reality invent it; he only looked on while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet, Elijah.' So must it have been with Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the function of the human understanding is no other than [This expression of regard for the great painter of America may well justify the publication of the following beautiful sonnet, which Mr. Allston, a master of either pencil, did the Editor the honor to send to him SONNET On the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And thou art gone-most lov'd, most honor'd Friend! Cambridge Port, Massachusetts, America Ed.] merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensation; and the sensations again, all their reality from the impressions ab extra ; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea at all. The process by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology. Far, very far am I from burdening with the odium of these consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principles or the results of the first. Nay, he assumes as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist nowhere but in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own. Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy ; but God only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet [See Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding. Sect. vii. Ed.] the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbor nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; some who deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they become wiser. The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us crossexamine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity (Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being [Destiny of Nations. Poet. Works, I. Ed.] 5 [This principle of a continuum, cette belle loi de la continuité, as Leibnitz calls it in his lively style, which is even gay for that of a deep philosopher, intent on discovering, the composition of the Universe, was introduced by him and first announced, as he mentions himself, in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres de Mr. Bayle, which forms Art. xxiv. of Erdmann's edition of his works, under the title of Extrait d'une Lettre à Mr. Bayle, &c. He dwells upon this law in many of his philo rather a law of matter, at least of phenomena considered as ma. terial. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to locomotion. In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colors on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive." In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.' sophical writings. "C'est une de mes grandes maximes," says he, "et des plus vérifiées, que le nature ne fait jamais des sauts." Natura non agit saltatim.) J'appellois cela la loi de la continuité, &c., et l'usage de cette loi est très considérable dans la Physique." Nouveaux Essais Avant propos, p. 198 of Erdmann's edit. S. C.] 6 [Schelling describes an activity and passivity which reciprocally presuppose, or are conditioned through, one another. But he is endeavoring to solve the problem how the I beholds itself as perceptive Transsc. Id., p. 136, et passim. S. C.] ' [Maasz thus defines the imagination at p. 2. "But all representations and modifications of the sense" (receptivity of impressions). "which a not really in it, so far as it is affected by an object, must be produced through an active faculty of the same, which is distinguished from the But, in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it. Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be copresent with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word being that which had co-existed with the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect; so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B. on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time per se, as contradistinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same 8 Senses, and may be called the Imagination in the widest sense." Trans!. S. C.] 8 [Schelling teaches that the most original measure of Time is Space; of Space, Time; and that both are opposed to each other for this reason that they mutually limit one another. Transsc. Id. Tübingen, 1800, pp 216-17. See also Idem, 325-6. S. C.J |