the watch, he will be impressed with the belief that it is an animal, which cannot be the work of man. Multiplied experience confirms this mode of thinking which is ascribed to the savage. The Peruvians mistook the Spaniards for gods, because they made use of gunpowder, rode on horseback, and came in vessels which sailed quite alone. The inhabitants of the island of Tenian being ignorant of fire before the arrival of Europeans, the first time they saw it, conceived it to be an animal who devoured the wood. Thus it is, that the savage, in the same manner as many great and learned men, who believe themselves much more acute, will attribute the strange effects that strike his organs, to a genius or to a spirit; that is to say, to an unknown power; to whom he will ascribe capabilities of which he believes the beings of his own species are entirely destitute: by this he will prove nothing, except that he is himself ignorant of what man is capable of producing. It is thus that a raw unpolished people raise their eyes to heaven, every time they witness some unusual phenomenon. It is thus that the people denominate all those strange effects, with the natural causes of which they are ignorant, miraculous, supernatural, divine; but these are not by reasonable persons therefore considered proofs of what they assert: as the multitude are generally unacquainted with the cause of any thing, every object becomes a miracle in their eyes; at least they imagine God is the immediate cause of the good they enjoy--of the evil they suffer. In short, it is thus that the theologians themselves solve every difficulty that starts in their road; they ascribe to God all those phenomena, of the causes of which either they are themselves ignorant, or else unwilling that man should be acquainted with the source. In the _third place_, the savage, in opening the watch, and examining its parts, will perhaps feel, that this machinery announces a work which can only be the result of human labour. He will perhaps perceive, that they very obviously differ from the immediate productions of nature, whom he has not observed to produce wheels made of polished metal. He will further notice, perhaps, that these parts when separated, no longer act as they did when they were combined; that the motion he so much admired, ceases when their union is broken. After these observations, he will attribute the watch to the ingenuity of man; that is to say, to a being like himself, of whom he has some ideas, but whom he judges capable to construct machines to which he is himself utterly incompetent. In short, he will ascribe the honour of his watch to a being known to him in some respects, provided with faculties very far superior to his own; but he will be at an immense distance from the belief, that this material work, whose ingenuity pleases him so much, can be the effect of an immaterial cause; or of an agent destitute of organs, without extent; whose action upon material beings cannot be within, the sphere of his comprehension. Nevertheless, man, when he cannot embrace the causes of things, does not scruple to insist that they are impossible to be the production of nature, although he is entirely ignorant how far the powers of this nature extend; to what her capabilities are equal. In viewing the world, we must acknowledge material causes for many of those phenomena which take place in it; those who study nature are continually adding fresh discoveries to this list of physical causes; science, as she enriches the intellectual stores of human enjoyment, every day throws a broader light on the energies of nature, which _prejudice_, aided by its almost inseparable companion, _ignorance_, would for ever bind down in the fetters of impotence. Let us not, however, be told, that pursuing this hypothesis, we attribute every thing to a blind cause--to the fortuitous concurrence of atoms--to chance. Those only are called blind causes of which we know not either the combination, the laws, or the power. Those effects are called fortuitous, with whose causes man is unacquainted; to which his experience affords him no clue; which his ignorance prevents him from foreseeing. All those effects, of which he does not see the necessary connection with their causes, he attributes to chance. Nature is not a blind cause; she never acts by chance; nothing that she does would ever be considered fortuitous, by him who should understand her mode of action--who had a knowledge of her resources--who was intelligent in her ways. Every thing that she produces is strictly necessary--is never more than a consequence of her eternal, immutable laws; all is connected in her by invisible bonds; every effect we witness flows necessarily from its cause, whether we are in a condition to fathom it, or whether we are obliged to let it remain hidden from our view. It is very possible there should be ignorance on our part; but the words spirit, intelligence, will not remedy this ignorance; they will rather redouble it, by arresting our research; by preventing us from conquering those impediments which obstruct us in probing the natural causes of the effects, with which our visual faculties bring us acquainted. This may serve for an answer to the clamour of those who raise perpetual objections to the partizans of nature, by unceasingly accusing them with attributing every thing to chance. Chance is a word devoid of sense, which furnishes no substantive idea; at least it indicates only the ignorance of its employers. Nevertheless, we are triumphantly told, it is reiterated continually, that a regular work cannot be ascribed to the concurrence of chance. Never, we are informed, will it be possible to arrive at the formation of a poem such as the Iliad, by means of letters thrown together promiscuously or combined at random. We agree to it without hesitation; but, ingenuously, are the letters which compose a poem thrown with the hand in the manner of dice? It would avail as much to say, we could not pronounce a discourse with the feet. It is nature, who combines according to necessary laws, under given circumstances, a head organized in a mode suitable to bring forth a poem: it is nature who assembles the elements, which furnish man with a brain competent to give birth to such a work: it is nature, who, through the medium of the imagination, by means of the passions, in consequence of the temperament which she bestows upon man, capacitates him to produce such a masterpiece of fancy; such a never-fading effort of the mind: it is his brain modified in a certain manner, crowded with ideas, decorated with images, made fruitful by circumstances, that alone can become the matrix in which a poem can be conceived--in which the matter of it can be digested: this is the only womb whose activity could usher to an admiring world, the sublime stanzas which develope the story of the unfortunate Priam, and immortalize their author. A head organized like that of Homer, furnished with the same vigour, glowing with the same vivid imagination, enriched with the same erudition, placed under the same circumstances, would necessarily, and not by chance, produce the poem of the Iliad; at least, unless it be denied that causes similar in every thing must produce effects perfectly identical. We should without doubt be surprised, if there were in a dice-box a hundred thousand dice, to see a hundred thousand sixes follow in succession; but if these dice were all cogged or loaded, our surprise would cease: the particles of matter may be compared to cogged dice, that is to say, always producing certain determinate effects under certain given circumstances; these particles being essentially varied in themselves, countless in their combinations, they are cogged in myriads of different modes. The head of Homer, or of Virgil, was no more than an assemblage of particles, possessing peculiar properties; or if they will, of dice cogged by nature; that is to say, of beings so combined, of matter so wrought, as to produce the beautiful poems of the Iliad or the Aeneid. As much may be said of all other productions: indeed, what are men themselves but cogged dice--machines into which nature has infused the bias requisite to produce effects of a certain description? A man of genius produces a good work, in the same manner as a tree of a good species, placed in a prolific soil, cultivated with care, grafted with judgment, produces excellent fruit. Then is it not either knavery or puerility, to talk of composing a work by scattering letters with the hand; by promiscuously mingling characters; or gathering together by chance, that which can only result from a human brain, with a peculiar organization, modified after a certain manner? The principle of human generation does not develope itself by chance; it cannot be nourished with effect, expanded into life, but in the womb of a woman: a confused heap of characters, a jumble of symbols, is nothing more than an assemblage of signs, whose proper arrangement is adequate to paint human ideas; but in order that these ideas may be correctly delineated, it is previously requisite that they should have been conceived, combined, nourished, connected, and developed in the brain of a poet; where circumstances make them fructify, mature them, and bring them forth in perfection, by reason of the fecundity, generated by the genial warmth and the peculiar energy of the matrix, in which these intellectual seeds shall have been placed. Ideas in combining, expanding, connecting, and associating themselves, form a whole, like all the other bodies of nature: this whole affords us pleasure, becomes a source of enjoyment, when it gives birth to agreeable sensations in the mind; when it offers to our examination pictures calculated to move us in a lively manner. It is thus that the history of the Trojan war, as digested in the head of Homer, ushered into the world with all the fascinating harmony of numbers peculiar to himself, has the power of giving a pleasurable impulse to heads, who by their analogy with that of this incomparable Grecian, are in a capacity to feel its beauties. From this it will be obvious, that nothing can be produced by chance; that no effect can exist without an adequate cause for its existence; that the one must ever be commensurate with the other. All the works of nature grow out of the uniform action of invariable laws, whether our mind can with facility follow the concatenation of the successive causes which operate; or whether, as in her more complicated productions, we find ourselves in the impossibility of distinguishing the various springs which she sets in motion to give birth to her phenomena. To nature, the difficulty is not more to produce a great poet, capable of writing an admirable poem, than to form a glittering stone or a shining metal which gravitates towards a centre. The mode she adopts to give birth to these various beings, is equally unknown to us, when we have not meditated upon it; frequently the most sedulous attention, the most patient investigation affords us no information; sometimes, however, the unwearied industry of the philosopher is rewarded, by throwing into light the most mysterious operations. Thus the keen penetration of a Newton, aided by uncommon diligence, developed the starry system, which, for so many thousand years, had eluded the research of all the astronomers by whom he was preceded. Thus the sagacity of a Harvey giving vigour to his application, brought out of the obscurity in which for almost countless centuries it had been buried, the true course pursued by the sanguinary fluid, when circulating through the veins and arteries of man, giving activity to his machine, diffusing life through his system, and enabling him to perform those actions which so frequently strike an astonished world with wonder and regret. Thus Gallileo, by a quickness of perception, a depth of reasoning peculiar to himself, held up to an admiring world, the actual form and situation of the planet we inhabit; which until then had escaped the observation of the most profound geniuses--the most subtle metaphysicians--the whole host of priests; which when first promulgated was considered so extraordinary, so contradictory to all the then received opinions, either sacred or profane, that he was ranked as an atheist, as an impious blasphemer, to hold communion with whom, would secure to the communers a place in the regions of everlasting torment; in short, it was held an heresy of such an indelible dye, that notwithstanding the infallibility of his sacred function, Pope Gregory, who then filled the papal chair, excommunicated all those who had the temerity to accredit so abominable a doctrine. Man is born by the necessary concurrence of those elements suitable to his construction; he increases in bulk, corroborates his system, expands his powers, in the same manner as a plant or a stone; which as well as himself, are augmented in their volume, invigorated in their capabilities, by the addition of homogeneous matter, that exists within the sphere of their attraction. Man feels, thinks, receives ideas, acts after a certain manner, that is to say, according to his organic structure, which is peculiar to himself; that renders him susceptible of modifications, of which the stone and the plant are utterly incapable. On the other hand, the organization of these beings is of a nature to enable them to receive other modifications, which man is not more capacitated to experience, than the stone or the plant are those which constitute him what he is. In consequence of this peculiar arrangement, the man of genius produces works of merit; the plant when it is healthy yields delicious fruits the stone when it is placed in a suitable matrix possesses a glittering brilliance which dazzles the eyes of mortals; each in their sphere of action both surprise and delight us; because we feel that they excite in us sensations, that harmonize with what we call order; in consequence of the pleasure they infuse, by the rarity, by the magnitude, and by the variety of the effects which they occasion us to experience. Nevertheless, that which is found most admirable in the productions of nature, that which is most esteemed in the actions of man, most highly valued in animals, most sought after in vegetation, most in request among fossils, is never more than the natural effects of the different particles of matter, diversely arranged, variously combined, submitted to numerous modifications; from matter thus united result organs, brains, temperament, taste, talents, all the multifarious properties, all the multitudinous qualities, which discriminate the beings whose multiplied activity make up the sum of what is designated animated nature. Nature then produces nothing but what is necessary; it is not by fortuitous combinations, by chance throws, that she exhibits to our view the beings we behold; all her throws are sure, all the causes she employs have infallibly their effects. Whenever she gives birth to extraordinary, marvellous, rare beings, it is, that the requisite order of things the concurrence of the necessary productive causes, happens but seldom. As soon as those beings exist, they are to be ascribed to nature, equally with the most familiar of her productions; to nature every thing is equally possible, equally facile, when she assembles together the instruments or the causes necessary to act. Thus it seems presumption in man to set limits to the powers of nature, which he so very imperfectly understands. The combinations, or if they will, the throws that she makes in an eternity of existence, can easily produce all the beings that have existed: her eternal march must necessarily bring forth, again and again, the most astonishing circumstances; the most rare occurrences; those most calculated to rouse the wonder, to elicit the admiration of beings, who are only in a condition to give them a momentary consideration; who can get nothing more than a glimpse, without ever having either the leisure or the means to search into causes, which lie hid from their weak eyes, in the depths of Cimmerian obscurity. Countless throws during eternity, with elements and combinations varied almost to infinity, quite with relation to man, suffice to produce every thing of which he has a knowledge, with multitudes of other effects, of which he will never have the least conception. Thus, we cannot too often repeat to the metaphysicians, to the supporters of immateriality, to the inconsistent theologians, who commonly ascribe to their adversaries the most ridiculous opinions, in order to obtain an easy, short-lived triumph in the prejudiced eyes of the multitude; or in the stagnant minds of those who never examine deeply; that chance is nothing but a word, as well as many other words, imagined solely to cover the ignorance of those to whom the course of nature is inexplicable--to shield the idleness of others who are too slothful to seek into the properties of acting causes. It is not chance that has produced the universe, it is self-existent; nature exists necessarily from all eternity: she is omnipotent because every thing is produced by her energies; she is omnipresent, because she fills all space; she is omniscient, because every thing can only be what it actually is; she is immovable, because as a whole she cannot be displaced; she is immutable, because her essence cannot change, although her forms may vary; she is infinite, because she cannot have any bounds; she is all perfect, because she contains every thing: in short, she has all the abstract qualities of the metaphysician, all the moral faculties of the theologian, without involving any contradiction, since that which is the assemblage of all, must of necessity contain the properties of all. However concealed may be her ways, the existence of nature is indubitable; her mode of action is in some respects known to us. Experience amply demonstrates we might, if we were more industrious, become better acquainted with her secrets; but with an immaterial substance, with a pure spirit, the mind of man can never become familiar: he has no means by which he can picture to himself this incomprehensible, this inconceivable quality: in despite therefore of the roundness of assertion adopted by the theologian, notwithstanding all the subtilties of the metaphysician, it will always be for man, while he remains such as he now is, in the language of Doctor Samuel Clarke, that, _of which nothing can with truth be affirmed_. CHAP. VI. _Of Pantheism; or of the Natural Ideas of the Divinity._ The false principle that matter is not self-existent; that by its nature it is in an impossibility to move itself; consequently incompetent to the production of those striking phenomena which arrest our wondering eyes in the wide expanse of the universe; it will be obvious, to all who seriously attend to what has preceded, is the origin of the proofs upon which theology rests the existence of immateriality. After these suppositions, as gratuitous as they are erroneous, the fallacy of which we have exposed elsewhere, it has been believed that matter did not always exist, but that its existence, as well as its motion, is a production of time; due to a cause distinguished from itself; to an unknown agent to whom it is subordinate. As man finds in his own species a quality which he calls intelligence, which presides over all his actions, by the aid of which he arrives at the end he proposes to himself; he has clothed this invisible agent with this quality, which he has extended beyond the limits of his own conception: he magnified it thus, because, having made him the author of effects of which he found himself incapable, he did not conceive it possible that the intelligence he himself possessed, unless it was prodigiously amplified, would be sufficient to account for those productions, to which his erring judgment led him to conclude the natural energy of physical causes were not adequate. As this agent was invisible, as his mode of action was inconceivable, he made him a spirit, a word that really means nothing more than that he is ignorant of his essence, or that he acts like the breath of which he cannot trace the motion. Thus, in speaking of spirituality, he designated an occult quality, which he deemed suitable to a concealed being, whose mode of action was always imperceptible to the senses. It would appear, however, that originally the word spirit was not meant to designate immateriality; but a matter of a more subtile nature than that which acted coarsely on the organs: still of a nature capable of penetrating the grosser matter--of communicating to it motion--of instilling into it active life--of giving birth to those combinations--of imparting to them those modifications, which his organic structure rendered him competent to discover. Such was, as has been shewn, that all-powerful Jupiter, who in the theology of the ancients, was originally destined to represent the etherial, subtile matter that penetrates, vivifies, and gives activity to all the bodies of which nature is the common assemblage. It would be grossly deceiving ourselves to believe that the idea of spirituality, such as the subtilty of dreaming metaphysicians present it in these days, was that which offered itself to our forefathers in the early stages of the human mind. This immateriality, which excludes all analogy with any thing but itself--which bears no resemblance to any thing of which man is capacitated to have a knowledge, was, as we have already observed, the slow, the tardy fruit of his imagination, after he had quitted experience, and renounced his reason. Men reared in luxurious leisure, unceasingly meditating, without the assistance of those natural helps with which attentive observation would have furnished them, by degrees arrived at the formation of this incomprehensible quality, which is so fugitive, that although man has been compelled to reverence it, to accredit it against all the evidence of his senses, they have never yet been enabled to give any other explanation of its nature, than by using a term to which it is impossible to attach any intelligible idea. Seraphis said, with tears in his eyes, "that in making him adopt the opinion of spirituality, they had deprived him of his God." Many fathers of the church have given a human form to the Divinity, and treated all those as heretics who made him spiritual. Thus by dint of reasoning, by force of subtilizing, the word spirit no longer presents any one image upon which the mind can fix itself; when they are desirous to speak of it, it becomes impossible to understand them, seeing that each visionary paints it after his own manner; and in the portrait he forms, consults only his own temperament, follows nothing but his own imagination, adopts nothing but his own peculiar reveries; the only point in which they are at all in unison, is in assigning to it inconceivable qualities, which they naturally enough believe are best suited to the incomprehensible beings they have delineated: from the incompatible heap of these qualities, generally resulted a whole, whose existence they thus rendered impossible. In short, this word, which has occupied the research of so many learned and intelligent men; which is considered of such importance to mankind, has been, in consequence of theological reveries, always fluctuating: these never bearing the least resemblance to each other, it has become destitute of any fixed sense, a mere sound, to which each who echoes it affixes his own peculiar ideas, which are never in harmony with those of his neighbour; which indeed are not even steady in himself, but like the camelion, assume the colour of every differing circumstance. This unintelligible word has been substituted for the more intelligible one of matter; man, when clothed with power, has entertained the most rancorous antipathies, pursued the most barbarous persecutions, against those who have not been enabled to contemplate this changeable idea under the same point of view with himself. There have, however, been men who had sufficient courage to resist this torrent of opinion--to oppose themselves to this delirium; who have believed, that the object which was announced as the most important for mortals, as the sole object worthy of their thoughts, demanded an attentive examination; who apprehended that if experience could be of any utility, if judgment could afford any advantage, if reason was of any use whatever, it must, most unquestionably be, to consider this quality so opposed to every thing in nature, which was said to regulate all the beings which she contains. These quickly saw they could not subscribe to the general opinion of the uninformed, who never examine any thing, who take every thing upon the credit of others; much less was it consistent with sound sense to agree with their guides, who, either deceivers or deceived, forbade others to submit it to the scrutiny of reason; who were themselves frequently in an utter incapacity to pass it under such an ordeal. Thus some thinkers, disgusted with the obscure and contradictory notions which others had through habit mechanically attached to this incomprehensible property, had the temerity to shake off the yoke which had been imposed upon them from their infancy: calling reason to their aid against those terrors with which they alarmed the ignorant, revolting at the hideous descriptions under which they attempted to defend their hypothesis, they had the intrepidity to tear the veil of delusion; to rend asunder the barriers of imposture; they considered with calm resolution, this formidable prejudice, contemplated with a serene eye this unsupported opinion, examined with cool deliberation this fluctuating notion, which had become the object of all the hopes, the source of all the fears, the spring of all the quarrels which distracted the mind, and disturbed the harmony of blind, confiding mortals. The result of these inquiries has uniformly been, a conviction that no rational proof has ever been adduced in support of this hypothesis; that from the nature of the thing itself, none can be offered; that an incorporeity is inconceivable to corporeal beings; that these only behold nature acting after invariable laws, in which every thing is material; that all the phenomena of which the world is the theatre, spring out of natural causes; that man as well as all the other beings is the work or this nature, is only an instrument in her hand, obliged to accomplish the eternal decrees of an imperious necessity. Whatever efforts the philosopher makes to penetrate the secrets of nature, he never finds more, as we have many times repeated, than matter; various in itself, diversely modified in consequence of the motion it undergoes. Its whole, as well as its parts, displays only necessary causes producing necessary effects, which flow necessarily one out of the other: of which the mind, aided by experience, is more or less competent to discover the concatenation. In virtue of their specific properties, all the beings that come under our review, gravitate towards a centre--attract analogous matter--repel that which is unsuitable to combination--mutually receive and give impulse--acquire qualities--undergo modifications which maintain them in existence for a season--are born and dissolved by the operation of an inexorable decree, that obliges every thing, we behold to pass into a new mode of existence. It is to these continued vicissitudes that are to be ascribed all the phenomena, whether trivial or of magnitude; ordinary or extraordinary; known or unknown; simple or complicated; which are operated in the universe. It is by these mutations alone that we have any knowledge of nature: she is only mysterious to those who contemplate her through the veil of prejudice: her course is always simple to those who look at her without prepossession. To attribute the effects to which we are witnesses, to nature, to matter, variously combined with the motion that is inherent to it, is to give them an intelligible and known cause; to attempt to penetrate deeper, is to plunge ourselves into imaginary regions, where we find only a chaos of obscurities--where we are lost in an unfathomable abyss of incertitude. Let us then be content with contemplating nature, who, being self-existent, must in her essence possess motion; which cannot be conceived without properties, from which result perpetual action and re-action; or those continual efforts which give birth to such a numerous train of circumstances; in which a single molecule cannot be found, that does not necessarily occupy the place assigned to it, by immutable and necessary laws--that is for an instant in an absolute state of repose. What necessity can there exist to seek out of matter for a power to give it play, since its motion flows as necessarily out of its existence as its bulk, its form, its gravity, &c. since nature in inaction would no longer be nature? If it be demanded, How can we figure to ourselves, that matter by its own peculiar energy can produce all the effects we witness? I shall reply, that if by matter it is obstinately determined to understand nothing but a dead, inert mass, destitute of every property, incapable of moving itself, we shall no longer have a single idea of matter; we shall no longer be able to account for any thing. As soon, however, as it exists, it must have properties; as soon as it has properties, without which it could not exist, it must act by virtue of those properties; since it is only by its action we can have a knowledge of its existence, be conscious of its properties. It is evident that if by matter be understood that which it is not, or if its existence be denied, those phenomena which strike our visual organs cannot be attributed to it. But if by nature be understood (that which she really is), an heap of existing matter, possessing various properties, we shall be obliged to acknowledge that nature must be competent to move herself; by the diversity of her motion, must have the capability, independent of foreign aid, to produce the effects we behold; we shall find that nothing can be made from nothing; that nothing is made by chance; that the mode of action of every particle of matter, however minute, is necessarily determined by its own peculiar, or by its individual properties. We have elsewhere said, that that which cannot be annihilated--that which in its nature is indestructible--cannot have been inchoate, cannot have had a beginning to its existence, but exists necessarily from all eternity; contains within itself a sufficient cause for its own peculiar existence. It becomes then perfectly useless to seek out of nature a cause for her action which is in some respects known to us; with which indefatigable research may, judging of the future by the past, render us more familiar. As we know some of the general properties of matter; as we can discover some of its qualities, wherefore should we seek its motion in an unintelligible cause, of which we are not in a condition to become acquainted with any one of its properties? Can we conceive that immateriality could ever draw matter from its own source? Impossible; it is not within the grasp of human intellect. If creation is an eduction from nothing, there must have been a time when matter had not existence; there must consequently be a time when it will cease to be: this latter is acknowledged by many theologians themselves to be impossible. Do those who are continually talking of this mysterious act of omnipotence, by which a mass of matter has been, all at once, substituted to nothing, perfectly understand what they tell us? Is there a man on earth who conceives that a being devoid of extent can exist, become the cause of the existence of beings who have extent--act upon matter--draw it from his own peculiar essence--set it in motion? In truth, the more we consider theology, the more we must be convinced that it has invented words destitute of sense; substituted sounds to intelligible realities. For want of consulting experience, for want or studying nature, for want of examining the material world, we have plunged ourselves into an intellectual vacuum, which we have peopled with chimeras, We have not stooped to consider matter, to study its different periods, to follow it through its numerous, changes. We have either ridiculously or knavishly confounded dissolution, decomposition, the separation of the elementary particles of bodies, with their radical destruction; we have been unwilling to see that the elements are indestructible; although the forms are fleeting, and depend upon transitory combination. We have not distinguished the change of figure, the alteration of position, the mutation of texture, to which matter is liable, from its annihilation, which is impossible; we have falsely concluded, that matter Was not a necessary being--that it commenced to exist--that this existence was derived from that which possessed nothing in common with itself--that that which was not substance, could give birth to that which is. Thus an unintelligible name has been substituted for matter, which furnishes us with true ideas of nature; of which at each instant we experience the influence, of which we undergo the action, of which we feel the power, and of which we should have a much better knowledge, if our abstract opinions did not continually fasten a bandage over our eyes. Indeed the most simple notions of philosophy shew us, that, although bodies change and disappear, nothing is however lost in nature; the various produce of the decomposition of a body serves for elements, supplies materials, forms the basis, lays the foundation for accretions, contributes to the maintenance of other bodies. The whole of nature subsists, and is conserved only by the circulation, the transmigration, the exchange, the perpetual displacement of insensible atoms--the continual mutation of the sensible combinations of matter. It is by this palingenesia, this regeneration, that the great whole, the mighty macrocosm subsists; who, like the Saturn of the ancients, is perpetually occupied with devouring her own children. It will not then be inconsistent with observation, repugnant to reason, contrary to good sense, to acknowledge that matter is self-existent; that it acts by an energy peculiar to itself; that it will never be annihilated. Let us then say, that matter is eternal; that nature has been, is, and ever will be occupied with producing and destroying; with doing and undoing; with combining and separating; in short, with following a system of laws resulting from its necessary existence. For every thing that she doth, she needs only to combine the elements of matter; these, essentially diverse, necessarily either attract or repel each other; come into collision, from whence results either their union or dissolution; by the same laws that one approximates, the other recedes from their respective spheres of action. It is thus that she brings forth plants, fossils, animals, men; thus she gives existence to organized, sensible, thinking beings, as well as to those who are destitute of either feeling or thought. All these act for the season of their respective duration, according to immutable laws, determined by their various properties; arising out of their configuration; depending on their masses; resulting from their ponderosity, &c. Here is the true origin of every thing which is presented to our view; this indicates the mode by which nature, according to her own peculiar powers, is in a state to produce all those astonishing effects which assail our wondering eyes; all that phenomena to which mankind is the witness; as well as all the bodies who act diversely upon the organs with which he is furnished, of which he can only judge according to the manner in which these organs are affected. He says they are good, when they are analogous to his own mode of existence--when they contribute to the maintenance of the harmony of his machine: he says they are bad, when they disturb this harmony. It is thus he ascribes views, ideas, designs, to the being he supposes to be the power by which nature is moved; although all the experience we are able to collect, unequivocally proves, that she acts after an invariable, eternal code of laws. Nature is destitute of those views which actuate man; she acts necessarily, because she exists: her system is immutable, and founded upon the essence of things. It is the essence of the seed of the male, composed of primitive elements, which serve for the basis of an organized being, to unite itself with that of the female; to fructify it; to produce, by this combination, a new organized being; who, feeble in his origin, not having yet acquired a sufficient quantity of material particles to give him consistence, corroborates himself by degrees; strengthens himself by the daily accretion of analogous matter; is nourished by the modifications appropriate to his existence: matured by the continuation of circumstances calculated to give vigour to his frame; thus he lives, thinks, acts, engenders in his turn other organized beings similar to himself. By a consequence of his temperament and of physical laws, this generation does not take place, except when the circumstances necessary to its production find themselves united. Thus this procreation is not operated by chance; the animal does not fructify, but with an animal of his own species, because this is the only one analogous to himself, who unites the qualities, who combines the circumstances, suitable to produce a being resembling himself; without this he would not produce any thing, or he would only give birth to a being who would be denominated a monster, because it would be dissimilar to himself. It is of the essence of the grain of plants, to be impregnated by the pollen or seed of the stygma of the flower; in this state of copulation they in consequence develope themselves in the bowels of the earth; expand by the aid of water; shoot forth by the accession of heat; attract analogous particles to corroborate their system: thus by degrees they form a plant, a shrub, a tree, susceptible of that life, filled with that motion, capable of that action which is suitable to vegetable existence. It is of the essence of particular particles of earth, homogeneous in their nature, when separated by circumstances, attenuated by water, elaborated by heat, to unite themselves in the bosom of mountains, with other atoms which are analogous; to form by their aggregation, according to their various affinities, those bodies possessing more or less solidity; having more or less purity, which are called diamonds, chrystals, stones, metals, minerals. It is of the essence of exhalations raised by the heat of the atmosphere, to combine, to collect themselves, to dash against each other, and either by their union or their collision to produce meteors, to generate thunder. It is of the essence of some inflammable matter to gather itself together, to ferment in the caverns of the earth, to increase its active force by augmenting its heat, and then explode, by the accession of other matter suitable to the operation, with that tremendous force which we call earthquakes; by which mountains are destroyed; cities overturned; the inhabitants of the plains thrown into a state of consternation; these full of alarm, unused to meditate on natural effects, unconscious of the extent of physical powers, stretch forth their hands in dismay, heave the most desponding sighs, utter aloud their complaints, and earnestly implore a cessation of those evils, which nature, acting by necessary laws, obliges them to experience as necessarily as she does those benefits by which she fills them with the most extravagant joy. In short, it is of the essence of certain climates to produce men so organized, whose temperament is so modified, that they become either extremely useful or very prejudicial to their species, in the same manner as it is the property of certain portions of the land, to bring forth either delicious fruits or dangerous poisons. In all this nature acts necessarily; she pursues an undeviating course, which we are bound to consider the perfection of wisdom; because she exists necessarily, has her modes of action determined by certain, invariable laws, which themselves flow out of the constituent properties of the various beings she contains, and those circumstances, which the eternal motion she is in must necessarily bring about. It is ourselves who have a necessary aim, which is our own conservation; it is by this that we regulate all the ideas we form to ourselves of the causes acting in nature; it is according to this standard we judge of every thing we see or feel. Animated ourselves, existing after a certain manner, possessing a soul endowed with rare and peculiar qualities, we, like the savage, ascribe a soul and animated life to every thing that acts upon us. Thinking and intelligent ourselves, we give these, faculties to those beings whom we suppose to be more powerful than mortals; but as we see the generality of matter incapable of modifying itself, we suppose it must receive its impulse from some concealed agent, some external cause, which our imagination pictures as similar to ourselves. Necessarily attracted by that which is advantageous to us, repelling by an equal necessity that which is prejudicial to our manner of existence; we cease to reflect that our modes of feeling are due to our peculiar organization, modified by physical causes: in this state, either of inattention or ignorance, we mistake the natural results of our own peculiar structure, for instruments employed by a being whom we clothe with our own passions--whom we suppose actuated by our own views--who, possessing our ideas, embraces a mode of thinking and acting similar to ourselves. If after this it be asked, What is the end of nature? We shall reply that on this head we are ignorant; that it is more than probable no man will ever fathom the secret; but we shall also say, it is evidently to exist, to act, to conserve her whole. If then it be demanded, Wherefore she exists? We shall again reply, of this we know nothing at present, possibly never shall; but we shall also say, she exists necessarily, that her operations, her motion, her phenomena, are the necessary consequences of her necessary existence. There necessarily exists something; this is nature or the universe, this nature necessarily acts as she does. If it be wished to substitute any other word for nature, the question will still remain as it did, as to the cause of her existence; the end she has in view. It is not by changing of terms that a geometrician can solve problems; one word will throw no more light on a subject than another, unless that word carries a certain degree of conviction in the ideas which it generates. As long as we speak of matter, if we cannot develope all its properties, we shall at least have fixed, determinate ideas; something tangible, of which we have a slight knowledge, that we can submit to the examination of our senses: but from the moment we begin to talk of immateriality, of incorporeity, from thence our ideas become confused; we are lost in a labyrinth of conjecture--we have no one means of seizing the subject on any side--we are, after the most elaborate arguments, after the most subtle reasoning, obliged to acknowledge we cannot form the most slender opinion respecting it, that has any thing substantive for its support. In short, that it is precisely that thing "of which every thing may be denied, but of which nothing can with truth be affirmed." Let us clothe this incomprehensible being with whatever qualities we may, it will be always in ourselves we seek the model; they will be our own faculties that we delineate, our own passions that we describe. In like manner man, as long as he is ignorant, will always conjecture that it is for himself alone the universe was formed; not withstanding, he has nothing more to do, than to open his eyes in order to be undeceived. He will then see, that he undergoes a common destiny, equally partakes with all other beings of the benefits, shares with them without exception the evils of life; like them he is submitted to an imperious necessity, inexorable in its decrees; which is itself nothing more than the sum total of those laws which nature herself is obliged to follow. Thus every thing proves that nature, or matter, exists necessarily; that it cannot in any moment swerve from those laws imposed upon it by its existence. If it cannot be annihilated, it cannot have been inchoate. The theologian himself agrees that it requires a miracle to annihilate an atom. But is it possible to derogate from the necessary laws of existence? Can that which exists necessarily, act but according to the laws peculiar to itself? Miracle is another word invented to shield our own sloth, to cover our own ignorance; it is that by which we wish to designate those rare occurrences, those solitary effects of natural causes, whose infrequency do not afford us means of diving into their springs. It is only saying by another expression, that an unknown cause hath by modes which we cannot trace, produced an uncommon effect which we did not expect, which therefore appears strange to us. This granted, the intervention of words, far from removing the ignorance in which we found ourselves with respect to the power and capabilities of nature, only serves to augment it, to give it more durability. The creation of matter becomes to our mind as incomprehensible, and appears as impossible as its annihilation. Let us then conclude that all those words which do not present to the mind any determinate idea, ought to be banished the language of those who are desirous of speaking so as to be understood; that abstract terms, invented by ignorance, are only calculated to satisfy men destitute of experience; who are too slothful to study nature, too timid to search into her ways; that they are suitable only to content those enthusiasts, whose curious imagination pleases itself with making fruitless endeavours to spring beyond the visible world; who occupy themselves with chimeras of their own creation: in short, that these words are useful only to those whose sole profession it is to feed the ears of the uninformed with pompous sounds, that are not comprehended by themselves--upon the sense of which they are in a state of perpetual hostility with each other--upon the true meaning of which they have never yet been able to come to a common agreement; which each sees after his own peculiar manner of contemplating objects, in which there never was, nor probably never will be, the least harmony of feeling. Man is a material being; he cannot consequently have any ideas, but of that which like himself is material; that is to say, of that which is in a capacity to act upon his organs, which has some qualities analogous with his own. In despite of himself, he always assigns material properties to his gods; the impossibility he finds in compassing them, has made him suppose them to be spiritual; distinguished from the material world. Indeed he, must be content, either not to understand himself, or he must have material ideas of the Divinity; the human mind may torture itself as long as it pleases, it will never, after all its efforts, be enabled to comprehend, that material effects can emanate from immaterial causes; or that such causes can have any relation with material beings. Here is the reason why man, as we have seen, believes himself obliged to give to his gods, these morals which he so much so highly esteems, in those beings of his race, who are fortunate enough to possess them: he forgets that a being who is spiritual, adopting the theological hypothesis, cannot from thence either have his organization, or his ideas; that it cannot think in his mode, nor act after his manner; that consequently it cannot possess what he calls intelligence, wisdom, goodness, anger, justice, &c. as he himself understands those terms. Thus, in truth, the moral qualities with which he has clothed the Divinity, supposes him material, and the most abstract theological notions, are, after all, founded upon a direct, undeniable _Anthropomorphism_. In despite of all their subtilties, the theologians cannot do otherwise; like all the beings of the human species, they have a knowledge of matter alone: they have no real idea of a pure spirit. When they speak of the intelligence, of the wisdom, of the designs of their gods, they are always those of men which they describe, that they obstinately persist in giving to beings, of which, according to their own shewing, to the evidence they themselves adduce, their essence does not render them susceptible; who if they had those qualities with which they clothe them, would from that very moment cease to be incorporeal; would be in the truest sense of the word, substantive matter. How shall we reconcile the assertion, that beings who have not occasion for any thing--who are sufficient to them selves--whose projects must be executed as soon as they are formed; can have volition, passions, desires? How shall we attribute anger to beings without either blood or bile? How can we conceive an omnipotent being (whose wisdom we admire in the striking order he has himself established in the universe,) can permit that this beautiful arrangement should be continually disturbed, either by the elements in discord, or by the crimes of human beings? In short, this being cannot have any one of the human qualities, which always depend upon the peculiar organization of man--upon his wants--upon his institutions, which are themselves always relative to the society in which he lives. The theologian vainly strives to aggrandize, to exaggerate in idea, to carry to perfection by dint of abstraction, the moral qualities of man; they are unsuitable to the Divinity; in vain it is asserted they are in him of a different nature from what they are in his creatures; that they are perfect; infinite; supreme; eminent; in holding this language, they no longer understand themselves; they can have no one idea of the qualities they are describing, seeing that man can never have a conception of them, but inasmuch as they bear an analogy to the same qualities in himself. It is thus that by force of metaphysical subtilty, mortals have no longer any fixed, any determinate idea of the beings to which they have given birth. But little contented with understanding physical causes, with contemplating active nature; weary of examining matter, which experience proves is competent to the production of every thing, man has been desirous to despoil it of the energy which it is its essence to possess, in order to invest it in a pure spirit; in an immaterial substance; which he is under the necessity of re-making a material being, whenever he has an inclination either to form an idea of it to himself, or make it understood by others. In assembling the parts of man, which he does no more than enlarge, which he swells out to infinity, he believes he forms an immaterial being, who, for that reason, acquires the capability of performing all those phenomena, with the true causes of which he is ignorant; nevertheless those operations of which he does comprehend the spring, he as sedulously denies to be due to the powers of this being; time, therefore, according to these ideas, as he advances the progress of science, as he further developes the secrets of nature, is continually diminishing the number of actions ascribed to this being--is constantly circumscribing his sphere of action. It is upon the model of the human soul that he forms the soul of nature, or that secret agent from which she receives impulse. After having made himself double, he makes nature in like manner twofold, and then he supposes she is vivified by an intelligence, which he borrows from himself, Placed in an impossibility of becoming acquainted with this agent, as well as with that which he has gratuitously distinguished from his own body; he has invented the word spiritual to cover up his ignorance; which is only in other words avowing it is a substance entirely unknown to him. From that moment, however, he has no ideas whatever of what he himself has done; because he first clothes it with all the qualities he esteems in his fellows, and then destroys them by an assurance, that they in no wise resemble the qualities he has been so anxious to bestow. To remedy this inconvenience, he concludes this spiritual substance much more noble than matter; that its prodigious subtilty, which he calls simplicity, but which is only the effect of metaphysical abstraction, secures it from decomposition, from dissolution, from all those revolutions, to which material bodies, as produced by nature, are evidently exposed. It is thus, that man always prefers the marvellous to the simple; the unintelligible to the intelligible; that which he cannot comprehend, to that which is within the range of his understanding; he despises those objects which are familiar to him; he estimates those alone with which he is incapable of having any intercourse: that of which he has only confused vague ideas, he concludes must contain something important for him to know--must have something supernatural in its construction. In short, he needs mystery to move his imagination--to exercise his mind--to feed his curiosity; which never labours harder, than when it is occupied with enigmas impossible to be guessed at; which from that very circumstance, he judges to be extremely worthy of his research. This, without doubt, is the reason he looks upon matter, which he has continually under his eyes, which he sees perpetually in action, eternally changing its form, as a contemptible thing--as a contingent being, that does not exist necessarily; consequently, that cannot exist independently: this is the reason why he has imagined a spirit, which he will never be able to conceive; which on that account he declares to be superior to matter; which he roundly asserts to be anterior to nature, and the only self-existent being. The human wind found food in these mystical ideas, they unceasingly occupied it; the imagination had play, it embellished them after its own manner: ignorance fed itself with the fables to which these mysteries gave rise; habit identified them with the existence of man himself: when each could ask the other concerning these ideas, without any one being in a capacity to return a direct answer, he felt himself gratified, he immediately concluded that the general impossibility of reply stamped them with the wondrous faculty of immediately interesting his welfare; of involving his most prominent interests, more than all the things put together, with which he had any possible means of becoming intimately acquainted. Thus they became necessary to his happiness; he believed he fell into a vacuum without them; he became the decided enemy to all those who endeavoured to lead him back to nature, which he had learned to despise; to consider only as an impotent mass, an heap of inert matter, not possessing any energy but what it received from causes exterior to itself; as a contemptible assemblage of fragile combinations, whose forms were continually subject to perish. In distinguishing nature from her mover, man has fallen into the same absurdity as when he separated his soul from his body; life from the living being; the faculty of thought from the thinking being: deceived on his own peculiar nature, having taken up an erroneous opinion upon the energy of his own organs, he has in like manner been deceived upon the organization of the universe; he has distinguished nature from herself; the life of nature from living nature; the action of nature from active nature. It was this soul of the world--this energy of nature--this principle of activity, which man first personified, then separated by abstraction; sometimes decorated with imaginary attributes; sometimes with qualities borrowed from his own peculiar essence. Such were the aerial materials of which man availed himself to construct the incomprehensible, immaterial substances, which have filled the world with disputes--which have divided man from his fellow--which to this day he has never been able to define, even to his own satisfaction. His own soul was the model. Deceived upon the nature of this, he never had any just ideas of the Divinity, who was, in his mind, nothing more than a copy exaggerated or disfigured to that degree, as to make him mistake the prototype upon which it had been originally formed. If, because man has distinguished himself from his own existence, it has been impossible for him ever to form to himself any true idea of his own nature; it is also because he has distinguished nature from herself, that both herself and her ways have been mistaken. Man has ceased to study nature, that he might, recur by thought to a substance which possesses nothing in common with her; this substance he has made the mover of nature, without which she would not be capable of any thing; to whom every thing that takes place in her system, must be attributed; the conduct of this being has appeared mysterious, has been held up as marvellous, because he seemed to be a continual contradiction: when if man had but recurred to the immutability of the laws of nature, to the invariable system she pursues, all would have appeared intelligible; every thing would have been reconciled; the apparent contrariety would have vanished. By thus taking a wrong view of things, wisdom and intelligence appeared to be opposed by confusion and disorder; goodness to be rendered nugatory by evil; while all is only just what it must inevitably be, under the given circumstances. In consequence of these erroneous opinions, in the place of applying himself to the study of nature, to discover the method of obtaining her favors, or to seek the means of throwing aside his misfortunes; in the room of consulting his experience; in lieu of labouring usefully to his own happiness; he has been only occupied with expecting these things by channels through which they do not flow; he has been disputing upon objects be never can understand, while he has totally neglected that which was within the compass of his own powers; which he might have rendered propitious to his views, by a more industrious application of his own talent; by a patient investigation, for the purpose of drawing at the fountain of truth, the limpid balsam that alone can heal the sorrows or his heart. Nothing could be well more prejudicial to his race, than this extravagant theory; which, as we shall prove, has become the source of innumerable evils. Man has been for thousands of years trembling before idols of his own creation--bowing down before them with the most servile homage--occupied with disarming their wrath--sedulously employed in propitiating their kindness, without ever advancing a single step on the road he so much desires to travel. He will perhaps continue the same course for centuries to come, unless by some unlooked for exertion on his part, he shall happen to discard the prejudices which blind him; to lay aside his enthusiasm for the marvellous; to quit his fondness for the enigmatical; rally round the standard of his reason: unless, taking experience for his guide, he march undauntedly forward under the banner of truth, and put to the rout that host of unintelligible jargon, under the cumbrous load of which he has lost sight of his own happiness; which has but too frequently prevented him from seeking the only means adequate either to satisfy his wants, or to ameliorate the evils which he is necessarily obliged to experience. Let us then re-conduct bewildered mortals to the altar of nature; let us endeavour to destroy that delusion which the ignorance of man, aided by a disordered imagination, has induced him to elevate to her throne; let us strive to dissipate that heavy mist which obscures to him the paths of truth; let us seek to banish from his mind those visionary ideas which prevent him from giving activity to his experience; let us teach him if possible not to seek out of nature herself, the causes of the phenomena he admires--to rest satisfied that she contains remedies for all his evils--that she has manifold benefits in store for those, who, rallying their industry, are willingly patiently to investigate her laws--that she rarely withholds her secrets from the researches of those who diligently labour to unravel them. Let us assure him that reason alone can render him happy; that reason is nothing more than the science of nature, applied to the conduct of man in society; that this reason teaches that every thing is necessary; that his pleasures as well as his sorrows are the effects of nature, who in all her works follows only laws which nothing can make her revoke; that his interest demands he should learn to support with equanimity of mind, all those evils which natural means do not enable him to put aside. In short, let us unceasingly repeat to him, it is in rendering his fellow creature happy, that he will himself arrive at a felicity he will in vain expect from others, when his own conduct refuses it to him. Nature is self-existent; she will always exist; she produces every thing; contains within herself the cause of every thing; her motion is a necessary consequence of her existence; without motion we could form no conception of nature; under this collective name we designate the assemblage of matter acting by virtue of its peculiar energies. Every thing proves to us, that it is not out of nature man ought to seek the Divinity. If we have only an incomplete knowledge of nature and her ways--if we have only superficial, imperfect ideas of matter, how shall we be able to flatter ourselves with understanding or having any certain notions of immateriality, of beings so much more fugitive, so much more difficult to compass, even by thought, than the material elements; so much more shy of access than either the constituent principles of bodies, their primitive properties, their various modes of acting, or their different manner of existing? If we cannot recur to first causes, let its content ourselves with second causes, with those effects which we can submit to experience, let us collect the facts with which we have an acquaintance; they will enable us to judge of what we do not know: let us at least confine ourselves to the feeble glimmerings of truth with which our senses furnish us, since we do not possess means whereby to acquire broader masses of light. Do not let us mistake for real sciences, those which have no other basis than our imagination; we shall find that such can at most be but visionary: let us cling close to nature which we see, which we feel, of which we experience the action; of which at least we understand the general laws. If we are ignorant of her detail, if we cannot fathom the secret principles she employs in her most complicated productions, we are at least certain she acts in a permanent, uniform, analogous, necessary manner. Let us then observe this nature; let us watch her movements; but never let us endeavour to quit the routine she prescribes for the beings of our species: if we do, we shall not only be obliged to return, but we shall also infallibly be punished with numberless errors, which will darken our mind, estrange us from reason; the necessary consequence will be countless sorrows, which we may otherwise avoid. Let us consider we are sensible parts of a whole, in which the forms are only produced to be destroyed; in which combinations are ushered into life, that they may again quit it, after having subsisted for a longer or a shorter season. Let us look upon nature as an immense elaboratory which contains every thing necessary for her action; who lacks nothing requisite for the production of all the phenomena she displays to our sight. Let us acknowledge her power to be inherent in her essence; amply commensurate to her eternal march; fully adequate to the happiness of all the beings she contains. Let us consider her as a whole, who can only maintain herself by what we call the discord of the elements; that she exists by the continual dissolution and re-union of her parts; that from this springs the universal harmony; that from this the general stability has its birth. Let us then re-establish omnipotent nature, so long mistaken by man, in her legitimate rights. Let us place her on that adamantine throne, which it is for the felicity of the human race she should occupy. Let us surround her with those ministers who can never deceive, who can never forfeit our confidence--_Justice and Practical Knowledge_. Let us listen to her eternal voice; she neither speaks ambiguously, nor in an unintelligible language; she may be easily comprehended by the people of all nations; because _Reason_ is her faithful interpreter. She offers nothing to our contemplation but immutable truths. Let us then for ever impose silence on that enthusiasm which leads us astray; let us put to the blush that imposture which would riot on our credulity; let us discard that gloomy superstition, which has drawn us aside from the only worship suitable to intelligent beings. Above all, never let us forget that the temple of happiness can only be reached through the groves of virtue, which surround it on every side; that the paths which lead to these beautiful walks can only be entered by the road of experience, the portals of which are alone opened to those who apply to them the key of truth: this key is of very simple structure, has no complicated intricacy of wards, and is easily formed on the anvil of social intercourse, merely by _not doing unto others that which you would not wish they should do unto you._ CHAP. VII. _Of Theism.--Of the System of Optimism.--Of final Causes_. Very few men have either the courage or the industry to examine opinions, which every one is in agreement to acknowledge; there is scarcely any one who ventures to doubt their truth, even when no solid arguments have been adduced in their support. The natural supineness of man readily receives them without examination upon the authority of others--communicates them to his successors in the season of their infancy; thus is transmitted from race to race, notions which once having obtained the sanction of time, are contemplated as clothed with a sacred character, although perhaps to an unprejudiced mind, who should be bent on searching into their foundation, no proofs will appear, that they ever were verified. It is thus with immateriality: it has passed current from father to son for many ages, without these having done any thing more than habitually consign to their brain those obscure ideas which were at first attached to it, which it is evident, from the admission even of its advocates, can never be removed, to admit others of a more enlightened nature. Indeed how can it possibly be, that light can be thrown upon an incomprehensible subject: each therefore modifies it after his own manner; each gives it that colouring that most harmonizes with his own peculiar existence; each contemplates it under that perspective which is the issue of his own particular vision: this from the nature of things cannot be the same in every individual: there must then of necessity be a great contrariety in the opinions resulting. It is thus also that each man forms to himself a God in particular, after his own peculiar temperament--according to his own natural dispositions: the individual circumstances under which he is found, the warmth of his imagination, the prejudices he has received, the mode in which he is at different times affected, have all their influence in the picture he forms. The contented, healthy man, does not see him with the same eyes as the man who is chagrined and sick; the man with a heated blood, who has an ardent imagination, or is subject to bile, does not pourtray him under the same traits as he who enjoys a more peaceable soul, who has a cooler fancy, who is of a more phlegmatic habit. This is not all; even the same individual does not view him in the same manner at different periods of his life: he undergoes all the variations of his machine--all the revolutions of his temperament--all those continual vicissitudes which his existence experiences. The idea of the Divinity is said to be innate; on the contrary, it is perpetually fluctuating in the mind of each individual; varies every moment in all the beings of the human species; so much so, that there are not two who admit precisely the same Deity; there is not a single one, who, under different circumstances, does not see him variously. Do not then let us be surprised at the variety of systems adopted by mankind on this subject; it ought not to astonish us that there is so little harmony existing among men upon a point of such consequence; it ought not to appear strange that so much contradiction should prevail in the various doctrines held forth; that they should have such little consistency, such slender connection with each other; that the professors should dispute continually upon the rectitude of the opinions adopted by each: they must necessarily wrangle upon that which each contemplates so variously--upon which there is hardly a single mortal who is constantly in accord with himself. All men are pretty well agreed upon those objects which they are enabled to submit to the test of experience; we do not hear any disputes upon the principles of geometry; those truths that are evident, that are easily demonstrable, never vary in our mind; we never doubt that the part is less than the whole; that two and two make four; that benevolence is an amiable quality; that equity is necessary to man in society. But we find nothing but perpetual controversy upon all those systems which have the Divinity for their object; they are full of incertitude; subject to continual variations: we do not see any harmony either in the principles of theology, or in the principles of its graduates. Even the proofs offered of his existence have been the subject of cavil; they have either been thought too feeble, have been brought forward against rule, or else have not been taken up with sufficient zeal to please the various reasoners who advocate the cause; the corollaries drawn from the premises laid down, are not the same in any two nations, scarcely in two individuals; the thinkers of all ages, in all countries, are perpetually in rivalry with each other; unceasingly quarrel upon all the points of religion; can never agree either upon their theological hypotheses, or upon the fundamental truths which should serve for their basis; even the attributes, the very qualities ascribed, are as warmly contested by some, as they are zealously defended by others. These never-ending disputes, these perpetual variations, ought, at least, to convince the unprejudiced, that the ideas of the Divinity have neither the generally-admitted evidence, nor the certitude which are attributed to them; on the contrary, these contrarieties in the opinions of the theologians, if submitted to the logic of the schools, might be fatal to the whole of them: according to that mode of reasoning, which at least has the sanction of our universities, all the probabilities in the world cannot acquire the force of a demonstration; a truth is not made evident but when constant experience, reiterated reflection, exhibits it always under the same point of view; the evidence of a proposition cannot be admitted unless it carries with it a substantive demonstration; from the constant relation which is made by well constituted senses, results that evidence, that certitude, which alone can produce full conviction: if the major proposition of a syllogism should be overturned by the minor, the whole falls to the ground. Cicero, who is no mean authority on such a subject, says expressly, "No reasoning can render that false, which experience has demonstrated as evident." Wolff, in his Ontology, says; "That which is repugnant in itself, cannot possibly be understood; that those things which are in themselves contradictions, must always be deficient of evidence." St. Thomas says, "Being, is all that which is not repugnant to existence." However it may be with these qualities, which the theologians assign to their immaterial beings, whether they may be irreconcileable, or whether they are totally incomprehensible, what can result to the human species in supposing them to have intelligence and views? Can an universal intelligence, whose care must be equally extended to every thing that exists, have more direct, more intimate relations with man, who only forms an insensible portion of the great whole? Can we seriously believe that it is to make joyful the insects, to gratify the ants of his garden, that the Monarch of the universe has constructed and embellished his habitation? Would our feeble eyes, therefore, become stronger--would our narrow views of things be enlarged--should we be better capacitated to understand his projects--could we with more certitude divine his plans, enter into his designs--would our exility of judgment be competent to measure his wisdom, to follow the eternal order he has established? Will those effects, which flow from his omnipotence, emanate from his providence--whether we estimate them as good, or whether we tax them as evil--whether we consider them beneficial, or view them as prejudicial--be less the necessary results of his wisdom, of his justice, of his eternal decrees? In this case can we reasonably suppose that a Being, so wise, so just, so intelligent, will derange his system, change his plan, for such weak beings as ourselves? Can we rationally believe we have the capacity to address worthy prayers, to make suitable requests, to point out proper modes of conduct to such a Being? Can we at all flatter ourselves that to please us, to gratify our discordant wishes, he will alter his immutable laws? Can we imagine that at our entreaty he will take from the beings who surround us their essences, their properties, their various modes of action? Have we any right to expect he will abrogate in our behalf the eternal laws of nature, that he will disturb her eternal march, arrest her ever-lasting course, which his wisdom has planned; which his goodness has conferred; which are, in fact, the admiration of mankind? Can we hope that in our favour fire will cease to burn, when we approximate it too closely; that fever shall not consume our habit, when contagion has penetrated our system; that gout shall not torment us, when an intemperate mode of life shall have amassed the humours that necessarily result from such conduct; that an edifice tumbling in ruins shall not crush us by its fall, when we are within the vortex of its action? Will our vain cries, our most fervent supplications, prevent a country from being unhappy, when it shall be devastated by an ambitious conqueror; when it shall be submitted to the capricious will of unfeeling tyrants, who bend it beneath the iron rod of their oppression? If this infinite intelligence gives a free course to those events which his wisdom has prepared; if nothing happens in this world but after his impenetrable designs; we ought silently to submit; we have in fact nothing to ask; we should be madmen to oppose our own weak intellect to such capacious wisdom; we should offer an insult to his prudence if we were desirous to regulate them. Man must not flatter himself that he is wiser than his God; that he is in a capacity to make him change his will; with having power to determine him to take other means than those which he has chosen to accomplish his decrees. An intelligent Divinity can only have taken those measures which embrace complete justice; can only have availed himself of those means which are best calculated to arrive at his end; if he was capable of changing them, he could neither be called wise, immutable, nor provident. If it was to be granted, that the Divinity did for a single instant suspend those laws which he himself has given, if he was to change any thing in his plan, it would be supposing he had not foreseen the motives of this suspension; that he had not calculated the causes of this change; if he did not make these motives enter into his plan, it would be saying he had not foreseen the causes that render them necessary: if he has foreseen them without making them part of his system, it would be arraigning the perfection of the whole. Thus in whatever manner these things are contemplated, under whatever point of view they are examined, it is evident that the prayers which man addresses to the Divinity, which are sanctioned by the different modes of worship, always suppose he is supplicating a being whose wisdom and providence are defective; in fact, that his own is more appropriate to his situation. To suppose he is capable of change in his conduct, is to bring his omniscience into question; to vitally attack his omnipotence; to arraign his goodness; at once to say, that he either is not willing or not competent to judge what would be most expedient for man; for whose sole advantage and pleasure they will, notwithstanding, insist he created the universe: such are the inconsistent doctrines of theology; such the imbecile efforts of metaphysics. It is, however, upon these notions, extravagant as they may appear, ill directed as they assuredly are, inconclusive as they must be acknowledged by unprejudiced minds, that are founded all the superstitions and many of the religions of the earth. It is by no means an uncommon sight, to see man upon his knees before an all-wise God, whose conduct he is endeavouring to regulate; whose decrees he wishes to avert; whose plan he is desirous to reform. These inconsistent objects he is occupied with gaining, by means equally repugnant to sound sense; equally injurious to the dignity of the Divinity: adopting his own sensations as the criterion of the feelings of the Deity; in some places he tries to win him to his interests by presents; sometimes we behold even the princes of the earth attempting to direct his views, by offering him splendid garments, upon which their own fatuity sets an inordinate value, merely because they have laboured at them themselves; some strive to disarm his justice by the most splendid pageantry; others by practices the most revolting to humanity; some think his immutability will yield to idle ceremonies; others to the most discordant prayers; it not unfrequently happens that to induce him to change in their favour his eternal decrees, those who have opposite interests to promote, each returns him thanks for that which the others consider as the greatest curse that can befal them. In short, man is almost every where prostrate before an omnipotent God, who, if we were to judge by the discrepancy of their requests, never has rendered his creatures such as they ought to be; who to accomplish his divine views has never taken the proper measures, who to fulfil his wisdom has continual need of the admonitions of man, conveyed either in the form of thanks or prayers. We see, then, that superstition is founded upon manifest contradictions, which man must always fall into when he mistakes the natural causes of things--when he shall attribute the good or evil which he experiences to an intelligent cause, distinguished from nature, of which he will never be competent to form to himself any certain ideas. Indeed, man will always be reduced, as we have so frequently repeated, to the necessity of clothing his gods with his own imbecile qualities: as he is himself a changeable being, whose intelligence is limited; who, placed in divers circumstances, appears to be frequently in contradiction with himself; although he thinks he honours his gods in giving them his own peculiar qualities, he in fact does nothing more than lend them his own inconstancy, cover them with his own weakness, invest them with his own vices. It is thus that in reasoning, he is unable to account for the necessity of things--that he imagines there is a confusion which his prayers will have a tendency to remove--that he thinks the evils of life more than commensurate with the good: he does not perceive that an undeviating system, by operating upon beings diversely organized, whose circumstances are different, whose modes of action are at variance, must of necessity sometimes appear to be inimical to the interests of the individual, while it embraces the general good of the whole. The theologian may subtilize, exaggerate, render as unintelligible as he pleases, the attributes with which he clothes his divinities, he will never be able to remove the contradictions which arise from the discordant qualities which he thus heaps together; neither will he be able to give man any other mode of judging than what arises from the exercise of his senses, such as they are actually found. He will never be able to furnish the idea of an immutable being, while he shall represent this being as capable of being irritated and appeased by the prayers of mortals. He will never delineate the features of omnipotence under the portrait of a being who cannot restrain the actions of his inferiors. He will never hold up a standard of justice, while he shall mingle it with mercy, however amiable the quality; or while he shall represent it as punishing those actions, which the perpetrators were under the necessity of committing. Neither will he be able, under any circumstances, to make a finite mind comprehend infinity; much less when he shall represent this infinity as bounded by finity itself. From this it will be obvious, that immaterial substances, such as are depicted by the theologians, can only be looked upon as the offspring of a metaphysical brain, unsupported by any of those proofs which are usually required to establish the propositions laid down among men; all the qualities which they ascribe to them, are only those which are suitable to material substances; all the abstract properties with which they invest them, are incomprehensible by material beings; the whole taken together, is one confused mass of contradictions: they have held forth to man, that it highly imported to his interests to know, to understand these substances; he has consequently set his intellect in action to discover some means of compassing an end, said to be so consequential to his welfare; he has, however, been unable to make any progress, because no clue could be offered to him of the road he must pursue; all was mere assertion unsupported by evidence; the whole was enveloped in complete darkness, into which the least scintillation of light could never penetrate. Notwithstanding, as soon as man believes himself greatly interested in knowing a thing, he labors to form to himself an idea of that, the knowledge of which he thinks so important; if insuperable obstacles impede his inquiries--if difficulties of a magnitude to alarm his industry intervene--if with immense labour he makes but little progress, then the slender success that attends his research, aided by a slothful disposition, while it wearies his diligence disposes him to credulity. It was thus, that a crafty ambitious Arab, subtle and knavish in his manners, insinuating in his address, profiting by this credulous inclination, made his countrymen adopt his own fanciful reveries as permanent truths, of which it was not permitted them for an instant to doubt; following up these opinions with enthusiasm, he stimulated them on to become conquerors; obliging the conquered to lend themselves to his system, he gave currency to a creed, invented solely for the purpose of enslaving mankind, which now spreads over immense regions inhabited by a numerous population, although like other systems it does not escape sectarianism, having above seventy branches. Thus ignorance, despair, sloth, the want of reflecting habits, place the human race in a state of dependance upon those who build up systems, while upon the objects which are the foundations, they have no one settled idea: once adopted, however, whenever these systems are brought into question, man either reasons in a very strange manner, or else is the dupe of very deceitful arguments: when they are agitated, and he finds it impossible to understand what is said concerning them when his mind cannot embrace the ambiguity of these doctrines, he imagines those who speak to him are better acquainted with the objects of their discourse than himself; these seizing the favourable opportunity, do not let it slip, they reiterate to him with Stentorian lungs, "That the most certain way is to agree with what they tell him; to allow himself to be guided by them;" in short, they persuade him to shut his eyes, that he may with greater perspicuity distinguish the road he is to travel: once arrived at this influence, they indelibly fix their lessons; irrevocably chain him to the oar; by holding up to his view the punishments intended for him by these imaginary beings, in case he refuses to accredit, in the most liberal manner, their marvellous inventions; this argument, although it only supposes the thing in question, serves to close his mouth--to put an end to his research; alarmed, confused, bewildered, he seems convinced by this victorious reasoning--attaches to it a sacredness that fills him with awe--blindly conceives that they have much clearer ideas of the subject than himself--fears to perceive the palpable contradictions of the doctrines announced to him, until, perhaps, some being, more subtle than those who have enslaved him, by labouring the point incessantly, attacking him on the weak side of his interest, arrives at throwing the absurdity of his system into light, and finally succeeds by inducing him to adopt that of another set of speculators. The uninformed man generally believes his priests have more senses than himself; he takes them for superior beings; for divine men. He only sees that which these priests inform him he must contemplate; to every thing else his eyes are completely hoodwinked; thus the authority of the priests frequently decides, without appeal, that which is useful perhaps only to the priesthood. When we shall be disposed to recur to the origin of things, we shall ever find that it has been man's imagination, guided by his ignorance, under the influence of fear, which gave birth to his gods; that enthusiasm or imposture have generally either embellished or disfigured them; that credulity readily adopted the fabulous accounts which interested duplicity promulgated respecting them; that these dispositions, sanctioned by time, became habitual. Tyrants finding their advantage in sustaining them, have usually established their power upon the blindness of mankind, and the superstitious fears with which it is always accompanied. Thus, under whatever point of view it is considered, it will always be found that _error cannot be useful to the human species._ Nevertheless, the happy enthusiast, when his soul is sensible of its enjoyments, when his softened imagination has occasion to paint to itself a seducing object, to which he can render thanks for the kindness he experiences, will ask, "Wherefore deprive me of a being that I see under the character of a sovereign, filled with wisdom, abounding in goodness? What comfort do I not find in figuring to myself a powerful, intelligent, indulgent monarch, of whom I am the favorite; who continually occupies himself with my welfare--unceasingly watches over my safety--who perpetually administers to my wants--who always consents that under him I shall command the whole of nature? I believe I behold him constantly showering his benefits on man; I see his Providence labouring for his advantage without relaxation; he covers the earth with verdure to delight him; he loads the trees with delicious fruits to gratify his palate; he fills the forests with animals suitable to his nourishment; he suspends over his head planets with innumerable stars, to enlighten him by day, to guide his erring steps by night; he extends around him the azure firmament to gladden his sight; he decorates the meadows with flowers to please his fancy; he causes crystal fountains to flow with limpid streams to slake his thirst; he makes rivulets meander through his lands to fructify the earth; he washes his residence with noble rivers, that yield him fish in abundance. Ah! suffer me to thank thee, Author of so many benefits: do not deprive me of my charming sensations. I shall not find my illusions so sweet, so consolatory in a severe destiny--in a rigid necessity--in a blind inanimate matter--in a nature destitute of intelligence, devoid of feeling." "Wherefore," will say the unfortunate, from whom his destiny has rigorously withheld those benefits which have been lavished on so many others; "wherefore ravish from me an error that is dear to me? Wherefore annihilate to me a being, whose consoling idea dries up the source of my tears--who serves to calm my sorrows? Wherefore deprive me of an object which I represent to myself as a compassionate, tender father; who reproves me in this world, but into whose arms I throw myself with confidence, when the whole of nature appears to have abandoned me? Supposing it no more than a chimera, the unhappy have occasion for it, to guarantee them against frightful despair: is it not cruel, is it not inhuman, to be desirous of plunging them into a vacuum, by seeking to undeceive them? Is it not an useful error, preferable to those truths which deprive the mind of every consolation, which do not hold forth any relief from its sorrows?" Thus will equally reason the Negro, the Mussulman, the Brachman, and others. We shall reply to these enthusiasts, no! truth can never render you unhappy; it is this which really consoles us; it is a concealed treasure, much superior to all the superstitions ever invented by fear; it can cheer the heart; give it courage to support the burthens of life; make us smile under adversity; elevate the soul; render it active; furnishes it with means to resist the attacks of fate; to combat misfortunes with success. This will shew clearly that the good and evil of life are distributed with an equal hand, without respect to man's peculiar comforts; that all beings are equally regarded in the universe; that every thing is submitted to necessary laws; that man has no right whatever to think himself a being peculiarly favoured--who is exempted from the common operations of the eternal routine; that it is folly to think he is the only being considered--one for whose enjoyment alone every thing is produced; an attention to facts will suffice to put an end to this delusion, however pleasant may be the indulgence of such a notion; the most superficial glance of the eye will be sufficient to undeceive us in the idea, that he is the _final cause_ of the creation--the constant object of the labours of nature, or of its Author. Let us seriously ask him, if he does not witness good constantly blended with evil? If he does not equally partake of them with the other beings in nature? To be obstinately bent to see only the evil, is as irrational as to be willing only to notice the good. Providence seems to be just as much occupied for one class of beings as for another. We see the calm succeed the storm; sickness give place to health; the blessings of peace follow the calamities of war; the earth in every country bring forth roots necessary for the nourishment of man, produce others suitable to his destruction. Each individual of the human species is a compound of good and bad qualities; all nations present a varied spectacle of virtues, growing up beside vices; that which gladdens one being, plunges another into sadness--no event takes place that does not give birth to advantages for some, to disadvantages for others. Insects find a safe retreat in the ruin of the palace, which crushes man in its fall; man by his death furnishes food for myriads of contemptible insects; animals are destroyed by thousands that he may increase his bulk; linger out for a season a feverish existence. We see beings engaged in perpetual hostility, each living at his neighbour's expence; the one banquetting upon that which causes the desolation of the other; some luxuriously growing into flesh upon the misery which wears others into skeletons--profiting by misfortunes, rioting upon disasters, which ultimately, reciprocally destroy them. The most deadly poisons spring up beside the most wholesome fruits the earth equally nourishes the fatal steel which terminates man's career, and the fruitful corn that prolongs his existence; the bane and its antidote are near neighbours, repose on the same bosom, ripen under the same sun, equally court the hand of the incautious stranger. The rivers which man believes flow for no other purpose than to irrigate his residence, sometimes swell their waters, overtop their banks, inundate his fields, overturn his dwelling, and sweep away the flock and shepherd. The ocean, which he vainly imagines was only collected together to facilitate his commerce supply him with fish, and wash his shores; often wrecks his ships, frequently bursts its boundaries, lays waste his lands, destroys the produce of his industry, and commits the most frightful ravages. The halcyon, delighted with the tempest, voluntarily mingles with the storm; rides contentedly upon the surge; rejoiced by the fearful howlings of the northern blast, plays with happy buoyancy upon the foaming billows, that have ruthlessly dashed in pieces the vessel of the unfortunate mariner; who, plunged into an abyss of misery, with tremulous emotion clings to the wreck; views with horrific despair, the premature destruction of his indulged hopes; sighs deeply at the thoughts of home; with aching heart, thinks of the cherished friends his streaming eyes will never more behold in an agony of soul dwells upon the faithful affection of an adored wife, who will never again repose her drooping head upon his manly bosom; grows wild with the appalling remembrance of beloved children, his wearied arms will never more encircle with parental fondness; then sinks for ever, the unhappy victim of circumstances that fill with glee the fluttering bird, who sees him yield to the overwhelming force of the infuriate waves. The conqueror displays his military skill, fights a sanguinary battle, puts his enemy to the rout, lays waste his country, slaughters thousands of his fellows, plunges whole districts into tears, fills the land with the moans of the fatherless, the wailings of the widow, in order that the crows may have a banquet--that ferocious beasts may gluttonously gorge themselves with human gore--that worms may riot in luxury. Thus when there is a question concerning an agent we see act so variously; whose motives seem sometimes to be advantageous, sometimes disadvantageous for the human race; at least each individual will judge after the peculiar mode in which he is himself affected; there will consequently be no fixed point, no general standard in the opinions men will form to themselves. Indeed our mode of judging will always be governed by our manner of seeing, by our way of feeling. This will depend upon our temperament, which itself springs out of our organization, and the peculiarity of the circumstances in which we are placed; these can never be the same for all the beings of our species. These individual modes of being affected, then, will always furnish the colours of the portrait which man may paint to himself of the Divinity; it must therefore be obvious they can never be determinate--can have no fixity--can never be reduced to any graduated scale; the inductions which they may draw from them, can never be either constant or uniform; each will always judge after himself, will never see any thing but himself or his own peculiar situation in the picture he delineates. This granted, the man who has a contented, sensible soul, with a lively imagination, will paint the Divinity under the most charming traits; he will believe that he sees in the whole of nature nothing but proofs of benevolence, evidence of goodness, because it will unceasingly cause him agreeable sensations. In his poetical extacy he will imagine he every where perceives the impression of a perfect intelligence--of an infinite wisdom--of a providence tenderly occupied with the welfare of man; self-love joining itself to these exalted qualities, will put the finishing hand to his persuasion, that the universe is made solely for the human race; he will strive in imagination to kiss with transport the hand from which he believes he receives so many benefits; touched with his kindness, gratified with the perfume of roses whose thorns he does not perceive, or which his extatic delirium prevents him from feeling, he will think he can never sufficiently acknowledge the necessary effects, which he will look upon as indubitable testimony of the divine predilection for man. Completely inebriated with these feelings, this enthusiast will not behold those sorrows, will not notice that confusion of which the universe is the theatre: or if it so happens, he cannot prevent himself from being a witness, he will be persuaded that in the views of an indulgent providence, these calamities are necessary to conduct man to a higher state of felicity; the reliance which he has in the Divinity, upon whom he imagines they depend, induces him to believe, that man only suffers for his good; that this being, who is fruitful in resources, will know how to make him reap advantage from the evils which he experiences in this world: his mind thus pre-occupied, from thence sees nothing that does not elicit his admiration call forth his gratitude; excite his confidence; even those effects which are the most natural, the most necessary, appear in his eyes miracles of benevolence; prodigies of goodness: he shuts his eyes to the disorders which could bring these amiable qualities into question: the most cruel calamities, the most afflicting events, the most heart-rending circumstances, cease to be disorders in his eyes, and do nothing, more than furnish him with new proofs of the divine perfections; he persuades himself that what appears defective or imperfect, is only so in appearance; he admires the wisdom, acknowledges the bounty of the Divinity, even in those effects which are the most terrible for his race--most suitable to discourage his species--most fraught with misery for his fellow. It is, without doubt, to this happy disposition of the human mind, in some beings of his order, that is to be ascribed the system of _Optimism_, by which enthusiasts, furnished with a romantic imagination, seem to have renounced the evidence of their senses: to find that even for man every thing is good in nature, where the good has constantly its concomitant evil, and where minds less prejudiced, less poetical, would judge that every thing is only that which it can be--that the good and the evil are equally necessary--that they have their source in the nature of things; moreover, in order to attribute any particular character to the events that take place, it would be needful to know the aim of the whole: now the whole cannot have an aim, because if it had a tendency, an aim, or end, it would no longer be the whole, seeing that that to which it tended would be a part not included. It will be asserted by some, that the evils which we behold in this world are only relative, merely apparent; that they prove nothing against the good: but does not man almost uniformly judge after his own mode of feeling; after his manner of co-existing with those causes by which he is encompassed; which constitute the order of nature with relation to himself; consequently, he ascribes wisdom and goodness to all that which affects him pleasantly, disorder to that state of things by which he is injured. Nevertheless every thing which we witness in the world conspires to prove to us, that whatever is, is necessary; that nothing is done by chance; that all the events, good or bad, whether for us or for beings of a different order, are brought about by causes acting after certain and determinate laws; that nothing can he a sufficient warrantry in us to clothe with any one of our human qualities, either nature or the motive-power which has been given to her. With respect to those who pretend that supreme wisdom will know how to draw the greatest benefits for us, even out of the bosom of those calamities which it is permitted we shall experience in this world; we shall ask them, if they are themselves the confidents of the Divinity; or upon what they found these assertions so flattering to their hopes? They will, without doubt, tell us they judge by analogy; that from the actual proofs of goodness and wisdom, they have a just right to conclude in favour of future bounty. Would it not be a fair reply to ask, If they reason by analogy, and man has not been rendered completely happy in this world, what analogy informs them he will be so in another? If, according to their own shewing, man is sometimes made the victim of evil in his present existence, in order that he may attain a greater good, does not analogical reasoning, which they say they adopt, clearly warrant a deduction, that the same afflictions, for the same purposes, will be equally proper, equally requisite in the world to come? Thus this language founds itself upon ruinous hypotheses, which have for their bases only a prejudiced imagination. It, in fact, signifies nothing more than that man once persuaded, without any evidence, of his future happiness, will not believe it possible he can be permitted to be unhappy: but might it not be inquired what testimony does he find, what substantive knowledge has he obtained of the peculiar good that results to the human species from those sterilities, from those famines, from those contagions, from those sanguinary conflicts, which cause so many millions of men to perish; which unceasingly depopulate the earth, and desolate the world we inhabit? Is there any one who has sufficient compass of comprehension to ascertain the advantages that result from the evils that besiege us on all sides? Do we not daily witness beings consecrated to misfortune, from the moment they quitted the womb of the parent who brought them into existence, until that which re-committed them to the earth, to sleep in peace with their fathers; who with great difficulty found time to respire; lived the constant sport of fortune; overwhelmed with affliction, immersed in grief, enduring the most cruel reverses? Who is to measure the precise quantity of misery required to derive a certain portion of good? Who is to say when the measure of evil will be full which it is necessary to suffer? The most enthusiastic Optimists, the _Theists_ themselves, the partizans of _Natural Religion_, as well as the most credulous and superstitious, are obliged to recur to the system of another life, to remedy the evils man is decreed to suffer in the present; but have they really any just foundation to suppose the next world will afford him a happiness denied him in this? If it is necessary to recur to a doctrine so little probable as that of a future existence, by what chain of reasoning do they establish their opinion, that when he shall no longer have organs, by the aid of which he is at present alone enabled either to enjoy or to suffer, he shall be able to compensate the evils he has endured; to enjoy a felicity, to partake of a pleasure this organic structure has refused him while on his pilgrimage through the land of his fathers. From this it will be seen, that the proofs of a sovereign intelligence, or of a magnified human quality drawn from the order, from the harmony, from the beauty of the universe, are never more than those which are derived from men who are organized and modified after a certain mode; or whose cheerful imagination is so constructed as to give birth to agreeable chimeras which they embellish according to their fancy: these illusions, however, must be frequently dissipated even in themselves, whenever their machine becomes deranged; when sorrows assail them, when misfortune corrodes their mind; the spectacle of nature, which under certain circumstances has appeared to them so delightful, so seducing, must then give place to disorder, must yield to confusion. A man of melancholy temperament, soured by misfortunes, made irritable by infirmities, cannot view nature and her author under the same perspective, as the healthy man of a sprightly humour, who is contented with every thing. Deprived of happiness, the fretful man can only find disorder, can see nothing but deformity, can find nothing but subjects to afflict himself with; he only contemplates the universe as the theatre of malice, as the stage for tyrants to execute their vengeance; he grows superstitious, he gives way to credulity, and not unfrequently becomes cruel, in order to serve a master whom he believes he has offended. In consequence of these ideas, which have their growth in an unhappy temperament, which originate in a peevish humour, which are the offspring of a disturbed imagination, the superstitious are constantly infected with terror, are the slaves to mistrust, the creatures of discontent, continually in a state of fearful alarm. Nature cannot have charms for them; her countless beauties pass by unheeded; they do not participate in her cheerful scenes; they look upon this world, so marvellous to the happy man, so good to the contented enthusiast, as a _valley of tears_, in which a vindictive fate has placed them only to expiate crimes committed either by themselves or by their fathers; they consider themselves as sent here for no other purpose than to be the sharers of calamity; the sport of a capricious fortune; that they are the children of sorrow, destined to undergo the severest trials, to the end that they may everlastingly arrive at a new existence, in which they shall be either happy or miserable, according to their conduct towards the ministers of a being who holds their destiny in his hands. These dismal notions have been the source of all the irrational systems that have ever prevailed; they have given birth to the most revolting practices, currency to the most absurd customs. History abounds with details of the most atrocious cruelties, under the imposing name of public worship; nothing has been considered either too fantastical or too flagitious by the votaries of superstition. Parents have immolated their children; lovers have sacrificed the objects of their affection; friends have destroyed each other: the most bloody disputes have been fomented; the most interminable animosities have been engendered, to gratify the whim of implacable priests, who by crafty inventions have obtained an influence over the people; to please blind zealots, who have never been able either to give fixity to their ideas, or to define their own feelings. Idle dreamers nourished with bile, intoxicated with theologic fury--atrabilarians, whose melancholic humour frequently disposes them to wickedness--visionaries, whose devious imaginations, heated with intemperate zeal, generally leads them to the extremes of fanaticism, working upon ignorance, whose usual bias is credulity, have incessantly disturbed the harmony of mankind, kindled the inextinguishable flame of discord, and in an almost uninterrupted succession, strewed the earth with the mangled carcasses of the multitudinous victims to mad-brained error, whose only crime has been their incapacity to dream according to the rules prescribed by these infuriate maniacs; although these have never been uniform--never assimilated in any two countries--never borne the same features in any two ages, nor even had the united concurrence of the persecuting contemporaries. It is then in the diversity of temperament, arising from variety of organization--in the contrariety of passions, springing out of this miscellany, modified by the most opposite circumstances, that must be sought the difference we find in the opinions of the theist, the optimist, the happy enthusiast, the zealot, the devotee, the superstitious of all denominations; they are all equally irrational--the dupes of their imagination--the blind children of error. What one contemplates under a favorable point of view, the other never looks upon but on the dark side; that which is the object of the most sedulous research to one set, is that which the others most seek to avoid: each insists he is right; no one offers the least shadow of substantive proof of what he asserts; each points out the great importance of his mission, yet cannot even agree with his colleagues in the embassy, either upon the nature of their instructions, or the means to be adopted. It is thus whenever man sets forth a false supposition, all the reasonings he makes on it are only a long tissue of errors, which entail on him an endless series of misfortunes; every time he renounces the evidence of his senses, it is impossible to calculate the bounds at which his imagination will stop; when he once quits the road of experience, when he travels out of nature, when he loses sight of his reason, to strike into the labyrinths of conjecture, it is difficult to ascertain where his folly will lead him--into what mischievous swamps this _ignis fatuus_ of the mind may beguile his wandering steps. It is certainly true, the ideas of the happy enthusiast will be less dangerous to himself, less baneful to others, than those of the atrabilarious fanatic, whose temperament may render him both cowardly and cruel; nevertheless the opinions of the one and of the other will not be less chimerical; the only difference will be, that of the first will produce agreeable, cheerful dreams; while that of the second will present the most appalling visions, terrific spectres, the fruit of a peevish transport of the brain: there will, however, never be more than a step between them all; the smallest revolution in the machine, a slight infirmity, an unforeseen affliction, suffices to change the course of the humours--to vitiate the temperament--to endanger the organization--to overturn the whole system of opinions of the happiest. As soon as the portrait is found disfigured, the beautiful order of things is overthrown relatively to himself; melancholy grapples him--pusillanimity benumbs his faculties--by degrees plunges, him into the rankest depths of gloomy superstition; he then degenerates into all those irregularities which are the dismal harvest of fanatic ignorance ploughed with credulity. Those ideas, which have no archetype but in the imagination of man, must necessarily take their complexion from his own character; must be clothed with his own passions; must constantly follow the revolutions of his machine; be lively or gloomy; favourable or prejudicial; friendly or inimical; sociable or savage; humane or cruel; according as he whose brain they inhabit shall himself be disposed; in fact, they can never be more than the shadow of the substance he himself interposes between the light and the ground on which they are thrown. A mortal plunged from a state of happiness into misery, whose health merges into sickness, whose joy is changed into affliction, cannot in these vicissitudes preserve the same ideas; these naturally depend every instant upon the variations, which physical sensations oblige his organs to undergo. It will not therefore appear strange that these opinions should be fluctuating, when they depend upon the state of the nervous fluid, upon the greater or less portion of igneous matter floating in the sanguinary vessels. _Theism_, or what is called _Natural Religion_, cannot have certain principles; those who profess it must necessarily be subject to vary in their opinions--to fluctuate in their conduct, which flows out of them. A system founded upon wisdom and intelligence, which can never contradict itself, when circumstances change will presently be converted into fanaticism; rapidly degenerate into superstition; such a system, successively meditated by enthusiasts of very distinct characters, must of necessity experience vicissitudes, and quickly depart from its primitive simplicity. The greater part of those philosophers who have been disposed to substitute theism for superstition, have not felt that it was formed to corrupt itself--to degenerate. Striking examples, however, prove this fatal truth. Theism is almost every where corrupted; it has by degrees given way to those superstitions, to those extravagant sects, to those prejudicial opinions with which the human species is degraded. As soon as man consents to acknowledge invisible powers out of nature, upon which his restless mind will never be able invariably to fix his ideas--which his imagination alone will be capable of painting to him; whenever he shall not dare to consult his reason relatively to those powers, it must necessarily be, that the first false step leads him astray, that his conduct as well as his opinions becomes in the long run perfectly absurd. Those are usually called Theists, who, undeceived upon the greater number of grosser errors to which the uninformed, the superstitiously ignorant, tend the most determined support, simply hold the notion of unknown agents endowed with intelligence, wisdom, power and goodness, in short, full of infinite perfections, whom they distinguish from nature, but whom they clothe after their own fashion; to whom they ascribe their own limited views; whom they make act according to their own absurd passions. The religion of Abraham appears to have originally been a kind of theism, imagined to reform the superstition of the Chaldeans; Moses modified it, and gave it the Judaical form. Socrates was a theist, who lost his life in his attack on polytheism; his disciple Aristocles, or Plato, as he was afterwards called from his large shoulders, embellished the theism of his master, with the mystical colours which he borrowed from the Egyptian and Chaldean priests, which he modified in his own poetical brain, and preserved a remnant of polytheism. The disciples of Plato, such as Proclus, Ammonius, Jamblicus. Plotinus, Longinus, Porphyrus, and others, dressed it up still more fantastically, added a great deal of superstitious mummery, blended it with magic, and other unintelligible doctrines. The first doctors of Christianity were Platonists, who combined the reformed Judaism with the philosophy taught in Academia. Mahomet, in combating the polytheism of his country, seems to have been desirous of restoring the primitive theism of Abraham, and his son Ishmael; yet this has now seventy-two sects. Thus it will be obvious, that theism has no fixed point, no standard, no common measure more than other systems: that it runs from one supposition to another, to find in what manner evil has crept into the world. Indeed it has been for this purpose, which perhaps after all will never be satisfactorily explained, that the doctrine of free-agency was introduced; that the fable of Prometheus and the box of Pandora was imagined; that the history of the Titanes was invented; notwithstanding, it must be evident that these things as well as all the other trappings of superstition, are not more difficult of comprehension than the immaterial substances of the theists; the mind who can admit that beings devoid of parts, destitute of organs, without bulk, can move matter, think like man, have the moral qualities of human nature, need not hesitate to allow that ceremonies, certain motions of the body, words, rites, temples, statues, can equally contain secret virtues; has no occasion to withhold its faith from the concealed powers of magic, theurgy, enchantments, charms, talismans, &c.; can shew no good reason why it should not accredit inspirations, dreams, visions, omens, soothsayers, metamorphoses, and all the host of occult sciences: when things so contradictory to the dictates of reason, so completely opposed to good sense are freely admitted, there can no longer be an thing which ought to possess the right to make credulity revolt; those who give sanction to the one, may without much hesitation believe whatever else is offered to their credence. It would be impossible to mark the precise point at which imagination ought to arrest itself--the exact boundary that should circumscribe belief--the true dose of folly that may be permitted them; or the degree of indulgence that can with safety be extended to those priests who are in the habit of teaching so variously, so contradictorily, what man ought to think on the subjects they handle so advantageously to themselves; who when it becomes a question what remuneration is due from mankind for their unwearied exertions in his favour, are, in spite of all their other differences, in the most perfect union; except perhaps when they come to the division of the spoil: in this, indeed, the apple of discord sometimes takes a tremendous roll. Thus it will be clear that there can be no substantive grounds for separating the theists from the most superstitious; that it becomes impossible to fix the line of demarcation, which divides them from the most credulous of men; to shew the land-marks by which they can be discriminated from those who reason with the least conclusive persuasion. If the theist refuses to follow up the fanatic in every step of his cullibility, he is at least more inconsequent than the last, who having admitted upon hearsay an inconsistent, whimsical doctrine, also adopts upon report the ridiculous, strange means which it furnishes him. The first sets forth with an absurd supposition, of which he rejects the necessary consequences; the other admits both the principle and the conclusion. There are no degrees in fiction any more than in truth. If we admit the superstition, we are bound to receive every thing which its ministers promulgate, as emanating from its principle. None of the reveries of superstition embrace any thing more incredible than immateriality; these reveries are only corollaries drawn with more or less subtilty from unintelligible subjects, by those who have an interest in supporting the system. The inductions which dreamers have made, by dint of meditating on impenetrable materials, are nothing more than ingenious conclusions, which have been drawn with wonderful accuracy, from unknown premises, that are modestly offered to the sanction of mankind by enthusiasts, who claim an unconditional assent, because they assure us no one of the human race is in a capacity either to see, feel, or comprehend the object of their contemplation. Does not this somewhat remind us of what Rabelais describes as the employment of Queen Whim's officers, in his fifth book and twenty-second chapter? Let us then acknowledge, that the man who is this most credulously superstitious, reasons in a more conclusive manner, or is at least more consistent in his credulity, than those, who, after having admitted a certain position of which they have no one idea, stop short all at once, and refuse to accredit that system of conduct which is the immediate, the necessary result of a radical and primitive error. As soon as they subscribe to a principle fatally opposed to reason, by what right do they dispute its consequences, however absurd they may be found? We cannot too often repeat, for the happiness of mankind, that the human mind, let it torture itself as much as it will, when it quits visible nature leads itself astray; for want of an intelligent guide it wanders in tracks that bewilder its powers, and is quickly obliged, to return into that with which it has at least some, acquaintance. If man mistakes nature and her energies, it is because he does not sufficiently study her--because he does not submit to the test of experience the phenomena he beholds; if he will obstinately deprive her of motion, he can no longer have any ideas of her. Does, he, however, elucidate his embarrassments, by submitting her action to the agency of a being of which he makes himself the model? Does he think he forms a god, when he assembles into one heterogeneous mass, his own discrepant qualities, magnified until his optics are no longer competent to recognize them, and then unites to them certain abstract properties of which he cannot form to himself any one conception? Does he, in fact, do more than collect together that which becomes, in consequence of its association, perfectly unintelligible? Yet, strange as it may appear, when he no longer understands himself--when his mind, lost in its own fictions, becomes inadequate to decipher the characters he has thus promiscuously assembled--when he has huddled together a heap of incomprehensible, abstract qualities, which he is obliged to acknowledge are the mere creatures of imagination, not within the reach of human intellect, he firmly persuades himself he has made a most accurate and beautiful portrait of the Divinity; he ostentatiously displays his picture, demands the eulogy of the spectator, and quarrels with all those who do not agree to adulate his creative powers, by adopting the inconceivable being he holds forth to their worship; in short, to question the existence of his extravaganza, rouses his most bitter reproaches; elicits his everlasting scorn; entails on the incredulous his eternal hatred. On the other hand, what could we expect from such a being, as they have supposed him to be? What could we consistently ask of him? How make an immaterial being, who has neither organs, space, point, or contact, understand that modification of matter called voice? Admit that this is the being who moves nature--who establishes her laws--who gives to beings their various essences--who endows them with their respective properties; if every thing that takes place is the fruit of his infinite providence--the proof of his profound wisdom, to what end shall we address our prayers to him? Shall we solicit him to acknowledge that the wisdom and providence with which we have clothed him, are in fact erroneous, by entreating him to alter in our favour his eternal laws? Shall we give him to understand our wisdom exceeds his own, by asking, him for our pleasure to change the properties of bodies--to annihilate his immutable decrees--to trace back the invariable course of things--to make beings act in opposition to the essences with which he has thought it right to invest them? Will he at our intercession prevent a body ponderous and hard by its nature, such as a stone, for example, from wounding, in its fall a sensitive being such as the human frame? Again, should we not, in fact, challenge impossibilities, if the discordant attributes brought into union by the theologians were correct; would not immutability oppose itself to omnipotence; mercy to the exercise of rigid justice; omniscience, to the changes that might be required in foreseen plans? In physics, in consequence of the general research after a perpetual motion, science has drawn forth the discovery, that by amalgamating metals of contrary properties, the contractile powers of one kind, under given circumstances which cause the dilation of the other, by their opposite tendencies neutralize the actual effects of each, taken separately, and thus produce an equality in the oscillations, that, neither possessed individually. It will perhaps, be insisted, that the infinite science of the Creator of all things, is acquainted with resources in the beings he has formed, which are concealed from imbecile mortals; that consequently without changing any thing, either in the laws of nature, or in the essence of things, he is competent to produce effects which surpass the comprehension of our feeble understanding; that these, effects will in no wise be contrary to that order which he himself has established in nature. Granted: but then I reply, _first_, that every thing which is conformable to the nature of things, can neither be called supernatural nor miraculous: many things are, unquestionably, above our comprehension; but then all that is operated in the world is natural--grows out of those immutable laws by which nature is regulated. In the _second_ place, it will be requisite to observe, that by the word miracle an effect is designed, of which, for want of understanding nature, she is believed incapable. In the _third_ place, it is worthy of remark, that the theologians, almost universally, insist that by miracle is meant not an extraordinary effort of nature, but an effect directly opposite to her laws, which nevertheless they equally challenge to have been prescribed by the Divinity. Buddaeus says, "a miracle is an operation by which the laws of nature, upon which depend the order and the preservation of the universe, are suspended." If, however, the Deity, in those phenomena that most excite our surprise, does nothing more than give play to springs unknown to mortals, there is, then, nothing in nature, which, in this sense, may not be looked upon as a miracle; because the cause by which a stone falls is as unknown to us, as that which makes our globe turn on its own axis. Thus, to explain the phenomena of nature by a miracle, is, in other words, to say we are ignorant of the actuating causes; to attribute them to the Divinity, is to agree we do not comprehend the resources of nature: it is little better than accrediting magic. To attribute to a sovereignly intelligent, immutable, provident, wise being, those miracles by which he derogates from his own laws, is at one blow to annihilate all these qualities: it is an inconsistency that would shame a child. It cannot be supposed that omnipotence has need of miracles to govern the universe, nor to convince his creatures, whose minds and hearts must be in his own hands. The last refuge of the theologian, when driven off all other ground, is the possibility of every thing he asserts, couched in the dogma, "that nothing is impossible to the Divinity." He makes this asseveration with a degree of self-complacency, with an air of triumph, that would almost persuade one he could not be mistaken; most assuredly, with those who dip no further than the surface, he carries complete conviction. But we must take leave to examine a little the nature of this proposition, and we do apprehend that a very slight degree of consideration will shew that it is untenable. In the _first_ place, as we have before observed, the possibility of a thing by no means proves its absolute existence: a thing may be extremely possible, and yet not be. _Secondly_, if this was once to become an admitted argument, there would be, in fact, an end of all morality and religion. The Bishop of Chester, Doctor John Wilkins, says, "would not such men be generally accounted out of their wits, who could please themselves by entertaining actual hopes of any thing, merely upon account of the possibility of it, or torment themselves with actual fears of all such evils as are possible? Is there any thing imaginable wore wild and extravagant amongst those in bedlam than this would be?" _Thirdly_, the impossibility would reasonably appear to be on the other side, so far from nothing being impossible, every thing that is erroneous would seem to be actually so; the Divinity could not possibly either love vice, cherish crime, be pleased with depravity, or commit wrong; this decidedly turns the argument against them; they must either admit the most monstrous of all suppositions, or retire from behind the shield with which they have imagined they rendered themselves invulnerable. To those who may be inclined to inquire, whether it would not be better that all things were operated by a good, wise, intelligent Being, than by a blind nature, in which not one consoling quality is found; by a fatal necessity always inexorable to human intreaty? It may be replied, _first_, that our interest does not decide the reality of things, and that when this should be even wore advantageous than it is pointed out, it would prove nothing. _Secondly_, that as we are obliged to admit some things are operated by nature, it is certainly on the side of probability that she performs the others; especially as her capabilities are more substantively proved by every age as it advances. _Thirdly_, that nature duly studied furnishes every thing necessary to render us as, happy as our essence admits. When, guided by experience, we shall consult her, with cultivated reason; she will discover to us our duties, that is to say, the indispensable means to which her eternal and necessary laws have attached our preservation, our own happiness, and that of society. It is decidedly in her bosom that we shall find wherewith to satisfy our physical wants; whatever is out of nature, can have no existence relatively to ourselves. Nature, then, is not a step-mother to us; we do not depend upon an inexorable destiny. Let us therefore endeavour to become more familiar with her resources; she will procure us a multitude of benefits when we shall pay her the attention she deserves: when we shall feel disposed to consult her, she will supply us with the requisites to alleviate both our physical and moral evils: she only punishes us with rigour, when, regardless of her admonitions, we plunge into excesses that disgrace us. Has the voluptuary any reason to complain of the sharp pains inflicted by the gout, when experience, if he had but attended to its counsels, has so often warned him, that the grossness of sensual indulgence must inevitably amass in his machine those humours which give birth to the agony he so acutely feels? Has the superstitious bigot any cause for repining at the misery of his uncertain ideas, when an attentive examination of that nature, he holds of such small account, would have convinced him that the idols under whom he trembles, are nothing but personifications of herself, disguised under some other name? It is evidently by incertitude, discord, blindness, delirium, she chastises those who refuse to, acknowledge the justice of her claims. In the mean time, it cannot be denied, that a pure Theism, or what is called Natural Religion, may not be preferable to superstition, in the same manner as reform has banished many of the abuses of those countries who have embraced it; but there is nothing short of an unlimited and inviolable liberty of thought, that can permanently assure the repose of the mind. The opinions of men are only dangerous when they are restrained, or when it is imagined necessary to make others think as we ourselves think. No opinions, not even those of superstition itself, would be dangerous, if the superstitious did not think themselves obliged to enforce their adoption, or had not the power to persecute those who refused. It is this prejudice, which, for the benefit of mankind, it is essential to annihilate; and if the thing be not achievable, then the next object which philosophy may reasonably propose to itself, will be to make the depositaries of power feel that they never ought to permit their subjects to commit evil for either superstitious or religious opinions. In this case, wars would be almost unheard of amongst men: instead of beholding the melancholy spectacle of man cutting the throat of his fellow man, because this cannot see with his eyes, we shall witness him essentially labouring to his own happiness by promoting that of his neighbour; cultivating the earth in peace; quietly bringing forth the productions of nature, instead of puzzling his brain with theological disputes, which can never be of the smallest advantage, except to the priests. It must be a self-evident truth, that an argument by men, upon that which is not accessible to man, _could only have been invented by knaves, who, like the professors of legerdemain, were determined to riot luxuriously on the ignorance and credulity of mankind._ CHAP. VIII. _Examination of the Advantages which result from Man's Notions on the Divinity.--Of their Influence upon Mortals;--upon Politics;--upon Science;--upon the Happiness of Nations, and that of Individuals._ The slender foundation of those ideas which men form to themselves of their gods, must have appeared obvious in what has preceded; the proofs which have been offered in support of the existence of immaterial substances, have been examined; the want of harmony that exists in the opinions upon this subject, which all concur in agreeing to be equally impossible to be known to the inhabitants of the earth, has been shewn; the incompatibility of the attributes with which, theology has clothed incorporeity, has been explained. It has been proved, that the idols which man sets up for adoration, have usually had their birth, either in the bosom of misfortune, when ignorance was at a loss to account for the calamities of the earth upon natural principles, or else have been the shapeless fruit of melancholy, working upon an alarmed mind, coupled with enthusiasm and an unbridled imagination. It has been pointed out how these prejudices, transmitted by tradition from father to son, grafting themselves upon infant minds, cultivated by education, nourished by fear, corroborated by habit, have been maintained by authority; perpetuated by example. In short, every thing must have distinctly evidenced to us, that the ideas of the gods, so generally diffused over the earth, has been little more than an universal delusion of the human race. It remains now to examine if this error has been useful. It needs little to prove error can never be advantageous for mankind; it is ever founded upon his ignorance, which is itself an acknowledged evil; it springs out of the blindness of his mind to acknowledged truths, and his want of experience, which it must be admitted are prejudicial to his interests: the more importance, therefore, he shall attach to these errors, the more fatal will be the consequences resulting from their adoption. Bacon, the illustrious sophist, who first brought philosophy out of the schools, had great reason when he said, "The worst of all things is deified error." Indeed, the mischiefs springing from superstition or religious errors, have been, and always will be, the most terrible in their consequences--the most extensive in their devastation. The more these errors are respected, the more play they give to the passions; the more value is attached to them, the more the mind is disturbed; the more they are insisted upon, the more irrational they render those, who are seized with the rage for proselytism; the more they are cherished, the greater influence they have on the whole conduct of our lives. Indeed, there can he but little likelihood that he who renounces his reason, in the thing which he considers as most essential to his happiness, will listen to it on any other occasion. The slightest reflection will afford ample proof to this sad truth: in those fatal notions which man has cherished on this subject, are to be traced the true sources of all those prejudices, the fountain of all those sorrows, to which he is the victim. Nevertheless, as we have elsewhere said, utility ought to be the only standard, the uniform scale, by which to form a judgment on either the opinions, the institutions, the systems, or the actions of intelligent beings; it is according to the measure of happiness which these things procure for us, that we ought either to cover them with our esteem, or expose them to our contempt. Whenever they are useless it is our duty to despise them; as soon as they become pernicious, it is imperative to reject them; reason imperiously prescribes that our detestation should be commensurate with the evils which they cause. Taking these principles for a land-mark, which are founded on our nature, which must appear incontestible to every reasonable being, with experience for a beacon, let us coolly examine the effects which these notions have produced on the earth. We have already, in more than one part of the work, given a glimpse of the doctrine of that morals, which having only for object the preservation of man, and his conduct in society, can have nothing, in common with imaginary systems: it has been shewn, that the essence of a sensitive, intelligent, rational being, properly meditated, would discover motives competent to moderate the fury of his passions--to induce him to resist his vicious propensities--to make him fly criminal habits--to invite him to render himself useful to those beings for whom his own necessities have a continual occasion; thus, to endear himself to his, fellow mortals, to become respectable in his own esteem. These motives will unquestionably be admitted to possess more solidity, to embrace greater, potency, to involve more truth, than those which are borrowed from systems that want stability; that assume more shapes than there are languages; that are not tangible to the tact of humanity; that must of necessity present a different perspective to all who shall view them through the medium of prejudice. From what has been advanced, it will be felt that education, which should make man in early life contract good habits, adopt favorable dispositions, fortified by a respect for public opinion, invigorated by ideas of decency, strengthened by wholesome laws, corroborated by the desire of meriting the friendship of others, stimulated by the fear of losing his own esteem, would be fully adequate to accustom him to a laudable conduct, amply sufficient to divert him from even those secret crimes, from which he is obliged to punish himself by remorse; which costs him the most incessant labour to keep concealed, by the dread of that shame, which must always follow their publicity. Experience demonstrates in the clearest manner, that the success of a first crime disposes him to commit a second; impunity leads on to the third, this to a lamentable sequel that frequently closes a wretched career with the most ignominious exhibition; thus the first delinquency is the commencement of a habit: there is much less distance from this to the hundredth, than from innocence to criminality: the man, however, who lends himself to a series of bad actions, under even the assurance of impunity, is most woefully deceived, because he cannot avoid castigating himself: moreover, he cannot know at what point of iniquity he shall stop. It has been shewn, that those punishments which society, for its own preservation, has the right to inflict on those who disturb its harmony, are more substantive, more efficacious, more salutary in their effects, than all the distant torments held forth by the priests; they intervene a more immediate obstacle to the stubborn propensities of those obdurate wretches, who, insensible to the charms of virtue, are deaf to the advantages that spring from its practice, than can be opposed by the denunciations, held forth in an hereafter existence, which he is at the same moment taught may be avoided by repentance, that shall only take place when the ability to commit further wrong has ceased. In short, one would be led to think it obvious to the slightest reflection, that politics, founded upon the nature of man, upon the principles of society, armed with equitable laws, vigilant over morals, faithful in rewarding virtue, constant in visiting crime, would be more suitable to clothe ethics with respectability, to throw a sacred mantle over moral goodness, to lend stability to public virtue, than any authority that can be derived from contested systems, the conduct of whose professors frequently disgrace the doctrines they lay down, which after all seldom do more than restrain those whose mildness of temperament effectually prevents them from running into excess; those who, already given to justice, require no coercion. On the other hand, we have endeavoured to prove that nothing can be more absurd, nothing actually more dangerous, than attributing human qualities to the Divinity which cannot but choose to find themselves in a perpetual contradiction. Plato has said "that virtue consists in resembling God." But how is man to resemble a being, who, it is acknowledged, is incomprehensible to mankind--who cannot be conceived by any of those means, by which he is alone capable of having perceptions? If this being, who is shewn to man under such various aspects, who is said to owe nothing to his creatures, is the author of all the good, as well as all the evil that takes place, how can he be the model for the conduct of the human race living together in society? At most he can only follow one side of the character, because among his fellows, he alone is reputed virtuous who does not deviate in his conduct from justice; who abstains from evil; who performs with punctuality those duties he owes to his fellows. If it be taken up, and insisted he is not the author of the evil, only of the good, I say very well: that is precisely what I wanted to know; you thereby acknowledge he is not the author of every thing; we are no longer at issue; you are inconclusive to your own premises, consequently ought not to demand an implicit reliance on what you choose to assert. But, replies the subtle theologian, that is not the affair; you must seek it in the creed I have set forth--in the religion of which I am a pillar. Very good: Is it then actually in the system of fanatics, that man should draw up his ideas of virtue? Is it in the doctrines which these codes hold forth, that he is to seek for a model? Alas! do they not pourtray their idols: under the most unwholesome colours; do they not represent them as following their caprice in every thing, who love or hate, who choose or reject, who approve or condemn according to their whim, who delight in carnage, who send discord amongst men, who act irrationally, who commit wantonness, who sport with their feeble subjects, who lay continual snares for them, who rigorously interdict the use of their reason? What, let us seriously ask, would become of morality, if men proposed to themselves such portraits for models! It was, however, for the most part, systems of this temper that nations adopted. At was in consequence of these principles that what has been called religion in most countries, was far removed from being favourable to morality; on the contrary, it often shook it to its foundation--frequently left no vestige of its existence. It divided man, instead of drawing closer the bonds of union; in the place of that mutual love, that reciprocity of succour, which ought ever to distinguish human society, it introduced hatred and persecution; it made them seize every opportunity to cut each other's throat for speculative opinions, equally irrational; it engendered the most violent heart-burnings--the most rancorous animosities--the most sovereign contempt. The slightest difference in their received opinions rendered them the most mortal enemies; separated their interests for ever; made them despise each other; and seek every means to render their existence miserable. For these theological conjectures, nations become opposed to nations; the sovereign frequently armed himself against his subjects; subjects waged war with their sovereign; citizens gave activity to the most sanguinary hostility against each other; parents detested their offspring; children plunged the pointed steel, the barbed arrow, into the bosoms of those who gave them existence; husbands and wives disunited, became the scourges of each other; relations forgetting the ties of consanguinity, tore each other to pieces, or else reciprocally consigned them to oblivion; all the bonds of society were rent asunder; the social compact was broken up; society committed suicide: whilst in the midst of this fearful wreck--regardless of the horrid shrieks called forth by this dreadful confusion--unmindful of the havock going forward on all sides--each pretended that he conformed to the views of his idol, detailed to him by his priest--fulminated by the oracles. Far from making himself any reproach, for the misery he spread abroad, each lauded his own individual conduct; gloried in the crimes he committed in support of his sacred cause. The same spirit of maniacal fury pervaded the rites, the ceremonies, the customs, which the worship, adopted by superstition, placed so much above all the social virtues. In one country, tender mothers delivered up their children to moisten with their innocent blood the altars of their idols; in another, the people assembled, performed the ceremony of consolation to their deities, for the outrages they committed against them, and finished by immolating to their anger human victims; in another, a frantic enthusiast lacerated his body, condemned himself for life to the most rigorous tortures, to appease the wrath of his gods. The Jupiter of the Pagans was a lascivious monster; the Moloch of the Phenicians was a cannibal; the savage idol of the Mexican requires thousands of mortals to bleed on his shrine, in order to satisfy his sanguinary appetite. Such are the models superstition holds out to the imitation of man; is it then surprising that the name of these despots became the signal for mad-brained enthusiasm to exercise its outrageous fury; the standard under which cowardice wreaked its cruelty; the watchword for the inhumanity of nations to muster their barbarous strength; a sound which spreads terror wherever its echo could reach; a continual pretext for the most barefaced breaches of public decorum; for the most shameless violation of the moral duties? It was the frightful character men gave of their gods, that banished kindness from their hearts--virtue from their conduct--felicity from their habitations--reason from their mind: almost every where it was some idol, who was disturbed by the mode in which unhappy mortals thought; this armed them with poignards against each other; made them stifle the cries of nature; rendered them barbarous to themselves; atrocious to their fellow creatures: in short, they became irrational, breathed forth vengeance, outraged humanity, every time that, instigated by the priest, they were inclined to imitate the gods of their idolatry, to display their zeal, to render themselves acceptable in their temples. It is not, then, in such systems, man ought to seek either for models of virtue, or rules of conduct suitable to live in society. He needs human morality, founded upon his own nature; built upon invariable experience; submitted to reason. The ethics of superstition will always he prejudicial to the earth; cruel masters cannot be well served, but by those who resemble them: what then becomes of the great advantages which have been imagined resulted to man, from the notions which have been unceasingly infused into him of his gods? We see that almost all nations acknowledge them; yet, to conform themselves to their views, they trampled under foot the clearest rights of nature--the most evident duties of humanity; they appeared to act as if it was only by madness the most incurable--by folly the most preposterous--by the most flagitious crimes, committed with an unsparing hand, that they hoped to draw down upon themselves the favor of heaven--the blessings of the sovereign intelligence they so much boast of serving with unabated zeal; with the most devotional fervor; with the most unlimited obedience. As soon, therefore, as the priests give them to understand their deities command the commission of crime, or whenever there is a question of their respective creeds, although they are wrapt in the most impenetrable obscurity, they make it a duty with themselves to unbridle their rancour--to give loose to the most furious passions; they mistake the clearest precepts of morality; they credulously believe the remission of their own sins will be the reward of their transgressions against their neighbour. Would it not be better to be an inhabitant of Soldania in Africa, where never yet form of worship entered, or the name of God resounded, than thus to pollute the land with superstitious castigation--with the enmity of priests against each other? Indeed, it is not generally in those revered mortals, spread over the earth to announce the oracles of the gods, that will be found the most sterling virtues. These men, who think themselves so enlightened, who call themselves the ministers of heaven, frequently preach nothing but hatred, discord, and fury in its name: the fear of the gods, far from having a salutary influence over their own morals, far from submitting them to a wholesome discipline, frequently do nothing more than increase their avarice, augment their ambition, inflate their pride, extend their covetousness, render them obstinately stubborn, and harden their hearts. We may see them unceasingly occupied in giving birth to the most lasting animosities, by their unintelligible disputes. We see them hostilely wrestling with the sovereign power, which they contend is subordinate to their own. We see them arm the chiefs of nations against the legitimate magistrates; distribute to the credulous multitude the most mortal weapons, to massacre each other in the prosecution of those futile controversies, which sacerdotal vanity clothes with the most interesting importance. Do these men, who advance the beauty of their theories, who menace the people with eternal vengeance, avail themselves of their own marvellous notions to moderate their pride--to abate their vanity--to lessen their cupidity--to restrain their turbulence--to bring their vindictive humours under control? Are they, even in those countries where their empire is established upon pillars of brass, fixed on adamantine rocks, decorated with the most curious efforts of human ingenuity--where the sacred mantle of public opinion shields them with impunity--where credulity, planted in the hot-bed of ignorance, strikes the roots of their authority into the very centre of the earth; are they, I would ask, the enemies to debauchery, the foes to intemperance, the haters of those excesses which they insist a severe God interdicts to his adorers? On the contrary, are they not seen to be emboldened in crime; intrepid in iniquity; committing the most shameful atrocities; giving free scope to their irregularities; indulging their hatred; glutting their vengeance; exercising the most savage cruelties on the miserable victims to their cowardly suspicion? In short, it may be safely advanced, without fear of contradiction, that scarcely any thing is more frequent, than that those men who announce these terrible creeds--who make men tremble under their yoke--who are unceasingly haranguing upon the eternity and dreadful nature of their punishments--who declare themselves the chosen ministers of their oracular laws--who make all the duties of morality centre in themselves; are those whom superstition least contributes to render virtuous; are men who possess the least milk of human kindness; the fewest feelings of tenderness; who are the most intolerant to their neighbours; the most indulgent to themselves; the most unsociable in their habits; the most licentious in their manners; the most unforgiving in their disposition. In contemplating their conduct, we should be tempted to accredit, that they were perfectly undeceived with respect to the idols whom they serve; that no one was less the dupe to those menaces which they so solemnly pronounce in their name, than themselves. In the hands of the priests of almost all countries, their divinities resembled the head of Medusa, which, without injuring him who shewed it, petrified all others. The priests are generally the most crafty of men, and many among them are substantively wicked. Does the idea of these avenging, these remunerating systems, impose upon some princes of the earth, who found their titles, who rest their power upon them; who avail themselves of their terrific power to intimidate their subjects; to make the people, often rendered unhappy by their caprice, hold them in reverence? Alas! the theological, the supernatural ideas, adopted by the pride of some sovereigns, have done nothing more than corrupt politics--than metamorphose, them into an abject tyranny. The ministers of these idols, always tyrants themselves, or the cherishers of despots, are unceasingly crying out to monarchs that they are the images of the Divinity. Do they not inform the credulous multitude that heaven is willing they should groan under the most cruel bondage; writhe under the most multifarious injustice; that to suffer is their inheritance; that their princes have the indubitable right to appropriate the goods, dispose of the persons, coerce the liberty; command the lives of their subjects? Do not some of these chiefs of nations, thus poisoned in the name of deified idols, imagine that every indulgence of their wayward humour is freely permitted to them? At once competitors, representatives, and rivals of the celestial powers, do they not, in some instances, exercise after their example the most arbitrary despotism? Do they not, in the intoxication into which sacerdotal flattery has plunged them, think that like their idols, they are not accountable to man for their actions, that they owe nothing to the rest of mortals, that they are bound by no bonds but their own unruly will, to their miserable subjects? Then it is evident that it is to theological notions, to the loose flattery of its ministers, that are to be ascribed the despotism, the tyrannical injustice, the corruption, the licentiousness of some princes, and the blindness of those people, to whom in heaven's name they interdict the love of liberty; who are forbid to labour effectually to their own happiness; to oppose themselves to violence, however flagrant; to exercise their natural rights, however conducive to their welfare. These intoxicated rulers, even while adoring their avenging gods, in the act of bending others to their worship, do not scruple to outrage them by their irregularities--by their want of moral virtue. What morality is this, but that of men who offer themselves as living images, as animated representatives of the Divinity? Are those monarchs, then, who are habitually unjust, who wrest without remorse the bread from the hands of a famished people, to administer to the profligacy of their insatiable courtiers--to pamper the luxury of the vile instruments of their enormities, atheists? Are, then, those ambitious conquerors, who not contented with oppressing their own slaves, carry desolation, spread misery, deal out death among the subjects of others, atheists? Do we not witness in some of those potentates who rule over nations by _divine right_, (a patent of power, which every usurper claims as his own) ambitious mortals, whose exterminating fury nothing can arrest; with hearts perfectly insensible to the sorrows of mankind; with minds without energy; with souls without virtue; who neglect their most evident duties, with which they do not even deign to become acquainted; powerful men, who insolently set themselves above the rules of equity; knaves who make a sport of honesty? Generally speaking, is there the least sincerity in the alliances which these rulers form among themselves? Do they ever last longer than for the season of their convenience? Do we find substantive virtues adorn those who most abjectly submit themselves to all the follies of superstition? Do they not tax each other as violators of property--as faithlessly aggrandizing themselves at the expence of their neighbour; in fact, do we not see them endeavouring to surprise, anxious to over-reach, ready to injure each other, without being arrested by the menaces of their creeds, or at all yielding to the calls of humanity? In general, they are too haughty to be humane; too inflated with ambition to be virtuous; they make a code for themselves, which they cannot help violating. Charles the Fifth used to say, "that being a warrior, it was impossible for him to have either conscience or religion." His general, the Marquis de Piscaire, observed, that "nothing was more difficult, than to serve at one and the same time, the god _Mars_ and _Jesus Christ_." Indeed, nothing can be more opposed to the true spirit of Christianity than the profession of arms; notwithstanding the Christian princes have the most numerous armies, and are in perpetual hostility with each other: perhaps the clergy themselves do not hold forth the most peaceable examples of the doctrine they teach; they sometimes wrangle for tithes, dispute for trifling enjoyments, quarrel for worldly opinion, with as much determined obstinacy, with as, much settled rancour, with as little charity, as could possibly inhabit the bosom of the most unenlightened Pagan, whose ignorance they despise--whose superstition they rank as the grossest effort of idolatrous debasement. It might almost admit of doubt whether they would be quite pleased to see the mild maxims of the Evangelists, the true Christian meekness, rigidly followed--whether they might not think the complete working of their own system would clash with their own immediate interests? Is it a demonstrable axiom that the ministers of the Christian faith do not think soldiers are beings extremely well calculated to give efficacy to their doctrine--solidity to their advantages--durability to their claims? Be this as it may, priests as well as monarchs have occasionally waged war for the most futile interests; impoverished a people from the anti-christian motives; wrested from each other with all the venom of furies, the bloody remnant of the nations they have laid waste; in fact, to judge by their conduct on certain occasions, it might have been a question if they were not disputing who should have the credit of making the greater number of miserable beings upon earth. At length, either wearied with their own fury, exhausted by their own devouring passions, or compelled by the stern hand of necessity, they have permitted suffering humanity to take breath; they have allowed the miseries concomitant on war, to cease for an instant their devastating havoc; they have made peace in the name of that God, whose decrees, as attested by themselves, they have been so wantonly outraging,--still ready, however, to violate their most solemn pledges, when the smallest interest could offer them a pretext. Thus it will be obvious, in what manner the idea of the Divinity operates on the priest, as well as upon those who are called his images; who insist they have no account to render but to him alone. Among these representatives of the Divine Majesty, it is with difficulty during thousands of years we find some few who have equity, sensibility, virtue, or even the most ordinary talent. History points out some of these vicegerents of the Deity, who in the exacerbation of their delirious rage, have insisted upon displacing him, by exalting themselves into gods; and exacting the most obsequious worship; who have inflicted the most cruel torments on those who have opposed themselves to their madness, and refused to acknowledge the Divinity of their persons. These men, whose licentiousness knew no limits, from the impunity which attended their actions, notwithstanding they had learned to despise public opinion, to set decency at defiance, to indulge in the most shameless vice: in spite of the power they possessed; of the homage they received; of the terror they inspired: although they had learned to counterfeit, with great effect, the whole catalogue of human virtues; found it impossible, even with the addition of their enormous wealth, wrenched from the necessities of laborious honesty, to counterfeit the animating blush, which modest merit brings forth, when eulogized by some happy being whose felicity he has occasioned, by following the great law of nature--which says, "_love thy neighbour as thyself_." On the contrary, we see them grow listless with satiety; disgusted with their own inordinate indulgences; obliged to recur to strange pleasures, to awaken their benumbed faculties; to run headlong into the most costly follies, in the fruitless attempt to keep up the activity of their souls, the spring of which they had for ever relaxed, by the profligacy of their enjoyment. History, although it describes a multitude of vicious rulers, whose irregular propensities were of the most mischievous consequence to the human race, nevertheless, shews us but few who have been atheists. The annals of nations, on the contrary, offer to our view great numbers of superstitious princes, governed by their mistresses, led by unworthy favorites, leagued with priests, who passed their lives plunged in luxury; indulging the most effeminate pursuits; following the most childish pleasures; pleased with ostentatious show; slaves even to the fashion of the vestments that covered them; but strangers to every manly virtue; insensible to the sorrows of their subjects; although uniformly good to their hungry courtiers, invariably kind to those cringing sycophants who surrounded their persons, and poisoned their ears with the most fulsome flattery: in short, superstitious persecutors, who, to render themselves acceptable to their priests, to expiate their own shameful irregularities, added to all their other vices that of tyrannizing over the mind, of fettering the conscience, of destroying their subjects for their opinions, when they were in hostility with their own received doctrines. Indeed, superstition in princes frequently allied itself with the most horrid crimes; they have almost all professed religion, although very few of them have had a just knowledge of morality--have practiced any useful substantive virtue. Superstitious notions, on the contrary, often serve to render them more blind, to augment their evil inclinations; to set them at a greater distance from moral goodness. They for the most part believe themselves assured of the favor of heaven; they think they faithfully serve their gods, that the anger of their divinities is appeased, if for a short season they shew themselves attached to futile customs--lend themselves to absurd rites--perform some ridiculous duties, which superstition imposes on them, with a view to obtain their assistance in the prosecution of its own plans, very rarely in strict unison with their immediate interest. Nero, the cruel, sanguinary, matricidal Nero, his hands yet reeking with the blood of that unfortunate being who had borne him in her womb, who had, with agonizing pains, given the monster to the world that plunged the dagger in her heart, was desirous to be initiated into the _Eleusinian Mysteries_. The odious Constantine himself, found in the priests, accomplices disposed to expiate his crimes. The infamous Philip, whose ungovernable ambition caused him to be called the daemon of the south, whilst he assassinated his wife and son, caused the throats of the wretched Batavians to be cut for their religious opinions. It is thus, that the priests of superstition sometimes persuade sovereigns they can atone for crimes, by committing others of a more atrocious kind--of an increased magnitude. It would be fair to conclude, from the conduct of so many princes, who had so much superstition, but so slender a portion of virtue, that the notion of their gods, far from being useful to them, only served to render them wore corrupt--to make them more abominable than they already were; that the idea of an avenging power, placed in the perspective of futurity, imposed but little restraint on the turbulence of deified tyrants, who were sufficiently powerful not to fear the reproaches of their subjects--who had the insensibility to be deaf to the censure of their fellows--who were gifted with an obduracy of soul, that prevented their having compassion for the miseries of mankind, from whom they fancied themselves so pre-eminently distinguished; which, in fact, they were, if crime can be allowed for the standard of distinction. Neither heaven nor earth furnishes a balsam of sufficient efficacy to heal the inveterate wounds of beings cankered to this degree: for such chronic diseases, there is "no balm in Gilead:" there is no curb sufficiently coercive to rein in the passions, to which superstition itself gives activity; which only makes them more unruly; renders them more inveterately rash. Whenever men flatter themselves with easily expiating their sins--when they soothe themselves with the consolitary idea of appeasing the anger of the gods by a show of earnestness, they then deliver themselves up, with the most unrestrained freedom, to the bent of their criminal pursuits. The most dissolute men are frequently in appearance extremely attached to superstition: it furnishes them with a means of compensating by ceremonies, that of which they are deficient in morals: it is much easier for them to adopt a faith, to believe in a doctrine, to conform themselves to certain rituals, than to renounce their habits, resist their passions, or relinquish the pursuit of that pleasure, which results to unprincipled minds from the prosecution of the most diabolical schemes. Under chiefs, depraved even by superstition, nations continued necessarily to be corrupted. The great conformed themselves to the vices of their masters; the example of these distinguished men, whom the uninformed erroneously believe to be happy, was followed by the people; courts thus became the sinks from whence issued the epidemic contagion of licentious indulgence. The law only held forth pictures of honesty; the dispensers of jurisprudence were partial, partook of the mania of the times, were labouring under the general disease; Justice suffered her balance to rust, occasionally removed her bandage, although she always wore it in the presence of the poor; genuine ideas of equity had grown into disuse; distinct notions of right and wrong became troublesome and unfashionable; education was neglected; it served only to produce prejudiced beings, grounded in ignorance--devotees, always ready to injure themselves--fanatics, eager to shew their zeal ever willing to annoy their unfortunate neighbours. Superstition, sustained by tyranny, ousted every other feeling, hoodwinked its destined victims, rendered those tractable whom it had the intention to despoil. Whoever doubts of these truisms, has only to turn over the pages of history, he will find myriads of evidence to much more than is here stated. Machiavel, in his _Political Discourses upon Titus Livius_, labours the point hard, to shew the utility of superstition to the Roman Republic: unfortunately, however, the examples he brings forward in its support, incontestibly prove that none but the senate profited by the infatuation of the people, who availed itself of their blindness more effectually to bend them to its yoke. Thus it was that nations, destitute of equitable laws, deficient in the administration of justice, submitted to irrational government, continued in slavery by the monarch, chained up in ignorance by the priest, for want of enlightened institutions, deprived of reasonable education, became corrupt, superstitious, and flagitious. The nature of man, the just interests of society, the real advantage of the sovereign, the true happiness of the people, once mistaken, were completely lost sight of; the morality of nature, founded upon the essence of man living in society, was equally unknown; lay buried under an enormous load of prejudice, that no common efforts were competent to remove. It was entirely forgotten that man has wants; that society was formed that he might, with greater security, facilitate the means of satisfying them; that government, to be legitimate, ought to have for object, the happiness--for end, the means of maintaining the indivisibility of the community; that consequently it ought to give activity to springs, full play to motives suitable to have a favorable influence over sensible beings. It was quite overlooked, that virtue faithfully rewarded, vice as regularly visited, had an elastic force, of which the public authorities could efficaciously avail themselves, to determine their citizens to blend their interests; to work out their own felicity, by labouring to the happiness of the body of which they were members. The social virtues were unknown, the _amor patriae_ became a chimera. Men thus associated, thus blinded by their superstitious bias, credulously believed their own immediate interest consisted in injuring each other; they were solely occupied with meriting the favor of those men, who fatally accreditted the doctrine of clerical flatterers, of silver-toned courtiers, which taught that they wore distinctly interested in injuring the whole. This is the mode in which the human heart has become perverted; here is the genuine source of moral evil; the hot-bed of that epidemical depravity, the cause of that hereditary corruption, the fountain of that inveterate delinquency, which pervaded the earth; rendering the abundance of nature nothing better than a curse; blasting the fairest prospects of humanity; degrading man below the beast of the forest; sinking his intellectual faculties in the most savage barbarity; rendering him the vile instrument of lawless ambition; the wretched tool by which the fetters of his species were firmly rivetted; obliging him to moisten his harvest with the bitter tears of the most abject slavery. For the purpose of remedying so many crying evils, grown insupportable, recourse was had to new superstitions. Notwithstanding this alone had produced them, it was still imagined, that the menaces of heaven would restrain passions which every thing conspired to rouse in all hearts; fatuity persuaded monarchs that ideal, metaphysical barriers, terrible fables, distant phantoms, would be competent to curb those inordinate desires, to rein in that impetuous propensity to crime, that rendered society incommodious to itself; credulity fancied that invisible powers would be more efficacious, than those visible motives that evidently invited mortals to the commission of mischief. Every thing was understood to be achieved, by occupying man's mind with gloomy chimeras, with vague, undefinable terrors, with avenging angels; and politics madly believed that its own interests grew out of the blind submission of its subjects, to the ministers of these delusive doctrines. What was the result? Nations had only sacerdotal laws; theological morality; accommodated to the interests of the hierarchy--suitable to the views of subtle priests: who substituted reveries for realities, opinions for reason, rank fallacies for sterling truths; who made ceremonies supply the place of virtue; a pious blindness supersede the necessity of an enlightened understanding; undermined the sacredness of oaths, and placed fanaticism on the altars of sociability. By a necessary consequence of that confidence which the people were compelled to give to the ministers of superstition, two distinct authorities were established in each state, who were substantially at variance, in continual hostility with each other. The priest fought the sovereign with the formidable weapon of opinion; it generally proved sufficiently powerful to shake the most established thrones. Thus, although the hierarchy was unceasingly admonishing the people to submit themselves to the divine authority of their sovereigns, because it was derived immediately from heaven, yet, whenever it so happened that the monarch did not repay their advocacy, by blindly yielding his own authority to the supervisance of the priests, these made no scruple of threatening him with loss of his temporalities; fulminated their anathemas, interdicted his dominions, and sometimes went the length of absolving his subjects from allegiance. Superstition, in general, only upholds despotism, that it may with greater certainty direct its blows against its enemies; it overthrows it whenever it is found to clash with its interests. The ministers of invisible powers preach up obedience to visible powers, only when they find these humbly devoted to themselves. Thus the sovereign was never at rest, but when abjectly cringing to his priest, he tractably received his lessons--lent himself to his frantic zeal--and piously enabled him to carry on the furious occupation of proselytism. These priests, always restless, full of ambition, burning with intolerance, frequently excited the sovereign to ravage his own states--encouraged him to tyranny: when, pursuing this sacerdotal mania, he feared to have outraged humanity, to have incurred the displeasure of heaven, he was quickly reconciled to himself, upon promise of undertaking some distant expedition, for the purpose of bringing some unfortunate nation within the pale of their own particular creed. When the two rival powers united themselves, morality gained nothing by the junction; the people were neither more happy, nor more virtuous; their morals, their welfare, their liberty, were equally overwhelmed by the combined powers. Thus, superstitious princes always felt interested in the maintenance of theological opinions, which were rendered flattering to their vanity, favorable to their power. Like the grateful perfumes of Arabia, that are used to cover the ill scent of a deadly poison, the priest lulled them into security by administering to their sensualities; these, in return, made common cause with him: fully persuaded that the superstition which they themselves adopted, must be the most wholesome for their subjects, most conducive to their interests, those who refused to receive the boon, thus gratuitously forced upon them, were treated as enemies, held up to public scorn, and rendered the victims of punishment. The most superstitious sovereign became, either politically or through piety, the executioner of one part of his slaves; he was taught to believe it a sacred duty to tyrannize over the mind--to overwhelm the refractory--to crush the enemy of his priest, under an idea that he was therefore hostile to his own authority. In cutting the throats of these unfortunate sceptics, he imagined he at once discharged his obligations to heaven, and gave security to his own power. He did, not perceive, that by immolating victims to his priest, he in fact strengthened the arm of his most formidable foe--the real enemy to his authority--the rival of his greatness--the least subjected of his subjects. But the prevalence of these false notions, with which both the minds of the sovereign and the people were prepossessed, it was found that every thing in society concurred to gratify the avidity, to bolster the pride, to glut the vengeance of the sacerdotal order: every where, it was to be observed, that the most turbulent, the most dangerous, the most useless men, were those who were the most amply rewarded. The strange spectacle presented itself, of beholding those who were born the bitterest enemies to sovereign power, cherished by its fostering care--honoured at its hands: the most rebellious subjects were looked upon as the pillars of the throne; the corrupters of the people were rendered the exclusive masters of education; the least laborious of the citizens were richly rewarded for their idleness--munificently remunerated for the most futile speculations--held in respect for their fatal discord--gorged with benefits for their inefficacious prayers: they swept off the fat of the land for their expiations, so destructive to morals, so calculated to give permanency to crime. Thus, by a strange fatuity, the viper that could, and frequently did, inflict the most deadly sting on the bosom of confiding credulity, was pampered and nourished by the unsuspecting hand of its destined victim. For thousands of years, nations as well as sovereigns were emulously despoiling themselves to enrich the expounders of superstition; to enable them to wallow in abundance: they loaded them with honors, decorated them with titles, invested them with privileges, granted them immunities, for no other purpose than to make them bad citizens, unruly subjects, mischievous beings, who revenged upon society the advantages they had received. What was the fruit that kings and people gathered from their imprudent kindness? What was the harvest these men yielded to their labour? Did princes really become more powerful; were nations rendered more happy; did they grow more flourishing; did men become more rational? No! Unquestionably, the sovereign lost the greater portion of his authority; he was the slave of his priest; and when he wished to preserve the remnant that was left, or to recover some part of what had been wrested from him, he was obliged to be continually wrestling against the men his own indulgence, his own weakness, had furnished with means, to set his authority at defiance: the riches of society were lavished to support the idleness, maintain the splendour, satiate the luxury of the most useless, the most arrogant, the most dangerous of its members. Did the morals of the people improve under the pastoral care of these guides, who were so liberally rewarded? Alas! the superstitious never knew them, their fanatic creed had usurped the place of every virtue; its ministers, satisfied with upholding the doctrines, with preserving the ceremonies so useful to their own interests, only invented fictitious crimes--multiplied painful penances--instituted absurd customs; to the end, that they might turn even the transgressions of their slaves to their own immediate profit. Every where they exercised a monopoly of expiatory indulgences; they made a lucrative traffic of pretended pardons from above; they established a tariff, according to which crime was no longer contraband, but freely admitted upon paying the customs. Those subjected to the heaviest impost, were always such as the hierarchy judged most inimical to its own stability; you might at a very easy rate obtain permission to attack the dignity of the sovereign, to undermine the temporal power, but it was enormously dear to be allowed to touch even the hem of the sacerdotal garments. Thus heresy, sacrilege, &c. were considered crimes of a much deeper dye, that fixed an indelible stain on the perpetrator, alarmed the mind of the priestly order, much more seriously than the most inveterate villainy, the most determined delinquency, which more immediately involved the true interests of society. Thence the ideas of the people were completely overturned, imaginary crimes terrified them, while real crimes had no effect upon their obdurate hearts. A man, whose opinions were at variance with the received doctrines, whose abstract systems did not harmonize with those of his priest, was more loathed than a corrupter of youth; more abhorred than an assassin; more hated than an oppressor; was held in greater contempt than a robber; was punished with greater rigor than the seducer of innocence. The acme of all wickedness, was to despise that which the priest was desirous should be looked upon as sacred. The celebrated Gordon says, "the most abominable of heresies, is to believe there is any other god than the clergy." The civil laws concurred to aid this confusion of ideas; they inflicted the most serious penalties, punished in the most atrocious manner those unknown crimes which imagination had magnified into the most flagitious actions; heretics, infidels, were brought to the stake, and publicly burnt with the utmost refinement of cruelty; the brain was tortured to find means of augmenting the sufferings of the unhappy victims to sacerdotal fury; whilst calumniators of innocence, adulterers, depredators of every description, knaves of all kinds, were at a trifling cost absolved from their past iniquity, and opened a new account of future delinquency. Under such instructors what could become of youth? The period of juvenility was shamefully sacrificed to superstition. Man, from his earliest infancy, was poisoned with unintelligible notions; fed with mysteries; crammed with fables; drenched with doctrines, in which he was compelled to acquiesce without being able to comprehend. His brain was disturbed with phantoms, alarmed with chimeras, rendered frantic by visions. His genius was cramped with puerile pursuits, mechanical devotions, sacred trifles. Superstition at length so fascinated the human mind, made such mere automata of mankind, that the people consented to address their gods in a dialect they did not themselves understand: women occupied their whole lives in singing Latin, without comprehending a word of the language; the people assisted very punctually, without being competent to explain any part of the worship, under an idea that it was taken kindly they should thus weary themselves; that it was sufficient to shew their persons in the sacred temples, which were beautifully decorated to fascinate their senses. Thus man wasted his most precious moments in absurd customs; spent his life in idle ceremonies; his bead was crowded with sophisms, his mind was loaded with errors; intoxicated with fanaticism, he was the declared enemy to reason; for ever prepossessed against truth, the energy of his soul was resisted by shackles too ponderous for its elasticity; the spring gave way, and he sunk into sloth and wretchedness: from this humiliating state he could never again soar; he could no longer become useful either to himself or to his associates: the importance he attached to his imaginary science, or rather the systematic ignorance which served for its basis, rendered it impossible for the most fertile soil to produce any thing but thorns; for the best proportioned tree to yield any thing but crabs. Does a superstitious, sacerdotal education, form intrepid citizens, intelligent fathers of families, kind husbands, just masters, faithful servants, loyal subjects, pacific associates? No! it either makes peevish enthusiasts or morose devotees, who are incommodious to themselves, vexatious to others: men without principle, who quickly pour the waters of Lethe over the terrors with which they have been disturbed; who know no moral obligation, who respect no virtue. Thus superstition, elevated above every thing else, held forth the fanatical dogma, "Better to obey the gods than men;" in consequence, man believed he must revolt against his prince, detach himself from his wife, detest his children, estrange himself from his friends, cut the throats of his fellow-citizens, every time they questioned the veracity of his faith: in short, a superstitious education, when it had its effect, only served to corrupt the juvenile heart--to fascinate youthful winds with its pageantry--to degrade the human soul--to make man mistake the duties he owed to himself, his obligations to society, his relations with the beings by whom he was surrounded. What advantages might not nations have reaped, if they would have employed on useful objects, those riches, which ignorance has so shamefully lavished on the expounders of superstition; which fatuity has bestowed on the most useless ceremonies? What might not have been the progress of genius, if it had enjoyed those ample remunerations, granted during so many ages to those priests who at all times opposed its elevation? What perfection might not science have attained, what height might not the arts have reached, if they had had the same succours that were held forth with a prodigal hand to enthusiasm and futility? Upon what rocks might not morality have been rested, what solid foundations might not politics have found, with what majestic grandeur might not truth have illumined the human horizon, if they had experienced the same fostering cares, the same animating countenance, the same public sanction, which accompanied imposture--which was showered upon fanaticism--which shielded falsehood from the rude attack of investigation--which gave impunity to its ministers? It is then obvious, that superstitious, theological notions, have not produced any of those solid advantages that have been held forth; if may be doubted whether they were not always, and ever will remain, contrary to healthy politics, opposed to sound morality; they frequently change sovereigns into restless, jealous, mischievous, divinities; they transform their subjects into envious, wicked slaves, who by idle pageantry, by futile ceremonies, by an exterior acquiescence in unintelligible opinions, imagine themselves amply compensated for the evil they commit against each other. Those who have never had the confidence to examine these sublimated opinions; those who feel persuaded that their duties spring out of these abstruse doctrines; those who are actually commanded to live in peace, to cherish each other, to lend mutual assistance, to abstain from evil, and to do good, presently lose sight of these sterile speculations, as soon as present interests, ungovernable passions, inveterate habits, or irresistible whims, hurry them away. Where are we to look for that equity, that union of interest, that peace, that concord, which these unsettled notions, supported by superstition, backed with the full force of authority, promise to the societies placed under their surveillance? Under the influence of corrupt courts, of time-serving priests, who, either impostors or fanatics, are never in harmony with each other, are only to be discerned vicious men, degraded by ignorance--enslaved by criminal habits--swayed by transient interests--guided by shameful pleasures--sunk in a vortex of dissipation; who do not even think of the Divinity. In despite of his theological ideas, the subtle courtier continues to weave his dark plots, labours to gratify his ambition, seeks to satisfy his avidity, to indulge his hatred, to wreak his vengeance, to give full swing to all the passions inherent to the perversity of his being: maugre that frightful hell, of which the idea alone makes her tremble, the woman of intrigue persists in her amours; continues her harlotry, revels in her adulteries. Notwithstanding their dissipated conduct, their dissolute manners, their entire want of moral principle, the greater part of those who swarm in courts, who crowd in cities, would recoil with horror, if the smallest doubt was exhibited of the truth of that creed which they outrage every moment, of their lives. What advantage, then, has resulted to the human race from those opinions, so universal, at the same time so barren? They seem rarely to have had any other kind of influence than to serve as a pretext for the most dangerous passions--as a mantle of security for the most criminal indulgences. Does not the superstitious despot, who would scruple to omit the least part of the ceremonies of his persuasion, on quitting the altars at which he has been sacrificing, on leaving the temple where they have been delivering the oracles and terrifying crime in the name of heaven, return to his vices, reiterate his injustice, increase his political crimes, augment his transgressions against society? Issuing from the sacred fane, their ears still ringing with the doctrines they have heard, the minister returns to his vexations, the courtier to his intrigues, the courtezan to her prostitution, the publican to his extortions, the merchant to his frauds, the trader to his tricks. Will it be pretended that those cowardly assassins, those dastardly robbers, those miserable criminals, whom evil institutions, the negligence of government, the laxity of morals, continually multiply; from whom the laws, in many instances too sanguinary, frequently wrest their existence; will it, I say, be pretended that the malefactors who regularly furnish the gibbets, who daily crowd the scaffolds, are either incredulous or atheists? No! Unquestionably, these unfortunate beings, these wretched outcasts, these children of turpitude, firmly believe in God; his name has been repeated to them from their infancy; they have been informed of the punishment destined for sinners: they have been habituated in early life to tremble at his judgments; nevertheless they have outraged society; their unruly passions, stronger than their fears, not having been coerced by visible motives, have not, for much more cogent reasons, been restrained by those which are invisible: distant, concealed punishments will never be competent to arrest those excesses which present and assured torments are incapable of preventing. In short, does not every day's experience furnish us the lesson, that men, persuaded that an all-seeing Deity views them, hears them, encompasses them, do not on that account arrest their progress when the furor exists, either for gratifying their licentious passions, or committing the most dishonest actions? The same individual who would fear the inspection of the meanest of his fellows, whom the presence of another man would prevent from committing a bad action, from delivering himself up to some scandalous vice, freely sins, cheerfully lends himself to crime, when he believes no eyes beholds him but those of his God. What purpose, then, does the conviction of the omniscience, the ubiquity, the omnipotence of the Divinity answer, if it imposes much less on the conduct of the human being, than the idea of being overlooked by the least of his fellow men? He who would not have the temerity to commit a crime, even in the presence of a child, will make no scruple of boldly committing it, when he shall have only his God for a witness. These facts, which are indubitable, ill serve for a reply to those who insist that the fear of God is more suitable to restrain the actions of men, than wholesome laws, with strict discipline. When man believes he has only his God to dread, he commonly permits nothing to interrupt his course. Those persons who do not in the least suspect the power of superstitious notions, who have the most perfect reliance on their efficacy, very rarely, however, employ them, when they are desirous to influence the conduct of those who are subordinate to them; when they are disposed to re-conduct them to the paths of reason. In the advice which a father gives to his vicious, criminal son, he rather represents to him the present temporal inconveniencies to which his conduct exposes him, than the danger he encounters in offending an avenging God; he points out to him the natural consequences of his irregularities, his health damaged by debaucheries; the loss of his reputation by criminal pursuits; the ruin of his fortune by gambling; the punishments of society, &c. Thus the DEICOLIST himself, on the most important occasions of life, reckons more stedfastly upon the force of natural motives, than upon those supernatural inducements furnished by superstition: the same man, who vilifies the motives that an atheist can have to do good and abstain from evil, makes use of them himself on this occasion, because he feels they are the most substantive he can employ. Almost all men believe in an avenging and remunerating God; yet nearly in all countries the number of the wicked bears a larger proportion than that of the good. If the true cause of this general corruption be traced, it will be more frequently found in the superstitious notions inculcated by theology, than in those imaginary sources which the various superstitions have invented to account for human depravity. Man is always corrupt wherever he is badly governed; wherever superstition deifies the sovereign, his government becomes unworthy: this perverted and assured of impunity, necessarily render his people miserable; misery, when it exceeds the point of endurance, as necessarily renders them wicked. When the people are submitted to irrational masters, they are never guided by reason. If they are blinded by priests, who are either deceived or impostors, their reason become useless. Tyrants, when combined with priests, have generally been successful in their efforts to prevent nations from becoming enlightened--from seeking after truth--from ameliorating their condition--from perfectioning their morals; and never has the union smiled upon liberty: the people, unable to resist the mighty torrent produced by the confluence of two such rivers, have usually sunk into the most abject slavery. It is only by enlightening the mass of mankind, by demonstrating truth, that we can promise to render him better; that we can indulge the hope of making him happy. It is by causing both sovereigns and subjects to feel their true relations with each other, that their actual interests will be improved; that their politics will be perfectioned: it will then be felt and accredited, that the true art of governing mortals, the sure method of gaining their affections, is not the art of blinding them, of deceiving them, or of tyrannizing over them. Let us, then, good humouredly consult reason, avail ourselves of experience, interrogate nature; we shall, perhaps, find what is requisite to be done, in order to labour efficaciously to the happiness of the human race. We shall most assuredly perceive, that error is the true source of the evils which embitter our existence; that it is in cheering the hearts, in dissipating those vain phantoms which alarm the ignorant, in laying the axe to the root of superstition, that we can peaceably seek after truth; that it is only in the conflagration of this baneful tree, we can ever expect to light the torch which shall illumine the road to felicity. Then let man study nature; observe her immutable laws; let him dive into his own essence; let him cure himself of his prejudices: these means will conduct him by a gentle declivity to that virtue, without which he must feel he can never be permanently happy in the world he inhabits. If man could once cease to fear, from that moment he would be truly happy. Superstition is a domestic enemy which he always carries within himself: those who will seriously occupy themselves with this formidable phantom, must be content to endure continual agonies, to live in perpetual inquietude: if they will neglect the objects most worthy of interesting them, to run after chimeras, they will commonly pass a melancholy existence, in groaning, in praying, in sacrificing, in expiating faults, either real or imaginary, which they believe calculated to offend their priests; frequently in their irrational fury they will torment themselves, they will make it a duty to inflict on their own persons the most barbarous punishments: but society will reap no benefit from these mournful opinions--from the tortures of these pious irrationals; because their mind, completely absorbed by their gloomy reveries, their time dissipated in the most absurd ceremonies, will leave them no opportunity of being really advantageous to the community of which they are members. The most superstitions men are commonly misanthropists, quite useless to the world, and very injurious to themselves: if ever they display energy, it is only to devise means by which they can increase their own affliction; to discover new methods to torture their mind; to find out the most efficacious means to deprive themselves of those objects which their nature renders desirable. It is common in the world to behold penitents, who are intimately persuaded that by dint of barbarous inflictions on their own persons, by means of a lingering suicide, they shall merit the favor of heaven. Madmen of this species are to be seen every where; superstition has in all ages, in all places, given birth to the most cruel extravagances, to the most injurious follies. If, indeed, these irrational devotees only injure themselves, and deprive society of that assistance which they owe to it, they without doubt do less mischief than those turbulent, zealous fanatics, who, infuriated with their superstitious ideas, believe themselves bound to disturb the world, to commit actual crimes, to sustain the cause of what they denominate the true faith. It not unfrequently happens that in outraging morality, the zealous enthusiast supposes he renders himself agreeable to his God. He makes perfection consist either in tormenting himself, or in rending asunder, in favour of his fanatical ideas, the most sacred ties that connect mortals with each other. Let us, then, acknowledge, that the notions of superstition, are not more suitable to procure the welfare, to establish the content, to confirm the peace of individuals, than they are of the society of which they are members. If some peaceable, honest, inconclusive enthusiasts, find either comfort or consolation in them, there are millions who, more conclusive to their principles, are unhappy during their whole life; who are perpetually assailed by the most melancholy ideas; to whom their disordered imagination shews these notions, as every instant involving them in the most cruel punishments. Under such formidable systems, a tranquil, sociable devotee, is a man who has not reasoned upon them. In short, every thing serves to prove, that superstitious opinions have the strongest influence over men; that they torment them unceasingly, divide them from their dearest connections, inflame their minds, envenom their passions, render them miserable without ever restraining their actions, except when their own temperament proves too feeble to propel them forward: all this holds forth one great lesson, that _superstition is incompatible with liberty, and can never furnish good citizens_. CHAP. IX. _Theological Notions cannot be the Basis of Morality.--Comparison between Theological Ethics and Natural Morality.--Theology prejudicial to the human Mind._ Felicity is the great end of human existence; a supposition therefore, to be actually useful to man, should render him happy. By what parity of reasoning can he flatter himself that an hypothesis, which does not facilitate his happiness in his present duration, may one day conduct him to permanent bliss? If mortals only sigh, tremble, and groan in this world, of which they have a knowledge, upon what foundation is it they expect a more felicitous existence hereafter, in a world of which they know nothing? If man is every where the child of calamity, the victim to necessary evil, the unhappy sufferer under an immutable system, ought he reasonably to indulge a greater confidence in future happiness? On the other hand, a supposition which should throw light on every thing, which should supply an easy solution to all the questions to which it could be applied, when even it should not be competent to demonstrate the certitude, would probably be true: but that system which should only obscure the clearest notions, render more insoluble the problems desired to be resolved by its means, would most assuredly be looked upon as fallacious; as either useless or dangerous. To be convinced of this principle, let us examine, without prejudice, if the theological ideas of the Divinity have ever given the solution to any one difficulty. Has the human understanding progressed a single step by the assistance of this metaphysical science? Has it not, on the contrary, had a tendency to obscure the wore certain science of morals? Has it not, in many instances, rendered the most essential duties of our nature problematical? Has it not in a great measure confounded the notions of virtue and vice, of justice and injustice? Indeed, what is virtue, in the eyes of the generality of theologians? They will instantly reply, "that which is conformable to the will of the incomprehensible beings who govern nature." But way it not be asked, without offence to the individual opinions of any one, what are these beings, of whom they are unceasingly talking, without having the capacity to comprehend them? How can we acquire a knowledge of their will? They will forthwith reply, with a confidence that is meant to strike conviction on uninformed minds, by recounting what they are not, without even attempting to inform us what they are. If they do undertake to furnish an idea of them, they will heap upon their hypothetical beings a multitude, of contradictory, incompatible attributes, with which they will form a whole, at once impossible for the human mind to conceive or else they will refer to oracles, by which they insist their intentions have been promulgated to mankind. If, however, they are requested to prove the authenticity of these oracles, which are at such variance with each other, they will refer to miracles in support of what they assert: these miracles, independent of the difficulty there must exist to repose in them our faith, when, as we have seen, they are admitted even by the theologians themselves, to be contrary to the intelligence, the immutability, to the omnipotency of their immaterial substances, are, moreover, warmly disputed by each particular sect, as being impositions, practised by the others for their own individual advantage. As a last resource, then, it will be necessary to accredit the integrity, to rely on the veracity, to rest on the good faith of the priests, who announce these oracles. On this again, there arises two almost insuperable difficulties, in the _first_ place, who shall assure us of their actual mission? are we quite certain none of them may be mistaken? how shall we be justified in giving credence to their powers? are they not these priests themselves, who announce to us that they are the infallible interpreters of a being whom they acknowledge they do not at all know? In the _second_ place, which set of these oracular developements are we to adopt? For to give currency to the whole, would, in point of fact, annihilate them entirely; seeing, that no two of them run in unison with each other. This granted, the priests, that is to say, men extremely suspicious, but little in harmony with each other, will be the arbiters of morality; they will decide (according to their own uncertain knowledge, after their various passions, in conformity to the different perspectives under which they view these things,) on the whole system of ethics; upon which absolutely rests the repose of the world--the sterling happiness of each individual. Would this be a desirable state? would it be that from which humanity has the best founded prospect of that felicity, which is the desired object of his research? Again; do we not see that either enthusiasm or interest is the only standard of their decisions? that their morals are as variable as their caprice? those who listen to them, very rarely discover to what line they will adhere. In their various writings, we have evidence of the most bitter animosities; we find continual contradictions; endless disputes upon what they themselves acknowledge to be the most essential points; upon those premises, in the substantive proof of which their whole system depends; the very beings they depict as their source of their various creeds, are pourtrayed as variable as themselves; as frequently changing their plans as these are their arguments. What results from all this to a rational man? It will be natural for him to conclude, that neither inconstant gods, nor vacillating priests, whose opinions are more fluctuating than the seasons, can be the proper models of a moral system, which should be as regular, as determinate, as invariable as the laws of nature herself; as that eternal march, from which we never see her derogate. No! Arbitrary, inconclusive, contradictory notions, abstract, unintelligible speculations, can never be the sterling bases of the ethical science! They must be evident, demonstrable principles, deduced from the nature of man, founded upon his wants, inspired by rational education, rendered familiar by habit, made sacred by wholesome laws, that will flash conviction on our mind, render systems useful to mankind, make virtue dear to us--that will people nations with honest men--fill up the ranks with faithful subjects--crowd them with intrepid citizens. Incomprehensible beings can present nothing to our imagination, save vague ideas, which will never embrace any common point of union amongst those who shall contemplate them. If these beings are painted as terrible, the mind is led astray; if changeable, it always precludes us from ascertaining the road we ought to pursue. The menaces held forth by those, who, in despite of their own assertions, say they are acquainted with the views, with the determination of these beings, will seldom do more than render virtue unpleasant; fear alone will then make us practise with reluctance, that which reason, which our own immediate interest, ought to make us execute with pleasure. The inculcation of terrible ideas will only serve to disturb honest persons, without in the least arresting the progress of the profligate, or diverting the course of the flagitious: the greater number of men, when they shall be disposed to sin, to deliver themselves up to vicious propensities, will cease to contemplate these terrific ideas, will only behold a merciful God, who is filled with goodness, who will pardon the transgressions of their weakness. Man never views things but on that side which is most conformable to his desires. The goodness of God cheers the wicked; his rigour disturbs the honest man. Thus, the qualities with which theology clothes its immaterial substances, themselves turn out disadvantageous to sound morality. It is upon this infinite goodness that the most corrupt men will have the audacity to reckon, when they are either hurried along by crime, or given up to habitual vice. If, then, they are reminded of their criminal courses, they reply, "God is good, his mercy is infinite, his clemency boundless:" thus it may be said that religion itself is pressed into the service of vice, by the children of turpitude. Superstition, above all, rather abets crime than represses it, by holding forth to mortals that by the assistance of certain ceremonies, the performance of certain rites, the repetition of certain prayers, aided by the payment of certain sums of money, they can appease the anger of their gods, assuage the wrath of heaven, wash out the stains of their sins, and be received with open arms into the happy number of the elect--be placed in the blissful abodes of eternity. In short, do not the priests of superstition universally affirm, that they possess infallible secrets, for reconciling the most perverse to the pale of their respective systems? It must be concluded from this, that however these systems are viewed, in whatever manner they are considered, they cannot serve for the basis of morality, which in its very nature is formed to be invariably the same. Irascible systems are only useful to those who find an interest in terrifying the ignorance of mankind, that they may advantage themselves of his fears--profit by his expiations. The nobles of the earth, who are frequently men not gifted with the most exemplary morals--who do not on all occasions exhibit the most perfect specimens of self-denial--who would not, perhaps, be at all times held up as mirrors of virtue, will not see these formidable systems, when they shall be inclined to listen to their passions; to lend themselves to the indulgence of their unruly desires: they will, however, feel no repugnance to make use of them to frighten others, to the end that they may preserve unimpaired their superiority; that they may keep entire their prerogatives; that they may more effectually bind them to servitude. Like the rest of mankind, they will see their God under the traits of his benevolence; they will always believe him indulgent to those outrages they may commit against their fellows, provided they shew due respect for him themselves: superstition will furnish them with easy means to turn aside his Wrath; its ministers seldom omit a profitable opportunity, to expiate the crimes of human nature. Morality is not made to follow the caprices of the imagination, the fury of the passions, the fluctuating interests of men: it ought to possess stability; to be at all times the same, for all the individuals of the human race; it ought neither to vary in one country, nor in one race from another: neither superstition nor religion, has a privilege to make its immutability subservient to the changeable laws of their systems. There is but one method to give ethics this solidity; it has been more than once pointed out in the course of this work: it is only to be founded upon the nature of man, bottomed upon his duties, rested upon the relations subsisting between intelligent beings, who are in love, with their happiness, who are occupied with their own preservation, who live together in society that they may With greater facility ascertain these ends. In short we must take for the basis of morality the necessity of things. In weighing these principles, which are self evident, confirmed by constant experience, approved by reason, drawn from nature herself, we shall have an undeviating tone of conduct; a sure system of morality, that will never be in contradiction with itself. Man will have no occasion to recur to theological speculations to regulate his conduct in the visible world. We shall then be capacitated to reply to those who pretend that without them there can be no morality. If we reflect upon the long tissue of errors, upon the immense chain of wanderings, that flow from the obscure notions these various systems hold forth--of the sinister ideas which superstition in all countries inculcates; it would be much more conformable to truth to say, that all sound ethics, all morality, either useful to individuals or beneficial to society, is totally incompatible with systems which never represent their gods but under the form of absolute monarchs, whose good qualities are continually eclipsed by dangerous caprices. Consequently, we shall be obliged to acknowledge, that to establish morality upon a steady foundation, we must necessarily commence by at least quitting those chimerical systems upon which the ruinous edifice of supernatural morality has hitherto been constructed, which during such a number of ages, has been so uselessly preached up to a great portion of the inhabitants of the earth. Whatever may have been the cause that placed man in his present abode, that gave him the faculties he possesses; whether the human species be considered as the work of nature, or whether it be supposed that he owes his existence to an intelligent being, distinguished from nature; the existence of man, such as he is, is a fact; we behold in him a being who thinks, who feels, who has intelligence, who loves himself, who tends to his own conservation, who in every moment of his duration strives to render his existence agreeable; who, the more easily to satisfy his wants and to procure himself pleasure, congregates in society with beings similar to himself; of whom his conduct can either conciliate the favour, or draw upon him the disaffection. It is, then, upon these general sentiments, inherent in his nature, which will subsist as long as his race shall endure, that we ought to found morality; which is only a science embracing, the duties of men living together in society. These duties have their spring in our nature, they are founded upon our necessities, because we cannot reach the goal of happiness, if we do not employ the requisite means: these means constitute the moral science. To be permanently felicitous, we must so comport ourselves as to merit the affection, so act as to secure the assistance of those, beings with whom we are associated; these will only accord us their love, lend us their esteem, aid us in our projects, labour to our peculiar happiness, but in proportion as our own exertions shall be employed for their advantage. It is this necessity, flowing naturally out of the relations of mankind, that is called MORAL OBLIGATION. It is founded upon reflection, rested upon those motives competent to determine sensible, intelligent beings, to pursue that line of conduct, which in best calculated to achieve that happiness towards which they are continually verging. These motives in the human species, never can be other than the desire, always regenerating, of procuring good and avoiding evil. Pleasure and pain, the hope of happiness, or the fear of misery, are the only motives suitable to have an efficacious influence on the volition of sensible beings. To impel them towards this end, it is sufficient these motives exist and be understood to have a knowledge of them, it is only requisite to consider our own constitution: according to this, we shall find we can only love those actions, approve that conduct, from whence result actual and reciprocal utility; this constitutes VIRTUE. In consequence, to conserve ourselves, to make our own happiness, to enjoy security, we are compelled to follow the routine which conducts to this end; to interest others in our own preservation, we are obliged to display an interest in theirs; we must do nothing that can have a tendency to interrupt that mutual co-operation which alone can lead to the felicity desired. Such is the true establishment of moral obligation. Whenever it is attempted to give any other basis to morality than the nature of man, we shall always deceive ourselves; none other can have the least stability; none can be more solid. Some authors, even of great integrity, have thought, that to give ethics more respectability in the eyes of man, to render more inviolable those duties which his nature imposes on him, it was needful to clothe them with the authority of a being whom they have made superior to nature--whom they have rendered more powerful than necessity. Theology, seizing on these ideas, with its own general want of just inference, has in consequence invaded morality; has endeavoured to connect it with its various systems. By some it has been imagined, this union would render virtue more sacred; that the fear attached to invisible powers, who govern nature, would lend more weight, would give more efficacy to its laws; in short, it has been believed that man, persuaded, of the necessity of the moral system, seeing it united with superstition, would contemplate superstition itself as necessary to his happiness. Indeed it is the supposition that these systems are essential to morality, that sustains the theological ideas--that gives permanency to the greater part of all the creeds on earth; it is erroneously imagined that without them man would neither understand nor practise the duties he owes to others. This prejudice once established, gives currency to the opinion that the vague ideas growing out of these systems are in such a manner connected with morality, are so linked with the actual welfare of society, that they cannot be attacked without overturning the social duties that bind man to his fellow. It is thought that the reciprocity of wants, the desire of happiness, the evident interests of the community, would be mere skeleton motives, devoid of all active energy, if they did not borrow their substance from these various systems; if they were not invested with the force derived from these numerous creeds; if they were not clothed with the sanction of those ideas which have been made the arbiters of all things. Nothing, however, is more borne out by the evidence of experience, nothing has more thoroughly impressed itself on the minds of reflecting men, than the danger always arising from connecting truth with fiction; the known with the unknown; the delirium of enthusiasm, with the tranquillity of reason. Indeed what has resulted from the confused alliance, from the marvellous speculations, which theology has made with the most substantive realities? of mixing up its evanescent conjectures with the confirmed aphorisms of time? The imagination bewildered, has mistaken truth: superstition, by aid of its gratuitous suppositions, has commanded nature--made reason bow, under its bulky yoke,--submitted man to its own peculiar caprices; very frequently in the name of its gods obliged him to stifle his nature, to piously violate the most sacred duties of morality. When these superstitions have been desirous of restraining mortals whom they had previously hood-winked, whom they had rendered irrational, it gave them only ideal curbs, imaginary motives; it substituted unsubstantial causes, for those which were substantive; marvellous supernatural powers, for those which were natural, and well understood; it supplied actual realities, by ideal romances and visionary fables. By this inversion of principle, morality had no longer any fixed basis: nature, reason, virtue, demonstration, were laid prostrate before the most undefinable systems; were made to depend upon oracular promulgations, which never spake distinctly; indeed, they generally silenced reason, were often delivered by fanatics, which time proved to be impostors; by those who, always adopting the appellation of inspired beings, gave forth nothing but the wanderings of their own delirium, or else were desirous of profiting by the errors which they themselves instilled into mankind. Thus these men became deeply interested in preaching abject submission, non-resistance, passive-obedience, factitious virtues, frivolous ceremonies; in short, an arbitrary morality, conformable to their own reigning passions; frequently prejudicial to the rest of the human race. It was thus, in making ethics flow from these various systems, they in point of fact submitted it to the dominant passions of men, who had a direct interest in moulding it to their own advantage. In being disposed to found it upon undemonstrated theories, they founded it upon nothing; in deriving it from imaginary sources, of which each individual forms to himself his own notion, generally adverse to that of his neighbour; in resting it upon obscure oracles, always delivered ambiguously, frequently interpreted by men in the height of delirium, sometimes by knaves, who had immediate interests to promote, they rendered it unsteady--devoid of fixed principle,--too frequently left it to the mercy of the most crafty of mankind. In proposing to man the changeable creeds of the theologians for a model, they weakened the moral system of human actions; frequently annihilated that which was furnished by nature; often substituted in its place nothing but the most perplexing incertitude; the most ruinous inconsistency. These systems, by the qualities which are ascribed, to them, become inexplicable enigmas, which each expounds as best suits himself; which each explains after his own peculiar mode of thinking; in which the theologian ever finds that which most harmonizes with his designs; which he can bend to his own sinister purposes; which he offers as irrefragible evidence of the rectitude of those actions, which at bottom have nothing but his own advantage in view. If they exhort the gentle, indulgent, equitable man, to be good, compassionate, benevolent; they equally excite the furious, who is destitute of these qualities, to be intolerant, inhuman, pitiless. The morality of these systems varies in each individual; differs in one country from another; in fact, those actions which some men look upon as sacred, which they have learned to consider meritorious, make others shudder with horror--fill them with the most painful recollections. Some see the Divinity filled with gentleness and mercy; others behold him as full of wrath and fury, whose anger is to be assuaged by the commission of the most shocking cruelties. The morality of nature is clear, it is evident even to those who outrage it. It is not thus with superstitious morality; this is as obscure as the systems which prescribe it; or rather as fluctuating as the passions, as changeable as the temperaments, of those who expound them; if it was left to the theologians, ethics ought to be considered as the science of all others the most problematical, the most unsteady, the most difficult to bring to a point; it would require the most profound, penetrating genius, the most active, vigorous mind, to discover the principles of those duties man owes to himself, that he ought to exercise towards others; this would render the sources of the moral system attainable by a very small number of individuals; would effectually lock them up in the cabinets of the metaphysicians; place them under the treacherous guardianship of priests: to derive it from those systems, which are in themselves undefinable, with the foundations of which no one is actually acquainted, which each contemplates after his own mode, modifies after his own peculiar ideas, is at once to submit it to the caprice of every individual; it is completely to acknowledge, we know not from whence it is derived, nor whence it has its principles. Whatever may be the agent upon whom they make nature, or the beings she contains, to depend; with whatever power they way suppose him invested, it is very certain that man either does, or does not exist; but as soon as his existence is acknowledged, as soon as it is admitted to be what it actually is, when he shall be allowed to be a sensible being living in society, in love with his own felicity, they cannot without either annihilating him, or new modelling him, cause him to exist otherwise than he does. Therefore, according to his actual essence, agreeable to his absolute qualities, conformable to those modifications which constitute him a being, of the human species, morality becomes necessary to him, and the desire of conserving himself will make him prefer virtue to vice, by the same necessity that he prefers pleasure to pain. If, following up the doctrine of the theologians, "that man hath occasion for supernatural grace to enable him to do good," it must be very injurious to sound principles of morality; because he will always wait for "the call from above," to exercise that virtue, which is indispensable to his welfare. Tertullian, nevertheless says expressly, "wherefore will ye trouble yourselves, seeking after the law of God, whilst ye have that which is common to all the world, and which is written on the tablets of nature?" To say, that man cannot possess any moral sentiments without embracing the discordant systems offered to his acceptance, is, in point of fact, saying, that he cannot distinguish virtue from vice; it is to pretend that without these systems, man would not feel the necessity of eating to live, would not make the least distinction, would be absolutely without choice in his food: it is to pretend, that unless he is fully acquainted with the name, character, and qualities of the individual who prepares a mess for him, he is not competent to discriminate whether this mess be agreeable or disagreeable, good or bad. He who does not feel himself satisfied what opinions to adopt, upon the foundation and moral attributes of these systems, or who even formally denies them, cannot at least doubt his own existence-his own functions--his own qualities--his own mode of feeling--his own method of judging; neither can he doubt the existence of other organized beings similar to himself; in whom every thing discovers to him qualities analogous with his own; of whom he can, by certain actions, either gain the love or incur the hatred--secure the assistance or attract the ill-will--merit the esteem or elicit the contempt; this knowledge is sufficient to enable him to distinguish moral good and evil. In short, every man enjoying a well-ordered organization, possessing the faculty of making true experience, will only need to contemplate himself in order to discover what he owes to others: his own nature will enlighten him much more effectually upon his duties, than those systems in which he will consult either his own unruly passions, those of some enthusiast, or those of an impostor. He will allow, that to conserve himself, to secure his own permanent welfare, he is frequently obliged to resist the blind impulse of his own desires; that to conciliate the benevolence of others, he must act in a mode conformable to their advantage; in reasoning thus, he will find out what virtue actually is; if he puts his theory into practice, he will be virtuous; he will be rewarded for his conduct by the harmony of his own machine; by the legitimate esteem of himself, confirmed by the good opinion of others, whose kindness he will have secured: if he acts in a contrary mode, the trouble that will ensue, the disorder of his frame, will quickly warn him that nature, thwarted by his actions, disapproves his conduct, which is injurious to himself; to which he will be obliged to add the condemnation of others, who will hate him. If the wanderings of his mind prevent him from seeing the more immediate consequences of his irregularities, neither will he perceive the distant rewards, the remote punishments, which these systems hold forth; because they will never speak to him so distinctly as his conscience, which will either reward or punish him on the spot. Theology has never yet known how to give a true definition of virtue: according to it, it is an effort of grace, that disposes man to do that which is agreeable to the Divinity. But what is this grace? How doth it act upon man? How shall we know what is agreeable to a Divinity who is incomprehensible to all men? Every thing that has been advanced evidently proves, that superstitious morality is an infinite loser when compared with the morality of nature, with which, indeed, it is found in perpetual contradiction. Nature invites man to love himself, to preserve his existence, to incessantly augment the sum of his happiness: superstition teaches him to be in love only with formidable doctrines, calculated to generate his dislike; to detest himself; to sacrifice to his idols his most pleasing sensations--the most legitimate pleasures of his heart. Nature counsels man to consult reason, to adopt it for his guide; superstition pourtrays this reason as corrupted, as a treacherous director, that will infallibly lead him astray. Nature warns him to enlighten his understanding, to search after truth, to inform himself of his duties; superstition enjoins him not to examine any thing, to remain in ignorance, to fear truth; it persuades him there are no relations so important to his interest, as those which subsist between himself and systems which he can never understand. Nature tells the being who is in love with his welfare, to moderate his passions, to resist them when they are found destructive to himself, to counteract them by substantive motives collected from experience; superstition desires a sensible being to have no passions, to be an insensible mass, or else to combat his propensities by motives borrowed from the imagination, which are as variable as itself. Nature exhorts man to be sociable, to love his fellow creatures, to be just, peaceable, indulgent, benevolent, to permit his associates to freely enjoy their opinions; superstition admonishes him to fly society, to detach himself from his fellow mortals, to hate them when their imagination does not procure them dreams conformable to his own; to break through the most sacred bonds, to maintain his own opinions, or to frustrate those of his neighbour; to torment, to persecute, to massacre, those who will not be mad after his own peculiar manner. Nature exacts that man in society should cherish glory, labour to render himself estimable, endeavour to establish an imperishable name, to be active, courageous, industrious; superstition tells him to be abject, pusillanimous, to live in obscurity, to occupy himself with ceremonies; it says to him, be useless to thyself, and do nothing for others. Nature proposes to the citizen, for his model, men endued with honest, noble, energetic souls, who have usefully served their fellow citizens; superstition recommends to his imitation mean, cringing sycophants; extols pious enthusiasts, frantic penitents, zealous fanatics, who for the most ridiculous opinions have disturbed the tranquility of empires. Nature urges the husband to be tender, to attach himself to the company of his mate, to cherish her in his bosom; superstition makes a crime of his susceptibility, frequently obliges him to look upon the conjugal bonds as a state of pollution, as the offspring of imperfection. Nature calls to the father to nurture his children, to cherish their affection, to make them useful members of society; superstition advises him to rear them in fear of its systems, to hoodwink them, to make them superstitious, which renders them incapable of actually serving society, but extremely well calculated to disturb its repose. Nature cries out to children to honor their parents, to listen to their admonitions, to be the support of their old age; superstition says, prefer the oracles; in support of the systems of which you are an admitted member, trample father and mother under your feet. Nature holds out to the philosopher that he should occupy himself with useful objects, consecrate his cares to his country, make advantageous discoveries, suitable to perfect the condition of mankind; superstition saith, occupy thyself with useless reveries; employ thy time in endless dispute; scatter about with a lavish hand the seeds of discord, calculated to induce the carnage of thy fellows; obstinately maintain opinions which thou thyself canst never understand. Nature points out to the perverse man, that he should blush for his vices, that he should feel sorrow for his disgraceful propensities, that he should be ashamed of crime; it shews him, that his most secret irregularities will necessarily have an influence over his own felicity; superstition crieth to the most corrupt men, to the most flagitious mortals, "do not irritate the gods, whom thou knowest not; but if, peradventure, against their express command, thou dost deliver thyself up to crime, remember that their mercy is infinite, that their compassion endureth for ever, that therefore they may be easily appeased; thou hast nothing more to do than to go into their temples, prostrate thyself before their altars, humiliate thyself at the feet of their ministers; expiate thy transgressions by largesses, by sacrifices, by offerings, by ceremonies, and by prayer; these things done with a willing spirit, and a contrite heart, will pacify thine own conscience, and cleanse thee in the eyes of heaven." The rights of the citizen, or the man in society, are not less injured by superstition, which is always in contradiction with sound politics. Nature says distinctly to man, "thou art free; no power on earth can justly deprive thee of thy rights, without thine own consent; and even then, thou canst not legitimately make thyself a slave to thy like." Superstition tells him he is a slave, condemned to groan all his life under the iron rod of the representatives of its system. Nature commands man to love the country which gave him birth, to serve it faithfully, to blend his interests with it, to unite against all those who shall attempt to injure it; superstition generally orders him to obey without murmur the tyrants who oppress it, to serve them against its best interests, to merit their favors by contributing to enslave their fellow citizens to their ungovernable caprices: notwithstanding these general orders, if the sovereign be not sufficiently devoted to the priest, superstition quickly changes its language, it then calls upon subjects to become rebels; it makes it a duty in them to resist their masters; it cries out to them, "it is better to obey the gods than men." Nature acquaints princes that they are men: that it is not by their capricious whims that they can decide what is just; that it is not their wayward humours that can mark what is unjust; that the public will maketh the law. Superstition often insinuates to them that they are gods, to whom nothing in this world ought to offer resistance; sometimes, indeed, it transforms them into tyrants, whom enraged heaven is desirous should be immolated to its wrath. Superstition corrupts princes; these corrupt the law, which, like themselves, becomes unjust; from thence institutions are perverted; education only forms men who are worthless, blinded with prejudice, smitten with vain objects, enamoured of wealth, devoted to pleasures, which they must obtain by iniquitous means: thus nature, mistaken, is disdained; virtue is only a shadow quickly sacrificed to the slightest interest, while superstition, far from remedying these evils to which it has given birth, does nothing more than render them still more inveterate; or else engenders sterile regrets which it presently effaces: thus, by its operation, man is obliged to yield to the force of habit, to the general example, to the stream of those propensities, to those causes of confusion, which conspire to hurry all his species, who are not willing to renounce their own welfare, on to the commission of crime. Here is the mode by which superstition, united with politics, exert their efforts to pervert, abuse, and poison the heart of man; the generality of human institutions appear to have only for their object to abase the human character, to render it more flagitiously wicked. Do not then let us be at all astonished if morality is almost every where a barren speculation, from which every one is obliged to deviate in practice, if he will not risk the rendering himself unhappy. Men can only have sound morals, when, renouncing his prejudices, he consults his nature; but the continued impulse which his soul is every moment receiving, on the part of more powerful motives, quickly compels him to forget those ethical rules which nature points out to him. He is continually floating between vice and virtue; we behold him unceasingly in contradiction with himself; if, sometimes, he justly appreciates the value of an honest, upright conduct, experience very soon shews him, that this cannot lead him to any thing, which he has been taught to desire, on the contrary, that it may be an invincible obstacle to the happiness which his heart never ceases for an instant to search after. In corrupt societies it is necessary to become corrupt, in order to become happy. Citizens, led astray at the same time both by their spiritual and temporal guides, neither knew reason nor virtue. The slaves both of their superstitious systems, and of men like themselves, they had all the vices attached to slavery; kept in a perpetual state of infancy, they had neither knowledge nor principles; those who preached virtue to them, knew nothing of it themselves, and could not undeceive them with respect to those baubles in which they had learned to make their happiness consist. In vain they cried out to them to stifle those passions which every thing conspired to unloose: in vain they made the thunder of the gods roll to intimidate men whose tumultuous passions rendered them deaf. It was soon discovered that the gods of the heavens were much less feared than those of the earth; that the favour of the latter procured a much more substantive welfare than the promises of the former; that the riches of this world were more tangible than the treasures reserved for favorites in the next; that it was much more advantageous for men to conform themselves to the views of visible powers than to those of powers who were not within the compass of their visual faculties. Thus society, corrupted by its priests, guided by their caprice, could only bring forth a corrupt offspring. It gave birth to avaricious, ambitious, jealous, dissolute citizens, who never saw any thing happy but crime; who beheld meanness rewarded; incapacity honoured; wealth adored; debauchery held in esteem; who almost every where found talents discouraged; virtue neglected; truth proscribed; elevation of soul crushed; justice trodden under foot; moderation languishing in misery; liberality of mind obligated to groan under the ponderous bulk of haughty injustice. In the midst of this disorder, in this confusion of ideas, the precepts of morality could only be vague declamations, incapable of convincing any one. What barrier could superstition, with its imaginary motives, oppose to the general corruption? When it spake reason, it could not be heard; its gods themselves were not sufficiently powerful to resist the torrent; its menaces failed of effect, on those hearts which every thing hurried along to crime; its distant promises could not counterbalance present advantages; its expiations, always ready to cleanse mortals from their sins, emboldened them to persevere in their criminal pursuits; its frivolous ceremonies calmed their consciences; its zeal, its disputes, its caprices, only multiplied the evils, with which society found itself afflicted; only gave them an inveteracy that rendered them more widely mischievous; in short, in the most vitiated nations there was a multitude of devotees, and but very few honest men. Great and small listened to the doctrines of superstition, when they appeared favorable to their dominant passions; when they were desirous to counteract them, they listened no longer. Whenever superstition was conformable to morality, it appeared incommodious, it was only followed when it either combatted ethics or destroyed them. The despot himself found it marvellous, when it assured him he was a god upon earth; that his subjects were born to adore him alone, to administer to his phantasms. He neglected it when it told him to be just; from thence he saw it was in contradiction with itself, that it was useless to preach equity to a deified mortal; besides, he was assured the gods would pardon every thing, as soon as he should consent to recur to his priests, always ready to reconcile them; the most wicked of their subjects reckoned in the same manner upon their divine assistance: thus superstition, far from restraining vice, assured its impunity; its menaces could not destroy the effects which its unworthy flattery had produced in princes; these same menaces could not annihilate the hope which its expiations had furnished to all. Sovereigns, either inflated with pride, or always confident of washing out their crimes by timely sacrifices, no longer actually feared their gods; become gods themselves, they believed they were permitted any thing against poor pitiful mortals, whom they no longer considered under any other light than as playthings destined for their earthly amusement. If the nature of man was consulted in his politics which supernatural ideas have so woefully depraved, it would completely rectify those false notions that are entertained equally by sovereigns and by subjects; it would contribute more amply than all the superstitions existing, to render society happy, powerful, and flourishing under rational authority. Nature would teach man, it is for the purpose of enjoying a greater portion of happiness, that mortals live together in society; that it is its own preservation, its own immediate felicity, that society should have for its determinate, unchangeable object: that without equity, a nation only resembles a congregation of enemies; that his most cruel foe, is the man who deceives him in order that he may enslave him; that the scourges most to be feared, are those priests who corrupt his chiefs, who, in the name of the gods assure them of impunity for their crimes: she would prove to him that association is a misfortune under unjust, negligent, destructive governments. This nature, interrogated by princes, would teach them they are men and not gods; that their power is only derived from the consent of other men; that they themselves are citizens, charged by other citizens, with the care of watching over the safety of the whole; that the law ought to be only the expression of the public will; that it is never permitted them to counteract nature, or to thwart the invariable end of society. This nature would make monarchs feel, that to be truly great, to be decidedly powerful, they ought to command elevated, virtuous souls; not minds degraded by despotism, vitiated by superstition. This nature would teach sovereigns, that in order to be cherished by their subjects, they ought to afford them succour; to cause them to enjoy those benefits which their wants render imperative, that they should at all times maintain them, inviolably, in the possession of their rights, of which they are the appointed defenders--of which they are the constituted guardians. This nature would prove to all those princes who should deign to consult her, that it is only by good actions, by kindness, they can either merit the love, or secure the attachment of the people; that oppression does nothing more than raise up enemies against them; that violence only makes their power unsteady; that force, however brutally used, cannot confer on them any legitimate right; that beings essentially in love with happiness, must sooner or later finish by revolting against an authority that establishes itself by injustice; that only makes itself felt by the outrage it commits: this is the manner in which nature, the sovereign of all beings, in whose system all are equal, would speak to one of these superb monarchs, whom flattery has deified:--"Untoward, headstrong child! Pigmy, so proud of commanding pigmies! Have they then assured thee that thou art a god? Have they flattered thee that thou art something supernatural? Know there is nothing superior to myself. Contemplate thine own insignificance, acknowledge thine impotence against the slightest of my blows. I can break thy sceptre; I can take away thine existence; I can level thy throne with the dust; I can scatter thy people; I can destroy even the earth which thou inhabitest; and yet thou hast the folly to believe thou art a god. Be then, again, thyself; honestly avow that thou art a man, formed to submit to my laws equally with the meanest of thy subjects. Learn then, and never let it escape thy memory, that thou art the man of thy people; the minister of thy nation; the interpreter of its laws; the executer of its will; the fellow-citizen of those whom thou hast the right of commanding, only because they consent to obey thee, in view of that well being which thou promisest to procure for them. Reign, then, on these conditions; fulfil thy sacred engagements. Be benevolent: above all, equitable. If thou art willing to have thy power assured to thee, never abuse it; let it be circumscribed by the immovable limits of eternal justice. Be the father of thy people, and they will cherish thee as thy children. But, if unmindful of thy duties, thou neglectest them; if negligent of thine own interest, thou separatest them from those of thy great family, if thou refusest to thy subjects that happiness which thou owest them; if, heedless of thy own security, thou armest thyself against them; thou shall be like all tyrants, the slave to gloomy care, the bondman of alarm, the vassal of cruel suspicion: thou wilt become the victim to thine own folly. Thy people, reduced to despair, shorn of their felicity, will no longer acknowledge thy divine rights. In vain, then, thou wouldst sue for aid to that superstition which hath deified thee; it can avail nothing with thy people, whom sharp misery had rendered deaf; heaven will abandon thee to the fury of those enemies to which thy frenzy shall have given birth. Superstitious systems can effect nothing against my irrevocable decrees, which will that man shall ever irritate himself against the cause of his sorrows." In short, every thing would make known to rational princes, that they have no occasion for superstition to be faithfully obeyed on earth; that all the powers contained in these systems will not sustain them when they shall act the tyrant; that their true friends are those who undeceive the people in their delusions; that their real enemies are those who intoxicate them with flattery--who harden them in crime--who make the road to heaven too easy for them--who feed them with fanciful, chimerical doctrines, calculated to make them swerve from those cares, to divert them from those sentiments, which they justly owe to their nations. It is then, I repeat it, only by re-conducting man to nature, that we can procure him distinct notions, evident opinions, certain knowledge; it is only by shewing him his true relations with his fellows, that we can place him on the road to happiness. The human mind, blinded by theology, has scarcely advanced a single step. Man's superstitious systems have rendered him sceptical on the most demonstrable truths. Superstition, while it pervaded every thing, while it had an universal influence, served to corrupt the whole: philosophy, dragged in its train, although it swelled its triumphant procession, was no longer any thing but an imaginary science: it quitted the real world to plunge into the sinuosities of the ideal, inconceivable labyrinths of metaphysics; it neglected nature, who spontaneously opened her book to its examination, to occupy itself with systems filled with spirits, with invisible powers, which only served to render all questions more obscure; which, the more they were probed, the more inexplicable they became; which took delight in promulgating that which no one was competent to understand. In all difficulties it introduced the Divinity; from thence things only became more and more perplexed, until nothing could be explained. Theological notions appear only to have been invented to put man's reason to flight; to confound his judgment; to deceive his mind; to overturn his clearest ideas in every science. In the hands of the theologian, logic, or the art of reasoning, was nothing more than an unintelligible jargon, calculated to support sophism, to countenance falsehood, to attempt to prove the most palpable contradictions. Morality, as we have seen, became wavering and uncertain, because it was founded on ideal systems, never in harmony with themselves, which, on the contrary, were continually contradicting their own most positive assertions. Politics, as we have elsewhere said, were cruelly perverted by the fallacious ideas given to sovereigns of their actual rights. Jurisprudence was determinately submitted to the caprices of superstition, which shackled labour, chained down human industry, controuled activity, and fettered the commerce of nations. Every thing, in short, was sacrificed to the immediate interests of these theologians: in the place of every rational science, they taught nothing but an obscure, quarrelsome metaphysics, which but too often caused the blood of those unhappy people to flow copiously who were incapable of understanding its hallucinations. Born an enemy to experience, theology, that supernatural science, was an invincible obstacle to the progress of the natural sciences, as it almost always threw itself in their way. It was not permitted to experimental philosophy, to natural history, to anatomy, to see any thing but through the jaundiced eye of superstition. The most evident facts were rejected with disdain, proscribed with horror, when ever they could not be made to quadrate with the idle hypotheses of superstition. Virgil, the Bishop of Saltzburg, was condemned by the church, for having dared to maintain the existence of the antipodes; Gallileo suffered the most cruel persecutions, for asserting that the sun did not make its revolution round the earth. Descartes was obliged to die in a foreign land. Priests, indeed, have a right to be the enemies to the sciences; the progress of reason must, sooner or later, annihilate superstitious ideas. Nothing that is founded upon nature, that is bottomed upon truth, can ever be lost; while the systems of imaginations, the creeds of imposture, must be overturned. Theology unceasingly opposed itself to the happiness of nations--to the progress of the human mind--to useful researches--to the freedom of thought; it kept man in ignorance; all his steps being guided by it, he was no more than a tissue of errors. Indeed, is it resolving a question in natural philosophy, to say that an effect which excites our surprise, that an unusual phenomenon, that a volcano, a deluge, a hurricane, a comet, &c. are either signs of divine wrath, or works contrary to the laws of nature? In persuading nations, as it has done, that the calamities, whether physical or moral, which they experience, are the effects of the divine anger, or chastisements which his power inflicts on them, has it not, in fact, prevented them from seeking after remedies for these evils? Would it not have been more useful to have studied the nature of things, to have sought in nature herself, or in human industry, for succours against those sorrows with which mortals are afflicted, than to attribute the evil which man experiences to an unknown power, against whose will it cannot be supposed there exists any relief? The study of nature, the search after truth, elevates the soul, expands the genius, is calculated to render man active, to make him courageous. Theological notions appear to have been made to debase him, to contract his mind, to plunge him into despondence. In the place of attributing to the divine vengeance those wars, those famines, those sterilities, those contagions, that multitude of calamities, which desolate the earth; would it not have been more useful, more consistent with truth, to have shewn man that these evils were to be ascribed to his own folly, or rather to the unruly passions, to the want of energy, to the tyranny of some princes, who sacrifice nations to their frightful delirium? The irrational people, instead of amusing themselves with expiations for their pretended crimes, seeking to render themselves acceptable to imaginary powers; should they not rather have sought in a more healthy administration, the true means of avoiding those scourges, to which they were the victims? Natural evils demand natural remedies: ought not experience then long since to have convinced mortals of the inefficacy of supernatural remedies, of expiatory sacrifices, of fastings, of processions, &c. which almost all the people of the earth have vainly opposed to the disasters which they experienced? Let us then conclude, that theology with its notions, far from being useful to the human species, is the true source of all those sorrows which afflict the earth of all those errors by which man is blinded; of those prejudices which benumb mankind; of that ignorance which renders him credulous; of those vices which torment him; of those governments which oppress him. Let us be fully persuaded that those theological, supernatural ideas, with which man is inspired from his infancy, are the actual causes of his habitual folly; are the springs of his superstitious quarrels; of his sacred dissensions; of his inhuman persecutions. Let us, at length, acknowledge, that they are these fatal ideas which have obscured morality; corrupted polities; retarded the progress of the sciences; annihilated happiness; banished peace from the bosom of mankind, Then let it be no longer dissimulated, that all those calamities, for which man turns his eyes towards heaven, bathed in tears, have their spring in the imaginary systems he has adopted: let him, therefore, cease to expect relief from them; let him seek in nature, let him search in his own energies, those resources, which superstition, deaf to his cries, will never procure for him. Let him consult the legitimate desires of his heart, and he will find that which he oweth to himself, also that which he oweth to others; let him examine his own essence, let him dive into the aim of society, from thence he will no longer be a slave; let him consult experience, he will find truth, and he will discover, that _error can never possible render him happy._ CHAP. X. _Man can form no Conclusion from the Ideas which are offered him of the Divinity.--Of their want of just Inference.--Of the Inutility of his Conduct._ It has been already stated, that ideas to be useful, must be founded upon truth; that experience must at all times demonstrate their justice: if, therefore, as we have proved, the erroneous ideas which man has in almost all ages formed to himself of the Divinity, far from being of utility, are prejudicial to morality, to politics, to the happiness of society, to the welfare of the individuals who compose it, in short, to the progress of the human understanding; reason, and our interest, ought to make us feel the necessity of banishing from our mind these illusive, futile opinions, which can never do more than confound it--which can only disturb the tranquillity of our hearts. In vain should we flatter ourselves with arriving at the correction of theological notions; erroneous in their principles, they are not susceptible of reform. Under whatever shape an error presents itself, as soon as man shall attach an undue importance to it, it will, sooner or later, finish by producing consequences dangerous in proportion to their extent. Besides, the inutility of those researches, which in all ages have been made after the true nature of the Divinity, the notions that have hitherto been entertained, have done little more than throw it into greater obscurity, even to those who have most profoundly meditated on the subject; then, ought not this very inutility to convince us that this subject is not within the reach of our capacity that this being will not be better known to us, or by our descendants, than it hath been to our ancestors, either the most savage or the most ignorant? The object, which of all others man has at all times reasoned upon the most, written upon the most, nevertheless remains the least known; far from progressing in his research, time, with the aid of theological ideas, has only rendered it more impossible to be conceived. If the Divinity be such as dreaming theology depicts, he must himself be a Divinity who is competent to form an idea of him. We know little of man, we hardly know ourselves, or our own faculties, yet we are disposed to reason upon a being inaccessible to our senses. Let us, then, travel in peace over the line described for us by nature, without having a wish to diverge from it, to hunt after vague systems; let us occupy ourselves with our true happiness; let us profit of the benefits spread before us; let us labour to multiply them, by diminishing the number of our errors; let us quietly submit to those evils we cannot avoid, and not augment them by filling our mind with prejudices calculated to lead us astray. When we shall give it serious reflection, every thing will clearly prove that the pretended science of theology is, in truth, nothing but presumptuous ignorance, masked under pompous, unintelligible words. In short, let us terminate unfruitful researches; be content at least to acknowledge our invincible ignorance; it will clearly be more substantively advantageous, than an arrogant science, which has hitherto done little more than sow discord on the earth--affliction in the heart of man. In supposing a sovereign intelligence who governs the world; in supposing a Divinity who exacts from his creatures that they should have a knowledge of him, that they should understand his attributes, his wisdom, his power; who is desirous they should render him homage; it must be allowed, that no man on earth in this respect completely fulfils the views of providence. Indeed, nothing is more demonstrable than the impossibility in which the theologians find themselves, to form to their mind any idea whatever of the Divinity. Procopius, the first bishop of the Goths, says in the most solemn manner: "I esteem it a very foolish temerity to be disposed to penetrate into the knowledge of the nature of God;" and further on he acknowledges, "that he has nothing more to say of him, except that he is perfectly good. He who knoweth more, whether he be ecclesiastic or layman, has only to tell it." The weakness, the obscurity of the proofs offered, of the systems attributed to him, the manifest contradictions into which they fall, the sophisms, the begging of the question, which are employed, evidently prove they are themselves in the greatest incertitude upon the nature of that being with whom it is their profession to occupy their thoughts: even the author of _A New View of Society_ acknowledges, "that up to this moment it is, not possible yet to say which is right or which is wrong: that had any one of the various opposing systems which until this day have governed the world, and disunited man from man, been true, without any mixture of error; that system, very speedily after its public promulgation, would have pervaded society, and compelled all men to have acknowledged its truth." But granting that they have a knowledge of this being, that his essence, his attributes, his systems, were so fully demonstrated to them, as no longer to leave any doubt in their mind, do the rest of the human race enjoy the same advantages? Are they, in fact, in a condition to be charged with this knowledge? Ingenuously, how many persons are to be found in the world, who have the leisure, the capacity, the penetration, necessary to understand what is meant to be designated under the name of an immaterial being--of a pure spirit, who moveth matter without being himself matter; who is the motive of all the powers of nature, without being contained in nature--without being able to touch it? Are there, in the most religious societies, many persons who are competent to follow their spiritual guides, in the subtle proofs which they adduce in evidence of their creeds, upon which they bottom their systems of theology? Without question very few men are capable of profound, connected meditation; the exercise of intense thought is, for the greater number, a species of labour as painful as it is unusual. The people, obliged to toil hard, in order to obtain subsistence, are commonly incapable of reflection; nobles, men of the world, women, young people, occupied with their own immediate affairs, taken up with gratifying their passions, employed in procuring themselves pleasure, as rarely think deeply as the uninformed. There are not, perhaps, two men in an hundred thousand, who have seriously asked themselves the question, _What it is they understand by the word God?_ Whilst it is extremely rare to find persons to whom the nature of God is a problem. Nevertheless, as we have said, conviction supposes that evidence alone has banished doubt from the mind. Where, then, are the web who are convinced of the rectitude of these systems? Who are those in whom we shall find the complete certitude of these truths, so important to all? Who are the persons, who have given themselves an accurate account of the ideas they have formed upon the Divinity, upon his attributes, upon his essence? Alas! throughout the whole world, are only to be seen some speculators, who, by dint of occupying themselves with the idea, have, with great fatuity, believed they have discovered something decisive in the confused, unconnected wanderings of their own imagination; they have, in consequence, endeavoured to form a whole, which, chimerical as it is, they have accustomed themselves to consider as actually existing: by force of musing upon it, they have sometimes persuaded themselves they, saw it distinctly; these have not unfrequently succeeded in making others believe, their reveries, although they may not have mused upon it quite so much as themselves. It is seldom more than hearsay, that the mass of the people adopt either the systems of their fathers, or of their priests: authority, confidence, submission, habit, take place of conviction--supersede proof; they prostrate themselves before idols, lend themselves to different creeds, because their ancestors have taught them to fall down, and worship; but never do they inquire wherefore they bend the knee: it is only because, in times far distant, their legislators, their guides, have imposed it upon them as a duty; these have said, "adore and believe those gods, whom ye cannot comprehend; yield yourselves in this instance to our profound wisdom; we know more than ye do respecting the Divinity." But wherefore, it might be inquired, should I take this system upon your authority? It is, they will reply, because the gods will have it thus; because they will punish you, if you dare to resist. But are not these gods the thing in question? Nevertheless, man has always been satisfied with this circle of errors; the idleness of his mind made him find it most easy to yield to the judgment of others. All superstitions are uniformly founded upon error, established by authority; equally forbid examination; are equally indisposed to permit that man should reason upon them; it is power that wills he should unconditionally accredit them: they are rested solely upon the influence of some few men, who pretend to a knowledge of things, which they admit are incomprehensible for all their species; who, at the same time, affirm they are sent as missionaries to announce them to the inhabitants of the earth: these inconceivable systems, formed in the brain of some enthusiastic persons, have most unquestionably occasion for men to expound them to their fellows. Man is generally credulous as a child upon those objects which relate to superstition; he is told he must believe them; as he generally understands nothing of the matter, he imagines he runs no risk in joining sentiments with his priest, whom he supposes has been competent to discover what he himself is not able to comprehend. The most rational people argue thus: "What shall I do? What interest can so many persons have to deceive?" But, seriously, does this prove that they do not deceive? They may do it from two motives: either because they are themselves deceived, or because they have a great interest in deceiving. By the confession of the theologians themselves, man is, for the greater part, without _religion_: he has only _superstition_. Superstition, according to them, "is a worship of the Divinity, either badly understood or irrational," or else, "worship rendered to a false Divinity." But where are the people or the clergy who will allow, either that their Divinity is false, or their worship irrational? How shall it be decided who is right, or who is wrong? It is evident that in this affair great numbers must be wrong. Indeed, Buddaeus, in his _Treatise on Atheism_, tells us, "in order that a religion may be true, not only the object of the worship must be true, but we must also have a just idea of it. He, then, who adoreth God without knowing him, adoreth him in a perverse and corrupt manner, and is generally guilty of superstition." This granted, would it not be fair to demand of the theologians, if they themselves can boast of having a _just idea_ or real knowledge of the Divinity? Admit for a moment they have, would it not then be evident, that it is for the priest, for the inspired, for the metaphysician, that this idea, which is said to be so necessary for the whole human race, is exclusively reserved? If we examine, however, we shall not find any harmony among the theological notions of these various inspired men, or of that hierarchy which is scattered over the earth: even those who make a profession of the same system, are not in unison upon the leading points. Are they ever contented with the proofs offered by their colleagues? Do they unanimously subscribe to each other's ideas? Are they agreed upon the conduct to be adopted; upon the manner of explaining their texts; upon the interpretation of the various oracles? Does there exist one country upon the whole earth, where the science of theology is actually perfectioned?--where the ideas of the Divinity are rendered so clear, as not to admit of cavil? Has this science obtained any of that steadiness, any of that consistency, any of that uniformity, which is found attached to other branches of human knowledge; even to the most futile arts, or to those trades which are most despised? Has the multitude of subtle distinctions, with which theology in some countries is filled throughout; have the words spirit, immateriality, incorporeity, predestination, grace, with other ingenious inventions, imagined by sublime thinkers, who during so many ages have succeeded each other, actually had any other effect than to perplex things; to render the whole obscure; decidedly unintelligible? Alas! do, they not offer practical demonstration, that the science held forth as the most necessary to man, has not, hitherto, been able to acquire the least degree of stability; has remained in the most determined state of indecision; has entirely failed in obtaining solidity? For thousands of years the most idle dreamers have been relieving each other, meditating on systems, diving into concealed ways, inventing hypothesis suitable to develope this important enigma. Their slender success has not at all discouraged theological vanity; the priests have always spoken of it as of a thing with which they were most intimately acquainted; they have disputed with all the pertinancy of demonstrated argument; they have destroyed each other with the most savage barbarity; yet, notwithstanding, to this moment, this sublime science remains entirely unauthenticated; almost unexamined. Indeed, if things were coolly contemplated, it would be obvious that these theories are not formed for the generality of mankind, who for the most part are utterly incompetent to comprehend the aerial subtilities upon which they rest. Who is the man, that understandeth any thing of the fundamental principles of these systems? Whose capacity embraces spirituality, immateriality, incorporeity, or the mysteries of which he is every day informed? Are there many persons who can boast of perfectly understanding the state of the question, in those theological disputations, which have frequently had the potency to disturb the repose of mankind? Nevertheless, even women believe themselves obliged to take part in the quarrels excited by these idle speculators, who are of less actual utility, to society, than the meanest artizan. Man would, perhaps, have been too happy, if confining himself to those visible objects which interest him, he had employed half that energy which he has wasted in researches after incomprehensible systems, upon perfectioning the real sciences; in giving consistency to his laws; in establishing his morals upon solid foundations; in spreading a wholesome education among his fellows. He would, unquestionably, have been much wiser, more fortunate, if he had agreed to let his idle, unemployed guides quarrel among themselves unheeded; if he had permitted them to fathom those depths calculated to astound the mind, to amaze the intellect, without intermeddling with their irrational disputes. But it is the essence of ignorance, to attach great importance to every thing which it doth not understand. Human vanity makes the mind bear up against difficulties. The more an object eludes our inquiry, the more efforts we make to compass it; because from thence our pride is spurred on, our curiosity is set afloat, our passions are irritated, and it assumes the character of being highly interesting to us. On the other hand, the more continued, the more laborious our researches have been, the more importance we attach to either our real or our pretended discoveries; the more we are desirous not to have wasted our time; besides, we are always ready warmly to defend the soundness of our own judgment. Do not let us then be surprised at the interest that ignorant persons have at all times taken in the discoveries of their priests; nor at the obstinate pertinacity which they have ever manifested in their disputes. Indeed, in combating for his own peculiar system, each only fought for the interests of his own vanity, which of all human passions is the most quickly alarmed, the most calculated to lead man on to the commission of great follies. Theology is truly the vessel of the Danaides. By dint of contradictory qualities, by means of bold assertions, it has so shackled its own systems as to render it impossible they should act. Indeed, when even we should suppose the existence of these theological systems, the reality of codes so discordant with each other and with themselves, we can conclude nothing from them to authorize the conduct, or sanction the mode of worship which they prescribe. If their gods are infinitely good, wherefore should we dread them? If they are infinitely wise, what reason have we to disturb ourselves with our condition? If they are omniscient, wherefore inform them of our wants, why fatigue them with our requests? If they are omnipresent, of what use can it be to erect temples to them? If they are lords of all, why make sacrifices to them; why bring them offerings of what already belongs to them? If they are just, upon what foundation believe that they will punish those creatures whom they have filled with imbecility? If their grace works every thing in man, what reason can there be why he should be rewarded? If they are omnipotent, how can they be offended; how can we resist them? If they are rational, how can the enrage themselves against blind mortals, to whom they have left the liberty of acting irrationally? If they are immutable, by what right shall we pretend to make them change their decrees? If they are inconceivable, wherefore should we occupy ourselves with them? If the knowledge of these systems be the most necessary thing, wherefore are they not more evident, more consistent, more manifest? This granted, he who can undeceive himself on the afflicting notions of these theories, hath this advantage over the credulous, trembling, superstitious mortal--that he establishes in his heart a momentary tranquility, which, at least, rendereth him happy in this life. If the study of nature hath banished from his mind, those chimeras with which the superstitions man is infested, he, at least, enjoys a security of which this sees himself deprived. In consulting this nature, his fears are dissipated, his opinions, whether true or false, acquire a steadiness of character; a calm succeeds the storm, which panic terror, the result of wavering notions, excite in the hearts of all men who occupy themselves with these systems. If the human soul, cheered by philosophy, had the boldness to consider things coolly; it would no longer behold the universe submitted to implacable systems, under which man is continually trembling. If he was rational, he would perceive that in committing evil he did not disturb nature; that he either injureth himself alone, or injures other beings capable of feeling the effects of his conduct, from thence he would know the line of his duties; he would prefer virtue to vice, for his own permanent repose: he would, for his own satisfaction, for his own felicity in this world, find himself deeply interested in the practice of moral goodness; in rendering virtue habitual; in making it dear to the feeling of his heart: his own immediate welfare would be concerned in avoiding vice, in detesting crime, during the short season of his abode among intelligent, sensible beings, from whom he expects his happiness. By attaching himself to these rules, he would live contented with his own conduct; he would be cherished by those who are capable of feeling the influence of his actions; he would expect without inquietude the term when his existence should have a period; he would have no reason to dread the existence which _might_ follow the one he at present enjoys: he would not fear to be deceived in his reasonings. Guided by demonstration, led gently along by honesty, he would perceive, that he could have nothing to dread from a beneficent Divinity, who would not punish him for those involuntary errors which depend upon the organization, which without his own consent he has received. Such a man so conducting himself, would have nothing to apprehend, whether at the moment of his death, he falls asleep for ever; or whether that sleep is only a prelude to another existence, in which he shall find himself in the presence of his God. Addressing himself to the Divinity, he might with confidence say, "O God! Father, who hath rendered thyself invisible to thy child! Inconceivable, hidden Author of all, whom I could not discover! Pardon me, if my limited understanding hath not been able to know thee, in a nature, where every thing hath appeared to me to be necessary! Excuse me, if my sensible heart hath not discerned thine august traits among those numerous systems which superstitious mortals tremblingly adore: if, in that assemblage of irreconcileable qualities, with which the imagination hath clothed thee, I could only see a phantom. How could my coarse eyes perceive thee in nature, in which all my senses have never been able to bring me acquainted but with material beings, with, perishable forms? Could I, by the aid of these senses, discover thy spiritual essence, of which no one could furnish me any idea? Could my feeble brain, obliged to form its judgments after its own capacity, discern thy plans, measure thy wisdom, conceive thine intelligence, whilst the universe presented to my view a continued mixture of order and confusion--of good and evil--of formation and destruction? Have I been able to render homage to the justice of thy priests, whilst I so frequently beheld crime triumphant, virtue in tears? Could I possibly acknowledge the voice of a being filled with wisdom, in those ambiguous, puerile, contradictory oracles, published in thy name in the different countries of the earth I have quitted? If I have not known thy peculiar existence, it is because I have not known either what thou couldst be, where thou couldst be placed, or the qualities which could be assigned thee. My ignorance is excusable, because it was invincible: my mind could not bend itself under the authority of men, who acknowledged they were as little enlightened upon thine essence as myself; who were for ever disputing among themselves; who were in harmony only in imperiously crying out to me, to sacrifice to them that reason which thou hadst given to me; But, oh God! If thou cherishest thy creatures, I also, like thee, have cherished them; I have endeavoured to render them happy, in the sphere in which I have lived. If thou art the author of reason, I have always listened to it--have ever endeavoured to follow it; if virtue pleaseth thee, my heart hath always honoured it; I have never willingly outraged it: when my powers have permitted me, I have myself practised it; I was an affectionate husband, a tender father, a sincere friend, a faithful subject, a zealous citizen; I have held out consolation to the afflicted; and if the foibles of my nature have been either injurious to myself or incommodious to others, I have not at least made the unfortunate groan under the weight of my injustice. I have not devoured the substance of the poor--I have not seen without pity the widow's tears; I have not heard without commiseration the cries of the orphan. If thou didst render man sociable, if thou was disposed that society should subsist, if thou wast desirous the community might be happy, I have been the enemy to all who oppressed him, the decided foe to all those who deceived him, in order that they might advantage themselves of his misfortunes. "If I have not thought properly of thee, it is because my understanding could not conceive thee; if I have spoken ill of thy systems, it is because my heart, partaking too much of human nature, revolted against the odious portrait under which they depicted thee. My wanderings have been the effect of the temperament which thou hast given me; of the circumstances in which, without my consent, thou hast placed me; of those ideas, which in despite of me, have entered into my mind. As thou art good, as thou art just, (as we are assured thou art) thou wilt not punish me for the wanderings of mine imagination; for faults caused by my passions, which are the necessary consequence of the organization which I have received from thee. Thus I cannot doubt thy justice, I cannot dread the condition which thou preparest for me. Thy goodness cannot have permitted that I should incur punishment for inevitable errors. Thou wouldst rather prevent my being born, than have called me into the rank of intelligent beings, there to enjoy the fatal liberty of rendering myself eternally unhappy." It is thus that a disciple of nature, who, transported all at once into the regions of space, should find himself in the presence of his God, would be able to speak, although he should not have been in a condition to lend himself to all the abstract systems of theology which appear to have been invented for no other purpose than to overturn in his mind all natural ideas. This illusory science seems bent an forming its systems in a manner the most contradictory to human reason; notwithstanding we are obliged to judge in this world according to its dictates; if, however, in the succeeding world, there is nothing conformable to this, what can be of more inutility, than to think of it or reason upon it? Besides, wherefore should we leave it to the judgment of men, who are, themselves, only enabled to act after our manner? Without a very marked derangement of our organs, our sentiments hardly ever vary upon those objects which either our senses experience, or which reason has clearly demonstrated, In whatever circumstances we are found, we have no doubt either upon the whiteness of snow, the light of day, or the utility of virtue. It is not so with those objects which depend solely upon our imagination--which are not proved to us by the constant evidence of our senses; we judge of them variously, according to the dispositions in which we find ourselves. These dispositions fluctuate by reason of the involuntary impulse which our organs every instant receive, on the part of an infinity of causes, either exterior to ourselves, or else contained within our own frame. These organs are, without our knowledge, perpetually modified, either relaxed or braced by the density, more or less, of the atmosphere; by heat and by cold; by dryness and by humidity; by health and by sickness; by the heat of the blood; by the abundance of bile; by the state of the nervous system, &c. These various causes have necessarily an influence upon the momentary ideas, upon the instantaneous thoughts, upon the fleeting opinions of man, He is, consequently, obliged to see under a great variety of hues, those objects which his imagination presents to him; without it all times having the capacity to correct them by experience: to compare them by memory. This, without doubt, is the reason why man is continually obliged to view his gods, to contemplate his superstitious systems, under such a diversity of aspects, in different periods of his existence. In the moment, when his fibres find themselves disposed to he tremulous, he will be cowardly, pusillanimous; he will think of these systems only with fear and trembling. In the moment, when these same fibres shall have more tension, he will possess more firmness, he will then view these systems with greater coolness. The theologian will call his pusillanimity, "inward feeling;" "warning from heaven;" "secret inspiration;" but he who knoweth man, will say that this is nothing more than a mechanical motion, produced by a physical or natural cause. Indeed, it is by a pure physical mechanism, that we can explain all the revolutions that take place in the system, frequently from one minute to another; all the fluctuations in the opinions of mankind; all the variations of his judgment: in consequence of which we sometimes see him reasoning justly, sometimes in the most irrational manner. This is the mode by which, without recurring to grace, to inspirations, to visions, to supernatural notions, we can render ourselves an account of that uncertain, that wavering state into which we sometimes behold persons fall, when there is a question respecting their superstition, who are otherwise extremely enlightened. Frequently, in despite of all reasoning, momentary dispositions re-conduct them to the prejudices of their infancy, upon which on other occasions they appear to be entirely undeceived. These changes are very apparent, especially under infirmities, in sickness, or at approach of death. The barometer of the understanding is then frequently obliged to fall. Those chimeras which he despised, or which in a state of health, he set down at their true value, are then realized. He trembles, because his machine is enfeebled; he is irrational because his brain is incapable of fulfilling its functions with exactitude. It is evident these are the actual causes of those changes which the priests well know how to make use of against what they call incredulity; from which they draw proofs of the reality of their sublimated opinions. Those conversions, or those alterations, which take place, in the ideas of man, have always their origin in some derangement of his machine; brought on either by chagrin or by some other natural or known cause. Submitted to the continual influence of physical causes, our systems invariably follow the variations of the body; we reason well when the body is healthy--when it is soundly constituted; we reason badly when the corporeal faculties are deranged; from thence our ideas become disconnected, we are no longer equal to the task of associating them with precision; we are incapable of finding principles, or to draw from them just inferences; the brain, in fact, is shaken; we no longer contemplate any thing under its actual point of view. It is a man of this kind, who does not see things in frosty weather, under the same traits as when the season is cloudy, or when it is rainy; he does not view them in the same manner in sorrow as in gaiety; when in company as when alone. Good sense suggests to us, that it is when the body is sound, when the mind is undisturbed by any mist, that we can reason with accuracy; this state can furnish us with a general standard, calculated to regulate our judgment; even to rectify our ideas, when unexpected causes shall make them waver. If the opinions even of the same individual, are fluctuating, subject to vaccillate, how many changes must they experience in the various beings who compose the human race? If there do not, perhaps, exist two persons who see a physical object under the same exact form or colour, what much greater variety must they not have in their mode of contemplating those things which have existence only in their imagination? What an infinity of combinations, what a multitude of ideas, must not minds essentially different, form to themselves when they endeavour to compose an ideal being, which each moment of their existence must present to them under a different aspect? It would, then, be a most irrational enterprise, to attempt to prescribe to man what he ought to think of superstition, which is entirely under the cognizance of his imagination; for the admeasurement of which, as we have very frequently repeated, mortals will never have any common standard. To oppugn the superstitious opinions of man, is to commence hostilities with his imagination--to attack his fancy--to be at war with his organization--to enter the lists with his habits, which are of themselves sufficient to identify with his existence, the most absurd, the most unfounded ideas. The more imagination man has, the greater enthusiast he will be in matters of superstition; reason will have the less ability to undeceive him in his chimeras. In proportion as his fancy is powerful, these chimeras themselves will become food necessary to its ardency. In fine, to battle with the superstitious notions of man, is to combat the passions he usually indulges for the marvellous; it is to assail him on that side where he is least vulnerable; to force him in that position where he unites all his strength--where he keeps the most vigilant guard. In despite of reason, those persons who have a lively imagination, are perpetually re-conducted to those chimeras which habit renders dear to them, even when they are found troublesome; although they should prove fatal. Thus a tender soul hath occasion for a God that loveth him; the happy enthusiast needeth a God who rewardeth him; the unfortunate visionary wants a God who taketh part in his sorrows; the melancholy devotee requireth a God who chastiseth him, who maintaineth him in that trouble which has become necessary to his diseased organization; the frantic penitent exacteth a God, who imposes upon him an obligation to be inhuman towards himself; whilst the furious fanatic would believe himself unhappy, if he was deprived of a God who commanded him to make others experience the effect of his inflamed humours, of his unruly passions. He is, without question, a less dangerous enthusiast who feeds himself with agreeable illusions, than he whose soul is tormented with odious spectres. If a placid, tender soul, does not commit ravages in society, a mind agitated by incommodious passions, cannot fall to become, sooner or later, troublesome to his fellow creatures. The God of a Socrates, or a Fenelon, may be suitable to souls as gentle as theirs; but he cannot be that of a whole nation, in which it is extremely rare men of their temper are found: if honest men only view their gods as fitted with benefits; vicious, restless, inflexible individuals, will give them their own peculiar character, from thence will authorize themselves to indulge, a free course to their passions. Each will view his deities with eyes only open to his own reigning prejudice; the number of those who will paint them as afflicting will always be greater, much more to be feared, than those who shall delineate them under seducing colors: for one mortal that those ideas will render happy, there will be thousands who will be made miserable; they will, sooner or later, become an inexhaustible source of contention; a never failing spring of extravagant folly; they will disturb the mind of the ignorant, over whom impostors will always gain ascendancy--over whom fanatics will ever have an influence: they will frighten the cowardly, terrify the pussillanimous, whose imbecility will incline them to perfidy, whose weakness will render them cruel; they will cause the most upright to tremble, who, even while practising virtue, will fear incurring the divine displeasure; but they will not arrest the progress of the wicked, who will easily cast them aside, that they may the more commodiously deliver themselves up to crime; or who will even take advantage of these principles, to justify their transgression. In short, in the hands of tyrants, these systems will only serve to crush the liberty of the people; will be the pretext for violating, with impunity, all equitable rights. In the hands of priests they will become talismans, suitable to intoxicate the mind; calculated to hoodwink the people; competent to subjugate equally the sovereign as the subject; in the hands of the multitude, they will be a two-edged sword, with which they will inflict, at the same moment, the most dreadful wounds on themselves--the most serious injuries on their associates. On the other hand, these theological systems, as we have seen, being only an heap of contradictions, which represent the Divinity under the most incompatible characters, seem to doubt his wisdom, when they invite mortals to address their prayers to him, for the gratification of their desires; to pray to him to grant that which he has not thought it proper to accord to them. Is it not, in other words, to accuse him with neglecting his creatures? Is it not to ask him to alter the eternal decrees of his justice; to change the invariable laws which he hath himself determined? Is it not to say to him, "O, my God! I acknowledge thy wisdom, thine omniscience, thine infinite goodness; nevertheless, thou forgettest thy servant; thou losest sight of thy creature; thou art ignorant, or thou feignest ignorance, of that which he wanteth: dost thou not see that I suffer from the marvellous arrangement, which thy wise laws have made in the universe? Nature, against thy commands, actually renders my existence painful: change then, I beseech thee, the essence which thy will has given to all beings. Grant that the elements, at this moment, lose in my favor their distinguishing properties; so order it, that heavy bodies shall not fall, that fire shall not burn, that the brittle frame which I have received at thine hands, shall not suffer those shocks which it every instant experiences. Rectify, I pray thee, for my happiness, the plan which thine infinite prudence hath marked out from all eternity." Such is very nearly the euchology which man adopts; such are the discordant, absurd requests which he continually puts up to the Divinity, whose wisdom he extols; whose intelligence he holds forth to admiration; whose providence he eulogizes; whose equity he applauds; whilst he is hardly ever contented with the effects of the divine perfections. Man is not more consequent in those thanksgivings which he believes himself obliged to offer to the throne of grace. Is it not just, he exclaims, to thank the Divinity for his kindness? Would it not be the height of ingratitude to refuse our homage to the Author of our existence; to withhold our acknowledgements from the Giver of every thing that contributes to render it agreeable? But does he not frequently offer up his thanksgivings for actions that overwhelm his neighbour with misery? Does not the husbandman on the hill, return thanks for the rain that irrigates his lands parched with drought, whilst the cultivator of the valley is imploring a cessation of those showers which deluge his fields--that render useless the labour of his hands? Thus each becomes thankful for that which his own limited views points out to him as his immediate interest, regardless of the general effect produced by those circumstances on the welfare of his fellows. Each believes that it is either a peculiar dispensation of providence in his own favor, or a signal of the heavenly wrath directed against himself; whilst the slightest reflection would clearly evince it to be nothing more than the inevitable order of things, which take place without the least regard to his individual comforts. From this it will be obvious, that these systems do not teach their votaries, practically, to love their neighbour as themselves. But in matters of superstition, mortals never reason; they only follow the impulse of their fears; the direction of their imagination; the force of their temperament; the bent of their own peculiar passions; or those of the guides, who have acquired the right of controling their understanding. Fear has generally created these systems; terror unceasingly accompanies them; it is impossible to reason while we tremble. We do not, however, flatter ourselves that reason will be capable, all at once, to deliver the human race from those errors with which so many causes united have contributed to poison him. The vainest of all projects would be the expectation of curing, in an instant, those epidemical follies, those hereditary fallacies, rooted during so many ages; continually fed by ignorance; corroborated by custom; borne along by the passions made inveterate by interest; grounded upon the fears, established upon the ever regenerating calamities of nations. The ancient disasters of the earth gave birth to the first systems of theology, new revolutions would equally produce others; even if the old ones should chance to be forgotton. Ignorant, miserable, trembling beings, will always either form to themselves systems, or else adopt those which imposture shall announce--which fanaticism shall be disposed to give them. It would therefore be useless to propose more than to hold out reason to those who are competent to understand it; to present truth to those who can sustain its lustre; who can with serenity contemplate its refulgent beauty; to undeceive those who shall not be inclined to oppose obstacles to demonstration; to enlighten those who shall not desire pertinaciously to persist in error. Let us, then, infuse courage into those who want power to break with their illusions; let us cheer up the honest man, who is much more alarmed by his fears than the wicked, who, in despite of his opinions, always follows the rule of his passions: let us console the unfortunate, who groans under a load of prejudices which he has not examined: let us dissipate the incertitude of those whose doubts render them unhappy; who ingenuously seek after truth, but who find in philosophy itself only wavering opinions little calculated to determine their fluctuating minds. Let us banish from the man of genius those chimerical speculations which cause him to waste his time; let us wrest his gloomy superstition from the intimidated mortal, who, duped by his vain fears, becomes useless to society; let us remove from the atrabilarious being those systems that afflict him, that exasperate his mind, that do nothing more than kindle his anger against his incredulous neighbour; let us tear from the fanatic those terrible ideas which arm him with poniards against the happiness of his fellows; let us pluck from tyrants, let us snatch from impostors, those opinions which enable them to terrify, to enslave, and to despoil the human species. In removing from honest men their formidable notions let us not encourage those of the wicked, who are the enemies of society; let us deprive the latter of those illegitimate sources, upon which they reckon to expiate their transgressions; let us substitute actual, present terrors, to those which are distant and uncertain to those which do not arrest the most licentious excesses; let us make the profligate blush at beholding themselves what they really are; let the ministers of superstition tremble at finding their conspiracies discovered; let them dread the arrival of the day, when mortals, cured of those errors with which they have abused them, will no longer be enslaved by their artifice. If we cannot induce nations to lay aside their inveterate prejudices, let us, at least, endeavour to prevent them from relapsing into those excesses, to the commission of which superstition has so frequently hurried them; let mankind form to himself chimeras, if he cannot do without them; let him think as he may feel inclined, provided his reveries do not make him forget that he is a man; that he does not cease to remember that a sociable being is not formed to resemble the most ferocious animals. Let us try to balance the fictitious interests of superstition, by the more immediate advantages of the earth. Let sovereigns, as well as their subjects, at length acknowledge that the benefits resulting from truth, the happiness arising from justice, the tranquillity springing out of wholesome laws, the blessings to be derived from a rational education, the superiority to be obtained from a physical, peaceable morality, are much more substantive than those they vainly expect from their respective superstitious systems, Let them feel, that advantages so tangible, benefits so precious, ought not to be sacrificed to uncertain hopes, so frequently contradicted by experience. In order to convince themselves of these truths, let every rational man consider the numberless crimes which superstition has caused upon our globe; let them study the frightful history of theology: let them read over the biography of its more odious ministers, who have too often fanned the spirit of discord--kindled the flame of fury--stirred up the raging fire of madness: let the prince and the people, at least, sometimes learn to resist the demoniacal passions of these interpreters of unintelligible systems, which they acknowledge they do not themselves at all understand, especially when they shall invoke them to be inhuman; when they shall preach up intolerance; when they invite them to barbarity; above all, when they shall command them, in the name of their gods, to stifle the cries of nature; to put down the voice of equity; to be deaf to the remonstrances of reason; to be blind to the interest of society. Feeble mortals! led astray by error, how long will ye permit your imagination, so active, so prompt to seize on the marvellous, to continue to seek out of the universe pretexts to render you baneful to yourselves, injurious to the beings with whom ye live in society? Wherefore do ye not follow in peace, the simple, easy route marked out for ye by nature? To what purpose do ye scatter thorns on the road of life? What avails it, that ye multiply those sorrows to which your destiny exposes ye? What advantages can ye derive from systems with which the united efforts of the whole human species have not been competent to bring ye acquainted? Be content, then, to remain ignorant of that, which the human mind is not formed to comprehend; which human intellect is not adequate to embrace: occupy yourselves with truth; learn the invaluable art of living happy; perfection your morals; give rationality to your governments; simplify your laws, and rest them on the pillars of justice; watch over education, and see that it is of an invigorating quality; give attention to agriculture, and encourage beneficial improvements; foster those sciences which are actually useful, and place their professors in the most honorable stations; labor with ardour, and munificently reward those whose assiduity promotes the general welfare; oblige nature by your industry to open her immense stores, to become propitious to your exertions; do these things, and the gods will oppose nothing to your felicity. Leave to idle thinkers, to soporific dreamers, to waking visionaries, to useless enthusiasts, the unproductive task, the unfruitful occupation, of fathoming depths, from which ye ought sedulously to divert your attention; enjoy with moderation, the benefits attached to your present existence; augment their number when reason sanctions the multiplication; but never attempt to spring yourselves forward, beyond the sphere destined for your action. If you must have chimeras, permit your fellow creatures to have theirs also; but never cut the throats of your brethren, when, they cannot rave in your own manner. If ye will have unintelligible systems, if ye cannot be contented without marvellous doctrines, if the infirmities of your nature require an invisible crutch, adopt such as may best suit with your humour; select those which you may think most calculated to support your tottering frame; if ye can, let your own imagination give birth to them; but do not insist on your neighbours making the same choice with yourself: do not suffer these imaginary theories to infuriate your mind: let them not so far intoxicate your understandings, as to make ye mistake the duties ye owe to the real beings with whom ye are associated. Always remember, that amongst these duties, the foremost, the most consequential, the most immediate in its bearing upon the felicity of the human race, stands, _a reasonable indulgence for the foibles of others_. CHAP. XI. _Defence of the Sentiments contained in this Work.--Of Impiety.--Do there exist Atheists?_ What has been said in the course of this work, ought sufficiently to undeceive those who are capable of reasoning on the prejudices to which they attached so much importance. But the most evident truths frequently crouch under fear; are kept at bay by habit; prove abortive against the force of enthusiasm. Nothing is more difficult to remove from its resting place than error, especially when long prescription has given it full possession of the human mind. It is almost unassailable when supported by general consent; when it is propagated by education; when it has acquired inveteracy by custom: it commonly resists every effort to disturb it, when it is either fortified by example, maintained by authority, nourished by the hopes, or cherished by the fears of a people, who have learned to look upon these delusions as the most potent remedies for their sorrows. Such are the united forces which sustain the empire of unintelligible systems over the inhabitants of this world; they appear to give stability to their throne; to render their power immoveable; to make their reign as lasting as the human race. We need not, then, be surprised at seeing the multitude cherish their own blindness; encourage their superstitious notions; exhibit the most sensitive fear of truth. Every where we behold mortals obstinately attached to phantoms from which they expect their happiness; notwithstanding these fallacies are evidently the source of all their sorrows. Deeply smitten with the marvellous, disdaining the simple, despising that which is easy of comprehension, but little instructed in the ways of nature, accustomed to neglect the use of their reason, the uninformed, from age to age, prostrate themselves before those invisible powers which they have been taught to adore. To these they address their most fervent prayers; implore them in their misfortunes, offer them the fruits of their labour; they are unceasingly occupied either with thanking their vain idols for benefits they have not received at their bands, or else in requesting from them favors which they can never obtain. Neither experience nor reflection can undeceive them; they do not perceive these idols, the work of their own hands, have always been deaf to their intreaties; they ascribe it to their own conduct; believe them to be violently irritated: they tremble, groan out the most dismal lamentations; sigh bitterly in their temples; strew their altars with presents; load their priests with their largesses; it never strikes their attention that these beings, whom they imagine so powerful, are themselves submitted to nature; are never propitious to their wishes, but when nature herself is favourable. It is thus that nations are the accomplices of those who deceive them; are themselves as much opposed to truth as those who lead them astray. In matters of superstition, there are very few persons who do not partake, more or less, of the opinions of the illiterate. Every man who throws aside the received ideas, is generally considered a madman; is looked upon as a presumptuous being, who insolently believes himself much wiser than his associates. At the magical sound of superstition, a sudden panic, a tremulous terror takes possession of the human species: whenever it is attacked, society is alarmed; each individual imagines he already sees the celestial monarch lift his avenging arm against the country in which rebellious nature has produced a monster with sufficient temerity to brave these sacred opinions. Even the most moderate persons tax with folly, brand with sedition, whoever dares combat with these imaginary systems, the rights of which good sense has never yet examined. In consequence, the man who undertakes to tear the bandeau of prejudice, appears an irrational being--a dangerous citizen; his sentence is pronounced with a voice almost unanimous; the public indignation, roused by fanaticism, stirred up by imposture, renders it impossible for him to be heard in his defence; every one believes himself culpable, if he does not exhibit his fury against him; if he does not display his zeal in hunting him down; it is by such means man seeks to gain the favor of the angry gods, whose wrath is supposed to be provoked. Thus the individual who consults his reason, the disciple of nature, is looked upon as a public pest; the enemy to superstition is regarded as the enemy to the human race; he who would establish a lasting peace amongst men, is treated as the disturber of society; the man who would be disposed to cheer affrighted mortals by breaking those idols, before whom prejudice has obliged them to tremble, is unanimously proscribed as an atheist. At the bare name of atheist the superstitious man quakes; the deist himself is alarmed; the priest enters the judgement chair with fury glaring in his eyes; tyranny prepares his funeral pile, the vulgar applaud the punishments which irrational, partial laws, decree against the true friend of the human species. Such are the sentiments which every man must expect to excite, who shall dare to present his fellow creatures with that truth which all appear to be in search of, but which all either fear to find, or else mistake what we are disposed to shew it to them. But what is this man, who is so foully calumniated as an atheist? He is one who destroyeth chimeras prejudicial to the human race; who endeavours to re-conduct wandering mortals back to nature; who is desirous to place them upon the road of experience; who is anxious that they should actively employ their reason. He is a thinker, who, having meditated upon matter, its energies, its properties, its modes of acting, hath no occasion to invent ideal powers, to recur to imaginary systems, in order to explain the phenomena of the universe--to develope the operations of nature; who needs not creatures of the imagination, which far from making him better understand nature, do no more than render it wholly inexplicable, an unintelligible mass, useless to the happiness of mankind. Thus, the only men who can have pure, simple, actual ideas of nature, are considered either as absurd or knavish speculators. Those who form to themselves distinct, intelligible notions of the powers of the universe, are accused of denying the existence of this power: those who found every thing that is operated in this world, upon determinate, immutable laws, are accused with attributing every thing to chance; are taxed with blindness, branded with delirium, by those very enthusiasts themselves, whose imagination, always wandering in a vacuum, regularly attribute the effects of nature to fictitious causes, which have no existence but in their own heated brain; to fanciful beings of their own creation; to chimerical powers, which they obstinately persist in preferring to actual, demonstrable causes. No man in his proper senses can deny the energy of nature, or the existence of a power by virtue of which matter acts; by which it puts itself in motion; but no man can, without renouncing his reason, attribute this power to an immaterial substance; to a power placed out of nature; distinguished from matter; having nothing in common with it. Is it not saying, this power does not exist, to pretend that it resides in an unknown being, formed by an heap of unintelligible qualities, of incompatible attributes, from whence necessarily results a whole, impossible to have existence? Indestructible elements, the atoms of Epicurus, of which it is said the motion, the collision, the combination, have produced all beings, are, unquestionably, much more tangible than the numerous theological systems, broached in various parts of the earth. Thus, to speak precisely, they are the partizans of imaginary theories, the advocates of contradictory beings, the defenders of creeds, impossible to be conceived, the contrivers of substances which the human mind cannot embrace on any side, who are either absurd or knavish; those enthusiasts, who offer us nothing but vague names, of which every thing is denied, of which nothing is affirmed, are the real _Atheists_; those, I say, who make such beings the authors of motion, the preservers of the universe, are either blind or irrational. Are not those dreamers, who are incapable of attaching any one positive idea to the causes of which they unceasingly speak, true deniers? Are not those visionaries, who make a pure nothing the source of all beings, men really groping in the dark? Is it not the height of folly to personify abstractions, to organize negative ideas, and then to prostrate ourselves before the figments of our own brain? Nevertheless, they are men of this temper who regulate the opinions of the world; who hold up to public scorn, those who are consistent to principle; who expose to the most infuriate vengeance, those who are more rational than themselves. If you will but accredit those profound dreamers, there is nothing short of madness, nothing on this side the most complete derangement of intellect, that can reject a totally incomprehensible motive-power in nature. Is it, then, delirium to prefer the known to the unknown? Is it a crime to consult experience, to call in the evidence of our senses, in the examination of that which we are informed is the most important to be understood? Is it a horrid outrage to address ourselves to reason; to prefer its oracles to the sublime decisions of some sophists, who themselves acknowledge they do not comprehend any thing of the systems they announce? Nevertheless, according to these men, there is no crime more worthy of punishment--there is no enterprize more dangerous to morals--no treason more substantive against society, than to despoil these immaterial substances, which they know nothing about, of those inconceivable qualities which these learned doctors ascribe to them--of that equipage with which a fanatical imagination has furnished them--of those miraculous properties with which ignorance, fear, and imposture have emulated each other in surrounding them: there is nothing more impious than to call forth man's reason upon superstitious creeds; nothing more heretical than to cheer up mortals against systems, of which the idea alone is the source of all their sorrows; there is nothing more pious, nothing more orthodox, than to exterminate those audacious beings who have had sufficient temerity to attempt to break an invisible charm that keeps the human species benumbed in error: if we are to put faith in the asseverations of the hierarchy, to be disposed to break man's chains is to rend asunder his most sacred bonds. In consequence of these clamours, perpetually renovated by the disciples of imposture, kept constantly afloat by the theologians, reiterated by ignorance, those nations, which reason, in all ages, has sought to undeceive, have never dared to hearken to its benevolent lessons: they have stood aghast at the very name of physical truth. The friends of mankind were never listened to, because they were the enemies to his superstition--the examiners of the doctrines of his priest. Thus the people continued to tremble; very few philosophers had the courage to cheer them; scarcely any one dared brave public opinion; completely inoculated by superstition, they dreaded the power of imposture, the menaces of tyranny, which always sought to uphold themselves by delusion. The yell of triumphant ignorance, the rant of haughty fanaticism, at all time stifled the feeble voice of the disciple of nature; his lessons were quickly forgotten; he was obliged to keep silence; when he even dared to speak, it was frequently only in an enigmatical language, perfectly unintelligible to the great mass of mankind. How should the uninformed, who with difficulty compass the most evident truths, those that are the most distinctly announced, be able to comprehend the mysteries of nature, presented under half words, couched under intricate emblems. In contemplating the outrageous language which is excited among theologians, by the opinions of those whom they choose to call atheists; in looking at the punishments which at their instigation were frequently decreed against them, should we not be authorized to conclude, that these doctors either are not so certain as they say they are, of the infallibility of their respective systems; or else that they do not consider the opinions of their adversaries so absurd as they pretend? It is always either distrust, weakness, or fear, frequently the whole united, that render men cruel; they have no anger against those whom they despise; they do not look upon folly as a punishable crime. We should be content with laughing at an irrational mortal, who should deny the existence of the sun; we should not think of punishing him, unless we had, ourselves, taken leave of our senses. Theological fury never proves more than the imbecility of its cause. Lucian describes Jupiter, who disputing with Menippus, is disposed to strike him to the earth with his thunder; upon which the philosopher says to him, "Ah! thou vexest thyself, thou usest thy thunder! then thou art in the wrong." The inhumanity of these men-monsters, whose profession it was to announce chimerical systems to nations, incontestibly proves, that they alone have an interest in the invisible powers they describe; of which they successfully avail themselves to terrify, mortals: they are these tyrants of the mind, however, who, but little consequent to their own principles, undo with one hand that which they rear up with the other: they are these profound logicians who, after having formed a deity filled with goodness, wisdom and equity, traduce, disgrace, and completely annihilate him, by saving he is cruel, capricious, unjust, and despotic: this granted, these men are truly impious; decidedly heretical. He who knoweth not this system, cannot do it any injury, consequently cannot be called impious. "To be impious," says Epicurus, "is not to take away from the illiterate the gods which they have; it is to attribute to these gods the opinions of the vulgar." To be impious is to insult systems which we believe; it is knowingly to outrage them. To be impious, is to admit a benevolent, just God, at the same time we preach up persecution and carnage. To be impious, is to deceive men in the name of a Deity, whom we make use of as a pretext for our own unworthy passions. To be impious, is to speak falsely on the part of a God, whom we suppose to be the enemy of falsehood. In fine, to be impious, is to make use of the name of the Divinity in order to disturb society--to enslave it to tyrants--to persuade man that the cause of imposture is the cause of God; it is to impute to God those crimes which would annihilate his divine perfections. To be impious, and irrational, at the same time, is to make, by the aggregation of discrepant qualities, a mere chimera of the God we adore. On the other hand, to be pious, is to serve our country with fidelity; it is to be useful to our fellow creatures; to labour to the welfare of society. Every one can put in his claim to this piety, according to his faculties; he who meditates can render himself useful, when he has the courage to announce truth--to attack error--to battle those prejudices which everywhere oppose themselves to the happiness of mankind; it is to be truly useful, it is even a duty, to wrest from the hands of mortals those homicidal weapons which wretched fanatics so profusely distribute among them; it is highly praiseworthy to deprive imposture of its influence; it is loving our neighbour as ourself to despoil tyranny of its fatal empire over opinion, which at all times it so successfully employs to elevate knaves at the expence of public happiness; to erect its power upon the ruins of liberty; to establish unruly passions upon the wreck of public security. To be truly pious, is religiously to observe the wholesome laws of nature; to follow up faithfully those duties which she prescribes to us; in short, to be pious is to be humane, equitable, benevolent: it is to respect the rights of mankind. To be pious and rational at the same time, is to reject those reveries which would be competent to make us mistake the sober counsels of reason. Thus, whatever fanaticism, whatever imposture may say, he who denieth the solidity of systems which have no other foundation than an alarmed imagination; he who rejecteth creeds continually in contradiction with themselves; he who banisheth from his heart, doctrines perpetually wrestling with nature, always in hostility with reason, ever at war with the happiness of man; he, I repeat, who undeceiveth himself on such dangerous chimeras, when his conduct shall not deviate from those invariable rules which sound morality dictates, which nature approves, which reason prescribes, may be fairly reputed pious, honest, and virtuous. Because a man refuseth to admit contradictory systems, as well as the obscure oracles, which are issued in the name of the gods, does it then follow, that such a man refuses to acknowledge the evident, the demonstrable laws of nature, upon which he depends, of which he in obliged to fulfil the necessary duties, under pain of being punished in this world; whatever he may be in the in the next? It is true, that if virtue could by any chance consist in an ignominious renunciation of reason, in a destructive fanaticism, in useless customs, the atheist, as he is called, could not pass for a virtuous being: but if virtue actually consists in doing to society all the good of which we are capable, this miscalled atheist may fairly lay claim to its practice: his courageous, tender soul, will not be found guilty, for hurling his legitimate indignation against prejudices, fatal to the happiness of the human species. Let us listen, however, to the imputations which the theologians lay upon those men they falsely denominate atheists; let us coolly, without any peevish humour, examine the calumnies which they vomit forth against them: it appears to them that atheism, (as they call differing in opinion from themselves,) is the highest degree of delirium that can assail the human mind; the greatest stretch of perversity that can infect the human heart; interested in blackening their adversaries, they make incredulity the undeniable offspring of folly; the absolute effect of crime. "We do not," say they to us, "see those men fall into the horrors of atheism, who have reason to hope the future state will be for them a state of happiness." In short, according to these metaphysical doctors, it is the interest of their passions which makes them seek to doubt systems, at whose tribunals they are accountable for the abuses of this life; it is the fear of punishment which is alone known to atheists; they are unceasingly repeating the words of a Hebrew prophet, who pretends that nothing but folly makes men deny these systems; perhaps, however, if he had suppressed his negation, he would have more closely aproximated the truth. Doctor Bentley, in his _Folly of Atheism_, has let loose the whole Billingsgate of theological spleen, which he has scattered about with all the venom of the most filthy reptiles: if he and other expounders are to be believed, "nothing is blacker than the heart of an atheist; nothing is more false than his mind. Atheism," according to them, "can only be the offspring of a tortured conscience, that seeks to disengage itself from the cause of its trouble. We have a right", says Derham, "to look upon an atheist as a monster among rational beings; as one of those extraordinary productions which we hardly ever meet with in the whole human species; and who, opposing himself to all other men, revolts not only against reason and human nature, but against the Divinity himself." We shall simply reply to all these calumnies by saying, it is for the reader to judge if the system which these men call atheism, be as absurd as these profound speculators (who are perpetually in dispute on the uninformed, ill organized, contradictory, whimsical productions of their own brain) would have it believed to be! It is true, perhaps, that the system of naturalism hitherto has not been developed in all its extent: unprejudiced persons however, will, at least, be enabled to know whether the author has reasoned well or ill; whether or not he has attempted to disguise the most important difficulties; distinctly to see if he has been disingenuous; they will be competent to observe if, like unto the enemies of human reason, he has recourse to subterfuges, to sophisms, to subtle discriminations, which ought always to make it suspected of those who use them, either that they do not understand or else that they fear the truth. It belongs then to candour, it is the province of disinterestedness, it is the duty of reason to judge, if the natural principles which have been here ushered to the world be destitute of foundation; it is to these upright jurisconsults that a disciple of nature submits his opinions: he has a right to except against the judgment of enthusiasm; he has the prescription to enter his caveat against the decision of presumptuous ignorance; above all, he is entitled to challenge the verdict of interested knavery. Those persons who are accustomed to think, will, at least find reasons to doubt many of those marvellous notions, which appear as incontestable truths only to those, who have never assayed them by the standard of good sense. We agree with Derham, that atheists are rare; but then we also say, that superstition has so disfigured nature, so entangled her rights--enthusiasm has so dazzled the human mind-terror has so disturbed the heart of man--imposture has so bewildered his imagination--tyranny has so enslaved his thoughts: in fine, error, ignorance, and delirium have so perplexed and confused the clearest ideas, that nothing is more uncommon than to find men who have sufficient courage to undeceive themselves on notions which every thing conspires to identify with their very existence. Indeed, many theologians in despite of those bitter invectives with which they attempt to overwhelm the men they choose to call atheists, appear frequently to have doubted whether any ever existed in the world. Tertullian, who, according to modern systems, would be ranked as an atheist, because he admitted a corporeal God, says, "Christianity has dissipated the ignorance in which the Pagans were immersed respecting the divine essence, and there is not an artizan among the Christians who does not see God, and who does not know him." This uncertainty of the theologic professors was, unquestionably, founded upon those absurd ideas, which they ascribe to their adversaries, whom they have unceasingly accused with attributing every thing to chance--to blind causes--to dead, inert matter, incapable of self-action. We have, I think, sufficiently justified the partizans of nature against these ridiculous accusations; we have throughout the whole proved, and we repeat it, that chance is a word devoid of sense, which as well as all other unintelligible words, announces nothing but ignorance of actual causes. We have demonstrated that matter is not dead; that nature, essentially active and self-existent, has sufficient energy to produce all the beings which she contains--all the phenomena we behold. We have, throughout, made it evident that this cause is much more tangible, more easy of comprehension, than the inconceivable theory to which theology assigns these stupendous effects. We have represented, that the incomprehensibility of natural effects was not a sufficient reason for assigning to them a system still more incomprehensible than any of those of which, at least, we have a slight knowledge. In fine, if the incomprehensibility of a system does not authorize the denial of its existence, it is at least certain that the incompatibility of the attributes with which it is clothed, authorizes the assertion, that those which unite them cannot be any thing more than chimeras, of which the existence is impossible. This granted, we shall be competent to fix the sense that ought to be attached to the name of atheist; which, notwithstanding, the theologians lavish on all those who deviate in any thing from their opinions. If, by atheist, be designated a man who denieth the existence of a power inherent in matter, without which we cannot conceive nature, and if it be to this power that the name of God is given, then there do not exist any atheists, and the word under which they are denominated would only announce fools. But if by atheists be understood men without enthusiasm; who are guided by experience; who follow the evidence of their senses; who see nothing in nature but what they actually find to have existence, or that which they are capacitated to know; who neither do, nor can perceive any thing but matter essentially active, moveable, diversely combined, in the full enjoyment of various properties, capable of producing all the beings who display themselves to our visual faculties, if by atheists be understood natural philosophers, who are convinced that without recurring to chimerical causes, they can explain every thing, simply by the laws of motion; by the relation subsisting between beings; by their affinities; by their analogies; by their aptitude to attraction; by their repulsive powers; by their proportions; by their combinations; by their decomposition: if by atheists be meant these persons who do not understand what _Pneumatology_ is, who do not perceive the necessity of spiritualizing, or of rendering incomprehensible, those corporeal, sensible, natural causes, which they see act uniformly; who do not find it requisite to separate the motive-power from the universe; who do not see, that to ascribe this power to an immaterial substance, to that whose essence is from thenceforth totally inconceivable, is a means of becoming more familiar with it: if by atheists are to be pourtrayed those men who ingenuously admit that their mind can neither receive nor reconcile the union of the negative attributes and the theological abstractions, with the human and moral qualities which are given to the Divinity; or those men who pretend that from such an incompatible alliance, there could only result an imaginary being; seeing that a pure spirit is destitute of the organs necessary to exercise the qualities, to give play to the faculties of human nature: if by atheists are described those men who reject systems, whose odious and discrepant qualities are solely calculated to disturb the human species--to plunge it into very prejudicial follies: if, I repeat it, thinkers of this description are those who are called atheists, it is not possible to doubt their existence; and their number would be considerable, if the light of sound natural philosophy was more generally diffused; if the torch of reason burnt more distinctly; or if it was not obscured by the theological bushel: from thence, however, they would be considered neither as irrational; nor as furious beings, but as men devoid of prejudice, of whose opinions, or if they prefer it, whose ignorance, would be much more useful to the human race, than those ideal sciences, those vain hypotheses, which for so many ages have been the actual causes of all man's tribulation. Doctor Cudworth, in his _Intellectual System_, reckons four species of atheists among the ancients. First.--The disciples of Anaximander, called _Hylopathians_, who attributed every thing to matter destitute of feeling. His doctrine was, that men were born of earth united with water, and vivified by the beams of the sun; his crime seems to have been, that he made the first geographical maps and sun-dials; declared the earth moveable and of a cylindrical form. Secondly.--The _Atomists_, or the disciples of Democritus, who attribute every thing, to the concurrence of atoms. His crime was, having first taught that the milky way was occasioned by the confused light from a multitude of stars. Thirdly.--The _Stoics_, or the disciples of Zeno, who admitted a blind nature acting after certain laws. His crime appears to be, that he practised virtue with unwearied perseverance, and taught that this quality alone would render mankind happy. Fourthly.--The _Hylozoists_, or the disciples of Strato, who attributed life to matter. His crime consisted in being one of the most acute natural philosophers of his day, enjoying high favour with Ptolemy Philadelphus, an intelligent prince, whose preceptor be was. If, however, by atheists, are meant those men, who are obliged to avow, that they have not one idea of the system they adore, or which they announce to others; who cannot give any satisfactory account, either of the nature or of the essence of their immaterial substances; who can never agree amongst themselves on the proofs which they adduce in support of their System; on the qualities or on the modes of action of their incorporeities, which by dint of negations they render a mere nothing; who either prostrate themselves, or cause others to bow down, before the absurd fictions of their own delirium: if, I say, by atheists, be denominated men of this stamp, we shall be under the necessity of allowing, that the world is filled with them: we shall even be obliged to place in this number some of the most active theologians, who are unceasingly reasoning upon that Which they do not understand; who are eternally disputing upon points which they cannot demonstrate; who by their contradictions very efficaciously undermine their own systems; who annihilate all their own assertions of perfection, by the numberless imperfections with which they clothe them; who rebel against their gods by the atrocious character under which they depict them. In short, we shall be able to consider as true atheists, those credulous, weak persons, who upon hearsay and from tradition, bend the knee before idols, of whom they have no other ideas, than those which are furnished them by their spiritual guides, who themselves acknowledge that they comprehend nothing about the matter. What has been said amply proves that the theologians themselves have not always known the sense they could affix to the word atheist; they have vaguely attacked, in an indistinct manner, calumniated with it, those persons whose sentiments and principles were opposed to their own. Indeed, we find that these sublime professors, always infatuated with their own particular opinions, have frequently been extremely lavish in their accusations of atheism, against all those whom they felt a desire to injure; whose characters it was their pleasure to paint in unfavourable colours; whose doctrines they wished to blacken; whose systems they sought to render odious: they were certain of alarming the illiterate, of rousing the antipathies of the silly, by a loose imputation, or by a word, to which ignorance attaches the idea of horror, merely because it is unacquainted with its true sense. In consequence of this policy, it has been no uncommon spectacle to see the partizans of the same sect, the adorers of the same gods, reciprocally treat each other as atheists, in the fervour of their theological quarrels; to be an atheist, in this sense, is not to have, in every point, exactly the same opinions as those with whom we dispute, either on superstitious or religious subjects. In all times the uninformed have considered those as atheists, who did not think upon the Divinity precisely in the same manner as the guides whom they were accustomed to follow. Socrates, the adorer of a unique God, was no more than an atheist in the eyes of the Athenian people. Still more, as we have already observed, those persons have frequently been accused of atheism, who have taken the greatest pains to establish the existence of the gods, but who have not produced satisfactory proofs: when their enemies wished to take advantage of them, it was easy to make them pass for atheists, who had wickedly betrayed their cause, by defending it too feebly. The theologians have frequently been very highly incensed against those who believed they had discovered the most forcible proof of the existence of their gods, because they were obliged to discover that their adversaries could make very contrary inductions from their propositions; they did not perceive that it was next to impossible not to lay themselves open to attack, in establishing principles visibly founded upon that which each man sees variously. Thus Paschal says, "I have examined if this God, of whom all the world speaks, might not have left some marks of himself. I look every where, and every where I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers one nothing, that may not be a matter of doubt and inquietude. If I saw nothing in nature which indicated a Divinity, I should determine with myself, to believe nothing about it. If every where I saw the sign of a creator, I should repose myself in peace, in the belief of one. But seeing too much to deny, and too little to assure me of his existence, I am in a situation that I lament, and in which I have an hundred times wished, that if a God doth sustain nature, he would give unequivocal marks of it, and that if the signs which he hath given be deceitful, that he would suppress them entirely; that he said all or nothing, to the end that I might see which side I ought to follow." In a word, those who have most vigorously taken up the cause of the theological systems, have been taxed with atheism and irreligion; the most zealous partizans have been looked upon as deserters, have been contemplated as traitors; the most orthodox theologians have not been able to guarantee themselves from this reproach; they have mutually bespatered each other; prodigally lavished, with malignant reciprocity, the most abusive terms: nearly all have, without doubt, merited these invectives, if in the term atheist be included those men who have not any idea of their various systems, that does not destroy itself, whenever they are willing to submit it to the touchstone of reason. From whence we may conclude, without subjecting ourselves to the reproach of being hasty, that error will not stand the test of investigation; that it will not pass the ordeal of comparison; that it is in its hues a perfect chamelion; that consequently it can never do more than lead to the most absurd deductions: that the most ingenious systems, when they have their foundations in hallucination, crumble like dust under the rude band of the assayer; that the most sublimated doctrines, when they lack the substantive quality of rectitude, evaporate under the scrutiny of the sturdy examiner, who tries them in the crucible; that it is not by levelling abusive language against those who investigate sophisticated theories, they will either be purged of their absurdities, acquire solidity, or find an establishment to give them perpetuity; that moral obliquities, can never be made rectilinear by the mere application of unintelligible terms, or by the inconsiderate jumble of discrepant properties, however gaudy the assemblage: in short, that the only criterion of truth is, _that it is ever consistent with itself_. CHAP. XII. _Is what is termed Atheism compatible with Morality?_ After having proved the existence of those whom the superstitious bigot, the heated theologian, the inconsequent theist, calls _atheists_, let us return to the calumnies which are so profusely showered upon them by the deicolists. According to Abady, in his _Treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion_, "an atheist cannot be virtuous: to him virtue is only a chimera; probity no more than a vain scruple; honesty nothing but foolishness;--he knoweth no other law than his interest: where this sentiment prevails, conscience is only a prejudice; the law of nature only an illusion; right no more than an error; benevolence hath no longer any foundation; the bonds of society are loosened; the ties of fidelity are removed; friend is ready to betray friend; the citizen to deliver up his country; the son to assassinate his father, in order to enjoy his inheritance, whenever they shall find occasion, and that authority or silence shall shield them from the arm of the secular power, which alone is to be feared. The most inviolable rights, and most sacred laws, must no longer be considered, except as dreams and visions." Such, perhaps, would be the conduct, not of a feeling, thinking, reflecting being, susceptible of reason; but of a ferocious brute, of an irrational wretch, who should not have any idea of the natural relations which subsist between beings, reciprocally necessary to each other's happiness. Can it actually be supposed, that a man capable of experience, furnished with the faintest glimmerings of sound sense, would lend himself to the conduct which is here ascribed to the atheist; that is to say, to a man who is conversant with the evidence of facts; who ardently seeks after truth; who is sufficiently susceptible of reflection, to undeceive himself by reasoning upon those prejudices which every one strives to shew him as important; which all voices endeavour to announce to him as sacred? Can it, I repeat, be supposed, that any enlightened, any polished society, contains a citizen so completely blind, not to acknowledge his most natural duties; so very absurd, not to admit his dearest interests; so completely besotted not to perceive the danger he incurs in incessantly disturbing his fellow creatures; or in following no other rule, than his momentary appetites? Is not every human being who reasons in the least possible manner, obliged to feel that society is advantageous to him; that he hath need of assistance; that the esteem of his fellows is necessary to his own individual happiness; provoked, that he has every thing to fear from the wrath of his associates; that the laws menace whoever shall dare to infringe them? Every man who has received a virtuous education, who has in his infancy experienced the tender cares of a parent; who has in consequence tasted the sweets of friendship; who has received kindness; who knows the worth of benevolence; who sets a just value upon equity; who feels the pleasure which the affection of our fellow creatures procures for us; who endures the inconveniences which result from their aversion who smarts under the sting which is inflicted by their scorn, is obliged to tremble at losing, by his measures, such manifest advantages--at incurring such, imminent danger. Will not the hatred of others, the fear of punishment, his own contempt of himself, disturb his repose every time that, turning, inwardly upon his own conduct, he shall contemplate it under the same perspective as does his neighbour? Is there then no remorse but for those who believe in incomprehensible systems? Is the idea that we are tinder the eye of beings of whom we have but vague notions, more forcible than the thought that we are viewed by our fellow men; than the fear of being detected by ourselves; than the dread of exposure; than the cruel necessity of becoming despicable in our own eyes; than the wretched alternative, to be constrained to blush guiltily, when we reflect on our wild career, and the sentiments which it must infallibly inspire? This granted, we shall reply deliberately to this Abady, that an atheist is a man who understands nature, who studies her laws; who knows his own nature; who feels what it imposes upon him. An atheist hath experience; this experience proves to him every moment that vice can injure him; that his most concealed faults, his most secret dispositions, may be detected--may display his character in open day; this experience proves to him that society is useful to his happiness; that his interest authoritatively demands he should attach himself to the country that protects him, which enables him to enjoy in security the benefits of nature; every thing shews him that in order to be happy he must make himself beloved; that his parent is for him the most certain of friends; that ingratitude would remove him from his benefactor; that justice is necessary to the maintenance of every association; that no man, whatever way he his power, can be content with himself, when he knows he is an object of public hatred. He who has maturely reflected upon himself, upon his own nature, upon that of his associates, upon his own wants, upon the means of procuring them, cannot prevent himself from becoming acquainted with his duties--from discovering the obligations he owes to himself, as well as those which he owes to others; from thence he has morality, he has actual motives to confirm himself to its dictates; he is obliged to feel, that these duties are imperious: if his reason be not disturbed by blind passions, if his mind be not contaminated by vicious habits, he will find that virtue is the surest road to felicity. The atheists, as they are styled, or the fatalists, build their system upon necessity: thus, their moral speculations, founded upon the nature of things, are at least much more permanent, much more invariable, than those which only rest upon systems that alter their aspect according to the various dispositions of their adherents--in conformity with the wayward passions of those who contemplate, them. The essence of things, and the immutable laws of nature, are not subject to fluctuate; it is imperative with the atheist, as he is facetiously called by the theologian, to call whatever injures himself either vice or folly; to designate that which injures others, crime; to describe all that is advantageous to society, every thing which contributes to its permanent happiness, virtue. It will be obvious, then, that the principles of the miscalled atheist are much less liable to be shaken, than those of the enthusiast, who shall have studied a baby from his earliest Infancy; who should have devoted not only his days, but his nights, to gleaning the scanty portion of actual information that he scatters through his volumes; they will have a much more substantive foundation than those of the theologian, who shall construct his morality upon the harlequin scenery of systems that so frequently change, even in his own distempered brain. If the atheist, as they please to call those who differ in opinion with themselves, objects to the correctness, of--their systems, he cannot deny his own existence, nor that of beings similar to himself, by whom he is surrounded; he cannot doubt the reciprocity of the relations that subsist between them; he cannot question the duties which spring out of these relations; Pyrrhonism, then, cannot enter his mind upon the actual principles of morality; which is nothing more than the science of the relations of beings living together in society. If, however, satisfied with a barren, speculative knowledge of his duties, the atheist of the theologian should not apply them in his conduct--if, hurried along by the current of his ungovernable passions--if, borne forward by criminal habits--if, abandoned to shameful vices-if, possessing a vicious temperament, which he has not been sedulous to correct--if, lending himself to the stream of outrageous desires, he appears to forget his moral obligations, it by no means follows, either that he hath no principles, or that his principles are false: it can only be concluded from such conduct, that in the intoxication of his passions, in the delirium of his habits, in the confusion of his reason, he does not give activity to doctrines grounded upon truth; that he forgets to give currency to ascertained principles; that he may follow those propensities which lead him astray. In this, indeed, he will have dreadfully descended to the miserable level of the theologian, but he will nevertheless find him the partner of his folly--the partaker of his insanity--the companion of his crime. Nothing is, perhaps, more common among men, than a very marked discrepancy between the mind and the heart; that is to say, between the temperament, the passions, the habits the caprices, the imagination, and the judgment, assisted by reflection. Nothing is, in fact, more rare, than to find these harmoniously running upon all fours with each other; it is, however, only when they do, that we see speculation influence practice. The most certain virtues are those which are founded upon the temperament of man. Indeed, do we not every day behold mortals in contradiction with themselves? Does not their more sober judgment unceasingly condemn the extravagancies to which their undisciplined passions deliver them up? In short, doth not every thing prove to us hourly, that men, with the very best theory, have sometimes the very worst practice; that others with the most vicious theory, frequently adopt the most amiable line of conduct? In the blindest systems, in the most atrocious superstitions, in those which are most contrary to reason, we meet with virtuous men, the mildness of whose character, the sensibility of whose hearts, the excellence of whose temperament, re conducts them to humanity, makes them fall back upon the laws of nature, in despite of their furious theories. Among the adorers of the most cruel, vindictive, jealous gods, are found peaceable, souls, who are enemies to persecution; who set their faces against violence; who are decidedly opposed to cruelty: among the disciples of a God filled with mercy, abounding in clemency, are seen barbarous monsters; inhuman cannibals: nevertheless, both the one and the other acknowledge, that their gods ought to serve them for a model. Wherefore, then, do they not in all things conform themselves? It is because the most wicked systems cannot always corrupt a virtuous soul; that those which are most bland, most gentle in their precepts, cannot always restrain hearts driven along by the impetuosity of vice. The organization will, perhaps, be always more potential than either superstition or religion. Present objects, momentary interests, rooted habits, public opinion, have much more efficacy than unintelligible theories, than imaginary systems, which themselves depend upon the organic structure of the human frame. The point in question then is, to examine if the principles of the atheist, as he is erroneously called, be true, and not whether his conduct be commendable? An atheist, having an excellent theory, founded upon nature, grafted upon experience, constructed upon reason, who delivers himself up to excesses, dangerous to himself, injurious to society, is, without doubt, an inconsistent man. But he is not more to be feared than a superstitious bigot; than a zealous enthusiast; or than even a religious man who, believing in a good, confiding in an equitable, relying on a perfect God, does not scruple to commit the most frightful devastations in his name. An atheistical tyrant would assuredly not be more to be dreaded than a fanatical despot. An incredulous philosopher, however, is not so mischievous a being as an enthusiastic priest, who either fans the flame of discord among his fellow subjects, or rises in rebellion against his legitimate monarch. Would, then, an atheist clothed with power, be equally dangerous as a persecuting priest-ridden king; as a savage inquisitor; as a whimsical devotee; or, as a morose bigot? These are assuredly more numerous in the world than atheists, as they are ludicrously termed, whose opinions, or whose vices are far from being in a condition to have an influence upon society; which is ever too much hoodwinked by the priest, too much blinded by prejudice, too much the slave of superstition, to be disposed to give them a patient hearing. An intemperate, voluptuous atheist, is not more dangerous to society than a superstitions bigot, who knows how to connect licentiousness, punic faith, ingratitude, libertinism, corruption of morals, with his theological notions. Can it, however, be ingeniously imagined, that a man, because he is falsely termed an atheist, or because he does not subscribe to the vengeance of the most contradictory systems, will therefore be a profligate debaucheé, malicious, and persecuting; that he will corrupt the wife of his friend; will turn his own wife adrift; will consume both his time and his money in the most frivolous gratifications; will be the slave to the most childish amusements; the companion of the most dissolute men; that he will discard all his old friends; that he will select his bosom confidents from the brazen betrayers of their native land--from among the hoary despoilers of connubial happiness--from out of the ranks of veteran gamblers; that he will either break into his neighbour's dwelling, or cut his throat; in short, that he will lend himself to all those excesses, the most injurious to society, the most prejudicial to himself, the most deserving public castigation? The blemishes of an atheist, then, as the theologian styles him, have not any thing more extraordinary in them than those of the superstitious man; they possess nothing with which his doctrine can be fairly reproached. A tyrant, who should be incredulous, would not be a more incommodious scourge to his subjects, than a theological autocrat, who should wield his sceptre to the misery of his people. Would the nation of the latter feel more happy, from the mere circumstance that the tyger who governed it believed in the most abstract systems, heaped the most sumptuous presents on the priests, and humiliated himself at their shrine? At least it must be acknowledged, according to the shewing of the theologian himself, that under the dominion of the atheist, a nation would not have to apprehend superstitious vexations; to dread persecutions for opinion; to fear proscriptions for ill-digested systems; neither would it witness those strange outrages that have sometimes been Committed for the interests of heaven, even under the mildest monarchs. If it was the victim to the turbulent passions of an unbelieving prince, the sacrifice to the folly of a sovereign who should be an infidel, it would not, at least, suffer from his blind infatuation, for theological systems which he does not understand; nor from his fanatical zeal, which of all the passions that infest monarchs, is ever the most destructive, always the most dangerous. An atheistical tyrant, who should persecute for opinions, would be a man not consistent with his own principles; he could not exist; he would not, indeed, according to the theologian, be an atheist at most, he would only furnish one more example, that mortals much more frequently follow the blind impulse of their passions, the more immediate stimulus of their interest, the irresistible torrent of their temperament, than their speculations, however grave, however wise. It is, at least, evident, that an atheist has one pretext less than a credulous prince, for exercising his natural wickedness. Indeed, if men condescended to examine things coolly, they would find that on this earth the name of God is but too frequently made use of as a motive to indulge the worst of human passions. Ambition, imposture, and tyranny, have often formed a league to avail themselves of its influence, to the end that they might blind the people, and bend them beneath a galling yoke: the monarch sometimes employs it to give a divine lustre to his person--the sanction of heaven to his rights--the confidence of its votaries to his most unjust, most extravagant whims. The priest frequently uses it to give currency to his pretensions, to the end that he may with impunity gratify his avarice, minister to his pride, secure his independence. The vindictive, enraged, superstitious being, introduces the cause of his gods, that he may give free scope to his fury, which he qualifies with zeal. In short, superstition becomes dangerous, because it justifies those passions, lends legitimacy to those crimes, holds forth as commendable those excesses, of which it does not fail to gather the fruit: according to its ministers, every thing is permitted to revenge the most high: thus the name of the Divinity is made use of to authorize the most baneful actions, to palliate the most injurious transgressions. The atheist, as he is called, when he commits crimes, cannot, at least, pretend that it is his gods who command them, or who clothe them with the mantle of their approval, this is the excuse the superstitious being offers for his perversity; the tyrant for his persecutions; the priest for his cruelty, and for his sedition; the fanatic for the ebullition of his boiling passions; the penitent for his inutility. "They are not," says Bayle, "the general opinions of the mind, but the passions, which determine us to act." Atheism, as it is called, is a system which will not make a good man wicked but it may, perhaps, make a wicked man good. "Those," says the same author, "who embraced the sect of Epicurus, did not become debaucheés because they had adopted the doctrine of Epicurus; they only lent themselves to the system, then badly understood, because they were debaucheés." In the same manner, a perverse man may embrace atheism, because he will flatter himself, that this system will give full scope to his passions: he will nevertheless be deceived. Atheism, as it is called, if well understood, is founded upon nature and upon reason, which never can, like superstition, either justify or expiate the crimes of the profligate. From the diffusion of doctrines which make morality depend upon unintelligible, incomprehensible systems, that are proposed to man for a model, there has unquestionably resulted very great inconvenience. Corrupt souls, in discovering, how much each of these suppositions are erroneous or doubtful, give loose to the rein of their vices, and conclude there are not more substantive motives for acting well; they imagine that virtue, like these fragile systems, is merely chimerical; that there is not any cogent solid reason for practising it in this world. Nevertheless, it must be evident, that it is not as the disciples of any particular tenet, that we are bound to fulfil the duties of morality; it is as men, living together in society, as sensible beings seeking to secure to ourselves a happy existence, that we should feel the moral obligation. Whether these systems maintain their ground, or whether the do not, our duties will remain the same; our nature, if consulted, will incontestibly prove, that _vice is a decided evil, that virtue is an actual, a substantial good_. If, then, there be found atheists who have denied the distinction of good and evil, or who have dared to strike at the foundations of morality; we ought to conclude, that upon this point they have reasoned badly; that they have neither been acquainted with the nature of man, nor known the true source of his duties; that they have falsely imagined that ethics, as well as theology, was only an ideal science; that the fleeting systems once destroyed, there no longer remained any bonds to connect mortals. Nevertheless, the slightest reflection would have incontestibly proved, that morality is founded upon immutable relations subsisting between sensible, intelligent, sociable beings; that without virtue, no society can maintain itself; that without putting the curb on his desires, no mortal can conserve himself: man is constrained from his nature to love virtue, to dread crime, by the same necessity that obliges him to seek happiness, and fly from sorrow: thus nature compels him to place a distinction between those objects which please, and those objects Which injure him. Ask a man, who is sufficiently irrational to deny the difference between virtue and vice, if it would be indifferent to him to be beaten, robbed, calumniated, treated with ingratitude, dishonoured by his wife, insulted by his children, betrayed by his friend? His answer will prove to you, that whatever he may say, he discriminates the actions of mankind; that the distinction between good and evil, does not depend either upon the conventions of men, or upon the ideas which they may have of particular systems; upon the punishments or upon the recompenses which attend mortals in a future existence. On the contrary, an atheist, as he is denominated, who should reason with justness, would feel himself more interested than another in practising those virtues to which he finds his happiness attached in this world. If his views do not extend themselves beyond the limits of his present existence, he must, at least, desire to see his days roll on in happiness and in peace. Every man, who during the calm of his passions, falls back upon himself, will feel that his interest invites him to his own preservation; that his felicity rigorously demands he should take the necessary means to enjoy life peaceably that it becomes an imperative duty to himself to keep his actual abode free from alarm; his mind untainted by remorse. Man oweth something to man, not merely because he would offend any particular system, if he was to injure his fellow creature; but because in doing him an injury he would offend a man; would violate the laws of equity; in the maintenance of which every human being finds himself interested. We every day see persons who are possessed of great talents, who have very extensive knowledge, who enjoy very keen penetration, join to these advantages a very corrupt heart; who lend, themselves to the most hideous vices: their opinions may be true in some respects, false in a great many others; their principles may be just, but their inductions are frequently defective; very often precipitate. A man may embrace sufficient knowledge to detect some of his errors, yet command too little energy to divest himself of his vicious propensities. Man is a being whose character depends upon his organization, modified by habit--upon his temperament, regulated by education--upon his propensities, marshalled by example--upon his; passions, guided by his government; in short, he is only what transitory or permanent circumstances make him: his superstitious ideas are obliged to yield to this temperament; his imaginary systems feel a necessity to accommodate themselves to his propensities; his theories give way to his interests. If the system which constitutes man an atheist in the eyes of this theologic friend, does not remove him from the vices with which he was anteriorly tainted, neither does it tincture him with any new ones; whereas, superstition furnishes its disciples with a thousand pretexts for committing evil without repugnance; induces them even to applaud themselves for the commission of crime. Atheism, at least, leaves men such as they are; it will neither increase a man's intemperance, nor add to his debaucheries, it will not render him more cruel than his temperament before invited him to be: whereas superstition either lacks the rein to the most terrible passions, gives loose to the most abominable suggestions, or else procures easy expiations for the most dishonourable vices. "Atheism," says Chancellor Bacon, "leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, laws, reputation, and every thing that can serve to conduct him to virtue; but superstition destroys all these things, and erects itself into a tyranny over the understandings of men: this is the reason why atheism never disturbs the government, but renders man more clear-sighted, as seeing nothing beyond the bounds of this life." The same author adds, "that the times in which men have turned towards atheism, have been the most tranquil; whereas superstition has always inflamed their minds, and carried them on to the greatest disorders; because it infatuates the people with novelties, which wrest from and carry with them all the authority of government." Men, habituated to meditate, accustomed to make study a pleasure, are not commonly dangerous citizens: whatever may be their speculations, they never produce sudden revolutions upon the earth. The winds of the people, at all times susceptible to be inflamed by the marvellous, their dormant passions liable to be aroused by enthusiasm, obstinately resist the light of simple truths; never heat themselves for systems that demand a long train of reflection--that require the depth of the most acute reasoning. The system of atheism, as the priests choose to denominate it, can only be the result of long meditation; the fruit of connected study; the produce of an imagination cooled by experience: it is the child of reason. The peaceable Epicurus never disturbed Greece; his philosophy was publicly taught in Athens during many centuries; he was in incredible favour with his countrymen, who caused statues to be erected to him; he had a prodigious number of friends, and his school subsisted for a very long period. Cicero, although a decided enemy to the Epicureans, gives a brilliant testimony to the probity both of Epicurus and his disciples, who were remarkable for the inviolable friendship they bore each other. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, there was at Athens a public professor of the philosophy of Epicurus, paid by that emperor, who was himself a stoic. Hobbes did not cause blood to flow in England, although in his time, religious fanaticism made a king perish on the scaffold. The poem of Lucretius caused no civil wars in Rome; the writings of Spinosa did not excite the same troubles in Holland as the disputes of Gomar and D'Arminius. In short, we can defy the enemies to human reason to cite a single example, which proves in a decisive manner that opinions purely philosophical, or directly contrary to superstition, have ever excited disturbances in the state. Tumults have generally arisen from theological notions, because both princes and people have always foolishly believed they ought to take a part in them. There is nothing so dangerous as that empty philosophy, which the theologians have combined with their systems. It is to philosophy, corrupted by priests, that it peculiarly belongs to blow up the embers of discord; to invite the people to rebellion; to drench the earth with human blood. There is, perhaps, no theological question, which has not been the source of immense mischief to man; whilst all the writings of those denominated atheists, whether ancient or modern, have never caused any evil but to their authors; whom dominant imposture has frequently immolated at his deceptive shrine. The principles of atheism are not formed for the mass of the people, who are commonly under the tutelage of their priests; they are not calculated for those frivolous capacities, not suited to those dissipated minds, who fill society with their vices, who hourly afford evidence of their own inutility; they will not gratify the ambitious; neither are they adapted to intriguers, nor fitted for those restless beings who find their immediate interest in disturbing the harmony of the social compact: much less are they made for a great number of persons, who, enlightened in other respects, have not sufficient courage to divorce themselves from the received prejudices. So many causes unite themselves to confirm man in those errors which he draws in with his mother's milk, that every step that removes him from these endeared fallacies, costs him uncommon pain. Those persons who are most enlightened, frequently cling on some side to the general prepossession. By giving up these revered ideas, we feel ourselves, as it were, isolated in society: whenever we stand alone in our opinions, we no longer seem to speak the language of our associates; we are apt to fancy ourselves placed on a barren, desert island, in sight of a populous, fruitful country, which we can never reach: it therefore requires great courage to adopt a mode of thinking that has but few approvers. In those countries where human knowledge has made some progress; where, besides, a certain freedom of thinking is enjoyed, may easily be found a great number of deicolists, theists, or incredulous beings, who, contented with having trampled under foot the grosser prejudices of the illiterate, have not dared to go back to the source--to cite the more subtle systems before the tribunal of reason. If these thinkers did not stop on the road, reflection would quickly prove to them that those systems which they have not the fortitude to examine, are equally injurious to sound ratiocination, fully as revolting to good sense, quite as repugnant to the evidence of experience, as any of those doctrines, mysteries, fables, or superstitious customs, of which they have already acknowledged the futility; they would feel, as we have already proved, that all these things are nothing more than the necessary consequences of those primitive errors which man has indulged for so many ages in succession; that in admitting these errors, they no longer have any rational cause to reject the deductions which the imagination has drawn from them. A little attention would distinctly shew them, that it is precisely these errors that are the true cause of all the evils of society; that those endless disputes, those sanguinary quarrels, to which superstition and the spirit of party every instant give birth, are the inevitable effects of the importance they attach to errors which possess all the means of distraction, that scarcely ever fail to put the mind of man into a state of combustion. In short, nothing is more easy than to convince ourselves that imaginary systems, not reducible to comprehension, which are always painted under terrific aspects, must act upon the imagination in a very lively manner, must sooner or later produce disputes--engender enthusiasm--give birth to fanaticism--end in delirium. Many persons acknowledge, that the extravagances to which superstition lends activity, are real evils; many complain of the abuse of superstition, but there are very few who feel that this abuse, together with the evils, are the necessary consequences of the fundamental principles of all superstition; which are founded upon the most grievous notions, which rest themselves on the most tormenting opinions. We daily see persons undeceived upon superstitious ideas, who nevertheless pretend that this superstition "is salutary for the people;" that without its supernatural magic, they could not be kept within due bounds; in other words, could not be made the voluntary slaves of the priest. But, to reason thus, is it not to say, poison is beneficial to mankind, that therefore it is proper to poison them, to prevent them from making an improper use of their power? Is it not in fact to pretend it is advantageous to render them absurd; that it is a profitable course to make them extravagant; wholesome to give them an irrational bias; that they have need of hobgoblins to blind them; require the most incomprehensible systems to make them giddy; that it is imperative to submit them either to impostors or to fanatics, who will avail themselves of their follies to disturb the repose of the world? Again, is it an ascertained fact, does experience warrant the conclusion, that superstition has a useful influence over the morals of the people? It appears much more evident, is much better borne out by observation, falls more in with the evidence of the senses, that it enslaves them without rendering them better; that it constitutes an herd of ignorant beings, whom panic terrors keep under the yoke of their task-masters; whom their useless fears render the wretched instruments of towering ambition--of rapacious tyrants; of the subtle craft of designing priests: that it forms stupid slaves, who are acquainted with no other virtue, save a blind submission to the most futile customs, to which they attach a much more substantive value than to the actual virtues springing out of the duties of morality; or issuing from the social compact which has never been made known to them. If by any chance, superstition does restrain some few individuals, it has no effect on the greater number, who suffer themselves to be hurried along by the epidemical vices with which they are infected: they are placed by it upon the stream of corruption, and the tide either sweeps them away, or else, swelling the waters, breaks through its feeble mounds, and involves the whole in one undistinguished mass of ruin. It is in those countries where superstition has the greatest power, that will always be found the least morality. Virtue is incompatible with ignorance; it cannot coalesce with superstition; it cannot exist with slavery: slaves can only be kept in subordination by the fear of punishment; ignorant children are for a moment intimidated by imaginary terrors. But freemen, the children of truth, have no fears but of themselves; are neither to be lulled into submission by visionary duties, nor coerced by fanciful systems; they yield ready obedience to the evident demonstrations of virtue; are the faithful, the invulnerable supporters of solid systems; cling with ardour to the dictates of reason; form impenetrable ramparts round their legitimate sovereigns; and fix their thrones on an immoveable basis, unknown to the theologian; that cannot be touched with unhallowed hands; whose duration will be commensurate with the existence of time itself. To form freemen, however, to have virtuous citizens, it is necessary to enlighten them; it is incumbent to exhibit truth to them; it is imperative to reason with them; it is indispensable to make them feel their interests; it is paramount to learn them to respect themselves; they must be instructed to fear shame; they must be excited to have a just idea of honour; they must be made familiar with the value of virtue, they must be shewn substantive motives for following its lessons. How can these happy effects ever be expected from the polluted fountains of superstition, whose waters do nothing more than degrade mankind? Or how are they to be obtained from the ponderous, bulky yoke of tyranny, which proposes nothing more to itself, than to vanquish them by dividing them; to keep them in the most abject condition by means of lascivious vices, and the most detestable crimes? The false idea, which so many persons have of the utility of superstition, which they, at least, judge to be calculated to restrain the licentiousness of the illiterate, arise from the fatal prejudice that it is a useful error; that truth may be dangerous. This principle has complete efficacy to eternize the sorrows of the earth: whoever shall have the requisite courage to examine these things, will without hesitation acknowledge, that all the miseries of the human race are to be ascribed to his errors; that of these, superstitious error must he the most prejudicial, from the importance which is usually attached to it; from the haughtiness with which it inspires sovereigns; from the worthless condition which it prescribes to subjects; from the phrenzy which it excites among the vulgar. We shall, therefore, be obliged to conclude, that the superstitious errors of man, rendered sacred by time, are exactly those which for the permanent interest of mankind, for the well-being of society, for the security of the monarch himself, demand the most complete destruction; that it is principally to their annihilation, the efforts of a sound philosophy ought to be directed. It is not to be feared, that this attempt will produce either disorders or revolutions: the more freedom shall accompany the voice of truth, the more convincing it will appear; although the more simple it shall be, the less it will influence men, who are only smitten with the marvellous; even those individuals who most sedulously seek after truth, who pursue it with the greatest ardour, have frequently an irresistible inclination, that urges them on, and incessantly disposes them to reconcile error with its antipode. That great master of the art of thinking, who holds forth to his disciples such able advice, says, with abundant reason, "that there is nothing but a good and solid philosophy, which can, like another Hercules, exterminate those monsters called popular errors: it is that alone which can give freedom to the human mind." Here is, unquestionably, the true reason why atheism, as it is called, of which hitherto the principles have not been sufficiently developed, appears to alarm even those persons who are the most destitute of prejudice. They find the interval too great between vulgar superstition and an absolute renunciation of it; they imagine they take a wise medium in compounding with error; they therefore reject the consequences, while they admit the principle; they preserve the shadow and throw away the substance, without foreseeing that, sooner or later, it must, by its obstetric art, usher into the world, one after another, the same follies which now fill the heads of bewildered human beings, lost in the labyrinths of incomprehensible systems. The major part of the incredulous, the greater number of reformers, do no more than prune a cankered tree, to whose root they dare not apply the axe; they do not perceive that this tree will in the end produce the same fruit. Theology, or superstition, will always be an heap of combustible matter: brooded in the imagination of mankind, it will always finish by causing the most terrible explosions. As long as the sacerdotal order shall have the privilege of infecting youth--of habituating their minds to tremble before unmeaning words--of alarming nations with the most terrific systems, so long will fanaticism be master of the human mind; imposture will, at its pleasure, cast the apple of discord among the members of the state. The most simple error, perpetually fed, unceasingly modified, continually exaggerated by the imagination of man, will by degrees assume a collossal figure, sufficiently powerful to upset every institution; amply competent to the overthrow of empires. Theism is a system at which the human mind cannot make a long sojourn; founded upon error, it will, sooner or later, degenerate into the most absurd, the most dangerous superstition. Many incredulous beings, many theists, are to be met with in those countries where freedom of opinion reigns; that is to say, where the civil power has known how to balance superstition. But, above all, atheists as they are termed, will be found in those nations where, superstition, backed by the sovereign authority, most enforces the ponderosity of its yoke; most impresses the volume of its severity; imprudently abuses its unlimited power. Indeed, when in these kind of countries, science, talents, the seeds of reflection, are not entirely stifled, the greater part of the men who think, revolt at the crying abuses of superstition; are ashamed of its multifarious follies; are shocked at the corruption of its professors; scandalized at the tyranny of its priests: are struck with horror at those massive chains which it imposes on the credulous. Believing with great reason, that they can never remove themselves too far from its savage principles, the system that serves for the basis of such a creed, becomes as odious as the superstition itself; they feel that terrific systems can only be detailed by cruel ministers; these become detestable objects to every enlightened, to every honest mind, in which either the love of equity, or the sacred fire of freedom resides; to every one who is the advocate of humanity--the indignant spurner of tyranny. Oppression gives a spring to the soul; it obliges man to examine closely into the cause of his sorrows; misfortune is a powerful incentive, that turns the mind to the side of truth. How formidable a foe must not outraged reason be to falsehood? It at least throws it into confusion, when it tears away its mask; when it follows it into its last entrenchment; when it proves, beyond contradiction, that _nothing is so dastardly as delusion detected, or tyrannic power held at bay._ CHAP. XIII. _Of the motives which lead to what is falsely called Atheism.--Can this System be dangerous?--Can it be embraced by the Illiterate?_ The reflections, as well as the facts which have preceded, will furnish a reply to those who inquire what interest man has in not admitting unintelligible systems? The tyrannies, the persecutions, the numberless outrages committed under these systems; the stupidity, the slavery, into which their ministers almost every where plunge the people; the sanguinary disputes to which they give birth; the multitude of unhappy beings with which their fatal notions fill the world; are surely abundantly sufficient to create the most powerful, the most interesting motives, to determine all sensible men, who possess the faculty of thought, to examine into the authenticity of doctrines, which cause so many serious evils to the inhabitants of the earth. A theist, very estimable for his talents, asks, "if there can be any other cause than an evil disposition, which can make men atheists?" I reply to him, yes, there are other causes. There is the desire, a very laudable one, of having a knowledge of interesting truths; there is the powerful interest of knowing what opinions we ought to hold upon the object which is announced to us as the most important; there is the fear of deceiving ourselves upon systems which are occupied with the opinions of mankind, which do not permit he should deceive himself respecting them with impunity. But when these motives, these causes, should not subsist, is not indignation, or if they will, an evil disposition, a legitimate cause, a good and powerful motive, for closely examining the pretensions, for searching into the rights of systems, in whose name so many crimes are perpetrated? Can any man who feels, who thinks, who has any elasticity in his soul, avoid being incensed against austere theories, which are visibly the pretext, undeniably the source, of all those evils, which on every side assail the human race? Are they not these fatal systems which are at once the cause and the ostensible reason of that iron yoke that oppresses mankind; of that wretched slavery in which he lives; of that blindness which hides from him his happiness; of that superstition, which disgraces him; of those irrational customs which torment him; of those sanguinary quarrels which divide him; of all the outrages which he experiences? Must not every breast in which humanity is not extinguished, irritate itself against that theoretical speculation, which in almost every country is made to speak the language of capricious, inhuman, irrational tyrants? To motives so natural, so substantive, we shall join those which are still more urgent, more personal to every reflecting man: namely, that benumbing terror, that incommodious fear, which must be unceasingly nourished by the idea of capricious theories, which lay man open to the most severe penalties, even for secret thoughts, over which he himself has not any controul; that dreadful anxiety arising out of inexorable systems, against which he may sin without even his own knowledge; of morose doctrines, the measure of which he can never be certain of having fulfilled; which so far from being equitable, make all the obligations lay on one side; which with the most ample means of enforcing restraint, freely permit evil, although they hold out the most excruciating punishments for the delinquents? Does it not then, embrace the best interests of humanity, become of the highest importance to the welfare of mankind, of the greatest consequence to the quiet of his existence, to verify the correctness of these systems? Can any thing be more rational than to probe to the core these astounding theories? Is it possible that any thing can be more just, than to inquire rigorously into the rights, sedulously to examine the foundations, to try by every known test, the stability of doctrines, that involve in their operations, consequences of such colossal magnitude; that embrace, in their dictatory mandates, matters of such high behest; that implicate the eternal felicity of such countless millions in the vortex of their action? Would it not be the height of folly to wear such a tremendous yoke without inquiry; to let such overwhelming notions pass current unauthenticated; to permit the soi-disant ministers of these terrific systems to establish their power, without the most ample verification of their patents of mission? Would it, I repeat, be at all wonderful, if the frightful qualities of some of these systems, as exhibited by their official expounders, whom the accredited functionaries of similar systems, do not scruple, in the face of day, to brand as impostors, should induce rational beings to drive them entirely from their hearts; to shake off such an intolerable burden of misery; to even deny the existence of such appalling doctrines, of such petrifying systems, which the superstitious themselves, whilst paying them their homage, frequently curse from the very bottom of their hearts? The theist, however, will not fail to tell the atheist, as he calls him, that these systems are not such as superstition paints them; that the colours are coarse, too glaring, ill assorted, the perspective out of all keeping; he will then exhibit his own picture, in which the tints are certainly blended with more mellowness, the colouring of a more pleasing hue, the whole more harmonious, but the distances equally indistinct: the atheist, in reply, will say, that superstition itself, with all the absurd prejudices, all the mischievous notions to which it gives birth, are only corollaries drawn from the fallacious ideas, from those obscure principles, which the deicolist himself indulges. That his own incomprehensible system authorizes the incomprehensible absurdities, the inconceivable mysteries, with which superstition abounds; that they flow consecutively from his own premises; that when once the mind of mortals is bewildered in the dark, inextricable mazes of an ill-directed imagination, it will incessantly multiply its chimeras. To assure the repose of mankind, fundamental errors must be annihilated; that he may understand his true relations, be acquainted with his imperative duties, primary delusions must be rectified; to procure him that serenity of soul, without which there can be no substantive happiness, original fallacies must be undermined. If the systems of the superstitious be revolting, if their theories be gloomy, if their dogmas are unintelligible, those of the theist will always be contradictory; will prove fatal, when he shall be disposed to meditate upon them; will become the source of illusions, with which, sooner or later, imposture will not omit to abuse his credulity. Nature alone, with the truths she discovers, is capable of lending to the human mind that firmness which falsehood will never be able to shake; to the human heart that self-possession, against which imposture will in vain direct its attacks. Let us again reply to those who unceasingly repeat that the interest of the passions alone conduct man to what is termed atheism: that it is the dread of future punishment that determines corrupt individuals to make the most strenuous efforts to break up a system they have reason to dread. We shall, without hesitation, agree that it is the interest of man's passions which excites him to make inquiries; without interest, no man is tempted to seek; without passion, no man will seek vigorously. The question, then, to be examined, is, if the passions and interests, which determine some thinkers to dive into the stability or the systems held forth to their adoption, are or are not legitimate? These interests have, already been exposed, from which it has been proved, that every rational man finds in his inquietudes, in his fears, reasonable motives to ascertain, whether or not it be necessary to pass his life in perpetual dread; in never ceasing agonies? Will it be said, that an unhappy being, unjustly condemned to groan in chains, has not the right of being willing to render them asunder; to take some means to liberate himself from his prison; to adopt some plan to escape from those punishments, which every instant threaten him? Will it be pretended that his passion for liberty has no legitimate foundation, that he does an injury to the companions of his misery, in withdrawing himself from the shafts of tyrannical infliction; or in furnishing, them also with means to escape from its cruel strokes? Is, then, an incredulous man, any thing more than one who has taken flight from the general prison, in which despotic superstition detains nearly all mankind? Is not an atheist, as he is called, who writes, one who has broken his fetters, who supplies to those of his associates who have sufficient courage to follow him, the means of setting themselves free from the terrors that menace them? The priests unceasingly repeat that it is pride, vanity, the desire of distinguishing himself from the generality of mankind, that determines man to incredulity. In this they are like some of those wealthy mortals, who treat all those as insolent who refuse to cringe before them. Would not every rational man have a right to ask the priest, where is thy superiority in matters of reasoning? What motives can I have to submit my reason to thy delirium? On the other hand, way it not be said to the hierarchy, that it is interest which makes them priests; that it is interest which renders them theologians; that it is for the interest of their passions, to inflate their pride, to gratify their avarice, to minister to their ambition, &c. that they attach themselves to systems, of which they alone reap the benefits? Whatever it may be, the priesthood, contented with exercising their power over the illiterate, ought to permit those men who do think, to be excused from bending the knee before their vain, illusive idols. We also agree, that frequently the corruption of morals, a life of debauchery, a licentiousness of conduct, even levity of mind, may conduct man to incredulity; but is it not possible to be a libertine, to be irreligious, to make a parade of incredulity, without being on that account an atheist? There is unquestionably a difference between those who are led to renounce belief in unintelligible systems by dint of reasoning, and those who reject or despise superstition, only because they look upon it as a melancholy object, or an incommodious restraint. Many persons, no doubt, renounce received prejudices, through vanity or upon hearsay; these pretended strong minds have not examined any thing for themselves; they act upon the authority of others, whom they suppose to have weighed things more maturely. This kind of incredulous beings, have not, then, any distinct ideas, any substantive opinions, and are but little capacitated to reason for themselves; they are indeed hardly in a state to follow the reasoning of others. They are irreligious in the same manner as the majority of mankind are superstitious, that is to say, by credulity like the people; or through interest like the priest. A voluptuary devoted to his appetites; a debaucheé drowned in drunkenness; an ambitious mortal given up to his own schemes of aggrandizement; an intriguer surrounded by his plots; a frivolous, dissipated mortal, absorbed by his gewgaws, addicted to his puerile pursuits, buried in his filthy enjoyments; a loose woman abandoned to her irregular desires; a choice spirit of the day: are these I say, personages, actually competent to form a sound judgment of superstition, which they have never examined? Are they in a condition to maturely weigh theories that require the utmost depth of thought? Have they the capabilities to feel the force of a subtle argument; to compass the whole of a system: to embrace the various ramifications of an extended doctrine? If some feeble scintillations occasionally break in upon the cimmerian darkness of their minds; if by any accident they discover some faint glimmerings of truth amidst the tumult of their passions; if occasionally a sudden calm, suspending, for a short season, the tempest of their contending vices, permits the bandeau of their unruly desires by which they are blinded, to drop for an instant from their hoodwinked eyes, these leave on them only evanescent traces; scarcely sooner received than obliterated. Corrupt men only attack the gods when they conceive them to be the enemies to their vile passions. Arrian says, "that when men imagine the gods are in opposition to their passions, they abuse them, and overturn their altars." The Chinese, I believe, do the same. The honest man makes war against systems which he finds are inimical to virtue--injurious to his own happiness--baneful to that of his fellow mortals--contradictory to the repose, fatal to the interests of the human species. The bolder, therefore, the sentiments of the honest atheist, the more strange his ideas, the more suspicious they appear to other men, the more strictly he ought to observe his own obligations; the more scrupulously he should perform his duties; especially if he be not desirous that his morals shall calumniate his system; which duly weighed, will make the necessity of sound ethics, the certitude of morality, felt in all its force; but which every species of superstition tends to render problematical, or to corrupt. Whenever our will is moved by concealed and complicated motives, it is extremely difficult to decide what determines it; a wicked man may be conducted to incredulity or to scepticism by those motives which he dare not avow, even to himself; in believing he seeks after truth, he may form an illusion to his mind, only to follow the interest of his passions; the fear of an avenging system will perhaps determine him to deny their existence without examination; uniformly because he feels them incommodious. Nevertheless, the passions sometimes happen to be just; a great interest carries us on to examine things more minutely; it may frequently make a discovery of the truth, even to him who seeks after it the least, or who is only desirous to be lulled to sleep, who is only solicitous to deceive himself. It is the same with a perverse man who stumbles upon truth, as it is with him, who flying from an imaginary danger, should encounter in his road a dangerous serpent, which in his haste he should destroy; he does that by accident, without design, which a man, less disturbed in his mind, would have done with premeditated deliberation. To judge properly of things, it is necessary to be disinterested; it is requisite to have an enlightened mind, to have connected ideas to compass a great system. It belongs, in fact, only to the honest man to examine the proofs of systems--to scrutinize the principles of superstition; it belongs only to the man acquainted with nature, conversant with her ways, to embrace with intelligence the cause of the SYSTEM OF NATURE. The wicked are incapable of judging with temper; the ignorant are inadequate to reason with accuracy; the honest, the virtuous, are alone competent judges in so weighty an affair. What do I say? Is not the virtuous man, from thence in a condition to ardently desire the existence of a system that remunerates the goodness of men? If he renounces those advantages, which his virtue confers upon him the right to hope, it is, undoubtedly, because he finds them imaginary. Indeed, every man who reflects will quickly perceive, that for one timid mortal, of whom these systems restrain the feeble passions, there are millions whose voice they cannot curb, of whom, on the contrary, they excite the fury; for one that they console, there are millions whom they affright, whom they afflict; whom they make unhappy: in short, he finds, that against one inconsistent enthusiast, which these systems, which are thought so excellent, render happy, they carry discord, carnage, wretchedness into vast countries; plunge whole nations into misery; deluge them with tears. However this may be, do not let us inquire into motives which may determine a man to embrace a system; let us rather examine the system itself; let us convince ourselves of its rectitude; if we shall find that it is founded upon truth, we shall never, be able to esteem it dangerous. It is always falsehood that is injurious to man; if error be visibly the source of his sorrows, reason is the true remedy for them; this is the panacea that can alone carry consolation to his afflictions. Do not let us farther examine the conduct of a man who presents us with a system; his ideas, as we have already said, may be extremely sound, when even his actions are highly deserving of censure. If the system of atheism cannot make him perverse, who is not so by his temperament, it cannot render him good, who does not otherwise know the motives that should conduct him to virtue. At least we have proved, that the superstitious man, when he has strong passions, when he possesses a depraved heart, finds even in his creed a thousand pretexts more than the atheist, for injuring the human species. The atheist has not, at least, the mantle of zeal to cover his vengeance; he has not the command of his priest to palliate his transports; he has not the glory of his gods to countenance his fury; the atheist does not enjoy the faculty of expiating, at the expence of a sum of money, the transgressions of his life; of availing himself of certain ceremonies, by the aid of which he may atone for the outrages he may have committed against society; he has not the advantage of being able to reconcile himself with heaven, by some easy custom; to quiet the remorse of his disturbed conscience, by an attention to outward forms: if crime has not deadened every feeling of his heart, he is obliged continually to carry within himself an inexorable judge, who unceasingly reproaches him for his odious conduct; who forces him to blush for his own folly; who compels him to hate himself; who imperiously obliges him to fear examination, to dread the resentment of others. The superstitious man, if he be wicked, gives himself up to crime, which is followed by remorse; but his superstition quickly furnishes him with the means a getting rid of it; his life is generally no more than a long series of error and grief, of sin and expiation, following each other in alternate succession; still more, he frequently, as we have seen, perpetrates crimes of greater magnitude, in order to wash away the first. Destitute of any permanent ideas on morality, he accustoms himself to look upon nothing as criminal, but that which the ministers, the official expounders of his system, forbid him to commit: he considers actions of the blackest dye as virtues, or as the means of effacing those transgressions, which are frequently held out to him as faithfully executing the duties of his creed. It is thus we have seen fanatics expiate their adulteries by the most atrocious persecutions; cleanse their souls from infamy by the most unrelenting cruelty; make atonement for unjust wars by the foulest means; qualify their usurpations by outraging every principle of virtue; in order to wash away their iniquities, bathe themselves in the blood of those superstitious victims, whose infatuation made them martyrs. An atheist, as he is falsely called, if he has reasoned justly, if he has consulted nature, hath principles more determinate, more humane, than the superstitious; his system, whether gloomy or enthusiastic, always conducts the latter either to folly or cruelty; the imagination of the former will never be intoxicated to that degree, to make him believe that violence, injustice, persecution, or assassination are either virtuous or legitimate actions. We every day see that superstition, or the cause of heaven, as it is called, hoodwinks even those persons who on every other occasion are humane, equitable, and rational; so much so, that they make it a paramount duty to treat with determined barbarity, those men who happen to step aside from their mode of thinking. An heretic, an incredulous being, ceases to be a man, in the eyes of the superstitious. Every society, infected with the venom of bigotry, offers innumerable examples of juridical assassination, which the tribunals commit without scruple, even without remorse. Judges who are equitable on every other occasion, are no longer so when there is a question of theological opinions; in steeping their hands in the blood of their victims, they believe, on the authority of the priests, they conform themselves to the views of the Divinity. Almost every where the laws are subordinate to superstition; make themselves accomplices in its fanatical fury; they legitimate those actions most opposed to the gentle voice of humanity; they even transform into imperative duties, the most barbarous cruelties. The president Grammont relates, with a satisfaction truly worthy of a cannibal, the particulars of the punishment of Vanini, who was burned at Thoulouse, although he had disavowed the opinions with which he was accused; this president carries his demoniac prejudices so far, as to find wickedness in the piercing cries, in the dreadful howlings, which torment wrested from this unhappy victim to superstitious vengeance. Are not all these avengers of the gods miserable men, blinded by their piety, who, under the impression of duty, wantonly immolate at the shrine of superstition, those wretched victims whom the priests deliver over to them? Are they not savage tyrants, who have the rank injustice to violate thought; who have the folly to believe they can enslave it? Are they not delirious fanatics, on whom the law, dictated by the most inhuman prejudices, imposes the necessity of acting like ferocious brutes? Are not all those sovereigns, who to gratify the vanity of the priesthood, torment and persecute their subjects, who sacrifice to their anthropophagite gods human victims, men whom superstitious zeal has converted into tygers? Are not those priests, so careful of the soul's health, who insolently break into the sacred sanctuary of man's mind, to the end that they may find in his opinions motives for doing him an injury, abominable knaves, disturbers of the public repose, whom superstition honours, but whom virtue detests? What villains are more odious in the eyes of humanity, what depredators more hateful to the eye of reason, than those infamous inquisitors, who by the blindness of princes, by the delirium of monarchs, enjoy the advantage of passing judgment on their own enemies; who ruthlessly commit them to the charity of the flames? Nevertheless, the fatuity of the people makes even these monsters respected; the favour of kings covers them with kindness; the mantle of superstitious opinion shields them from the effect of the just execration of every honest man. Do not a thousand examples prove, that superstition has every where produced the most frightful ravages: that it has continually justified the most unaccountable horrors? Has it not a thousand times armed its votaries with the dagger of the homicide; let loose passions much wore terrible than those which it pretended to restrain; broken up the most sacred bonds by which mortals are connected with each other? Has it not, under the pretext of duty, under the colour of faith, under the semblance of zeal, under the sacred name of piety, favoured cupidity, lent wings to ambition, countenanced cruelty, given a spring to tyranny? Has it not legitimatized murder; given a system to perfidy; organized rebellion; made a virtue of regicide? Have not those princes who have been foremost as the avengers of heaven, who have been the lictors of superstition, frequently themselves become its victims? In short, has it not been the signal for the most dismal follies, the most wicked outrages, the most horrible massacres? Has not its altars been drenched with human gore? Under whatever form it has been exhibited, has it not always been the ostensible cause of the most bare-faced violation--of the sacred rights of humanity? Never will an atheist, as he is called, as called, as he enjoys his proper senses, persuade himself that similar actions can be justifiable; never will he believe that he who commits them can be an estimable man; there is no one but the superstitious, whose blindness makes him forget the most evident principles of morality, whose callous soul renders him deaf to the voice of nature, whose zeal causes him to overlook the dictates of reason, who can by any possibility imagine the most destructive crimes are the most prominent features of virtue. If the atheist be perverse, he, at least, knows that he acts wrong; neither these systems, nor their priests, will be able to persuade him that he does right: one thing, however, is certain, whatever crimes he may allow himself to commit, he will never be capable of exceeding those which superstition perpetrates without scruple; that it encourages in those whom it intoxicates with its fury; to whom it frequently holds forth wickedness itself, either as expiations for offences, or else as orthodox, meritorious actions. Thus the atheist, however wicked he may be supposed, will at most be upon a level with the devotee, whose superstition encourages him to commit crimes, which it transforms into virtue. As to conduct, if he be debauched, voluptuous, intemperate, adulterous, the atheist in this differs in nothing from the most credulously superstitious, who frequently knows how to connect these vices with his credulity, to blend with his superstition certain atrocities, for which his priests, provided he renders due homage to their power, especially if he augments their exchequer, will always find means to pardon him. If he be in Hindoostan, his brahmins will wash him in the sacred waters of the Ganges, while reciting a prayer. If he be a Jew, upon making an offering, his sins will be effaced. If he be in Japan, he will be cleansed by performing a pilgrimage. If he be a Mahometan, he will be reputed a saint, for having visited the tomb of his prophet; the Roman pontiff himself will sell him indulgences; but none of them will ever censure him for those crimes he may have committed in the support of their several faiths. We are constantly told, that the indecent behaviour of the official expounders of superstition, the criminal conduct of the priests, or of their sectaries, proves nothing against the goodness of their systems. Admitted: but wherefore do they not say the same thing of the conduct of those whom they call atheists, who, as we have already proved, way have a very substantive, a very correct system of morality, even while leading a very dissolute life? If it be necessary to judge the opinions of mankind according to their conduct, which is the theory that would bear the scrutiny? Let us, then, examine the opinion of the atheist, without approving his conduct; let us adopt his mode of thinking, if we find it marked by the truth; if it shall appear useful; if it shall be proved rational; but let us reject his mode of action, if that should be found blameable. At the sight of a work performed with truth, we do not embarrass ourselves with the morals of the workman: of what importance is it to the universe, whether the illustrious Newton was a sober, discreet citizen, or a debauched intemperate man? It only remains for us to examine his theory; we want nothing more than to know whether he has reasoned acutely; if his principles be steady; if the parts of his system are connected; if his work contains more demonstrable truths, than bold ideas? Let us judge in the same manner of the principles of the atheist; if they appear strange, if they are unusual, that is a solid reason for probing them more strictly; if he has spoken truth, if he has demonstrated his positions, let us yield to the weight of evidence; if he be deceived in some parts, let us distinguish the true from the false; but do not let us fall into the hacknied prejudice, which on account of one error in the detail, rejects a multitude of incontestible truisms. Doctor Johnson, I think, says in his preface to his Dictionary, "when a man shall have executed his task with all the accuracy possible, he will only be allowed to have done his duty; but if he commits the slightest error, a thousand snarlers are ready to point it out." The atheist, when he is deceived, has unquestionably as much right to throw his faults on the fragility of his nature, as the superstitious man. An atheist may have vices, may be defective, he may reason badly; but his errors will never have the consequences of superstitious novelties; they will not, like these, kindle up the fire of discord in the bosom of nations; the atheist will not justify his vices, defend his wanderings by superstition; he will not pretend to infallibility, like those self-conceited theologians who attach the Divine sanction to their follies; who initiate that heaven authorizes those sophisms, gives currency to those falsehoods, approves those errors, which they believe themselves warranted to distribute over the face of the earth. It will perhaps be said, that the refusal to believe in these systems, will rend asunder one of the most powerful bonds of society, by making the sacredness of an oath vanish. I reply, that perjury is by no means rare, even in the most superstitious nations, nor even among the most religious, or among those who boast of being the most thoroughly convinced of the rectitude of their theories. Diagoras, superstitious as he was, and it was not well possible to be more so, it is said became an atheist, on seeing that the gods did not thunder their vengeance on a man who had taken them as evidence to a falsity. Upon this principle, how many atheists ought there to be? From the systems that have made invisible unknown beings the depositaries of man's engagements, we do not always see it result that they are better observed; or that the most solemn contracts have acquired a greater solidity. If history was consulted, it would now and then be in evidence, that even the conductors of nations, those who have said they were the images of the Divinity, who have declared that they held their right of governing immediately from his hands, have sometimes taken the Deity as the witness to their oaths, have made him the guarantee of their treaties, without its having had all the effect that might have been expected, when very trifling interests have intervened; it would appear, unless historians are incorrect, that they did not always religiously observe those sacred engagements they made with their allies, much less with their subjects. To form a judgment from these historic documents, we should be inclined to say, there have been those who had much superstition, joined with very little probity; who made a mockery both of gods and men; who perhaps blushed when they reviewed their own conduct: nor can this be at all surprising, when it not unfrequently happened that superstition itself absolved them from their oaths. In fact, does not superstition sometimes inculcate perfidy; prescribe violation of plighted faith? Above all, when there is a question of its own interests, does it not dispense with engagements, however solemn, made with those whom it condemns? It is, I believe, a maxim in the Romish church, that _"no faith is to be held with heretics."_ The general council of Constance decided thus, when, notwithstanding the emperor's passport, it decreed John Hus and Jerome of Prague to be burnt. The Roman pontiff has, it is well known, the right of relieving his sectaries from their oaths; of annulling their vows: this same pontiff has frequently arrogated to himself the right of deposing kings; of absolving their subjects from their oaths of fidelity. Indeed, it is rather extraordinary that oaths should be prescribed, by the laws of those nations which profess Christianity, seeing that Christ has expressly forbidden the use of them. If things were considered attentively, it would be obvious that under such management, superstition and politics are schools of perjury. They render it common: thus knaves of every description never recoil, when it is necessary to attest the name of the Divinity to the most manifest frauds, for the vilest interests. What end, then, do oaths answer? They are snares, in which simplicity alone can suffer itself to be caught: oaths, almost every where, are vain formalities, that impose nothing upon villains; nor do they add any thing to the sacredness of the engagements of honest men; who would neither have the temerity nor the wish to violate them; who would not think themselves less bound without an oath. A perfidious, perjured, superstitious being, has not any advantage over an atheist, who should fail in his promises: neither the one nor the other any longer deserves the confidence of their fellow citizens nor the esteem of good men; if one does not respect his gods, in whom he believes, the other neither respects his reason, his reputation, nor public opinion, in which all rational men cannot refuse to believe. Hobbes says, "an oath adds nothing to the obligation. For a covenant, if lawful, binds in the sight of God, without the oath, as much as with it: if unlawful, bindeth not at all: though it be confirmed with an oath." The heathen form was, "let Jupiter kill me else, as I kill this beast." Adjuration only augments, in the imagination of him who swears, the fear of violating an engagement, which he would have been obliged to keep, even without the ceremony of an oath. It has frequently been asked, if there ever was a nation that had no idea of the Divinity: and if a people, uniformly composed of atheists, would be able to subsist? Whatever some speculators may say, it does not appear likely that there ever has been upon our globe, a numerous people who have not had an idea of some invisible power, to whom they have shewn marks of respect and submission: it has been sometimes believed that the Chinese were atheists: but this is an error, due to the Christian missionaries, who are accustomed to treat all those as atheists, who do not hold opinions similar with their own upon Divinity. It always appears that the Chinese are a people extremely addicted to superstition, but that they are governed by chiefs who are not so, without however their being atheists for that reason. If the empire of China be as flourishing as it is said to be, it at least furnishes a very forcible proof that those who govern have no occasion to be themselves superstitious, in order to govern with propriety a people who are so. It is pretended that the Greenlanders have no idea of the Divinity. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe it of a nation so savage. Man, inasmuch as he is a fearful, ignorant animal, necessarily becomes superstitious in his misfortunes: either he forms gods for himself, or he admits the gods which others are disposed to give him; it does not then appear, that we can rationally suppose there may have been, or that there actually is, a people on the earth a total stranger to some Divinity. One will shew us the sun, the moon, or the stars; the other will shew us the sea, the lakes, the rivers, which furnish him his subsistence, the trees which afford him an asylum against the inclemency of the weather; another will shew us a rock of an odd form; a lofty mountain; or a volcano that frequently astonishes him by its emission of lava; another will present you with his crocodile, whose malignity he fears; his dangerous serpent, the reptile to which he attributes his good or bad fortune. In short, each individual will make you behold his phantasm or his tutelary or domestic gods with respect. But from the existence of his gods, the savage does not draw the same inductions as the civilized, polished man: the savage does not believe it a duty to reason continually upon their qualities; he does not imagine that they ought to influence his morals, nor entirely occupy his thoughts: content with a gross, simple, exterior worship, he does not believe that these invisible powers trouble themselves with his conduct towards his fellow creatures; in short, he does not connect his morality with his superstition. This morality is coarse, as must be that of all ignorant people; it is proportioned to his wants, which are few; it is frequently irrational, because it is the fruit of ignorance; of inexperience; of the passions of men but slightly restrained, or to say thus, in their infancy. It is only numerous, stationary, civilized societies, where man's wants are multiplied, where his interests clash, that he is obliged to have recourse to government, to laws, to public worship, in order to maintain concord. It is then, that men approximating, reason together, combine their ideas, refine their notions, subtilize their theories; it is then also, that those who govern them avail themselves of invisible powers, to keep them within bounds, to render them docile, to enforce their obedience, to oblige them to live peaceably. It was thus, that by degrees, morals and politics found themselves associated with superstitious systems. The chiefs of nations, frequently, themselves, the children of superstition, but little enlightened upon their actual interests; slenderly versed in sound morality; with an extreme exilty of knowledge on the actuating motives of the human heart; believed they had effected every thing requisite for the stability of their own authority; as well as achieved all that could guarantee the repose of society, that could consolidate the happiness of the people, in rendering their subjects superstitious like themselves; by menacing them with the wrath of invisible powers; in treating them like infants who are appeased with fables, like children who are terrified by shadows. By the assistance of these marvellous inventions, to which even the chiefs, the conductors of nations, are themselves frequently the dupes; which are transmitted as heirlooms from race to race; sovereigns were dispensed from the trouble of instructing themselves in their duties; they in consequence neglected the laws, enervated themselves in luxurious ease, rusted in sloth; followed nothing but their caprice: the care of restraining their subjects was reposed in their deities; the instruction of the people was confided to their priests, who were commissioned to train them to obedience, to make them submissive, to render them devout, to teach them at an early age to tremble under the yoke of both the visible and invisible gods. It was thus that nations, kept by their tutors in a perpetual state of infancy, were only restrained by vain, chimerical theories. It was thus that politics, jurisprudence, education, morality, were almost every where infected with superstition; that man no longer knew any duties, save those which grew out of its precepts: the ideas of virtue were thus falsely associated with those of imaginary systems, to which imposture generally gave that language which was most conducive to its own immediate interests: mankind thus fully persuaded, that without these marvellous systems, there could not exist any sound morality, princes, as well as subjects, equally blind to their actual interests, to the duties of nature, to their reciprocal rights, habituated themselves to consider superstition as necessary to mortals--as indispensibly requisite to govern men--as the most effectual method of preserving power--as the most certain means of attaining happiness. It is from these dispositions, of which we have so frequently demonstrated the fallacy, that so many persons, otherwise extremely enlightened, look upon it as an impossibility that a society formed of atheists, as they are termed, could subsist for any length of time. It does not admit a question, that a numerous society, who should neither have religion, morality, government, laws, education, nor principles, could not maintain itself; that it would simply congregate beings disposed to injure each other, or children who would follow nothing but the blindest impulse; but then is it not a lamentable fact, that with all the superstition that floats in the world, the greater number of human societies are nearly in this state? Are not the sovereigns of almost every country in a continual state of warfare with their subjects? Are not the people, in despite of their superstition, not withstanding the terrific notions which it holds forth, unceasingly occupied with reciprocally injuring each other; with rendering themselves mutually unhappy? Does not superstition itself, with its supernatural notions, unremittingly flatter the vanity of monarchs, unbridle the passions of princes, throw oil into the fire of discord, which it kindles between those citizens who are divided in their opinion? Could those infernal powers, who are supposed to be ever on the alert to mischief mankind, be capable of inflicting greater evils upon the human race than spring from fanaticism, than arise out of the fury to which theology gives birth? Could atheists, however irrational they may be supposed, if assembled together in society, conduct themselves in a more criminal manner? In short, is it possible they could act worse than the superstitious, who, saturated with the most pernicious vices, guided by the most extravagant systems, during so many successive ages, have done nothing more than torment themselves with the most cruel inflictions; savagely cut each other's throats, without a shadow of reason; make a merit of mutual extermination? It cannot be pretended they would. On the contrary, we boldly assert, that a community of atheists, as the theologian calls them, because they cannot fall in with his mysteries, destitute of all superstition, governed by wholesome laws, formed by a salutary education, invited to the practice of virtue by instantaneous recompences, deterred from crime by immediate punishments, disentangled from illusive theories, unsophisticated by falsehood, would be decidedly more honest, incalculably more virtuous, than those superstitious societies, in which every thing contributes to intoxicate the mind; where every thing conspires to corrupt the heart. When we shall be disposed usefully to occupy ourselves with the happiness of mankind, it is with superstition that the reform must commence; it is by abstracting these imaginary theories, destined to affright the ignorant, who are completely in a state of infancy, that we shall be able to promise ourselves the desirable harvest of conducting man to a state of maturity. It cannot be too often repeated, there can be no morality without consulting the nature of man, without studying his actual relations with the beings of his own species; there can be no fixed principle for man's conduct, while it is regulated upon unjust theories; upon capricious doctrines; upon corrupt systems; there can be no sound politics without attending to human temperament, without contemplating him as a being associated for the purpose of satisfying his wants, consolidating his happiness, and assuring its enjoyment. No wise government can found itself upon despotic systems; they will always make tyrants of their representatives. No laws can be wholesome, that do not bottom themselves upon the strictest equity; which have not for their object the great end of human society. No jurisprudence can be advantageous for nations, if its administration be regulated by capricious systems, or by human passions deified. No education can be salutary, unless it be founded upon reason; to be efficacious to its proposed end, it must neither be construed upon chimerical theories, nor upon received prejudices. In short, there can be no probity, no talents, no virtue, either under corrupt masters, or under the conduct of those priests who render man the enemy to himself--the determined foe to others; who seek to stifle in his bosom the germ of reason; who endeavour to smother science, or who try to damp his courage. It will, perhaps, be asked, if we can reasonably flatter ourselves with ever reaching the point to make a whole people entirely forget their superstitious opinions; or abandon the ideas which they have of their gods? I reply, that the thing appears utterly impossible; that this is not the end we can propose to ourselves. These ideas, inculcated from the earliest ages, do not appear of a nature to admit eradication from the mind of the majority of mankind: it would, perhaps be equally arduous to give them to those persons, who, arrived at a certain time of life, should never have heard them spoken of, as to banish them from the minds of those, who have been imbued with them from their tenderest infancy. Thus, it cannot be reckoned possible to make a whole nation pass from the abyss of superstition, that is to say, from the bosom of ignorance, from the ravings of delirium, into absolute naturalism, or as the priests of superstition would denominate it, into atheism; which supposes reflection--requires intense study--demands extensive knowledge--exacts a long series of experience--includes the habit of contemplating nature--the faculty of observing her laws; which, in short, embraces the expansive science of the causes producing her various phenomena; her multiplied combinations, together with the diversified actions of the beings she contains, as well as their numerous properties. In order to be an atheist, or to be assured of the capabilities of nature, it is imperative to have meditated her profoundly: a superficial glance of the eye will not bring man acquainted with her resources; optics but little practised on her powers, will unceasingly be deceived; the ignorance of actual causes will always induce the supposition of those which are imaginary; credulity will, thus re-conduct the natural philosopher himself to the feet of superstitious phantoms, in which either his limited vision, or his habitual sloth, will make him believe he shall find the solution to every difficulty. Atheism, then, as well as philosophy, like all profound abstruse sciences, is not calculated for the vulgar; neither is it suitable to the great mass of mankind. There are, in all populous, civilized nations, persons whose circumstances enable them to devote their time to meditation, whose easy finances afford them leisure to make deep researches into the nature of things, who frequently make useful discoveries, which, sooner or later, after they have been submitted to the infallible test of experience, when they have passed the fiery ordeal of truth, extend widely their salutary effects, become extremely beneficial to society, highly advantageous to individuals. The geometrician, the chemist, the mechanic, the natural philosopher, the civilian, the artizan himself, are industriously employed, either in their closets, or in their workshops, seeking the means to serve society, each in his sphere: nevertheless, not one of their sciences or professions are familiar to the illiterate; not one of the arts with which they are respectively occupied, are known to the uninitiated: these, however, do not fail, in the long run, to profit by them, to reap substantive advantages from those labours, of which they themselves have no idea. It is for the mariner, that the astronomer explores his arduous science; it is for him the geometrician calculates; for his use the mechanic plies his craft: it is for the mason, for the carpenter, for the labourer, that the skilful architect studies his orders, lays down well-proportioned elaborate plans. Whatever may be the pretended utility of Pneumatology, whatever may be the vaunted advantages of superstitious opinions, the wrangling polemic, the subtle theologian, cannot boast either of toiling, of writing, or of disputing for the advantage of the people, whom, notwithstanding, he contrives to tax, very exorbitantly, for those systems they can never understand; from whom he levies the most oppressive contributions, as a remuneration for the detail of those mysteries, which under any possible circumstances, cannot, at any time whatever, be of the slightest benefit to them. It is not, then, for the multitude that a philosopher should propose to himself, either to write or to meditate: the Code of Nature, or the principles of atheism, as the priest calls it, are not, as we have shewn, even calculated for the meridian of a great number of persons, who are frequently too much prepossessed in favour of the received prejudices, although extremely enlightened on other points. It is extremely rare to find men, who, to an enlarged mind, extensive knowledge, great talents, join either a well regulated imagination, or the courage necessary to successfully oppugn habitual errors; triumphantly to attack those chimerical systems, with which the brain has been inoculated from the first hour of its birth. A secret bias, an invincible inclination, frequently, in despite of all reasoning, re-conducts the most comprehensive, the best fortified, the most liberal minds, to those prejudices which have a wide-spreading establishment; of which they have themselves taken copious draughts during the early stages of life. Nevertheless, those principles, which at first appear strange, which by their boldness seem revolting, from which timidity flies with trepidation, when they have the sanction of truth, gradually insinuate themselves into the human mind, become familiar to its exercise, extend their happy influence on every side, and finally produce the most substantive advantages to society. In time, men habituate themselves to ideas which originally they looked upon as absurd; which on a superficial glance they contemplated as either noxious or irrational: at least, they cease to consider those as odious, who profess opinions upon subjects on which experience makes it evident they may be permitted to have doubts, without imminent danger to public tranquillity. Then the diffusion of ideas among mankind is not an event to be dreaded: if they are truths, they will of necessity be useful: by degrees they will fructify. The man who writes, must neither fix his eyes upon the time in which he lives, upon his actual fellow citizens, nor upon the country he inhabits. He must speak to the human race; he must instruct future generations; he must extend his views into the bosom of futurity; in vain he will expect the eulogies of his contemporaries; in vain will he flatter himself with seeing his reasoning adopted; in vain he will soothe himself with the pleasing reflection, that his precocious principles will be received with kindness; if he has exhibited truisms, the ages that shall follow will do justice to his efforts; unborn nations shall applaud his exertions; his future countrymen shall crown his sturdy attempts with those laurels, which interested prejudice withholds from him in his own days; it must therefore be from posterity, he is to expect the need of applause due to his services; the present race is hermetically sealed against him: meantime let him content himself with having done well; with the secret suffrages of those few friends to veracity who are so thinly spread over the surface of the earth. It is after his death, that the trusty reasoner, the faithful writer, the promulgator of sterling principles, the child of simplicity, triumphs; it is then that the stings of hatred, the shafts of envy, the arrows of malice, either exhausted or blunted, enable mankind to judge with impartiality; to yield to conviction; to establish eternal truth upon its own imperishable altars, which from its essence must survive all the error of the earth. It is then that calumny, crushed like the devouring snail by the careful gardener, ceases to besmear the character of an honest man, while its venomous slime, glazed by the sun, enables the observant spectator to trace the filthy progress it had made. It is a problem with many people, _if truth may not be injurious?_ The best intentioned persons are frequently in great doubt upon this important point. The fact is, _it never injures any but those who deceive mankind_: this has, however, the greatest interest in being undeceived. Truth may be injurious to the individual who announces it, but it can never by any possibility harm the human species; never can it be too distinctly presented to beings, always either little disposed to listen to its dictates, or too slothful to comprehend its efficacy. If all those who write to publish important truths, which, of all others, are ever considered the most dangerous, were sufficiently ardent for the public welfare to speak freely, even at the risk of displeasing their readers, the human race would be much more enlightened, much happier than it now is. To write in ambiguous terms, is very frequently to write to nobody. The human mind is idle; we must spare it, as much as possible, the trouble of reflection; we must relieve it from the embarrassment of intense thinking. What time does it not consume, what study does it not require, at the present day, to unravel the amphibological oracles of the ancient philosophers, whose actual sentiments are almost entirely lost to the present race of men? If truth be useful to human beings, it is an injustice to deprive them of its advantages; if truth ought to be admitted, we must admit its consequences, which are also truths. Man, taken generally, is fond of truth, but its consequences often inspire him with so much dread, so alarm his imbecility, that, frequently, he prefers remaining in error, of which a confirmed habit prevents him from feeling the deplorable effects. Besides, we shall say with Hobbes, "that we cannot do men any harm by proposing truth to them; the worst mode is to leave them in doubt, to let them remain in dispute." If an author who writes be deceived, it is because he may have reasoned badly. Has he laid down false principles? It remains to examine them. Is his system fallacious? Is it ridiculous? It will serve to make truth appear with the greatest splendor: his work will fall into contempt; the writer, if he be witness to its fall, will be sufficiently punished for his temerity; if he be defunct, the living cannot disturb his ashes. No man writes with a design to injure his fellow creatures; he always proposes to himself to merit their suffrages, either by amusing them, by exciting their curiosity, or by communicating to them discoveries, which he believes useful. Above all, no work can be really dangerous, if it contains truth. It would not be so, even if it contained principles evidently contrary to experience--opposed to good sense. Indeed, what would result from a work that should now tell us the sun is not luminous; that parricide is legitimate; that robbery is allowable; that adultery is not a crime? The smallest reflection would make us feet the falsity of these principles; the whole human race would protest against them. Men would laugh at the folly of the author; presently his book, together with his name, would be known only by its ridiculous extravagancies. There is nothing but superstitious follies that are pernicious to mortals; and wherefore? It is because authority always pretends to establish them by violence; to make them pass for substantive virtues; rigorously punishes those who shall be disposed to smile at their inconsistency, or examine into their pretensions. If man was more rational, he would examine superstitious opinions as he examines every thing else; he would look upon theological theories with the same eyes that he contemplates systems of natural philosophy, or problems in geometry: the latter never disturbs the repose of society, although they sometimes excite very warm disputes in the learned world. Theological quarrels would never be attended with any evil consequences, if man could gain the desirable point of making those who exercise power, feel that the disputes of persons, who do not themselves understand the marvellous questions upon which they never cease wrangling, ought not to give birth to any other sensations than those of indifference; to rouse no other passion than that of contempt. It is, at least, this indifference not speculative theories, so just, so rational, so advantageous for states, that sound philosophy may propose to introduce, gradually, upon the earth. Would not the human race be much happier--if the sovereigns of the world, occupied with the welfare of their subjects, leaving to superstitious theologians their futile contests, making their various systems yield to healthy politics; obliged these haughty ministers to become citizens; carefully prevented their disputes from interrupting the public tranquillity? What advantage might there not result to science; what a start would be given to the progress of the human mind, to the cause of sound morality, to the advancement of equitable jurisprudence, to the improvement of legislation, to the diffusion of education, from an unlimited freedom of thought? At present, genius every where finds trammels; superstition invariably opposes itself to its course; man, straitened with bandages, scarcely enjoys the free use of any one of his faculties; his mind itself is cramped; it appears continually wrapped up in the swaddling clothes of infancy. The civil power, leagued with spiritual domination, appears only disposed to rule over brutalized slaves, shut up in a dark prison, where they reciprocally goad each other with the efferverscence of their mutual ill humour. Sovereigns, in general, detest liberty of thought, because they fear truth; this appears formidable to them, because it would condemn their excesses; these irregularities are dear to them, because they do not, better than their subjects, understand their true interests; properly considered, these ought to blend themselves into one uniform mass. Let not the courage of the philosopher, however, be abated by so many united obstacles, which would appear for ever to exclude truth from its proper dominion; to banish reason from the mind of man; to spoil nature of her imprescriptible rights. The thousandth part of those cares which are bestowed to infect the human mind, would be amply sufficient to make it whole. Let us not, then, despair of the case: do not let us do man the injury to believe that truth is not made for him; his mind seeks after it incessantly; his heart desires it faithfully; his happiness demands it with an imperious voice; he only either fears it, or mistakes it, because superstition, which has thrown all his ideas into confusion, perpetually keeps the bandeau of delusion fast bound over his eyes; strives, with an almost irresistible force, to render him an entire stranger to virtue. Maugre the prodigious exertions that are made to drive truth from the earth; in spite of the extraordinary pains used to exile reason--of the uninterrupted efforts to expel true science from the residence of mortals; time, assisted by the progressive knowledge of ages, may one day be able to enlighten even those princes who are the most outrageous in their opposition to the illumination of the human mind; who appear such decided enemies to justice, so very determined against the liberties of mankind. Destiny will, perhaps, when least expected, conduct these wandering outcasts to the throne of some enlightened, equitable, courageous, generous, benevolent sovereign, who, smitten with the charms of virtue, shall throw aside duplicity, frankly acknowledge the true source of human misery, and apply to it those remedies with which wisdom has furnished him: perhaps he may feel, that those systems, from whence it is pretended he derives his power, are the true scourges of his people; the actual cause of his own weakness: that the official expounders of these systems are his most substantial enemies--his most formidable rivals; he may find that superstition, which he has been taught to look upon as the main support to his authority, in point of fact only enfeebles it--renders it tottering: that superstitious morality, false in its principles, is only calculated to pervert his subjects; to break down their intrepidity; to render them perfidious; in short, to give them the vices of slaves, in lieu of the virtues of citizens. A prince thus disentangled from prejudice, will perhaps behold, in superstitious errors, the fruitful source of human sorrows, and commiserations, the condition of his race, it may be, will generously declare, that they are incompatible with every equitable administration. Until this epoch, so desirable for humanity, shall arrive, the principles of naturalism will be adopted only by a small number of liberal-minded men, who shall dive below the surface; these cannot flatter themselves either with making proselytes, or having a great number of approvers: on the contrary, they will meet with zealous adversaries, with ardent contemners, even in those persons who upon every other subject discover the most acute minds; display the most consummate knowledge. Those men who possess the greatest share of ability, as we have already observed, cannot always resolve to divorce themselves completely from their superstitious ideas; imagination, so necessary to splendid talents, frequently forms in them an insurmountable obstacle to the total extinction of prejudice; this depends much more upon the judgment than upon the mind. To this disposition, already so prompt to form illusions to them, is also to be joined the force of habit; to a great number of men, it would he wresting from them a portion of themselves to take away their superstitious notions; it would be depriving them of an accustomed aliment; plunging them into a dreadful vacuum: obliging their distempered minds to perish for want of exercise. Menage remarks, "that history speaks of very few incredulous women, or female atheists:" this is not surprising; their organization renders them fearful; their nervous system undergoes periodical variations; the education they receive disposes them to credulity. Those among them who have a sound constitution, who have a well ordered imagination, have occasion for chimeras suitable to occupy their leisure; above all, when the world abandons them, then superstitious devotion, with its attractive ceremonies, becomes either a business or an amusement. Let us not be surprised, if very intelligent, extremely learned men, either obstinately shut their eyes, or run counter to their ordinary sagacity, every time there is a question respecting an object which they have not the courage to examine with that attention they lend to many others. Lord Chancellor Bacon pretends, "that a little philosophy disposes men to atheism, but that great depth re-conducts them to religion." If we analyze this proposition, we shall find it signifies, that even moderate, indifferent thinkers, are quickly enabled to perceive the gross absurdities of superstition; but that very little accustomed to meditate, or else destitute of those fixed principles which could serve them for a guide, their imagination presently replaces them in the theological labyrinth, from whence reason, too weak for the purpose, appeared disposed to withdraw them: these timid souls, who fear to take courage, with minds disciplined to be satisfied with theological solutions, no longer see in nature any thing but an inexplicable enigma; an abyss which it is impossible for them to fathom: these, habituated to fix their eyes upon an ideal, mathematical point, which they have made the centre of every thing, whenever they lose sight of it, find the universe becomes an unintelligible jumble to them; then the confusion in which they feel themselves involved, makes them rather prefer returning to the prejudices of their infancy, which appear to explain every thing, than to float in the vacuum, or quit a foundation which they judge to be immoveable. Thus the proposition of Bacon should seem, to indicate nothing, except it be that the most experienced persons cannot at all times defend themselves against the illusions of their imagination; the impetuosity of which resists the strongest reasoning. Nevertheless, a deliberate study of nature is sufficient to undeceive every man who will calmly consider things: he will discover that the phenomena of the world is connected by links, invisible to superficial notice, equally concealed from the too impetuous observer, but extremely intelligible to him who views her with serenity. He will find that the most unusual, the most marvellous, as well as the most trifling, or ordinary effects, are equally inexplicable, but that they all equally flow from natural causes; that supernatural causes, under whatever name they way be designated, with whatever qualities they may be decorated, will never do more than increase difficulties; will only make chimeras multiply. The simplest observation will incontestibly prove to him that every thing is necessary; that all the effects he perceives are material; that they can only originate in causes of the same nature, when he even shall not be able to recur to them by the assistance of his senses. Thus his mind, properly directed, every where show him nothing but matter, sometimes acting in a manner which his organs permit him to follow, at others in a mode imperceptible by the faculties he possesses: he will see that all beings follow constant invariable laws, by which all combinations are united and destroyed; he will find that all forms change, but that, nevertheless, the great whole ever remains the same. Thus, cured of the idle notions with which he was imbued, undeceived in those erroneous ideas, which from habit be attached to imaginary systems, he will cheerfully consent to be ignorant of whatever his organs do not enable him to compass; he will know that obscure terms, devoid of sense, are not calculated to explain difficulties; guided by reason, he will throw aside all hypothesis of the imagination; the champion of rectitude, he will attach himself to realities, which are confirmed by experience, which are evidenced by truth. The greater number of those who study nature, frequently do not consider, that prejudiced eyes will never discover more than that which they have previously determined to find: as soon as they perceive facts contrary to their own ideas, they quickly turn aside, and believe their visual organs have deceived them; if they return to the task, it is in hopes to find means by which they may reconcile the facts to the notions with which their own mind is previously tinctured. Thus we find enthusiastic philosophers, whose determined prepossession shews them what they denominate incontestible evidences of the systems with which they are pre-occupied, even in those things, that most openly contradict their hypothesis: hence those pretended demonstrations of the existence of theories, which are drawn from final causes--from the order of nature--from the kindness evinced to man, &c. Do these same enthusiasts perceive disorder, witness calamities? They induct new proofs of the wisdom, fresh evidence of the intelligence, additional testimony to the bounty of their system, whilst all these occurrences as visibly contradict these qualities, as the first seem to confirm or to establish them. These prejudiced observers are in an ecstacy at the sight of the periodical motions of the planets; at the order of the stars; at the various productions of the earth; at the astonishing harmony in the component parts of animals: in that moment, however, they forget the laws of motion; the powers of gravitation; the force of attraction and repulsion; they assign all these striking phenomena to unknown causes, of which they have no one substantive idea. In short, in the fervor of their imagination they place man in the centre of nature; they believe him to be the object, the end, of all that exists; that it is for his convenience every thing is made; that it is to rejoice his mind, to pleasure his senses, that the whole was created; whilst they do not perceive, that very frequently the entire of nature appears to be loosed against his weakness; that the elements themselves overwhelm him with calamity; that destiny obstinately persists in rendering him the most miserable of beings. The progress of sound philosophy will always be fatal to superstition, whose notions will be continually contradicted by nature. Astronomy has caused judiciary astrology to vanish; experimental philosophy, the study of natural history and chemistry, have rendered it impossible for jugglers, priests or sorcerers, any longer to perform miracles. Nature, profoundly studied, must necessarily cause the overthrow of those chimerical theories, which ignorance has substituted to her powers. Atheism, as it is termed, is only so rare, because every thing conspires to intoxicate man with a dazzling enthusiasm, from his most tender age; to inflate him from his earliest infancy, with systematic error, with organized ignorance, which of all others is the most difficult to vanquish, the most arduous to root out. Theology is nothing more than a science of words, which by dint of repetition we accustom ourselves to substitute for things: as soon as we feel disposed to analyze them, we are astonished to find they do not present us with any actual sense. There are, in the whole world, very few men who think deeply: who render to themselves a faithful account of their own ideas; who have keen penetrating minds. Justness of intellect is one of the rarest gifts which nature bestows on the human species. It is not, however, to be understood by this, that nature has any choice in the formation of her beings; it is merely to be considered, that the circumstances very rarely occur which enable the junction of a certain quantity of those atoms or parts, necessary to form the human machine in such due proportions, that one disposition shall not overbalance the others; and thus render the judgment erroneous, by giving it a particular bias. We know the general process of making gunpowder; nevertheless, it will sometimes happen that the ingredients have been so happily blended, that this destructive article is of a superior quality to the general produce of the manufactory, without, however, the chemist being on that account entitled to any particular commendation; circumstances have been decidedly favorable, and these seldom occur. Too lively an imagination, an over eager curiosity, are as powerful obstacles to the discovery of truth, as too much phlegm, a slow conception, indolence of mind, or the want of a thinking habit: all men have more or less imagination, curiosity, phlegm, bile, indolence, activity: it is from the happy equilibrium which nature has observed in their organization, that depends that invaluable blessing, correctness of mind. Nevertheless, as we have heretofore said, the organic structure of man is subject to change; the accuracy of his mind varies with the mutations of his machine: from hence may be traced those almost perpetual revolutions that take place in the ideas of mortals; above all when there is a question concerning those objects, upon which experience does not furnish any fixed basis whereon to rest their merits. To search after right, to discover truth, requires a keen, penetrating, just, active mind; because every thing strives to conceal from us its beauties: it needs an upright heart, one in good faith with itself, joined to an imagination tempered with reason, because our habitual fears make us frequently dread its radiance, sometimes bursting like a meteor on our darkened faculties; besides, it not unfrequently happens, that we are actually the accomplices of those who lead us astray, by an inclination we too often manifest to dissimilate with ourselves on this important measure. Truth never reveals itself either to the enthusiast smitten with his own reveries; to the fellifluous fanatic enslaved by his prejudices; to the vain glorious mortal puffed up with his own presumptuous ignorance; to the voluptuary devoted to his pleasures; or to the wily reasoner, who, disingenuous with himself, has a peculiar spontaneity to form illusions to his mind. Blessed, however, with a heart, gifted with a mind such as described, man will surely discover this _rara avis:_ thus constituted, the attentive philosopher, the geometrician, the moralist, the politician, the theologian himself, when he shall sincerely seek truth, will find that the corner-stone which serves for the foundation of all superstitious systems, is evidently rested upon fiction. The philosopher will discover in matter a sufficient cause for its existence; he will perceive that its motion, its combination, its modes of acting, are always regulated by general laws, incapable of variation. The geometrician, without quiting nature, will calculate the active force of matter; it will then become obvious to him, that to explain its phenomena, it is by no means necessary to have recourse to that which is incommensurable with all known powers. The politician, instructed in the true spring which can act upon the mind of nations, will feel distinctly, that it is not imperative to recur to imaginary theories, whilst there are actual motives to give play to the volition of the citizens; to induce them to labour efficaciously to the maintenance of their association; he will readily acknowledge that fictitious systems are calculated either to slaken the exertions, or to disturb the motion of so complicated a machine an human society. He who shall more honor truth than the vain subtilities of theology, will quickly perceive that this pompous science is nothing more than an unintelligible jumble of false hypothesis; that it continually begs its principles; is full of sophisms; contains only vitiated circles; embraces the most subdolous distinctions; is ushered to mankind by the most disingenuous arguments, from which it is not possible, under any given circumstances, there should result any thing but puerilities--the most endless disputes. In short, all men who have sound ideas of morality, whose notions of virtue are correct, who understand what is useful to the human being in society, whether it be to conserve himself individually, or the body of which he is a member, will acknowledge, that in order to discover his relations, to ascertain his duties, he has only to consult his own nature; that he ought to be particularly careful neither to found them upon discrepant systems, nor to borrow them from models that never can do more than disturb his mind; that will only render his conduct fluctuating; that will leave him for ever uncertain of its proper character. Thus, every rational thinker, who renounces his prejudices, will be enabled to feel the inutility, to comprehend the fallacy of so many abstract systems; he will perceive that they have hitherto answered no other purpose than to confound the notions of mankind; to render doubtful the clearest truths. In quitting the regions of the empyreum, where his mind can only bewilder itself, in re-entering his proper sphere, in consulting reason, man will discover that of which he needs the knowledge; he will be able to undeceive himself upon those chimerical theories, which enthusiasm has substituted for actual natural causes; to detect those figments, by which imposture has almost every where superseded the real motives that can give activity in nature; out of which the human mind never rambles, without going woefully astray; without laying the foundation of future misery. The Deicolists, as well as the theologians, continually reproach their adversaries with their taste for paradoxes--with their attachment to systems; whilst they themselves found all their reasoning upon imaginary hypothesis--upon visionary theories; make a principle of submitting their understanding to the yoke of authority; of renouncing experience; of setting down as nothing the evidence of their senses. Would it not be justifiable in the disciples of nature, to say to these men, who thus despise her, "We only assure ourselves of that which we see; we yield to nothing but evidence; if we have a system, it is one founded upon facts; we perceive in ourselves, we behold every where else, nothing but matter; we therefore conclude from it that matter can both feel and think: we see that the motion of the universe is operated after mechanical laws; that the whole results from the properties, is the effect of the combination, the immediate consequence of the modification of matter; thus, we are content, we seek no other explication of the phenomena which nature presents. We conceive only an unique world, in which every thing is connected; where each effect is linked to a natural cause, either known or unknown, which it produces according to necessary laws; we affirm nothing that is not demonstrable; nothing that you are not obliged to admit as well as ourselves: the principles we lay down are distinct: they are self-evident: they are facts. If we find some things unintelligible, if causes frequently become arduous, we ingenuously agree to their obscurity; that is to say, to the limits of our own knowledge. But in order to explain these effects, we do not imagine an hypothesis; we either consent to be for ever ignorant of them, or else we wait patiently until time, experience, with the progress of the human mind, shall throw them into light: is not, then, our manner of philosophizing consistent with truth? Indeed, in whatever we advance upon the subject of nature, we proceed precisely in the same manner as our opponents themselves pursue in all the other sciences, such as natural history, experimental philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, &c. We scrupulously confine ourselves to what comes to our knowledge through the medium of our senses; the only instruments with which nature has furnished us to discover truth. What is the conduct of our adversaries? In order to expound things of which they are ignorant, they imagine theories still more incomprehensible than what they are desirous to explain; theories of which they themselves are obliged to acknowledge they have not the most slender notion. Thus they invert the true principles of logic, which require we should proceed gradually from that which is most known, to that with which we are least acquainted. Again, upon what do they found the existence of these theories, by whose aid they pretend to solve all difficulties? It is upon the universal ignorance of mankind; upon the inexperience of man; upon his fears; upon his disordered imagination; upon a pretended _intimate sense_, which in reality is nothing more than the effect of vulgar prejudice; the result of dread; the consequence of the want of a reflecting habit, which induces them to crouch to the opinions of others; to be guided by the mandates of authority, rather than take the trouble to examine for their own information. Such, O theologians! are the ruinous foundations upon which you erect the superstructure of your doctrine. Accordingly, you find it impossible to form to yourselves any distinct idea of those theories which serve for the basis of your systems; you are unable to comprehend either their attributes, their existence, the nature of their localities, or their mode of action. Thus, even by your own confession, ye are in a state of profound ignorance, on the primary elements of that which ye constitute the cause of all that exists: of which, according to your own account, it is imperative to have a correct knowledge. Under whatever point of view, therefore, ye are contemplated, it must be admitted ye are the founders of aerial systems; of fanciful theories: of all systematizers, ye are consequently the most absurd; because in challenging your imagination to create a cause, this cause, at least, ought to diffuse light over the whole; it would be upon this condition alone that its incomprehensibility could be pardonable; but to speak ingenuously, does this cause serve to explain any thing? Does it make us conceive more clearly the origin of the world; bring us more distinctly acquainted with the actual nature of man; does it more intelligibly elucidate the faculties of the soul; or point out with more perspicuity the source of good and evil? No! unquestionably: these subtle theories explain nothing, although they multiply to infinity their own difficulties; they, in fact, embarrass elucidation, by plunging into greater obscurity those matters in which they are interposed. Whatever may be the question agitated, it becomes complicated: as soon as these theories are introduced, they envelope the most demonstrable sciences with a thick, impenetrable mist; render the most simple notions complex; give opacity to the most diaphanous ideas; turn the most evident opinions into insolvable enigmas. What exposition of morality does the theories, upon which ye found all the virtue, present to man? Do not all your oracles breathe inconsistency? Does not your doctrines embrace every gradation of character, however discrepant: every known property, however opposed. All your ingenious systems, all your mysteries, all the subtilties which ye have invented, are they capable of reconciling that discordant assemblage of amiable and unamiable qualities, with which ye have dressed up your figments? In short, is it not by these theories that ye disturb the harmony of the universe; is it not in their name ye follow up your barbarous proscriptions; in their support, that ye so inhumanly exterminate all who refuse to subscribe to your organized reveries; who withhold assent to those efforts of the imagination which ye have collectively decorated with the pompous name of religion; but which, individually, ye brand as superstition, always excepting that to which ye lend yourselves. Agree, then, O Theologians! Acknowledge, then, ye subtle metaphysicians! Consent, then, ye organizers of fanciful theories! that not only are ye systematically absurd, but also that ye finish by being atrocious; because whenever ye obtain the ascendancy one over the other, your unfortunate pre-eminence is distinguished by the most malevolent persecution; your domination is ushered in with cruelty; your career is described with blood: from the importance which your own interest attaches to your ruinous dogmas; from the pride with which ye tumble down the less fortunate systems of those who started with you for the prize of plunder; _from that savage ferocity, under which ye equally overwhelm human reason, the happiness of the individual, and the felicity of nations._" CHAP. XIV. _A Summary of the Code of Nature_. Truth is the only object worthy the research of every wise man; since that which is false cannot be useful to him: whatever constantly injures him cannot be founded upon truth; consequently, ought to be for ever proscribed. It is, then, to assist the human mind, truly to labour for his happiness, to point out to him the clew by which he may extricate himself from those frightful labyrinths in which his imagination wanders; from those sinuosities whose devious course makes him err, without ever finding a termination to his incertitude. Nature alone, known through experience, can furnish him with this desirable thread; her eternal energies can alone supply the means of attacking the Minotaur; of exterminating the figments of hypocrisy; of destroying those monsters, who during so many ages, have devoured the unhappy victims, which the tyranny of the ministers of Moloch have exacted as a cruel tribute from affrighted mortals. By steadily grasping this inestimable clew, rendered still more precious by the beauty of the donor, man can never be led astray--will never ramble out of his course; but if, careless of its invaluable properties, for a single instant he suffers it to drop from his hand; if, like another Theseus, ungrateful for the favour, he abandons the fair bestower, he will infallibly fall again into his ancient wanderings; most assuredly become the prey to the cannibal offspring of the White Bull. In vain shall he carry his views above his head, to find resources which are at his feet; so long as man, infatuated with his superstitious notions, shall seek in an imaginary world the rule of his earthly conduct, he will be without principles; while he shall pertinaciously contemplate the regions of a distempered fancy, so long he will grope in those where he actually finds himself; his uncertain steps will never encounter the welfare he desires; never lead him to that repose after which he so ardently sighs, nor conduct him to that surety which is so decidedly requisite to consolidate his happiness. But man, blinded by his prejudices; rendered obstinate in injuring his fellow, by his enthusiasm; ranges himself in hostility even against those who are sincerely desirous of procuring for him the most substantive benefits. Accustomed to be deceived, he is in a state of continual suspicion; habituated to mistrust himself, to view his reason with diffidence, to look upon truth as dangerous, he treats as enemies even those who most eagerly strive to encourage him; forewarned in early life against delusion, by the subtilty of imposture, he believes himself imperatively called upon to guard with the most sedulous activity the bandeau with which they have hoodwinked him; he thinks his eternal welfare involved in keeping it for ever over his eyes; he therefore wrestles with all those who attempt to tear it from his obscured optics. If his visual organs, accustomed to darkness, are for a moment opened, the light offends them; he is distressed by its effulgence; he thinks it criminal to be enlightened; he darts with fury upon those who hold the flambeau by which he is dazzled. In consequence, the atheist, as the arch rogue from whom he differs ludicrously calls him, is looked upon as a malignant pest, as a public poison, which like another Upas, destroys every thing within the vortex of its influence; he who dares to arouse mortals from the lethargic habit which the narcotic doses administered by the theologians have induced passes for a perturbator; he who attempts to calm their frantic transports, to moderate the fury of their maniacal paroxysms, is himself viewed as a madman, who ought to be closely chained down in the dungeons appropriated to lunatics; he who invites his associates to rend their chains asunder, to break their galling fetters, appears only like an irrational, inconsiderate being, even to the wretched captives themselves: who have been taught to believe that nature formed them for no other purpose than to tremble: only called them into existence that they might be loaded with shackles. In consequence of these fatal prepossessions, the _Disciple of Nature_ is generally treated as an assassin; is commonly received by his fellow citizens in the same manner as the feathered race receive the doleful bird of night, which as soon as it quits its retreat, all the other birds follow with a common hatred, uttering a variety of doleful cries. No, mortals blended by terror! The friend of nature is not your enemy; its interpreter is not the minister of falsehood; the destroyer of your vain phantoms is not the devastator of those truths necessary to your happiness; the disciple of reason is not an irrational being, who either seeks to poison you, or to infect you with a dangerous delirium. If he is desirous to wrest the thunder from those terrible theories that affright ye, it is that ye way discontinue your march, in the midst of storms, over roads that ye can only distinguish by the sudden, but evanescent glimmerings of the electric fluid. If he breaks those idols, which fear has served with myrrh and frankencense--which superstition has surrounded by gloomy despondency--which fanaticism has imbrued with blood; it is to substitute in their place those consoling truths that are calculated to heal the desperate wounds ye have received; that are suitable to inspire you with courage, sturdily to oppose yourselves to such dangerous errors; that have power to enable you to resist such formidable enemies. If he throws down the temples, overturns the altars, so frequently bathed with the bitter tears of the unfortunate, blackened by the most cruel sacrifices, smoked with servile incense, it is that he may erect a fane sacred to peace; a hall dedicated to reason; a durable monument to virtue, in which ye may at all times find an asylum against your own phrenzy; a refuge from your own ungovernable passions; a sanctuary against those powerful dogmatists, by whom ye are oppressed. If he attacks the haughty pretensions of deified tyrants, who crush ye with an iron sceptre, it is that ye may enjoy the rights of your nature; it is to the end that ye may be substantively freemen, in mind as well as in body; that ye may not be slaves, eternally chained to the oar of misery; it is that ye may at length be governed by men who are citizens, who may cherish their own semblances, who way protect mortals like themselves, who may actually consult the interests of those from whom they hold their power. If he battles with imposture, it is to re-establish truth in those rights which have been so long usurped by fiction. If he undermines the base of that unsteady, fanatical morality, which has hitherto done nothing more than perplex your minds, without correcting your hearts; it is to give to ethics an immovable basis, a solid foundation, secured upon your own nature; upon the reciprocity of those wants which are continually regenerating in sensible beings: dare, then, to listen to his voice; you will find it much more intelligible than those ambiguous oracles, which are announced to you as the offspring of capricious theories; as imperious decrees that are unceasingly at variance with themselves. Listen then to nature, she never contradicts her own eternal laws. "O thou!" cries this nature to man, "who, following the impulse I have given you, during your whole existence, incessantly tend towards happiness, do not strive to resist my sovereign law. Labour to your own felicity; partake without fear of the banquet which is spread before you, with the most hearty welcome; you will find the means legibly written on your own heart. Vainly dost thou, O superstitious being! seek after thine happiness beyond the limits of the universe, in which my hand hath placed thee: vainly shalt thou search it in those inexorable theories, which thine imagination, ever prone to wander, would establish upon my eternal throne: vainly dost thou expect it in those fanciful regions, to which thine own delirium hath given a locality and a shame: vainly dost thou reckon upon capricious systems, with whose advantages thou art in such ecstasies; whilst they only fill thine abode with calamity--thine heart with dread--thy mind with illusions--thy bosom with groans. Know that when thou neglectest my counsels, the gods will refuse their aid. Dare, then, to affranchise thyself from the trammels of superstition, my self-conceited, pragmatic rival, who mistakes my rights; renounce those empty theories, which are usurpers of my privileges; return under the dominion of my laws, which, however severe, are mild in comparison with those of bigotry. It is in my empire alone that true liberty reigns. Tyranny is unknown to its soil; equity unceasingly watches over the rights of all my subjects, maintains them in the possession of their just claims; benevolence, grafted upon humanity, connects them by amicable bonds; truth enlightens them; never can imposture blind them with his obscuring mists. Return, then, my child, to thy fostering mother's arms! Deserter, trace back thy wandering steps to nature! She will console thee for thine evils; she will drive from thine heart those appalling fears which overwhelm thee; those inquietudes that distract thee; those transports which agitate thee; those hatreds that separate thee from thy fellow man, whom thou shouldst love as thyself. Return to nature, to humanity, to thyself! Strew flowers over the road of life: cease to contemplate the future; live to thine own happiness; exist for thy fellow creatures; retire into thyself, examine thine own heart, then consider the sensitive beings by whom thou art surrounded: leave to their inventors those systems which can effect nothing towards thy felicity. Enjoy thyself, and cause others also to enjoy, those comforts which I have placed with a liberal hand, for all the children of the earth; who all equally emanate from my bosom: assist them to support the sorrows to which necessity has submitted them in common with thyself. Know, that I approve thy pleasures, when without injuring thyself, they are not fatal to thy brethren, whom I have rendered indispensably necessary to thine own individual happiness. These pleasures are freely permitted thee, if thou indulgest them with moderation; with that discretion which I myself have fixed. Be happy, then, O man! Nature invites thee to participate in it; but always remember, thou canst not be so alone; because I invite all mortals to happiness as well as thyself; thou will find it is only in securing their felicity that thou canst consolidate thine own. Such is the decree of thy destiny: if thou shalt attempt to withdraw thyself from its operation, recollect that hatred will pursue thee; vengeance overtake thy steps; and remorse be ever ready at hand to punish the infractions of its irrevocable mandates. "Follow then, O man! in whatever station thou findest thyself, the routine I have described for thee, to obtain that happiness to which thou hast an indispensable right to challenge pretension. Let the sensations of humanity interest thee for the condition of other men, who are thy fellow creatures; let thine heart have commisseration for their misfortunes: let thy generous hand spontaneously stretch forth to lend succour to the unhappy mortal who is overwhelmed by his destiny; always bearing in thy recollection, that it may fall heavy upon thyself, as it now does upon him. Acknowledge, then, without guile, that every unfortunate has an inalienable right to thy kindness. Above all, wipe from the eyes of oppressed innocence the trickling crystals of agonized feeling; let the tears of virtue in distress, fall upon thy sympathizing bosom; let the genial glow of sincere friendship animate thine honest heart; let the fond attachment of a mate, cherished by thy warmest affection, make thee forget the sorrows of life: be faithful to her love, responsible to her tenderness, that she may reward thee by a reciprocity of feeling; that under the eyes of parents united in virtuous esteem, thy offspring may learn to set a proper value on practical virtue; that after having occupied thy riper years, they may comfort thy declining age, gild with content thy setting sun, cheer the evening of thine existence, by a dutiful return of that care which thou shalt have bestowed on their imbecile infancy. "Be just, because equity is the support of human society! Be good, because goodness connects all hearts in adamantine bonds! Be indulgent, because feeble thyself, thou livest with beings who partake of thy weakness! Be gentle, because mildness attracts attention! Be thankful, because gratitude feeds benevolence, nourishes generosity! Be modest, because haughtiness is disgusting to beings at all times well with themselves. Forgive injuries, because revenge perpetuates hatred! Do good to him who injureth thee, in order to shew thyself more noble than he is; to make a friend of him, who was once thine enemy! Be reserved in thy demeanor, temperate in thine enjoyment, chaste in thy pleasures, because voluptuousness begets weariness, intemperance engenders disease; forward manners are revolting: excess at all times relaxes the springs of thy machine, will ultimately destroy thy being, and render thee hateful to thyself, contemptible to others. "Be a faithful citizen; because the community is necessary to thine own security; to the enjoyment of thine own existence; to the furtherance of thine own happiness. Be loyal, but be brave; submit to legitimate authority; because it is requisite to the maintenance of that society which is necessary to thyself. Be obedient to the laws; because they _are_, or _ought to be_, the expression of the public will, to which thine own particular will ought ever to be subordinate. Defend thy country with zeal; because it is that which renders thee happy, which contains thy property, as well as those beings dearest to thine heart: do not permit this common parent of thyself, as well as of thy fellow citizens, to fall under the shackles of tyranny; because from thence it will be no more than thy common prison. If thy country, deaf to the equity of thy claims, refuses thee happiness--if, submitted to an unjust power, it suffers thee to be oppressed, withdraw thyself from its bosom in silence, but never disturb its peace. "In short, be a man; be a sensible, rational being; be a faithful husband; a tender father; an equitable master; a zealous citizen; labour to serve thy country by thy prowess; by thy talents; by thine industry; above all, by thy virtues. Participate with thine associates those gifts which nature has bestowed upon thee; diffuse happiness, among thy fellow mortals; inspire thy fellow citizens with content; spread joy over all those who approach thee, that the sphere of thine actions, enlivened by thy kindness, illumined by thy benevolence, may re-act upon thyself; be assured that the man who makes others happy cannot himself be miserable. In thus conducting thyself, whatever may be the injustice of others, whatever may be the blindness of those beings with whom it is thy destiny to live, thou wilt never be totally bereft of the recompense which is thy due; no power on earth be able to ravish from thee that never failing source of the purest felicity, inward content; at each moment thou wilt fall back with pleasure upon thyself; thou wilt neither feel the rankling of shame, the terror of internal alarm, nor find thy heart corroded by remorse. Thou wilt esteem thyself; thou wilt be cherished by the virtuous, applauded and loved by all good men, whose suffrages are much more valuable than those of the bewildered multitude. Nevertheless, if externals occupy thy contemplation, smiling countenances will greet thy presence; happy faces will express the interest they have in thy welfare; jocund beings will make thee participate in their placid feelings. A life so spent, will each moment be marked by the serenity of thine own soul, by the affection of the beings who environ thee; will be made cheerful by the friendship of thy fellows; will enable thee to rise a contented, satisfied guest from the general feast; conduct thee gently down the declivity of life, lead thee peaceably to the period of thy days; for die thou must: but already thou wilt survive thyself in thought; thou wilt always live in the remembrance of thy friends; in the grateful recollection of those beings whose comforts have been augmented by thy friendly attentions; thy virtues will, beforehand have erected to thy fame an imperishable monument: if heaven occupies itself with thee, it will feel satisfied with thy conduct, when it shall thus have contented the earth. "Beware, then, how thou complainest of thy condition; be just, be kind, be virtuous, and thou canst never be wholly destitute of felicity. Take heed how thou enviest the transient pleasure of seductive crime; the deceitful power of victorious tyranny; the specious tranquillity of interested imposture; the plausible manners of venal justice; the shewy, ostentatious parade of hardened opulence. Never be tempted to increase the number of sycophants to an ambitious despot; to swell the catalogue of slaves to an unjust tyrant; never suffer thyself to be allured to infamy, to the practice of extortion, to the commission of outrage, by the fatal privilege of oppressing thy fellows; always recollect it will be at the expence of the most bitter remorse thou wilt acquire this baneful advantage. Never be the mercenary accomplice of the spoilers of thy country; they are obliged to blush secretly whenever they meet the public eye. "For, do not deceive thyself, it is I who punish, with an unerring hand, all the crimes of the earth; the wicked may escape the laws of man, but they never escape mine. It is I who have formed the hearts, as well an the bodies of mortals; it is I who have fixed the laws which govern them. If thou deliverest thyself up to voluptuous enjoyment, the companions of thy debaucheries may applaud thee; but I shall punish thee with the most cruel infirmities; these will terminate a life of shame with deserved contempt. If thou givest, thyself up to intemperate indulgences, human laws may not correct thee, but I shall castigate thee severely by abridging thy days. If thou art vicious, thy fatal habits will recoil on thine own head. Princes, those terrestrial divinities, whose power places them above the laws of mankind, are nevertheless obliged to tremble under the silent operation of my decrees. It is I who chastise them; it is I who fill their breasts with suspicion; it is I who inspire them with terror; it is I who make them writhe under inquietude; it is I who make them shudder with horror, at the very name of august truth; it is I who, amidst the crowd of nobles who surround them, make them feel the inward workings of shame; the keen anguish of guilt; the poisoned arrows of regret; the cruel stings of remorse; it is I who, when they abuse my bounty, diffuse weariness over their benumbed souls; it is I who follow uncreated, eternal justice; it is I who, without distinction of persons, know how to make the balance even; to adjust the chastisement to the fault; to make the misery bear its due proportion to the depravity; to inflict punishment commensurate with the crime. The laws of man are just, only when they are in conformity with mine; his judgements are rational, only when I have dictated them: my laws alone are immutable, universal, irrefragable; formed to regulate the condition of the human race, in all ages, in all places, under all circumstances. "If thou doubtest mine authority, if thou questionest the irresistible power I possess over mortals, contemplate the vengeance I wreak on all those who resist my decrees. Dive into the recesses of the hearts of those various criminals, whose countenances, assuming a forced smile, cover souls torn with anguish. Dost thou not behold ambition tormented day and night, with an ardour which nothing can extinguish? Dost not thou see the mighty conquerer become the lord of devastated solitudes; his victorious career, marked by a blasted cultivation, reign sorrowfully over smoking ruins; govern unhappy wretches who curse him in their hearts; while his soul, gnawed by remorse, sickens at the gloomy aspect of his own triumphs? Dost thou believe that the tyrant, encircled with his flatterers, who stun him with their praise, is unconscious of the hatred which his oppression excites; of the contempt which his vices draw upon him; of the sneers which his inutility call forth; of the scorn which his debaucheries entail upon his name? Dost thou think that the haughty courtier does not inwardly blush at the galling insults he brooks; despise, from the bottom of his soul, those meannesses by which he is compelled to purchase favours; feel at his heart's core the wretched dependence in which his cupidity places him. "Contemplate the indolent child of wealth, behold him a prey to the lassitude of unmeasured enjoyment, corroded by the satiety which always follows his exhausted pleasures. View the miser with an emaciated countenance, the consequence of his own penurious disposition, whose callous heart is inaccessible to the calls of misery, groaning over the accumulating load of useless treasure, which at the expense of himself, he has laboured to amass. Behold the gay voluptuary, the smiling debaucheé, secretly lament the health they have so inconsiderately damaged so prodigally thrown away: see disdain, joined to hatred, reign between those adulterous married couples, who have reciprocally violated the sacred vows they mutually pledged at the altar of Hymen; whose appetencies have rendered them the scorn of the world; the jest of their acquaintance; polluted tributaries to the surgeon. See the liar deprived of all confidence; the knave stript of all trust; the hypocrite fearfully avoiding the penetrating looks of his inquisitive neighbour; the impostor trembling at the very name of formidable truth. Bring under your review the heart of the envious, uselessly dishonored; that withers at the sight of his neighbour's prosperity. Cast your eyes on the frozen soul of the ungrateful wretch, whom no kindness can warm, no benevolence thaw, no beneficence convert into a genial fluid. Survey the iron feelings of that monster whom the sighs of the unfortunate cannot mollify. Behold the revengeful being nourished with venemous gall, whose very thoughts are serpents; who in his rage consumes himself. Envy, if thou canst, the waking slumbers of the homicide; the startings of the iniquitous judge; the restlessness of the oppressor of innocence; the fearful visions of the extortioner; whose couches are infested with the torches of the furies. Thou tremblest without doubt at the sight of that distraction which, amidst their splendid luxuries, agitates those farmers of the revenue, who fatten upon public calamnity--who devour the substance of the orphan--who consume the means of the widow--who grind the hard earnings of the poor: thou shudderest at witnessing the remorse which rends the souls of those reverend criminals, whom the uninformed believe to be happy, whilst the contempt which they have for themselves, the unerring shafts of secret upbraidings, are incessantly revenging an outraged nation. Thou seest, that content is for ever banished the heart; quiet for ever driven from the habitations of those miserable wretches on whose minds I have indelibly engraved the scorn, the infamy, the chastisement which they deserve. But, no! thine eyes cannot sustain the tragic spectacle of my vengeance. Humanity obliges thee to partake of their merited sufferings; thou art moved to pity for these unhappy people, to whom consecrated errors renders vice necessary; whose fatal habits make them familiar with crime. Yes; thou shunnest them without hating them; thou wouldst succour them, if their contumacious perversity had left thee the means. When thou comparest thine own condition, when thou examinest thine own soul, thou wilt have just cause to felicitate thyself, if thou shalt find that peace has taken up her abode with thee; that contentment dwells at the bottom of thine own heart. In short, thou seest accomplished upon them, as well as, upon thyself, the unalterable decrees of destiny, which imperiously demand, that crime shall punish itself, that virtue never shall be destitute Of remuneration." Such is the sum of those truths which are contained in the _Code of Nature_; such are the doctrines, which its disciples can announce. They are unquestionably preferable to that supernatural superstition which never does any thing but mischief to the human species. Such is the worship that is taught by that sacred reason, which is the object of contempt with the theologian; which meets the insult of the fanatic; who only estimates that which man can neither conceive nor practise; who make his morality consist in fictitious duties; his virtue in actions generally useless, frequently pernicious to the welfare of society; who for want of being acquainted with nature, which is before their eyes, believe themselves obliged to seek in ideal worlds imaginary motives, of which every thing proves the inefficacy. The motive which the morality of nature employs, is the self-evident interest of each individual, of each community, of the whole human species, in all times, in every country, under all circumstances. Its worship is the sacrifice of vice, the practise of real virtues; its object is the conservation of the human race, the happiness of the individual, the peace of mankind; its recompences are affection, esteem, and glory; or in their default, contentment of mind, with merited self-esteem, of which no power will ever be able to deprive virtuous mortals; its punishments, are hatred, contempt, and indignation; which society always reserves for those who outrage its interests; from which even the most powerful can never effectually shield themselves. Those nations who shall be disposed to practise a morality so wise, who shall inculcate it in infancy, whose laws shall unceasingly confirm it, will neither have occasion for superstition, nor for chimeras. Those who shall obstinately prefer figments to their dearest interests, will certainly march forward to ruin. If they maintain themselves for a season, it is because the power of nature sometimes drives them back to reason, in despite of those prejudices which appear to lead them on to certain destruction. Superstition, leagued with tyranny, for the waste of the human species, are themselves frequently obliged to implore the assistance of a reason which they contemn; of a nature which they disdain; which they debase; which they endeavour to crush under the ponderous bulk of artificial theories. Superstition, in all times so fatal to mortals, when attacked by reason, assumes the sacred mantle of public utility; rests its importance on false grounds, founds its rights upon the indissoluble alliance which it pretends subsists between morality and itself; notwithstanding it never ceases for a single instant to wage against it the most cruel hostility. It is, unquestionably, by this artifice, that it has seduced so many sages. In the honesty of their hearts, they believe it useful to politics; necessary to restrain the ungovernable fury of the passions; thus hypocritical superstition, in order to mask to superficial observers, its own hideous character, like the ass with the lion's skin, always knows how to cover itself with the sacred armour of utility; to buckle on the invulnerable shield of virtue; it has therefore, been believed imperative to respect it, notwithstanding it felt awkward under these incumbrances; it consequently has become a duty to favor imposture, because it has artfully entrenched itself behind the altars of truth; its ears, however, discover its worthlessness; its natural cowardice betrays itself; it is from this intrenchment we ought to drive it; it should be dragged forth to public view; stripped of its surreptitious panoply; exposed in its native deformity; in order that the human race may become acquainted with its dissimulation; that mankind may have a knowledge of its crimes; that the universe may behold its sacrilegious hands, armed with homicidal poniards, stained with the blood of nations, whom it either intoxicates with its fury, or immolates without pity to the violence of its passions. The MORALITY OF NATURE is the only creed which her interpreter offers to his fellow citizens; to nations; to the human species; to future races, weaned from those prejudices which have so frequently disturbed the felicity of their ancestors. The friend of mankind cannot be the friend of delusion, which at all times has been a real scourge to the earth. The APOSTLE OF NATURE will not be the instrument of deceitful chimeras, by which this world is made only an abode of illusions; the adorer of truth will not compromise with falsehood; he will make no covenant with error; conscious it must always be fatal to mortals. He knows that the happiness of the human race imperiously exacts that the dark unsteady edifice of superstition should be razed to its foundations; in order to elevate on its ruins a temple suitable to peace--a fane sacred to virtue. He feels it is only by extirpating, even to the most slender fibres, the poisonous tree, that during so many ages has overshadowed the universe, that the inhabitants of this world will be able to use their own optics--to bear with steadiness that light which is competent to illumine their understanding--to guide their wayward steps--to give the necessary ardency to their souls. If his efforts should be vain; if he cannot inspire with courage, beings too much accustomed to tremble; he will, at least, applaud himself for having dared the attempt. Nevertheless, he will not judge his exertions fruitless, if he has only been enabled to make a single mortal happy: if his principles have calmed the conflicting transports of one honest soul; if his reasonings have cheered up some few virtuous hearts. At least he will have the advantage of having banished from his own mind the importunate terror of superstition; of having expelled from his own heart the gall which exasperates zeal; of having trodden under foot those chimeras with which the uninformed are tormented. Thus, escaped from the peril of the storm, he will calmly contemplate from the summit of his rock, those tremendous hurricanes which superstition excites; he will hold forth a succouring hand to those who shall be willing to accept it; he will encourage them with his voice; he will second them with his best exertions, and in the warmth of his own compassionate heart, he will exclaim: O NATURE; sovereign of all beings! and ye, her adorable daughters, VIRTUE, REASON, and TRUTH! remain for ever our revered protectors: it is to you that belong the praises of the human race; to you appertains the homage of the earth. Shew, us then, O NATURE! that which man ought to do, in order to obtain the happiness which thou makest him desire. VIRTUE! Animate him with thy beneficent fire. REASON! Conduct his uncertain steps through the paths of life. TRUTH! Let thy torch illumine his intellect, dissipate the darkness of his road. Unite, O assisting deities! your powers, in order to submit the hearts of mankind to your dominion. Banish error from our mind; wickedness from our hearts; confusion from our footsteps; cause knowledge to extend its salubrious reign; goodness to occupy our souls; serenity to dwell in our bosoms. Let imposture, confounded, never again dare to shew its head. Let our eyes, so long, either dazzled or blindfolded, be at length fixed upon those objects we ought to seek. Dispel for ever those mists of ignorance, those hideous phantoms, together with those seducing chimeras, which only serve to lead us astray. Extricate us from that dark abyss into which we are plunged by superstition; overthrow the fatal empire of delusion; crumble the throne of falsehood; wrest from their polluted hands the power they have usurped. Command men, without sharing your authority with mortals: break the chains that bind them down in slavery: tear away the bandeau by which they are hoodwinked; allay the fury that intoxicates them; break in the hands of sanguinary, lawless tyrants, that iron sceptre with which they are crushed to exile; the imaginary regions, from whence fear has imported them, those theories by which they are afflicted. Inspire the intelligent being with courage; infuse energy into his system, that, at length, he may feel his own dignity; that he may dare to love himself; to esteem his own actions when they are worthy; that a slave only to your eternal laws, he may no longer fear to enfranchise himself from all other trammels; that blest with freedom, he may have the wisdom to cherish his fellow creature; and become happy by learning to perfection his own condition; instruct him in the great lesson, that the high road to felicity, is prudently to partake himself, and also to cause others to enjoy, the rich banquet which thou, O Nature! hast so bountifully set before him. Console thy children for those sorrows to which their destiny submits them, by those pleasures which wisdom allows them to partake; teach them to be contented with their condition; to banish envy from their mind; to yield silently to necessity. Conduct them without alarm to that period which all beings must find; _let them learn that time changes all things, that consequently they are made neither to avoid its scythe nor to fear its arrival._ [TRANSLATOR'S APPENDIX] A BRIEF SKETCH OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF M. DE. MIRABAUD. At a time when we are on the eve of an important change in our political affairs, which must evidently lead either to the recovery and re-establishment of our liberties, or to a military despotism, those who are connected with the press ought to use every exertion to enlighten their fellow-citizens, and to assert their right of canvassing, in the most free and unrestrained manner, every subject connected with the happiness of man. The priesthood have ever been convenient tools in the hands of tyrants, to keep the bulk of the people in a degraded servility. By the superstitious and slavish doctrines which they infuse into their minds, they prevent them from thinking for themselves and asserting their own independence. At a moment when national schools are erecting in every quarter of the country, not with a sincere desire of enlightening the rising generation, but with the insidious design of instilling into their minds the doctrines of "Church and King," in order to bolster up a little longer the present rotten, tottering, and corrupt system: at a moment, too, when thousands of fanatic preachers are traversing the country, with a view to subjugate the human mind to the baleful empire of visonary enthusiasm and sectarian bigotry to the utter extinction of every noble, manly, liberal, and pilanthropic principle;--at such a moment as this, we thought that the "SYSTEM OF NATURE" could not fail to render essential service to the cause both of civil and religious liberty. No work, ancient or modern, has surpassed it, in the eloquence and sublimity of its language, or in the facility with which it treats the most abtruse and difficult subjects. It is, without exception, the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced, in the investigation of morals and theology--in the destruction of priestcraft and superstition--and in developing the sources of all those passions and prejudices which have proved so fatal to the tranquillity of the world. The republic of letters has never produced an author whose pen was so well calculated to emancipate mankind from all those trammels with which the nurse, the schoolmaster and the priest have successively locked up their noblest faculties, before they were capable of reasoning and judging for themselves. The frightful apprehensions of the gloomy bigot, and all the appalling terrors of superstition, are here utterly annihilated, to the complete satisfaction of every unbiassed and impartial person.--These we considered as necessary observations to make, previous to any attempt at the biography of the author. Biography may be reckoned among the most interesting of literary productions. Its intrinsic value is such, that, though capable of extraordinary embellishment from the hand of genius, yet no inferiority of execution can so degrade it, as to deprive it of utility. Whatever relates even to man in general, considered only as an aggregate of active and intelligent beings, has a strong claim upon our notice; but that which relates to our author, as distinguished from the rest of his species, moving in a more exalted sphere, and towering above them by the resplendent excellencies of his mind, seems to me to be peculiarly calculated for our contemplation, and ought to form the highest pleasure of our lives. There is a principle of curiosity implanted in us, which leads us, in an especial manner, to investigate our fellow creatures; the eager inquisitiveness with which the mechanic seeks to know the history of his fellow-workmen and the ardour with which the philosopher, the poet, or the historian hunts for details that may familiarize him with, a Descartes or a Newton, with a Milton, a Hume, or a Gibbon--spring from the same source. Their object, however, may perhaps vary; for, in the former, it may be for the sake of detraction, invidious cavil, or malice; in the latter, it is a sweet homage paid by the human heart to the memory of departed genius. It has been repeatedly observed that the life of a scholar affords few materials for biography. This is only negatively true;--could every scholar have a Boswell, the remark would vanish; or were every scholar a Rousseau, a Gibbon, or a Cumberland it would be equally nugatory. What can present higher objects of contemplation--what can claim more forcibly our attention--where can we seek for subjects of a more precious nature, than in the elucidation of the operations of mind, the acquisition of knowledge, the gradual expansion of genius; its application, its felicities, its sorrows, its wreaths of fame, its cold, undeserved neglect? Such scenes, painted by, the artist himself, are a rich bequest to mankind: even when traced by the hand of friendship or the pencil of admiration, they possess a permanent interest in our hearts. I cannot conceive a life more worthy of public notice, more important, more interesting to human nature, than the life of a literary man, were it executed according to the ideas I have formed of it: did it exhibit a faithful delineation of the progress of intellect, from the cradle upwards; did it portray, in accurate colors, the production of what we call genius: by what accident it was first awakened; what were its first tendencies; how directed to a particular object; by what means it was nourished and unfolded; the gradual progress of its operation in the production of a work; its hopes and fears; its delights; its miseries; its inspirations; and all the thousand fleeting joys that so often invest its path but for a moment, and then fade like the dews of the morning. Let it contain too a transcript of the many nameless transports that float round the heart, that dance in the gay circle before the ardent gazing eye, when the first conception of some future effort strikes the mind; how it pictures undefined delights of fame and popular applause; how it anticipates the bright moments of invention, and dwells with prophetic ecstasy on the felicitous execution of particular parts, that already start into existence by the magic touch of a heated imagination. Let it depict the tender feelings of solitude, the breathings of midnight silence, the scenes of mimic life, of imaged trial, that often occupy the musing mind; let it be such a work, so drawn, so coloured, and who shall pronounce it inferior? Who rather will not confess that it presents a picture of human nature, where every heart may find some corresponding harmony? When, therefore, it is said, that the life of a scholar is barren, it is so only because it has never been properly delineated; because those parts only have been selected which are common, and fail to distinguish him from the common man; because we have never penetrated into his closet, or into his heart; because we have drawn him only as an outward figure, and left unnoticed that internal structure that would delight, astonish, and improve. And then, when we compare the life of such a man with the more active one of a soldier, a statesman, or a lawyer, we pronounce it insipid, uninteresting. True;--the man of study has not fought for hire--he has not slaughtered at the command of a master: he would disdain to do so. Though unaccompanied with the glaring actions of public men, which confound and dazzle by their publicity, but shrink from the estimation of moral truth, it would present a far nobler picture; yes, and a more instructive one:--the calm disciple of reason meditates in silence; he walks his road with innoxious humility; he is poor, but his mind is his treasure; he cultivates his reason, and she lifts him to the pinnacle of truth; he learns to tear away the veil of self-love, folly, pride, and prejudice, and bares the human heart to his inspection; he corrects and amends; he repairs the breaches made by passion; the proud man passes him by, and looks upon him with scorn; but he feels his own worth, that ennobling consciousness which swells in every vein, and inspires him with true pride--with manly independence: to such a man I could sooner bow in reverence, than to the haughtiest, most successful candidate for the world's ambition. But of such men, for the reason I have already mentioned, our information is scanty. While of others, who have commanded a greater share of public notoriety, venal or mistaken admiration has given more than we wished to know. Among these respected individuals of human nature, may be placed Mirabaud. Had Mirabaud been an Englishman, who doubts but that we should have possessed at least ample details of the usual subjects of biographical notice; while all that has been collected among his own countrymen, is a scanty memoir in a common dictionary. That we are doomed to remain ignorant of the life of such men, speaks a loud disgrace.--I lament it. JOHN BAPTISTE MIRABAUD, was born at Paris in the year 1674. He prosecuted his infantile studies under the direction of his parents, and was afterwards entered a member of the _Congregation of the Priests of the Oratory_, where he passed several years, and produced some very bold writings, which were never intended for publication. He was subsequently appointed tutor to the princesses of the House of Orleans, and then took the resolution of destroying the greater part of the manuscripts that he produced while a member of the _Congregation_; but the treachery of some of his friends, to whom he had confided his manuscripts, rendered this precaution useless, for some of his works were published during the time he remained the preceptor to his royal pupils; among which number may be reckoned his "New Liberties of Thought," a work but little calculated for gaining him friends in the purlieus of the Court of Orleans. The "Origin and Antiquity of the World," in three parts, was also published at this period, and from the publication of this work, may be dated the resolution of M. de Mirabaud to quit his office of preceptor, which he relinquished, having become more independent; he now gave himself up entirely to his philosophical studies, and produced the "System of Nature," with which he was assisted by Diderot, D'Alembert, Baron D'Olbac, and others. The profound metaphysical knowledge displayed throughout the System of Nature, and the doctrines which are therein advanced, warrants the conclusion, that it is at once the most decisive, boldest, and most extraordinary work, that the human understanding ever had the courage to produce. The study of metaphysics his generally been considered the most terrific to the indolent mind; but the clear and perspicuous reasoning of a Mirabaud, who has united the most profound argument, with the most fascinating eloquence, charm and instruct us at the same time. But it was not, to be expected that such doctrines as are contained in the System of Nature, would be advanced without meeting with some opposition from the superficial and bigoted metaphysicians, who feel an interest in upholding a system of delusion and superstition. No! certainly not, Their interest was threatened, and their _craft_ in danger, and the consequence was, that the _Atheist_ or _Disciple of Nature_, has been abused with every scurrilous epithet, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Atheism is stigmatized with having "opened a wide door for libertinism, destroying the social and moral compact; and striking a deadly blow at religion. It is asserted that the atheist, who by his opinions has deprived himself of the hope and consolation of a future life, has no motive for the practise of virtue, or to contribute to the well being of society. Deprived of a chimera which religion every where presents him, he wanders through the cheerless gloom of scepticism, regardless of the consequences of an abandoned life. Without a God, he acknowledges no benefactor; without divine laws, he knows no rule for the conduct of life, and submits to no law but his passions. An enemy to all social order, he spurns at human laws, and breaks through every barrier opposed to his wickedness." Under such colours is an atheist painted: a short digression must be suffered to examine this picture, and to disprove the assertions so sweepingly made. I admit that atheism strikes a deadly blow at religion; because under the cloak of religion, mankind have been oppressed in all ages; but that it encourages libertinism, or destroys the "social and moral compact," I have yet to learn. In all organized governments, men are restrained from crime and compelled to submission by laws supposed to be made for the general benefit. These laws are the effect of the first formation of society for mutual preservation. Here then is a sufficient motive for the one as well as the other, to contribute to the well-being of society. The laws of Nature are the same in effect on the atheist and the religionist. If man be led captive by his passions, and gives himself to debauchery and voluptuousness, nature will punish him with bodily infirmities and a debilitated mind. If he be intemperate, she will shorten his days and bring him to the grave with the most poignant remorse. The fatal effects of his vicious propensities will fall upon his own head. A disturber of social order will live in continual fear of the vengeance of society, and that very fear is a more dreadful punishment than the just vengeance which perhaps he escapes. It renders life burdensome, and makes a man hateful to himself. Can men have stronger motives for the practise of virtue? The atheist is in full possession of these motives, and the religionist is most completely swayed by them, whatever may be his pretensions to others derived from religion. But we are assured he has other motives; more powerful incentives, in the promise of future rewards and punishments. This, like all other chimerical doctrines, cannot be maintained if we look at the general practise of mankind. Let us trace the effects of this doctrine, or rather let us examine the actions, conduct, and character of men professing it, and we shall see how little influence it has over them. The bulk of society believe they shall answer in a future life for the deeds done in the present. Nay, I hardly think one in a hundred thousand will say they doubt it. What then is its effect? With this dreadful sentence, _"Thou shalt go into everlasting punishment,"_ continually sounded in their ears, do we not daily see the greatest enormities committed? Are not the most horrid crimes perpetrated in all parts of the world? The most vicious propensities and the most extravagant follies are almost indiscriminately gratified. Is not vice frequently triumphant, and virtue compelled to seek her own reward in retirement? The laws of society are broken by the most flagrant injustice, and the laws of nature outraged by the most shocking depravity. All this evil exists in nations believing themselves to be accountable beings after death. Where then are the beneficial effects arising, to mankind from the promulgation of this doctrine? Men who cannot be restrained from doing evil by human laws, have no dread of any other. Their whole lives and conduct confirm this. Others who live in submission to the laws of society, give themselves up to those vicious habits, (without fear of divine laws) which the law does not take cognizance of. Men, not wholly depraved, or not without the pale of society, generally respect the laws, and fear the bad opinion of others. Hence we observe, when interest or passion leads them into secret vices, they invariably play the hypocrite; and although they are aware of the denunciations of their God, whom they acknowledge is a witness to all their actions, while they preserve their fair fame they still persevere. In fact, they live as if they disbelieved in his existence; and yet the greatest criminal, the most depraved wretch, would shudder at being told there is no God. The atheist, as a man, is liable to commit the same crimes, and fall into the same vices as the believer; but because he is an atheist, is he a worse criminal than the other? In one respect, I conceive he is not so bad. He only acts in defiance of _human_ laws,--he only offends men; the other infringes _both divine_ and _human_;--he defies both God and man. Both are injurious to society and themselves, and both are actuated by the came motives. Again we are told, that the well disposed part of mankind are rendered more virtuous, and the vicious less vicious by this doctrine. How are we to know that? If the virtuous man acts uprightly, does good to his fellow creatures, restrains his passions, and returns good for evil, experience teaches him it is his interest so to do. Those who are viciously disposed are only deterred from crime by penal laws. Societies cannot long exist, where evil has the ascendency. Without social laws, this would really be the case, notwithstanding the threats of an avenging God. If men were told they would not be answerable for the evil committed in this life to human laws, but that God would punish them after death, it is evident the human race would soon be exterminated. On the other hand, tell them their crimes will never be punished by God, or, in other words, there is no other God than NATURE, but that the laws of men will avenge the offences against society; so long as those laws are administered with justice and impartiality, so long will such society continue to improve. Hence it is evident that the system which will maintain order in society by itself, must be the best and most rational. A good government without religion would be more solid and lasting, and tend more to the preservation of mankind, than all the theocratical or ecclesiastical governments that ever the world was subject to.--Thus much for the opponents of atheism. It has been asserted with a perverse obstinacy, by the advocates for the existence of a deity, that the SYSTEM OF NATURE was never written by the author whose name it bears.--It is granted that it was not published during his life: but that circumstance forms no reason why such a conclusion should be drawn. The persecutions which the atheists have endured, were a sufficient excuse for the work not appearing in any form during the life time of its venerable author. The Athenians sought to try Diagoras the Melian, for atheism; but he fled from Athens, and a price was offered for his head. Protagoras was banished from Athens, and his books burnt, because he ventured to assert, that he knew nothing of the gods. Stephen Dolet was burnt at Paris for atheism. Giordano Bruno was burnt by the Inquisitors in Italy. Lucilio Vanini was burnt at Thoulouse, through the kind offices of an Attorney-General. Bayle was under the necessity of fleeing to Holland. Casimio Liszynski was executed at Grodno;--and Akenhead at Edinborough. And the body of the eloquent and erudite Hume, was obliged to be watched many nights by his friends, lest it should be taken up by the fanatics, who considered him one of the greatest monsters of iniquity, because he did not happen to believe as they believed.--With these pictures of Christian persecution before his eyes, is it surprising that M. de Mirabaud should adopt the resolution of suffering the SYSTEM OF NATURE to appear as a posthumous work? That the same fate would have attended him, the most devout Christian will not undertake to deny. However the sentiments of M. de Mirabaud may be condemned by the fanatics, all those who knew him bear the most brilliant testimony of his integrity, candour, and the soundness of his understanding; in a word, to his social virtues, and the innocence of his manners. He died universally regretted, at Paris, the twenty-fourth of June, 1760, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. The following works, written by him at different periods, were never published:--_The Life of Jesus Christ. Impartial Reflections on the Gospel. The Morality of Nature. An Abridged History of the Priesthood; Ancient and Modern. The Opinions of the Ancients concerning the Jews._ A wretched mutilated edition of this last work was published at Amsterdam, in 1740, in two small volumes, under the title of _Miscellaneous Dissertations_. FINIS.